I am handed the tiny cup together with a little plastic envelope containing a napkin, sugar, a non-fattening sweetener, powdered milk and a stirrer. Finally there is a small square of blue paper, which is my receipt. The boy has five or six little blocks of these differently coloured papers cunningly attached to the handlebar of the cart, and for each sale – coffee, biscuits, sandwiches, beer – he must tear off a different-coloured receipt and give it to the customer.
Once, when the minibar boy saw me promptly dump my receipt in the ashtray, he warned me that I was legally obliged to retain it for the duration of my journey, as if it was a sort of ticket without which my digestive processes might be subject to sanction. If the capotreno, or the Fiamme Gialle, the tax police, he explained, ran a surprise check on the train, it was important that they find that the minibar operator was giving receipts. Otherwise he might just be taking the money and pocketing it – for the coffee, for example – perhaps charging me a bit less so that I came in on the deal. Or he could be serving friends for free. Anyway, it was my legal responsibility, he said, to keep my receipt and be ready to demonstrate that such corruption wasn’t taking place.
I confessed to him that I had never thought of this, though at a price of €1 this thimbleful of instant coffee is so expensive I can imagine some people wanting to pay a great deal less. At the end of his working day, the solemn boy went on, the number of coloured receipts handed out had to correspond to the quantity of goods sold and the amount of money taken. For example, the plastic envelopes containing sugar, stirrer and powdered milk all had to be accounted for. He couldn’t just give a plastic teaspoon, for example, to someone who wanted it for a yogurt she had brought from home! People were always asking him, the boy complained, without having any idea of the constraints he was working under. He spoke as though he were running a major department store. I sipped my coffee as he set off on his way, ringing his bell, and yelling ‘Minibar!’ It tasted bitter and metallic, as I knew it would.
IMAGINE, THEN, THAT YOU have chosen to travel on the 21.05 Intercity. It’s the last of the evening, and as usual about thirty minutes late. Never mind, because tonight you have lucked out: you have found yourself an empty compartment. You check on the little reservations board by the door and find there are no cards posted there to indicate that anyone has a claim to any of the six places. You have it all to yourself. You go in, slide the door closed behind you, hang your coat on one of the hooks provided and sit by the window facing the direction of the locomotive. This is great. For a few iffy minutes now other people walk by, glance into your compartment, weigh you up and move on. Clearly you are sending out powerfully misanthropic signals. Good. You pull out your book or students’ work. There is a little Formica-topped table, or flap, that folds out of the wall under the window – you can put your papers on that – then an old ashtray, which has to be tugged open with great caution. Painted battleship grey and shaped like an old-fashioned cradle, it offers considerable resistance to being opened, but once the resistance is overcome it can fly out and dump damp tissues and old banana skins on your trousers and shoes.
Beneath table flap and bin is the heater, or air-conditioning vent. Notices warn you to keep the compartment door to the corridor shut so the air-conditioning can operate efficiently. A tiny flap of window at the top of the pane can be pulled open for fresh air, though a red circle on the glass of the flap showing a bottle lying at a forty-five-degree angle to the vertical and crossed out by a thick red line reminds you that you shouldn’t experiment with squeezing bottles through this tight space to chuck them out into the night. In any event, your opportunities for vandalism are limited. The window flap is locked in winter when it’s too cold outside and locked again in summer when it might interfere with the air conditioning. If the air conditioning isn’t working you’d definitely be better off in an Interregionale, whose big windows can be opened right up. Still, Italians are famous for fearing draughts and quite capable of travelling with all the windows closed, even in the most suffocating heat.
So you sit down and check that you have your stamped supplemento at hand to show the inspector when he comes. You open the book you are reading. The lighting is decent and has three settings – off, medium and bright – which can be operated from a knob above the compartment door. The knob has a delightfully old-fashioned design of a light bulb beside it, with radiating lines to suggest that the bulb is emitting light, though in fact the light source is neon.
There is also an individual lamp clamped to the lower of the two luggage racks above your head. It has a brass, trumpet-shaped shade that looks like it was designed in the sixties. Sometimes there’s a bulb inside. But however much you toggle the little stick switch below, it never works.
No, that’s not true. Not quite never. These lamps have been out of action for a decade and more, they are not maintained, yet once in a blue moon
