At Verona station there is a local boy in his teens who will climb on the train and start selling you a story about having lost his wallet and needing money to get back to his parents in Turin. The first time I gave him some money. Later, when I pointed out to him that he had tried the same tale on me three times in less than six months and that since his accent was Veronese it was hard to believe he lived in Turin, he became quite aggressive, as if it were unreasonable of me to expect him to think of something new every day, or to pay attention to the kind of detail that might concern a novelist.
The Indian immigrants sell roses at the traffic lights near the station. That’s in the evening, when you’re returning. They never beg, but offer a bunch of six or seven roses for only €5. It’s a bargain. Sometimes I go for it. Sometimes I wonder if there is any connection between this flower-selling and the prostitutes standing on duty nearby. Do some men buy their regular girl a rose?
The Chinese sell a variety of cheap jewellery and pirated designer goods which they spread on sheets and rugs in the entry tunnels to the metro at Milano Centrale. Sometimes there are as many as twenty Chinese peddlers in the tunnels here as you hurry back to the station after a day at the university. They squat on their haunches quietly chatting to each other, ready to gather up their wares in the rug if the police come to bother them. They can be gone with all their clobber in seconds. Sometimes, with all the commuters and all the blankets spread on the floor, it’s hard to find your way through.
ONCE, ABOUT TWO YEARS ago, I helped a Chinese man join this little community at Milano Centrale. My wife and I were setting off for a walk in our small village just outside Verona when we saw an Asian man looking anxiously about him in the tiny central piazza. It was the first immigrant we had ever seen in Novaglie. He was tall, in his late twenties perhaps, heavily built and clearly, to risk a pun, disorientated. He wore a smart grey suit that looked as if it had fallen on him from a great height. His shoes were too big. He carried no bag. As we walked towards him, he looked at us anxiously, undecided whether to talk, then turned and hurried away. We saw him knocking on one of the doors that open directly on the street. Then another. Then another. People were pretending not to be home.
When we returned from our walk the man was still hanging around in what is an amorphous, depressing little piazza: no more than a bus stop, a few containers for recycling bottles and paper, and a low, prefabricated gymnasium. The one or two older and finer buildings are hidden, as so often in Italy, behind high walls and cypress hedges. The man looked more anxious now. He was quite dark-skinned for an Asian. I went to speak to him.
‘Posso aiutare?’
He didn’t understand.
‘English?’ I asked. ‘Can I help?’
‘Mi-la-no,’ he said.
‘Parlez-vous français? Deutsch?’
‘Mi-la-no,’ he repeated.
‘This isn’t Milan,’ I said. ‘We’re a hundred miles from Milan.’ Then, inspired, I suggested, ‘Char. You want char?’ I had remembered that ‘char’, a word we used for tea in northern England as children, actually came from Chinese.
He nodded eagerly.
We drove the man into town. He moved the way I would no doubt move if someone had suddenly asked me to walk around a strange town in a turban or a kimono. In the first bar in the suburbs I bought him tea and a hamburger. I remember being struck by the practised way he shook the sugar packet before opening it. It was the first gesture he had made with ease. Packets rather. He must have taken four. He ate his hamburger and drank his sickly tea without a word, making no attempt to discover what my plans for him might be, trusting entirely to my good intentions.
There is a small monastery on this side of town known for its charity. ‘Don’t go to the police,’ the monks said. They will send him straight back to wherever he came from. He had probably been pushed out of a container truck, they thought, driving into Italy from Croatia. ‘They cross the border in the middle of the night,’ a monk explained, ‘drive for a few hours, then push their passengers out one by one in the most deserted places. He’s probably walked quite a long way.’
‘He wants to go to Milan,’ I said. They shook their heads. They couldn’t help. Then my wife said, ‘Take him to a Chinese restaurant.’
There are only two or three Chinese restaurants in Verona. I’m not a fan of Chinese food. I drove him to the nearest, a garish place at the bottom of an amorphous block of flats. The manager was young, smartly dressed in a light grey suit quite similar to that of the new arrival but worn with panache. Immediately the anxious face of my young man became animated and adult. The two spoke together very rapidly in businesslike tones. They shared a language. Suddenly the restaurant owner pulled a €100 note from his pocket and handed it to the man.
Take him to the station, he told me, and put him on a train to Milan.
‘But does he know where to go when he gets there?’
‘He is to meet some people in the station. They are expecting him.
