Night train to Bari

The train left Milano Centrale at nine and something in me unclenched before we cleared the yard. There is no version of flying that does this. A plane is an interruption between two taxis; a night train is a place, with weather and neighbours and a corridor where you can stand with your forehead against the cold glass and watch Emilia go by as a string of sodium lamps.¹

I had the top berth. Below me a man of about seventy read a paperback with the cover folded back, one thumb keeping his place, the way my grandfather did. We never spoke beyond buonasera. At Bologna he was replaced, silently, by a student who slept in her coat.

What I keep from these trips is never the destination. It is the stops in the small hours — Pescara, Termoli — stations lit like aquariums, one man with a trolley, the recorded announcement talking to nobody. You see a town with its face washed, before it has decided what to be for the day. I find it almost unbearably tender, and I have stopped apologising for that.

Somewhere after Foggia the light started. Not sunrise — the thing before it, when the window stops being a mirror and becomes a window again, and the sea arrives on the left like something remembered. I went to the corridor. The student was already there with two paper cups of coffee from the machine, and she handed me one as if we had agreed on it the night before.

Bari at seven smelled of bread and diesel. I walked from the station to the old town with my bag on my shoulder and my back complaining about the berth, and I was — there is no better word for it — arrived. Eleven hours is not what the journey costs. It is what it is worth.

Footnotes

1. The 22:50 Intercity Notte, for the record. Book the couchette, not the seat. This is the only travel advice I will ever give with total confidence. ↩