How to Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays

How to Use the Taxi Driver

The minute you take your seat in a taxi the problem of appropriate interaction with the driver arises. The taxi driver is someone who spends all day driving in city traffic (an activity that provokes either heart attack or delirium), in constant conflict with other human drivers. Consequently, he is nervous and hates every anthropomorphic creature. This attitude leads members of the radical chic to say that all taxi drivers are fascists. Not true. The taxi driver has no interest in ideological problems: he hates trade union demonstrations, not for their political orientation, but rather because they block traffic. He would hate a parade of Daughters of the Duce just as much. All he wants is a strong government that will send all private car owners to the gallows and establish a reasonable, but strict curfew—between 6 A.M. and midnight, say. He is a misogynist, but only as regards women who move about. If they stay home and cook pasta, he can tolerate them.

Italian taxi drivers can be divided into three categories: those who express these opinions throughout the course of the ride; those who are silent and communicate their misanthropy through their driving; and those who work off their tensions in pure narration, describing what happened to them with this or that fare. These tranches de vie lack any allegorical significance, and if they were told in a tavern the bartender would feel obliged to send the narrator home, saying it was time to go to bed. But to the taxi driver these tales seem odd and surprising, and you would be wise to comment on them with frequent interjections on the order of "It's a crazy world! There're a lot of flakes out there! You mean they really said that?!" This participation does not budge the driver from his fabulatory autism, but it enhances your own self-esteem.

An Italian visiting New York runs some risks if, after reading on the driver's ID a name like De Cu-tugnatto, Esippositto, Perquocco, he reveals his own nationality. The driver invariably begins speaking a non-existent language, taking deep offense if you don't understand it. You must then immediately say, in English, that you speak only the dialect of your native region. For that matter, he is convinced that in Italy, nowadays, the national language is English. But, generally speaking, New York taxi drivers have either a Jewish name or a non-Jewish name. Those with Jewish names are Zionist reactionaries, those with non-Jewish names are anti-Semitic reactionaries. In either case, they do not make assertions, only pronunciamentos. It is hard to know how to behave with those who have a vaguely Middle Eastern or Russian name, as you can't figure out whether they are Jewish or not. To avoid accidents you must then say you have changed your mind and, instead of the corner of Seventh and Fourteenth, you want to go to Charlton Street. The driver will then have a tantrum, slam on the brakes, and make you get out, because New York drivers know only the streets with numbers and not those with names.

Paris taxi drivers, on the other hand, do not know any streets at all. If you ask one to take you to Place Saint-Sulpice, he'll let you off at the Odéon, saying that's the closest he can get. But first he will have moaned at length over your overweening demands with some cries of "Ah, ^a, monsieur, alors...."If you venture to suggest he consult a guidebook, he either does not reply or suggests that if you wanted bibliographical information you should have consulted an archivist-paleographer at the Sorbonne. Asians are a category apart: with extreme politeness they tell you not to worry, they'll find the place at once, and three times they make the circuit of the boulevards; then they ask what's the difference if, instead of taking you to the Gare du Nord, they've brought you to the Gare de l'Est—after all, there are plenty of trains at both stations.

In New York, as far as I can tell, you can't summon a taxi by telephone to some club; in Paris you can; but they don't come. In Stockholm you can call them only by phone, because they don't trust any old stranger walking along the street. But to discover what phone number to call, you would have to stop a passing taxi, and, as I just said, the drivers don't trust anybody.

German drivers are courteous and correct. They don't speak, they just press the accelerator. When you get out, white as a sheet, you realize why they come to Italy for relaxation and drive in front of you, doing sixty kilometers per hour in the fast lane.

If you set a Frankfurt driver in his Porsche to compete with a Rio driver in his battered Volkswagen, the Rio driver would arrive first, partly because he doesn't stop at traffic lights. If he did, he would see another battered Volkswagen pull up beside him, full with boys just waiting to reach out and snatch his passenger's wristwatch.

In any part of the world there is one sure way of recognizing a taxi driver: he is that person who never has any change.

1988