The Car

a confession, part 1

I have a recurrent dream. I am driving a large white BMW in traffic in a big city. The car is full of people bickering with each other and distracting me. Traffic is heavy and complicated, and I am having a hard time figuring out what lane to be in. But my most pressing worry is the car itself, which I know I have been neglecting. In the dream I know it urgently needs an oil change (the oil light is on), and that my cruel neglect is causing it pain, as if it were a pet I am forgetting to feed. I also know in the dream that I will not act upon the guilty feeling, and that the car’s suffering will continue.

The last time I had this dream, some months ago, I woke up relieved that it was not reality, and immediately thought of something far worse. The trouble with the dream was that I had not made up the existence of the white BMW. I suddenly remembered that my mother had one in Paris, when she lived in a lovely apartment at the end of a pedestrian cul-de-sac in the 17th. It was kept in a large multi-story car park nearby. She had to sell the place when she retired and moved to Milan. Twenty years ago I cleared the flat after she left. The dream suddenly jogged my memory. Where was the car? I completely forgot about the car. I left the car behind. I abandoned the car. I have no idea where it was or is. I had never before connected the dream car with the actual car. I forgot a pristine, white BMW.

The sale of the flat was unpleasant. It was bought by an old couple who lived nearby in a poky apartment but had accumulated vast real estate money. For them it was quite a coup, because they already owned two of the three floors of the detached house, and my mother’s top floor flat completed the property, which could then be sold on as a town house for twice the price. The new owners were Balzac-grade swamp creatures. They haggled for months, until the estate agent threatened them with a lawsuit if they dithered one second longer. The elderly notary who did the paperwork told me that he had met a lot of awful people in his profession, but never anyone as repugnant as those two.

It was my job to empty the Paris flat, so I stayed there for a few days, arranged for the movers to come and found a vide-caves¹ to deal with the basement storage in which older stuff was stored. The vide-caves, a father-son outfit from rural Ile-de-France, arrived with a van that looked like it would accommodate only half the stuff in the basement. They took it all, and lumbered back down the street so full that the back wheels were canted inwards. I felt so good that it was all done.

It wasn’t done. I forgot the car. Worse than that, I only realised I’d forgotten it years later. The car had probably cried silently when they came to collect it, dumped it in a junkyard and tore it apart.

How had I forgotten it? I loved that car. My mother had driven it around Milan for years before she moved to Paris. It had Swiss diplomatic license plates, because my stepfather was a UN man living in Geneva. These CD or corps diplomatique plates were colloquially known as Cazzi Duri plates in Italy, meaning “hard-on” plates, to denote the general good feeling of having them, because they made it possible to park anywhere.

I had once been stopped in this car by police at the Swiss border when re-entering Italy. A senior border police officer was instructing a young recruit. He said to his student, gesturing toward me: “See, this is a typical dodgy customer that you should inspect thoroughly: a young man, clearly not Swiss, clearly not a diplomat, driving a Swiss car with CD plates into Italy for no good reason. What’s he up to: drugs, money?” Then, satisfied with this opportunity to impart an important lesson, he turned to me with a smile and said, “Thank you. You may go.”

to be continued

1. cellar-emptier. They do it for free and the stuff is theirs.