by Umberto Eco
What happens when your suitcase is crammed to the bursting point? Fools rush out and buy a second suitcase, in suede or pigskin. But this solution means that afterwards you have both hands occupied. Briefcase Expander is, so to speak, a packsaddle that sits astride your regular suitcase, and you can use it for everything that won't fit into the first bag, achieving an overall girth of six feet or more. For forty-five dollars you enjoy the sensation of boarding the plane with a mule under your arm.
Ankle-Valet ($19.95) allows you to conceal your credit cards in a secret pocket fastened to your calf. Indispensable for dope smugglers. Drive-Alert is placed behind the ear when you drive, so that the moment you doze off—or start to zzz, as the comics put it—and your head slumps forward beyond an established safety limit, an alarm goes off. The photographs indicate that it transforms the wearer's ears into something reminiscent of Star Trek, Elephant Man, or the young Clark Gable. When you are wearing it, if someone asks you, "Will you marry me?" don't answer with too vigorous an affirmative. The ultrasounds would do you in at once.
I would also mention in passing an automatic birdfeed distributor, a personalized beer stein with a bicycle bell (ring it to order a second round), a face sauna, a Coca-Cola fountain in the form of a gasoline pump, and Bicycle-Seat: a double bicycle seat, one per buttock. Good for those with a prostate problem. The ad informs us that the device has a "split-end design (no pun intended)."
If between planes you also explore the newsstands, you learn many things. Some days ago I discovered that there are various magazines addressed exclusively to treasure-hunters. Trésors de l'Histoire, for example, which is published in Paris, contains articles about fabulous caches possibly buried in various zones of France, giving specific geographical and topographical details and information on treasures already found in those localities.
The issue I bought includes directions regarding treasures to be found even on the bed of the Seine, ranging from ancient coins to objects thrown into the river over the centuries: swords, vases, boats, not to mention other goodies including works of art; there are also treasures buried in Brittany by the apocalyptic sect of Eon de l'Estoile in the Middle Ages; treasures from the magic forest of Brocéliande, dating back to the days of Merlin and the Grail cycle, with detailed instructions for identifying, if you strike it rich, the Holy Grail itself; treasures interred in Normandy by the Vendéens during the French Revolution; the treasure of Olivier le Diable, the barber of Louis XI; treasures mentioned—ostensibly in jest, though they actually exist—in the Arsène Lupin novels. Further, there is a Guide de la France trésoraire, which the article only describes generically, because the complete work is available for 26 francs. It contains 74 maps (scale 1:100), allowing the reader to choose the region most convenient for him.
Meanwhile, the reader will be wondering how you hunt for a treasure underground or underwater. No problem: the magazine offers articles and advertisements describing a vast range of equipment essential for the treasure-hunter. There are different types of detector, variously sensitive to gold or metals or other precious materials. For underwater hunting, there are wetsuits, masks, machines with discriminating devices that identify only jewels, and, of course, there are fins. There are even special credit cards with which, after spending two thousand dollars, you can select another two hundred dollars' worth of goods, free. (The existence of such a bonus is puzzling; by this time the customer should have discovered, at the very least, a casket filled with pieces of eight).
For eight hundred dollars you can be the proud owner of an M-Scan. Though somewhat bulky, it can identify copper coins at a depth of twenty-two centimeters, a chest at two meters, and a metal mass enclosed in an impenetrable cell as much as three meters below your feet. Further instructions explain how to hold and orient the various types of detectors, advising that rainy weather facilitates the hunt for large masses, while dry weather is best for small objects. The Beachcomber 60 is specially engineered for searching beaches and highly mineralized terrain (as you can imagine, if a copper coin is buried next to a vein of diamonds the machine might act up and ignore the coin altogether). Moreover, another ad reminds us that ninety percent of the world's gold is still to be discovered, and the easy-to-handle Goldspear detector (fifteen hundred dollars) has been specially conceived to identify auriferous veins. A pocket detector (Metallocator) is available at a modest price for use in fireplaces and antique furniture. For less than forty dollars, an AF2 spray will clean and remove rust from the coins you find. Also for the less wealthy enthusiast, there are numerous radioesthesic plumblines. And for further information there are numerous volumes with such alluring titles as The Mysterious Story of French Treasures; Guide to Buried Treasure; France, the Promised Land; Caves and Caverns of France; and Treasure-hunting in Belgium and Switzerland.
You will wonder why, with all this inestimable wealth at their disposal, the editors of this magazine waste the best days of their lives writing instead of setting off for the forests of Brittany. The fact is that the magazine, the books, the detectors, the fins, the rust-cleaners, and all the rest are sold by the same organization, which has a chain of shops virtually covering the continent. So the mystery is quickly elucidated: they have already found their treasure.
What remains to be discovered is the identity of those who enrich these editors, but they are probably the same people who, in Italy, try to find spectacular bargains at televised auctions and rush to exploit the incredible beneficence of wholesale furniture outlets. At least the French enjoy some healthy hikes in the woods.
1986
How to Follow Instructions
Anyone familiar with Italian cafés knows—and has suffered from—those high-tech sugar bowls that are activated by the customer's attempt to remove the spoon from the bowl. At the first, faint tug, the bowl's lid comes down like a guillotine, causing the spoon to fly into the air, scattering sugar throughout the immediate vicinity, while the victim mentally consigns the inventor of this device to a concentration camp. But, on the contrary, that genius is probably enjoying the fruits of his crime on the remote and exclusive beach of some island paradise. The American humorist Shelley Berman once suggested that in the near future the same genius will invent a totally secure automobile, whose doors will open only from the inside.
For a number of years I drove a car that was, in many respects, excellent—except for the fact that the driver's ashtray was set inside the left-hand door. As everyone knows, a driver grips the wheel with his left hand, keeping his right hand free to deal with the gearshift and the various knobs and dials. If you also smoke with your right hand, depositing the ashes in a receptacle to the left of your left shoulder becomes quite a complex operation, one requiring you to remove your eyes from the road ahead. And if the car, like the one I am describing, can attain a speed of eighty miles per hour, the few seconds' distraction it takes to knock ash into the ashtray can mean sodomizing a Mack truck. The gentleman who invented this system was a serious professional who has caused the death of many people, not through tobacco-related cancers but through collisions with a foreign body.
I have a passion for word-processing systems. If you buy one of these programs, you are given a package with some diskettes, instructions, and a guarantee, which costs anywhere between eight hundred thousand and a million lire. For instruction, you can have recourse either to a company-provided instructor or to the manual. The instructor has usually been trained by the inventor of the sugar bowl mentioned above, and it is advisable to empty a Magnum into his chest the moment he sets foot inside your door. They'll give you perhaps twenty years (less, if you have a smart lawyer), but you will still be saving yourself time.
The real trouble starts when you consult the manual (what I now have to say applies to any manual for any kind of computer program or device). A computer manual appears to be a plastic container with sharp corners, which you must not leave within reach of the children. When you slip the contents out of this container, they seem to be
a number of booklets bound in reinforced concrete, and therefore impossible to transport from living room to study. Their titles are conceived in such a way as to prevent you from understanding which should be read first. The less sadistic firms usually give you only two; the more perverse organizations offer as many as four.
Your immediate impression is that the first manual explains things step by step, for the retarded, while the second is addressed to experts, the third to professionals, and so on. Wrong. Each booklet says things that the others do not say; the things you need to know at once are in the manual for engineers, the information for engineers is in the manual for the retarded. Moreover, on the assumption that in future years you will amplify the manual, they are bound in loose-leaf style, with three hundred sheets or more.
Anyone who has handled a loose-leaf notebook knows that, after it has been consulted once or twice, apart from the difficulty in turning the pages, the rings bend out of shape, and soon the binder explodes, shedding leaves all over the room. Human beings accustomed to seek information are used to dealing with objects called books, perhaps featuring pages with color-coded edges or indentations, as in address books, so that readers can promptly find what they need. The authors of computer manuals are unaware of these humane conveniences and supply objects that last about eight hours. The only reasonable solution is to dismember the manuals, study them for six months under the guidance of an Etruscologist, condense them into four file cards (which will be enough), and throw the originals away.
1985
How to Become a Knight of Malta
I have received a letter on paper headed Ordre Souverain Militaire de Saint-Jean de Jérusalem—Chevaliers de Malte—Prieuré Oecuménique de la Sainte-Trinité-de-Villedieu—Quartier Général de la Vallette—Prieuré de Québec. The letter contains an invitation to become a Knight of Malta. I would have preferred a brief directly from Charlemagne, but I immediately reported the matter to my children, to let them know their father wasn't just any old dad. Then I looked over my shelves for the volume of Caffanjon and Galimard Flavigny, Ordres et contre-ordres de chevalerie, Paris, 1982, in which a list of pseudo-orders of Malta is published, circulated by the authentic Sovereign Military and Hospitaler Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, Rhodes, and Malta, whose headquarters is in Rome.
There are another sixteen orders of Malta, all having practically the same name, except for very slight variations; and all repudiate or recognize one another in turn. In 1908 some Russians founded an order in the United States, which in recent years has been headed by His Royal Highness Prince Roberto Pa-ternò II, Ayerbe Aragona, Duke of Perpignan, Head of the Royal Houses of Aragon and the Balearic Islands, Grand Master of the Orders of the Collar of Sant'Agata dei Paternò and of the Royal Crown of the Balearics. But a splinter order broke off from this one in 1934, when a Dane founded a rival order, giving its chancellorship to Prince Peter of Greece and Denmark.
In the 1960s a defector from the Russian branch, Paul de Granier de Cassagnac, founded an order in France, choosing as its protector King Peter II of Yugoslavia. In 1965 the ex-king Peter II of Yugoslavia quarreled with Cassagnac and founded in New York another order whose grand prior, in 1970, was Prince Peter of Greece and Denmark, who then left that order for the Danish one. In 1966 the chancellor of this order was a certain Robert Bassaraba von Bran-covan Khgimchiacvili, who was, however, expelled, and who consequently founded the order of the Ecumenical Knights of Malta, whose Imperial and Royal Protector was then to be Prince Enrico III Costantino di Vigo Lascaris Aleramico Paleologo del Monferrato, heir to the throne of Byzantium, Prince of Thessaly, who was later to found yet another order of Malta, the Priorate of the United States, whereas Bassaraba, in 1975, tried to establish his own Priorate of the Trinité de Villedieu, the one to which I would have belonged, but his attempt failed. I then found a Byzantine protectorate, an order created by Prince Carol of Rumania after he broke off from Cassagnac's, a Grand Priorate of which one Tonna-Barthet is the Grand Bailiff, while Prince Andrew of Yugoslavia—former Grand Master of the order founded by Peter II—is Grand Master of the Priorate of Russia (but then the prince withdrew and the order changed its name to Grand Royal Priorate of Malta and of Europe); an order created in the seventies by a Baron de Choibert and by Vittorio Busa, Orthodox Archbishop Metropolitan of Bialystok, Patriarch of the Western and Eastern Diaspora, President of the Republic of Danzig (sic), President of the Democratic Republic of Byelorussia and Grand Khan of Tartary and Mongolia, Viktor Timur II; and an International Grand Priorate created in 1971 by the above-mentioned Royal Highness Roberto Paternò with the Baron-Marquis of Alaro, of which another Paternò became Grand Protector in 1982: head of the Imperial House of Leopardi Tomassini Paternò of Constantinople, heir of the Roman Empire of the East, consecrated legitimate successor of the Apostolic Catholic Orthodox Church of the Byzantine Rite, Marquis of Mon-teaperto, Count Palatine of the throne of Poland.
In 1971 my order appeared in Malta, born of a schism within that of Bassaraba, under the exalted protection of Alessandro Licastro Grimaldi Lascaris Commenius Vingtmille, Duke of La Chastre, Sovereign Prince and marquess of Déols, and the Grand Master now is the marquess Charles Stivala de Flavigny, who after the death of Licastro recruited Pierre Pasleau, who assumes the titles of Licastro as well as those of His Grace the Archbishop Patriarch of the Catholic Orthodox Church of Belgium, Grand Master of the Sovereign Military Order of the Temple of Jerusalem and Grand Master and Hierophant of the Universal Masonic Order of the Ancient Oriental Rite and the Joint Primitive Rite of Memphis and Misraim.
I replaced the volume. Perhaps it, too, contains false information. But I realized that a man has to belong to something, if he doesn't want to feel like nothing. Italy's notorious P2 Lodge has been dissolved, while the Opus Dei has lost all secrecy and is now on everyone's lips. I have made my choice: The Italian Recorder Society. One, True, Ancient, and Accepted.
1986
How to Deal with Telegrams
In the old days, on receiving the mail in the morning, you opened the sealed envelopes and threw away the unsealed ones. Now the organizations that used to send unsealed envelopes send sealed ones, even by special delivery. You open the letter eagerly, only to find some absolutely trivial invitation. Especially irritating, because the highest-tech envelopes now have systems of hermetic sealing that resist letter-openers, teeth, jabbing knives. Traditional glue has been replaced by quick-setting cement, the kind dentists use. Luckily we are still safe from promotional schemes, as they always betray themselves with words like "free offer" on the outside, in gold letters. I was taught as a child that when you are offered something free, you should promptly call the police.
But the situation is getting worse. In the past you opened telegrams with real interest, ripping the envelopes in your haste: either they brought some piece of bad news or they informed you of the sudden death of a long-forgotten uncle in America. Now, if someone has a message of no interest to communicate, he sends you a telegram.
Telegrams fall into three categories. The imperative: "You are invited to attend important conference day after tomorrow on cultivation lupins in Apulia Undersecretary Ministry of Forests presiding please telex immediately time of arrival" (then comes a series of acronyms and numbers occupying two pages, in which naturally, and happily, the name of the pretentious sender is lost). The taken-for-granted: "As per previous agreement we confirm your participation conference regarding treatment of paraplegic koalas, please fax immediately." Of course, there was no previous agreement, or perhaps the preliminary invitation is still en route, via ordinary mail. But when the letter does arrive, it has been superseded by the telegram, already discarded, and the letter then follows it into the wastebasket. Finally, there is the third, enigmatic category: "Roundtable on computer science and crocodiles postponed as announced please confirm availability new dates." What dates? What availability? Wastebasket.
Now, however, the telegram has been made obsolete by the invention of
overnight express delivery. In this method, which costs sums that would make Tina Brown blanch, the envelope can be opened only with the help of barbed-wire cutters; and once opened, it still does not disclose its contents immediately, thanks to the barrier, composed of various strips of Scotch tape, that must be overcome. Sometimes this system is employed purely for snobbish reasons (like the ceremonies of ritual consumption studied by Mauss); all there is, in the end, is a little note that says "hi" (but hours are spent in hunting for it, because the original envelope is the size of a garbage bag, and not everyone has the long arms of a Mr. Hyde). More often the envelope has a black-mailing function, and also contains a coupon for your reply. The sender is suggesting: "To say what I have to say to you I have spent an outrageous sum of money; the speed of delivery expresses my anxiousness; since there is a prepaid reply, if you don't answer you are a scoundrel." Such arrogance deserves punishment. Nowadays I open only the express envelopes that I myself have asked, by telephone, to be sent to me. The others I throw away, but even then they are a nuisance, because they clog up the basket. I dream of carrier pigeons.
Often telegrams and express envelopes announce awards. In this world there are honors and prizes that everyone is pleased to receive (the Nobel, the Golden Fleece, the Garter, the Irish Sweepstakes) and others that require nothing but acceptance. Anyone who has to publicize a new brand of shoe polish, a retarding condom, or some sulfurous mineral water, organizes an award. It is not very easy to get a board of judges together. What's difficult is to find winners. That is to say, they could be found easily if the prizes went to young people at the beginning of their career, but in that case press and TV wouldn't cover the event. So the winner, at the very least, must be Mother Teresa. But if Mother Teresa went to collect all the prizes she is awarded, the death rate in Calcutta would soar. The telegram announcing the prize, therefore, must assume an imperative tone and hint at severe sanctions in the event of refusal: "Happy to inform you that this evening, within one hour, you will be given the Golden Truss stop your presence indispensable in order to receive unanimous vote of unbiased jury otherwise must regretfully honor someone else." The telegram presupposes that the recipient will leap to his feet, screaming, "No, no! It's mine! Mine!"
