LITMIR.BIZ

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middle-aged couple were banging on the window trying to attract the attention of an adolescent boy in the corridor. He was wearing a Gauguin T-shirt and was embarrassed by the way his parents were making a big fuss about his leaving, waving and mouthing things at him through the window. He was more relieved than any of us when the air-conditioning hummed into life and, a few minutes later, punctual to the second, the train nudged out of Termini. Between us and the sky, the network of overhead wires and cables was so extensive it seemed merely the first stage of a project to put a sun roof over the whole of Italy. An alphabet of aerials stretched away over the roofs. Sheets and towels hung from every balcony. Washing hanging out to dry: that is the real national flag of Italy, emblem and proof of how the fabric of daily life endures.

      Soon we were passing the truncated remains of an Ancient Roman viaduct; beyond that was a glimpse of the autostrada so that the essential trajectory of Roman history seemed a straight line, an unwavering determination to get somewhere else as quickly as possible. The mountains in the background were cut from the same cloth as the sky: a slightly darker shade, that was the only difference. Had we the capacity to analyse it there would almost certainly be a geology of the air as well as of rock.

      The controllore came by, fining the young Gauguin because he had not stamped his ticket at the station: so that’s what his parents were making such a fuss about. A new ruling this: unstamped, a ticket was now valid for three months which meant that it was advantageous to avoid stamping your ticket – hence the heavy fine for omitting to do so. Everyone felt sorry for the boy and the controllore relented, fining him the smallest possible amount. A great debate ensued about the injustice of this new ruling. The controllore went on checking tickets while all around him the debate – which in no way excluded him: just because he was charged with implementing the new rule did not mean he had to relinquish his right to be an Italian: to join in – became more energetic in spite of the fact that essentially everyone was in agreement. New laws are always being passed but they alter almost nothing. Their real purpose is, precisely, to engender debate, to give the people of Italy a chance to express a lively opposition to the state so unanimous that it actually creates a supportive atmosphere of unity and national well-being. Everyone feels the state is fleecing them, treating them unfairly, so that feeling cheated by the state – and finding some small ways of cheating the state – turns out to be the cement that binds the nation together. In this way the state is sacrificed to the idea of the nation. That’s Italian history, in a nutshell

      The controllore rested his elbow on the door, put his foot up on the ashtray (not on the seat of course) so that he was now in the classic Italian discursive attitude: propped up, leaning in such a way as to suggest, as Italians always do, that discussion originated in the simple biological need to come to terms with the heat. Six months from now, he said, taking off his hat to emphasise that he was now speaking ex cathedra, he would be out of a job. The new ticket laws were the first step towards getting rid of controllori. So, the cult of rationalisation had come to Italy – and what a shame it was! In England we had completely absorbed the ethic of cost-efficiency. Cut costs – no matter what the cost! It comes easy to us. Even as we protest against a particular instance of it we accept, somewhere in our empirical English psyche, the principle that this is the way things must be. We can easily forsake the pleasures that come from that which is not strictly necessary – but in Italy, where life is devoted to making life that bit nicer, to providing an extra bit of sweetness in a cornetto (by their pastries ye shall know them!), it goes against the grain utterly. So what if the state is losing money? So what if it is more efficient to have some robotic fraud-proof ticket system? It is nice, fun, to have a handsome controllore come around like this in his pressed blue shirt, checking tickets and joining in the debate about his impending obsolescence.

      The debate continued after the controllore had gone on to join in the debate in the next compartment. Not at all like being on a train in England where everyone is tacitly affronted by everyone else, terrified lest their legs touch those of the person opposite. England must be the only country in the world where you plonk yourself down next to someone in a train without saying a word, where the normal form of greeting is to keep your eyes fixed on the ground. Here, though, the six of us were perfectly at home in our little compartment. A railway compartment is actually the Italians’ preferred version of the indoors. Ours was like a tiny piazza, a place to gather and discuss. The democratic ethos of the piazza-compartment is a product, like so much else in southern Italy, of the heat. None of the men was wearing a jacket. We were all in shirts or T-shirts. Madness to wear a tie on a day like this! Hierarchies are difficult to maintain without jackets. In shirts, people are practically equal – the only way to establish a jacket-less hierarchy is by turning the shirt into a uniform. Hence the frequency of military coups in South America, violent attempts to resist the levelling tendency of the shirt.

      A drunk shoved open the door, asking for money. None was forthcoming and he threw some soiled abuse into the compartment. The man next to me, a waiter on the ferries, told him to watch his mouth. The drunk lurched out into the corridor and made the slightest, meanest gesture of a throat being cut – not one of those harmless piratical swipes across the whole of the throat, just a tiny slit to indicate that cutting open your neck would mean no more to him than nicking himself shaving. With that he was gone, snaking his way out into the corridor. A few minutes later, from the direction in which he had slithered, came the sound of commotion, or rather a sound over and above the normal commotion of the crowded corridor. The waiter was up on his feet and into the corridor instantly, hitching his jeans up over his stomach, a stomach which at that moment indicated neither sloth nor greed but a ballast of strength and fearlessness, immunity to slashing. He had blue eyes and dark, dark skin. His mere presence in the corridor subdued the throat-cutter who muttered off into the next carriage – first class, as it happened. Now he was really asking for trouble.

      To travel is to eat. We were tucking into our lunch, which is to say Laura was munching crackers and I was eating bread and pomodori. These tomatoes tasted nothing like English tomatoes. They tasted tomatoey. I ate them one after another, the taste like a memory of childhood which actually turned out not to be a taste but a smell of taste, the reddening green smell – I had it exactly – of my Uncle Harry’s greenhouse in Shurdington where the air ripened under glass. We offered our food to everyone in the compartment but no one accepted. We were the only ones eating. Everyone else was too busy talking about food to eat. They were all saving themselves for enormous meals tonight (especially the waiter from the ferries who had not seen his wife for two months). After lunch a consensus of silence fell on the compartment and a round of dozing took place.

      I read Sea and Sardinia. More accurately, I read the first paragraph of Sea and Sardinia over and over until I felt sleepy. I loved the first sentence, its urgency of intention: ‘Comes over one an absolute desire to move.’ The sentence had ended, left, moved on, almost as soon as it had begun, while I, the diligent reader, was still checking that it had everything it needed to leave, to be a sentence. The whole of the first paragraph was like that, I thought to myself: a train that was moving out fractionally ahead of its appointed time, doors still ajar, leaving the reader running along after it, unsure where it was heading, but convinced of the need to climb aboard before it gathered too much momentum: ‘Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither.’ It was only with that quaint ‘whither’ that we had the chance to gather our senses and settle down comfortably in our seats. I love that first paragraph, I thought to myself, sleepily. I resolved to look at it more closely, to discuss it ‘at length’ in my study of Lawrence, the study I was going to Sicily to research. In Rome I’d had that idea of putting together an album of pictures of Lawrence. I still wanted to do that but now, after reading a paragraph of Sea and Sardinia, I also wanted to do a series of travel sketches of places Lawrence had been, an album of travel pictures, I thought, sleepily. Came over me an absolute desire to sleep . . . I opened my eyes once before falling asleep and saw that Laura had fallen asleep, in fact everyone in the compartment was sleeping so that it seemed I was standing guard, falling asleep when I was meant to be keeping watch.

      I woke up, other people woke up or slept. I read, looked out of the window, slept, read, or dreamed

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