God and the State Railways

IN ORDER to understand this story fully, it is necessary to have a working knowledge of the trade union movement in Italy. Since there are no Italians who have this knowledge, it could, consequently, well be that the story is incomprehensible, and yet God usually comes to the rescue in such cases, bringing an order which is perhaps a little rudimentary to a chaos which has seemed complete.

I have seen many Gods in my time. There is a Russian God with slim admonishing fingers and a brown look of disapproval, a terra-cotta phantom involved in angular chants, smelling of earth, damp cloisters, and incense, aglitter with traces of gold at the edges; there is an Anglican God, more reasonable and less dramatic, the victim of a tragic miscarriage of justice in which His only son fell foul of a legal system which had none of the advantages of British researches in the field of jurisprudence, a God eminently understanding and discreetly sad, prayed to with an intensity none the less solemn for being curiously casual; there is a Hollywood God, only seen from behind in the form of Christ, or as a disturbing palpitation in a sky too cerulean to be quite true, an apparition which stays the Roman whips in mid-air, which brings frowns of misgiving to the foreheads of procurators and centurions as they prepare for battles lost in advance, which is the signal for a hundred female voices to rise to the ceiling of their range in a rapturous vocalise, accompanied by the full resources of a mid-Victorian orchestra; there is the God of the minorchannel American TV Bible Belt, the Lord of the rimless glasses and the no-nonsense man-toman approach, the Lord of the electric organ, the latter-day Gothic arch, the God in the street with no unnecessary predilection for the arts.

You don’t have to be a Catholic to catch a glimpse of the Italian God — not the bearded figure portrayed by the Renaissance painter, but the reflection in the upcast eye of the simple widow for whom events have become too complicated for assessment, let alone solution. He is the final appeal to sanity after the disillusionment with mortal justice, the ultimate voice which will invade the conscience of the police, the judges, the lawyers, the government employees, all those with papers to sign, with cards to punch, with stamps to stamp, the weight which every mortal carries Atlas-like on his shoulders for the span of his natural life, and the poorer the country, the greater the weight. Occasionally even the voluble Italians run out of arguments, and then a strike is called. Nobody is ever quite sure who called it, and those who called it are never quite sure if the call will be obeyed. Because the unions are without the resources for a prolonged protest, these strikes have only a nuisance value. They are a reminder to the government that unions do exist, but they also remind the government that unions are relatively weak.

On November 8, a railway strike was decreed in the whole of Italy. Inflammatory posters went up, with much talk of bread, wages, and honor. Midnight was to be the hour of action. At 8:40 — or, rather, at 20:40 — every evening a train leaves Rome for Florence, Milan, Domodossola, and Geneva, with carriages for Dunkirk, Hamburg, Zurich, Brussels. Several sleeping cars are attached to the regular wagons, and the occupants are invariably highly international. I can speak with authority only about the travelers in sleeping car No. 3, bound for Geneva, because I was one of them.

I arrived in the station with about ten minutes to go. The majority of porters seemed sullen. They were either strike-minded or else just apprehensive. As I tottered away from my taxi under the weight of my baggage, one porter pointed to another, seated on his barrow, who pointed to a third, leaning against a wall, who pointed to a fourth. Then, out of nowhere, a fifth arrived, more helpful than a porter should be. Words were passed.

“Italy will remain a country steeped in ignorance so long as there are creatures like you about,” said the first porter. The second porter just spat. That was his eloquence.

My porter put down my bags. “Let me tell you fellows something —”

“We don’t want to hear from blacklegs,” said the third.

“Go to High Mass,” said the fourth, looking into space and munching a dandelion seed.

“The strike isn’t called till midnight,” my porter went on, “but you people are acting as though it’s already started. That’s not honest.”

“You’re working extra hard to compensate for the time you’ll lose during the strike. Call that honest?” The first porter had flared up.

“No use arguing with an idiot. Go to High Mass, that’s where you belong — with the priests.”

“It’s not a question of priests,” my porter retaliated angrily, “but of honor, of making a bella figura in front of foreigners. It’s by people like you that most of the foreigners judge our country.”

“It’ll do the foreigners good to see our country as it really is,” said the third porter, “and, in any case, to hell with foreigners.”

“Without the foreigners, where would our economy be?” said my porter. “Answer me that!”

“We could all be rich if the wealth of the Vatican were divided among the people,” said the first.

I permitted myself to intervene. “My train leaves in seven minutes.”

My porter picked up my luggage and threw it onto his barrow. “The wealth of the Vatican,” he muttered breathlessly as he half ran. “The Communists always think of a negative solution like that, Good, we distribute the riches of the Church. We’d all be rich for one afternoon, and then what? We’d all be poor again, including the Church. It’s better that someone’s rich, it’s reassuring. Eh! The secret is that it’s tough to be rich and a Communist. I know nothing about the others, the Russians, but over here the hope of every Communist is to get himself a successful racket, so that there’s no need for him to be a Communist any more. Communism’s strictly for the have-nots, and everyone wants to have. That’s how deep it goes.”

After all the rush, the atmosphere around sleeping car No. 3 was surprisingly quiet, grave even. So many cruel armistices have been signed in railway carriages that it takes very little to give them an aura of fatality and gloom. Now there was a little cluster of officials near the entrance, muttering to each other as the steam swirled up lazily from under the train and wound itself around their legs. They were consulting documents, making notes, scratching things out.

The controller looked me square in the eye, and I already felt like a general in defeat. “It is understood,” he said, “that you leave at your own risk.”

“Yes,” I replied. It was unconditional surrender, but what alternative was there? “How much do I owe you?” I asked the porter.

“Whatever you wish, Dottore.” He shrugged fatalistically, conjuring up a vision of destitute children who could do with a crust of bread. It was dishonest but brilliant. There is a fixed fee per bag carried. I knew this, but I still overtipped him. I had no wish for anyone to lose his faith in capitalism at this particular moment.

“How does it look?” I asked the controller.

“Bad,” he replied. “Half an hour ago it was better; then a quarter of an hour ago it was worse. Now it is just bad.”

He was a good-looking man, this controller, who managed to make his brown wagon-lit uniform appear military. He was young and dark, with the calculating aspect of one who enjoys initiative and who feels he has his finger on the pulse of events.

I ENTERED the wagon to find most of the occupants in the corridor. The lady in the next compartment seemed both imperious and worried. I learned later that she was the Duchess of Calapiccola and that we had absolutely no friends in common. She held a diminutive dog in her hand which blended with her bull-colored tweed like a chameleon. It was invisible until it barked, which it did occasionally in an utterly personal manner, a kind of bronchial belch of a very old and very large man. People who heard this voice but who failed to see the dog tended to look at the duchess with surprise, a look which she met with a stare of melodramatic hostility. Further down the corridor there was a senior nun of some rare order. The small portion of her face visible gave no indication of its true dimensions. She may have had a tendency toward stoutness or she may have been scrawny; I neither knew nor cared to know. What I could see was not so much pink as white with scarlet flushes, with an expression so enclosed and a smile so enigmatic and dogged that my only wish was to avoid all contact with her. She had companionship, in any case, in the shape of a thin, sour priest with dandruff on his shoulders. They conversed in whispers, he looking at her with a yellow, liverish intensity, she responding with the slightest movement of her lips, her eyes downcast so demurely that she seemed like a grotesque caricature of a well-behaved little girl.

There was, of course, the inevitable American individualist who had to be somewhere in a hurry, kept on checking his watch with other watches, consulted tickets which had been sold him back to Dayton, Ohio, and flicked over the pages of A Hundred Useful Phrases in Italian without finding anything to say which corresponded with his mood.

“Go by train to save time,” he said, without the guarantee that anyone could understand him, “and you land right in the middle of a strike. I guess you can’t win.”

Hearing a man speak with an unaccustomed timbre to his voice, the duchess’s dog pricked up ears almost as large as itself, inclined its head to one side, began shivering like an epileptic, and barked. The American reacted like everyone else by looking at the duchess, then saw the dog.

“Hello, little feller,” he said, extending an affectionate hand with a huge fraternity ring on the fourth finger. The dog, seeing a vast five-pronged weapon advancing in its direction, embossed with a great golden orb, encrusted with a red stone and cabalistic runes, flew into a passion of defiance. It may have been small, but it still had the instincts of a dog, and of a fierce dog at that. Now it was at bay, defending its mistress. The duchess placed a blue-veined hand over its eyes, and with its world precipitately plunged into darkness, it whimpered feebly with frustrated blood lust and fell asleep in a matter of seconds, its dreams filled with violence and rampant hatred.

“I’m sorry,” said the American, confused. “What is it? I thought it was a Chihuahua, but it seems too small for that.”

The duchess gazed at him with undisguised loathing.

“He’s cute anyhow. Kind of hard not to step on, I should think.”

The duchess entered her compartment and closed the door. Snubbed, the American looked at the priest, who stared back unhappily from sometime in the Middle Ages, the whites of his eyes almost as dark as the pupils. Even the smile of the nun had about it a trace of reproof.

Confused, wronged, misunderstood, the American retired to his compartment. I looked at the priest and didn’t try to disguise my disapproval. He suddenly smiled back. His expression was quite shockingly pleasant and open. I found it impossible not to respond.

“Let us hope we all reach our destinations on time,” he said with a shrug. “Trains and cars and airplanes have made us lazy — they gave us hope and made us negligent. With them we leave everything to the last moment. A thousand years ago we would have left on horseback with plenty of time to spare.”

“They didn’t have strikes in those days,” I said.

“Oh, they had worse than strikes. I don’t blame the railwaymen for airing their complaints.”

“It’s all a question of communication,” I replied. The expression on the priest’s face which the American took to be a reproach was, in fact, there only because the priest was thinking of something quite different. The priest probably never even heard the dog bark. As for the duchess, had the American been outrageously gallant and had he paid her some empty compliment instead of lavishing his playfulness on the dog, she would probably have slapped the dog hard for interrupting at the wrong moment. If life was difficult in its insignificant moments, how much more difficult was it in moments of importance. The nun probably had the right idea by avoiding contact with anything but the murals, the crucifixes, the cold corridors of her imagination, a static world without surprises. And yet, wasn’t that a form of surrender, of self-gratification at the expense of life?

I looked at my watch. It was 9:12. The train was still in the station. I released the blind, which flew up, and wound down the window. The controller was alone.

“What’s it look like now?” I called to him.

He smiled grimly. “Had you asked me five minutes ago, I would have said worse. Now I don’t quite know.”

The train lurched, then began creeping away.

“We’ll reach Florence anyway,” he called, poising himself with the elegance of one used to leaping onto moving objects. “From there on, beh!” He grimaced and joined the train.

I tried to read now that I was alone. The nun, I suspected, felt quite at home in a train, since I imagined monastic life to be a little like existence in a sleeping car, the embryonic warmth and intimacy, the isolation, the feeling of walking about in your own mind. If I were a monk, the one fear I would have would be to be relegated to a large cell. That would be the worst of both worlds.

The dog barked next door. “Shut up,” I said aloud, but not so that the duchess would hear it. I put away my book and fell asleep.

WHEN I woke up, the train was no longer moving. I looked at my watch. It was well after midnight. The strike was on. I became conscious of voices, not just the usual voices of a station. Someone was making a speech. There was some heckling.

I peered around the blind. It was like a scene from an early Soviet film. I could almost hear the searing sound track which would accompany such a sequence, mainly brass, a semitone flat for technical reasons, but also with the burden of an epic sadness. The railway workers were gathered on the platform. It was cold. Whenever one of them spoke, explosions of breath would shoot into tlie midnight blue. The lighting was glacial, unkind. It made them all look hungry. There was paper on the platform. A trolley of refreshments stood abandoned — at precisely twelve o’clock, I imagined. Plump bottles of Chianti, bars of chocolate, all four wheels pointing in different directions.

“Ragazzi!” said the speaker. “By order of the Central Committee of—” It was hard to hear; the contents of that kind of speech are always quite predictable. However worthy the cause, revolutionary resolutions invariably lose their drama in a fog of useless, predictable oratory. When people have a sense of occasion, they sink to it.

I no longer looked, just listened. There was very little opposition at first, merely isolated shouting. Then a new voice took over, a voice I quickly recognized as that of the controller of our sleeping car. He spoke with a certain — for lack of a better word, I will call it “majesty.” There was no effort of rodomontade; he fell into none of the temptations which the Italian language prepares for those endowed with voice too rich or vision too baroque. He spoke simply, like a foreigner, and it was probably because he sounded like a foreigner that they listened.

The strike, he contended, was calculated to annoy. It had not been prepared carefully enough to do anything but that, nor could the unions, with their present structure, even hope to organize anything more thoroughly. He compared the dignity of the operation to that of street urchins ringing doorbells and then running away. He asked a rhetorical question of the assembly. Was that an occupation worthy of fathers of families?

He reminded the house that Italians were always jealous of foreign vices and neglectful of their own virtues. “Why should we feel ashamed or weak because we are a hospitable nation? Some of us wish we were in Russia. Some of us have been in Russia and are very glad to be here. I would rather be hungry in Italy,” he declared roundly at the end, “than full of buckwheat in a paradise chosen for me!”

There was applause, not so much for the content as for the performance. A vote of some kind was taken, and after five minutes the train moved grudgingly out of the station.

I put on my dressing gown and went to congratulate the controller.

“Did you really mean all you said?” I asked him.

“No.” Oh, he was absolutely honest.

“My duty,” he said, “is to get the train out of Italy. I am paid to do that. I may quarrel with my salary, but now is not the moment to do it, with a trainload of travelers.”

“And were you in Russia during the war?”

“No,” he replied, expressionless. “But I didn’t lie. I never said I had been. I just said some of us had been, which is true. Actually, I should very much like to go one day.”

“Where did you get the idea of buckwheat?”

“Oh, I’m not ignorant. I know what the other people eat. Throw out a phrase like that, and those who have been to Russia will never think to ask you whether you have been.”

“You ought to be in politics,” I said.

“Ah, Dottore, I’m not dishonest,” he replied. “I just use my head sufficiently not to have to be. Politics would corrupt me.”

The American looked out into the corridor. “Do you have any mineral water on ice?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” replied the controller.

“Incidentally,” the American went on, “I’d like to know your name.”

“Why, sir, have I done anything to displease you?” The controller was not in the least discountenanced.

“On the contrary,” said the American, blinking in an admiring fashion. “I just saw you deal with a pretty nasty situation there. You sure kept your head. I don’t understand the Italian language, of course, but I guess I’ve had enough experience of this kind of thing to appreciate what you did.”

“Thank you, sir,” replied the controller, “but may I ask what you thought of doing with my name?”

“I’m lunching with the United States consul general in Milano next week when I get back from Geneva. I want to commend you to him.”

“To what purpose?”

“Well, I figured you’d appreciate it. Besides, we need every friend we can get. I know that and you know that.”

The poor man was a little lost. He had even said “Milano” instead of “Milan” as a gesture of solidarity. He believed deeply that most men were brothers. Desperately he sought to impose his fraternity on those he considered worthy of it.

“Well, let me give you my card,” he said. “If ever you’re in any kind of trouble, remember William C. Rosencrantz. I’m what’s known as a trouble shooter with the —” And here he mentioned an agglomeration of initials which stood for one of the many overlapping agencies of the U.S. government. The controller took the card, thanked him, and went to fetch the mineral water, which the American probably didn’t want but had simply used as a sly conversational gambit.

“Yes, that was a fairly ugly situation,” said Mr. Rosencrantz.

“Oh, the worst that would have happened is that the train wouldn’t have gone on,” I said.

“Don’t you believe it. It only needs a spark for a situation like that to ignite. Ever been to Laos?”

“No.”

“Well, if you had, you wouldn’t be so optimistic.”

I thought it perhaps too cruel to point out that we weren’t in Laos, so in the interests of harmony I told him that he might be right. He took my concession very badly.

“I damn well know I’m right,” he snapped. “I’ve seen altogether too much apathy in Europe.”

“Apathy about what?” I asked him sharply.

“The International Communist Conspiracy,” he barked back.

“Oh, that.” I relaxed and smiled. “May I ask you how long you’ve been here?” I asked.

“Been where?”

I decided to take the initiative. “We are in Italy at the moment, not in Laos.”

“I was in Laos six years,” he said.

“And here?”

“Two weeks next Tuesday.”

“Well, then, if we should have to spend several days aboard this train, I will listen with great respect to what you have to say about the Far East, but I will obviously be forced to take what you say about Italy with a pinch of salt.”

THE controller returned with the mineral water just as the duchess opened her door. “It’s a disgrace!" she cried. “The train moved out of the station just as I was on the point of taking my dog for his walk.”

“Normally we only stop in Florence for ten minutes,” replied the controller. “Tonight you had over an hour to walk the dog.”

“Don’t answer back.” said the duchess, malevolently. “You mean we’re already an hour late? It’s a scandal! I only take the train because my dog’s health isn’t up to air travel.” She addressed the dog with a possessive love on the scale of Greek tragedy: “Your ears don’t support the altitude, do they?”

“Signora Duchessa, let the dog run up and down the corridor. If he performs any little duties, I will sweep them up.”

“And what if someone steps on her? Could the company ever refund a sentimental loss?”

“I will look after her. It’s a her, is it?”

“See for yourself!”

“I can’t without my glasses.”

The duchess smiled savagely and gave the dog some final instructions before surrendering it to the controller. The dog seemed neither to listen nor to notice the temporary change of ownership.

“Who is that old bitch?” asked Mr. Rosencrantz when the duchess had retired.

“She’s not a Communist, as you may imagine,” I replied, “nor are you a Communist, as she may imagine.”

“She thinks I’m a Communist?”

“She doubtless thinks the whole of the United States is Communistic, and by her Standards, she’s right. The Bill of Rights is an appalling piece of emancipatory jurisdiction; the South was right; and there’s very little to choose between Washington and Lenin. Neither of them believed in the divine right of kings, and that’s enough to put them both in the camp of insurrection against the existing order,”

“That’s ridiculous,” said Mr. Rosencrantz, hotly. “Why —”

“I’m only expressing the probable opinions of the Duchess of Calapiccola.” I interrupted. “It’s no use telling me that they are ridiculous. Tell her.”

“I don’t speak Italian.”

“She doubtless speaks English better than either of us. She must have had a squadron of governesses when she was little.”

Mr. Rosencrantz was so unhappy, I softened to him. “How does it feel to find yourself suddenly a left-winger, along with Benjamin Franklin, Admiral Radford, and the Archbishop of Canterbury?”

The controller tried to put the dog down, but the motion of the train was too much for its legs and it rocked to and fro like a diminutive drunk. It proved to be even more difficult to pick up. The nun appeared and bent down with a look of self-effacing sweetness. The fact that the dog managed to bite her as it slid by her supplicating hands only served to sugar her expression still further.

The priest had been in the corridor all the time. “You did well,” he told the controller sadly, “but I do honestly feel those poor men deserve more money than they get.”

“I’m one of those poor men,” said the controller, “so you won’t expect me not to agree with you. No one is ever paid enough in this world, with the exception of those who are paid too much.”

The priest savored the remark and nodded sadly. I translated the conversation for the benefit of Mr. Rosencrantz, who frowned.

“Think the priest’s in the conspiracy?” I whispered .

“There’s an awful lot of well-meaning idealists who are fellow travelers without knowing it,” he confided.

The dog managed to deliver itself of the thimbleful of water it had drunk during the day, and the controller returned it to the duchess, who was so well bred she neglected to thank him, but instead ordered a coffee, very hot and very strong, for eight thirty, together with a half glass of lukewarm water, lukewarm, mark you, 45° C., to take some medicine in, and if the train should stop at a station, a copy of the morning paper and also a packet of Turkish cigarettes, and if the train didn’t stop at a station, she would want to know the reason, and, incidentally, she had connections.

The controller smiled when she had gone and explained to the suspicious Mr. Rosencrantz that the Duchess of Calapiccola came from one of the oldest Roman families and that she owned most of the province of Basilicata.

“She seems a very ungracious lady to me,” observed Mr. Rosencrantz, with understatement born of a desire to be conciliatory until such time as he knew precisely who was fellow-traveling with whom, and where, and, indeed, why.

“We don’t own a province, sir,” said the controller. “We can afford to be pleasant. Nobody ever wants anything from us.”

“Anticipating any more trouble?” asked Mr. Rosencrantz, steering the conversation back onto familiar lines.

“In the north, they may be more difficult to convince.”

“On account of the industries?” Mr. Rosencrantz flashed, sharp as a knife.

“Yes.”

“Does the same hold true of Laos?” I asked.

“Yes,” he responded earnestly, “inasmuch as there isn’t much industry. You see, it is a predominantly agrarian economy, based largely on —”

“Rice!” I flashed, sharp as a knife myself.

“Right!” cried Mr. Rosencrantz. I had made a friend.

I SLEPT well until I became aware that the train was no longer moving. There seemed something uncomfortably final about the general atmosphere of peace and quiet on this occasion. I looked out. We were in the confines of a large, unutterably lugubrious station. There was an early mist of the most petrifying cheerlessness. One light was on in a signal box, and a man was reading. In the middle distance, a window was lit up. A woman with unkempt hair seemed to be setting a table, while a man in long winter underwear kept appearing and disappearing. As far as I could see, they weren’t talking.

I washed, brushed my teeth, and dressed. Afterward I still felt as though I hadn’t washed or brushed my teeth, or ever undressed. That’s sleeping cars.

Mr. Rosencrantz was in the corridor. “We’ve been here over an hour,” he said grimly, as though the situation were creeping perceptibly onto a diplomatic level.

“Where are we, Milan?”

“I guess so. Our boy’s finding out what’s going on.”

“Oh. Cigarette?”

“No, thanks just the same. I used to smoke over four packs a day. I gave it up when I had my appendectomy with complications — peritonitis — and I’ve never smoked since.”

I even preferred Laos to this topic, and so I returned to my compartment to await results.

After a quarter of an hour, the controller returned. “It’s going to be all right,” he said. “The strike was only partially successful. Up here, they’re all too tired to do much about it. There’s nothing more exhausting than sitting up all night consciously avoiding work. One or two are still holding out, but I talked them into letting us leave.”

Soon we were under way again, and as the sun came out surprisingly and brilliantly over the still sweep of Lago Maggiore, impertinently hot for the time of year, picking out the folds in the flesh of the snow-capped mountains in pink and gray, I began to half forget my traveling companions in pleasant anticipation of my arrival in Geneva. Then, within five kilometers of the Swiss frontier, the train unexpectedly slowed down and finally came to a halt. I opened the window and leaned out. The lights were red. I saw that in the usual reshuffle of railway cars we had moved up next to the engine overnight, and we were now alongside the fifty yards of platform of what looked like a whistle stop. There was a station of sorts, but it seemed like a toy. There was a tiny buffet, but no sign of life.

The controller leapt onto the platform.

“Does the train usually stop here?” I asked him.

“I’ve been with the company twelve years,” he replied, “and I’ve never stopped here before.” Then he called to the engine driver, with an oscillating gesture of a hand cupped toward the body, the Italian for “What the hell’s going on?”

“Beh, the lights are red,” cried the engine driver.

The controller placed his hands on his hips and just stood there for a moment, frustrated.

Then the stationmaster made an entrance. There was nothing consoling in the dramatic perfection of his timing. Me threw open the glass door center stage and advanced with the small, vigorous steps of a corpulent tenor sure of his reputation and therefore of his applause. His face was worn by conflict, his eyes unforgiving.

“What’s going on?” asked the controller.

“There’s a strike on. Didn’t you know about it?” replied the stationmaster pugnaciously.

“You mean you are holding up the train in obedience to the strike order?”

“Certainly.”

“For how long?”

The stationmaster consulted an old gun-metal watch. “Another eighteen hours and forty-six minutes.”

The controller smiled affectionately. “They let us through in Florence and Milan,” he said.

“That’s their failure.”

“You mean to say we’ve got all this way and you’re going to stop us five kilometers from the frontier?”

“Certainly, strike orders are given to be obeyed.”

“Now look here —”

“There is no argument with me!” shouted the stationmaster. “No argument!”

The controller looked up at the engine driver.

“It’ll cost me my job if I disobey a signal,” the engine driver called.

The stationmaster nodded with grim satisfaction. “In any case, I have pulled the switches, so that if you were rash enough to proceed, you’d find yourself on the siding.” And he pointed to a pair of buffers nestling under a moist rock.

Other controllers appeared, a guard, even the chef of the dining car, having made their way through the train.

“What’s the name of this station?” asked our controller.

“Mine di Trasquera,” replied the stationmaster. “It’s not marked. That is the fault of the state, not me.”

“But where’s the village?”

“ There is no village, just a cement factory and a chapel, to throw dust in the eyes of the workers.”

There were faces at every window now, the nun, an older nun with whom she had been traveling but who had retired early, the priest, the American, the duchess, even the dog — all were there, and many more.

“Figlio mio,” said the priest.

“Oh, it’s you.” The stationmaster recognized him.

“Why do you pass such gratuitous comment on what has been a source of comfort for so many?”

“You know my point of view, Don Gioacchino. The Church is a retrogressive element. Its force derives from the ignorance in which it keeps the working masses. You say our Lord built His Church on Saint Peter. ‘On this rock, I will build my Church.’ The rock is superstition. The rock is stupidity. The rock is witchcraft!”

Both nuns crossed themselves.

The priest smiled. “Always in your arguments you betray a surprising knowledge of the Bible.”

“ The great Stalin was brought up in a seminary. There’s no better education for a leader of the people, I’ll grant you that.”

“Thank you, at least you make me feel we’re doing some useful work,” the priest replied quietly.

“I can do without your sarcasm, Don Gioacchino,” snapped the stationmaster.

“I can do without yours, and yet I accept it in good grace. Now, can we get a taxi into Iselle di Trasquera?”

“You can do what you like, but you can’t use my phone.”

“We have Mother Mary with us. She has been poorly. We’ve just been up to Rome to see a specialist.”

“I’m sorry. We’re on strike.”

“Oh, don’t make any concession on my account,” said the older nun robustly, unable to conceal her annoyance.

The train officials tried to appeal to the stationmaster, but to no avail. He pleased himself too much in his role of a commissar to be swayed.

WHILE this was going on, I turned to Mr. Rosencrantz, whose spirit was once more in Laos. “Well, how is it to be face to face with the real thing?” I asked him. “Not a fellow traveler, not a man pretending to be a solid citizen, but a self-avowed, proud, unrepentant Communist.”

“Is that what he is? A Communist in a key position, in a country allied to the United States by treaty?”

“A military alliance,” I corrected.

“That’s true. That’s worse. What’s the name of this place?”

“Mine di Trasquera.”

“Would you spell that?”

I did so.

“And where is that?” he inquired;

“About five kilometers —”

“That’s three miles.”

“— more or less from Iselle di Trasquera, which is on the Swiss frontier.”

“That’d be the border of Switzerland.”

“If you prefer it.”

Mr. Rosencrantz took copious notes. “Would you please ask him his name?”

I tried to attract the stationmaster’s attention, but it wasn’t easy, since he was engaged in an ideological discussion with the train officials. Eventually he came toward us. “Yes?”

“This gentleman would like to know your name.”

“What for?”

“He’s a high official of the American government.”

The stationmaster smiled maliciously. “Cavalieri, Ferruccio, stationmaster, secretary of the Partito Comunista Italiano, Sezzione Iselle di Trasquera.”

“Would you spell that?” Mr. Rosencrantz asked me again.

I did so, laboriously. Mr. Rosencrantz was more used to dictating than being dictated to.

“Imprisoned by the fascists for a total of seven years.”

Comrade Cavalieri was greedy for a large and accurate file in the black book of the State Department.

“Major in the Paris Commune Partisan Shock Division,” he continued. “Wounded three times, once seriously. Decorated with seven medals, one American, one promised but never delivered.”

The duchess could stand this appeasement no longer. “I am the Duchess of Calapiccola,” she hissed.

“I’m very sorry to hear it,” replied the stationmaster, diverting his attention to her.

“My brother-in-law is Count Parri-Ponti, the administrator of the State Railways.”

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

“I’ll get you fired for this.”

“They’ve tried, they’ve tried, believe me. But stationmasters of my quality and experience don’t grow on trees. I’d be in charge of a proper station by now if I weren’t true to my convictions. Padua, Parma, Brescia, a station a man can be proud of. They leave me here, but they don’t dare get rid of me. If I went, half the stationmasters in the north would leave in sympathy.”

“I’ll have you evicted,” cried the furious duchess. “I’m a very sick woman. I am registered in a clinic in Lausanne. I will die if I don’t reach the clinic by this afternoon.”

“There is a very reputable funeral parlor in Iselle, run by Ronco, Giuseppe, a member of our cell.”

The duchess spat into the stationmaster’s face. Regrettably, the stationmaster, having very little experience in the etiquette governing such cases, spat back, with greater power and accuracy. To its eternal disgrace, the dog refrained from barking.

The officials had made their way sadly back to their posts on the train. The priest and the two nuns had alighted and were standing on the platform with their belongings. I could hear the duchess breaking up the furniture next door. Mr. Rosencrantz was taking a photograph of the station.

The battle was over. The stationmaster was in command of the field. The priest and the nuns stood there like prisoners of war, waiting to be told what to do. Even the controller, so used to success, sat in the corridor, his head in his hands. There were eighteen hours to wait. Eighteen hours of silence, with nothing to do but watch the hands creep over the clock face.

I LOOKED up at the sky. Surely if there was an Italian God up in the Italian heaven, this was the moment to strike. Only five kilometers away was the realm of the Swiss God, dour, sensible, and accurate, who would probably allow the eighteen hours to elapse, for He is the God of the chronometer and timekeepers. The nuns were also looking skyward. Could it be that, from those tremendous heights, the frontiers seemed a little hazy? O Dio, siamo Italiani!

Then it happened. Quivering with excitement, the stationmaster’s assistant emerged from his cubicle; a youth of eighteen, six foot four, with a squint and a stammer.

“Further up the l-l-line —” he gasped.

“What? Speak up!” cried the stationmaster.

“A landslide, near the tunnel —”,

“A landslide?”

“Just around the bend where the s-s-signals are!”

“A landslide!” The stationmaster was thunderstruck.

In an evangelistic ecstasy, the youth addressed the train. “If the train had been allowed to p-p-proceed, it would have been derailed. You’d all have been k-k-killed!”

The young nun fell onto her knees. ”Un miracolo!” she shrieked.

The stationmaster stood there, gray as death, humiliated, stabbed in the back.

“Would you mind translating that?” asked Mr. Rosencrantz.

We crossed the Simplon pass by motor coach and went on our various ways by Swiss trains.

Two days later, in Geneva, I happened to pick up a copy of an Italian paper. The headlines ran, “Stationmaster’s Presence of Mind Saves International Train from Inevitable Disaster.” I read the article. It was in the form of an interview with Cavalieri, Ferruccio, stationmaster of Mine di Trasquera.

“Yes,” said the stationmaster to the interviewer, “I’ve had thirty-six years in the service of the State Railways, interrupted, of course, by seven years in a fascist prison. There’s no getting away from it, experience counts in any profession. I knew that the coming of winter brings with it many hazards, especially in mountain regions. Only two days before, I had said to Finzi, Gianni, my assistant, ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if one of these fine mornings we don’t have a landslide near that tunnel — the one where the signals are.’ I don’t know why, but when the express came in yesterday, I hesitated to let it go on. Oh, they tried to persuade me. They said it had been held up by some strike or other down south, advanced all sorts of reasons to get me to let it go, but I was adamant.”

“The Cardinal Archbishop of Milan has suggested it was Divine Providence which made you so stubborn,” the interviewer suggested.

“I am too humble a man to know the truth of that,” Cavalieri went on, “but I will say that as I was debating with myself whether or not to change the signals, a voice within me kept saying, ‘Nod ”

“Just ‘No’?”

“No. ‘Thou shalt not let the train pass!’”

I marveled at the extreme loyalty of the assistant to his chief until I caught sight of a photograph at the bottom of the front page. Both he and Cavalieri were being congratulated by Count Parri-Ponti, administrator of the State Railways, brother-in-law of the Duchess of Calapiccola, and both were beaming with pleasure. Medals would undoubtedly follow, the caption said, and promotion to a larger station.

The editorial of the paper carried the theme of the men’s devotion to duty onto a level of mysticism and asked the burning question of the Italian conscience. “How many such men are there in our land, hidden in remote places, only to be discovered by some quirk of fate for what they are, simple, trusting heroes, with the ability to recognize the voice of God when they hear it? It is time some of our politicians realized the simple truth which emerges with a crystal clarity from such a case as this. To be Italian is to believe. That is the strength of Ferruccio Cavalieri. This is our strength also.”

O slightly smiling God of Italy, you know, whereas abroad money may corrupt, or power, or any of the galaxy of vices which man may choose for his temporal pleasure and eventual undoing, in your country it is not as simple as that. Alexander VI, the Borgia Pope, was not the best ol spiritual leaders —some even say that he was a monster of evil — and yet, how much more unrestrainedly evil could he have been had he not been Pope! In his case, as in the case of Ferruccio Cavalieri, stationmaster of Mine di Trasquera, virtue corrupts. Never again can the poor fellow make a categorical decision in the hardness and clarity of his heart, never again can he address a meeting with the absolute conviction that he is right, never again can he assume the dogmatic air of the Soviet theorist. Why not? Because he is Italian, and because you, his God, are Italian too. Whatever he may do or say from now on, he will not be able to prevent his eye from straying upward in apprehension of your next move.