Ciccio and Laura crunched through a couple of plates of these blackened conker shells. As always happens with seafood the detritus was way in excess of what little bits there were to eat and soon the table was piled high with urchin shells. What next? I wondered. Ah mussels, of course. I hate anything that comes in shells and this meal was going to be nothing but shell — shell and, if I was lucky, bones. By now I was desperately hungry and since although I will not eat seafood I can eat fish — at a push — I helped myself to a portion of the fish that Ciccio had ordered for us all. I hadn’t asked what kind of fish it was but I recognised it as soon as I had had my first mouthfuclass="underline" a bone fish, a fish so full of little white bones that you had to pick and inspect, sift and sort through every forkful to make sure you didn’t choke — and after a while that demanded more concentration than it was worth so I just left it on my plate.
At that point, a low point for me, a friend of Ciccio’s arrived bearing the bag of stuff we were to take back to Renata. He shook hands, handed over the bag and left. In the bag were cartons of Prozac: boxes and boxes of Prozac. The delivery of this consignment was clearly a relief to Ciccio and he was now able to get down to the serious business of the evening: phoning Renata. The waiter brought a cordless phone, Ciccio dialled and was immediately submerged in conversation. I had realised some time ago that Ciccio’s phone bills were fairly heavy but now I saw that his acquaintances also bore part of the punishing cost of his relationship with Renata. After a surprisingly short time, however, he hung up.
‘She’s calling back,’ he explained, unstrapping his watch and putting it on the table in front of him as if to say: right, now we’re going to have a real phone call. After thirty seconds, though, she had still not called back and so he tried her again. Engaged. He lit a cigarette and tried again. Engaged. They had reached telephonic gridlock; both lines were engaged constantly because they were both trying to call each other. Drawing deeply on his cigarette, Ciccio mustered all his will-power and let the phone sit there unused. It rang and Ciccio snatched it up. It was Renata and she was close to hysteria. Why hadn’t he called? The whole scene was like a government health warning for the adverse side-effects of Prozac. On the other hand what would she have been like without Prozac? Dead possibly, whereupon Telecom Italia would either suffer a major reduction in turnover or, alternatively, would have been free to liberate a good part of its network for more urgent matters than this mad romance.
At the end of the evening I settled the bill, still hoping, even as I handed over my wad of lire, that Ciccio would either offer to pay or tell the owner that I was writing an article on his restaurant. We left the restaurant and Ciccio drove us back to vile Furci. We drove as if our lives depended on it, as if our lives didn’t depend on it. We overtook everything in sight but, since other people were overtaking us, then — by the Italian law of highway moderation — we were driving perfectly safely.
I was looking forward to sitting on the train for eight or nine hours, reading Sea and Sardinia, thinking about Lawrence and Sicily, not budging from my seat. Instead, once we got to Villa San Giovanni, it was the train that refused to budge. More precisely, it budged a bit, shunting back and forth a few metres each way to hook up extra carriages from the ferry. The train extended itself by two carriages at a time until it was half a mile long. While all this was going on I hung out of the door, brake-man-style, looking out across the rails and the empty freights towards the blue Straits of Messina and, beyond that, Sicily. When the train was ready the doors shut and. . we stayed where we were for another half an hour. Then the air-conditioning came on and. . we stayed where we were for a while longer.
This proved to be only the first instalment in a series of setbacks. Later, as we headed out of Napoli, there was a crash and my window shattered. An explosion of glass. We threw ourselves to the far side of the compartment which was full of screaming. Something had hit the window, shattering it, but, we saw now, the window was intact even though it had shattered. The double laminate had saved us: the outside pane had smashed but the inner one had held. A guard came running and the train pulled in at the next station, Aversa. A rock, he said, or a brick. It happens all the time. Boys gather on the bridges and hurl rocks and bricks at trains: a popular hobby in Napoli. Last year five people were killed.
‘Non è una buona idea,’ said the fat man sitting next to me, ‘sedersi vicino al finestrino a Napoli.’
A team of railway officials began digging out the remains of the window. We got off the train, milled around and got back on again. I took the same seat as before, aware now that there was only a single pane between me and the rock-strewn world outside. Everything proceeded smoothly until the intercom pinged into life and the guard asked if there was a doctor on the train. If there was a doctor on board could he go immediately to the back of the train because there was a medical emergency. We heard no more about it but at the next station the train made another unscheduled stop. At the far end of the platform, a stretcher was waiting.
‘Whatever next?’ said my plump neighbour as the train rolled on again.
Next, the guard announced that due to ‘una interruzione fatale’ up ahead the train would have to stop at the next station, Cisterna. For how long? Everyone piled out of the train to find out, to mill around. Information was gleaned and passed on. The fat man from our compartment proved an invaluable source of information. By now I was into the spirit of the journey, hoping for even more catastrophic developments. I was happy to mill around in Cisterna with the evening sun angling over the station buildings. Especially since I now had the opportunity to do what was utterly forbidden in England: to walk across the tracks. I was not the only one to enjoy this. One group of passengers actually went and sat on the rails. Soon everyone was scampering across the tracks on some flimsy pretext or other. The delay also provided an excellent opportunity for the use of cellular phones: up and down the platform people were dialling home, postponing dinner. Gelati were bought and licked. A football was produced and a brief game of head tennis ensued. Someone began singing: a jokey song, Laura explained, about the love of a controllore for a beautiful passenger. Essentially, everyone took the opportunity to act like Italians. This is what Italians love to do more than anything: to act like Italians. They never tire of it! Day in, day out! Young boys, teenage girls, middle-aged mothers, even old men in their eighties — especially old men in their eighties! — they all love acting like Italians.
Laura asked if I could go up into the cab of the locomotive. The driver said it was not allowed but then, since nothing in Italy is utterly forbidden, he relented and Laura took a picture of me at the controls. Next she asked the guard to pose for a photo next to me so that our fellow passengers would be in no doubt that this was what the inglesi loved more than anything: to be treated like thirteen-year-olds. We were getting a lot of photos out of the trip back but it was difficult to imagine anyone collecting and poring over them the way I had done with pictures of Lawrence.
We milled around some more. Then, suddenly, the whistle! Back on the train! Back on the train! We were on our way again — as far as the next stop, where we got off once more and milled around again until the guard got the order to proceed.
We pulled into Termini five hours late. I had no complaints. It had been such fun, getting on and off the train like the escaping POWs in Von Ryan’s Express. The hours of mild catastrophe, of milling around and posing for photographs, had engendered a lovely spirit among the passengers, especially between the people in our compartment. On the platform Laura and I shook hands with them all, affectionately, and in the right spirit. In a way I wished that we were still in transit, were heading for some more distant, hindrance-littered destination so that we could all remain together. I was sorry to leave them.