Another thing I appreciate is the way the Trenitalia maintenance staff mends the vandalised armrests. Covered in imitation leather, these rests, which fold up into the seat back for those who wish to lie across the seats or to lean heavily against each other with the curtains drawn, are frequently slashed, perhaps by football fans, or passengers angry at yet another delay. Instead of replacing them, Trenitalia has a worker somewhere who sews up the tears using a thick orange-coloured tape that, applied in a crude cross-stitch, stands out against the dark polished brown of the fake leather and gives the impression that the repair is actually a fashion element. You have to admire this kind of solution.
THE TRAIN HAS BEGUN to pull out of the station and you’re just settling down to read when an ear-splitting voice erupts from a loudspeaker in the panel over the door, the panel with the knob that adjusts the neon.
‘Benvenuti a bordo a treno 624 Svevo per Trieste Centrale!’
This is not the mechanical speak of the station announcements, but the would-be friendly voice of your capotreno, who has his hideaway in the last compartment of the front carriage, a sacred space where no passenger is allowed to sit, even if the train is bursting at the seams. He lists the stations you’ll be stopping at. He informs you that there’s a minibar, something you already knew. He warns you that smoking is now forbidden on Italian trains, corridors included. At a volume that has the compartment wall panels trembling, he encourages you to turn down the volume on your mobile phone ringtone. ‘Thank you for choosing Trenitalia,’ he concludes, ‘and buon viaggio!’ Who else could you have chosen? you wonder. Still, the voice is silent now. Relax. Then he starts again in another language. Leddies an gennlmen! Next it will be Mesdames et messieurs, then Meine Damen und Herren.
I jump to my feet. Beside the knob that controls the lighting, there are two other knobs above the compartment door – significantly over head height, that is. They are also of quaintly old-fashioned design, black plastic hemispheres sprouting pointy little fingers. One controls heat and cold. Supposedly. You know that because there are two small thermometers designed on each side of the knob, the one to the left coloured blue, the one to the right red, with, over the top, a widening curved line to suggest the gradual passage from blue to red – that is, cold to heat – as the knob turns. It is pointless to fiddle with this knob since it just turns round and round and makes no difference at all to the temperature. This service, like the individual lamps, has long been discontinued; the temperature is centrally controlled, though the passenger isn’t informed of that, just as he isn’t informed, except by this initial announcement, that the image of a smoking cigarette on the glass door of the compartment no longer means that you can smoke in here. ‘’Ave a good journey!’ The capotreno winds up his English performance. If I’m quick I can still escape his French.
The volume control can be recognised by the design of a little loudspeaker emitting radiating lines and tiny quavers and semiquavers, in a charming reminder of piano teachers and music lessons, though I can’t recall music ever being played on the train PA system. The knob has three clicks – presumably loud, medium and off – though again, you will get little joy from moving it to these settings. I never found a single knob that functioned as it was designed to. Yet the volume control does work in its way, in the sense that if you can get the knob to stick between any two clicks, the sound abruptly disappears. You have turned it off. The knob has a propensity to slip, so this adjustment is a delicate one, but it is possible. ‘Mesdames et messieurs! Bien …’
Done it!
Suddenly the voice is only a rumour in the distance, a radio in someone else’s apartment. Turning to sit down, I catch a glimpse of my face in the strip of mirror between seat and luggage rack. I’m looking old and harassed. Take it easy. Relax, read.
And I do. I sit back and return to my novel. This is bliss. The evening after a reasonably productive day, the sway of the carriage over the points leaving Centrale, the lights of the city streets sliding by in the big night, the voice of Thomas Bernhard on the page before me; above all, the intimacy of a compartment all to myself. Perfect.
For about five minutes.
Just as the train rides through the platforms of Lambrate, where desultory passengers are still waiting for the 21.15 Interregionale, now half an hour late, the compartment door is hauled open and with a great clattering and banging and a frightening fit of coughing in comes a truly pantomime figure: an extremely tall, bulky man with a huge head, no neck, a most respectable paunch and an ankle in plaster up to his knee. He is walking with the help of a single aluminium crutch but despite this handicap carries a backpack and a very large, very old duffel bag. Panting hard, with the look of a man who has
