How to Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays

How to Travel on American Trains

You can undertake an air journey with an ulcer, scabies, housemaid's knee, tennis elbow, shingles, AIDS, galloping consumption, and leprosy. But not with a cold. Anyone who has tried it knows that when the aircraft suddenly descends from ten thousand meters you feel shooting pains in the ear, your head seems about to explode, and you hammer your fists against the window, yelling to be let out, even without a parachute. Well aware of all this but armed with a nasal spray of devastating effect, I resolved to leave for New York, clogged nostrils and all. A mistake. Once on the ground again, I felt as if I were lying in the Philippine Trench. I could see people opening their mouths but I couldn't hear any sound at all. The doctor subsequently explained to me, in sign language, that my tympana were inflamed; he stuffed me with antibiotics and sternly enjoined me not to fly for at least three weeks. Since I had to visit three different places on the East Coast, I traveled by train.

American trains are the image of what the world might be like after an atomic war. It isn't that the trains don't leave, it's that often they don't arrive, having broken down en route, causing people to wait during a six-hour delay in enormous stations, icy and empty, without a snack bar, inhabited by suspicious characters, and riddled with underground passages that recall the scenes in the New York subways in Return to the Planet of the Apes. The line between New York and Washington, patronized by newspaper reporters and senators, in first class offers at least business-class comfort, with a tray of hot food worthy of a university dining hall. But other lines have filthy coaches, with eviscerated leatherette cushions, and the snack bar offers food that makes you nostalgic (you'll say I'm exaggerating) for the recycled sawdust you are forced to eat on the Milan-Rome express.

We see Technicolor films in which ferocious crimes are committed in luxurious sleeping cars, where beautiful white women are served champagne by handsome black waiters who have just stepped out of Gone With the Wind. Lies, all lies. In reality, on American trains the passengers seem to have just stepped out of The Night of the Living Dead; and the conductors proceed with disgust along the aisles, stumbling over Coca-Cola cans, abandoned shopping bags, and sheets of newspaper smeared with the tuna fish salad that erupts from sandwiches when hungry travelers open red-hot plastic containers radiated by microwaves extremely harmful to the genetic patrimony.

The train, in America, is not a choice. It is a punishment for, having neglected to read Weber on the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, making the mistake of remaining poor. But liberals are politically correct no matter what, and the conductors are extremely polite even with the dirtiest dropout (naturally I should say "victim of marginalization"). In Pennsylvania Station there are many "non-travelers" wandering around, casting glazed looks at their neighbors' luggage. But the controversy about police brutality in Los Angeles is still in the air, and New York is a PC city. The Irish cop approaches the presumed bum, smiles, and asks him how he happens to be in the neighborhood. The bum appeals to the Rights of Man, and the cop, remarking angelically that it's a lovely day outside, goes off, dangling (not swinging) his long nightstick.

Among the poor, too, there are those who cannot manage to abandon the ultimate symbol of marginalization: they smoke. If you try to climb into the one smoking car, you suddenly find yourself in the Dreigroschenoper. I was the only one wearing a tie. For the rest, catatonic freaks, sleeping tramps snoring with their mouths open, comatose zombies. As the smoker was the last car of the train, on arrival, this collection of outcasts had to walk a hundred yards or so, slouching along the platform like Jerry Lewis.

Having escaped from this railway hell and changed into uncontaminated clothes, I found myself having supper in the private dining room of a faculty club, among well-dressed professors with educated accents. At the end, I asked if there was somewhere I could go and smoke. A moment of silence and embarrassed smiles followed, then someone closed the doors, a lady extracted a pack of cigarettes from her purse, others looked at my own pack. Furtive glances of complicity, stifled laughter, as in a striptease theater. There followed ten minutes of delightful, thrilling transgression. I was Lucifer, arrived from the world of shadows, and I illuminated everyone with the blazing torch of sin.

1991