How to Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays

How to Go Through Customs

The other night, after an amorous tryst with one of my numerous mistresses, I did away with my partner, bludgeoning her to death with a rare Cellini saltcellar. 1 was inspired not only by the strict moral code instilled in me since childhood, according to which a woman who indulges in the pleasures of the senses is unworthy of mercy, but also by an esthetic motive: namely, to experience the thrill of the perfect crime.

I waited, listening to a CD of English baroque water music, until the corpse was cold and the blood had congealed; then, with an electric saw, I began dismembering the body, trying at the same time to adhere to certain fundamental anatomical principles, thus paying a tribute to our culture, without which refinement and the social contract would not exist. Finally, I packed the pieces in two suitcases of oryx hide, put on a gray suit, and caught the wagon-lit for Paris.

Once I had handed over my passport and a scrupulous customs declaration to the conductor, listing the few hundred francs I was carrying on my person, I slept like a log, for nothing encourages repose more than the sense of having performed one's duty. Nor did customs venture to disturb a traveler who, merely by purchasing a private berth in first class, asserted ipso facto his membership in the hegemonic class and thus his status as a person above suspicion. The situation was all the more satisfying since, to avoid any withdrawal symptoms, I was carrying with me a trifling amount of morphine, perhaps eight hundred grams of cocaine, and a canvas by Titian.

I will not go into details about how, once in Paris, I rid myself of the wretched remains. I will leave that to your imagination. You can simply go to the Beaubourg, set your valises on one of its escalators, and years will pass before anyone notices. Or else you can stow them in a niche specially provided for such purposes in the Gare de Lyon. The password-controlled method of unlocking the storage space is so complex that thousands of pieces of luggage lie there and no one ever dares to attempt to retrieve them. But, even more simply, you can sit at a table at the Deux Magots and leave the suitcases outside the La Hune bookshop. Within minutes they will be stolen, and from then on it's the thief's problem. I cannot deny, however, that the matter left me in a state of tension, which, for that matter, always marks the achievement of an artistically complex and perfect operation.

On my return to Italy I felt on edge and so decided to treat myself to a vacation in Locarno. Suffering, through some inexplicable sense of guilt, from a vague fear of being recognized, I decided to travel second class, wearing jeans and a polo shirt with a crocodile logo.

At the border I was assailed by vigilant customs officials, who examined my luggage and personal belongings down to the most intimate undergarments, then charged me with clandestine importation into Switzerland of a carton of filter-tip MS. And finally they discovered that, behind my sphincter, I had concealed fifty Swiss francs of uncertain provenance, for which I was unable to produce documentation of proper acquisition through a bank.

I was subjected to interrogation beneath a naked 1,000-watt bulb. I was whipped with a wet towel. I was temporarily held in solitary confinement, chained to my cot in a straitjacket.

Luckily, it occurred to me to declare that I had been a member of the underground terrorist group, the Fascist Black Brigades, since its foundation, that I had placed several bombs on express trains for ideological reasons, and that I considered myself a political prisoner. I was promptly assigned to a single room in the Welfare Center set up in a wing of the Grand Hôtel des Iles Borromées. A dietitian advised me to skip a few meals to trim down to ideal weight, while my psychiatrist initiated the process of having my status changed to house arrest, because of certified anorexia. In the meanwhile I wrote some anonymous letters to the courts in the area, insinuating that the judges regularly wrote one another reciprocal threatening anonymous letters, and I denounced the Queen Mother of Great Britain, accusing her of having had active relations with the Communist Combatant Squads.

If all goes smoothly, I should be home in a week.

1989