Off the Rails

by Beppe Severgnini

  After traveling through the Morvan Regional Natural Park, I strike up a conversation with Gianni, a retired cardiologist, former member of Lotta Continua, a militant left-wing organization, and an impassioned partisan of the creation of a united Kurdistan (revolutionaries always seem to find a revolution!). He goes to Paris frequently, and is full of youthful enthusiasm. He has an opinion about Trump: “These days, the left turns up its nose at the neglected corners of society. When I was young, we were always out in the working-class quarters and on the street. We understood the fears and the dreams of ordinary people. That no longer happens. The left—in Italy, in Europe, in the U.S.—is only interested in national party politics. They don’t work on the ground anymore! That opens up the market for the populists and their simplistic message. They convince voters that, hey, their savior is around the corner! That’s how people like Trump get elected.”

  And so? “And so the blue-collar worker has a tactical vision. The intellectual ought to have a more strategic vision.” I actually don’t quite understand what he means, but I feel like I’ve gone back to the vibrant discussions at the political rallies I attended in high school, and I don’t mind the sensation.

  In Paris

  We pull into Paris, Gare de Lyon.

  The photographer waiting for me at the station, Michel Setboun, is a celebrity. He documented the Iranian revolution in 1979, publishing his photographs in many leading American publications. He still goes back to Tehran frequently, where he published a monumental book. As a result, he is no longer allowed to set foot in the United States. Which makes him angry. “I was in New York on 9/11. I have photographs in the Ground Zero museum! And I’m not allowed to go back to America. Because I’ve been to Iran. Does that make sense to you?”

  That said, Michel takes The Donald and carries him around the Gare de Lyon, positioning him here and there. He’s not sure he’s going to be able to take pictures. He’s afraid he’ll be stopped by the police. “Well, I just took a picture of that woman in a burqa, a garment that is forbidden in France. So if they try to stop me, I’ll tell them: ‘Wait, her yes, and Trump no?’” The logic eludes me, but Setboun is so kind and likable that we agree to meet for a beer in a Marais bistro, Au Petit Fer à Cheval. There, too, mini-Trump, standing on the counter, is immensely popular. But in Paris the man himself is not well liked; in fact, no one offers to buy him a drink. Only one woman, a smiling American of Irish descent, puts in a good word for him. She is blond and petite. From the height of her barstool, she offers me a glossy black and gold business card. Maureen Donovan, an immigration lawyer, has this to say, with a sigh: “Trump makes me angry, but he does create plenty of paying work for me.”

  Paris–London

  The next morning, the Eurostar pulls out of the Gare du Nord at 10:13. Lots of security, not many people, airport atmosphere. But the train doesn’t take off into the sky; instead it leaves Paris, heads north, descends under the waters of the Channel, and heads to London. Mini-Trump returns to his post on the tray table. The attendant—Jean-Christophe, according to his name tag—offers mini-Trump a cup of coffee, utterly deadpan. But he does it in French, so mini-Trump ignores him, the same as he did the rest of Europe.

  Eight armed border policemen are traveling aboard the train: they’re relieving their fellow officers at our destination, in London. The French border controls are in the UK; the British border controls are in France—at point of departure on either end of the line. So passengers can just walk out of the station on arrival in both Paris and London (and illegal migrants are not allowed to board the train in the first place). One of the policemen comes over, leans on the table, and studies mini-Trump wordlessly. “Don’t arrest him,” I say. He smiles and introduces himself: his name is Claude; he’s going to retire soon. He has a weather-beaten face from an American Western. “The things we’ve seen, lately, with illegal immigrants. By now, I can spot a fake ID just by sense of touch. The real problem is that some of them have real IDs but fake identities. Those come in all day Saturday and Sunday. They know that the prefectures are closed and we have no way of checking. All we have here is one train and one tunnel. And he”—pointing at Trump—“wants to build a wall along the Mexican border? How many miles long is that? Almost two thousand? Just makes me laugh.”

  We emerge from the Channel tunnel and slide into the English light. Soon we’re in London. St. Pancras station welcomes us with its red bricks. Little Trump, who’s riding in the breast pocket of my jacket, immediately becomes a star. A British woman who’s just left the train comes over to give him a kiss. Wojcek, a young man from Danzig who’s just arrived in England, asks for a selfie. A group of Japanese tourists laughs enthusiastically. I leave the station and catch a black cab to the Reform Club. The cabbie is named Jeremy. He spots mini-Trump sticking out of my backpack. “A few days ago one of my fares was Kazuo Ishiguro, who just received the Nobel Prize in Literature. And today I have Donald Trump. This is definitely my week!” We pull up on Pall Mall and he offers me a special discount.

  I invite an American friend to lunch at the Reform Club—Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist for the Washington Post. Her husband comes with her: Radek Sikorski, longtime Polish minister of foreign affairs, now highly critical toward the direction politics is taking in Warsaw. We’ve all known one another since 1989. We talk about the American presidential election of 2016, and how the Russians made use of Facebook and Twitter to support Donald Trump (Anne wrote about this early on, and at the time many didn’t believe her). The subject of our conversation, in handy travel format, was left in the front lobby of the Reform Club. The lobby in which, according to Around the World in Eighty Days, Phileas Fogg made his celebrated wager.

  No doubt about it, Jules Verne had a wild imagination. But not even he could have dreamed up The Donald.

  10

  What to Bring

  What a beautiful respite a train journey is and a good book, too, and best of all the book on the train, in life and out of it at the same time.

  TIM PARKS, ITALIAN WAYS

  Maps

  It dawns on me that I’ve taken the wrong train, but it’s already pulled out of the station. I ask directions: “Excuse me, where are we going?” People answer me (a few courteously, others reluctantly). I realize that I don’t know any of the destinations they mention to me. Not one.

  “This is a train for Vigliante. It will arrive this evening.”

  “Where does it stop?”

  “Roccaglia, Arbule, Casamagna.”

  “Can you tell me the name of a bigger city?”

  “Sperantia, we’ll be there in an hour.”

  Out the wet train window, I see a city drawing closer. The tracks begin to proliferate; lighted windows pierce the mist. I think, Those people know where they live, but I don’t know where I am. The usual station sign appears, white letters on a blue background. SPERANTIA. A town I’ve never heard of. I get out of the train; I read the departure board: there must be a regional train heading to some familiar place. Tiny orange letters indicate unknown localities: Evalanche, Turilo, Sargenta. I walk out onto the piazza in front of the station; there are trolleys headed to New Sperantia, West Lucido, Asmaro.

  I go back in, anxiously, and board another train, packed with commuters who are all busy with their cell phones. Sooner or later this train will reach a city I know, I think to myself. Or a city that I don’t know, but which has connections to a city I do. I’m uneasy, but I can’t say so. It’s as if someone had changed the world.

  Luckily, I wake up.

  This is what I dreamed, while I was finishing the first draft of this book. Maybe I’m thinking and writing too much about trains. And so the trains decided to take my dreams, as well.

  But they did it courteously, reminding me of an important fact: trains move on the terrain of human beings, and that terrain should never be taken for granted. You need to respect it. And in order to r
espect it, you need to know it.

  Certainly, some travelers overdo it. They travel not in the world but inside a map, a tour guide, or an app. TripAdvisor doesn’t recommend; it commands you. Expedia limits experimentation. Life outside, to many, must match what’s written inside. If that doesn’t happen, they find it disquieting.

  This is hardly a new phenomenon. I remember, thirty years ago on the Trans-Siberian Express, people who knew every station, who anticipated every railway switch, who interpreted every horizon. Useful traveling companions, provided you don’t spend too much time with them. They couldn’t see Europe as it turned into Asia, the eyes and the colors as they changed. They saw names, numbers, miles, coordinates.

  These individuals, however, are becoming the exception. The norm is the opposite. The problem is no longer a surfeit of information, but a form of proud ignorance. Many travelers know why they are going, but not where they are going. The train, to them, is just an airplane that never takes off.

  You can hardly ask a commuter to sit glued to the window in rapt enchantment every day of his life. But when you’re somewhere new, looking around is a duty. That’s the world out there, and it’s putting on a show for us.

  * * *

  You may have noticed, if you read the things I write, that I have the greatest respect for the new Italians. Some of them—if I may transition for a moment from railway metaphors to nautical ones—mistake the harbor for the sea, and take refuge in petty anesthetic habits (their soccer team, their local bar, their friends, their city). But most of them have been obliged to launch their boats just as a storm is hitting—a storm that’s been blowing for several years now, and which isn’t nearly over.

  There are those who insist that millennials—the generation born between 1980 and 2000—are uninformed. Frankly, that doesn’t seem to me to be the case. They get their information in an unorthodox manner (Facebook notifications, text messages), while we got our information in a linear manner (radio ➞ TV ➞ daily newspaper ➞ weekly newsmagazine ➞ book). But young people do know things. They know when and why things happen. But they don’t always know where.

  Ask them to describe the route between Saxony and Castile, or to find Eritrea on a globe. Ask them to list the countries that border Ukraine, or what great river empties into the Black Sea. Ask them to tell you the capitals of Latvia, Cambodia, Paraguay, Nigeria, and New Zealand. And prepare to be surprised: I certainly was. I asked several young people to list the four provincial capitals of Campania and I saw expressions of true anguish. A niece of mine—there are quite a few, so the identity remains vague—once told me how many miles she thought it was from Milan to Paris. I’m not going to tell you her answer, because I love her.

  My father, born in 1917, answers these questions without hesitation. His generation had neither Google Maps nor GPS, but they had atlases, teachers, and a certain method. The locating took place in their head; they had no need of a smartphone. My generation—born in the fifties and sixties of the twentieth century—never had the same level of skill, but maps soothed our unrequited yearnings, and we did learn a little something. I suspect that, in the last twenty years, the socio-politico-economic-environmental teaching of geography might have overlooked some of the basic notions. Where a place is, for instance.

  If we don’t know where a place is, we’ll never fully understand how sweet it is to get there. Or how sad it is to leave, as your train chugs past the last few houses of a city where something important happened.

  We’d lose something, and it would be a shame.

  Reading

  Books are astonishing. They can excite us and keep us up at night. They can depress us and then raise us. They can transport us through time and space, and take us into wonderful worlds. They can give us courage when we most need it. The best ones manage to uplift us and change our moods. These are the perfect books to take with us aboard a train; the therapy of the rails runs through here, too.

  Which books are the most tonic? Among the various psychotropic literary substances, these are the hardest to find. A detective novel—be it a thriller, noir, or police procedural—generates tension and inquiry. A family saga draws us in. A love story arouses empathy; if there’s sex, curiosity and excitement ensue. These are literary genres with reliable effects. That is why publishers love inspectors, heartthrobs, sighs, and nuances.

  Railway fiction is elusive. To start with, it’s not universal; everyone has to find their own tonic. I don’t recommend professional humorists: all too often, they’re depressing. I began, as a teenager, with P. G. Wodehouse, whom I found exhilarating; rereading him today, he strikes me as an autopsy report on a now-dead England. Twenty years later I moved on to Tom Sharpe: no effect. A few minor psychological stirrings—a smile, the desire to pick up the book again—with David Lodge (Small World, Nice Work, Thinks . . . ). But it wasn’t the humor that attracted me. It was something else, and I still can’t quite pin it down. Perhaps it was movement, travel, and change.

  Are travel books the books you should pack in your suitcase, then? I wouldn’t be so sure. Great traveler writers are excellent company if they teach you to travel; otherwise, they’re just asking us to admire them for their exploits, their imagination, and their courage. On the Trans-Siberian Railroad, I brought The Big Red Train Ride by Eric Newby (appropriately disguised, since it was a prohibited book), a highly informative masterpiece of intelligence and wit that colored my trip from Moscow to Beijing. The most methodical of all the railway authors—Paul Theroux, previously quoted in this book—is on the other hand so very literary and adventurous that he’s intimidating. Taking The Old Patagonian Express with you on a train from Boston to New York is fair, but perhaps excessive.

  On the Web site www.goodreads.com, I found a section devoted to uplifting fiction. It begins with an explanation (“When you close these books you feel happy to be alive, secure that life is worth living”), a warning (“Some of these books may deal with the dark side of life, but they still convey that overall it is good to be alive”), and a ranking. First place goes to Pride and Prejudice; third place, To Kill a Mockingbird; eighth place, A Room with a View; twelfth place, Life of Pi; and thirteenth place, Bridget Jones’s Diary.

  Useful references with a view to our imminent departures? Not at all.

  Let’s try to turn the question around. What authors do I admire without considering them in any way uplifting? Let’s stick with the contemporary Brits. Martin Amis and Ian McEwan: exciting and depressing, not particularly encouraging. The Pregnant Widow and Sweet Tooth have a few moments of happiness: the young English visitors in the castle in Campania, the limited-run love affair of Serena, a student at Cambridge. American authors? Don DeLillo: epic, not especially reassuring. Underworld is a masterpiece—it recounts times and places in a sublime manner—but it hardly sprays good humor in all directions. Jonathan Franzen? Brilliant, occasionally therapeutic, but it’s a demanding therapy. Nor can the uneasy Philip Roth of the twenty-first century be considered a dispenser of good cheer (the man in question would only take offense). Everyman (2006), Indignation (2008), The Humbling (2009), and Nemesis (2010) prepare you to accept death, not to enjoy life. The Zuckerman saga—up to Exit Ghost—sounds a different note: a sort of skeptical good humor. Like the Bech series, written by the suave John Updike.

  Interesting: I found particularly stimulating those novels that illuminate everyday life with a new light; that suggest a point of view; that put things into a new order. They generate a sense of gratitude: Good job, author! You made yourself useful. You wrote things that I, too, like so many others, had thought, but set out on the page, they acquire a new confirmation.

  A book like that—a book capable of uplifting me—was The World According to Garp. I read it in 1980, I’ve reread it, and I’ve never forgotten it. Paradoxical episodes and grotesque incidents dissolve into the everyday life of the United States, of which John Irving ably transmits the flavor. Pag
es that taste of cold beer and barbecue sauce, potent evocations of America.

  Another American novel functions in a different way but possesses the same degree of psychotropic capacity, and it has only just recently enjoyed a certain success: Stoner by John Edward Williams (first published in 1965). The owner of the Elliott Bay Book Company, in Seattle, recommended it to me. After a public event, he came up to me and said: “This is a gift. You’ll thank me.”

  Let me get that out of the way right now: I do thank you. It is a book at once melancholy and happy, a surprising conveyor of serenity. I might recommend it to my seatmate or neighbor on a train, if he or she is behaving well. It tells the story of a teacher in Missouri who tries to give meaning to a life that offers few satisfactions. A life in which, however, he has stuck it out. He has done what he could.

  And Italy? One happy book is Una questione privata by Beppe Fenoglio, which was published posthumously in 1963, two months after the author’s death (and translated into English variously as A Private Matter, 1988, and A Private Affair, 2007). The book makes you love life the way the young protagonist loved it. The partisan Milton—a young man in the midst of the tempest of the Italian Resistance in World War II—not only explains to us, in simple terms, what a civil war is, but also recounts the beauty of existence, where only a very few would see beauty at all. Fulvia, Giorgio, the hills, the villa, the rain, hard work, youth: it all mingles and takes on meaning.

  Another peddler of happiness? Goffredo Parise, who wasn’t a happy man. But Sillabari (translated into English twice, as Abecedary, 1984, and Solitudes, 1998) is a sentimental education, a brief history of Italy, and, above all, a lesson: that precious moments are hidden in everyday life, and often we aren’t capable of capturing them. “Nowadays, I believe people need feelings more than they do ideologies,” Parise explained, right in the midst of an ideological era. The first stories—or poems in prose?—came out in the Corriere della Sera between 1971 and 1972, the rest, between 1973 and 1980. Read “Dolcezza” (“Sweetness”). You’ll understand what a journey can become, even just a short journey: a few simple touristic pursuits, over the course of a morning in Venice, illuminated by the author’s sensibility. Happiness and regret, taken together, produce sweetness: an impeccable title.