Prenotazione obbligatoria. The Eurostar is a reserved-seats-only train. You have to book. The idea behind this was that never again would the moneyed traveller find himself having to stand up on his long journey between the Milan stock exchange and Rome’s tortuous corridors of power; never again would a Friday evening through the tunnels of the Apennines remind one of the Milan metro in the rush hour, something that can very easily happen on an Intercity, even in the first class. No, for the Eurostar – a train of such beauty, of such speed, of such thrusting, long-distance purpose – a reservation would be absolutely obligatory. Away with the riff-raff and their Interregionale tickets trying to muscle on at the last minute and buy supplements aboard. Eurostar journeys are serious matters for serious people.
Of course, there are loopholes.
‘Please, please, Signor Capotreno’ – a man with a pink tie comes panting along the platform – ‘let me get on the train.’
The capotreno shakes his head. ‘This is a reservations-only train, signore.’
‘I know. But I’ve got an Intercity supplement.’
‘I’m afraid you need a Eurostar reservation.’
‘I know, but I wasn’t sure at the time I bought the ticket when I’d be travelling. I thought I’d be in the station earlier. Per favore. I really need to catch this train now.’
Overweight, harassed, reading glasses on a string around his neck, a green cap on his head, the capotreno is striding down the side of his shiny train, trailing behind him the smart trolley bag that all capotreni travel with.
‘Per favore,’ the pink tie insists, ‘it’s my niece’s first communion.’
‘Un momento,’ the capotreno finally says. He stops and looks at the man. No doubt he’s heard the first-communion story before. He purses his lips. ‘Just one place?’ he asks.
The capotreno caves in. The man climbs on. Inside, the corridors are chaos. Those who got on at the beginning of the journey, when the train was empty, have of course sat exactly where they wanted to sit, understandably choosing places far away from screaming babies and adolescents playing with the ringtones on their Nokias. But now that the train is filling, new arrivals come along and demand the places indicated on their bookings, so the people who were seated are getting up and heading off down the narrow aisle only to find that their proper places too have been taken. Someone else has to be moved. Luggage has to be pulled down from the strangely ungenerous rack. There’s an interminable milling and pushing. Finally, the determined traveller will find that two-thirds of the way down the train there are carriages that haven’t been booked at all, they are almost completely empty. The Trenitalia computer must book up the train a section at a time.
Perhaps the only real advantage of the Eurostar is its dining car. Often when the train is packed, this is the best place to sit and work with a little elbow room, though, of course, you have to buy a coffee if you want to sit. So one evening, harassed by the beep of a Game Boy, I head for the dining car and queue up at the bar where an elderly barista with the obligatory white hat on is taking far too long to make two cappuccini. Why? He has a nice Gaggia for producing coffee and and steaming milk. What’s the problem? Then I realise that he is preparing the milk, not in a jug for five or six coffees, but cappuccino by cappuccino in a paper cup. First he puts a shot of espresso in one cup. Then he pours a little cold milk into another, and holds it under the steam nozzle. He’s taking forever. Finally I get in my order and he starts the process again, working silently, carefully, intensely.
‘Slow business,’ I eventually put it to him, ‘to make the foam separately for each coffee in a paper cup.’
The machine is quite low, obliging him to bend. He lifts a grey eyebrow in my direction. ‘Eh sì, signore!’ he says.
‘Not the normal way,’ I remark.
Patiently measuring milk into a paper cup, he shakes his head. ‘Eh no, signore!’
I wait. He holds the cup under the steam nozzle and starts to froth it. He turns the steam off, examines the froth, turns the steam on again.
‘The normal thing would be to use a bricco,’ he says, as if talking to the machine. A jug.
‘That’s right,’ I agree.
Satisfied that he has the milk just so, he tilts the cup so that the liquid and froth pour out in a slow trickle into the other paper cup, where the coffee is waiting.
‘With a bricco,’ he goes on, ‘you can make froth for ten cups at once.’
‘I imagine you can,’ I agree.
Finally, putting one of the two cappuccini I’ve ordered in front of me, he looks me in the eye: ‘Ma qua, il bricco manca.’ Which is as much as to say: here there are no jugs.
‘They haven’t given you a jug?’
‘No, signore,’ and he repeats, ‘Qua, il bricco manca.’
‘But why not? How can you make all these cappuccini without a jug?’
Now he is working with the next paper cup, his eye measuring the milk again. There is something wonderfully professional and stubborn about everything he does.
‘You ask them. They won’t tell me.’
‘Everybody knows you need a jug to froth milk.’
‘sì, signore.’
‘They certainly have money for other things.’
‘They have so much money they are arrogant.’ He is talking to his machine again. It’s as if I were overhearing his complaints, quite by chance. ‘They grow arrogant. They spend money on this, money on that, ma qua, il bricco manca. No jug. No, signore.’
As he finally puts the two cappuccini on the bar, I tell him, ‘At that point, you might as well bring a jug from home.’
For some reason the remark trips a switch. This man, who had been so determinedly taciturn and wry, is suddenly furious:
