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.