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 such 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
