‘YOU DON’T HAVE TO explain anything to me.’ The young man shakes his head. ‘Nothing.’
About one thing I was wrong. Compartments do still exist. South of Rome. That was the big discovery on boarding the 11.39 to Palermo from Roma Termini. It would be amply confirmed in the days to come. In the south they still have compartments; they still have the old Intercities. They even call them Intercities. In fact, they still have lots of old things and old names down south that we’re rapidly forgetting about in Milan. For some reason this puts me in an excellent mood, as when you discover that a model of car you owned twenty years ago, or a word you once used and had forgotten, is still up and running in a foreign country. Somewhere between Rome and Reggio Calabria you go through a time warp.
‘Think what you like,’ the boy beside me says, ‘I don’t care.’
He’s tall and handsome in a languid southern way, his lithe body spreading over the seat like liquid copper, legs apart, left elbow pushing mine off our shared armrest, right hand scratching idly behind his neck. The phone is tucked, no hands, under his chin where he talks into it, as if savouring his armpit.
‘But that’s my business,’ he says calmly, ‘not yours.’
His seat is beside the door where three friends now appear, two girls and a boy all like himself in their late teens, early twenties. They want him to move into the next compartment where there is a spare seat. Without explaining anything into the phone, he covers the receiver, sighs, shakes his head. ‘I have to speak,’ he tells them.
Five of the six places are occupied and I’m the only one not on the phone. The girl to my left is peppy and pleased with herself.
‘Did something crazy!’ she says. She has sunglasses hitched up on a fraying perm. She says with a giggle, ‘That’s the million-dollar question.’
The man opposite is overweight and in his fifties, round bald head, glistening with sweat, his red skin meaty against his damp white shirt. The Rome metro and the buses are both on strike this morning. Perhaps like me he walked to the station. It’s hot out there. It’s hot in here, too. They haven’t hooked up the air conditioning yet; still five minutes before the Roma–Palermo Intercity is due to depart.
‘So Mass is at seven?’ the meaty man asks. He has a copy of the financial paper Il Sole 24 Ore, plus a black attaché case. As he speaks he seems openly curious about the fact that I’m typing rapidly on my laptop. Italians often seem surprised by people who type with more than two fingers.
‘No, the monsignore!’ he breaks into a laugh and I see he only has one front tooth up top. Oddly, he keeps his eye on me throughout the conversation, as if he wanted me to join in the laughter, as if there were some complicity between us. Is he a priest? Does some subtle intuition tell him that my father was a clergyman? Perhaps he’s one of the Vatican bankers, very much in the news these days, for corrupt practices. But then surely he would have kept his teeth in better shape, he would have arrived at the station in an air-conditioned limousine. He wears his watch face, I see, on the inside of his wrist, something I’ve always found odd, secretive.
‘You don’t know how much money I spent,’ the girl on my left says triumphantly.
‘It’s my decision and I’ve made it,’ the boy says quietly. At first I imagined he was speaking to his mother, since I’ve noticed that many young Italians feel that phoning one’s mother is the natural thing to do when boarding a train. Perhaps Trenitalia makes them think of Mamma. But now I see of course he is firing his girlfriend, he is telling her he wants no more discussion about their break-up. ‘Still harping on about that?’ he asks coolly, as if he’d imagined she were smarter. Totally relaxed, it seems he was born to have the kind of conversations that have always terrified me. For a while he studies his left hand, turning it this way and that, as he listens to her lament.
Only the fifth occupant, a middle-aged, well-dressed woman, sitting opposite the young man and beside the one-toothed banker priest, seems rather anxious. She has spoken to someone informing him or her that she made it to the train, that she is now sitting in a sweltering compartment, that she should be home, all things being well, at about 9 p.m., though she doubts that all things will be well, knowing these trains, that she would be grateful, yes, if she could be picked up at the station, that she has never been more disgusted by Rome than on this awful trip, that she has never been treated worse in her entire life, that she sincerely doubts she will be coming back, but yes, she knows she’s said that before. ‘Yes, yes, I’m sorry. I won’t go on.’
She hangs up and takes two magazines from her bag. Dipiù and Zero. Dipiù is gossip. The cover shows the naked torso of a grinning, unshaven young man, as if he were surprised
