The youngsters were all respect. No sooner was the conflict over, however, than I was appalled. Why do I rise to this kind of bait? I wondered. Why had I been so rude, so shrill? I stood up to pull my bag down from the luggage rack. I’m sick, I thought.
‘You’re surely not really going to get off,’ someone protested. Everyone seemed amazed when I stood and got my bag down.
‘But you’ve paid for your ticket!’
‘You can’t be serious. What’s he going to do, get the police? They’ll take one look at the PDF and laugh at him.’
‘He won’t dare come back the whole trip, he’ll just go to the other end of the train and hang out with his assistant.’
I sat down with my bag on my knee and thought about it. So, all these young people, young Italians, had understood my offer to get off the train not as a real offer, but as a way of defusing the argument, or creating an honourable stand-off, such that the inspector could continue to inspect and I could stay put and everybody would be happy. But I hadn’t meant it like that. And I wasn’t sure the inspector had understood it like that. Particularly not after his return and my inexcusable outburst. He would surely relish a chance for revenge if I offered it to him.
The train was approaching Peschiera. A few folk planning to visit Gardaland were standing up. Should I stay? Should I go? If I stay and he doesn’t come I will spend the next hour and a half in a state of anxiety and won’t be able to do any reading for the prize. If I stay and he returns there could be an almighty showdown, perhaps leading to legal action. I was aware that I couldn’t vouch for my own responses.
But there was something deeper: this whole culture of ambiguous rules, then heated argument about them without any clear-cut result, seems to serve the purpose of drawing you into a mindset of vendetta and resentment that saps energy from every other area of life. You become a member of society insofar as you feel hard done by, embattled. Others oppose you, or rally around you, for the entertainment. Almost everyone has some enemy they would like to crush. They become obsessed. They speak constantly about bureaucratic issues. Italian universities are full of such people, people who have been denied promotion because of some obscure regulation, people who have seen others promoted above them officially because they fell foul of some arcane paragraph in the university’s constitution, but in reality because the promoted person is a friend of a friend of the vice rector. The whole football scene in Italy is a farcical factory of these emotions, a gaudy theatre of mimed tribal conflict. To hang on in the train now, so that I could either boast before an appreciative audience that I had outwitted or faced down the inspector, or worse still so that I could plunge into a conflict that would engage my energies for months to come, would be to become more intensely and irretrievably Italian. No doubt about it. And all these young people around me wanted that. They couldn’t conceive of my taking any other course of action at this point. They wanted to see the end of the drama, the defeat of the public official or the confirmation that all the cards are stacked against the individual in his battle with the state. But my dream had always been to buy a ticket, use it and travel in relative comfort, hopefully getting a little reading done on the way.
The train was slowing down in Peschiera. On the platform Mickey Mouse and Scrooge McDuck were still shooting it out twenty years on. ‘Buon viaggio e buona giornata,’ I told my disgusted supporters and headed for the door. In the ticket office I paid twice the price of my original ticket for a seat on the next Frecciabianca, which arrived and departed from platform two only twenty minutes later, and after an uneventful journey spent reading Rohinton Mistry’s excellent novel A Fine Balance, I arrived in Milano Centrale some five minutes ahead of the Regionale Veloce that I had so ignominiously bailed out of. I thus had a last chance to wait for the train and confront my antagonist again, perhaps to tell him that I planned to write about the incident in a book where I hoped he would come off extremely badly. For thirty seconds I seriously considered this option in the great arrivals hall of Milano Centrale. I looked up to the chalky friezes of warriors hacking each other to death, a huge advertisement for Nike with the ominous slogan, in English, HOW FAR CAN YOU RUN?, and another poster inviting me to gamble for cash on my mobile phone. Surely the best thing to do, I decided, was to hurry to the university and get on with my Englishman’s life in Italy.
Part Three
TO THE END OF THE LAND
2012
Chapter 5
MILANO–ROMA–PALERMO
I’M SCARCELY SURE what nationality I really am these days. All I know is that for the past thirty years I’ve lived and worked in northern Italy, and like most of the people around me I know little of the south, though the south is always present to us as an idea – a bad one, for the most part. The news we get of the south does not endear it to us. It is Gomorrah, it is corrupt, it soaks up
