‘You can’t return to Sicily,’ he said. ‘Once you’ve gone, you’ve gone.’
At Catania, a man got on and claimed the seat next to me, occupied by the timorous wife. She went out into the corridor. I had forgotten her train problem and thought nothing of it for a while, then realised she was standing there, long-suffering and a little uncertain on her feet. Her husband was frowning over his crossword puzzle.
I went out and told her, please, to take my seat.
She hesitated. ‘But you were talking to the nice young man. I don’t want to interrupt you.’
‘Take it,’ I told her. ‘Please.’
I STAYED IN THE corridor for a while. I had forgotten how these old Intercities have a bar running along the bottom of the corridor windows about four feet from the floor. This is just right for gripping with both hands as, your back to the compartments and face to the window, you gaze out over the countryside as it flies by.
We were passing Etna. Its perfect volcano shape looked very beautiful in the bright sunshine behind the lava stone city of Catania. ‘And you feel you can touch it with your hand,’ Giovanni Verga’s short story ‘Malaria’ begins, ‘as if it smoked up from the fat earth, there, everywhere, around about the mountains that shut it in, from Agnone to Mount Etna.’ He was born near here, malaria country. It was the disease that smoked up from the bowels of the earth. I use that passage with my students sometimes. Likewise the opening paragraphs of Verga’s ‘Black Bread’, which talk about how an old man’s greed led him to go on working on fertile slopes below Etna, despite the fact that everyone knew you inevitably caught the disease and died if you worked there for any length of time.
I love Verga. In ‘Malaria’, the local inkeeper, whose five wives have all died of malaria, becomes obsessed with the railway when he realises that the people passing by on the trains don’t suffer from the disease. He associates the malaria with the smoke of the volcano, while the railways become synonymous with wealth and health. But he was wrong there. One of the first studies investigating the link between malaria and mosquitoes was carried out with the help of Italian state railways. They had a problem with workers living in cheap railwaymen’s housing north of Rome; these men were constantly falling ill. Someone had the bright idea of installing nets in the bedroom windows so that when they slept with the windows open in summer the mosquitoes wouldn’t get to them. At the time it was just a hypothesis, a hunch. The improvement in the railwaymen’s health was immediate.
Trains were also useful during the 1908 earthquake, which reduced Catania to a heap of rubble. We were sliding through the suburbs right now, a prosaic clutter of concrete and palm trees. Survivors of the quake were housed in hundreds of railway carriages that the newly nationalised railways had rushed to the scene. Seven years old at the time, Quasimodo later wrote a poem about it, recalling nights in freight wagons where herds of children chew almonds and dried apples while dreaming of corpses and rubble.
Thinking of Verga, I suddenly wanted to read him. I went back into the compartment and googled ‘Malaria’. This is the first time I’ve made a trip with the chance to be online on the move. I hadn’t realised how much fun it would be tapping in instantly to books I knew describing landscape and places. Moments later I was reading D. H. Lawrence’s translation:
twice a day he saw the long line of carriages crowded with people pass by … sometimes a peasant lad playing the accordion with his head bent, bunched up on the seat of a third-class compartment; the beautiful ladies who looked out of the windows with their heads swathed in a veil; the silver and the tarnished steel of the bags and valises which shone under the polished lamps; the high stuffed seat-backs with their crochet-work covers. Ah, how lovely it must be travelling in there, snatching a wink of sleep! It was as if a piece of a city were sliding past, with the lit-up streets and the glittering shops. Then the train lost itself in the vast mist of the evening, and the poor fellow, taking off his shoes for a moment, and sitting on the bench, muttered, ‘Ah! for that lot there isn’t any malaria.’
Crochet-work covers! Beautiful ladies with veiled faces. There was none of that today on Intercity 724, Siracusa to Rome. The frightened wife was snatching a wink of sleep in my seat. Her husband was huffing and puffing over his crossword. I smiled. It seemed the train not only served to unite Italy but now also constituted a kind of catalyst that brought all my thoughts of the country together, all my reading and travelling over thirty years. As we drew into Messina I remembered that I had once watched Hellas Verona play in the town, and the Verona fans I was with, no more than a handful, caused outrage chanting Forza Etna! – Go for it – Etna! – meaning, bury them in hot lava. The result was that at the end of the game they had to beg for police protection to save them from hordes of Sicilians determined to beat the living daylights out of these barbarous northerners. In the end we had to wait in the stadium for almost two hours before their rage cooled to boredom and it was safe to go.
BOARDING THE FERRY, MY bet with the sceptical Sicilians was definitely on; we were only a dozen minutes late. Nothing. Likewise when the train pulled into the absolutely nondescript station of Lamezia Terme. Now came the tricky bit. A bus connection. Between Lamezia Terme on the west coast of Calabria and Catanzaro close to the east coast, the Gulf of Taranto, a bridge
