‘Separati in casa.’ An estranged couple in the same house.
‘Già.’
The sun was now in absolute command. We needed to find shade fast. Fortunately the FSE train was already on the platform. We had started to board when two men appeared and told us this was the wrong train.
So it began. There was chatter back and forth with these railwaymen, an easy, friendly exchange you rarely get on Trenitalia. It was attractive. No automated announcements here, no sense of a distant, monolithic organisation. Actually, very little sense of any organisation at all. These generous railwaymen explained so much that in the end you understood nothing at all. This train, they said, was going to Zollino and so was the train to Otranto, which should be leaving now, but wasn’t here yet, though it would probably be along soon, but they weren’t sure, because someone somewhere wasn’t answering the phone and someone somewhere else had been ill but was feeling better now, and it would all work out. We should wait for the next train.
‘It’s very hot,’ I said.
‘There is air conditioning in the station building,’ they said, pointing back across eight platforms.
‘The girls have heavy bags,’ I said. It had been a struggle getting them up and down the stairs of the underpass.
The man considered the bags. The Japanese girls looked bewildered.
‘OK, get on this train, then,’ one man decided. It wasn’t clear whether these railwaymen were wearing uniforms. They had the same dark-coloured trousers and shirts, but, as it were, by chance.
The student now told me in an aside that these men were not giving us the whole truth. She had actually boarded the train, the correct train, to Otranto, shortly after seven when her night train arrived from Milan, and they had let her board, but then asked her to get off again because the train, they said, had to go somewhere to fill up with diesel fuel. She had imagined some ten or fifteen minutes, and now here she was ninety minutes later.
I sensed at once that FSE was, if not an organisation, at least a ‘happening’ that brought people together.
In any event, on the advice of our railwayman, we boarded the wrong train, which had truly ancient brown seats bolted to the floor. The driver, a lean man in complacent middle age, came out of his cabin and assured us that it dated back to 1936. I almost believed him, and we set off.
Yet the stations could not be prettier. They are built in the same pietra leccese as the city’s churches, recently cleaned and charmingly refurbished up front with bright green steel columns to support elegant platform shelters and nice new ticket machines (which I couldn’t for the life of me work out how to use) and all kinds of fresh, bright green, friendly signs, well designed and absolutely attractive. On almost every station there was a blue-and-white plaque thanking the European Community for its financial contribution and itemising the many purchases made with these generous handouts. But one finds the same thankful acknowledgements on Trenitalia stations, too. I photographed one that thanks the European Community for underwriting a
contract for the supply of services controlling infesting vegetation by mechanical means and chemical formulas along the railway lines and in open spaces falling under the jurisdiction of the regional infrastructure management of Bari, relative to the territorial infrastructure of Bari for financial years 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011.
Along with the names of everyone involved (the list is long), the plaque also gives the cost of this service: €3,614,750.57. Three million, six hundred and fourteen thousand, seven hundred and fifty euros and fifty-seven cents. ‘To deal with weeds over a four-year period.’
I always feel that every form of rhetoric and every detail must ultimately have its function and logic. Here, I can only assume that the fifty-seven cents are mentioned to give an impression of honesty and rigour worthy of the fiercest pignolo. It is common knowledge that, together with Sicily, Puglia is one of the two European regions most wasteful in its handling of Community subsidies.
When we got down at the darling little station of Zollino, a railwayman asked us where we were going and I said Otranto.
‘You were on the wrong train,’ he observed.
‘But the train to Otranto is coming?’
‘I hope so,’ he said. ‘I’d better phone.’
Unable to understand why they were worried that we hadn’t arrived where we were on the other train, I went into the station to escape from the sun. Again everything was very small, very cute, very new, or at least freshly renovated. Out of curiosity I went to the glass door leading into the street and small village outside. It was locked. How bizarre. We couldn’t get out of the station, and presumably no one could get in. I tried the door again. I must be mistaken. I was not. Outside there was a dead tree and a street of low white buildings with flat roofs. I went back to the platform and asked no questions.
The train to Otranto arrived. It was of a different vintage than the first – from the sixties, apparently, but similar. Ferrovie Sud Est use orange curtains, which look wonderful when the windows are open all along the carriage and they flap about in the hot, dry air. Actually this train was not going to Otranto either, but to Maglie, whence the third train, the one that really would at last have gone to Otranto, had been cancelled because someone was ill, but not to worry, there would be a bus.
The railwayman who gave us this news – I hesitate to call these men who spoke to us inspectors, because none of them looked at my ticket and it wasn’t
