Out of Sheer Rage. Geoff Dyer

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СКАЧАТЬ than the camera itself. The camera is the worst thing to carry. It’s heavy and it keeps digging into you; it has about ten sharp angles and they all dig in. It’s awkward as a spade, that camera. I hate it. I would like a lightweight modern automatic camera, the kind you can slip into a shirt pocket, the sort that doesn’t dig in, but it is too late get one now. In the last five years I have been to all kinds of eminently photographable places but I’ve never had a camera with me. To get a camera now would make a mockery of all those camera-less, unrecorded expeditions. I also wonder, superstitiously, if the moment I possess a camera, the moment I buy a camera for the express purpose of recording my travels, I will suddenly cease travelling altogether, will never leave the house and will have to content myself with using my lightweight, automatic, highly portable camera to take pictures of the house I never leave.

      In any case Laura has a lovely camera which is too heavy to take anywhere but because it is such a lovely camera she refuses to trade it in for a lightweight automatic which would take excellent pictures. Nine times out of ten we end up leaving the lovely camera behind and buying a disposable one which takes useless pictures. On this occasion, though, she was adamant about taking it.

      ‘How are we going to take pictures of Lawrence without a camera?’ she asked.

      ‘I am a camera,’ I said.

      The train was as full as a rush-hour tube. Although we had arrived twenty minutes early we were the last to take our seats in our compartment. People were loading on bags and boxes as though it would be six months before we sighted a platform again. There was only just enough room for our bags in the luggage racks. Then a hefty man, the kind of man who, in books, is usually referred to as a ‘fellow’, came and pointed out to another, even heftier fellow that he was in the wrong seat. No, said the fellow who was already sitting, holding his ticket up for the other passenger’s inspection, it was the right seat, and the right compartment . . . Wrong carriage! cried the standing man in vindication. They changed places and all the luggage was taken down again to extract the ousted fellow’s suitcase and make room for his replacement’s. Soon the corridor was so crowded that, to relieve congestion, it was necessary to take some more luggage into our compartment so that everything had to be taken down and loaded again, more rationally this time. We, the men, all stood up. Even if not lifting anything, we kept our arms raised, surrendering ourselves to the task.

      A middle-aged couple were banging on the window trying to attract the attention of an adolescent boy in the corridor. He was wearing a Gauguin T-shirt and was embarrassed by the way his parents were making a big fuss about his leaving, waving and mouthing things at him through the window. He was more relieved than any of us when the air-conditioning hummed into life and, a few minutes later, punctual to the second, the train nudged out of Termini. Between us and the sky, the network of overhead wires and cables was so extensive it seemed merely the first stage of a project to put a sun roof over the whole of Italy. An alphabet of aerials stretched away over the roofs. Sheets and towels hung from every balcony. Washing hanging out to dry: that is the real national flag of Italy, emblem and proof of how the fabric of daily life endures.

      Soon we were passing the truncated remains of an Ancient Roman viaduct; beyond that was a glimpse of the autostrada so that the essential trajectory of Roman history seemed a straight line, an unwavering determination to get somewhere else as quickly as possible. The mountains in the background were cut from the same cloth as the sky: a slightly darker shade, that was the only difference. Had we the capacity to analyse it there would almost certainly be a geology of the air as well as of rock.

      The controllore came by, fining the young Gauguin because he had not stamped his ticket at the station: so that’s what his parents were making such a fuss about. A new ruling this: unstamped, a ticket was now valid for three months which meant that it was advantageous to avoid stamping your ticket – hence the heavy fine for omitting to do so. Everyone felt sorry for the boy and the controllore relented, fining him the smallest possible amount. A great debate ensued about the injustice of this new ruling. The controllore went on checking tickets while all around him the debate – which in no way excluded him: just because he was charged with implementing the new rule did not mean he had to relinquish his right to be an Italian: to join in – became more energetic in spite of the fact that essentially everyone was in agreement. New laws are always being passed but they alter almost nothing. Their real purpose is, precisely, to engender debate, to give the people of Italy a chance to express a lively opposition to the state so unanimous that it actually creates a supportive atmosphere of unity and national well-being. Everyone feels the state is fleecing them, treating them unfairly, so that feeling cheated by the state – and finding some small ways of cheating the state – turns out to be the cement that binds the nation together. In this way the state is sacrificed to the idea of the nation. That’s Italian history, in a nutshell

      The controllore rested his elbow on the door, put his foot up on the ashtray (not on the seat of course) so that he was now in the classic Italian discursive attitude: propped up, leaning in such a way as to suggest, as Italians always do, that discussion originated in the simple biological need to come to terms with the heat. Six months from now, he said, taking off his hat to emphasise that he was now speaking ex cathedra, he would be out of a job. The new ticket laws were the first step towards getting rid of controllori. So, the cult of rationalisation had come to Italy – and what a shame it was! In England we had completely absorbed the ethic of cost-efficiency. Cut costs – no matter what the cost! It comes easy to us. Even as we protest against a particular instance of it we accept, somewhere in our empirical English psyche, the principle that this is the way things must be. We can easily forsake the pleasures that come from that which is not strictly necessary – but in Italy, where life is devoted to making life that bit nicer, to providing an extra bit of sweetness in a cornetto (by their pastries ye shall know them!), it goes against the grain utterly. So what if the state is losing money? So what if it is more efficient to have some robotic fraud-proof ticket system? It is nice, fun, to have a handsome controllore come around like this in his pressed blue shirt, checking tickets and joining in the debate about his impending obsolescence.

      The debate continued after the controllore had gone on to join in the debate in the next compartment. Not at all like being on a train in England where everyone is tacitly affronted by everyone else, terrified lest their legs touch those of the person opposite. England must be the only country in the world where you plonk yourself down next to someone in a train without saying a word, where the normal form of greeting is to keep your eyes fixed on the ground. Here, though, the six of us were perfectly at home in our little compartment. A railway compartment is actually the Italians’ preferred version of the indoors. Ours was like a tiny piazza, a place to gather and discuss. The democratic ethos of the piazza-compartment is a product, like so much else in southern Italy, of the heat. None of the men was wearing a jacket. We were all in shirts or T-shirts. Madness to wear a tie on a day like this! Hierarchies are difficult to maintain without jackets. In shirts, people are practically equal – the only way to establish a jacket-less hierarchy is by turning the shirt into a uniform. Hence the frequency of military coups in South America, violent attempts to resist the levelling tendency of the shirt.

      A drunk shoved open the door, asking for money. None was forthcoming and he threw some soiled abuse into the compartment. The man next to me, a waiter on the ferries, told him to watch his mouth. The drunk lurched out into the corridor and made the slightest, meanest gesture of a throat being cut – not one of those harmless piratical swipes across the whole of the throat, just a tiny slit to indicate that cutting open your neck would mean no more to him than nicking himself shaving. With that he was gone, snaking his way out into the corridor. A few minutes later, from the direction in which he had slithered, came the sound of commotion, or rather a sound over and above the normal commotion of the crowded corridor. The waiter was up on his feet and into the corridor instantly, hitching his jeans up over his stomach, a stomach which at that moment indicated neither sloth nor greed but a ballast of strength and fearlessness, immunity to slashing. He had blue eyes and dark, dark skin. His mere presence in the corridor СКАЧАТЬ