How to Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays Read Free Page A

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