How to Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays Read Free

telephone an old school friend, now a Highly Placed Person in local financial circles, and ask him to telephone the city's Bureau of Motor Vehicles. He makes an equally dishonest decision and, instead, privately calls a Highly Placed Person at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, who tells him that data of that sort cannot be given out, except to the police. I'm sure the reader will realize the risks the State would run if my license number were to be given out right and left: Qaddafi and the KGB would desire nothing more. So it must remain Top Secret.
    Another stroll down memory lane and I come up with another schoolmate, who is now a Highly Placed Person in a division of the government, but I warn him immediately not to get in touch with any important officials of the Motor Vehicles Bureau, because the matter is dangerous and he could end up being summoned before a parliamentary investigating committee. My suggestion, on the contrary, is to find a Lowly Placed Person, perhaps a night watchman, who can be bribed to take a peek at the files under cover of darkness. The Highly Placed Person in government is lucky enough to find a Medium Placed Person at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, who doesn't even have to be bribed, because he is a regular reader of
L'Espresso
and decides, out of his devotion to culture, to risk this dangerous favor for his favorite columnist (me). I don't know exactly what feats this daring figure performs, but the fact is that, the following day, I have the number of the license. My readers will forgive me if I refuse to reveal it: I have a wife and children to consider.
    With this number (which I now copy down everywhere and conceal in secret drawers against the next theft or loss) I pass through other lines at the Milan license office. I wave it triumphantly before the suspicious eyes of the clerk—who, with a smile that has nothing human about it, tells me that I must also display the number of the document with which, in the far-off 1950s, the Alessandrian authorities communicated the number of my license to the authorities of Milan.
    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