They will do everything possible to delay
the completion of transactions because they enjoy exercising petty tyranny, nurses,
orderlies, doctors, and prison guards. ("We're going as fast as we
can.", etc. Usual bullshit.) Bureaucratic cunts are some of the worst.
In May of 1981, as I was passing through
Amsterdam, I lost my wallet (or it was stolen, there are thieves even in
Holland). It contained only a small amount of money but a number of documents
and cards. I didn't become aware of the loss until, at the airport, about to
leave the country, I realised my credit card was missing. In the half an hour
remaining before takeoff I conducted a desparate search for a place to report
the loss (or theft). Within five minutes I was received by an airport police
sergeant who, in good English, explained that the matter was not within the
airport's jurisdiction, as the wallet had been lost in the city; nevetheless,
he agreed to type out a report and assured me that, at nine, when the office
opened, he would personally telephone American Express. And so, within ten
minutes, the Dutch part of my case was dealt with.
Back in Milan, I telephone American Express and ascertain that my card
number has been circulated worldwide, and the following day a new card arrives.
What a great thing civilisation is, I say to myself.
Then I tally the other lost documents and I make a report at the police
station. Another ten minutes. How wonderful, I say to myself: our police are
just like the Dutch. Among the lost items is my press card; I am able to obtain
a duplicate in three days. Better and better.
Alas,
I have also lost my driver's license. But this seems the least of my worries.
We live in a capital of the automobile industry, there's a Ford in our future,
our country's famous superhighways are the envy of the world. I call the
Italian Automobile Club and am told that I have only to give them the number of
the lost license. I realise I don't have it written it
down anywhere, except, of course, on the lost license itself and I try to find
out if they can look up my name in their files and find the number. Apparently
this is impossible.
I cannot live without
driving: it's a life-or-death matter and I decide to what as a rule I don't do:
find a shortcut, use connections. As a rule, I say, I don't do this because I
dislike putting friends or acquaintances to any trouble and I hate it when people
use such tactics with me. And besides, I live in Milan, where, if you need a
certificate from a city office, you don't have to call the mayor; it's quicker
to join the line at the window, where they're fairly efficient. But, the fact
is, anything involving our car makes all of us a bit nervous, so I call Rome
and speak with a Highly Placed Person at the Automobile Club there, who puts me
in touch with a Highly Placed Person Automobile Club of Milan, who tells his
secretary to do everything that can be done. Everything, in this case,
unfortunately amounts to very little, despite the secretary's politeness.
She
teaches me a few tricks; she urges me to track down an old receipt from Avis or
Hertz where the number of my license should appear on the carbon copy. In one
day she helps me fill out the preliminary forms then she tells me where I have
to go, namely the license office of the prefacture, an immense hall, teeming
with a desparate and malodorous crowd, reminiscent of the station of New Delhi
in the movies about the revolt of the sepoys; and here the
postulants, telling horrible tales ("I've been here since the first
invasion of Libay,"), are encamped with thermoses and sandwiches,
and when you reach the head of the line, as I personally discover, the window
is closing.
In
any case, I have to admit, it adds up to a few days of standing in line, during
which every time you reach the window, you learn that
you should have filled out a different form or should have brought a different
denomination of tax stamp and you are sent back to the end of the line. But,
as everyone knows, this is the way things are. All is in order, I'm finally
told: come back in about two weeks. Meanwhile, I take taxis.
Two
weeks later, after climbing over some postulants who have by now now gone into
irreversible coma, I discover at the window that the number I had copied from
the Avis receipt, whether through an error at the source or through defective
carbon paper or through deterioration of the ancient document, is not correct. Nothing
can be done if you give them the wrong number. "Very
well," I say, "you obviously can't look for a number that I'm unable
to tell you but you can look under Eco and find the number."
No.
Maybe it's ill will, or stress, or maybe licenses are listed only by number. In any case, what I ask is beyond their capabilities.
Try at the office where you first got the license, they say: the city of
Alessandria, many years ago. There, they should be able to reveal your number
to you.
I don't have time to go to Alessandria especially now that I
can't drive, so I fall back on a second shortcut: I 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
realise 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 peak 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 day's 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 wrote 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 paper, 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 manœuvering 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 authorises 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 tke 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 seires 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
drive 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 Fabriano, 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 civilisation 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, pass 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 jsut 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
swoopp 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 motorised 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
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