‘After a while, you could get yourself transferred home to Palermo,’ the chubby woman advised. ‘They have a large barracks there.’
He’d already had a chance to move back, the boy said, and added proudly, ‘Lots of my compagni would have said yes, but I’m not the kind. I want to live in new places.’
‘But you’re coming home for your leave, even if it’s only three days.’
‘My mother paid for my ticket,’ he said with a shrug. Everybody laughed.
IN THE LONG HOURS rattling down the coast – Salerno, Sapri, Paola – the dusty hills to our left and the dazzling sea to our right – Dipiù and Zero are passed around. The sixty-six-year-old actor and director Michele Placido was marrying a woman of twenty-eight. The model Raffaella Fico had announced that she was pregnant by the mad and maverick Mario Balotelli, the first truly black Italian to play for the national football team. Coal black and always in trouble, Balotelli was demanding a DNA test.
‘Furbe, queste ragazze,’ remarks the hefty woman, who is presiding over the conversation.
The soldier boy nods knowingly. ‘You bet.’ The young couple lean across to each other and nuzzle noses. Her eyebrows are plucked to pencil-line arches. Wearing shorts, his legs straddling hers are shaggy with hair.
‘If they wait and see when it’s born, it’ll be pretty obvious if it’s his,’ remarks the woman in the corner.
‘He’s not the only black in the world.’
‘The only one Fico has ever been seen with.’
‘You’re well informed,’ remarks the tubby woman, who throughout has shown a certain disdain for the gossip magazine, as if the publication interfered with her self-appointed role as hostess.
Finally the paper ends up in my hands. My laptop battery ran out long ago. To my surprise I find that there’s an interview with former prime minister Romano Prodi and an editorial criticising the present government’s emergency measures to cut pensions and other spending. Then there are articles you feel must be dusted off and reprinted every year: ‘Mediterranean Diet Improves Your Humour’; ‘I Want a Girlfriend Like My Mum’. I glance through and hand it back to its owner with a smile.
The large woman asks point-blank, ‘And where are you from?’
I was wondering when this was going to happen. The train compartment really is a unique environment to travel in. It will be a sad day when it is truly extinct. Arranging passengers face to face, three on three, with barely enough space for legs between, it militates against all those gadgets we use to isolate ourselves, the phones, the MP3s, the computer screens. Sooner or later, in a compartment, you just have to acknowledge each other’s presence, it’s so blindingly obvious that you’re a group, in the here and now, for the duration of this journey.
‘I live in Milan,’ I say, smiling her straight in the eyes.
Everybody listens. They all appreciate that the formula I’ve chosen has avoided saying where I’m from. It’s interesting how curious we all become when we spend a little time together, even though it’s completely irrelevant to us where the others are from. But then we hardly need to know that Raffaella is pregnant by Balotelli either.
‘Are you going to Sicily for business or pleasure?’
I’d like to answer generously, but the last thing a writer should do is say that he is a writer.
‘Pleasurable business.’
The woman twists her lips into a pout of wry frustration.
‘OK, OK,’ she says. ‘He doesn’t want to say.’
‘But where are you actually from?’ the young lover asks. I could hug him because he really seems perplexed. He hasn’t assumed I’m English.
‘London.’
We’re racing beside the sea. You can see people bathing less than a hundred yards away. There are sailing boats. To our left the hills are climbing into a blue heat haze. Distant villages glitter. In the compartment the two dull syllables London sound like distant gunshots.
‘Thought so,’ the chubby woman says with a smile.
AFTER HALF AN HOUR’S wait at Villa San Giovanni, the same woman observes, ‘It’s always the same. As far as Naples, announcements, politeness, ticket inspectors, more information than you’d want. After Naples, silence.’
This is true. Since they turned the train round at Naples, there hasn’t been a single announcement.
‘Why is that?’ I ask, since I’m now part of the conversation. ‘After all, it’s the same organisation. Trenitalia.’
‘We are abandoned,’ she says dramatically.
The woman beside her agrees. ‘The state has abandoned the south.’
‘It’s like they’re serving a different customer, who isn’t so important.’
All the women are fanning themselves now. The woman in the corner has her proper pink fan; the tubby woman has finally found some reason to appreciate Dipiù – its pages make a soft flapping noise; the long-necked girl simply invites the air towards herself with beckoning hands.
And our carriage is reversing now. It stops and starts. And stops again. By the time we are trundled into the boat’s dark hold the air is unbreathable. Fortunately, you can go up on deck. Everybody stands, apart from the older Sicilian woman in the corner. ‘I’ll look after everyone’s bags,’ she volunteers. She and the fat woman have huge suitcases. Something might be stolen.
‘But you won’t get to see the sea,’ I protest. I offer to change places with her for a while.
‘I live by the sea.’
To get off the train one has to walk down a couple of carriages, to where a train door coincides with steps leading up into the ship. Without a platform it’s quite a jump down. The air is full of fumes. The steps are narrow and steep. The space is not well lit. The twists and turns and galleyways and passages are disorientating. On deck the ship is half deserted. There are train passengers, a few people travelling by car, and a group of bus travellers who left one bus in Villa San Giovanni and will get on another in
