WRITING
THE NIGHT TRAIN TO VENICE
An unedited diary entry
It is five o'clock on the fifth of September and I am writing this at Gare de Paris Bercy. After three hours on a Eurostar whose air-conditioning had failed even Paris, the only city in which I have been the victim of bedbugs and been in a taxi which crashed, was a relief. But, although a relief, Paris was still too much movement and noise so I came here to Bercy on the rattling RER as quickly as I could for I knew it would be quieter. I didn't realise quite how quiet. Why they made this the departure station for the night trains to Italy — tonight they are mine to Venice and the ‘EC le Palatino' to Roma Termini — I cannot understand. It used to be Gare de Lyon. Bercy is no more than an empty marshalling yard which is laced with overhead cables that seem to serve no trains. These and the tracks form the horizontals which are linked by grey iron verticals supporting the cables and carrying square signs saying ‘50' and ‘Z'. What do they mean, these signs with no-one to read them? It could all be a film set. A fugitive stumbling among the ragwort growing in the brown shale between the tracks. Yellow and brown. Hot colours.
I feel sleepy in the heat. From time to time the sound of a blue-grey TGV in the distance brings me back to reality. From time to other time a red and grey RER, slow and deliberate in the other direction and then it is just the heat and the heavy silence once more. The rails and the ragwort, the blind signals and the sun . . .
There is an ominous ticking as of a tired clock and a locomotive has eased towards the barrier of quai P, the shining bluish arcs of the windscreen wipers emphasising all the summer insects crushed to its aggressive and filthy front. There is no sign of a driver and the sense of abandonment is heightened by the departures board which lists the expected trains and seems only to reinforce the knowledge that they are not yet here. The empty locomotive continues to click in the heavy air with an empty foreboding, and the falling sun shines on those of the rails which are not rusting.
Behind the landscape of rails and ragwort, cables and ironwork stands the grey concrete of poor flats whose balconies and satellite dishes throw late shadows on to the drab walls. Shadows rectangular and oval. The flats are of ten stories or more and are clad in pre-cast concrete panels. With the light as it is now you can see that few of these panels are on the same plane and it is easy to form the impression that they are not bolted to a steel frame but merely glued along their edges.
There in no-one here at this hour, which is too early for night trains, but some sparrows and some homeless. These probably are not homeless actually and have, I expect, like me, arrived too early for a train. They are Algerian, I think, or Moroccan and appear to be vagrants because they are surrounded by carrier bags and black bin liners wrapped around with adhesive parcel tape. There are two old women, a younger one, a boy of about sixteen, a girl of perhaps twelve and a girl child who can't yet walk.
The two old women are wearing the sort of clothes that seem to tell their histories. Sandals, thick stockings, grey-green; calf length Prussian blue loose skirts, and colourful blouses, loose with wide sleeves to the elbows. White cloths wrapped around their heads, the ends of these cloths forming two points between the shoulder blades. Large circular silver ear rings. Their breasts are huge and low, their faces are the faces of women who are always bending in stony fields and their eyebrows are like unkempt hedges. One of them wears an absurd little white pinafore such as you might see on a French maid in a Whitehall farce.
The younger woman (I surmise she is the daughter of one of the two) has much the same look, Romany almost, but watered down, and her head cloth is the grey-green of the older women's stockings. The youth is wearing blue jeans and a sweatshirt with the number 80 on the back as if he is part of an American university baseball team, which he is not. The girl, his sister perhaps, wears similar blue jeans, worn and fraying, with a thin pink tee shirt. It is hard to imagine that her little buds of breasts will one day become the pendulous dugs of the grandmother and even harder to imagine that hers were once as these. Like all the family her hair is very dark and she wears it in two long plaits each tied with a pink ribbon.
I like the baby best. She is wearing a baggy little suit of some thick fabric which I can only describe as pyjamas. Once upon a time the little suit was pink. Now it is filthy. Dust or snot or food or all three. She spends her time crawling away from the family group under the departures board, determined and adventurous, across the cracked bronze-brown floor tiles towards the automatic sliding glass doors which must be super sensitive as they open for her and she is away. It is only when she is half way across the zebra crossing and, surprisingly, the taxis have stopped for her, that the plaited girl runs after her, gathers her lovingly in her bare brown arms and covers the dirty little face with kisses. This happens several times, an unchanging ritual, and each time the rescuer turns and smiles at me over the bare shoulder from which the tee shirt has been pulled by the child. It is the rare look that a young Sophia Loren might have given, the knowing smile of the grisette, and I know that before many years have passed, broken hearts and empty wallets will be left in its wake.
Now the station which, architecturally, seems not unlike the departure lounge of some third rate airstrip in South America, has suddenly become busier. Someone pushes a sort of kiosk on casters rattling across those same bronze-brown floor tiles and parks it by the barrier of quai P where the locomotive still ticks, threatening. The notice on the kiosk, in English for some reason, says ‘Information Desk'. It is then abandoned but for an untidy pile of colourful leaflets. I wonder why the notice is in English and then realise it must be for the Americans. With more cases and bigger cases than anyone else there are a lot of Americans here and Americans always want information. The French, Italians, Algerians, Moroccans, Sudanese, Chinese, Australians and the one Englishman are all content to go with the flow but the Americans want information. Then I see that the leaflets are in French . . .
7.30 on the following morning. Milano Centrale. The office workers and shop girls already on their way. They are all cigarettes and sunglasses and they are not attractive. The reason for this, chiefly, is because they think they are. Milano Centrale is typical of nineteenth-century railway termini. Cast iron columns and arches studded with rivets. Painted grey to about three metres but above this they are left to rust, to decay and to the pigeons. Like all nineteenth-century railway ironwork the structure at Milano C'le has, over the years, been appended, amended and emended (but not mended) by the addition of electrical junction boxes, conduits rigid and conduits ribbed and flexible. Old junction boxes are abandoned, their cables cut off and left to hang like the entrails of petrified mammals. PVC downpipes cluster around the (presumably blocked) original cast iron ones and everything is covered with that urban dust that forms a smothering layer like felt. Always, on a low ledge there is a paper cup and if you look into it there will be the remains of a cappuccino and the tip of a Marlborough. I look away and return to my book (The Scarlet Letter). There is a gentle lurch as a new locomotive is attached to the back of the night train and the one which has taken us through eastern France and around the lakes and mountains of Switzerland and into the Italian dawn is disconnected. Being a terminal the only way out of Milano C'le is the way we came in. Gently we glide once more past the office girls, and as we gather a little speed the shadows of the low morning sun sweep across the compartment to record our course around a long bend and we are facing east again.
A few minutes west of Lontano there is a great plant for recycling scrap metal. At its red and white barrier there are long queues of articulated wagons with new and glossy cabs but old, brown and bent six-wheeled semi-trailers. These give the impression that the whole trailer, rather than merely its contents, will be lifted by one of the great cranes and dumped into the plant, leaving the severed cab, the opposite of a headless chicken, to dash about this flat country in search of the companionship of another trailer. A few more minutes and there are rows and rows of hundreds of new cars. Shining Citroens in the rising sun, suggesting the beginning of another pointless cycle. How long will it be before these are dumped, rusting and bent into a semi-trailer to wait at an early morning barrier as a night train from Paris sweeps past? And what of the journeys they will make between these two poles and how many plastic carrier bags from how many supermarkets? and how many children asking ‘are we nearly there?' and how many back seat seductions and front seat fellatios?
Now there are distant hillsides of vines looking like green corduroy. Here, by the tracks they are harvesting the grapes and this seems to involve large numbers of new four-wheel-drive Japanese pick-ups. Why? It never used to. Maize is the ubiquitous crop. There are the vines, there are the peach trees but these are only the punctuations in the pages of maize. There is a new housing estate, a concrete church, a schoolyard and an empty concrete road, a small river with concrete banks, a football pitch with floodlights and a station with no name. And the maize continues. I ask the steward for another coffee but I am allowed only one free one and I have to pay for the second which means he must complete a form in duplicate and give me the green copy. Concrete and paperwork. This can only be Italy.
At last the long train winds through the industrial mess of Mestre and Marghera and glides on to the iron bridge that links Venice to the mainland. Ponte della Libertà. Is this really the bridge to freedom or is it the unwanted cord that binds Venice to the rest of Italy? The bondage of nationalism. As one arrogant Venetian said: ‘If the bridge were not there, Europe would be a island.' Always at this point in the journey it seems to me that I am drifting back into history and it is equally easy to imagine that history is drifting across the wide lagoon towards me. Which I suppose it is.
An unedited diary entry
It is five o'clock on the fifth of September and I am writing this at Gare de Paris Bercy. After three hours on a Eurostar whose air-conditioning had failed even Paris, the only city in which I have been the victim of bedbugs and been in a taxi which crashed, was a relief. But, although a relief, Paris was still too much movement and noise so I came here to Bercy on the rattling RER as quickly as I could for I knew it would be quieter. I didn't realise quite how quiet. Why they made this the departure station for the night trains to Italy — tonight they are mine to Venice and the ‘EC le Palatino' to Roma Termini — I cannot understand. It used to be Gare de Lyon. Bercy is no more than an empty marshalling yard which is laced with overhead cables that seem to serve no trains. These and the tracks form the horizontals which are linked by grey iron verticals supporting the cables and carrying square signs saying ‘50' and ‘Z'. What do they mean, these signs with no-one to read them? It could all be a film set. A fugitive stumbling among the ragwort growing in the brown shale between the tracks. Yellow and brown. Hot colours.
I feel sleepy in the heat. From time to time the sound of a blue-grey TGV in the distance brings me back to reality. From time to other time a red and grey RER, slow and deliberate in the other direction and then it is just the heat and the heavy silence once more. The rails and the ragwort, the blind signals and the sun . . .
There is an ominous ticking as of a tired clock and a locomotive has eased towards the barrier of quai P, the shining bluish arcs of the windscreen wipers emphasising all the summer insects crushed to its aggressive and filthy front. There is no sign of a driver and the sense of abandonment is heightened by the departures board which lists the expected trains and seems only to reinforce the knowledge that they are not yet here. The empty locomotive continues to click in the heavy air with an empty foreboding, and the falling sun shines on those of the rails which are not rusting.
Behind the landscape of rails and ragwort, cables and ironwork stands the grey concrete of poor flats whose balconies and satellite dishes throw late shadows on to the drab walls. Shadows rectangular and oval. The flats are of ten stories or more and are clad in pre-cast concrete panels. With the light as it is now you can see that few of these panels are on the same plane and it is easy to form the impression that they are not bolted to a steel frame but merely glued along their edges.
There in no-one here at this hour, which is too early for night trains, but some sparrows and some homeless. These probably are not homeless actually and have, I expect, like me, arrived too early for a train. They are Algerian, I think, or Moroccan and appear to be vagrants because they are surrounded by carrier bags and black bin liners wrapped around with adhesive parcel tape. There are two old women, a younger one, a boy of about sixteen, a girl of perhaps twelve and a girl child who can't yet walk.
The two old women are wearing the sort of clothes that seem to tell their histories. Sandals, thick stockings, grey-green; calf length Prussian blue loose skirts, and colourful blouses, loose with wide sleeves to the elbows. White cloths wrapped around their heads, the ends of these cloths forming two points between the shoulder blades. Large circular silver ear rings. Their breasts are huge and low, their faces are the faces of women who are always bending in stony fields and their eyebrows are like unkempt hedges. One of them wears an absurd little white pinafore such as you might see on a French maid in a Whitehall farce.
The younger woman (I surmise she is the daughter of one of the two) has much the same look, Romany almost, but watered down, and her head cloth is the grey-green of the older women's stockings. The youth is wearing blue jeans and a sweatshirt with the number 80 on the back as if he is part of an American university baseball team, which he is not. The girl, his sister perhaps, wears similar blue jeans, worn and fraying, with a thin pink tee shirt. It is hard to imagine that her little buds of breasts will one day become the pendulous dugs of the grandmother and even harder to imagine that hers were once as these. Like all the family her hair is very dark and she wears it in two long plaits each tied with a pink ribbon.
I like the baby best. She is wearing a baggy little suit of some thick fabric which I can only describe as pyjamas. Once upon a time the little suit was pink. Now it is filthy. Dust or snot or food or all three. She spends her time crawling away from the family group under the departures board, determined and adventurous, across the cracked bronze-brown floor tiles towards the automatic sliding glass doors which must be super sensitive as they open for her and she is away. It is only when she is half way across the zebra crossing and, surprisingly, the taxis have stopped for her, that the plaited girl runs after her, gathers her lovingly in her bare brown arms and covers the dirty little face with kisses. This happens several times, an unchanging ritual, and each time the rescuer turns and smiles at me over the bare shoulder from which the tee shirt has been pulled by the child. It is the rare look that a young Sophia Loren might have given, the knowing smile of the grisette, and I know that before many years have passed, broken hearts and empty wallets will be left in its wake.
Now the station which, architecturally, seems not unlike the departure lounge of some third rate airstrip in South America, has suddenly become busier. Someone pushes a sort of kiosk on casters rattling across those same bronze-brown floor tiles and parks it by the barrier of quai P where the locomotive still ticks, threatening. The notice on the kiosk, in English for some reason, says ‘Information Desk'. It is then abandoned but for an untidy pile of colourful leaflets. I wonder why the notice is in English and then realise it must be for the Americans. With more cases and bigger cases than anyone else there are a lot of Americans here and Americans always want information. The French, Italians, Algerians, Moroccans, Sudanese, Chinese, Australians and the one Englishman are all content to go with the flow but the Americans want information. Then I see that the leaflets are in French . . .
7.30 on the following morning. Milano Centrale. The office workers and shop girls already on their way. They are all cigarettes and sunglasses and they are not attractive. The reason for this, chiefly, is because they think they are. Milano Centrale is typical of nineteenth-century railway termini. Cast iron columns and arches studded with rivets. Painted grey to about three metres but above this they are left to rust, to decay and to the pigeons. Like all nineteenth-century railway ironwork the structure at Milano C'le has, over the years, been appended, amended and emended (but not mended) by the addition of electrical junction boxes, conduits rigid and conduits ribbed and flexible. Old junction boxes are abandoned, their cables cut off and left to hang like the entrails of petrified mammals. PVC downpipes cluster around the (presumably blocked) original cast iron ones and everything is covered with that urban dust that forms a smothering layer like felt. Always, on a low ledge there is a paper cup and if you look into it there will be the remains of a cappuccino and the tip of a Marlborough. I look away and return to my book (The Scarlet Letter). There is a gentle lurch as a new locomotive is attached to the back of the night train and the one which has taken us through eastern France and around the lakes and mountains of Switzerland and into the Italian dawn is disconnected. Being a terminal the only way out of Milano C'le is the way we came in. Gently we glide once more past the office girls, and as we gather a little speed the shadows of the low morning sun sweep across the compartment to record our course around a long bend and we are facing east again.
A few minutes west of Lontano there is a great plant for recycling scrap metal. At its red and white barrier there are long queues of articulated wagons with new and glossy cabs but old, brown and bent six-wheeled semi-trailers. These give the impression that the whole trailer, rather than merely its contents, will be lifted by one of the great cranes and dumped into the plant, leaving the severed cab, the opposite of a headless chicken, to dash about this flat country in search of the companionship of another trailer. A few more minutes and there are rows and rows of hundreds of new cars. Shining Citroens in the rising sun, suggesting the beginning of another pointless cycle. How long will it be before these are dumped, rusting and bent into a semi-trailer to wait at an early morning barrier as a night train from Paris sweeps past? And what of the journeys they will make between these two poles and how many plastic carrier bags from how many supermarkets? and how many children asking ‘are we nearly there?' and how many back seat seductions and front seat fellatios?
Now there are distant hillsides of vines looking like green corduroy. Here, by the tracks they are harvesting the grapes and this seems to involve large numbers of new four-wheel-drive Japanese pick-ups. Why? It never used to. Maize is the ubiquitous crop. There are the vines, there are the peach trees but these are only the punctuations in the pages of maize. There is a new housing estate, a concrete church, a schoolyard and an empty concrete road, a small river with concrete banks, a football pitch with floodlights and a station with no name. And the maize continues. I ask the steward for another coffee but I am allowed only one free one and I have to pay for the second which means he must complete a form in duplicate and give me the green copy. Concrete and paperwork. This can only be Italy.
At last the long train winds through the industrial mess of Mestre and Marghera and glides on to the iron bridge that links Venice to the mainland. Ponte della Libertà. Is this really the bridge to freedom or is it the unwanted cord that binds Venice to the rest of Italy? The bondage of nationalism. As one arrogant Venetian said: ‘If the bridge were not there, Europe would be a island.' Always at this point in the journey it seems to me that I am drifting back into history and it is equally easy to imagine that history is drifting across the wide lagoon towards me. Which I suppose it is.
