On the Fortezza-Bolzano train there are two girls sitting opposite me, probably about sixteen. One is blond, the other dark. They look like the kind of scantily-clad young women you see on Italian TV, like the soubrettes in the programs my mother claims not to know because she watches only the Austrian ORF channels, but which she actually sits and gulps down for hours on end. They’re dressed identically: black jacket with gray fur collar, black trousers worn very low on the waist, slid into black boots. They look like they’re wearing a uniform. They get off at Bressanone, where Max, the largest discotheque in the area is situated: Easter Saturday or not, they’re going dancing.
South Tyrol discotheques used to be closed on Easter Saturday. In fact there weren’t any. Max didn’t use to hold a gay night every third Thursday of the month. No South Tyrol hotel would have written “gay-friendly” in their brochure (but only in the English-language ones aimed at an Anglo-Saxon clientele, not in the German or Italian ones). In the snow bulletin issued by the pistes and the pharmacy opening times on the Internet, you didn’t use to see a list of places where you could go cruising (in my town it’s the toilets of the bus station and the parking lot by the river).
My land has changed a lot. And Ulli bears witness to that.
There’s more waiting at Bolzano station, since the Rome sleeper leaves at midnight. I have a coffee. The barman is polite and speaks good Italian as well as German, with a distinct Bolzano accent, but his face, skin and body language are North African. I wonder which box he ticked on the Sprachgruppenzugehörigkeitserklärung form of the census, that heap of syllables and consonants, which intimidated even Signor Song.
Finally, it’s nearly midnight. I go to the platform and the train is already there. In the distance, beyond the freight trains on dead-end tracks, beyond the electric lines, beyond the rooftops and the cleft of Val d’Isarco, illuminated by the moon, the mountain peaks, called Catinaccio in Italian and the Rosengarten in German. More than simply two different names, it’s really about two different ways of living in nature. As a loudspeaker announces arriving and departing trains, the distant, pale presence of the Dolomitian needles seems to occupy, as well as another space, another time. Seen from the station, they look magical and unreachable.
The Neapolitan couchette attendant is about thirty, overweight, and has no wedding ring: it seems that the holiday shifts fall to the bachelors. He takes my ticket. “I’ll keep it and give it back to you in the morning. This way the ticket inspector will wake me up and not you.”
He’s protecting my sleep but, for a moment, the thought of being without my ticket makes me feel at his mercy.
“You’re all alone in the carriage,” he adds. That’s exactly what he says: “all alone”—and his tone is formal. It’s true that I’m all alone: all the other compartment doors are bolted, except for mine. It’s Easter Saturday, after all. Anyone gone to see their relatives for Easter has already arrived, and anyone who’s taken two weeks’ holiday is already in the southern seas. I too would be at my mother’s now if I weren’t here on a train, going to see Vito. Consequently, I have the compartment all to myself. The light is on and, neatly folded, the blanket with the embossed logo of the Ferrovie dello Stato, the towel and the sponge slippers, are waiting for me. With a creaking sound, the train departs.
“Would you like a nice coffee when you wake up?”
The couchette attendant comes knocking several more times, always for a different reason. After asking about the coffee he wants to make sure I lock myself in properly. He shows me how to arrange the ladder for the top bunks as an anti-burglar device: you have to jam it in the handle in such a way that if anyone tries to open the door, it’ll fall with a crash. He wants me to arrange it as he says, so that he can prove that if you want to force the handle from outside (he does it), the ladder would make quite a racket (it’s true) and I would wake up (that’s assuming I manage to get any sleep, I think, doubtfully). He keeps repeating, “It’s just the two of us in the entire carriage.”
Then he goes back to his compartment at the end of the carriage. But he hasn’t finished with me yet, and shouts, “What do you think, shall we turn down the heating?”
He’s gone from addressing me as “you” to referring to “we.”
As a matter of fact, it’s too warm, and my throat is beginning to feel dry.
“Absolutely!” I also shout back to make myself heard—there are at least four compartments between his and mine.
“Perhaps I’ll turn it up again before dawn when it’s colder!” he yells.
“All right!” I yell back.
We keep shouting like that from one compartment to the other but it’s something very intimate and confidential, like a husband and wife would talk to each other loudly from one room to the other in their home. (My mother’s always doing this when she comes to stay. She begins to cook and starts yelling a long speech about Ruthi from the kitchen, while I could be on the phone to a client. I’ve never managed to tell her just how annoying it is.) Well, at least, as Carlo would say, the couchette attendant didn’t decide to talk to me about his unhappy marriage. Perhaps because he’s a bachelor, even though I have a creeping suspicion that he might take off his wedding ring when he’s on night shifts—you never know if you might find yourself with a lady, “all alone.” Or perhaps because he’s tired, poor man.
I lie down on the bunk, facing the window. It’s almost one o’clock in the morning and I switch off the light. Since I’m lying down, it’s only when the train tilts on the curves that I can see the streetlights. Otherwise all I can see is their reddish glow reflected on the pale rocks of Val d’Adige, which consequently look as though they are bathed in their own light.
HAPPY EASTER OF THE RESURRECTION!
HAPPY HOLIDAY BUT ONLY TO BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE!
TAKE CARE, MY FRIEND.
HAPPY EASTER!
It’s late, but not all my friends lead the kind of lives where this is an important factor; besides, some of them live in different time zones. That’s why I keep receiving text messages wishing me a happy Easter: secular ones, religious, jokey, affectionate ones. The screen of the cellphone I’m holding lights up every time and for a couple of seconds, my face, illuminated by its blue light, is reflected in the window in front of me.
HAPPY EASTER, MY LOVE.
Carlo. I keep my finger on the keypad so the display doesn’t go off and I remain illuminated for a long time. My somewhat ghostly reflection is superimposed on the nocturnal landscape rushing past outside the train, with vertical, luminescent rocks and the star-studded darkness. My face flies over churches, over many castles on rocks, each and every one of them a cultural jewel of which I don’t even know the name (except for those where I have organized memorable PR events).
Suddenly, the lights and racket of the tunnel: we’re cutting straight under the Prealps and leaving Val d’Adige.
In a few minutes time we’ll be in Val Padana. Aussi. I’m coming out.