‘Do what you like,’ the young man says. His knee is jerking gently. ‘It’s really not my problem.’
‘I just have to dance,’ the girl by the window says. ‘That’s the truth. What can I do?’
The meaty man has a ring of white hair above his ears and more sprouting out of his shirt, but none on his head. Reading upside down, on the papers he’s now studying, I decipher the letterhead: ‘Reverendo Monsignor Don Andrea la Regine’.
Dipiù magazine carries a feature ‘Il Mammone più bello’ – Best-Looking Mummy’s Boy. Under a postage-stamp photo of a young man with a light blond beard is the subheading ‘Why I Can’t Find a Woman by Myself’.
‘Think what you like,’ the young man beside me purrs.
The train lurches into movement, just a few minutes late. I had been meaning to do some work on the trip. There are eleven and a half hours to get through, after all. But suddenly I just feel too happy. How lucky I am to be in a compartment again! How privileged to be surrounded by all this life and to be able to understand what everyone is saying, too. People speak so much about the mutual incomprehensibility of Italy’s dialects, but I can understand all five of these people, the boy clearly Sicilian, the girl to my left from Piacenza maybe, around there; she has those vowel sounds. The woman in the corner is also Sicilian. The man clearly Roman. All have their accents but all are understandable – all, like it or not, Professor Gilmour, very Italian.
And the train, no doubt, the train compartment in particular, has contributed to this slow unification of the language. More often than not it’s been on the train that I first heard new accents. I remember in particular the shock of hearing a group of kids from Bergamo. I honestly thought the language was not Indo-European. It was on the trains and buses with the fans of my local football team, the brigate gialloblù, that I finally learned the finer points of Veronese dialect. No doubt millions of Italians have had the same experience: trapped in train compartments with people from other parts of Italy, they set to work to understand each other.
I close my eyes and soak it up, as if this morning I were getting an unexpected pay-off for my thirty years in this country. I’m not above a little sentimentality from time to time. The girl is now complaining that she slept only an hour and a half, between five and six thirty. ‘He gave me a really shitty bed. You wouldn’t believe it.’ In the distance I can hear a hawker shouting his wares at the top of his nasal voice:
‘Aranciata, coca, birra, panini, acqua, acqua, acqua, panini!’
‘Still on about the same old stuff,’ the boy says. He’s shaking his head.
‘Caffè, acqua, panini!’
‘I told you the truth, you know.’
‘Coca-Cola, caffè, acqua, birra.’
The voice is getting closer, the speaker rearranging his five or six wares in every possible sequence, always with the same mad urgency. ‘Panini, acqua, acqua, birra, caffè.’
‘I didn’t do anything! It was a joke.’
A hand taps mine and I open my eyes. It’s a young Gypsy woman placing a printed card on my lap. She has a stack of them and goes out and along the corridor to deliver the rest. In a few minutes she’ll be back to see if any of us are willing to give. ‘I’m a poor woman from Bosnia,’ the card begins, ‘homeless, with two young children …’ It runs on for a few lines. The type is properly justified and there are no spelling or grammar mistakes. Presumably all the Gypsy women in a given group use the same printed card; otherwise it would push up costs.
‘That’s the third this morning,’ the woman reading about celebrities remarks.
The man who corresponds with the monsignor shakes his head, then pulls out a crumpled white handkerchief to mop up the sweat. I love a man who has a real cloth handkerchief.
‘Vabbè,’ the boy says lifelessly. ‘OK. OK. OK.’
Apparently the call is over because he suddenly pulls the phone from the crook of his neck and looks at it, turning it over in his hands a few times, as a man who has just used a revolver might examine the smoking barrel. Settling even more deeply in his seat, he starts to hum. I recognise the tune. What is it? Ah! ‘New York, New York’.
‘You old fraud!’ comes a booming voice. Two ticket inspectors are standing outside the compartment, laughing and joking. They are both men, in their fifties, pulling each other’s legs in strong southern accents.
‘Coca, caffè, panini, panini!’
The vendor appears, banging two refrigerated boxes against his hairy legs. He’s wearing a white vest and capacious shorts under a proud paunch and grinning.
‘Un abusivo,’ the possible priest remarks, trying to draw me into a conversation. By which he means this is not the official FS vendor with his proper minibar and wad of carefully distributed receipts. All the same, the abusivo exchanges smiles and words with the inspectors and calls them by name. Leaning into the compartment, he has just begun to shout, ‘Aranciate, coca, birra,’ when he sees me.
‘Beeah,’ he says. ‘Sanwidge. Sohda.’
Even an Englishman’s refreshment priorities are assumed.
‘No grazie,’ I tell him, keeping my words as few and my accent as perfect as possible.
Why is the priestly pate so interested in me? He’s staring.
With the inspectors and the hawker blocking the doorway, the Gypsy woman is having to wait her turn to come into the compartment and get her begging cards back. She doesn’t know
