I had no desire to eat Chinese, and the station was twenty minutes’ drive away. Nevertheless, I took the new arrival, stood in the queue with him at the ticket window, paid for an Intercity ticket to Milan, had it stamped for him (the last thing he needed was a brush with the inspector) and took him to the right platform. I wondered if he had any idea how much his €100 note was worth. The generosity of the restaurant owner had surprised and rather humbled me.
As the train came into the station, the man started saying something in his language. He was smiling now from a very round, slightly pockmarked face. He seemed excited. I shook my head. He mimed a person speaking on the phone, and then writing something. I wrote down my phone number for him. He never got in touch. It seems there are scores of Chinese people living in the old service tunnels under Milano Centrale. Everybody complains: these people are stealing our work, our culture. Yet faced with the plight of the individual immigrant, Italians are far more likely to help than to report the man to the police and have him deported. However reluctant Italians are to embrace a multiracial society, the old antipathy to government and authority works in favour of the illegal alien.
IT’S CURIOUS; YOU SEE so much of Italy’s new immigrant life revolving around the railways, you see Indian families on the move with all their belongings, you see the prostitutes and their pimps with their colourful shirts, you see Arabs and Turks opening kebab joints in station car parks, but you never see an immigrant working for Trenitalia.
As you drive your car along the riverside, the Adige, hurrying to the station for the train of the living dead, you can’t help but notice, even as early as six in the morning, a long queue of black, brown, yellow and, yes, white faces standing by a tall iron gate. It is the Questura, the police headquarters. They are immigrants looking for permits. Enjoying almost full employment, Veronese businesses need immigrants, they need cheap labour. But why do these people have to wait in a queue so early, even on the coldest of winter mornings? And why do we never see them driving buses, or checking tickets on trains?
The answer to the first question can only be the usual indifference of any branch of the Italian bureaucracy to those they supposedly serve. It’s quite normal for public offices to open for only a few hours on only two or three days a week. You are always a supplicant, never a customer.
As to why the immigrants are not working for public transport, the truth is that all state and public sector jobs require an end-of-school certificate, il certificato scolastico. From an Italian school, of course. Whenever one admires the homogeneity and apparent dignity of a society like Italy’s, a society that has retained a cohesion and identity largely lost in England or the metropolitan United States, one must always remember that it is constructed around such mechanisms of exclusion as the school certificate. Those immigrants who have not studied in Italian schools will not be permitted to collect Italian rubbish, or drive Italian buses, or sell tickets for the train of the living dead. The unions, so ready to strike and raise their voices about everything else, do not seem to make a fuss about this. It will be interesting to see what happens in the next few years as the immigrants’ children complete their studies. It will be a great day when a black capotreno tries to fine me for not having had my ticket punched.
THE RAILS AROUND US multiply and switch over each other as lines from all directions are gathered together for the final mile to Milano Centrale. For perhaps five minutes the train plays at going as slowly as a train can without actually stopping. All around us there are overpasses, gritty playgrounds, tenements. Graffiti everywhere. ‘Evviva la figa!’ someone has written. Long live pussy.
As the train pulls into Lambrate, the prostitute sleeps. I put my book in my bag. There’s an extraordinary tension for me in these last moments of the journey as the Interregionale grinds to a stop on another ordinary day of my life. The world appears to be suspended; for a few awful seconds you can’t help but be aware of the horror of routine, the days and years bleeding into a past as cluttered and unstructured as this railway landscape. Nobody else seems concerned. Two girls are teasing a third over a new tattoo she has, a little rose just above her bare hip. They touch it with manicured fingertips. The flesh is firm and brown. ‘Let me see,’ red tie demands, but now the train jolts to a stop and everybody is piling off. Nothing could be slower than the Interregionale on that last half-mile into Centrale. Better take the metro at Lambrate.
fn1 All the information in this first part of the book refers to 2005. Prepare for surprises in the second part, where everything changes so that much can remain the same.
Chapter 2
MILANO–VERONA
IF COMING TO Milan I get off my interregionale at lambrate, returning I board whatever train I take at Centrale. Because it’s convenient, and because I love going through Centrale. In particular, I love entering it, being outside it and moving inside, for this is surely the most monumental railway station in Western Europe. More than anywhere I know, Milano Centrale gives the traveller the impression that he really must be setting out on a very serious journey. This is a trifle comic when you hurry through the colossal central portal and across the majestic ticket hall as a matter of routine. You should be setting off to Berlin, or Paris, or even some other world
