THE JOY OF TRAINS is that you can read while you travel. In his book Le ferrovie, Stefano Maggi claims that the spread of railways in the late nineteenth century went hand in hand with a marked increase in reading as newsagents opened new outlets in all the stations, offering books and magazines for the journey. Alas, you can’t read on a bus. Or I can’t. If I try, I soon start to feel sick. I also start to feel trapped in my seat. It’s not that I really want to move around, but I’d like to feel I could, the way you usually can move about on a train. On the Italo, for example, I had very much enjoyed walking right to the front of the train and back.
Having arrived late, the driver was in a hurry. It was a four-and-a-half-hour ride. With no conversations to overhear, since almost everyone was sitting alone, and buses are anyway noisier than trains, I was reduced to staring at the landscape. Low hills, burned brown-green grass, bleached white tracks, small prickly trees and dusty vines. I was reminded of the only other time I had travelled deep into Sicily. Benetton’s promotional department was going to photograph young people in Corleone, in the heart of the heart of the country, to improve the image of a town that had unjustly been presented, they said, as nothing but Mafia, crime and tax evasion, this thanks or no thanks to the Godfather films. Would I come along and write about it? They offered more money than I was used to. I said I would, on the condition that I was free to write anything I wanted, and I told them straight that I had a gut dislike of Benetton’s opportunist mix of piety and promotion. They said I was absolutely free to say what I liked; they were modern people in favour of honesty and free speech. In a suffocatingly hot Corleone, the kids chosen (very carefully) to be photographed were only too eager to feature on Benetton publicity; they hoped this might prove a passport to leaving the place. Over lunch the new mayor, a brave young man who had been elected on an anti-corruption ticket, described how a severed goat’s head had recently been left on his doorstep. As the troupe moved around the small town’s central streets and piazza, old people sitting against the walls on old wooden kitchen chairs did not want to talk to us. At the end of a restaurant meal that seemed interminable thanks to the proprietor’s insistence that we try every dish on the menu, we were first given the bill and then asked what sum we would like to appear on the official receipt; if we were claiming expenses they were quite happy to jack up the figure by 50 per cent. Of course, such generosity could only mean that many customers were getting no receipt at all; otherwise there wouldn’t have been the cash to cover this. ‘We did tell them,’ one of the promo girls said to me, ‘that we were trying to change the image of the place.’
‘I guess they don’t associate a little cooking of the books with crime,’ I said with a laugh.
About an hour into the journey the bus attacked a series of hairpins, climbing up to a plateau. After a while we began the descent, at speeds that had to be unwise. At the third or fourth bend, the driver braked fiercely, and my head swayed forward to touch the seat in front. I thought nothing of it. He must know the road like the back of his hand. A couple of bends later the bus braked, skidded, then slammed to a stop at the elbow of the hairpin, sending all kinds of luggage, phones, wallets and books onto the floor. We were inches from a guardrail protecting us from a steep drop into a rocky gully. The hefty woman sitting on the other side of the aisle from me crossed herself. The woman behind me, a serious, professional-looking lady who had been trying to use her computer to do some work, asked me if I was OK. She had seen my head bang forward. I asked her if it was always like this, why was he in such a hurry.
‘He’s with his wife,’ she said.
I must have looked puzzled because she added, ‘The woman in the seat behind him.’
‘And so?’
‘He’s eager to arrive and settle down to Sunday lunch.’
This seemed to me a very generous explanation of why a man might respond to his wife’s presence by driving with mad haste. In any event, the superiority of the train was evident. Modern signalling systems discourage speeding, and there is no place for a wife to sit behind a husband driver in a train cab. Or a husband behind a wife driver, for that matter, for there is one woman who has qualified to drive Trenitalia’s frecce. I have been unable to find the statistics for women train drivers in general, but they do exist and there are even a couple of eccentric websites dedicated to sightings of them. What is certain is that there are more women driving the trains than black people of either
