Off the Rails

by Beppe Severgnini

  From Metaponto to Sibari, as I said, I find myself trainless. I travel aboard the Substitute Bus BA506, which is momentarily halted in its tracks in Trebisacce, outside the By Armentano clothing store, owned by the Armentano brothers (up to fifty percent off). The bus arrives on Viale della Libertà, finds a car double-parked, and has to wait. But the driver decides that our extremely tight connection in Sibari—a five-minute window—constitutes a point of honor for him. And in spite of city traffic, he keeps his promise. At 11:40 a.m. I board regional train no. 3727 to Catanzaro Lido. I talk politics with Rosy, a retired journalist, and Marco, forced to take the train because his license has been revoked. When I ask him, as a joke, which way to the restaurant car, he has momentary doubts about my mental health. It’s easier to find a dinosaur than a restaurant car on a train in Calabria.

  In the last section, from Catanzaro Lido to Reggio Calabria, I encounter a great many students: courteous young men with beards, lovely young women as dark as Byzantine Madonnas. Blue sea beneath the train window, so close that the self-propelled Littorina railcar seems to be racing over an empty beach. Clean bathroom facilities, no food whatsoever, tropical heating. I wonder whether the shortcomings of the Calabrian transportation system are the subject of discussions for travelers on this line. They are. “Politicians haven’t kept the promises they made before, so they avoid making any new ones,” says Consolato, disconsolately. “Promises about the transportation system? I don’t think so,” confirms Lucia, born in 1989. Protest? Not really. “You know how it is—we’re traditionalists around here.”

  Right after passing through Locri, the little train comes to a sudden stop. Excited voices inform us: “We hit a sheep!” The conductor explains the reason for the unexpected stop: “We need to check the running gear.” So it’s a question not of the woolly fellow’s health (needless to say, the sheep is no longer numbered among the living), but of the wheels and the brakes. When we get moving again, a robust-looking seventy-year-old sits down, gazes intensely at me, and asks, “So, what do you do?” I’m a journalist, I reply. “For what party?” For a newspaper, I explain. “But what party do you sympathize with?”

  “I can tell you who I antipathize with.”

  “All right,” he says.

  We arrive in Reggio Calabria at 4:50 p.m., nine hours of travel since my departure from Taranto. The city is without a mayor: the government has been ousted from power since October, and the city placed under temporary receivership because of the mountain of debts it’s struggling under. I’d like to know more, but I’m not in the mood to talk about local politics. I’ll look at the winter sea, instead. Today it is smooth and turquoise, and Sicily is a green shadow on the horizon. Italy along its edges, I must say, always has a certain allure.

  Reggio Calabria–Messina–Catania

  Anyone who works for the railways in Calabria, when referring to the lines along the Ionian coast, speaks of “our Gaza Strip.” An unruly place, let’s say. Stopped cars on level crossings, passengers without tickets, teenage boys who pull the emergency brake to get out wherever they please. As I was saying, I was lucky: crystal clear sea, on-time performance, plenty of smiles. But the color of the Ionian and the friendly expressions may be sufficient for occasional passengers—not those who are forced to the daily routine.

  The risk of the picturesque is considerable on this magnificent, troubled end of the Italian line. Many foreigners fall into it. But I’m no foreigner; I just come from far away in Italy. My hometown, Crema, is 68 miles from Switzerland and 762 miles from here.

  Today’s timetable includes a regional train from Reggio Calabria to Villa San Giovanni, then an Intercity, which will be loaded onto the ferryboat to Messina, and from there, on to Catania. Sicily—the sixteenth and last region of our trip—awaits me.

  Regional train to Rosarno departing at 1:55 p.m.: standing room only until Villa San Giovanni. Here I discover that the Intercity no. 723 is running an hour late. I find an alternative, I cross the strait—where Ulysses lost six men battling the sea monster Scylla, and every Italian government, sooner or later, announces it will build a bridge—and I land in Sicily. I push my wheeled suitcase from the Messina ferry station to the railway station—for some mysterious reason the two are not connected—and I notice I will have to wait an hour and a half for the regional train. Why are there no connections with the ferry from mainland Italy? It’s a mystery. The station is big, empty, and vaguely cemetery-like. Approaching people seems pointlessly cruel.

  But traveling in Italy—in southern Italy, in particular, and most especially in Sicily—is always the source of surprises. Hermes, a journalism student, introduces himself and tells me that he wrote his thesis on the political connivances in the media in Messina. I congratulate him, as there are plenty of connivances between politics and the media, in Messina and in the whole of Sicily. He smiles, and unpacks a tray full of truly majestic cannoli.

  Regional train no. 3869 departs on time, at 4:20 p.m. The sky is dark. Santa Teresa di Riva, Giardini Naxos, Acireale: the coast is magnificent, and we can just glimpse it between the low clouds and the steel gray sea. Traveling with us are twenty French students from the agronomy school of Clermont-Ferrand. A study trip, I am told. I ask, “How is your stay? Do you understand Italian politics?” A young woman opens her eyes wide: “In France, there is real tension around politics! Here we hardly noticed it.” Then she introduces me to Margaux, the class mascot, a plush monkey. I look at the monkey carefully, as darkness falls over Sicily: there are politicians with less personality.

  Catania–Palermo

  It’s hard to tell the story of an empty day: empty of events, passengers, conversations. But this is an island full of surprises, and on our railway trip from Trieste to Trapani, we must tell what we found. Today, that was little or nothing. In front of the Catania station, the gelato van catches a whiff of poor business to come. Inside, at the ticket window, Salvatore tries to keep up his morale: “Here people don’t have much of a culture of the train. They go to Palermo by bus or by car. Because, let’s admit it: the schedules are inconvenient, and not all the trains are like this one.”

  Sicily without light is unrecognizable. We leave Catania in the early afternoon beneath an ominous deep gray sky, in an unnatural calm. It will soon bring a very violent cloudburst—city flooded, cars submerged, pedestrians swept away—but the regional train no. 3853 gets out ahead of it, just slips under it, and heads inland. An impeccable, spotless, punctual train, the only one for Palermo; deserted, though. If Trenitalia knew my destination and schedule in advance—it does not—I’d suspect that these cars had been curated for the naive travel writer. Instead I discover that the regional train is always like this: decorous, clean. And empty.

  There are eight of us, engineer and conductor included. The cars—light blue and silent—look like the locker rooms of a swimming pool during a swimming lesson. Our train climbs toward Enna and runs through an enchanting landscape: green, uneven, low mountains and scattered houses. To kill time, and to give the passengers something to do, I go to the central seating area—conveniently arrayed in a small amphitheater—and convene a council of cabinet ministers. Let everyone choose an area of responsibility, and say the first thing they would do to improve things in Italy! My fellow passengers look at me as if I am crazy. Then they say, why not?

  After a brief argument over who will get to be the minister of transportation, the discussion begins, under the amused gaze of the conductor. Antonella, a student majoring in history at Messina, chooses the Ministry of Education: she wants money for scholarships and schools that aren’t falling apart. Salvatore T., our minister of transportation, says he belongs to the “big family of the Italian railways.” He’s thinking of high-speed rail in Sicily, but he’s afraid that it might come to nothing, like the bridge over the strait. Salvatore D., former CPA, is the most enthusiastic: he chooses the Ministry of the Treasury and asks to be made the minister of
outlays. He’d be the right one to calculate the waste, he says with grim satisfaction.

  The train stops at the station at Enna (empty) and Caltanissetta Xirbi (deserted); only at Termini Imerese, on the coastline again, does anybody board the train. The conductor, in regulation jacket and jeans, isn’t happy: in Sicily, given the regional government’s well-known financial difficulties, many local services have been cut, and there’s a real danger that this train line will meet the same fate. “Everyone wants to drive; it’s always more cars! We want to leave from our front door and park right where we’re going, even if it means triple-parking.” We who? I ask. We Italians? He looks at me in surprise: “We Sicilians!”

  We pull into Palermo five minutes late: no sign with the name of the city, for some reason. Cool evening, yellow lights. The newly appointed minister of outlays, faithful to his mandate, shows us the way out of the station. A young woman in a heavy jacket notices me, breaks away from her four friends. She’s seen me on television. She orders me to ask her a question. I toss out: “We decided to take the train from Catania. Did we do the right thing?” “From Catania? By train?” She bursts into a convulsion of laughter.

  If that’s a welcome to Palermo, I like it. It’s nice to see someone in a cheerful mood, once in a while.

  Palermo–Trapani

  I left from Trieste; today I’ll arrive in Trapani, the end of the line of my railway journey, from the far northeast to the far southwest of a worried nation. The regional train no. 8605 departs Palermo station at 9:29 a.m. It’s the last day, so I decide to trouble the other travelers immediately.

  Palermo is every bit as ancient and skeptical as the island it represents, and it can’t be upset by a traveling writer and his political questions. Over the years, it has passed from the center to the left to the right—and back, of course. My fellow passengers are cordial; they don’t run away at the sight of my notebook. A Northerner with a suitcase asking political questions first thing in the morning is strange, and around here, strangeness is considered an added value. We spend an hour discussing parties, leaders, promises, and disappointment. Sicilians are masters of language. In the end, I don’t know what they really think. But they all seem satisfied. They’ve been kind to an outsider without committing themselves. After all, you never know who might win the election.

  The train is full of light and it has a charming name: Minuetto. This rail line was opened in 1937. The previous one between Palermo and Trapani, inaugurated by the Società della Ferrovia Sicula Occidentale—Western Sicilian Railway Company—in 1885, passed through Mazara and Marsala; the total distance was 194 kilometers—120 miles—and the trip took ten hours. The point of the operation wasn’t to take passengers to Trapani, but to convey the wines of Marsala and the seafood of Mazara to Palermo. Even today, passenger service doesn’t seem to be a particular priority. Not even to the passengers, who—as we have seen—will gladly take a bus or their own car whenever possible.

  Lucia, twenty-four, is also heading back to Trapani. She studies on the train, book perched on her knees. She explains how difficult it is to navigate the murky waters of the University of Palermo toward her degree. She tells of exams rescheduled without notification, long waits in department hallways, mercurial professors. (“If they take an instant dislike to you, then it’s tough. The last one yelled at me, right in my face. It was that way from day one.”) “And in the psychology department, things are pretty good. In literature and business, things are even worse.” Disappointed? “Look: if you get your degree at Palermo, it means you really wanted to study. But it’s sad. It is as if my generation doesn’t exist.”

  Stormy skies along the way: the train windows look like Turner paintings. I departed from Trieste, and I’m arriving in Trapani after eleven days of travel, about thirteen hundred miles, sixteen regions, thirty stations, twenty-seven trains, and a replacement-railway bus. The trip ends with the sea on my right, green fields on my left, surrounded by ruins, prickly pears, overpasses, and lemon trees. I’ve watched thousands of Italians, listened to a few hundred. Do I know who is going to win this election? Of course not, but that was not the purpose of my journey. I crossed my country by land, from the border with Slovenia to a place where on a clear day you can see Africa, to check if we’re still one nation. We are, I must say. From north to south, people want a good job, a good family, good friends, and some happiness on the side. A better government? That, too. But not enough people are ready to give up their old habits and their little privileges in order to improve the quality of public life. Therefore Italy stays the same: an emotional, maddening proving ground and a great temptation. We are what others would like to be—at least some of the time—but don’t dare try.

  7

  Trans-Siberian Express: Honeymoon for Four

  1986

  What you are reading was written in a notebook crowded among two teaspoons, a soup spoon, a bottle of Russian mineral water, a packet of hand wipes, and three used tea bags that Lyuba refuses to take away. Here I should be more precise, because there are two Lyubas: the one who refuses to take away the tea bags is Big Lyuba, and when she walks down the train car corridor, her hips dust the window and at the same time the compartment door. The other one is Little Lyuba, who smokes Marlboros and smiles at any man under thirty.

  This is a confession: for our honeymoon I took my wife on a train trip of 5,593 miles in second class, which means with two strangers in the same compartment. In my defense, let me say (1) I’m not an idiot—I had reserved a first-class compartment so as to be alone with my bride, but the Russians screwed us; and (2) the Trans-Siberian Express is a dangerous temptation for a train lover: it runs across nearly one hundred degrees of longitude, as well as six time zones, and takes six days, one hour, and forty-one minutes. It leaves Moscow at 11:50 on Friday night and arrives in Beijing the following Friday at 6:31 in the morning. The food is terrible, you can only wash in the most rudimentary manner imaginable, the longest stop is for fifteen minutes, and the Russians do everything they can to convince you that you ought to have spent your vacation anywhere else but there. Still, it’s a remarkable journey, and if your wife is still smiling when you reach Beijing station, she’s an extraordinary woman, and you did the right thing by marrying her.

  * * *

  Trains heading for Siberia depart from the Yaroslavskaya station in Moscow, which you can guess by the people waiting. Sitting on the largest suitcases I’ve ever seen in my life, a horde of Tartars, Buryats, Koreans, Mongols, Kyrgyz, and Uzbeks, possibly accompanied by a few Russians, wait impassively under the fluorescent lights. They don’t seem to be waiting for an imminent departure; they just look like they’re waiting, period.

  Our train sits on Track 5. It’s green and looks like any ordinary train except for the magical sign reading Moscow–Beijing. An Englishman loaded down with cameras is informing a fellow traveler that the Trans-Siberian Express is the only overland connection between western Europe and the Pacific Ocean. The Russians are building a road, but it’s not yet finished, and even once it is finished, it will always be less reliable than the railroad: you can clear snow more easily off two rails than off a roadway. I would have liked to go on listening, but my wife, who’s already boarded the train, leans out the window and informs me that “there are four of us in the compartment, the bathroom is microscopic, and there’s a radio blaring in Russian.” We crack up laughing. What else can we do?

  First Day

  With us in the compartment are two young Russian women, who talk a great deal. The radio talks even more than they do, and nobody seems to know how to make it stop. As the train moves away from the station, leaving behind us the Tartars, Buryats, Mongols, and Uzbeks standing impassively under the fluorescent lights, we start exploring the carriages. We aren’t allowed to go forward, into the cars where most Russians travel; Big Lyuba, one of the two female conductors, explains this to us, barring our way and teaching us the one fundamental phrase for
anyone who wishes to understand the Soviet universe: nye razreshayetsya, “not allowed.” We turn around and head back, walking through first class, and then the dining car, and finally the cars occupied by the athletes of the North Korean national team, on their way home from the “Goodwill Games” in Moscow. Traveling in first class are six Swedish couples bursting with health, one couple per compartment, even though they’re not on their honeymoon. In the dining car sits a man named Boris, with a tie that he must have cooked in many different sauces. He informs us of the breakfast schedule for the following morning.

  In addition to their conductor duties, Lyuba and Lyuba are responsible for cleaning the cars. Our compartment is reasonably clean, at least. The two top bunks can be folded up flat against the wall during the day. Lowering the windows isn’t hard, provided you have two people hanging off the handles. The tray table can be collapsed like on any other train, and it almost immediately proceeds to do so, spilling a cup of scalding tea onto the floor. There is a restroom at either end of the car. In order to wash, there’s only a sink the size of half a watermelon, strictly without a stopper: if you want to fill the sink, you’ll need a small rubber ball—which we brought with us, having been warned. Among the conductors’ other tasks is to lock the bathroom doors ten minutes before pulling into stations and unlock them ten minutes after each departure. During the journey, I’ll have an opportunity to see that the two Lyubas perform this duty with a zeal bordering on sadism: no amount of begging will sway them, no number of contortions outside the locked door.