‘Your ticket says via Pordenone,’ he told me. ‘Don’t you read your documento di viaggio?’
I was fascinated. What kind of man is it who imagines that when one buys a train ticket one then stops to read it? Or thinks of it as a documento di viaggio?
The train stopped in a station. ‘I’ll be back in a moment to deal with this,’ he said severely; he would have to calculate the exact excess fare and then the exact fine in relation to that exact excess. Everything in Italy is worked out on the basis of cost per kilometre, with no regard to which lines are more heavily travelled or more costly to maintain. The man hurried off in his nice green blazer with its smart shiny buttons and … never came back. With an Italian official it may be that the more he insists on a facade of correctness, the more likely it is, if you are determined, that in the end he will let you off. I suspect that this is why Italian football players always challenge the referee’s decisions. You just never know. And if the man won’t actually reverse this decision maybe he’ll think twice about blowing his whistle for the next foul.
Anyway, the season ticket I have bought at 6.35 in the morning bears the warning: da convalidare (to be stamped). But being an annual ticket, of course, there’s no need to stamp it. In fact, it would be a mistake to do so. How could I stamp it every time I got on a train for the next year? Italy is not a country for beginners.
ONE OF THE GREAT advantages of the 6.40 is that it departs from Verona. You don’t have to hang around on the platform or in the waiting room. Even if you’re fifteen minutes early, you can go right ahead and sit on the train. I make for the last carriage. It has a very particular smell that always affects me deeply when, after the long summer holidays, I return to the trains and another year’s teaching. It is a mix of urine and disinfectant and tired synthetic upholstery impregnated with the smoke of years ago. You can’t smoke on the trains any more, but the smell lingers. There are smudgy neon lights that offend the eyes without illuminating a book. Here and there a seat is occupied, by a student returning to college with his newly done laundry; a man in overalls constantly clearing his throat; a black girl, plump and exhausted, clearly on her way home after a long night. There is a brisk trade in prostitutes outside Verona station, immigrant girls mainly, Africans and Slavs, living on the edge of slavery, I fear. They use the trains a lot. I’m not sure why. Heads wobble and suddenly nod. The girl, the only non-white in the carriage, is wearing shiny red boots. Someone snores. It’s an open-plan carriage, no compartments, and I choose a seat as far away from the others as possible. At 6.42 or 6.43 a faint tension is transmitted through the hard seat to the loins and the thighs. No train overcomes initial inertia as gently, as reluctantly, as wearily, as the 6.40 Interregionale to Genova Piazza Principe via Milano Centrale.
Then a late arrival bangs into the carriage and comes to sit down right next to me. Her Discman is tinkling, she wears a sickly perfume and has a jewel in her navel, and she carries a noisy paper bag with a sticky croissant. Why does this happen so often? There are people who want to be on their own, to mark out their own territory and be quiet there, and there are people who are eager to invade that territory, to sit close to someone else. There seem to be a disproportionate number of the latter in Italy. You sit in an empty compartment in a whole carriage of empty compartments, a whole train of them, and someone comes banging in and sits next to you.
Once, during a strike, I found a completely empty Intercity at Milan station, a ghost train. Eventually, an announcement said that the train might leave in two hours’ time but this couldn’t be guaranteed. The voice apologised for any inconvenience. Having no inclination to go and find myself a hotel, I decided to sit in the train and read. I chose a carriage halfway down the long platform. Since it was an Intercity, there were compartments. Suddenly a man was tugging open the sliding door to join me, a rather sad, lanky middle-aged man in a grey raincoat with a slack, worried mouth and thick spectacles. He had a huge suitcase, the sort of suitcase that has you wondering where on earth its owner can be going and for how long. Are these all his worldly possessions? Is he a refugee?
With some effort the man swung the suitcase up onto the luggage rack, sat down, brushed imaginary crumbs from his trousers, looked at me, smiled and began – I knew I couldn’t stop him – to talk: about the strike, about a difficult change of trains that awaited him in Venezia Mestre, about the impossibility of ever knowing what would happen in Italy even when you began the most banal of journeys. Wasn’t that so? It’s an interesting thing how often Italians like to refer to the country as if it were foreign to them, inhabited by people who are inexplicably unreliable. I barely nodded. ‘Ecco il capotreno!’ he suddenly shouted, and he jumped up and hurried out of the compartment and down the corridor to talk to a man in a smart cap walking along the platform.
This was my chance. Furtively, I picked up my own small bag, headed the other way up the carriage, and pushed through the two connecting doors into the next. I must have walked through about four completely
