Taking the lead from the way the Americans give names to their hurricanes, the Italians have recently started personifying the anticyclones that push north from Africa and make the summer weeks so torrid. Myth and ancient history provide the name pool. Caronte – that is, Charon, death’s ferryman – had paddled up the peninsula coasts a few weeks before. Now we had Crete’s cruel tyrant Minos, who was torturing us all with temperatures in the high thirties.
Names for the trains and now names for the weather; this constant desire to give human narrative and drama to all kinds of phenomena, as if thirty-six degrees with fast traffic on one side and a dazzling sea on the other weren’t dizzying enough. I was beginning to feel like it must be quite ordinary in Sicily to suffer from giramenti di testa. No sooner had the rocks turned into pebbles and begun to look swimmable than there were bars and hotels whose owners had fenced off the sea approach and proclaimed the ‘beach’ private. We’d gone almost a mile before a small patch of unclaimed boulders and grit looked like a place where we could finally take a dip. There was no shade. The Latvian lady again said that she felt it had definitely been a mistake to come to Sicily.
Returning to Palermo in the early evening, we had to stand. Hence we discovered who it was that really used the trains. Aside from some sun-dazed day trippers, the carriage was jammed with extra-comunitari carrying the big red boards, perhaps five feet by five, on which they pin the trinkets that they sell along the beaches: beads, bracelets, hair clips, headbands, cheap jewellery and small toys, all plastic, all made in China, to be sold by Africans on Italian beaches, all outside any tax net but taking wise advantage of Trenitalia’s cheap fares to get their goods to market.
Over the coming week, travelling the coasts of Sicily, Puglia and Calabria, I was going to see a great deal more of this. Lean black men in jeans and T-shirts humping these heavy boards back and forth for the benefit of the white Italian beachgoers. So although Trenitalia never employs extra-comunitari, the African immigrant’s initiation into Italy inevitably seems to involve the trains: the prostitutes in the north, shuffled and reshuffled around the various town centres, these hawkers along the coast. Chatting together, trying to stop their boards from entirely obstructing the doors and corridors, all in possession of regularly stamped tickets, the men don’t seem too unhappy with their lot. Perhaps there are worse ways to spend the day than stepping between bodies in skimpy bathing costumes.
MY PALERMO HOTEL WANTED cash in advance and didn’t give a receipt. But they did warn me that I would have to take a bus if I wanted to go to Modica, on the southern coast of Sicily, on a Sunday. ‘There are no trains on Sunday in Sicily,’ they told me. ‘You should arrive early for the bus because it might be full.’
My first thought was that this was nonsense. This hotel was on the fourth floor and run by a couple who might have been a Sicilian Norman Bates and his mamma, moving in a crepuscular, mahoganied light among dusty crucifixes and ceramic madonnas. They are big on ceramics in Sicily and never skimp on religious icons. I hurried to my room, opened Trenitalia’s ticket purchase page and typed in Palermo to Modica. The road distance is about 125 miles. Sure enough, a train came up, leaving at 8.49 a.m. and arriving at 4.11 p.m., three changes, seven hours and twenty-two minutes of travel. Damn.
Still, there was a train.
Then I noticed the little asterisk after 8.49. The asterisk – and this is something you have to watch out for because it is so small and apparently inoffensive – means that ‘la soluzione si riferisce al giorno successivo’ – this possibility refers to the next day. Rather than indicate there was no train on Sunday, they had given me the only train on Monday.
One gets so used to the idea that there are trains between cities, at least in Europe, that one rarely actually studies a rail map to see what is possible and what is not. Obviously this had been a mistake on my part. I found a rail map for Sicily on the Net and studied it. Immediately it was evident that the scant network in the interior of the island had nothing to do with modern tourist trails or indeed rapid communication between major Sicilian business centres. These lines had been built in the nineteenth century to bring sulphur and salt down from mines in the mountains. Sicily produced almost all of Europe’s sulphur in that period, and industrial Britain was the main buyer. Don Luigi Sturzo, whose street passes by Garibaldi’s railway station in Milan, had fought to reduce child slavery in the mines, the kind of awful working conditions recorded in Giovanni Verga’s story ‘Rosso Malpelo’, about a brutalised and violent young boy who simply disappears down a salt mine. Most of these mines closed in the early twentieth century; since then there seems to have been very little investment in redesigning the rail network for other uses. Sicily simply isn’t a train culture. Perhaps an efficient train system requires the presence of a strong central state determined to integrate all areas of a country into its communications network. The absence of state authority that has allowed the Mafia to flourish runs parallel with the weakness of the train service. If I wanted to travel to Modica on a Sunday I was going to have to take a bus run by the Sicilian municipal authority and hence under the attentive patronage of local politicians. As I write, the president of the region of Sicily has just been forced to resign, mainly over the grotesque overmanning in every area of
