Why is it so exciting to pull into Milan this morning, a city I’ve arrived in literally thousands of times before: the slow leftward bend of the rails as the train rumbles through Lambrate, turning south towards Centrale, the streets already busy below us, a woman on an upper floor opening a shutter to greet the morning, then the great glass arch of the station itself. Stepping down from the carriage, I have a feeling I have returned from furthest margins to the throbbing heart, the centre whose commercial energy keeps the whole body alive and breathing. On the platform people are streaming towards the ticket hall.
Then I realise that I have two problems. I’m too early, and I don’t have a clean shirt. I keep a decent jacket in my cupboard at the faculty, but not a shirt. Taking time for a cappuccino, I see the obvious. The moment has come, the moment when I shall have to confess that the shopping centre in Milano Centrale does have its uses. Instead of the stairs, I head for the tapis roulant. I stand patiently behind the others as it slides slowly downward. And, yes, the shops are already open at 7 a.m. I gaze at their glossy windows. Books, sports gear, menswear. Professor Parks may not have showered, but he will have a fresh white shirt when he passes judgement from the dais.
EPILOGUE
‘WHERE ARE YOU,’ a voice asked. ‘Why aren’t you here?’
This was a Thursday evening in Verona; the car had just emerged from a tunnel, in heavy traffic, when the phone rang. Or rather when I noticed that the phone was ringing, perhaps had been for some time. One shouldn’t answer the phone when driving, of course, but of course I did. And why is it so hard to get the phone from one’s pocket while at the wheel? I wriggled and pulled and tried to be careful not to push the button that would cancel the call and give the wrong impression to whomever it was, all the while hanging on to my place in a double line of cars now pushing towards an intersection. It’s the low position of the seat, I suppose, or the cut of the trousers. I had the impression that my caller must be about to hang up, so I didn’t take the time to look at the display before pressing the green button. I was expecting a call from my daughter.
‘Tim. Where are you? You weren’t on the train.’
Train? Who was this? What train? I had no idea. Now there was a traffic light.
‘Who is this?’ These days I reckon I’m old enough for people to forgive me a lapse of memory.
‘Edoardo. We’re all waiting.’
Damn. Edoardo who? I would have to ask.
‘Edoardo who?’
Now the voice hesitated – irritated perhaps, perhaps concerned for my health.
‘I know a lot of Edoardos,’ I said. Which wasn’t true.
‘Edoardo Parisi.’
It dawned.
‘Edoardo! But it’s tomorrow!’
‘Today,’ he said. ‘Don’t you remember I sent you the email with the change of date? You even acknowledged it.’
I was due to spend five days on a meditation retreat in the mountain home of Edoardo Parisi, a Vipassana teacher, in Maroggia high in the mountains of the Valtellina, north-east of Lake Como. The hope, of course, is always that one might calm oneself at some very deep level, become a paragon of serenity. And here I was so wired up I’d got the dates wrong and would lose a day. It was too late to make it out there this evening unless I used the car, and using the car for all that autostrada and then mountain road that I didn’t know, late in the evening, seemed unwise. It would have to be the train, tomorrow, as early as possible.
My plan had been first to return to Milan for a few duties at the university, then take the small train that runs up Lake Como in time for what I had thought would be an evening start. Instead, I now decided to go via Brescia, then north to Bergamo, then through the foothills of the Alps to Lecco, then up Lake Como to the station of Morbegno, where Edoardo’s wife would pick me up while the meditators were eating lunch. That way I hoped to gain a couple of hours.
I left Verona at 6.40 a.m. and arrived at Morbegno at 12.01 p.m. Five hours and three changes to go 120 miles. Seedy, run-down stations, miserable, poky trains where your knees all touched, rather worse actually than anything I had encountered in the south. Evidently there had been no European money here to brighten things up. The cash goes to the poorer regions. And whereas the coastal trains in the south had been mostly empty, these were packed.
At Calolziocorte, between Bergamo and Lecco, an ancient man climbed on in peasant work clothes and sat opposite me, his watery eyes at once anxious and vacant, his skin hanging loosely from his skull. Some ten minutes later it became evident that he had had some kind of accident. The carriage began to stink. We were all packed in, with people standing. There was nowhere to move. The man frowned and closed his eyes. In his early seventies, I reckoned. Probably he had decided there was nothing he could do but wait for his stop and get off. So for about twenty minutes we all savoured together, in mute general awareness, the ordinary human smell of shit.
There is no first class on this line. There is no way of isolating yourself from unpleasantness. To take a train like this is to open yourself to humanity as
