About fifteen minutes out of Rome we get a welcoming announcement from the capotreno listing all our stops, telling us where the dining car is, which carriages will go to Siracusa and which to Palermo, because after we have crossed to Sicily the train will split. His whole spiel is delivered in four languages and always with some panache.
The dropped girlfriend calls the Sicilian boy again. He listens patiently for quite a while before asking, ‘Did I say something I shouldn’t have?’ On the other side of me, the girl who had a tough night has settled down to sleep. Her head lolls.
‘I just felt like it,’ the boy says. He’s so patient and so ruthless. ‘I felt like it and I did it and that’s that. It’s called freedom.’
Writing those words down, one’s tempted to add a tag like ‘he said with sudden belligerence’ or ‘finality’; but he didn’t. He says everything in exactly the same tone, perhaps with just the slightest hint of the appropriate emotion, a discreet and washed-out colour.
‘In bocca al lupo,’ he says now. ‘Good luck with everything.’
Now I can hear a raised voice at the other end of the line. ‘Basta,’ he says. ‘Enough. I’ve decided and that’s that.’
He closes the call, puts the phone in his lap, and flexes his hand open and closed, open and closed, as might a boxer who has held his fist clenched too long. For a few minutes he stretches his mouth from side to side. Then he begins to hum again. Outside, the barren hills of Campania roll by. Thinking of voices and dialects and difficult conversations with girls I remember the last time I travelled this stretch of line on a train and saw these hills. It was that trip with the football supporters to see Hellas Verona play in Naples. The three boys I was with spent this stretch of the journey trying to chat up a Roman girl who was going to see her Neapolitan boyfriend for the weekend. They asked her every embarrassing and impertinent question that a group of boys ever could ask a young woman, and she dealt with it all so coolly and wryly, even taking time to say that she found their accents cute.
‘Evviva Verona!’ the boys yelled. ‘Home of Romeo and Juliet, city of romance.’ They tried to get her to join in cheers of Hellas, the name of Verona’s football club: ‘HEEELLLLLLAAAAS!’ They gave her a blue-and-yellow Hellas flag and asked her if she would lie on it when her boyfriend made love to her. She smiled and said she would. ‘Then you’ll be a buteleta,’ they said, a little girl (in Veronese), a Hellas girl. She’d like that, she said. She repeated the word buteleta in her Roman accent and all the boys laughed and tried to get her to repeat it in the correct Veronese accent. And the more she was game and unfazed, the harsher their dialect and requests became. She had to yell Hellaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaas when she climaxed with her boyfriend, they shouted. Very gravely she said she might. She’d have to think about it.
‘You don’t really want to sleep with a Neapolitan,’ one of them began. ‘What about me? Can’t you fancy me?’ The Veronese were such lovers, he said. ‘Maybe, someday,’ she said. ‘Show us a nipple,’ one of the boys asked. ‘Just one, please.’ She smiled and shook her head. ‘A bra strap then, a bra strap.’ She thought about it. She was very petite, cute, well made with very small, neatly moulded features. ‘OK,’ she said, and she moved the shoulder of her T-shirt to show them a beige bra strap. There was a wild roar.
Thus the trains bring Italians together, I reflect now, thinking back on that conversation that seemed both extremely spontaneous but absolutely scripted, and so terribly easy to remember, as if it had already happened a thousand times and would happen a thousand times again in the future, like this interminable phone call between the boy beside me and the girl he is leaving. She calls back again. He listens. After a while he says,
‘But it’s normal. People do this.’
And then after another few minutes,
‘E vabbè comunque.’ OK all the same.
This time the conversation was really over because he turned his phone off and in no time at all had fallen asleep. So now I had two young heads lolling, one on each side of me, in cartoon fashion, slowly sinking, suddenly dropping, then jerking up again, then sinking again. Train sleep. The monsignor’s friend smiled to show me he had noticed this too and how endearing it was. I frustrated him by opening my laptop again. When she turned a page, I was able to see that the woman beside him was reading an article titled, ‘Hate Turns Mother-in-Law into Murderer’.
SEVEN HOURS INTO THE journey, at Villa San Giovanni, a northern suburb of Reggio Calabria, they split the train in two and
