How to Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays (5 page)

We were now only a few feet from each other, I was just about to break into a broad, radiant smile, when suddenly I recognized him. It was Anthony Quinn. Naturally, I had never met him in my life, nor he me. In a thousandth of a second I was able to check myself, and I walked past him, my eyes staring into space.

Afterwards, reflecting on this incident, I realized how totally normal it was. Once before, in a restaurant, I had glimpsed Charlton Heston and had felt an impulse to say hello. These faces inhabit our memory; watching the screen, we spend so many hours with them that they are as familiar to us as our relatives', even more so. You can be a student of mass communication, debate the effects of reality, or the confusion between the real and the imagined, and expound the way some people fall permanently into this confusion; but still you are not immune to the syndrome. And there is worse.

I have received confidences from people who, appearing fairly frequently on TV, have been subjected to the mass media over a certain period of time. I'm not talking about Johnny Carson or Oprah Winfrey, but public figures, experts who have participated in panel discussions often enough to become recognizable. All of them complain of the same disagreeable experience. Now, as a rule, when we see someone we don't know personally, we don't stare into his or her face at length, we don't point out the person to the friend at our side, we don't speak of this person in a loud voice when he or she can overhear. Such behavior would be rude, even—if carried too far—aggressive. But the same people who would never point to a customer at a counter and remark to a friend that the man is wearing a smart tie behave quite differently with famous faces.

My guinea pigs insist that, at a newsstand, in the tobacconist's, as they are boarding a train or entering a restaurant toilet, they encounter others who, among themselves, say aloud, "Look, there's X." "Are you sure?" "Of course I'm sure. It's X, I tell you." And they continue their conversation amiably, while X hears them, and they don't care if he hears them: it's as if he didn't exist.

Such people are confused by the fact that a protagonist of the mass media's imaginary world should abruptly enter real life, but at the same time they behave in the presence of the real person as if he still belonged to the world of images, as if he were on a screen, or in a weekly picture magazine. As if they were speaking in his absence.

I might as well have grabbed Anthony Quinn by the lapel, dragged him to a phone booth, and called a friend to say, "Talk about coincidence! I've run into Anthony Quinn. And you know something? He seems real!" (After which I would throw Quinn aside and go on about my business.)

The mass media first convinced us that the imaginary was real, and now they are convincing us that the real is imaginary; and the more reality the TV screen shows us, the more cinematic our everyday world becomes. Until, as certain philosophers have insisted, we will think that we are alone in the world, and that everything else is the film that God or some evil spirit is projecting before our eyes.

1989

Some time ago, I enjoyed a fascinating experience in the Svalbard Islands, when the local Academy of Sciences invited me to spend several years there studying the Bonga nation, a society that flourishes in an area between Terra Incognita and the Isles of the Blest.

The Bongas' activities are more or less the same as our own, but they have an unusual insistence on the explicit, the declarative. They ignore the art of the implicit, the taken-for-granted.

For example, if we now begin to talk, obviously we use words; but we feel no need to say so. A Bonga, on the contrary, in speaking to another Bonga, begins by saying: "Pay attention. I am now speaking and I will use some words." We build houses and then (with the exception of the Japanese) we indicate to possible visitors the street, the number, the name of the occupant. The Bongas write "house" on every house, and "door" beside the door. If you ring a Bonga gentleman's bell, he will open the door, saying, "Now I am opening the door," and then introduce himself. If he invites you to dinner, he will show you to a chair with the words: "This is the table, and these are the chairs!" Then, in a triumphant tone, he announces, "And now, the maid! Here is Rosina. She will ask you what you want and will serve you your favorite dish!" The procedure is the same in restaurants.

It is strange to observe the Bongas when they go to the theater. As the house lights go down, an actor appears and says, "Here is the curtain!" Then the curtain parts and other actors enter, to perform, say,
Hamlet
or
Le Malade imaginaire.
But each actor is introduced to the audience, first with his real first and last names, then with the name of the character he is to play. When an actor has finished speaking, he announces: "Now, a moment of silence!" Some seconds go by, and then the next actor starts speaking. Needless to say, at the end of the first act, one of the players comes to the footlights to inform everyone that "there will now be an intermission."

What particularly impressed me was the fact that their musical shows consist, as ours do, of spoken skits, songs, duets, and dances. But in our country I was accustomed to the idea that two comedians first do their skit, then one begins to sing a song, then both exit as some pretty girls trip on stage and begin a dance, to give the spectator a bit of relief. Finally, the dance ends, and the actors return. In the Bonga theater, however, first the actors announce that a comic skit will now be seen, then they say they will now sing a duet, indicating that it will be humorous, and finally the last actor on stage announces, "Now the dance!" The thing that most amazed me was not that, during the intermission, some advertising slogans appeared on the curtain—they do this in our theaters—but that, after announcing the intermission, the actor duly added, "And now, commercials!"

For a long time I wondered what drove the Bongas to this obsessive clarification. Perhaps, I said to myself, they are somewhat slow-witted and if a person doesn't say "I'm going now" they don't realize that the person is saying goodbye. And to some extent this must have been the case. But there was another reason. The Bongas are performance-worshipers, and therefore they have to transform everything—even the implicit—into performance.

During my stay among the Bongas I also had the opportunity of reconstructing the history of applause. In ancient times, the Bongas applauded for two reasons: either because they were happy with a good performance, or because they wanted to honor some person of great merit. The duration of the applause indicated who was most appreciated and most loved. Again, in the past, wily impresarios, to convince audiences of a production's worth, stationed in the house some ruffians paid to applaud even when there was no motive. When television shows were first broadcast in Bonga, the producers lured relatives of the organizers into the studio and, thanks to a flashing light (invisible to TV viewers at home), alerted them when they were to applaud. In no time the viewers discovered the trick, but, while in our country such applause would have immediately been discredited, it was not so for the Bongas. The home audience began to want to join in the applause too, and hordes of Bonga citizens turned up of their own free will in the country's TV studios, ready to pay for the privilege of clapping. Some of these enthusiasts enrolled in special applause classes. And since at this point everything was in the open, it was the host himself who said, in a loud voice at the appropriate moments, "And now let's hear a good round of applause." But soon the studio audience began applauding without any urging from the host. He had simply to question someone in the crowd, asking him, for example, what he did for a living, and when he replied, "I'm in charge of the gas chamber at the city dog pound," his words were greeted by a resounding ovation. (This used to happen occasionally in the West, as when Bob Hope appeared and, before he could open his mouth to say hello, frenzied applause was already heard in the house. Or a host would say, "Here we are again, folks, like every Thursday," and the public would not only applaud, but split its sides.)

Applause became so indispensable that even during the commercials, when the salesman would say, "Buy PIP slimming tablets," oceanic applause would be heard. The viewers knew very well that there was no one in the studio with the salesman, but the applause was necessary; otherwise the program would have seemed contrived, and the viewers would switch channels. The Bongas want television to show them real life, as it is lived, without pretense. The applause comes from the audience (which is like us), not from the actor (who is pretending), and it is therefore the only guarantee that television is a window open on the world. The Bongas are currently preparing a program created entirely by actors applauding; it will be entitled
TeleTruth.
In order to feel that their feet are firmly on the ground, the Bongas now applaud all the time, even when they are not watching TV. They applaud at funerals, not because they are pleased or because they want to please the dear departed, but so as not to feel like shadows among other shadows, to make sure they are alive and real, like the images they see on the tiny screen. One day I was visiting a Bonga house when a relative entered, saying, "Granny was just run over by a truck!" The others all sprang to their feet and clapped wildly.

I cannot say that the Bongas are our inferiors. Indeed, one of them told me that they plan to conquer the world. And this idea is not entirely Platonic, as I realized when I came home. That evening I turned on the TV and I saw a host introducing the girls who assisted him, then announcing that he would do a comic monologue, and concluding with: "And now our ballet!" A distinguished gentleman, debating grave political problems with another distinguished gentleman, at a certain point broke off to say, "And now, a break for the commercials." Some entertainers even introduced the audience. Others, the camera that was filming them. Everyone applauded.

Distressed, I left the house and went to a restaurant famous for its nouvelle cuisine. The waiter arrived, bringing me three leaves of lettuce. And he said, "This is our macédoine of laitue lombarde, dotted with rughetta from Piedmont, finely chopped and dressed with sea salt, marinated in the balsamic vinegar of the house, anointed with first-pressing virgin olive oil from Umbria."

1987

The watch whose description I am reading (Patek Philippe calibre 89) is a pocket watch, a double case in eighteen-carat gold, endowed with thirty-three functions. The magazine article introducing the watch does not indicate the price, I suppose because of lack of space (though it would suffice to indicate the number of billions without printing all the zeros). Seized by a profound frustration, I went out and bought myself a new Casio for fifty thousand lire, just as all those who feel a mad desire for a Ferrari go out and calm themselves by purchasing at least a car radio. Anyway, to carry a pocket watch, I would have to buy an appropriate waistcoat as well.

Or, I told myself, I could keep it on the table. I would spend hours and hours knowing the day, the week, the month, the year, the decade, the century, the year's position in the leap-year cycle, hour, minute, and second of daylight saving time, hour, minute, and second in the time zone of my choice, temperature, sidereal time, moon phase, time of dawn and time of sunset, equation of time, position of the sun in the zodiac—not to mention the fun I could have shuddering at the infinity of the complete and mobile depiction of the stellar map, or pressing the stop button at the various dials of the chronograph and the tachymeter, or deciding when I should rest a moment and relax in the assurance of the built-in alarm. I was forgetting: a special indicator would show how much power remained. And still another thing: if I wanted, I could also know the exact time. But why should I?

If I were to possess this miracle, I would have no interest in knowing that it is ten minutes past ten. On the contrary, I would observe the rise and the setting of the sun (and I could do this even in a darkened room), I would learn the temperature, I would cast horoscopes, I would dream in the daytime of the blue dial where I could see the stars at night, but I would spend the night meditating on the time remaining before Easter. With such a watch it is no longer necessary to bother about external time, because that would become our sole concern for all our lives; and the time the watch narrates would be, not the immobile reflection of eternity, but eternity in progress. In other words, time would be only a fabled hallucination produced by that magic mirror.

I raise these issues because, for a while now, there have been magazines available devoted to collectible watches, rather expensive magazines printed on shiny paper with full-color pages, and I wonder whether they are bought only by readers who leaf through them as though they were volumes of fairy tales, or whether the publications are addressed to a public of serious purchasers, as I sometimes suspect. This would mean that the more the mechanical watch, miracle of centuries of experience, becomes useless, the stronger and more widespread is the desire to display, to regard fondly, to cherish as an investment, these wondrous and perfect time machines.

It is obvious that these machines are not designed to communicate the fleeting hour. The abundance of functions and their elegant distribution over numerous and symmetrical dials mean that, to learn that it is twenty past three on Friday, May 24, you have to shift your eyes at some length, following the movement of numerous hands, as, in sequence, you record the information in a notebook. For that matter, the envious Japanese electronics experts, now ashamed of their former practicality, have come out with promises of microscopic dials that will display barometric pressure, altitude, ocean depth, countdown timing, and temperature, not to mention, of course, data bank, telemetric time indicator, eight alarms, money-changing calculator, and hour signal.

All these clocks, like the whole information industry today, run the risk of no longer communicating anything because they tell too much. But they also possess another characteristic of the information industry: they no longer speak of anything except themselves and their internal functioning. The zenith is reached in some ladies' watches with imperceptible hands, just a marble face without hours or minutes, shaped in such a way that, at most, you could say we are somewhere between noon and midnight, and perhaps it's the day before yesterday. Anyway (as the designer hints), what else do the ladies for whom the watch is meant have to do, except look at a device that narrates its own vanity?