Although she was sitting across the aisle from me, her presence immediately imposed itself. My set of four seats was empty; so was hers. Trains give you this chance to feel another’s presence. She fanned herself and watched me reading. When the train turned a bend and the hot sunshine fell on her shoulder, she promptly shifted across the aisle to my set of seats. I looked up. She smiled deep into my eyes, raising black eyebrows, incongruous against the blonde hair, as if giving me the opportunity to say what had to be said. Her cheeks were dark, and some make-up had been used to hide the pores.
‘Buon giorno,’ I said.
‘Il sole,’ she explained. The sun.
‘Già,’ I agreed.
She stretched her mouth a little and set to watch me as I returned to my Kindle and she fanned herself slowly with the same deliberate rhythm. Then the train turned another bend and the sun was on our side again. She wriggled for a moment, sighed and eventually lifted her bulk to move back across the aisle to the other side. Again I looked up at her and again she smiled. Somehow it felt like a significant and highly satisfactory encounter.
IN SIRACUSA, ON THE east coast of the island, we were already back in serious civilisation. The station architecture here is exactly the same as it is in Brescia or a thousand other places, square columns clad in slabs of cheap polished limestone holding up the concrete shelters over the platforms. But it is unusual to find a waiting room labelled Prima Classe and laid out as if for a wake in the 1920s with benches that seem to have been carved from coffins and an austerely framed mirror where travellers can check that they still have a reflection. Outside, where the taxis were parked, the facade had recently been restored in a honey-beige stucco with bright white trimmings. On this newly renovated facade I found a plaque that, translated, read:
STATE RAILWAYS
AND THE CITY OF SIRACUSA
To Sebastiano Vittorini, 1883–1972
LITERARY RAILWAYMAN WHO WAS
STATIONMASTER IN THIS BUILDING
WHERE THE WRITER ELIO
MET ROSA QUASIMODO
SIRACUSA 2007
What was charming about this was the assumption that the passer-by reading the plaque would know that ‘the writer Elio’ was the celebrated, or once celebrated, Elio Vittorini, novelist, essayist and translator (of D. H. Lawrence, Poe and Faulkner). As for Rosa Quasimodo, I myself had no idea, until I checked on the Internet that she was both the sister of the Nobel-winning poet Salvatore Quasimodo, and Elio Vittorini’s wife. So this was a plaque for the public, but for a local public and a literary public, not the uneducated, not the curious tourist who might arrive in this town and wish for an explanation. The railway opened the town to the world, but the plaque celebrated Siracusa among educated Siracusans. Later I did a little research. Rosa’s father, it seems, like Elio’s, was a railwayman. That was how they met. The two were forced to marry because their parents discovered that they had spent a night in bed together. Such was the rule in those times in Sicily: automatic wedlock. ‘One August evening,’ Rosa wrote, ‘as agreed beforehand, he waited for me at his bedroom window, and I took my shoes off, climbed onto the roof of the station and clambered across to him.’
WHY DO SOME PEOPLE have to sit facing the direction of motion while others, like myself, really don’t care which way we sit, frontways, backways, sideways? As the Intercity skirted the coast northwards towards Catania and Messina – rigorously on time, I was pleased to notice – an elderly couple came into the compartment I was so far sharing with a young man. Both were very small, the man immediately identifiable as a whiner, a miserable soul with deep down-turned lines at the corners of his mouth, a long thin face, white hair combed over a bald spot, a bird-like body, all puffed up, oversized chest, but with meagre shoulders and stick-like legs. At first he couldn’t work out which seats were his and his wife’s, and he proceeded to get angry about this, assuming that I or the other man in the compartment, who was at the window beside me, both of us facing in the direction of motion, had somehow stolen their seats. They had seats 53 and 55, he said. Why weren’t the seats clearly marked? He and his wife had specifically asked for seats facing the direction of the train.
I pointed out that the seat numbers were indicated on the glass between the compartment and the corridor. ‘There’s a little schema, as you look in from the corridor.’ He went outside to look. His wife was tiny, frightened, shrivelled.
He couldn’t work it out. He could see the numbers but he couldn’t see how the little diagram explained where those numbers were. I stood up to help.
‘Perspective, signore,’ I said. ‘The seats close to us are further apart and the window seats closer together. So 51 and 52 are the corridor seats, 55 and 56 the window. That little square between the seats is the window. Odd numbers with their backs to the locomotive, even numbers facing it.’
He was furious. Furious he hadn’t understood, furious a foreigner had explained it, and most of all furious about the seats they had been given.
‘My wife needs to be facing the locomotive! We especially asked for seats facing the locomotive.’
The young man to my right remarked that the
