‘Guess how old I am,’ he challenges.
His wife is smiling complacently. I have no idea. I’m rather taken aback that he claims to have great-grandchildren. He doesn’t look that old. What’s the youngest you can be to have great-grandchildren?
‘I’d say you’re sixty-five.’
‘Fifty-seven,’ he says, grinning triumphantly.
He’s my age! I calculate: average childbearing age between eighteen and nineteen.
‘My first at seventeen,’ the wife says.
‘Can’t stop it,’ he says with a laugh. ‘It’s life!’
He seems blissfully happy with his lot.
‘People try,’ I said. ‘To stop it, I mean.’
‘You can’t.’ He shakes his head. ‘Fools. It’s life.’
AT SIBARI WE SWITCH trains for the section to Metaponto; that is, we exchange one heavily scrawled, poorly air-conditioned, single-carriage diesel for another heavily scrawled, poorly air-conditioned, single-carriage diesel. The train revs and the fumes intensify. The air conditioning is just enough to stop us from losing our heads. Just. A whistle and a lurch. One is usually so worried on trains about time, or at least so conscious of it. Will we depart on time? Are we running on time? Will we arrive on time? Will I win my bet? ‘This Regionale is travelling with a delay of eleven minutes. Trenitalia apologises for the inconvenience.’ ‘This Interregionale Veloce is now approaching Verona Porta Nuova. Terminus of our journey. On time! Thank you for travelling Trenitalia.’ Time time time. But today I’ve decided to pay no attention. I shan’t think of time at all. I refuse. After all, there is only one train running north and east along the Gulf of Taranto, rattling and swaying and stinking of diesel. Our train. There are no branch lines. There are no choices among Regionale, Regionale Veloce or Intercity, no Eurostar, no Frecciarossa. There is nowhere else to go but where we are going, along the timeless Mediterranean coast.
I have firmly decided I’m not going to look at my watch the whole four-hour journey. I’m on holiday, in a part of my country I have never visited. It’s hard, though. Hard not to look at your watch, hard to be here now, on each stretch of the journey, without being anxious for the end, without wanting anything to happen on the trip that you can engage with and write about. Buy your ticket each day now, I tell myself, wait for the train, climb aboard. Don’t expect company for the journey. Don’t expect to understand when there is a delay. Or even if there is a delay. Don’t ask whether the train is punctual. Don’t worry what Taranto will be like, what Lecce will be like, or Brindisi, or Bari. Don’t be concerned that you may have nothing to say about these places. Just be here, on the journey, at every moment of the journey; when the train is hurrying on and the landscape is whisked away – here and gone, here and gone – when the train stops and the same dull station name imposes itself for twenty minutes, Trebisacce, Trebisacce, Trebisacce. Learn to be happy with Trebisacce, and happy when the inspector blows his whistle; an electric warning sounds and the doors slide shut. Trebisacce slips behind at last. It’s gone. I almost miss it. Now Roseto, now Monte Giordano. Accept the names that come and go, places that will never mean anything to you – Rocca Imperiale, Policoro. You are simply here, on a journey from Crotone to Taranto, from this moment to the next, transported by Le Ferrovie dello Stato.
I think I am learning to take the journeys less anxiously. The sun helps, and the general feeling that these railways are not part of an urgent business world, they can’t be speeded up, they just are what they are. I’m learning to take them day by day and to accept that I really did move my life to Italy thirty years ago. I’m not sure why, but this trip to the south has made me think about that decision again. Thirty years ago I surrendered my identity, my Britishness. I became this strange hybrid, neither here nor there. Between places, between cultures. Recognised everywhere as English, but not really English now. Accept that. Now you are on a journey through tiny stations whose names are all new to you – Scanzano Jonico – but as real to those who live here as any other place. They are as much a part of your adoptive country as Verona, as Milan. Look at the bamboo growing in the gulley. Look at the dry gorse, look at the ruins and broken doors and the fat mother crouching on the platform to spray deodorant onto the armpits of her infant children. You are here now, arriving in the station of Metaponto, whether on time or not on time. It doesn’t matter.
So for a few hours my mind lapsed into this strange mood, lulled perhaps by the rhythm of wheels on rails, stifled by the poor ventilation, mesmerised by the fierce sunlight on this arid landscape.
TARANTO, BRINDISI, LECCE, BARI. If the provincial railway lines here are little more than buses on rails, running half empty, nevertheless when a mainline Intercity arrives from the distant north, then the carriages are full, the stations are full. Summer is the time of return. Students studying in Milan, Bologna, Turin, young men and women who went north to get education and find work. Their families are waiting for them, right on the platform. Mothers and fathers are there when they tumble out of
