‘Since no one is sitting next to me,’ I said, indicating the seat to my left, ‘perhaps la signora could sit here.’
They were uncertain about this. They apparently had an investment in sitting in the seats allotted to them. What if someone came and sat in their seats while they were sitting elsewhere? On the other hand, his wife could not sit with her back to the train. She just couldn’t.
‘We were supposed to sit together.’ The man had perfected a tone of voice that was both belligerent and plaintive.
‘I’m happy to move,’ I said.
But the man did not want this. I was sitting in the seat I was supposed to be in, and I should stay there. He couldn’t be responsible for moving me.
As yet the tiny wife had said not a word. He had done all the talking for her. Eventually she sat down next to me while her husband brought in two gigantic, brand-new green leather suitcases, and proceeded to look at them and then to look up at the luggage racks above our heads. Next to me, the young man had gone back to his laptop. A glance at his screen showed he was poring over some highly technical documents.
I offered to help the man put his cases up, but he refused. Watching him struggle, lift the bag, stagger, let it fall again, I’m suddenly reminded of the way, when boarding a plane, the whole overhead locker routine brings out the worst in people. The hostess checks your boarding card and you start towards your seat, only to find the passage blocked for minutes at a time by people trying to fit oversized bags into lockers that the early comers have already stuffed full with coats and packages and guitars and umbrellas. People push, voices are raised. The pilot warns you that we will miss our departure slot if the boarding process is not completed sufficiently quickly. What ought to be the simple matter of getting onto a vehicle and sitting down is protracted into a tetchy trial of nerves.
This doesn’t happen on the train, which will depart anyway even if your luggage is all over the floor. But there are times when I fear that someone heaving up a heavy bag will drop it on me or my laptop. This was one of those moments.
‘Please let me help you.’
Mr Misery again said no. He now had the huge suitcase at shoulder height but couldn’t find the extra push to get it above his head and began to totter backwards, then forwards again about the compartment, which was now in motion. Suddenly he let it fall on his feet.
The young man beside me offered to put it up for him.
‘No.’ He was grimly determined.
At this moment the ticket inspector came in. He saw that the newly arrived couple still had to put their cases up and said he would come back later.
‘No!’ the man cried. He began feeling through his pockets. His jacket pockets, his trouser pockets.
‘I want my tickets punched,’ he said.
‘I’ll come back later,’ the inspector assured him.
‘Please punch my tickets,’ he demanded.
This was new to me. I thought in thirty years of Italian train travel I had seen it all, but apparently not. Here was a man insisting he have his tickets not just seen but also punched.
While he was fussing in his pockets and the inspector watched him, bemused, the young man sitting next to me put aside his laptop, stood, grabbed the first of the two green bags, and with no apparent effort, swung it up onto the rack. The man glared at him but was now worried that he had lost his ticket.
‘Grazie,’ the wife found her voice. Then she said, ‘Perhaps they’re in my handbag.’
They were. The inspector punched them.
As soon as he was gone, Mr Misery announced angrily, ‘This is a long trip. If we don’t have our tickets punched in the first section, when they check them in the second and see they weren’t punched, they might think we have been trying to avoid inspection. That has happened to me before.’
However fascinated I am by all the things that can go wrong between ticket bearer and ticket inspector, a relationship that has come to take on almost a metaphysical significance for me, I decided not to accept this invitation to converse. Nor did my young computerised neighbour.
But after a few minutes the young man did speak to me. Was I English? he asked. He had seen I was writing in English on my laptop. And he began to explain that in a month’s time he would be heading to Australia, to emigrate. His uncle had gone thirty years ago, to Melbourne, and now he was going to join him. He was from Ragusa, he said, graduated in architecture in Rome with a thesis on green buildings that left no carbon footprint.
‘So we were on the same train all the way,’ I said, and explained that I had come from Modica.
He laughed. He wasn’t that much of a masochist. He had had his parents drive him to Siracusa. It took half the time.
‘Half for you, but not for them.’
‘True,’ he agreed.
‘Not to mention the carbon footprint.’
‘Già.’ He confessed that the work experience he was doing in an architect’s office in Velletri had left him rather sceptical as to the possibility of the zero carbon footprint. A building that really achieved that would be far too expensive to build.
The train from Modica to Siracusa cost €7.
I asked him if there was no work in Ragusa. Was that why he was leaving? But he said, no, there was work, there was even an architect’s office in Ragusa that would take him on, a good one. He hesitated. It was just that, once you had left a place like Ragusa, it became impossible to go back. If he wanted to stay he
