We’re turning right now, over the river, just a few minutes from the station. I can’t get away from them. I can’t even park and force them either to get it over with or go away. They stay beside me all the way across the bridge, beneath which, in a completely different manifestation of my personality, I love to play in my kayak on a wave that forms between two bridge pillars. Now the police are playing with me. They drop behind a little. To check my number plate? I’m very aware that the car is old and not a little battered. My daughter had a brush with the garage wall recently. And I rarely clean the car. Correction: I never clean it. I don’t believe in cleaning cars. Life is too short. How quickly could the police run a check on the plate, I wonder, and find that there is a recent speeding fine? This was actually my daughter again, returning in the early hours from a concert where her band had played. But I accepted the fine and the loss of points on my own licence, since I had more points than she to lose and they tend to be harder on young drivers. This was dishonest of me but crucial for my daughter, who at the time was driving all over Italy playing concerts. If they are able to run a check on some computer in their car, some dedicated police iPhone, and see that recent conviction, will that convince them to pull me over now? I can hardly start explaining that it wasn’t actually me speeding but my daughter, the rocker.
The traffic inches forward. The police draw alongside again. They’re very close, as if they wanted to brush against me. My neck is stiff from looking rigidly ahead. The adrenalin is pumping. I would love to stay cool, but at the crucial moments in life I never can. Five minutes are becoming an eternity. Thank God I’m wearing a nice jacket, which gives at least an air of respectability. Perhaps I could say that I was hurrying because I was on an exam commission and I feel a duty to my students. Would they buy that? They would tell me I should have got up earlier. When we finally pass the light and come out of the bottleneck on the city side, the police car stays nailed beside me; I can hardly speed away from it, so the two lanes of traffic stuck behind us now proceed through the underpass with admirable composure. I’m under escort is the truth, and leading a procession. The only thing that feels positive is that so far I’ve resisted looking at the two men. There are always two in an Italian police car. Perhaps my staring straight ahead, remaining entirely still, has created a sort of protective enchantment, an intimacy almost; if I turned to look at them, thus acknowledging my crime, the spell would be broken and they’d pull me over.
At long last, when I peel off left for the station, the police car accelerates away. They’ve gone. I feel incredibly grateful to them. What nice guys. They could have enforced the letter of the law, and the spirit, too, for that matter. I really was driving dangerously. Instead they just made me sweat for ten minutes. Turning off the motor, I realise I’ve made a decision. That is the end of driving for me, or at least of this kind of driving. I’ve pushed my luck for too long. From now on, however inconvenient it may be, however few trains there are, I will use Verona Porta Vescovo, a tiny station in a sleepy cul-de-sac on my side of town, the Venice side, just three quiet traffic lights from home.
VERONA PORTA VESCOVO IS the kind of station where you hear a bell ring out before a train comes. It’s a lovely sound, urgent and old-fashioned as a black-and-white film. The platforms are very long, very narrow, and generally deserted. To get to platform four, where trains depart for Verona and very occasionally Milan, you have to walk across the lines. I love doing this. It gives a pleasant sense of transgression, of really being in the nitty-gritty.
There are other leftovers from the past here. Above the door outside the station, a yellow sign protrudes perpendicular to the wall just above head height; it’s a long, rectangular arm holding up a large disc, which carries the image of an ancient black dial phone with white circular holes arranged in a circle around the circumference of the larger yellow disc to suggest one of those revolving dials you used to put your finger in and turn to form the number. It even has a few holes missing at the bottom right, just as those phones did, where your finger ran into the end stop. Black lettering along the yellow arm supporting the disc proclaims INTERURBANO AUTOMATICO (automatic long-distance calls). I presume this advertised the once-novel possibility of making long-distance calls without going through an operator. Ever since the mid-nineteenth century, when the laying of train lines went hand in hand with the introduction of the telegraph, railway stations have offered the most up-to-date communication services. They marked the beginning of the world perceived as network. You could send and receive messages through a grid, as it were, like lines on a map, without actually touching the ground any more, as the train passes over the landscape on its rails without ever really touching anything else. It was a more mental world, more mentally busy and fragmented than the
