by Tim Parks
Edoardo’s house in Maroggia is high up the mountainside, looking across the great valley that sweeps down from the Alpine peaks to Como. No train will ever reach up here, but in the long hours of silence, beginning at 4 a.m. and through until 8.30 in the evening, you occasionally hear the distant whistle of a locomotive as it strains up the valley to Sondrio or rushes down to Morbegno and Bellano. Why do trains whistle these days? To warn people? At a road crossing? Or approaching a country platform? Hearing that whistle, my mind would stray. It is always such a struggle when meditating to keep the mind focused on the present moment, on the breath and the flesh, as it is. The whistle should have warned me that my attention was slipping; instead it drew me into another world.
Cross-legged, at the back of the room, behind a dozen others, I began to follow the train down the valley towards Morbegno and beyond, trying to remember the names of the stations, Colico, Varenna, Lecco. These trains are driven, I thought, like the mind, by electric current, and at once I was imagining all the pylons and the wires running down the valley, creating a path, a network, that was separate from the landscape so that we could pass through it at great speed, as thoughts also hurtle by so fast but are rarely in contact with reality. The mind likes to move on rails, I decided after a couple of days in Maroggia, always the same old reflections and anxieties and obsessions, one leading to the other with great predictability. The same switches, the same buffers and terminuses that you never get beyond. Gallipolis of the mind.
The hours passed. The train whistled. How many times a day. Five? I thought of the earth under the sleepers and the flesh beneath these thoughts; I tried to conceive of the meeting point where the steel weighs down on the soil, and the idea meshes with a tangle of nerves and veins and in your head the train of thought rattles by with a shrill whistle. Was there a man on board that early-morning train, I wondered, who had shat in his pants, or a woman snoring garlic breath over her neighbours, or a student reading St Augustine? No doubt people were speaking on their phones so that radio waves flew back and forth from the train as it clattered down the valley, messages reaching out all over Lombardy, Italy, all over the world, perhaps. Why not? How hard it is when you really try to imagine everything that might be going on on a single train. Everything is constantly in motion, the wheels on the rails, the curtains flapping beside an open window, the capotreno moving down the carriage, the Gypsy boy one step ahead of him, getting out of one door and climbing in another when the official’s back is turned, the businessman’s fingers on his keyboard, the actors in a film that a student is watching on her iPad as the train goes into and out of tunnels beside Lake Como, where the sun sparkles on the water in dazzling and perpetual motion. The stiller you sit as a meditator the more you are aware of the infinite movement inside mind and body – the waves and tingles and currents and pulses. There is nothing that does not move inside this flesh and bone – or out there in the valley, for that matter – nothing that is not as lively as light on water or a ball thrown back and forth across second-class seats by kids on their way to school.
A man climbs down on the platform at Lecco and puffs hard on a cigarette before the capotreno’s whistle blows and he must toss it away and climb on board again. Are there passengers needing to make connections, I wondered, on this train? People anxious about time, about the onward journey from Milan? Where to? To Venice? To Rome? Naples? Palermo, even? It wasn’t impossible.
I began to think of the many train journeys I had taken in these thirty years in Italy, my mind reaching out across the Trenitalia map that isn’t Italy itself, but as it were a cobweb woven across it, with thousands and thousands of steel spiders speeding back and forth along its silvery threads. I heard a station bell tinkling through drumming rain, a strong smell of cow dung and pine trees. That must be Fortezza, just below the Brenner Pass, where the hero of my novel Cleaver changed trains on the way to his penitential retreat high up by the Austrian border. I heard a door slam in the balmy twilight as an old Rapido shuddered into motion on the platform at Peschiera; a young man with a shock of blond hair jumped down with a Gucci bag in his hand, and that was my villain Morris Duckworth committing his first crime, on Italian railways, of all places. And now flags are fluttering from the open windows of a filthy Regionale, a storm of blue-and-yellow flags. It’s the Brigate Gialloblù, the Hellas boys, chanting insults as the train squeals into neighbouring Vicenza for the annual derby. And I’m in that crowd, too, waving my flag. My football days.
These trains have eaten into my mind and my writing, I realised, sitting in this quiet room in Maroggia with twenty or so other meditators. I hadn’t realised how many train scenes I’d put in my books. And now they are preventing me from observing my breath, from concentrating on the sensations in skin and bone and belly. Now I remember a man in pain, physical and mental pain, obliged to move from the plush green seat of a first-class compartment on the Torino–Roma night train. He doesn’t have a reservation. He doesn’t even have a ticket. He finds a place in second class where two women are discussing the supposed superiority of Swiss railway carriages. It is Christopher Burton in Destiny on his way to bury his son. Anything can happen on an Italian train, he tells himself when he is moved again. Later he passes out when two prostitutes put the make on him and the capotreno has to call an ambulance to pick him up at the station in Genoa.
How I have cursed, I remembered then in the meditation room, the times a train of mine was delayed because a passenger was ill – once a wait of half an hour in Milano Centrale while they tried to get an ambulance up the platform – or again because someone had committed suicide on the line. How I fumed for the lost time. What an ungenerous fellow I am. Travelling by train means sharing a common fate; we are on this journey together, as the meditators at the retreat share their silent journey together through the long hours of the day; a journey to no particular destination. We know we will not reach enlightenment.
The train whistled again at the beginning of the metta bhavana on the last day, the meditation of loving kindness. ‘Let your mind go out to all those who are close to you and wish them well,’ Edoardo instructed us. ‘Then to all those you are acquainted with. Finally, to all people and creatures everywhere. If you have offended anyone, perhaps, in your thoughts, you could seek pardon from them; and if anyone has offended you, you could try to grant them your sincere pardon.’
I began my metta and the train whistled. Have I offended people on trains, or in this book? I’m sure I have. I can be very rude on trains and in print. I seek pardon. Have I been offended on trains? Oh, infinite, infinite times! Offended by noises, offended by smells, offended by delays, offended by ticket inspectors, offended by loud conversations, offended by filthy toilets, offended just a week or so ago by a young man who sat opposite me and picked his nose quite grossly all the way from Verona to Milan. I’d never realised how offensive that can be. I grant pardon. I grant my sincere pardon to the nose picker, and the ticket inspectors, the stinkers and the loudmouths. I wish them well, all the men and women travelling on Trenitalia this morning, all the inspectors and the drivers, the ticket sellers and the minibar men, I wish them well. And especially I wish well to any passenger with a book in his hand, any man or woman following the lines on the page, perhaps these very lines, as the wheels follow the rails across the landscape, hurrying forward through the world yet not quite part of it. What a beautiful respite a train journey is and a good book, too, and best of all the book on the train, in life and out of it at the same time, before we arrive at Termini and disembark and the book is put down and we must all part and go our separate ways, forever.
Acknowledgements
FOR SOME OF the historical background here I am indebted to Stefano Maggi and his excellent book Le ferrovie. I would also like to thank the Failla family and Angela Pia Salamina for their hospitality during my travels down south. The book would not have been written without much prodding from Matt Weiland whose editorial assistance proved invaluable when it came
to giving shape to my endless backs and forths; many thanks to him, then, and likewise, finally, to all those thousands of Trenitalia employees, ticket collectors included, who have taken me safely around my adopted patria for more than thirty years.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781448162529
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Published by Harvill Secker 2013
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Copyright © Tim Parks 2013
Tim Parks has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
A portion of this book appeared in different form in Granta.
Maps by David Atkinson, Hand Made Maps Ltd.
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by
HARVILL SECKER
Random House
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road
London SW1V 2SA
www.vintage-books.co.uk
Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm
The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781846557743 (hardback)
ISBN 9781448162529 (ebook)
