‘Look at rule five,’ he says.
Perhaps the reader could remember here that this man has a job to do checking tickets on an extremely busy train. It must already be absolutely clear that I have paid for my ticket and can’t reuse it or cheat in any way. So why isn’t he getting on with his job? But of course I know why. Deep down we all know that the rules are invented precisely to create the conditions for these confrontations, and when they occur they are immensely more important than merely checking that people have paid their fare or, in my case, reading some novel.
Rule five says: ‘The passenger cannot change the ticket or the class of the ticket.’
The passengers around me on both sides of the central aisle are beginning to smile broadly.
‘Which leaves rule six,’ the inspector says with a sigh. Something in his voice makes me look up at him. Our eyes meet. His dusty dry lips are twisted in the triumphant smile of bureaucratic Italy celebrating another victory.
I read out rule six; it says: ‘The passenger who is not able to show this receipt in printed form or does not present a valid ID is to be considered as travelling without a ticket and regolarizzato – regularised – according to current norms [ticket price + €50, or a regional fine].’
Again he sighs and says, ‘You do not have a printout. You do not have a ticket.’
From this point on I find it hard to recall the exact progress of the dialogue, for the simple reason that I lost control. I was suddenly trembling and furious, far beyond anything that appeared to be at stake. Why had this crucial change been made, I demanded, without warning the traveller up front rather than in a tiny rule that didn’t even appear on the screen without scrolling to the bottom? ‘A PDF is a stampa, a printout,’ I told him. ‘If I tell my computer to print it asks me if I want to print out a PDF.’ In what way was the printout on the screen any different from a printout on paper? What piece of information would he get with paper that he wasn’t getting on the screen? None. Nothing.
‘To me a printout means paper,’ he said.
‘Remember, I actually volunteered this information when you asked if there was anyone who hadn’t had their ticket checked. I could have just kept quiet. Surely that indicates I’m in good faith.’
He shook his head. ‘Without a paper printout I can’t accept that someone has a ticket.’
My voice began to wobble, perhaps my Italian slipped, my Englishness became more evident. An inspector is used to these confrontations. You’re not. You’re like the amateur who agrees to spend five minutes in the ring with the professional wrestler. I asked him whether, given that the regulations were new and given that the mistake I had made was understandable, he wasn’t willing on this one occasion to turn a blind eye. He didn’t even respond. He simply looked at me as if I were becoming too pathetic for words.
‘I’m not paying a fine,’ I said.
‘You don’t have a ticket,’ he told me. He had to ‘regularise’ my situation. That was his job.
‘I’ll get off at the next stop,’ I said. This, as we have seen before, is one way of resolving a ticket problem without formalising a fine. Logically the man could have insisted on fining me, but he hadn’t actually started writing out the fine.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Make sure you do.’ Smiling faintly as he turned away, he said, ‘And make sure you read the regulations before you travel on Trenitalia.’
No sooner had he turned his back than the people around me exploded into conversation. The girl next to me wanted to see the PDF at once.
‘It doesn’t say anything about paper,’ she said. ‘Only a stampa.’ A printout.
‘There are no avvertenze on the online tickets for the frecce,’ someone commiserated. ‘There was no reason why you should have gone and looked for them for a Regionale.’
‘If you were a pretty girl,’ the boy across the aisle said with a laugh, ‘there would have been no problem.’
‘That guy’s one of the most pignoli,’ somebody else agreed.
At this point, the inspector, perhaps hearing the tones of indignation, strode back down the aisle to defend himself. ‘If you people would only –’ he began.
‘Who the hell are you?’ I demanded.
I had totally lost it. The kids around me were agog. In particular the boy opposite had his mouth hanging open.
‘You’re the ticket inspector, right?’ The tone of my voice had shifted into an unpleasant treble. ‘I’ve agreed to get off your train, right? Conversation over. Go and inspect tickets. Isn’t that what they pay you for?’
‘You people like to complain, but –’
‘Stop!’ I yelled. ‘You have no right to interrupt a conversation between passengers on the train. We want to talk among ourselves. We can think what we like about you and your rules. We don’t want to talk to you. I’ve agreed to get off the train, now basta!’
The man looked at me, weighing up the situation, pursing his lips. He had displayed a weakness and he knew it. First he had acted with unreasonable inflexibility, then he had shown that he didn’t want to be ill thought of, he wanted to split me off from his regular, as he saw them, Regionale travellers. That was an error.
‘You have no right,’ I repeated. ‘We do not wish to speak to you.’
He looked at all of us. Myself and seven students, all with their books and laptops, abundant
