‘Or mistress,’ the fat woman insinuated.
‘Or daughter,’ someone else said forgivingly.
In any event, it was a scandal.
By the time the train lurched into serious motion, it seemed like the six of us had known each other for years. ‘My husband’s such a bore,’ complained the woman who lived two hundred yards from the station. ‘He always tries to get out of picking me up.’
The tubby woman smiled complacently, as if to say, Why don’t you tell him you get fits of dizziness? The boy beside me took the nth call from his mother asking him for a progress report. ‘How the hell should I know where we are?’ he shouted, peering out into the dark. ‘It seems they’re already on the platform in Palermo,’ he told us. ‘They’ll be waiting for hours.’
Then the train stopped at the tiny station of San Piero Patti.
And didn’t set off.
‘We’re not supposed to stop here, are we?’ I asked.
‘Waiting for the train to come the other way,’ the soldier boy commented.
‘Oh, the Englishman didn’t realise!’ The tubby woman was oddly triumphant. ‘What do you think, mister, that they would give us two lines? In Sicily!’
Thus I discovered that while the Ferrovie dello Stato had been investing €150 billion to build a high-speed line between Rome and Milan, they had not bothered to double up the line to Italy’s fifth-largest town, the principal city of Sicily. We arrived in Palermo shortly before midnight, where I witnessed the soldier boy being smothered with Mamma’s kisses on a platform with palm trees. The revolution could wait.
‘POSSO DARE UN’OCCHIATA ALLA sua mappa?’
There was only one person standing under the departures board in Palermo Centrale Saturday morning, a woman in her thirties, with austere cheekbones and flaxen hair pulled tightly back in a small ponytail. I spoke to her in Italian, out of a respect I myself am rarely shown, but I guessed that if there was any conversation it was going to be in English. Sure enough, when she looked blank and I asked, ‘May I take a look at your map?’ she handed it over.
The problem was that the destinations on the departures board didn’t correspond to anywhere I knew. I had planned to go to Trapani, at the western tip of the island; I had checked on Trenitalia’s website before leaving the hotel. There was a train departing at 10.39 a.m. that arrived at 1.28 p.m.; two hours and forty-nine minutes to go sixty-five miles. With two changes on the way. It seemed excessive, but I could always read, I thought. Or just watch people. Except that, on arrival at the station, the departures board had no trains leaving at 10.39, nor did any of the destinations posted seem to fit in with a trip to Trapani. I needed to understand where these places were.
The severe blonde woman spoke in a bizarre singsong English full of unusual mistakes, in the sense, I suppose, that they were not the mistakes I’m so used to hearing Italians make. She too had been planning to get the train to Trapani, she said, it was the obvious tourist destination. One felt this natural desire to arrive at the land’s limit. ‘I’m from Latvia,’ she added, as if to explain her disorientation.
The map wasn’t very helpful. I scanned the coast north and west of Palermo. There was no sign of Cinisi, to which three trains were headed. But my eye was attracted to a small seaside place to the west called Isola delle Femmine – Girls’ Island or Women’s Island. It might be a fun place for a swim, I thought.
We looked around for help. Come to any major railway station in northern Italy on a Saturday or Sunday morning and you’ll find it fizzing with families off for the weekend, hikers, mountain bikers, raucous football fans, the stolid Japanese, the African girls, quiet couples headed for art exhibitions with plenty of reading material for the journey, groups of Boy and Girl Scouts squatting around mountains of backpacks. The information office will be open, there will be plenty of ticket sellers at the windows, plus the lines of expensive new ticket machines. The bars will be full of people grabbing a quick cappuccino, others telling the barman exactly how much grappa they want in their espresso corretto. You have a strong sense of a community enjoying itself.
Here the only dozen or so people in the fairly large ticket hall were all queuing up at the one ticket window that was open. Beyond them, glass doors revealed a lush little chapel with satiny wood, polished marble and comfortably upholstered seating for maybe forty; all the dark chairs were directed to a sombre crucifix and sugar-white Madonna complete with an array of electric candles at her feet. The investment was considerable, but nobody was worshipping. Nobody was using the two brand-new ticket machines; they were the variety that take only credit cards. Apparently this was not the kind of place where anyone would want to set up a shopping centre.
I went to one of the ticket machines, touched the screen, and then tapped in T R A P A N I. Dutifully, the display suggested the same train my computer had proposed, the 10.39. Again I looked at the departures board: there was no 10.39. But there was something rather odd going on. The trains were not shown in strict order of time, earliest at the top, latest at the bottom. An eleven-something appeared above a ten-something. I shook my head and double-checked. Three departures were not in the ‘right’ place. I had never seen this before. Perhaps they had some other ordering system.
I played around a little more with the ticket machine, asking it for times to here and there, and it soon became clear that its data bank referred to some virtual rail network that had little to do with what was happening at Palermo Centrale that Saturday morning, assuming anything was happening at all. It was one of those
