Anyways, that's not what the countdown business was about ---it's about my dreaded driving test. It's scheduled for tomorrow at dawn, and if I don't pass it this time I'll have to pay another 150 euroes for a renewal of my learner's permit, and go on torturing myself with 25-euro lessons until I finally do pass it. We've already spent over 1,000 euroes on this process for the 2 of us. Bob was a sweetie & passed on his first try, but I got stuck on the part where they don't let you back up unless you can swivel your head all the way around backwards ---I swear I could see my opposite ear, but the gorgon who was testing me was never satisfied.
I told you how we discovered that we were tremendously illegal driving around with our American drivers' licenses, and how our insurance would not cover us if we were in an accident, and how we were even liable to get our car impounded etc etc unless we got Italian licenses right away. But did I tell you that there's only one way to get Italian drivers' licenses and that is to pay tons of money to a driving school? We hadn't twigged to that at first, and started out all the wrong way: lengthy humiliating trips to the Motor Vehicles Bureau (which is centralised and inaccessible, shut most of the time, and requires reams of different types of documentation every time you go there ---you're almost always missing an essential form or stamp) and paid a bunch of money but then learned that test inspectors are instructed to automatically flunk people who haven't gone through the driving school system. (I forgot to mention that we cannot simply have our licenses automatically converted like European citizens can; non-Community nationals have to start from scratch.)
Anyways, this summer we met a nice young woman from Kansas whose husband had some sort of (we think shady) connection with the boss at a driving school in Velletri --about 7 miles further down the Via Appia--- where we'd be assured of "good treatment" which seemed to mean they'd zip you through the cumbersome process of paperwork & legwork & assure you of success etc etc, so we teamed up with her & registered. First you have to study the Rules of the Road in a huge unintelligible tome, equipped with mock tests so you'll be ready for the most arcane experience imaginable: the rules are explained and the test questions are posed in intentionally obfuscating language; triple negatives, ambiguous terminology, uninformative illustrations, about 30 exceptions to the simple right-of-way rules, etc. After many weeks of wrestling with this slithery body of demi-knowledge (she'd come over to our house to study together & make brownies etc) you go in for the Theory part of the test, without which you cannot be admitted to the Practice part. This may have been the most humiliating part of the whole process, as the guy administering the test came up to each of the students who had been enrolled in the course and forcibly made us fill in the little boxes like he said, including a couple of glaring errors "so they won't suspect anything". The poor immigrant chumps who had been driving for years back in their home countries & thought this process was on the up & up all flunked. Each step of this odyssey costs a minor fortune.
Needless to say, we passed the theory part & now had to take some actual road-practice lessons, to understand what the inspectors required. Apparently the 3 most important things to remember are [1] whenever you are backing up you must turn your head all the way around and keep it that way until you shift out of reverse, [2] when getting out of the car you must turn your head way around and twist your arms so you are pulling the door latch with your other hand (?) and [3] when held up in traffic or at a red light, never let your car stop on a crosswalk. All these mean instant failure. Well, you're not supposed to run over any children either. Anyways, my second test is Saturday morning, and I'm feeling very vulnerable, as you never know when & which illogical requirement is going to jump out and bite you. I don't know how many times I can flunk the Practice part without having to do the Theory part all over again.
I hope my cute new haircut will help.
Well, after all that high-power dreading, I'm afraid my success, welcome as it was, suffered somehow from the intervention of Divine Injustice. I guess I shouldn't be surprised; after all these are people who've been brought up by people who were brought up by people, back into the mists of time, believing in an Angry Old Man as a deity --which is bad enough-- and a corrupt, double-talking church as His Agency here on Earth. The instructions are not at all BE GOOD, nor even OBEY ME, but basically boil down to SEEM TO OBEY ME, and it makes for terrible citizenship. So I was only mildly appalled by the driving instructor's reassurances that nobody cared if I drove like this once out on the road, but I HAD to drive like this for the test. In other words, they were not teaching me to drive properly; they were teaching me to pass the driving test.
In the event there wasn't really much of a test at all; not at all like the first time round: we were summoned for 9am to wait in a chilly drafty storefront, which we did for over an hour before I made bold to enquire about the prognosis and was told that the inspector's car had broken down and that someone had been dispatched to fetch him from Rome and that the proceedings would not begin before eleven. There were three people behind the desks who knew this, and ten anxious blue-fingered candidates milling about who hadn't been told. Of course me & Bob repaired to the nearest bar for the comforts of a hot cappuccino and sticky bun. There was a specialty delicatessen next door to the bar where I found a rare & thrilling kind of cheese I'd been looking for for years, so things were looking up & by the time we were all piled into little red cars & set off to the proving grounds (at this point Bob went home to warm up) I was feeling somewhat better about life. Particularly after the instructor told us that the inspector was in a hurry to get back to town to see about his car, and would probably not be too thorough with our tests.
Then followed that endless hurry-up-and-wait business, as one by one the candidates were whisked away to drive summarily around the block (more or less) and most of them passed. A curious bit of logistics was employed: as each candidate drove off with the instructor & the inspector in the car, the remaining candidates followed in two other cars driven by people from the school. It was a silly procession, round & round more or less the same route, one less of us each time.
I was the last on the list, it was lunchtime, but the scrawny teenager with shaved eyebrows and earrings all over his face, one place ahead of me, turned out to have something wrong with his papers and this created quite an upheaval: it seems his learner's permit had been stolen and the police report of the theft was missing the all-important stamp-seal that authenticates it. The boy went into TILT. He was in the car with me and the boss-lady. She tried to reassure him that he could simply get the thing stamped next week and take the next scheduled test, which would be in 15 days' time. Fifteen whole days! It was supposed to be today! He hurled himself into a hysterical tantrum, tearing his clothes and howling that he was the most unfortunate star-crossed man on earth; the fates had shafted him, why him; nothing this bad had ever happened to anyone before; his grandmother had died the day before and he was missing the funeral for his driving test and now wasn't going to be able to do the test either; he treated us to some truly rococo swearing involving not only the standard Holy-Mother-crossed-with-various-barnyard-animals stuff, but ranging far beyond that into lots of refreshing anatomy mixtures and one particularly juicy one involving Eve herself! Then he had the brilliant idea of calling up his mother at the funeral and ordering her in pretty rough terms to instruct his uncle the carabiniere (who was also there at the funeral) to rush over to the motor vehicle inspection yard (where we were headed) with his official stamp-seal (which he brings with him to funerals?) immediately and set things right. And damned if we didn't find them all lined up when we arrived at the yard, ready to spring into action. As this remarkably cohesive family was involved in a bout of barking & paper-ruffling, the inspector motioned wearily for me to get in the car. He was clearly not in the mood, and put me through a few desultory paces, driving up the via Appia and back, a mere ten minutes with no occasion to shift into reverse, and pronounced me fit to drive. Oh sure, he managed to get in a few scornful cracks about how ugly Atlanta is (his son is at Georgia Tech) and how all Americans drive automatic shift cars etc, but he clearly didn't have the stomach for any of the high-level sadism that goes with his office, and handed me my new license as if it were sticky & smelly. As the boss-lady and I drove off it looked like the pincushion boy was going to get his test after all.
On the ride back we reflected on the implications for society of a generation of young people with no frustration threshhold at all; no sense of proportion; no capacity for relativising; no recognition of cause & effect; accountability. Instant gratification or else. This kid hadn't cared enough about his grandmother (or her bereaved offspring) to postpone his driving test in order to attend the funeral; he hadn't enough respect for his parents' grieving to abstain from calling on them to drop what they were doing to service his needs (who leaves their cellphone on at a funeral, anyways?) and he simply could not stand to imagine waiting another two weeks to take his test. All right; we don't know what the real situation was; maybe the grandmother was a detestable dragon & they were all happier & better off without her. Maybe he desperately needed that license right away to be able to take his quadripeligic brother to the rehabilitation clinic on Monday or he loses his place. Or he's just landed a job that depends on his motor-mobility to be able to keep it. Whatever the truth of it, me and the boss-lady didn't feel we wanted to drive on the same road as this kid. Beginning with his feeling free to let loose with that elaborate heavy-duty swearing in front of two old ladies he didn't know from Adam. "That's the kind of brat who bludgeons his mother to death with a hammer because she won't give him the money for a phone card ---and she deserves it for bringing him up that way", muttered the boss-lady. Either way, the inspector seemed to feel bludgeoned enough to wave us through.
Maybe this is an extreme example, but I can't help feeling it has tarnished my triumph. One would like to feel that one has met the challenge oneself; that one has studied hard, and learned the stuff, and been judged on the merits of one's performance. But that's not always possible, and I am relieved at least that I got my drivers license, whatever the process. Sigh.
That evening we met some local friends at a concert and when I described my morning's experience to them, they nodded with great empathy and understanding: "I know; I know; these things depend on the phases of the moon; the color of your shoes; everything except what they should depend on." Which brings us back to Mother Church, but I've already treated you to that one.
Actually who am I to say that pre-Christian pagan life was any more rational?
As the immediate past recedes ---and after all I did go home with what I'd come for--- I find I don't really care all that much any more. Except for a residual hankering for a little more consideration for cause & effect.
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