At 3:21 p.m., right on schedule, we arrive in Lyon’s Part-Dieu station. Lots of policemen, people out strolling, bicycles, and sweat. The female train attendants get out with us, wearing tight-fitting pink sleeveless shirts. A young couple, curious about the video camera, ask us where we come from: one of us is German, three are Italians, and the little yellow chick is stateless, we reply.
Lyon is the third-largest city in France, founded by a lieutenant of Julius Caesar’s at Cicero’s suggestion. Today it is a manufacturing center, producing machine tools and offering health services, and it has a sumptuous historical center: twelve hundred acres classified by UNESCO as a World Heritage site, the largest area after Venice. “Avant, avant, Lion le melhor!” reads the city’s motto, in Arpitan. It means “Forward, forward, Lyon is the best,” of course. Obviously for us Italians. Not for Mark, who had his moment of glory between Vienna and Zurich—where he had home-field advantage—and from now on, he’ll need our help. All right, we’ll help him. We’ll even tell him what “Arpitan” means, if he’ll cut it out with the little yellow chick.
From Lyon to Marseille
The lady in red looks at us with dislike, which is promptly returned. Then she exchanges a few conspiratorial glances with her husband—a corpulent fellow, with thick, snowy hair and the sadness of someone who remembers he was once a handsome man—but fails to notice that I’m watching them. For starters, he had said, in a vinegary tone: “I don’t like video cameras.” As if Gianni, given the opportunity to film Mark with his yellow chick, had time to waste on the two of them.
In Lyon, a summer sun is shining. We take the TGV leaving for Nice at 2:37 p.m., but we’ll stop at Marseille. It must be the heat, but we’ve been treated rudely more frequently on this leg of the journey than in the entire trip from Moscow. The taxi driver in Lyon flew into a rage because I tried to remove the luggage from the trunk, without waiting for him to do it. A policeman warned us not to film in the station. Aboard the train, a young couple has taken our seats, and they show no intention of moving. To justify his refusal, the young man—who vaguely resembles Mark’s little yellow chick, only fatter—pulls out the Syllogism of the Obtuse Traveler: “Someone else took our seats, so we took these. Why don’t you go complain to the people who took our seats?”
I explain to him, with a smile and my very best French, that that’s not the way things work. These are our seats, the train is full, and most important of all, we need to work. I add a geographic reference, to play on his empathy: “We’ve been traveling for eight days; we started in Moscow.” And he replies, austerely: “I don’t give a damn where you come from.” Well, that’s no way to reply to salty old wolves of the rails like us. I assign the case to Soledad, who can’t wait to launch into a multilingual attack: five minutes later, our seats are free and ready for us. “Bon voyage,” I whisper to the usurper as he retreats in the face of a stern conductor. “Vous aussi,” he replies. His companion glares daggers at him, clearly seething: “You helpless rabbit!”
Experienced travelers know, however, you shouldn’t overemphasize a single episode and draw larger general conclusions from it. Our twenty-four hours in Lyon brought us examples of true courtesy and genuine surprises. We walked and walked, happy to stretch our lower limbs (our upper limbs are in fine shape, chiefly because of the constant lifting and lowering of our luggage). We saw a great many things. Les Halles de Lyon Paul Bocuse, a temple to gastronomy! Croix-Rousse, the neighborhood of the old-fashioned silk workers (roller shutters lowered)! Brasserie Le Sud, nominated for the Best Restaurant of the Second Week! In the afternoon, on a bridge, we philosophized about the importance of the light sweater in the tourist aesthetic.
We depart again, happy to be back on the train. By now, we’re clinical cases. Dromomania was the diagnosis of a reader who is a psychiatrist: an obsession with wandering, going places, getting on the road. Dromomania! If that’s true, I wouldn’t really mind. After all, this anxiety took us from Russia to southern France, where tonight we can hope to see the sea appear unexpectedly, as we round a curve. It doesn’t happen. But at the station of Marseille Saint-Charles, the wind brings us the smell of salt water, and that is enough for us.
From Marseille to Barcelona, via Montpellier
A boat! This is Mark’s latest brilliant idea. Herr Spörrle says: we’re always on the train (true), ten days is a long time (correct), Marseille and Barcelona face each other over the same stretch of sea (undeniable). But what boat captain would take four people like us aboard (to say nothing of the little yellow chick)? We walk down to the old harbor. Just as a joke, we ask the sailors on a gigantic yacht if they’ll give us a ride. When we ask them, “Can we get to Barcelona with this yacht?” they immediately burst into enthusiasm. The captain, they explain, lives in Palma de Mallorca, and would be only too happy to turn his prow westward. The captain in question joins us on dry land—early forties, bearded, with a movie star face—and tells us the price: twelve thousand euros a day, crew and fuel are extra.
Fishing boats, catamarans, sailboats, regatta racers, large rubber dinghies: no one else wants to take us seriously. It’s not the end of the world. We climb aboard a little tourist minitrain—our karma always brings us to this—and we devote ourselves to the exploration of the Panier, the old fishermen’s quarter, recently gentrified. Boarding with us is a class of French schoolchildren. The children study us, and they seem to consider us exotic. And how can we disagree? An Italian and a German who are speaking English in France, and the taller of the two carries a little yellow chick with him everywhere he goes.
Marseille doesn’t have much of a reputation, but it’s actually an interesting city. World famous for an anthem, a soap, and a harbor and its traditional organized crime, the city proves to be full of life and passion. The hotel—with a spectacular view of the old port, an imperial bed, and a metaphysical shower—allows us to check out late, and we sit for a few hours reading outdoors. “Work, work, work . . . I prefer the sound of the sea.” Poet Dino Campana—even though he was referring to a different sea—understood it all.
The taxi takes us to the station, slaloming past multicolored pedestrians who simply can’t be persuaded to respect the traffic lights. Train for Bordeaux departing at 4:12 p.m., but we’re getting out at Montpellier. An hour’s wait there for the connecting train. We should reach Barcelona—our third-to-last stop on this trip—at 10:45 that night. According to the Catalonian time zone, just in time for dinner.
In Barcelona
I’m in a hotel in Barcelona that seems like a karaoke of Taipei, with interior decoration by the cousins of Dolce & Gabbana on behalf of a soccer player: purple leather and silver picture frames, a black bathroom and gold pillows, leopard-skin blankets. We’ve just returned from a morning out bicycling.
Under an enameled sky—a blue lid over the Rambla—I tot up the accounts of our journey, which began in Moscow and has Lisbon as its destination. So far, two weeks, nine countries, eleven cities, 3,977 miles. Today, May 9, is Europe Day; but, as usual, no one has noticed. And yet, there’s plenty to celebrate. I wouldn’t want to seem romantic and naive to you—better than cynical and resigned, in any case—but I assure you: Europe exists. These recent days have confirmed what I’ve seen in thirty years of journalism and travel. Changing every night—four Slavic languages, then two cities in German, then two French cities, and now two Spanish ones, all the while speaking English, as well—pushes the brain to seek out common denominators. You become a foreigner right at home. It’s a good exercise, and every European ought to try it out from time to time.
Europe exists and it resembles itself. So we don’t have a common foreign policy and security policy? That’s true, and it’s a mistake. Was the introduction of the euro—without bothering to unify our tax and budget policies—a less-than-perfect operation? It certainly was. But the common currency, the cell phones that ring everywhere, the mixed, understandable languages, the populist right wings a
nd the slovenly left wings, the train stations illuminated by night, the police all with the same gazes, none too stern, the bars and cafés and menus, the students who feel at home wherever they go, the great cathedrals built by great sinners: all this reminds the traveler that there really is such a thing as Europe.
Kraków isn’t Barcelona and it isn’t Zurich. Still, it more closely resembles Barcelona and Zurich than it does Phoenix or Rio de Janeiro. Any American, Chinese, Japanese, or South African will tell you this is true. But since we live in the midst of the forest—a very nice forest indeed—we’re unable to see it. All we can see are the trunks of the trees, and every once in a while we bang our heads against them.
The migrants have a point. They consider Europe a safe and welcoming place: it’s not the same thing to raise a family in Benghazi as in Barcelona. The more tragedies occur in Africa and in the Middle East, the more the European Union will appear in the eyes of those people as exactly what it is: a haven in a storm, built by a generation that lived through a hurricane. It took decades of dictatorships (Communism, Nazism, Fascism) and two world wars, but our parents understood: Europe at peace is a masterpiece and it needs to be treated with a gentle touch.
Could someone explain that to the racists, please? Actually, I have an even better idea: take the racists and put them on a train and convince them to cross a continent that remains an island of good sense in the larger, unreasonable sea of the rest of the world. Let me repeat: the new arrivals sense this; our ancestors knew it. We are less intelligent, but we are capable of learning. If so, we can teach these things to our children, who need to hear them.
From Barcelona to Madrid
Trains are ritualistic places. After two weeks I know my own habits and I recognize those of my traveling companions.
Gianni puts on his earphones and reviews the material filmed during that day’s travel; when he smiles, it means that Mark has really given the best of himself. Every once in a while, Gianni will notice something: the indication of the train’s speed (between Barcelona and Madrid we hit 301 kilometers per hour, which is 187 miles per hour); an amusing and unexpected development; a particularly eccentric passenger. In those cases, he’ll pull out one of his video cameras—he has three: a small one, a medium one, and a big one—he’ll leap to his feet, and he’ll start filming. At that point a conductor will arrive and inform him that, in trains and at stations, filming is forbidden. He’ll smile and say: “No problem.” Because he’s already done filming.
Soledad prefers the window seat, even if she doesn’t look out much: she has too much translating to do. When she works, she puts her hair up and gets down to it, periodically murmuring comments in all the languages of the United Nations. If you ask her something, she raises her head and gazes at you with a pair of distracted blue eyes. You might announce that you just saw an ichthyosaurus go by, emblazoned with the logo of the Goethe-Institut, and she’d reply, “Ah. How nice.”
Mark observes, records, and comments upon every detail of the train we’re traveling in. He describes particularities, criticizes shortcomings, lauds the conveniences. Yesterday between Barcelona and Madrid—as we sped across Aragon into the setting sun—Herr Spörrle was praising the high level of service, superior to what is found in Germany: hot wet napkins, newspapers, spumante, orange juice, and mineral water (still or bubbly). In the servicio de bebidas—presented by a platinum-haired attendant, an Iberian Ivana Trump—there was also Martini Rojo and the D.O. Ribera del Duero Señorio de Nava vino tinto. I didn’t taste it myself, but I have to admit that it has a magnificent name.
Then there’s me. In comparison with my traveling companions, I spend less time on my computer and more time just watching: the landscape outside, the people inside. I like to read: books and trains are natural lovers. I don’t think there necessarily has to be a direct relationship between places and titles: here in Spain, it’s not mandatory to read Javier Marías or Carlos Ruiz Zafón. In a great novel, after all, there’s always everything. In the past few days I’ve been reading Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, which I brought with me from Moscow and which I’d like to finish before reaching Lisbon. During his lengthy nocturnal exposition, young Ippolit says something that I find fascinating:
On the other hand, all your thoughts, all the seeds scattered by you, perhaps forgotten by you, will grow up and take form. He who has received them from you will hand them on to another. And how can you tell what part you may have in the future determination of the destinies of humanity?
You can understand that it’s tough to travel with this burden of responsibility on our shoulders. What if someone chose to imitate us, retracing our itinerary? And then what if that person fell in love with a Polish co-ed or a Swiss business lawyer and decided to move across the continent or the world? Anything can happen on a long train journey! I’ll need to talk to the others about it, later, on the night train for Lisbon. Far ahead, down that track—we can’t see it, but we can already sense it—the ocean awaits us, the ocean, across which no one has ever yet laid tracks. Not even the Germans, though they know how to do anything.
From Madrid to Lisbon
The evening in Madrid, the last evening of our trip, is relaxed. Light drizzle and a holiday feel in the air, with the help of the Festival of Saint Isidore. After some hesitation, we dine in the little Taberna Embroque on Calle de Recoletos, a gathering spot for aficionados of the corrida. On the television, live coverage from the plaza de toros, and Soledad—surrounded by autographed photographs of toreros—is forced to stifle her animal rights instincts. On the photo of the legendary Juan Belmonte is written: “Se torea, como se es” (literally, “you fight the bulls the way you are”). Replace the Spanish verb torear with the Spanish verb viajar: here, too, you can’t bluff.
Trains are like boats, like camping, like prison. After fifteen days together, twenty-four hours a day, either you put up with one another or you strangle one another. Mark, Sole, Gianni, and I have developed our little tics, and we get along well. I understood it a few days ago as we were boarding a taxi: each of us knows exactly where to fit in and what to do, as if we were hopping onto a four-man bobsled. Tonight, too, as we head for the Madrid Chamartín station, we move with perfect coordination. Sole has the tickets; Gianni has his plans; Mark has his silences; I have my fantasies.
The night train for Lisbon leaves from Track 14 at 10:25 p.m. It’s clean and tidy, with a deserted and very literary dining car, almost elegant. The walls are pink plastic, and they produce a certain Barbie Dreamhouse effect. We’re welcomed by a courteous Portuguese conductor, who asks, “Do you have permits to film?” I reply, “We don’t have them and we never have, all the way from Moscow. So please don’t ruin everything now.” He smiles and says, “All right,” and turns to go. Then we drink cold Mateus wine, as the Europe available to us dwindles. Behind us lies a continent, and this evening it’s starting to weigh on us.
OSCARS FOR THE SECOND WEEK
Best Bathroom: Sofitel Vieux Port, Marseille (tropical shower with view of the harbor)
Best Bed: Hospes Puerta de Alcalá, Madrid (all four of us could have slept in one bed)
Worst Wi-Fi: Hospes Puerta de Alcalá, Madrid (at the reception desk they wouldn’t know a wireless network from a fisherman’s net)
Best Restaurant: Brasserie Le Sud, Lyon (exquisite, on the banks of the Rhône, and not even particularly expensive)
Worst Restaurant: Pulcino, Zurich (everything was modest, except for the price)
Most Disagreeable Encounter: the usurpers of our reserved seats on the Lyon–Marseille TGV
Most Agreeable Encounter: the young woman in Montpellier who blew us a kiss as the train pulled out
The Chicest Leg of the Trip: the high-speed train from Barcelona to Madrid
The Most Comfortable Leg of the Trip: train from Zurich to Geneva
The Most Spectacular Leg: Montpellier–Figueres (water all around, big sk
y)
Most Comfortable Sleeping Compartment: Madrid–Lisbon
Most Mysterious Station: Marseille
Station Most Closely Resembling an Airport: Barcelona Sants
Most Elegant Station: Madrid Atocha
Most Surprising City: Lyon
City We Were Sorriest to Leave: Lisbon, because it meant the end of the trip
Line of the Week: “The tall one is my wife; the short one is my daughter” (Mark, showing us a photograph of his wife and four-year-old daughter).
In Lisbon
With the early sun behind us and the last stretch of the river Tagus ahead of us, the train stops at Lisbon Santa Apólonia station: there’s no more land to run on.
The morning glitters like a majolica tile; the air is still. We’ve arrived. Moscow seems far away but within reach. Only overland travel makes it possible to understand distances and metabolize changes. Planes conveniently move our bodies from one place to another, but our brains don’t follow.
I find that I’m not as excited as I’d imagined. A little tired, instead, in part because I haven’t gotten much sleep. The freight trains of Estremadura province are noisy, and by night the stations of the Lusitania are too alluring to resist gazing out at. I stop, wheeled suitcase in one hand and backpack slung over my shoulders, on the platform in front of the train. I imagine that the look on my face must be that of an astronaut as he leaves the spacecraft, but it doesn’t matter. We’ve arrived, and no arrival should ever be taken for granted.
Off the Rails Page 9