MOST PEOPLE ON THE train are asleep, and if not, they wish they were. It’s not unusual to climb on board and find carriages turned into dormitories. But this can be dangerous. On two occasions recently the train of the living dead became the train of the truly dead. The first time, thank heaven, I wasn’t on it. In midwinter, shortly after the carriages had started to roll, there was a smell of smoke. An electrical fire had broken out. In the last carriage, four or five passengers were sufficiently awake to get up and start moving forward through the train. No one had noticed a woman in her forties fast asleep. By the time the smoke cleared she was dead.
As always when there is a fatal accident in Italy, the magistrates moved swiftly to arrest whoever might conceivably be considered responsible, in this case the poor capotreno who claimed he was told by one of the escaping passengers that the smoke-filled and hence extremely dangerous carriage had been completely evacuated. After a few anguished days in custody, he was released. A theatre of severity in Italy is always followed by lenience and very often indifference. It is hard to end up in jail for causing an accident, though many are briefly jailed for nothing at all.
The second fatality occurred on a morning of thesis commissions. I had to go to Milan and sit behind a table with seven or eight other professors to listen to students defending their graduate theses. Like the nullaosta, the thesis commission is a formality. No student I know of has ever failed. It is also a thing of unspeakable boredom: three or four hours in which tedium can be held in your hands and caressed like a small, fluffy animal. But woe onto him who cries off a thesis commission. Because if more than one professor is absent and the legal quorum isn’t reached, nobody can get his or her degree, and serious sanctions will follow. Thus the whole university experience depends, ultimately, on a long ceremony of collective tedium. It is interesting that my Italian colleagues for the most part share this assessment, some are far more scathing than I am, yet never feel that something should be done to alter the situation. Thesis commissions are as inevitable as pizza and the Pope.
On that particular thesis-commission morning, then, when, fifteen minutes out of Verona, the Interregionale braked sharply and shuddered to a stop, I at once felt nervous. Five minutes became ten. We were in open country just before the village of Sommacampagna. It was raining steadily. After perhaps half an hour the PA announced, ‘I signori viaggiatori sono avvisati che il treno sarà fermo per un periodo indeterminato!’
Stopped for an indeterminate period of time! How fatal those words sounded. As if the planet had ceased to turn. No explanation, no hint as to when the solar system might resume its various orbits. The rain fell and fell. Alarmed, I phoned a colleague in Milan who, I hoped, was an early riser. It occurred to me that if I started missing thesis commissions perhaps the university administration would reconsider my nullaosta when I applied the following year.
Meanwhile, the dozen or so passengers in the carriage were getting their hair wet hanging out of the windows trying to understand what was going on. ‘Suicide,’ someone knowledgeable decided. How did he know? Because we had braked violently in empty countryside. Because no trains had passed in the other direction. Obviously the line had been closed down, both ways. What else could it be? ‘This stretch is famous for suicides,’ he told us.
He was right. At 6.50 in the morning somebody had been feeling so unhappy that he or she had jumped under the first train the rainy morning brought. Not a student bound for the thesis commission, I hoped.
‘Then even before they clean things up,’ our knowledgeable traveller told everybody, ‘they have to get a doctor out to certify death and a forensic team to photograph the scene in case the driver was to blame.’
How could a driver ever be to blame if someone throws himself in front of the locomotive?
After perhaps an hour and a half the train made the strange movement of going backwards at a snail’s pace for ten minutes before it found a point to switch to a sideline. Our direction was then reversed again and we proceeded with caution through the station of Sommacampagna. Just beyond the platform, on a grassy embankment, I saw an ambulance team pushing a severed leg into a black plastic bag. Other men, in suits, stood under umbrellas. The curious thing was how little impression this made on me compared with my mental picture of the victim throwing himself on the rails, his healthy
