In Maremma (7 page)

Even so, we were determined to master the theory of
precedenza,
not only because we had to, but because, as theory, it had its own mysterious allure. Likewise we memorized the rules of passing (the most ignored of all on Italian roads), the basic mechanical principles of the car engine, and where it was and wasn't permissible to park. We learned what the
croce di Sant'Andrea
means, and what distinguished railroad crossings
con barriere
from those without.

At last, the morning of the test arrived. Having spent the night before in Rome, studying furiously in
a hotel lobby, we drove out very early to the Motorizzazione Civile (Motor Vehicles Authority), the offices of which were located far from the center of the city, on the Via Salaria. Like many municipal buildings in Italy, the Motorizzazione was an imposing, ugly structure, its very architecture seemingly designed to bully and offend. The walls were of dirty stone, and there were NO DOGS signs posted everywhere. Inside the light was greasy. There was a distant sound of traffic, a smell of gasoline. The testing room was a large and windowless trapezoid, cluttered with chair-desks of the sort more commonly found in high schools. In a sort of antechamber, a United Nations General Assembly of examinees sat waiting. Most of them were accompanied by instructors from their driving schools, who quizzed them on
precendenza
even as they waited.

DL was summoned first to the exam room, along with another American, a language teacher from Chicago who had already failed the test once. They spoke in English while the examiner, a prematurely elderly young man, read through their
pratiche.
With the language teacher, all appeared to be in order. Then the examiner opened DL's file, placing his medical certificate alongside his passport. For several minutes he looked from the certificate to the passport, the passport to the certificate. Then he closed both and pushed them across the desk.

“The medical certificate says that you were born in 1971,” he said. “The passport says you were born in 1961.”

DL laughed. “Oh, that's a mistake. I'm not surprised—you see, the doctor who gave me the eye exam was blind.”

No laughter. Not even a smile.

“Also your passport says that you were born in Pennsylvania, USA.”

“That's true.”

“But your medical certificate says that you were born in Pittsburgh, USA.”

“That's also true. Pittsburgh is the city. Pennsylvania is the state.”

“But they don't agree. They must agree.”

Here the language teacher entered the fray, assuring the examiner that DL was not lying: Pittsburgh really was a city in Pennsylvania. He went on to explain, with the remarkable calm of a teacher, that in America, the state of birth is always given on passports, just as in Italy the city of birth is given. No doubt the doctor put down the city in order to remain in accordance with Italian rules.

“But they don't agree,” the examiner repeated. “The documents must agree.”

“Pittsburgh is the second largest city in Pennsylvania;” DL threw in hopefully.

It was no use. The examiner was intractable. DL was ordered out and told to make a new appointment.

When he told MM what had happened, MM looked at his own documents, and discovered the same discrepancy: his medical certificate said that he had been born in Biloxi, while his passport said that he had been born in Mississippi.

We went to Bruno's office. He was as implacable as the examiner was intractable. First he looked at the medical forms. Then he looked at the passports. “Well, the examiner was right,” he said after a moment. “This is the doctor's fault. The documents must agree.”

We thought about it. We grew calmer. Of course the
documents must agree, we acknowledged. There was no reason to be angry with the examiner. He had
ragione.
He was just doing his job.

Only hours later, once we were back at Podere Fiume, did we realize what really happened that morning: for a few moments we thought like Italians.

Six weeks later, we returned to the Motorizzazione and this time actually took the test. MM went first, along with an Arab and an Albanian. For forty-five minutes, DL watched through an open door while the candidates sat hunched across the desk from the examiner, who made diagrams with his hands in the air. Not a word could be heard, though if one watched carefully one could see, intermittently, that MM was laughing.

“Did you pass?” DL asked anxiously, when the three men emerged.

“Sono promosso”
(“I am promoted”), he said.

It was now DL's turn. While he and two other candidates—both Romanian—responded to questions in the trapezoid-shaped room, MM answered the questions of those who had yet to be tested. Tension fostered an atmosphere of intimacy. For a time MM, the Tunisian woman who worked at the Saudi Arabian embassy, and the elegant lady from Bangladesh formed a little community. Worriedly they listened while he told them what had been asked (why is it dangerous to drive quickly on a curve?) and what had not (nothing about
precedenza;
a sigh of collective relief). A quarter of an hour passed. All at once one of the Romanians came flying out of the room, as if he had quite literally been ejected.
“Ha
bocciato,”
a driving teacher murmured darkly.

“It's the second time, too,” said another.

Half an hour after that, his countryman stormed out. He too had failed. DL was now alone with the examiner. Another quarter of an hour passed—by now the women were beside themselves—when at last he came out.

“
Anch'io sono promosso,”
he said—which meant only that he too had won the right to take another test.

A few days later, we were talking with Pina and Giampaolo, who ran our favorite restaurant in Maremma—Il Mulino in Semproniano—about the driving test. “Why do they make it so hard to pass?” we asked.

“It goes back to Fascism;” Giampaolo said. “In those days, the state was sadistic. The idea was to make private life as difficult as possible, to discourage independent thinking.”

“And to encourage corruption,” Pina added. “Bribery. This way, people who worked for the state could make extra money.”

The Fascist attitude also led to the invention of a whole industry: the industry of the
agente.

How odd that we were having this conversation in Tuscany, on a hilltop not far from the sea, on that lovely peninsula that was for centuries, quite literally, the mother of invention! After all, Italy gave us Leonardo da Vinci, and Galileo, and Marconi. Now most of that energy had been eaten up by the exigencies of contending with bureaucracy—contending with it, or evading it. If there were no longer poets in Italy, it was because bureaucracy had slain or absorbed them.

One month later.

To take the “practical” driving exam, we first had to meet someone called “Signor Antonio” in the Olympic Village in Rome. Since we had to be there at eight AM, we left home at five. (How pointless it all seemed, driving to Rome in the dark to take a driving exam!)

Although we had never been there before, getting to the proper piazza in the Villaggio Olimpico proved to be a piece of cake. Since we arrived at seven thirty, there was time for us to have a coffee before meeting up with Signor Antonio. Light was beginning to creep into the sky, which had an orange cast, later than it seemed it should have. This was the sirocco, that African wind that carries with it the sand of the Sahara, and that would worsen as the morning progressed, so that by the time we took the exam, it would be necessary to use headlights.

Having had our coffee, and not finding Signor Antonio, we walked around. It was in the summer of 1960 that the XVII Olympic games were held in Rome, and in addition to the dormitories for the athletes, which were now depressing apartments (according to a placard, one had recently been “de-ratted and disinfested”), other reminders of the event included an unmown park strewn with hypodermics; a granite obelisk bearing the five interlocking rings representing the Olympics; and streets named for the participating nations, many of which (Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union) no longer existed. There was also a grimly lit pharmacy with a gigantic sign in its front window announcing a special on “Incontinence Diapers.”

Presently Signor Antonio arrived, in a white Fiat 600.
We exchanged pleasantries, after which MM drove, then DL. After half an hour, we were through—or so we thought—for we had been given to understand that Signor Antonio was the examiner. But he was not. Instead, he explained, he simply worked for one of the more than five hundred driving schools in Rome; his function was not to conduct the exam but to give us a quick “lesson”—which we thought was the exam—and to provide the car for the real exam. In Italy, one cannot legally take the exam in one's own car. In Italy, one has to take the exam in a car specially outfitted with two sets of brakes—one for the driver and one for the forward passenger. (In retrospect, we thought of all the questions we should have asked. But then again, when the
agente
tells you, “Meet Signor Antonio at the Villaggio Olimpico,” why would you think to verify that he was the one who would dispense the license?)

Then the examiner himself arrived. He was a short, misshapen, corrupt-looking man with hair like a Brillo pad. In his arms he carried a thick briefcase which, we soon learned from Signor Antonio, contained the licenses for all the examinees who were waiting for him. Before beginning his work, though, he first had to be taken to the bar for coffee by Signor Antonio and his cohort of other “instructors.” While they were in the bar, an order for the exams was worked out. There were twelve examinees. We were to go seventh and eighth.

The long and the short of the exam is that one of us passed, the other failed. The one who failed was the first one of us to go, and the first American of the day as well. (All of the Asians had already failed.) Halfway into the exam, the misshapen examiner began delivering himself of anti-American invective to Signor Antonio, who was
in the car to man the second set of brakes. “Americans think they can come into Italy and get whatever they want,” he said. One did one's best to maintain one's cool. “They have to be taught,” he continued ominously. One called attention to two cars that had just run a stop sign, and was ignored. “This American;” the examiner said, then broke off to call Signor Antonio's attention to a poster for a female candidate in the upcoming election called Monica Ciccolini and made a deeply rude remark about her person, as well as the similarity of her name to that of the Italian porn actress and politician Cicciolina. Signor Antonio, meanwhile, had joined cause with the examiner and put in his oar about Americans—even though we had paid him one hundred thousand lire apiece to advocate for us.

Why one of us passed and the other failed was a caprice, for the system was designed so that the examiner did not have to be accountable for his decisions. If a passing surge of antipathy towards Americans was his reason for failing one of us (who passed the following month), the examiner would face no reprisals. We recalled once again what Pina and Giampaolo had said about the sadism of the Fascists; for all its rhetoric about
noi
(us), Fascism was deeply divisive. The populace was to be kept down, made anxious and insecure, even tyrannized, with the state transformed into an almost Homeric god. In the person of the driving examiner, we met that same sadism: a false and repellent pride in being Italian—and in
not
being Japanese, or Indian, or African, or Canadian—the implications of which were given weight by the then-recent movement of some citizens in the rich, Northern part of the country to secede and form a new nation called Padania; by the rise of
Neo-Fascism in the raiment of Forza Italia; by the constant pressure of the Catholic church to sustain a culture of conformism. Nor was the irony of this scene being enacted in the Olympic Village, a forty-year-old monument to an ideal of fraternity, lost on us. For though the Italians were vocal in criticizing their government, the fact remained that Italians had the system they had chosen, the system they wanted.