Salt, Tobacco, and the Bus
An early altercation with the authorities... or at least, a bus ticket checker with a serious ego
It’s not that Italy is more challenging than other countries I’ve lived in, it’s that the challenges are bizarre, and never quite what you think they’re going to be. It keeps you on your toes.
One of the strangest little challenges Adam and I faced upon arrival in Turin was figuring out how the hell to buy bus tickets. Due to covid, the front section of the bus was entirely sectioned off; no simple tossing of coins into the requisite slot next to the driver. There were no instructions at the bus stop, no machines for purchasing said tickets. A google search told us nothing other than confirming the existence of a transit app which does exist (yay!) but only for android phones, which we don’t have (boo!). Later I learned that you also needed an Italian bank account for top ups, which at the time I also did not have.
After getting caught early on trying to ride sans tickets and having to pay a fairly hefty fine (fair enough) we finally learned that, if one wants bus tickets, one must go to-- I am not joking-- the salt and tobacco shop, called Sale e Tabacchi. These are super common corner stores that can be found on almost every block in Italy, recognizable by their blue-and-white signage of a giant T. Despite their extremely specific name, they sell pretty much everything from cigarettes to lotto tickets to government stamps for official documents and taxes. Really, I’m ashamed I didn’t guess that this was where bus tickets would be found. Should I ever need an off-market organ, I now know exactly where I will go first.
Unsurprisingly, the tobacconist (as I now fondly think of him) in our little neighborhood was a grumpy figure and the closest thing to an anti-masker I had yet met in Italy. Strangely and despite our very different perspectives on how to fight the pandemic, I think his refusal to wear a mask was part of what made me feel affection towards him: his was the first shopkeeper’s face I’d seen in over a year.
Still, he often kept strange hours and would decide upon a whim whether any given day would be a day he would accept bank cards or if he would pretend like he’s never seen such technology before. This was, of course, pretty par for the course in smaller shops in Italy-- and they’re pretty much all smaller shops, nary a Costco nor Walmart in sight. Being the planner that I am, at my first opportunity I decided to buy a stack of single-use bus fares, which from my understanding would each give me 100 minutes of riding time from the moment I validated them on the bus itself.
Riding the bus legally for the first time gave me the same kind of thrill that riding the bus illegally gives to most people. I was cheerful-- ebullient, even. We’d been in Torino just about a month at that point: lockdown had been mostly lifted, drinks could be enjoyed on the beautiful streets, friends could be made, and now, busses could be legally ridden. It was all coming together: Torino was becoming our home.
One day, Adam and I hopped on the bus to meet a new friend for a drink in a distant part of the city. Halfway through the ride, ticket checkers boarded the bus in their very official uniforms.
Italians seem to really love official uniforms. In fact, my personal theory for why Italy has not one, not two, but five separate police forces is largely uniform-based. Why have one fancy uniform when you can have several? These ticket checkers were peak Italian in their uniformed glory; I appreciated their dedication as they rocked a shirt and thick blazer (complete with braided cord embellishments like icing on an elaborate cake) despite the ninety degree heat and lack of air conditioning.
I proudly showed our tickets, for all the world like a dog who has finally returned a thrown stick and is waiting for its deserved head pats. Unfortunately, the ticket checker frowned, and said something very quickly in Italian that I didn’t understand at all.
The thing about Italians, I’d realized, is that unlike many European peoples I could name (*cough*the French*cough*) they were always incredibly excited when foreigners tried to learn their language and use it, however poorly. Yet thus far they had completely lacked the ability to either simplify their vocabulary choices to something I might be able to catch-- and I wouldn’t even think about asking an Italian to slow down their speech.
So this ticket checker, realizing we have no idea what he’s talking about, held his hands up in an “I give up” gesture, and said something to the teenager sitting in front of us, gesturing wildly at us. Then, he got off at the next stop.
Adam and I looked at each other in confusion, and my recent legal-bus-ticket high has dimmed somewhat. The teenager turned around.
“You have the wrong tickets,” he said in very respectable English.
“Oh! What?” I replied with dismay.
“These tickets are extra to the city. You need intra-city tickets,” he explained.
“Oh,” I said, disappointed. “The tobacconist sold me these… I asked for biglietti a Torino.”
“He said it was okay, just get the right ones next time.”
“Thank you for explaining,” I replied. “We didn’t know.”
“Non c’e problema,” he replied and turned back around. Not a problem.
After marveling for a moment that a teenager would bother talking to strange foreigners at all-- something I doubted would happen in the States-- I frowned. “I can’t believe it.”
“You couldn’t have known,” Adam said soothingly.
“Yeah, but now we have useless bus tickets!”
“Expat tax,” Adam replied with a smile that elicited the laugh for which he’d hoped.
Every time something cost us a little extra, or we had to pay more than once, or there was a fee we weren’t anticipating (the latter of which happened all the time, unfortunately), we called it the “expat tax.” Somehow, this made watching the euros slipping through our fingers at an alarming rate seem more palatable.
We settled in for the rest of our ride, having made perfect time to meet our new friend for aperitivo in our favorite part of Torino to go out in, a slightly grungy but happening little neighborhood called San Salvario. The 68 bus was quite convenient, as it turned out-- it went right from our temporary digs in the tiny village of San Mauro to the Porta Nuova train station, and the second-to-last stop dropped us off right at the north side of San Salvario.
As the bus pulled in to our stop, I was jostled out of my daydreaming. “Damn, this is us already,” I told Adam, nudging his shoulder to get up as the bus doors opened. The bus drivers often seemed to be racing the clock-- I liked to imagine they had a pool running back at whatever hangout was the usual for the drivers to see who could go the fastest and annoy the most drivers with the fewest actual casualties.
Just as Adam had a single foot off of the bus, he was slammed backwards so sharply that I hit my nose on his shoulder, temporarily displacing my mask. As I readjusted it, I exclaimed, “Shit, did we miss it? That was our stop!”
But as I looked ahead, the doors of the bus were still open. Instead, two more members of the elite league of ticket checkers stood ahead of us: a huge young man with impressive eyebrows and built like a football player along with a tired-looking, tiny woman rapidly leaving middle age behind.
No fucking way there are more ticket checkers on this route, I thought, even as I said loudly, “That’s our stop!”
“Biglietti!” The man shouted, physically blocking me as I tried to get off the bus. Tickets!
“Don’t you touch her!” Adam yelled back, pointing at the doors. “We have to exit here!”
“Biglietti!” The man insisted again as the doors snapped shut behind him. Tickets!
“Scusi, you don’t understand, dobbiamo scendere, abbiamo gia parlato con la tua gente,” I said in extremely awkward and broken Italian, waving the tickets in his face. We have to get off here, we already spoke with your people.
“We already went through this,” Adam said angrily as the streets began to whoosh by, taking us from our destination. “We just went through this.”
“Quelli sono i biglietti sbagliati,” the man barked at me as I showed him the extra-city tickets we’d so recently learned about. “Devi pagare la multa.” These are the wrong tickets. You have to pay the fine.
“What? No, no fucking way,” Adam began to get a little heated. Usually a fairly level-headed person, he had a strong sense of justice, a dislike of bullies, and a serious problem with a person who would shove someone else, especially his wife, that all combined to evoke a side of his personality I’d only seen once or twice but thought of (in the most loving way possible) as both mule-headed and arrogant.
“Stop talking,” I said to him under my breath as I tried to gather my thoughts. A crazed spark flickered in the eyes of the giant man I started to think of as the footballer.
“Dove sono i tuoi documenti?” The footballer bellowed. Where are your documents?
I tried to make eye contact with his partner, the bored looking woman, to elicit a sympathetic ear. “Abbiamo parlato con altri come te. Ci hanno venduto i biglietti sbagliati. Siamo nuovi qui---” We spoke with others like you. We were sold the wrong tickets. We are new here...
The small woman shrugged and rolled her eyes. I inwardly cursed her poorly applied eyeliner.
“Documenti! Posso portari alla polizia!” Footballer pushed his hand into Adam’s chest aggressively, and I saw Adam begin to swell up in indignation. Documents! I can take you to the police!
“No no no--” I started to try to de-escalate the situation, but Adam cut me off.
“We’re not fucking paying,” he bellowed in English. “We JUST LEARNED ABOUT THESE TICKETS and your colleague said it was fine!”
“Shut up,” I snapped, but he was on a roll.
“We’re not trying to fucking scam anyone! You can’t even BUY tickets easily but we still did! We’re obviously trying to do the right thing here with these tickets.”
I put my hand on Adam’s chest and held it there. In low, quiet tones, I said “Shut. The. Fuck. Up.”
He bounced a little from foot to foot, no doubt influenced by the large ticket checker’s own aggressive energy. “Fine.”
“No documenti,” I said firmly. “Per favore, lascia che te lo dica--” No documents. Please, let me tell you...
I was cut off by the rapid breaking of the bus. In all this excitement, the bus had come to a stop at its final destination, Porta Nuova train station.
Everyone else exited the bus quietly, tickets unchecked.
We also exited, led by our new captors who ushered us outside. The woman watched us while the footballer went to get one of the branches of the police waiting at the train station. A new set of extremely bored looking cops surrounded us. Their uniforms had somewhat less elegant cord braided on them. I had barely half a moment to wonder if the complexity of the uniforms was inversely related to the importance of the job before launching into our defense.
“Per favorite, lasciami spiegare--”Please, let me explain.
The angry footballer was already making his case to the police in dramatic, heated tones. I was starting to get worried-- how could I possibly make our case? I knew that in theory, we were in the wrong here. We had the wrong tickets, but it was such an honest mistake I simply couldn’t believe we were going to be charged seventy euros for it. So I pulled out the entire stack of all of the single-use, now useless, tickets our tobacconist had sold me earlier.
“Ho comprato questi biglietti… Ho detto “biglietti a Torino”... Non so perche ha dato quelli sbaliatti. Siamo nuovi que e non lo sapevo.” I also handed over my US driver’s licence, the only form of ID I had on me at the time. I bought these tickets… I said ‘tickets to Turin’... I don’t know why he gave me the wrong ones. We are new here and I didn’t know.
The policeman held his hands out as if to calm me down. He rolled his eyes slightly at the footballer, who was still arguing loudly but with very little effect on his more official peers, who looked like they could not believe the ticket checker was wasting their time with such insignificant matters.
“Americani,” the policeman said to the footballer by way of explanation and shrugged. He took the several unused tickets out of my hand and held them out to the man.
Everyone looked at the provided tickets with great interest, as though I’d introduced some shocking new evidence in a high profile case being heard at the highest levels of court. For some reason, it sounded like the police and the ticket checkers got into an argument about the fact that the tickets had been purchased a week before. Triumphantly, the ticket checker said, “Hai comprato una settimana fa!” You bought them a week ago!
I shook my head incredulously. “Ho comprato molti bigletti perche non voglio mai restare senza biglietto! Ho cercato di essere corretto.” I bought many tickets because I don’t want to ever be without a ticket! I tried to be correct.
Mercifully, Adam remained quiet as they continued to discuss the situation, though I’m sure I heard a muttered, “I can’t fucking believe this.”
The police and the ticket checkers put their heads together again and continued in rapid Italian I probably couldn’t have followed even if I were a native speaker.
Finally, the aggressive ticket checker turned to me. “Capisci: questi sono i biglietti sbagliatti. Devi pagare una multa. Potrei obbligarti a pagare due biglietti, ma invece uno solo.” Understand: these are the wrong tickets. You have to pay a fine. I could force you to pay for two tickets, but instead only one. To emphasize the point, he held up two beefy fingers and then curled down his middle finger to leave only one.
I relayed this to Adam. “He’s offering to only have us pay one fine. So, thirty five euros.”
“This is bullshit. We’re obviously strangers here,” Adam said in frustration. “We were so obviously trying to do the right thing. Why the hell else would two foreigners have so many ‘extra city’ tickets? How much could the price differential be, anyway? Who would win with this scam?”
“I… I don’t think it’s about that anymore, to be honest. I think everyone is just pissed. Let’s just pay and get the fuck out of here,” I sighed. “We don’t really have a choice.”
“I guess not,” Adam said resentfully, and I nodded at the footballer, who nodded as though he knew we’d see reason.
The beefy man whipped out his portable payment device and entered in 35 euros. With an angry wave of his phone, Adam paid via contactless payment, a cheery beep confirming receipt of our fine. The actual police had wandered off by this point, as had the footballer’s partner.
That was when we entered bizarro world.
Suddenly and with no other provocation, the entire demeanor of the formerly pissed off ticket checker changed, including his body language. As we tried to slink off, he held his arms out and laughed-- not cruelly, but as though we were old friends settling a silly debt.
“Ehi! Va bene!” He said jovially. Hey! All good!
I nodded and shrugged and tried to turn away since at this point we were very late for our meeting with a new friend. I hated being late. “Va bene,” I muttered in return. Adam stewed next to me.
But the aggressive ticket checker, now apparently our friendly neighborhood ticket checker, wasn’t done. “Calcio? Futbol?” Soccer?
Adam shook his head and snapped, “What?”
“Inghilterra -- Italia! Futbol! Domenica,” England -- Italy. Soccer! Sunday! He now spoke in simple words, as though he was finally actually trying to communicate with us effectively.
I stared at him in disbelief for a moment as little sparks of recognition fired up in my head. I turned and said to Adam, “I… I think he’s asking if we watched the Euros final on Sunday.”
So some Italians are able to speak more slowly and clearly, a little voice said in my head nastily.
“Si, l’abbiamo visto. Gioco molto buono,” I replied as best I could. Yes, we saw it. Very good game.
“Why are we still here?” Adam growled, obviously less willing than the ticket checker to let go of our recent altercation.
“Pickford! Sterling! Henderson!” The ticket checker continued in an almost gleeful manner, nodding with each name.
“Is he trying to rub it in our face that England lost? We’re not even English,” Adam said incredulously.
I was at a loss as to how to respond. The rest of the police and his ticket checking partner were long gone at this point, presumably bored of tormenting foreigners, and yet this guy kept trying to engage us in conversation. “Forza Azzuri!” I managed to say to the ticket checker, the rallying cry for Italian supporters. To Adam, I replied, “Man, I don’t think so. I think he’s… genuinely trying to connect with us now?”
“Forza Azzuri! Si, bene!!” Ticket checker replied happily.
“What the fuck?” Adam asked, now far more bemused than upset at this bizarre turn of events.
“Si!” I responded with almost desperate cheer, “Forza Azzuri! Si! Arrivederci! Grazie! Ciao!” I responded with as much energy as I could muster, grabbing Adam’s arm. I half nodded, half bowed as I steered us away from the train station, hoping for enough enthusiasm to placate our recent nemesis yet enough speed to get us away.
After we were safely out of eyeshot, Adam and I paused and-- not for the first time that month, week, or even day-- stared at each other in sheer amazement.
“What… what just happened?” Adam said, looking completely stupefied. “I feel like that guy would have taken us out for a beer.”
“I don’t--” I took a deep breath to steady myself, also knocked off kilter by this Jekyll and Hyde display. “I think… I think maybe we only had to pay anything in the end was because his masculinity was threatened by you on the bus?”
Adam hmmm’d and nodded grudgingly, but continued, “Then what was with the act at the end? The super happy fun cop act?”
I shook my head as a realization dawned on me. “I think… I think maybe… I think maybe it wasn’t actually personal?”
I saw a hint of understanding dawn on Adam’s face, as well. “Woah. Weird.”
I tried to make sense of my thoughts. “I feel like back home if it was clear that innocent tourists had made a stupid mistake, usually no one would bother with a fine like that unless they had an absolute policy to always charge, or if the cop had a chip on his shoulder and was just picking on someone specifically, making it personal,” I began reasoning out slowly. “But obviously there’s no blanket policy here, since he had the power to charge us only for one ticket and not the other and the police looked at him like he was an asshole. But maybe… maybe because you got aggro with him, he felt like… maybe he felt like you threatened his masculinity and so we had to pay something for that? But then when we paid that score was evened, any grudge wiped away... so… he wanted to be friendly? Show no hard feelings?”
“That is--” Adam stopped, and instead just gave a low whistle as he also began to puzzle out the cultural differences at play. “Damn.”
“I don’t--” I stopped and put my face in my hands, suddenly exhausted and overwhelmed by speaking the most amount of Italian I’d ever spoken under extremely stressful circumstances. The time for calm was over. Now was the time for every feeling I hadn’t let myself experience over the last half an hour to come pouring out in a plaintive wail: “HOW DOES THIS COUNTRY FUNCTION??????
“Should I have offered him twenty euro cash? Should I have started things off by crying? Should we have just run to the back of the bus and hopped off? If you hadn’t said anything at all, would he have let us off without a fine?
HOW DOES THIS COUNTRY FUNCTION?!” I yelled up at the sky, panting.
Adam hugged me around the shoulders. “I have no fucking idea.”
We still don’t, really.
Epilogue:
We bought bicycles.
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