How to Travel With a Salmon & Other Essays Page 2
More telephone calls to old schoolmates, and the hapless middle-rank figure, who had already run such risks, returns to the scene, commits several dozen additional crimes, purloins some information that—apparently—the police would give their lives for, and conveys to me the number of the document, which I also keep well hidden, because, as everyone is aware, even the walls have ears.
I return to the Milan Bureau of Motor Vehicles, and with a few days of waiting in line, it's done, the fait is accompli: I am promised the magic document within about two weeks. By now it is late June, and finally I get my hands on a preliminary document stating that I have presented an application for the issuing of a license. Obviously there exists no form contemplating loss or theft, and the document is the kind that is issued to learners, before they are given a proper license. I show it to a traffic cop, asking him if it entitles me to drive, and the cop's expression depresses me: the good officer makes it clear that if he caught me behind the wheel with that piece of paper he'd make me rue the day I was born.
In fact, I rue it, and I return to the license office, where, in a few days' time, I learn that the document issued me was, so to speak, only an apéritif: I am to wait for another document, one that will say that, having lost my license, I can drive until I receive the new one, because the authorities have ascertained that I previously possessed the old one. Which is precisely what everybody knows, from the Dutch police to the Italian authorities, and the license office also knows it, only they don't want to come right out and say so until they've given the matter some thought. Mind you, everything the office might wish to know is what it knows already, and no matter how much thought they give it, they'll never manage to know anything further. But that's life. Towards the end of June I make repeated return visits to inquire about the vicissitudes of promised document number two, but its preparation apparently demands a great deal of work. I am ready to believe this. They ask me for so many documents and photographs that I can only conclude that this paper will be something like a passport, complete with watermarked pages and seals and so on.
At the end of June, having already spent mind-boggling amounts on taxis, I look for another shortcut. Look, I write for papers with national circulation; perhaps someone could help me, on the pretext that I have to travel for reasons connected with the public weal. Thanks to two Milan offices (of La Repubblica and L'Espresso), I manage to establish communication with the press office of the prefecture, where I find a kindly lady who expresses her willingness to look into my case. The kindly lady doesn't think for a moment of reaching for the phone: bravely, she goes in person to the license office and breaches the sanctum from which the profane are excluded, advancing amid labyrinthine rows of dossiers, lying there since time immemorial. What the lady does, I don't know (I hear stifled screams and cascades of papers; clouds of dust blow from beneath the door). Finally, the lady reappears, holding in her hand a yellow form, of tissue-like paper, the sort that parking attendants slip under your windshield wiper, nineteen centimeters by thirteen. No photograph appears on it. It is written by hand, with some ink smears from nibs dipped into inkwells straight out of Dombey and Son, the sort filled with lees and mucilage, causing streaks on the porous sheet. There is my name, with the number of the vanished license, and some printed lines declaring that the present document replaces the "above-described" license, but that it expires on December 29 (date obviously chosen to catch the victim as he is maneuvering along the tortuous curves of some Alpine locality, if possible in a blizzard, far from home, so he can be arrested and tortured by the highway police).
The paper authorizes me to drive in Italy, but I suspect it would confuse a foreign policeman considerably if I were to display it outside the country. Oh, well, at least I'm driving again. To make this story shorter, I'll add that in December my license isn't ready, I encounter some resistance when I try to renew the temporary one, I fall back once more on the press office of the prefecture, I receive the temporary document back with, written in a crabbed hand, what I could have written myself, namely that it is renewed until the following June (another date chosen to catch me out while I'm winding my way along a coast road), and I am also informed that a further extension of the document's validity has been approved, since the issuing of the actual license will take a long time yet. The choked voices of my companions in misfortune, encountered in the course of my waiting in lines, have informed me that there are people who have been without a license for a year, or two, or even three.
The day before yesterday I affixed the required annual tax stamp to the document; the tobacconist advised me not to cancel it, because if my license were to arrive, I'd have to buy a second stamp. But in not canceling it, I believe, I would be guilty of a crime.
At this point, three observations must be made. First, I received the temporary document in two months, but only because, through a series of privileges I enjoy thanks to my social position and my education, I was able to disturb a series of Highly Placed Persons in three cities, six public and private institutions, plus a daily paper and a weekly magazine, both distributed and read nationally. If I were a grocer or a clerk, by now I would have had to buy a bicycle. To drive with a real license you have to be Luciano Pavarotti.
The second observation is this: the document I preserve jealously in my wallet is of no value and is very easily forged, and the country must therefore be full of drivers in circulation whose identity is difficult to establish. Mass illegality, or mass pretended legality.
The third observation requires the reader to concentrate and try to picture an Italian driver's license. Since it no longer arrives in its slipcase (which the driver has to purchase on his own), a license consists of two or three pages of cheap paper and a photograph. These little booklets are not produced at Fa-briano, like the volumes of Franco Maria Ricci, they are not hand-bound by skilled craftsmen, they could be printed in any printing shop, of the humblest sort, and from the days of Gutenberg Western civilization has been able to turn out thousands and thousands of such things in a few hours (for that matter, the Chinese had already invented fairly rapid procedures with wood blocks).
Would it be so hard to make thousands of these booklets, paste the innocent driver's photograph into them, and distribute them, even by coin-operated machine? What goes on in the maze of the Bureau of Motor Vehicles and the license office?
All of us know that any ordinary terrorist is able to produce, in a few hours, dozens of fake licenses—and remember, it takes more time to produce a fake license than a genuine one. Now, if we don't want citizens who have lost their licenses to start frequenting murky taverns of ill fame in the hope of making contact with the Red Brigades, there is just one solution: employ all repentant terrorists in the license office. They have the know-how, they have plenty of free time, and work—as is well known—is good for the soul; thus with one fell swoop we empty many prison cells, we make socially useful people out of former criminals for whom enforced idleness might cause relapses into dangerous fantasies of omnipotence, and we do a service both for the motorized citizen and for the national petroleum industry.
But this may all be too simple. If you ask me, in this driver's license business there's the finger of a foreign power.
1982
How to Eat in Flight
A simple journey by air a few years ago (round trip to Amsterdam) cost me in the end two Brooks Brothers neckties, two Burberry shirts, two pairs of Bardelli slacks, a tweed jacket bought in Bond Street, and a Krizia waistcoat.
All international flights observe the commendable ritual of serving a meal. But, as everyone knows, the seats are narrow, the tray likewise, and the ride is sometimes bumpy. Furthermore, the napkins offered by airlines are skimpy and, if you stick one inside your collar, it leaves your abdomen vulnerable, whereas if you unfold one in your lap, your chest is exposed. Common sense would suggest that the foods served should be compact, not the kind that make spots. It is unnecessary to resort to vitamin tablets. There are su
ch compact foods as breaded veal cutlet, grilled meat, cheese, french fries, and roast chicken. Spot-making foods include spaghetti with abundant, American-style tomato sauce, eggplant parmesan, pizza straight from the oven, and piping hot consommé in little bowls without handles.
Now, a typical in-flight menu comprises some long-cooked meat smothered in brown gravy, generous portions of tomato, vegetables finely chopped and marinated in wine, rice, and peas with sauce. Peas are notoriously elusive—not even the greatest chefs can produce petits pois farcis—especially if, deferring to the insistence of Miss Manners, the consumer is determined to eat the peas with his fork rather than the more practical spoon. Don't tell me that the Chinese are worse off. I can assure you it is easier to grip a pea with chopsticks than to pierce it with a fork. It is also pointless to rebut that the fork is used to collect the peas, not to pierce them, because forks are designed for the sole purpose of dropping the peas they pretend to collect.
Furthermore, peas in flight are duly served only when there is turbulence and the captain turns on the "fasten seat belts" sign. As a result of this complex ergonomic calculation, the peas have only two alternatives: either they roll down your shirtfront or they fall on your fly.
As the ancient fabulists taught us, to prevent a fox from drinking out of a glass, the glass must be tall and slim. Glasses on planes are short, squat, rather basin-like. Obviously, any liquid will spill, obeying the laws of physics, even when there is no turbulence. The bread is not a French baguette, which you have to tear with your teeth even when it's fresh, but rather a special friable roll which, the moment it is grasped, explodes in a cloud of fine powder. Thanks to the Lavoisier principle this powder vanishes only in appearance: on debarking, you will find that it has all accumulated under your behind, managing to stain even the seat of your trousers. The dessert tends to the meringue genre, and its fragments mix with the bread, or else it dribbles over the fingers immediately, when the napkin is already steeped in tomato sauce and hence unusable.
True, you still have the perfumed towelette: but this cannot be distinguished from the little envelopes of salt, pepper, and sugar, and so, after you have put the sugar in the salad, the towelette has already ended up in the coffee, which is served boiling hot and in a heat-conducting cup filled to the brim, so that it may readily slip from your seared fingers and blend with the gravy that has now congealed around your waist. In business class the hostess pours the coffee directly into your lap, hastily apologizing in Esperanto.
Airline quartermasters are certainly enlisted from the ranks of those hotel experts who adopt the only type of pot that, instead of pouring the coffee into the cup, scatters eighty percent of it on the sheet. But why? The most obvious hypothesis is that they want to give the traveler an impression of luxury, and they assume he has in mind those old Hollywood movies where Nero always drinks from broad-brimmed goblets that spatter wine on his beard and his chlamys, or the pictures where a feudal lord gnaws a haunch of meat that smears grease on his lacy shirt, as he embraces a courtesan.
But why, then, in first class, where the space is ample, do they serve compact foods, like Russian caviar on buttered slices of toast, or smoked salmon or lobster chunks with a drop of oil and lemon? Is it perhaps because in the films of Luchino Visconti, when the Nazi aristocrats say "shoot him," they pop a single, compact grape into their mouth?
1987
How to Go Through Customs
The other night, after an amorous tryst with one of my numerous mistresses, I did away with my partner, bludgeoning her to death with a rare Cellini saltcellar. 1 was inspired not only by the strict moral code instilled in me since childhood, according to which a woman who indulges in the pleasures of the senses is unworthy of mercy, but also by an esthetic motive: namely, to experience the thrill of the perfect crime.
I waited, listening to a CD of English baroque water music, until the corpse was cold and the blood had congealed; then, with an electric saw, I began dismembering the body, trying at the same time to adhere to certain fundamental anatomical principles, thus paying a tribute to our culture, without which refinement and the social contract would not exist. Finally, I packed the pieces in two suitcases of oryx hide, put on a gray suit, and caught the wagon-lit for Paris.
Once I had handed over my passport and a scrupulous customs declaration to the conductor, listing the few hundred francs I was carrying on my person, I slept like a log, for nothing encourages repose more than the sense of having performed one's duty. Nor did customs venture to disturb a traveler who, merely by purchasing a private berth in first class, asserted ipso facto his membership in the hegemonic class and thus his status as a person above suspicion. The situation was all the more satisfying since, to avoid any withdrawal symptoms, I was carrying with me a trifling amount of morphine, perhaps eight hundred grams of cocaine, and a canvas by Titian.
I will not go into details about how, once in Paris, I rid myself of the wretched remains. I will leave that to your imagination. You can simply go to the Beaubourg, set your valises on one of its escalators, and years will pass before anyone notices. Or else you can stow them in a niche specially provided for such purposes in the Gare de Lyon. The password-controlled method of unlocking the storage space is so complex that thousands of pieces of luggage lie there and no one ever dares to attempt to retrieve them. But, even more simply, you can sit at a table at the Deux Magots and leave the suitcases outside the La Hune bookshop. Within minutes they will be stolen, and from then on it's the thief's problem. I cannot deny, however, that the matter left me in a state of tension, which, for that matter, always marks the achievement of an artistically complex and perfect operation.
On my return to Italy I felt on edge and so decided to treat myself to a vacation in Locarno. Suffering, through some inexplicable sense of guilt, from a vague fear of being recognized, I decided to travel second class, wearing jeans and a polo shirt with a crocodile logo.
At the border I was assailed by vigilant customs officials, who examined my luggage and personal belongings down to the most intimate undergarments, then charged me with clandestine importation into Switzerland of a carton of filter-tip MS. And finally they discovered that, behind my sphincter, I had concealed fifty Swiss francs of uncertain provenance, for which I was unable to produce documentation of proper acquisition through a bank.
I was subjected to interrogation beneath a naked 1,000-watt bulb. I was whipped with a wet towel. I was temporarily held in solitary confinement, chained to my cot in a straitjacket.
Luckily, it occurred to me to declare that I had been a member of the underground terrorist group, the Fascist Black Brigades, since its foundation, that I had placed several bombs on express trains for ideological reasons, and that I considered myself a political prisoner. I was promptly assigned to a single room in the Welfare Center set up in a wing of the Grand Hôtel des Iles Borromées. A dietitian advised me to skip a few meals to trim down to ideal weight, while my psychiatrist initiated the process of having my status changed to house arrest, because of certified anorexia. In the meanwhile I wrote some anonymous letters to the courts in the area, insinuating that the judges regularly wrote one another reciprocal threatening anonymous letters, and I denounced the Queen Mother of Great Britain, accusing her of having had active relations with the Communist Combatant Squads.
If all goes smoothly, I should be home in a week.
1989
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.