Letters

 

 

I receive a lot of letters and regret being unable to answer most of them, but I don’t have a permanent address or a typewriter (writing longhand is increasingly unpopular). In any case, a lot of the letters don’t reach me or they get lost somewhere along the way, but I’m sure that if the mailman knew me he would deliver them. It’s all right with me if someone else receives the letters meant for me or if someone is reading them on my behalf. It’s enough that a lot of people write to me, without even knowing where I am.

I’m not trying to change the established order of things or the way public administration works (I’m sure it takes a lot of effort to maintain order, and it’s enough that public administration works at all, if only for a few people). And I wasn’t trying to cause trouble when I asked a mailman I saw in the street if he had any letters for me. Since I don’t have a permanent address, I couldn’t tell if he was the mailman for my district. Very politely, I explained this to him when he asked which district I lived in. By the same token (although I don’t know the rules on this), I don’t believe that letters meant for me should remain undelivered just because they lack an address or a postal code. Unless, that is, you believe - and maybe the mailman, out of habit, did - that settling down in a house is a precondition for receiving letters. A lonely man can perfectly well send a message in a bottle that is picked up thirty years later at sea. (I read about this once in the newspaper. It happened during the Second World War. A serviceman on a boat out on the high seas wrote a message to his wife and stuffed it in a bottle that he tossed into the water. Thirty years later, a sailor picked it up near an island in the Pacific and took the trouble of mailing it to the addressee. The message, with its love code in a bottle like a butterfly in a glass case, had been floating around the oceans. Indelible and lost, a fish off course. The article gave no further information.)

‘No one writes letters if they don’t know where they’re sending them,’ he told me foolishly. I pointed out his mistake: in reality, the greatest letters ever written were never sent, even when the addressee had a fixed abode or a private mailbox. But in questioning him, I wasn’t referring to the greatest letters but to the ones people write me, stick in an envelope, and post.

‘You can file your complaint at the central office,’ the mailman told me gruffly. ‘Tell them where and when the letters were sent and who mailed them to you.’

I told him I had no idea who had written them or where they were coming from, since I’d never received them. Only after a mailman had delivered them to me could I know what letters we were talking about, and in that case I would have no reason to file a complaint or to state who had sent them or from where. And it didn’t seem fair for the authorities to refuse to look for my letters just because I didn’t know who had sent them.

‘If you don’t know who sent them or where they were sent from, the letters don’t exist,’ the civil servant replied categorically.

It seemed completely unfair that someone could say my letters didn’t exist just because I hadn’t received them yet, especially given my desire to read them and my perseverance in looking for them. ‘So what do you do with letters that don’t exist?’ I asked the man.

‘It depends,’ he told me hesitantly. ‘If the sender has put his address on the letter, like he’s supposed to, the letter is returned to him. Otherwise, there’s a waiting period.’

It seemed strange to me that a letter that didn’t exist would be returned to its place of origin, and not, as you would expect, to the addressee. Especially if you consider that whoever sent the letter sent it to a person, not to a place, the indirect object being fundamental and the residence holding only transitive significance. We can imagine a letter being written to a traveler, to a man who moves through space and time, but no one thinks to write a letter to a house; the walls may have ears, but not eyes. As for the letters that don’t exist but that are subject to a waiting period, what’s the point of that period? What are letters that don’t exist waiting for?

‘It’s standard procedure. If no one comes to claim them within six months,’ the man said reluctantly, ‘and if the address of the sender is unknown, they’re filed in the basement of the central office.’

‘How can I know when to go and claim a letter?’ I asked humbly. (In dealing with authorities, deference is always a good idea.)

‘You shouldn’t go and claim them,’ the mailman told me, as if I’d missed the most important point of his lecture. ‘They’re there to be stored. We know what country they come from, in what district they were posted, at what time they were sealed, and we know the name of the addressee, even though he may no longer live in the same place or the address is wrong or made up. So we classify them according to the place they were sent from and the date they were postmarked. We arrange them according to the city, the month, week, day, and time. Once the waiting period stipulated in the regulations has passed (which in no instance is to exceed six months), we take them down to the basement where they undergo further classification. I can’t comment on that step because it’s confidential. The supervisor and the archivist are the only ones who know about that. As you can imagine, that step is top secret. Once in the storage rooms, a letter is never lost.’

I receive a lot of letters and regret being unable to answer most of them, but I don’t have a permanent address or a typewriter. In any case, a lot of the letters don’t reach me, but I know there are people who write them and it’s always possible to read them on the wings of birds, inside a bottle, or in the moist sands of the sea.