How to Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays

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 Traditional glue has been replaced by quick-setting cement, the kind dentists use.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 But when the letter does arrive, it has been superseded by the telegram, already discarded, and the letter then follows it into the wastebasket.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!"

Oh yes, I almost forgot. There are also those postcards that arrive from Kuala Lumpur signed "George." George who?

1988