Off the Rails Read online

  ALSO BY BEPPE SEVERGNINI

  Ciao, America!

  La Bella Figura

  BERKLEY

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019

  Copyright © 2019 by Beppe Severgnini

  Translation copyright © 2019 by Antony Shugaar

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Severgnini, Beppe, author. | Shugaar, Antony, translator.

  Title: Off the rails : a train trip through life / Beppe Severgnini ;

  translated by Antony Shugaar.

  Other titles: Signori, si cambia. English.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Berkley, 2019. | Translation of: Signori, si cambia.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018033020| ISBN 9781592408726 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780698162112 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Severgnini, Beppe--Travel. | Voyages and travels. | Railroad travel.

  Classification: LCC G465 .S46813 2019 | DDC 910.4--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018033020

  First Edition: February 2019

  Jacket art: train by patrimonio designs ltd; train ticket by NMV; background map by Bardocz Peter

  Jacket design by Rita Frangie

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences and the words are the author’s alone.

  Version_1

  To Giles Watson

  CONTENTS

  ALSO BY BEPPE SEVERGNINI

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  -INTRODUCTION-

  The Therapy of the Rails

  -1-

  From Washington to Washington: With Antonio Across America

  -2-

  From Berlin to Palermo: A Vertical Europe

  -3-

  From Moscow to Lisbon: A Horizontal Europe

  -4-

  From Sydney to Perth: The Indian Pacific

  -5-

  From the Atlantic to the Pacific: Last Train for Obama

  -6-

  From Trieste to Trapani: Italy in Second Class

  -7-

  Trans-Siberian Express: Honeymoon for Four

  -8-

  From the Baltic to the Bosphorus: The Last Summer of Communism

  -9-

  From Naples to London: Across Europe with Little Donald

  -10-

  What to Bring

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX OF PLACES

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  INTRODUCTION

  The Therapy of the Rails

  I felt for the first time all the sweetness of life

  In a compartment of the North Express, between Wirballen and Pskow.

  VALERY LARBAUD, POEMS OF A. O. BARNABOOTH

  Does it even make sense to write and read about trains and travel at a time like this? When the world is changing and people are in constant movement? Certainly: now more than ever. While we travel, we think; we exercise our thoughts; we check our ideas in the eyes of a stranger. It becomes clear that the world is more than just the grim reports on the television news, that it’s a daily surprise and enterprise. You need to get out and see the world if you want to understand it. The intolerant are often ignorant and lazy; let’s get them moving. Let’s convince them to take a trip.

  Of all the different kinds of travel, the one I like best is the old kind, gradual, both private and social: train travel. A trip that appears to be a straight line. In fact, though, it’s the most surprising kind of travel. There couldn’t be anything better if what we’re interested in is the curves of the world.

  There are two categories of train lovers: those who watch trains and those who board them and depart. Trainspotters and train travelers. I found this distinction in the preface to a handsome illustrated book published in 1980, Great Railway Journeys of the World, based on a BBC documentary series. Personally, I’ve never had doubts on the matter. Trains are like friends and restaurants: you have to experience them.

  I’ve gone around the world in installments. Every trip has been a revelation. I watched regions, nations, and continents change moods and colors, and I’ve met more people on trains than in forty years of airplane flights. Every train trip has been a spectacle; come to think of it, so has every train traveler. Trains are stages, cafés, bazaars. The only talk show that will never go off the air is the one that buzzes with conversation, every single day, along the tracks of Italy, Europe, and the world at large. The characters repeat themselves—the liberal and the conservative, indignant or resigned, young and old, the intelligent young woman and the muscle-bound young man without much to say—but the plot changes, as does the backdrop. Familiarity, almost inevitably, springs from the shared sense of freedom: pure chance has brought us together; a train station will separate us. Trains let us remain passive without feeling we’re lazy. As Tim Parks, the author of Italian Ways, has observed, the railroad frees us “from any responsibility for speed and steering.” We can think, work, dream, or we can be distracted; we can even worry, if the day and the journey push us in that direction.

  Trains help us think. I will admit that I envied Tishani Doshi, a talented Indian poet, for the title of a book she recently published: Everything Begins Elsewhere. It’s true. The sources of our thoughts often lie concealed in the wrinkles of a journey. Traveling often produces a combination of imagination, stimuli, encounters, and memories. The ingredients are added and combined at the appropriate time. The railroad is the most effective blender available.

  The train is a symbol of change, of movement. For the past thirty years—maybe longer—we’ve never stopped talking about the same old things in Italy (corruption, crime, the problems of the South, the hardened arteries of our politics, the decline of labor unions, the glacial slowness of our administration); the national narrative is stuck. We have the impression we’re not progressing. That is why nations that are less well organized or poorer than Italy—India, for example, or China—tell pollsters they’re happier than we are. They have the impression they’re moving forward. Progress is exciting; being stuck is discouraging.

  Naturally, going forward is riskier than standing still. You can’t go off the rails if you’re not moving. And sometimes it doesn’t take much at all to derail. The very same day my editor proposed the book’s title—in an incredible coincidence—a train just outside Milan actually did go off the rails: a serious accident caused by a small defective piece of track fastener, just nine inches long. It happens to us all—people and nations. We can derail because of a trifle. But it is our duty to fix
the track and continue our journey, even if it’s a difficult one, even if we know it won’t go on forever. To discover you’re resilient is a source of relief, and relief is a sophisticated form of happiness.

  Literature is full of good examples. One such is Stoner, a novel by John Williams. It tells the story of a teacher trying to give meaning to a life full of disappointments, but a life in which he has stubbornly held his own. He did what he could. He kept going. He got back on track after derailing. At a certain point he writes: “A sense of his own identity came upon him with sudden force, and he felt the power of it. He was himself, and he knew what he had been.” We all need moments like this. Sometimes heroism consists of accepting that we’re not heroes, and just plugging away.

  * * *

  Trains—when they’re not an obligation and a restriction—are an exercise in mental hygiene. We travel alone and we travel with others: two ideal conditions, provided you can alternate freely between them. As we roll down the rails, life comes to visit us from outside, in the form of an unexpected smile, a talkative family, two young people speaking only with their eyes.

  Every train provides a narrative, included in the price of the ticket. A beginning and an end, a route as the plot. That is why trains appear so often in movies, and sometimes actually rise to the role of protagonist: think Shanghai Express with Marlene Dietrich and Night Train to Lisbon with Jeremy Irons. That’s the reason so many authors have chosen to set their works on trains (“The Lost Special” by Arthur Conan Doyle, Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie, “Jeumont, 51 Minutes Wait!” by Georges Simenon). Even if you’re not planning espionage or murder, take a train. Someone—I can’t remember who—wrote: “Train tracks are a closing zipper.” At a time of oversharing, like the present, that’s both reassuring and a consolation.

  My generation loved trains. For Americans now in their fifties, the words “Eurail Pass” have the same exotic and erotic appeal as “cruise liner” for those in their seventies. Even now, there are plenty of young people who understand: trains give you an insider’s view of Europe and beyond—on the cheap, if you’re organized. Trains always represent the national culture. On Russian trains, there is inevitably a tea samovar; on American trains, there’s eggs and bacon for breakfast; on Italian trains, there’s conversation around the clock.

  I’ll never forget my honeymoon, on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, from Moscow to Beijing, in the summer of 1986. When my mentor, the great journalist Indro Montanelli, heard about it, he opened wide those light blue eyes of his and told me: “It’s the most ridiculous idea I’ve ever heard in my life. Your punishment will be to write about it” (and that’s exactly what happened). Later, again by train, and again with the same wife, I traveled from the Baltic to the Bosphorus during Communism’s last chaotic summer (1989). In more recent years—with my wife, with our son, alone, or with Italian friends and German colleagues—I’ve crossed the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific (twice, once by the southern route and once by the northern route); I’ve followed the train tracks from Moscow to Lisbon; I’ve crossed Europe vertically (from Berlin to Palermo) and Australia horizontally (Sydney–Perth, a route that includes the world’s longest dead-straight stretch of railway track).

  And then there is my recent European journey with Donald Trump: from Naples to London, by train, with a bobblehead version of the forty-fifth president, in the fall of 2017, one year after his election. Traveling with a statuette, let me say, has its advantages. This Donald doesn’t talk, he doesn’t tweet, and you don’t have to ask people what they think of the forty-fifth president; they come and tell you.

  But the destination isn’t the main thing. All great journeys—from Catholic pilgrimages to the Grand Tour, from the first trip we take with our friends to our honeymoon—are, after all, a discovery of ourselves. And it might be with a little help from a stranger. Trains are rolling confession booths, and we’re almost never close friends with our father confessor. We’re looking for who we are: places and people are the mirrors that travel with us. It’s not an easy thing to admit. And in fact, let’s just go ahead and deny it. Still, it happens. The view we’re really interested in is inside us, not out the windows, however lovely that may be.

  * * *

  The book you now hold in your hands is the product of this conviction. Travel in general—and train travel in particular—is an opportunity to think, sum up, confront ideas; but it is especially a way to understand what we’re like, and what we’ve become. We, and the world around us. Once you turn the last page, I feel sure, you’ll have understood something more about Italy, Europe, and America; and even—I hope—about yourselves.

  That’s what happened to me. Of them all, the most stirring journey was crossing America overland with my twenty-year-old son. From Washington, DC, to Washington State, five thousand miles by train, bus, and car. A mutual discovery, I believe. A gift that my son, Antonio, chose to bestow upon me. A story that, with his permission, I choose to tell you.

  1

  From Washington to Washington: With Antonio Across America

  I haven’t been carrying him at all. He’s been carrying me!

  ROBERT M. PIRSIG, ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE

  The Europeans Don’t Live Here Anymore

  The house is made of wood, painted white, and looks west. The front door is black, with a carved fan decoration above it, and there are three windows with the shutters nailed to the facade, on the off chance that some modest European might have the impulse to shut them at night.

  But there’s no danger of that now. The Europeans don’t live here anymore.

  In 1994 and 1995, I lived here with my wife, Ortensia, and my son, Antonio, aged two. I was the only foreign correspondent for a brand-new Italian newspaper, La Voce, and I was based in Washington, DC. My official title was “bureau chief,” but to be honest, there was no bureau. I worked from home in Georgetown. It was a gracious part of America, full of talkative ladies and hyperactive dogs. Bill Clinton was in the White House—Monica Lewinsky, too, as it turned out—but politics was not the first topic of conversation. My neighbors talked mostly about the renovation of Volta Park and told me how to maintain tree boxes properly—they suspected that, as a newcomer, I’d be inattentive and possibly sloppy.

  We left one morning in May 1995, after holding a yard sale that amused the neighbors and loading a moving truck that angered the wife of the senator from Montana. (“Move that truck! I’m married to the senator from Montana!”) The truck carried away what was left of our furnishings, to be packed into a wooden crate and shipped to our house in Crema, Italy. Once it had been emptied and painted green, ventilated with a door and windows, and roofed with terra-cotta tiles, the crate went to live at the far end of the backyard, in the shade of the oak and the plane trees. A perfect playhouse.

  But the two-year-old boy has now turned twenty; he’d be embarrassed to take his girlfriend into the playhouse, even if we, his parents, would find it romantic. The crate from our move back is baked by sun and drenched by rain. I tell Antonio these things, but he ignores me. He’s looking at the American house where he was a toddler, amused rather than moved. “I remembered it as being bigger,” he says, forgetting that back then he was smaller.

  An evening in June, green leaves and blue sky: this time of year, Georgetown is at its best. We try to reenact a photograph snapped right here in 1995, on the sidewalk in front of the house: Papà kneeling, Antonio standing with a soccer ball in his hands. The difference is that, back then, even on my knees, I was still taller than he was; now I’m hip-high next to him. The new owners, Griff and Kathleen Jenkins, watch us with smiles on their faces. Griff busies himself with a pair of shears, enthusiastically trimming up and down the street, to make sure that no branches interfere with the Italians’ photography.

  We’ve become friends over the years. The Jenkins family—father, mother, two teenage girls—cheerfully
tolerated the stream of readers who came to see the house they’d read about. To reassure visitors they had the right place, and dissuade them from ringing the doorbell, they fastened a small bronze plaque to the door, engraved with the title of the book that tells the story of our lives behind those windows: Ciao, America!: An Italian Discovers the U.S.

  Antonio laughs. “Congratulations! I thought you had to be dead to get a bronze plaque.”

  The white wooden house on Thirty-fourth Street NW—a one-way street running downhill, then and now—has been renovated, but not beyond recognition. The ground floor, where we played soccer on the hardwood floors, using the fireplace as our goalpost, is still bright and sunny. The downstairs, with the kitchen and dining room, still resembles a fallout shelter: badly lit, sparsely furnished. We step out the back door into the yard. Everything looks familiar. The tree with white blossoms is where it ought to be, the magnolia still showers leaves into the neighbors’ yard, and the cement cherub is still making his way through the rosebushes. It did its best—of that I feel sure—but in twenty years it still hasn’t managed to become an antique. Older, perhaps, but not necessarily wiser. Much like us, much like America, which it’s now time for us to go check up on. The plan is to travel from Washington, DC, to Washington State, by the southern route. By train, though not without variations. An American curve five thousand miles long, running through Atlanta, New Orleans, Dallas, Flagstaff, Tucson, San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Destination: Seattle. A trip with my son, to discover the joy of letting him make the decisions. He always has, truth be told, but now it’s official. Because there’s no two ways about it: Antonio knows what he wants. For instance, here’s one condition he insisted on: we have to spend at least two days in Washington, DC, at a certain hotel near Dupont Circle. Ostensibly, to recover from his transatlantic flight and jet lag. Actually, though, because he wants to eat breakfast in the room, and he knows that he can forget about that luxury on an Amtrak train.