The train station is the ideal scenario for greetings and farewells. The car is too banal. What does it mean to set off in a car? Nothing. The airport is too exhausting and impersonal, the plane itself remote, unseen, the barriers and security disturbing. Here the powerful beast of the locomotive thrusts its nose under the great arch of the station. The lines straighten from the last bend. Clanking and squealing, the train slows. The last moments of waiting begin. Eyes focus on the platform, keen to possess their loved ones; in the train corridor, meanwhile, the long-awaited beloved is jostling and jostled, luggage at his heels. The train slows, slows, slows, teasing everyone on both sides of the divide, making them wait, making them savour the tension between absence and presence. Text messages are flying back and forth: ‘The last carriage but one.’ ‘The first after the restaurant car.’ ‘You’ll have to help with my bags.’ ‘Be nice to Zia Eleonora, her dog just died.’ ‘I look a state without my make-up.’
It’s simply agonising how long a train can take to stop in a terminal station where the macchinista high up in his cabin must gauge the distance to the buffers. The beast is inching now, steel wheel on steel rail. If this were an old Regionale, people would hang out of the windows, but the Intercity carriages are sealed – bursting with life, but silent. Then with a wonderful sigh and a last jarring squeal it has stopped, it is still. And still, the doors can’t open. Why is there such a long wait on trains, ten seconds, even twenty, almost a minute, between the locomotive stopping and the green light that tells you that you can push the button and open? All along the twelve packed carriages the buttons are pushed, and again with agonising slowness – it must be done on purpose – the heavy doors begin to inch away from the carriagework. If the whole of railway technology, the whole cultural and architectural heritage that is the Italian railway station, had been designed on purpose to maximise the emotional drama of return from afar, it could not have been done better. Now, after trips of six or eight or even ten hours, the passengers are tumbling out. Some will have to wait in the corridor while others fuss with their clumsy bags on the steep steps. Some are already striding down the platform.
The family come to greet their firstborn son, their beautiful daughter, sees a stream of strange faces flowing towards them, a dam release of insignificant others, people who mean nothing to them, pushing past, themselves irritated by these idiots blocking the way. When will the known face declare itself? When will Luca or Chiara appear and be mine? In the meantime, other trains are arriving and departing. Coincidenza, coincidenza! Regionale per Metaponto in partenza dal binario 4, anziché binario 7. Appearance, presence, is so mysterious. Not there, not there, not there, then suddenly, yes, yes, there, there she is. Stefania! Finalmente! That’s her face, her walk, her. So different from anybody else on the planet. You have the crowd, and in the midst of it, infinitely more special, her, Lucia, my daughter, my girlfriend, my sister.
In a space of twenty or so square yards towards the end of the platform dozens of families, lovers, mothers are sighting their object of desire. Now they must just survive the last tumultuous but strangely embarrassing seconds when the beloved is seen, recognised, but not yet close enough to speak to and embrace; all you can do is observe, watch, as they approach, and you too are observed and watched by your darling child; all this emotion is ready to pour out of you and instead there you are observing your beloved and observed by them, judging and being judged: Mario definitely looks thinner than he should. Why does Mamma always get so stupidly excited? And what an old-fashioned blouse! Then the embrace, the contact, and the southern child is back, possessed, adored, perhaps already regretting the freedoms and anonymity of Milan.
It’s so much more intense down here, the emotions on these platforms where Trenitalia hits its southernmost buffer and releases these Mediterranean children from the prison of the train into the loving clutches of mamma e papà. The sense that one has to go north for a serious career, or at least the start of that career, increases the south’s perception of itself as forever the victim, abandoned, even punished by the callous and confident north. Poor us, poor us! And this winds up the emotions of greeting and parting; when perhaps the truth for many of these kids is that the south’s asphyxiating family traditions, its asphyxiating adoration of its offspring, is as much the trigger for departure as anything else. True, the economic situation is dire. Youth unemployment is almost 50 per cent in the south. But many of these young men and women, after being spoiled silly in the summer weeks ahead, eating heavily and scorching themselves on perfect beaches, will be only too glad to be on the train again in early September. Then the carriages will be already there, waiting on the platform, and Father will quietly carry the bags on board, find the prenotazione obbligatoria, hoist his daughter’s heavy bags full of gifts onto the luggage rack, exchange a last embrace. The son will cross the aisle to wave to his mother standing on the platform and looking up at the window. She looks small and rather pathetic down there, her tired face upturned with a mole at the corner of her mouth; and he looks scandalously healthy after his days of seaside idleness, glowing
