Some forty minutes into the journey, having put the trauma of the fat man behind me, I look up and watch my new companion. A pleasant intimacy can settle over two people reading together on a train, even if nothing is said. Finally the young man shifts his book in such a way that I can glimpse the title: The Confessions of St Augustine. He has round, rimless glasses. His hair is that blond that is almost colourless, like greyish honey, slightly curly, tight to his head. He puckers brow and lips as he reads, he has thin lips, and makes sudden rapacious movements when he wants to jot down a note. Perhaps he’s studying at a seminary. Sometimes it is wiser, I reflect, to choose a compartment with a single quiet companion, rather than risk the precarious pleasure of the compartment all to yourself. Alone you are vulnerable. Together we two readers will surely discourage any further intrusion.
I turn my head and through the big black pane of the window spy a small walled cemetery on a low hillside. It’s uncanny, but I always seem to turn my head exactly as the train passes this cemetery. It’s on a low hill near Brescia. What is the mechanism that makes this happen? Do the dead call? There’s the glow of our Intercity windows in the night, a dark field, then the old cemetery, then a newer section added on. In the newer section, where the coffins are slotted into cement drawers in the high walls, you can see the flicker of those little red lights that keep the dead company; lumini, they’re called, as if the tenants of the place were all lying quietly there, reading together as they decay. At Desenzano my seminarian gets to his feet and puts his book away in his little student’s backpack. He smiles softly. Buon viaggio, he says. Buona sera, I reply.
Part Two
FIRST CLASS, HIGH SPEED
2007 – 2010
Chapter 3
MILANO–VERONA
I DISCOVERED, OR let’s say I finally started using, the tiny station of Verona Porta Vescovo (literally, Bishop’s Gate) in 2007. There was an intriguing plaque about Italian soldiers heading for Russia:
DA QUESTA STAZIONE PARTI’ LA PRIMA
TRADOTTA DI COMBATTENTI PER IL
FRONTE RUSSO
14 LUGLIO 1941
(The first troop train carrying combatants to the Russian front left from this station, 14 July 1941.) But that’s not what attracted me to use Porta Vescovo. It had simply become impossible to drive across town to the main station; impossible for me, that is. Not that by normal metropolitan standards Verona is congested; the bottleneck over the bridge taking you from east to west of the river on the circular road can slow things up ten minutes, but no more. All the same, I have begun to feel that the car’s pollution is not limited to the exhaust it pumps out; driving a car pollutes the mind, or at least my mind; it poisons and agitates. Another argument in favour of the train.
All over the city, people get out of their beds far too early. They don’t have time to shower and shave, to relax over coffee and a croissant. They leap into their cars and hit the accelerator, racing to the station, knowing that if they don’t find that parking space in the roads nearby they may miss their train. Moving from bed to road, soft mattress to hard tarmac in only five minutes, I find myself doing things I shouldn’t, overtaking where I shouldn’t, crossing lights at the last of last moments, reacting angrily when other hurrying drivers cut me off, loathing the scooters that hover in the mirror’s blind spot. My personality, I realise, is bending under the press of a collective stampede, the rush to be first, or at least on time. A wiser person than myself, I know, would not succumb to this contagion. But I’m not wise, and especially not on the road.
One day something happens to tip the balance; it’s Monday, I’m leaving home a little late, I’m hurtling towards the light where the circonvallazione, the busy circular road from the east, meets the Adige River and turns left and south before the famously congested bridge. This is one of the longest lights in the city; as I approach, it is already on yellow, actually it has long been on yellow, I’m aware of that. Yellows are much longer in Italy than in other countries. Precisely to give you no excuse. At the last of last seconds, the Alpha in front of me hits the brakes. I’m having none of it. I swerve right, overtake on the inside, and cross his path, turning left. As I do so, I see that the light is already red; in fact I’m only a yard or two clear of the cars now accelerating towards me from the right, along the river. Immediately the reason why the Alpha braked so hard is clear. The first car is police.
There are two lanes along the river. We now have five hundred slow yards to the bridge, where the traffic is backed up for another hundred yards across the river to the next light. The pula, as Italians call the police, draw alongside. I’ve got my speed right down now for the simple reason that the traffic here is barely moving. To my right, the police car has space to move ahead, but doesn’t. Damn. Blue and white, it simply sits beside me; when I move, it moves; when I stop, it stops.
I could turn and look the officers in the eye, but I don’t. I sit in traffic looking straight ahead, both hands sedately on the steering wheel, trying to appear absolutely ordinary and calm. I’m not calm, of course. I’m shaking. The two uniformed guys sitting so close to me know I crossed on red. This is a
