We arrived at the dock in Villa San Giovanni at 6.30 p.m. The train sat under full sunshine. The temperature was about thirty-five degrees. The windows were sealed. Very soon, the woman with the gossip magazines opened a large pink fan.
There had been some changes among the passengers. The dancing girl to my left and the gap-toothed banker priest had both got off before Naples. Opposite I now had a chubbily handsome woman in her forties who was keeping her husband constantly informed, by phone, as to her giramenti di testa – dizzy fits – and our possible arrival time in Messina. She seemed cultured, competent and entirely focused on the well-being of her large, slightly moist body.
Beside me, on the window side, was another young woman, this time with her boyfriend facing her, in what had previously been the empty seat. No sooner did this happy couple get on than they placed a large food cooler on the floor between them, their heads meeting and nuzzling over it as they rummaged among wrapping paper and Coke bottles and started to offer around crisps, tiny pizzas, ham sandwiches and little cakes. Everyone smiled and declined, except the boy who had seen off his girlfriend; he accepted a small pizza. With the air of someone used to presiding over intimate dinner parties, the large lady observed that she had realised at once the couple must be southerners because only southerners offered their food to people, not like the mean and miserable folk of the north. She smiled complacently. A more obvious invitation for general chatter and self-congratulation one could hardly imagine, since it was clear that the boy sprawled beside me and the permed woman with the gossip magazines had very southern physiognomies. I was the one odd man out, and she had clearly decided that wherever I was from I wasn’t likely to take offence.
From this point on, the compartment was a salon. The young couple, she with a charmingly long neck of the kind one sees on Etruscan vases, he with a young man’s beard that he constantly combed for crumbs as he ate, began to explain the foolishness of their trip: an uncle was picking them up in Palermo to drive them to his house on the coast just below Trapani. But they only had the weekend! So on Sunday evening they would be back on the night train from Palermo, which should get them to Naples just in time to be back at work Monday morning. Exhausting!
‘The fact is, I can’t fly,’ the girl confided, and she smiled at her boyfriend with such seductive apology for wasting his weekend on the train that he leaned across and put both hands around that long neck to forgive her. To my right the tall, sprawling, now single young man turned his phone over and over in his hand.
Then everyone felt the need to declare why they would do something so eccentric as to take a train, of all things, to Sicily. The permed woman, who appeared to be studying her magazines as if for an exam, explained that she lived only a couple of hundred yards from the small station at Castroreale, so that it really was the easiest thing for her, even though the bus would be cheaper and quicker, and the plane much quicker. The chubby woman said her blood pressure problems didn’t allow her to fly and she found the bus uncomfortable, the seats weren’t big enough, the movements too jerky. The boy told us he was training to be a soldier. He only had three days off. He would normally have gone by bus, but his parents had bought him the train ticket. The other listeners were so pleased to hear that they had a young soldier among them, and a handsome one at that, that they forgot to ask me, or were spared from asking me, what I was doing on this train, which was fine by me, since wherever possible I avoid the dull discussion about my foreignness and my writing habit. The boy described, with an animation he had not shown throughout the long call with his girlfriend, all the ordeals of his boot camp, in particular the marches in high temperatures carrying some eighty-odd pounds of equipment.
‘Would you be happy to be selected for Afghanistan?’ the woman with giramenti di testa asked with obvious concern.
‘Yes,’ the boy said. He spoke with some solemnity now. But it was more likely that he’d be fighting closer to home, he thought. ‘The revolution isn’t far away now,’ he told us. ‘With this economic crisis and everything. It’s already begun in Greece and Spain.’
It wasn’t clear from the way he spoke which side of the revolution he thought he would be on, if ever the fighting began, only that he was looking forward to this chance, as he saw it, to become adult. There was a curious curl to his upper lip, almost a sneer; he was eager to feel superior but knew it was something he had to work on, he had to train to become a good soldier, then
