Cattivo, Papà!
THE EVENING TRAINS ARE telefonino time. If I’m early and manage to catch the 17.25. Interregionale, things can get pretty noisy. People are less worried about being overheard in a big open-plan carriage than in the more controlled space of a compartment. There are men still involved in business calls, discussing ball bearings and delivery dates. There are mothers telling their children how to prepare dinner: ‘The fusilli, not the macaroni!’ A student complains that she was treated badly in an oral exam: ‘The professor asked something that wasn’t in the book, and he wrote the stupid thing!’ Boyfriends and girlfriends are weighing up the advantages of pizzeria and trattoria. ‘I’ll be in Brescia around eight,’ says a tense, pale man in his late thirties. ‘Make sure there’s a prosecco in the fridge.’
As the train pulls out of Centrale the capotreno, speaking over the PA, invites the gentile clientela not to disturb other passengers with their loud conversations and to turn off, or at least turn down, the ringtones of their phones. The announcement has exactly the effect of a speed limit on the Rome–Naples autostrada. So I have listened at length to a Sicilian man in his forties, quite a few seats away – olive skin, white shirt, gold cufflinks – discussing his ugly divorce with his lawyer, his new girlfriend, his mother, his brother and a variety of other people whom it was harder to place. This for the whole one hour and fifty minutes from Milan to Verona. To all of these people he repeated with great relish the phrase ‘un inferno durato dieci anni – a ten-year inferno – un inferno, ti giuro’, glancing around at the rest of us in the carriage as if for approval or sympathy.
Between Peschiera and Verona a funny scene repeats itself on almost every trip. Passing through the low hills at the bottom of the lake, the phone signal begins to break up; it comes and goes for a while, then disappears altogether. ‘Ci sei?’ the woman beside me is suddenly asking. Are you there? She raises her voice. ‘Can you hear me?’ asks the man opposite. And then three or four voices in unison. ‘Mi senti? Pronto? Pronto? Mi senti. Ci sei? Mi senti?’ All at once they are all looking in each other’s eyes, vaguely embarrassed, as if, while they had been speaking on the phone they were invisible somehow, and now, all of a sudden, cut off in the cutting, they must confront each other, and find themselves faintly absurd.
We’ve crossed the Valpolicella now. The line from Trento joins ours from the north, then the line from Bologna comes in from the south. Already you can see the limestone hills above Verona, the stadium, the ugly round sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, which looks down on the city from the first hilltop. Only the Church could get planning permission for a horror like that. The PA system crackles and an urgent voice announces: ‘Avvertiamo i signori viaggiatori che tra pochi momenti arriviamo alla stazione di Verona Porta Nuova, Verona Porta Nuova!’
When you get off the train in Italy it’s a point of politeness to say buon viaggio to those who remain. I like these little rituals, however empty and formal they appear. ‘Buon viaggio,’ I say to the woman who has been speaking on her mobile for most of the way. I try to mean it. The woman smiles and nods. It’s the first time she’s noticed me. ‘Buona sera,’ she replies graciously.
IF FOR SOME REASON I’m desperate to get back to Verona as early as possible, I’ll take a Eurostar. But I have to be desperate, for this is the train I like least. Unlike the Intercity, it doesn’t offer the intimacy of compartments. The days of the train compartment are numbered. The existence of trains with compartments suggests a community that is more or less homogeneous and at home with itself, a society where maybe you risk finding yourself saddled with a noisy companion, but not a nutcase who wants to murder you, a terrorist from some country you’ve never heard of.
The design of the Eurostar screams out, This is our vision of the future, this is stylish Italy, techno Italy, high-speed Italy. The long, sleek carriages are made to seem longer and sleeker still with three continuous bands of colour running the length of the train, locomotive included: a green band at the bottom, then a white, as if to hint at the Italian flag, and then a long, long line of shiny black, which masks the separate windows and prevents them from interrupting the hypnotic, forward-flung streamline of the thing. As you look at the Eurostar, and even more when you travel in it, you can’t help regretting the times when it was still possible to design something without being obliged to create the impression that science fiction is becoming reality and utopia is just around the corner. It isn’t. The aisles of the Eurostar are narrow, the seats are cramped. It’s true that the so-called Pendolino design of the locomotive, which allows the vehicle to lean (pendere) into the bends, means it can travel faster on ordinary lines, without the need of the straighter and smoother rails that French high-speed trains require. But given that these traditional lines are already very busy, it’s hard for the Eurostar to exploit this advantage.
But what really makes the Eurostar a nightmare is also its greatest claim to being serious and European, which is to say, un-Italian: as the sleek green-and-white bands slither and hiss into the station, that ubiquitous metallic voice is already announcing. EUROSTAR! – Novemiladuecentotrentasette – per
