THE FOLLOWING DAY I boarded the same train at 6.45, had an uneventful journey, and was able to see for myself that the Frecciargento did indeed complete this trip of about 130 arduous miles in just an hour and a half. The train races south over the open plain and the broad waters of the Po to Bologna, then hurtles under the Apennines through tunnel after tunnel, reaching speeds of almost two hundred miles an hour. Distances that in 1848 took Garibaldi weeks in his revolutionary back and forth across these mountains are eaten up in minutes. It’s a fantastic achievement.
The woman sitting across the aisle from me thought so too. When the ticket inspector arrived, shortly before Bologna, she had no ticket to show him. Rather grand, in her sixties, but frayed at the edges, wearing a dark red coat that she hadn’t taken off despite the excellent heating, she began to protest that she did have her ticket somewhere. Must have. Her son had bought it for her. She had put it in her handbag. She distinctly remembered. The inspector was patient but something in the woman’s voice was beginning to give her away as not quite compos mentis. ‘You people are always bothering me,’ she suddenly announced. Her mouth seemed strangely big and ill-defined, as if her features were as frayed as her coat. ‘That’s the trouble with this country. The honest people are harassed while the rich get off scotfree, the cheats, the tax dodgers, the presumptuous.’
Unnecessarily, the inspector remarked that it was important for passengers to pay for their tickets; otherwise the railway would go broke. The woman met the objection with another tirade of abuse. Why didn’t he believe her when she told him she had the ticket? Did he think she was a liar? Her voice strained with righteous indignation. The more animated she became, the more evident was the decay in her face. The inspector began to fill out a form for a fine. It was a long form; €60 were mentioned. Plus the price of the ticket. These inspectors always have to work smoothing layers of carbon paper on a book or bag and touching malfunctioning biros to their lips while the speeding train packed with revolutionary technologies sways and accelerates and brakes. The woman seemed alarmed and her voice became almost hysterical. She would never pay a fine, she yelled, never never never. Because she did have a ticket, if only she could find it. In the meantime, she had given up any pretence of looking.
‘I won’t give you my name,’ she told him abruptly when he asked for it. She folded her arms in defiance. ‘I don’t have an ID with me.’
By now everyone was watching. I had been trying to work, making notes for the meeting that lay ahead, but it was impossible. The inspector told her in that case she would have to get off the train at Bologna.
She wouldn’t, she told him. She had a ticket to Rome. She was going to Rome.
‘If you have a ticket, show me,’ the inspector said.
She couldn’t; she had lost it, she told him flatly. ‘Can’t you see that?’ Her thick white hair, through which she kept passing one hand, now revealed itself as dishevelled, unwashed, uncared for. From seeming quite an ordinary passenger it became clear that she was one of the dispossessed. She should not be among us.
‘I will not get off this train!’ she screamed.
Perhaps because of this transformation on her part, the inspector passed from being admirably patient to cruelly perverse as he took pleasure in dragging the scene out, explaining at great length the procedure she was facing. If she did not show him a ticket he was obliged to write out a fine. If she couldn’t or wouldn’t pay the ticket plus the fine of €60 on the spot, she would be obliged to disembark the train at the first station and pay a fine of €200 from home. If she refused to leave the train, he would invite two policemen to get on board at Bologna and remove her forcibly.
The woman began to appeal to the passengers around her. There were people in this country, she shouted, daily stealing hundreds of thousands of euros from the public purse, and this arrogant man was victimising a poor pensioner travelling to see her sick old aunt in Rome. It was a scandal.
As ever in Italy, the acknowledged lawlessness of the country’s ruling class offers an excellent alibi for smaller offenders. One of the reasons for endlessly voting for corrupt politicians is that your own misdemeanours seem trivial by comparison.
‘The sharks are all freeloading and then they pick on a poor woman who has lost her ticket,’ she wailed.
Nobody wanted to get involved. This is a business train for businesspeople.
‘My poor auntie is dying,’ the woman now began to cry. ‘She’s ninety-two.’ Her face betrayed a desperation that went far beyond any issue of tickets or fines, or even dying aunties. It had to do with dignity and humiliation, pure and simple. ‘What difference does it make whether I am on the train or not? There are plenty of seats free. It won’t cost them any more to get to Rome just because I’m on it.’
This was true, of course, but a dangerous road to go down.
‘Two policemen will come to remove you,’
