This train to Foggia | poster

A few days ago a very strange thing happened to me on the train that was taking me from Rome to Foggia, for some obscure reason, which, moreover, did not take me directly to my destination, but stopped here and there on the outskirts of the world without anyone bothering to ask me what I was thinking.

And I think that as always I was traveling first class precisely to avoid this kind of inconvenience, because I can’t imagine what time one must waste each time at the stations where other people get off and on. So much so that at a station that might have been called Caserta or Benevento, I can’t remember any longer, I couldn’t help but share my disappointment with a gentleman sitting at four o’clock in the morning whom I hadn’t noticed until then but who responded immediately to my grin with a series of lips.

I must confess that I understood absolutely nothing at first, and that in the following minutes I confined myself to giving him the slightest assent as we do in the first class, vigorously nodding my head or raising the left edge of my mouth closed with a small smile of pity for normalcy, until he began to reinforce his peculiar manner of opening his eyes and lips wide with an almost imperceptible gesture of his right hand, of which his right-hand finger was immediately protruding. Then it dawned on me that the lip and little fingers were secretly pointing at the objects the strange character was wearing or around her: now he was pointing to a copy of the Financial Times he had laid out on the table, for example, while saying with his lips “big economic-financial newspaper”. Then Giant Book became “a great French writer and especially the second volume of Sodom and Gomorrah”.

Or the forefinger is bent towards the same man, while he makes the syllables of “a blue suit and a light shirt, a pretty light shirt.”

In short, as you can imagine, the situation was starting to drag on and I no longer knew how to react to the endless entries in his stock (“Awesome fountain pen, father-in-law’s gift”, “Notebook, very nice notes”), when he had the bad idea of ​​starting to flick his finger and look around the cart, where some young men were sitting talking about football and enjoying themselves. And now he’d point to a man’s hat and say, “Classic canvas baseball,” or turn someone else’s arm into, “No watch.”

Meanwhile I was trying to look out the window with fear that those big tattooed boys might get annoyed, but perhaps it was precisely because I was avoiding staring at him that I finally realized that I had actually seen this guy. He must have noticed it then, for he smiled at me as if at the end of a joint venture, and afterwards referred to himself with a general gesture of his hand, as if to introduce himself I shall say he said of “great merit”.