How to Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays (4 page)

All this (and much more) will make for an intelligent vacation. Or, if you want to make things simple, just take with you the
Grundrisse,
the apocryphal Gospels, and microfiches of the unpublished works of Peirce. Or, if you resist intellectual stimulation, stick with Agatha.

1981

The minute you take your seat in a taxi the problem of appropriate interaction with the driver arises. The taxi driver is someone who spends all day driving in city traffic (an activity that provokes either heart attack or delirium), in constant conflict with other human drivers. Consequently, he is nervous and hates every anthropomorphic creature. This attitude leads members of the radical chic to say that all taxi drivers are fascists. Not true. The taxi driver has no interest in ideological problems: he hates trade union demonstrations, not for their political orientation, but rather because they block traffic. He would hate a parade of Daughters of the Duce just as much. All he wants is a strong government that will send all private car owners to the gallows and establish a reasonable, but strict curfew—between 6
A.M.
and midnight, say. He is a misogynist, but only as regards women who move about. If they stay home and cook pasta, he can tolerate them.

Italian taxi drivers can be divided into three categories: those who express these opinions throughout the course of the ride; those who are silent and communicate their misanthropy through their driving; and those who work off their tensions in pure narration, describing what happened to them with this or that fare. These
tranches de vie
lack any allegorical significance, and if they were told in a tavern the bartender would feel obliged to send the narrator home, saying it was time to go to bed. But to the taxi driver these tales seem odd and surprising, and you would be wise to comment on them with frequent interjections on the order of "It's a crazy world! There're a lot of flakes out there! You mean they really said that?!" This participation does not budge the driver from his fabulatory autism, but it enhances your own self-esteem.

An Italian visiting New York runs some risks if, after reading on the driver's ID a name like De Cu-tugnatto, Esippositto, Perquocco, he reveals his own nationality. The driver invariably begins speaking a non-existent language, taking deep offense if you don't understand it. You must then immediately say, in English, that you speak only the dialect of your native region. For that matter, he is convinced that in Italy, nowadays, the national language is English. But, generally speaking, New York taxi drivers have either a Jewish name or a non-Jewish name. Those with Jewish names are Zionist reactionaries, those with non-Jewish names are anti-Semitic reactionaries. In either case, they do not make assertions, only pronunciamentos. It is hard to know how to behave with those who have a vaguely Middle Eastern or Russian name, as you can't figure out whether they are Jewish or not. To avoid accidents you must then say you have changed your mind and, instead of the corner of Seventh and Fourteenth, you want to go to Charlton Street. The driver will then have a tantrum, slam on the brakes, and make you get out, because New York drivers know only the streets with numbers and not those with names.

Paris taxi drivers, on the other hand, do not know any streets at all. If you ask one to take you to Place Saint-Sulpice, he'll let you off at the Odéon, saying that's the closest he can get. But first he will have moaned at length over your overweening demands with some cries of "Ah, ^a, monsieur, alors...."If you venture to suggest he consult a guidebook, he either does not reply or suggests that if you wanted bibliographical information you should have consulted an archivist-paleographer at the Sorbonne. Asians are a category apart: with extreme politeness they tell you not to worry, they'll find the place at once, and three times they make the circuit of the boulevards; then they ask what's the difference if, instead of taking you to the Gare du Nord, they've brought you to the Gare de l'Est—after all, there are plenty of trains at both stations.

In New York, as far as I can tell, you can't summon a taxi by telephone to some club; in Paris you can; but they don't come. In Stockholm you can call them
only
by phone, because they don't trust any old stranger walking along the street. But to discover what phone number to call, you would have to stop a passing taxi, and, as I just said, the drivers don't trust anybody.

German drivers are courteous and correct. They don't speak, they just press the accelerator. When you get out, white as a sheet, you realize why they come to Italy for relaxation and drive in front of you, doing sixty kilometers per hour in the fast lane.

If you set a Frankfurt driver in his Porsche to compete with a Rio driver in his battered Volkswagen, the Rio driver would arrive first, partly because he doesn't stop at traffic lights. If he did, he would see another battered Volkswagen pull up beside him, full with boys just waiting to reach out and snatch his passenger's wristwatch.

In any part of the world there is one sure way of recognizing a taxi driver: he is that person who never has any change.

1988

I have nothing against soccer. I don't go to stadiums, for the same reason that I wouldn't go and spend the night in the basement of the Main Railroad Station in Milan (or stroll in Central Park in New York after six in the afternoon), but if the occasion arises I watch a good game on TV with interest and pleasure, because I recognize and appreciate all the merits of this noble sport. I don't hate soccer. I hate soccer fans.

Please don't misunderstand me. My feelings towards fans are exactly those that xenophobes of the Lombard League feel towards immigrants from the Third World. "I'm not a racist, so long as they stay home." By "home" here I mean both the places where they like to gather during the week (bars, living rooms, clubs) and the stadiums, where I am not interested in what happens. And for me it's a plus if the Liverpool fans arrive, because then I can amuse myself reading the news reports: if we must have
cir-censes,
some blood at least should be spilled.

I don't like the soccer fan, because he has a strange defect: he cannot understand why you are not a fan yourself, and he insists on talking to you as if you were. To convey my meaning I will give you an analogy. I play the recorder (worse and worse, according to a public statement by Luciano Berio, but to be followed so closely by a Great Master is a satisfaction). Now let's suppose that I am in a train compartment and, to strike up a conversation, I ask the gentleman sitting opposite me, "Have you heard Frans Brüggen's latest CD?"

"What? Eh?"

"I'm talking about the
Pavane Lacbryme.
If you ask me, he takes the opening bars too slowly."

"I'm afraid I don't understand."

"I'm talking about Van Eyck, of course,
[slowly and distinctly
] The Blockflöte."

"Look, I'm not.... Do you play it with a bow?"

"Oh, I understand, you aren't—"

"No."

"That's funny. Did you know that, for a custom-made Coolsma, there's a three-year waiting list? So an ebony Moeck is better. It's the best, at least of those on the market. Galway says the same thing. Tell me something: do you go as far as the fifth variation of
Derdre Doen Daphne D'Over?
"

"Actually, I'm getting off at Parma."

"Oh, I see. You prefer to play in F rather than in C. It's more satisfying in some ways, I know. Mind you, I've discovered a sonata by Loeillet that—"

"Lay who?"

"But I'd like to hear you in the
Fantasias
of Tele-mann. Can you manage them? Don't tell me you use the German fingering?"

"Look, when it comes to the Germans, I.... Granted, the BMW is a great car, and I respect them, but—"

"I get it. You use the baroque fingering. Right. Though the St. Martin's-in-the-Fields bunch—"

There. You understand my point, I'm sure. And you will sympathize with my hapless traveling companion if he pulls the alarm cord. But the same thing happens with the soccer fan. And the situation is particularly difficult when the fan is also your taxi driver.

"So what about Vialli, eh?"

"I must have missed that."

"But you're going to watch the game tonight, aren't you?"

"No, I have to work on Book Z of the
Metaphysics,
you know? The Stagirite."

"Okay. You watch it and you'll see if I'm right or not. I say Van Basten might be the new Maradona. What do you think? But I'd keep an eye on Aldaiz, all the same."

And so on and on. Like talking to a wall. It isn't that he doesn't care a fig that / don't care a fig. It's that he can't conceive that
anyone
could exist and not care a fig. He wouldn't understand it even if I had three eyes and a pair of antennae emerging from the green scales of my nape. He has no notion of the diversity, the variety, the incomparability of the various possible worlds.

I have used the taxi driver as an example, but the situation is the same when the interlocutor belongs to the managerial class. It's like ulcers: they strike rich and poor alike. It is curious, however, that creatures so adamantine in their conviction that all humans are the same are ready to bash in the head of the fan who comes from the neighboring province. This ecumenical chauvinism wrings roars of admiration from me. It's as if the members of the Lombard League were to say: "Suffer the Africans to come unto us. So we can kick their ass."

1990

There are several ways to prepare good coffee. There is the caffè alla napoletana, the caffè espresso, café turque, cafesinho do Brasil, French café-filtre, American coffee. Each coffee, in its own way, is excellent. American coffee can be a pale solution served at a temperature of 100 degrees centigrade in plastic thermos cups, usually obligatory in railroad stations for purposes of genocide, whereas coffee made with an American percolator, such as you find in private houses or in humble luncheonettes, served with eggs and bacon, is delicious, fragrant, goes down like pure spring water, and afterwards causes severe palpitations, because one cup contains more caffeine than four espressos.

Swill-coffee is something apart. It is usually made from rotten barley, dead men's bones, plus a few genuine coffee beans fished out of the garbage bins of a Celtic dispensary. It is easily recognized by its unmistakable odor of feet marinated in dishwater. It is served in prisons, reform schools, sleeping cars, and luxury hotels. Of course, if you stay at the Plaza Majestic, at the Maria Jolanda & Brabante, at the Des Alpes et Des Bains, you can actually order an espresso, but when it arrives in your room it is almost covered by a sheet of ice. To avoid this mishap you ask instead for the Continental Breakfast, and you lie back, prepared to savor the pleasure of having the day's first meal in bed.

The Continental Breakfast consists of two rolls, one croissant, orange juice (in homeopathic measure), a curl of butter, a little pot of blueberry preserve, another of honey, and one of apricot jam, a jug of milk, now cold, a bill totaling a hundred thousand lire, and a devilish pot full of swill. The pots used by normal people—or the good old coffee makers from which you pour the fragrant beverage directly into the cup—allow the coffee to descend through a narrow nozzle or beak, whereas the upper part includes some safety device that keeps the lid closed. The Grand Hotel and wagon-lit swill arrives in a pot with a very wide beak—like a deformed pelican's—and with an extremely mobile lid, so devised that—drawn by an irrepressible
horror vacui
—it slides automatically downwards when the pot is tilted. These two devices allow the hellish pot to pour half the coffee immediately onto the rolls and jam and then, thanks to the sliding lid, to scatter the rest over the sheets. In sleeping cars the pots can be of cheaper manufacture, because the movement of the train itself assists in the scattering of the coffee; in hotels, on the other hand, the pot must be of china to make the sliding of the lid easier, but still devastating.

As to the origin and purpose of the coffeepot from hell, there are two schools of thought. The school of Freiburg asserts that this device allows the hotel to demonstrate, with fresh sheets, that your bed has been duly re-made. The school of Bratislava insists that the motivation is moralistic (cf. Max Weber,
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Catholicism):
the hellish coffeepot prevents any lazing in bed because it is very uncomfortable to eat a brioche, already steeped in coffee, when you are wrapped in coffee-soaked sheets.

The hellish coffeepot is not for sale to individuals, but is produced exclusively for the great hotel chains and for the wagon-lit company. Nor is it used in prisons, where the swill is served in mess tins, because sheets soaked in coffee would be harder to detect in the darkness if knotted together for purposes of escape.

The Freiburg school suggests having the waiter set the breakfast tray on the table and not on the bed. The Bratislava school responds that this indisputably avoids the pouring of coffee on the sheets, but not its spilling over the edge of the tray and soiling the pajamas (the hotel does not provide a new pair daily); and, in any case, pajamas or not, coffee taken at the table falls straight on the abdomen and the genitals, producing burns where they would not be advisable. To this objection the Freiburg school replies with a shrug; and, frankly, this answer is unsatisfactory.

1988

A few months ago, as I was strolling in New York, I saw, at a distance, a man I knew very well heading in my direction. The trouble was that I couldn't remember his name or where I had met him. This is one of those sensations you encounter especially when, in a foreign city, you run into someone you met back home, or vice versa. A face out of context creates confusion. Still, that face was so familiar that, I felt, I should certainly stop, greet him, converse; perhaps he would immediately respond, "My dear Umberto, how are you?" or even "Were you able to do that thing you were telling me about?" And I would be at a total loss. It was too late to flee. He was still looking at the opposite side of the street, but now he was beginning to turn his eyes towards me. I might as well make the first move; I would wave and then, from his voice, his first remarks, I would try to guess his identity.