Italian Ways

by Tim Parks

  The train rattles along a low ridge now and you can look down across old terracotta housetops and the concrete sprawl of hotels, pizzerias and gelaterie to the big lake, brightly grey in the morning light, stretching north as far as the eye can see, with terraced hills first, then darker mountains rising and closing in on either side, turning the water black. A fishing boat trails a long wake but seems to be fixed there. The surface is very still and solid-looking. A couple of backpackers clamber into the carriage, arguing in German. The Inter-regionali have rather cunning swing doors between carriages: you can never work out whether you’re supposed to push or pull, or on which side of the double door to do it. The backpackers have a tussle and almost fall over each other coming into the carriage.

  To the left of the train are the low hills of Custoza, rounded morainic mounds of silt and rubble brought down by the glaciers when the lake was formed. Here in 1866 Victor Emmanuel II led his troops against the Austro-Hungarians, still masters of the Veneto despite the unification of the rest of Italy. Austria had offered to hand over the territory in return for Italian neutrality in its war with Germany, but Victor Emmanuel felt that the honour of his ancient family and new nation demanded that he win the territory by force of arms. His army of 120,000 was defeated by 80,000 Austrians. Fourteen thousand men died. Their skulls are on display in an ossuary. You can see where the bullets passed through. Most of them were young enough to have excellent teeth.

  A significant part of that victorious Austrian army of 1866 was made up of local Italians who were not greatly inspired by the idea of national unity, and even today on walls between Peschiera and Desenzano you can read such graffiti as GOVERNO LADRO, VENETO LIBERO. The governo ladro, the thieving government, is always understood to be Roman, not local. And again: CALL ME A DOG, BUT NOT AN ITALIAN. FREE US FROM SOUTHERN FILTH. And so on. Perhaps as a result some tourists and ingenuous foreign journalists may imagine that there is a serious separatist movement here. But this is just a rhetorical flourish, not unlike that slogan FastTicket. People like the idea that there is a separatist movement, they like hating Rome and the south, and then they travel Trenitalia to work in distant towns, or to their favourite holiday beach in Puglia where quite probably they have friends and relatives. In much the same way people like the fact that a pope is against contraception and abortion but then continue with their sensible, hypercontrolled sex lives. In every aspect of Italian life, one of the key characteristics to get to grips with is that this is a nation at ease with the distance between ideal and real. They are beyond what we call hypocrisy. Quite simply they do not register the contradiction between rhetoric and behaviour. It’s an enviable mindset.

  MOST PEOPLE ON THE train are asleep, and if not, they wish they were. It’s not unusual to climb on board and find carriages turned into dormitories. But this can be dangerous. On two occasions recently the train of the living dead became the train of the truly dead. The first time, thank heaven, I wasn’t on it. In midwinter, shortly after the carriages had started to roll, there was a smell of smoke. An electrical fire had broken out. In the last carriage, four or five passengers were sufficiently awake to get up and start moving forward through the train. No one had noticed a woman in her forties fast asleep. By the time the smoke cleared she was dead.

  As always when there is a fatal accident in Italy, the magistrates moved swiftly to arrest whoever might conceivably be considered responsible, in this case the poor capotreno who claimed he was told by one of the escaping passengers that the smoke-filled and hence extremely dangerous carriage had been completely evacuated. After a few anguished days in custody, he was released. A theatre of severity in Italy is always followed by lenience and very often indifference. It is hard to end up in jail for causing an accident, though many are briefly jailed for nothing at all.

  The second fatality occurred on a morning of thesis commissions. I had to go to Milan and sit behind a table with seven or eight other professors to listen to students defending their graduate theses. Like the nullaosta, the thesis commission is a formality. No student I know of has ever failed. It is also a thing of unspeakable boredom: three or four hours in which tedium can be held in your hands and caressed like a small, fluffy animal. But woe onto him who cries off a thesis commission. Because if more than one professor is absent and the legal quorum isn’t reached, nobody can get his or her degree, and serious sanctions will follow. Thus the whole university experience depends, ultimately, on a long ceremony of collective tedium. It is interesting that my Italian colleagues for the most part share this assessment, some are far more scathing than I am, yet never feel that something should be done to alter the situation. Thesis commissions are as inevitable as pizza and the Pope.

  On that particular thesis-commission morning, then, when, fifteen minutes out of Verona, the Interregionale braked sharply and shuddered to a stop, I at once felt nervous. Five minutes became ten. We were in open country just before the village of Sommacampagna. It was raining steadily. After perhaps half an hour the PA announced, ‘I signori viaggiatori sono avvisati che il treno sarà fermo per un periodo indeterminato!’

  Stopped for an indeterminate period of time! How fatal those words sounded. As if the planet had ceased to turn. No explanation, no hint as to when the solar system might resume its various orbits. The rain fell and fell. Alarmed, I phoned a colleague in Milan who, I hoped, was an early riser. It occurred to me that if I started missing thesis commissions perhaps the university administration would reconsider my nullaosta when I applied the following year.

  Meanwhile, the dozen or so passengers in the carriage were getting their hair wet hanging out of the windows trying to understand what was going on. ‘Suicide,’ someone knowledgeable decided. How did he know? Because we had braked violently in empty countryside. Because no trains had passed in the other direction. Obviously the line had been closed down, both ways. What else could it be? ‘This stretch is famous for suicides,’ he told us.

  He was right. At 6.50 in the morning somebody had been feeling so unhappy that he or she had jumped under the first train the rainy morning brought. Not a student bound for the thesis commission, I hoped.

  ‘Then even before they clean things up,’ our knowledgeable traveller told everybody, ‘they have to get a doctor out to certify death and a forensic team to photograph the scene in case the driver was to blame.’

  How could a driver ever be to blame if someone throws himself in front of the locomotive?

  After perhaps an hour and a half the train made the strange movement of going backwards at a snail’s pace for ten minutes before it found a point to switch to a sideline. Our direction was then reversed again and we proceeded with caution through the station of Sommacampagna. Just beyond the platform, on a grassy embankment, I saw an ambulance team pushing a severed leg into a black plastic bag. Other men, in suits, stood under umbrellas. The curious thing was how little impression this made on me compared with my mental picture of the victim throwing himself on the rails, his healthy body meeting the steel wheels. Or maybe her body. That makes me shiver, perhaps because one somehow thinks of doing it oneself. A few days later the newspapers attacked the railways for sending the clean-up bill to the relatives. A pignolo, no doubt, trying to balance the company’s impossible books.

  AT 7.40 THE TRAIN stops in the town of Brescia. This is Lombardy now. Suddenly a middle-aged man a few seats down from me comes to life. He jumps up, slams open the window, and is leaning out, beckoning to friends on the crowded platform. ‘Qua, qua. In fretta!’ Here, here. Hurry! He is saving seats for them, a coat on one, a bag on another, a newspaper on the next. In less than five minutes the train is crowded, it’s packed. People are standing, pushing. No one can find space for their bags. Worse still, everybody is talking. Everybody seems to know each other.

  This is something I have never observed in England. There, on a commuter train, most of the passengers are shut away in themselves, in a newspaper, a book, or trying to prolong the dreams of an ho
ur before. There’s a pleasant melancholy to the journey. But not on the Interregionale to Milan. These dead are alive, which is so much more disconcerting. Either the travellers are neighbours in Brescia or work colleagues in Milan. They form knots of animated discussion all down the carriage. Some knots know other knots and intertwine and snag. Students swap study notes. Football, politics and the proper way to prepare an asparagus risotto are urgently discussed. I insert a pair of yellow sponge earplugs.

  But it isn’t enough. Half a dozen men and women in their early thirties are crowded around me. There is usually one who does all the talking while the others offer occasional confirmations or objections. When the sexes are mixed, the one talking is always a man. ‘Juve was let off an obvious penalty again.’ Juve or Juventus is one of the so-called Big Four football teams – Juventus, Inter Milan, AC Milan and Roma – that invariably win the championship. ‘Did you see? Una vergogna.’ It’s a suit speaking, in his thirties with a nasal voice, a scrubbed bank clerk’s face, an earring, a sneer, a bright red tie. He laughs and jokes constantly. The women exchange indulgent smiles. Two of them are standing arm in arm, touching each other. There’s a strange collective consciousness to these groups, something quite physical. They like their bodies and they like their accessories, their handbags and laptops and mobiles and tiny designer backpacks. ‘Look at this I bought. Look at this.’ They finger the new material and touch their friend’s arm.

  ‘Joke,’ begins the red tie noisily. ‘Listen up. So, Berlusconi’s son asks his papà advice about how to lay some girl he’s hot for, right? And old Berlusca tells him, “Stefano, first you buy her a diamond necklace, va bene? You take her to an expensive restaurant, book a room in a five-star hotel and make sure there’s a chilled bottle of the finest champagne on the bedside table. And she’s yours. Go for it.” “But Papà,” his son protests, “isn’t love supposed to be free? I don’t want her to think I’m buying her.” And what does Silvio reply?’ The man smiles brightly before the punchline; he’s extremely pleased with himself. ‘What does il buon Silvio say? “Free love?” he says. “Romance! That was just a story the cheapskate Commies invented so they could fuck for nothing!” So they could fuck for nothing!’

  The others titter and groan. Someone remembers something a talk-show host said the previous evening about the way referees were selected for Serie A football games. I resign myself to an hour of forced listening, albeit with the pleasant muffling effect of the earplugs.

  Recently, prompted by God knows what hypersensitive traveller, Trenitalia began to talk about the possibility of a ‘quiet carriage’ for those who didn’t want to talk. But before going ahead with this revolutionary project they decided to carry out a survey of passenger attitudes. The newspapers published some responses. Most fascinating were the people who simply didn’t understand: ‘If I don’t want a guy to talk to me,’ one woman says, ‘I know how to tell him to leave me alone.’ ‘People can talk or not talk as they choose,’ observes a student. They simply could not grasp the idea that some of us might want to be quiet to read and work. ‘What happens if I’m in the quiet carriage and my phone rings?’ somebody objected. With this simple observation he was sure he had demonstrated the folly of the project. No more was heard of it.

  ONE OF THE THINGS that indicates the importance of the railways in the Italian psyche is how often they are chosen as a target in political and industrial protest. In the late nineties I remember looking up from my book on the way to Milan – in the company as always of the living dead – and noticing that the train was stationary. It was an unscheduled stop; we were sitting still in flat, open fields, poplars and pylons the only scenery. We could hear vehicles hooting and a rather odd background noise, something like the lowing of cattle. I stood up and pulled down my window. It was the lowing of cattle. A group of farmers had filled a field with tractors and driven a couple of cows onto the line to block the trains. Banners protested about EC milk quotas.

  Time passed. Hanging out of the window, I saw that a TV camera had arrived. There were policemen, too, who seemed to be chatting to the farmers. Somebody banged down a window in a carriage further up and started shouting insults. ‘comunisti! fannulloni! [Slackers] Pagliacci! [Clowns] Merde!’ The farmers shouted back. There were gestures of the variety that rival fans exchange at the stadium: scorn, derision.

  When the ticket inspector came by I asked him why the police weren’t clearing the line. With a wry smile, he explained that there was friendly agreement among the railway unions, the farmers and the police to let the farmers block each train for half an hour. After which they would let it by and block the next one. ‘It would be dangerous,’ he pointed out, ‘to put a cow on the track if the driver didn’t know when and where to expect it. The animal could get killed.’

  So we had the classic Italian compromise, a theatre of strife when all was actually agreed. Anarchy is rare in Italy, but legality is always up for renegotiation, especially if you can present yourself as hard done by, something farmers have a special vocation for. For every litre of milk, the EC guarantees European farmers about double the world market price; in return, the farmers must stay inside specific limits and not exploit the high price with overproduction. The farmers of northern Italy had vastly exceeded their EC milk quotas but did not want to pay the resulting fines. To encourage the Italian government to negotiate on their behalf, it seemed a good idea to block the trains passing through their fields.

  For the next six weeks it became standard procedure to have the train stop in the middle of fields somewhere while the driver chatted to farmers and cows mooed at the passengers. The protesters put up large tents and sat at camping tables drinking from big bottles of wine while they watched us trapped on our Interregionali or Intercities. At times it was hard not to feel that train drivers, police and TV cameramen were enjoying the situation. Every evening the TV dramatised our plight and spoke of the damage to the economy while continuing to sympathise with the farmers at the expense of supposedly obscure European rules. Eventually the government caved in, as it always does, went to Brussels and got what the farmers wanted for them. What they promised in return I cannot recall, but I sincerely doubt they delivered. Italy is the most enthusiastic member of the EU and also the country most frequently condemned by the European Court for breaking EU rules. There is no contradiction. During the farmers’ protest, travellers got so used to the whole affair that they took account of the half-hour milk-quota delay when planning their journey times.

  MORE OFTEN THE PEOPLE holding up the trains will be the railway workers themselves, for there is almost never a time when they do not have an ongoing dispute with their employers.

  As always the situation is complicated. Work contracts are negotiated for two-or three-year periods, after which they must be renewed. The government, however, and the large employers rarely renew the contract when it’s due for renewal. Perhaps they only start negotiating at this point. So it’s common to have situations where, officially, a contract has lapsed for as many as three or four years. The workers continue to be paid at the level of the old contract, and this puts pressure on the unions to accept a lower offer than they would have wanted; otherwise their workers will get no offer at all. The unions understand this and raise their initial demands accordingly.

  Throughout the long negotiation period there will be regular one-day strikes to remind the employers that the situation is urgent. The all-out strike is almost never used in Italy; it is not in line with the feeling that everything can be negotiated, that the final weapon must always be held back.

  The public is told no more than that the strikes are for renewal of contract, which of course sounds more reasonable than saying that people are striking for a wage rise. Since one is rarely aware of exactly what is at stake – a feeling apparently shared by many of the railway workers themselves – the strikes take on the characteristics of an act of God, something beyond your ken. Or simply a routine annoyance. Depending on people’s political
sympathies, they either support the workers unquestioningly, or speak about an Italy that will never be as ‘serious’ as France or Germany.

  One says ‘strike’, but the word does not quite mean what it would elsewhere: that the trains aren’t running, and that is that. Government and unions have negotiated a minimum service to be maintained during strikes. Again there is a sort of complicity in transgression, or rather a cooperation in non-cooperation. The result is another of those ambiguous situations that Italians have such a flair for.

  The strike is announced a week or two in advance, although it is also announced that it might be cancelled or postponed, or that the government could declare it illegal. There is a telephone number you can call to find out which trains are running, but it is always busy. A poster goes up in Verona station, with a list of i treni circolanti in the event of strikes, a sort of strike timetable, as if a strike day was like a Sunday or a bank holiday. But the poster includes a caveat that maybe the trains won’t be running after all.

  Of course the whole thing is studied to cause maximum confusion while pretending to lessen the impact of the strike. My policy is always to go to the station and the hell with it. There’s usually something running. In fact, I can’t recall a single strike that has actually stopped me getting from Verona to Milan. It’s a line with plenty of international trains and, as we’ve seen, it’s important for the Italians to seem serious in the eyes of their French and Austrian neighbours. Most commuters take the day off, though. It’s un’assenza giustificata, a legitimate absence. So the aim of the strike is achieved anyway, and without upsetting those who really want to travel. All in all, it’s a rather elegant solution.

  THE HILLS ABOVE BRESCIA are particularly gloomy. Looming mounds of grey-green vegetation scarcely cover a base of chalky limestone, giving the landscape an odd, threadbare look. Here and there the slopes are broken by the white scar of a quarry, its vertical face scored with horizontal lines. Shapelessness alternates with harsh geometry: shopping centres, cemeteries.