Edoardo’s house in Maroggia is high up the mountainside, looking across the great valley that sweeps down from the Alpine peaks to Como. No train will ever reach up here, but in the long hours of silence, beginning at 4 a.m. and through until 8.30 in the evening, you occasionally hear the distant whistle of a locomotive as it strains up the valley to Sondrio or rushes down to Morbegno and Bellano. Why do trains whistle these days? To warn people? At a road crossing? Or approaching a country platform? Hearing that whistle, my mind would stray. It is always such a struggle when meditating to keep the mind focused on the present moment, on the breath and the flesh, as it is. The whistle should have warned me that my attention was slipping; instead it drew me into another world.
Cross-legged, at the back of the room, behind a dozen others, I began to follow the train down the valley towards Morbegno and beyond, trying to remember the names of the stations, Colico, Varenna, Lecco. These trains are driven, I thought, like the mind, by electric current, and at once I was imagining all the pylons and the wires running down the valley, creating a path, a network, that was separate from the landscape so that we could pass through it at great speed, as thoughts also hurtle by so fast but are rarely in contact with reality. The mind likes to move on rails, I decided after a couple of days in Maroggia, always the same old reflections and anxieties and obsessions, one leading to the other with great predictability. The same switches, the same buffers and terminuses that you never get beyond. Gallipolis of the mind.
The hours passed. The train whistled. How many times a day. Five? I thought of the earth under the sleepers and the flesh beneath these thoughts; I tried to conceive of the meeting point where the steel weighs down on the soil, and the idea meshes with a tangle of nerves and veins and in your head the train of thought rattles by with a shrill whistle. Was there a man on board that early-morning train, I wondered, who had shat in his pants, or a woman snoring garlic breath over her neighbours, or a student reading St Augustine? No doubt people were speaking on their phones so that radio waves flew back and forth from the train as it clattered down the valley, messages reaching out all over Lombardy, Italy, all over the world, perhaps. Why not? How hard it is when you really try to imagine everything that might be going on on a single train. Everything is constantly in motion, the wheels on the rails, the curtains flapping beside an open window, the capotreno moving down the carriage, the Gypsy boy one step ahead of him, getting out of one door and climbing in another when the official’s back is turned, the businessman’s fingers on his keyboard, the actors in a film that a student is watching on her iPad as the train goes into and out of tunnels beside Lake Como, where the sun sparkles on the water in dazzling and perpetual motion. The stiller you sit as a meditator the more you are aware of the infinite movement inside mind and body – the waves and tingles and currents and pulses. There is nothing that does not move inside this flesh and bone – or out there in the valley, for that matter – nothing that is not as lively as light on water or a ball thrown back and forth across second-class seats by kids on their way to school.
A man climbs down on the platform at Lecco and puffs hard on a cigarette before the capotreno’s whistle blows and he must toss it away and climb on board again. Are there passengers needing to make connections, I wondered, on this train? People anxious about time, about the onward journey from Milan? Where to? To Venice? To Rome? Naples? Palermo, even? It wasn’t impossible.
I began to think of the many train journeys I had taken in these thirty years in Italy, my mind reaching out across the Trenitalia map that isn’t Italy itself, but as it were a cobweb woven across it, with thousands and thousands of steel spiders speeding back and forth along its silvery threads. I heard a station bell tinkling through drumming rain, a strong smell of cow dung and pine trees. That must be Fortezza, just below the Brenner Pass, where the hero of my novel Cleaver changed trains on the way to his penitential retreat high up by the Austrian border. I heard a door slam in the balmy twilight as an old Rapido shuddered into motion on the platform at Peschiera; a young man with a shock of blond hair jumped down with a Gucci bag in his hand, and that was my villain
