The rotten driver

I am returning from the supermarket and I see a woman driving with a bag of trash on the hood of her car, resting on the windshield, on the passenger side. Perplexed, I cannot stop looking at her. Only one explanation comes to mind: she does not want to endure the smell of her own waste for even a couple of minutes. You do not need to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce that she lives in the neighborhood, surely on one of the adjacent streets. Let us ignore that it is 9 in the morning, another sign of incivility.

The scene, pathetic, functions as an X-ray of our time. We live in the age of asepsis and deodorization. We are obsessed with consumption, but we are repulsed by waste. We want clean fish, shiny fruit, and life wrapped in protective plastic, but we are incapable of living with, even if only for a three-street journey, the smell of our own trash. We prefer to gamble with road safety by placing a bag of trash on the windshield rather than endure the physical and invisible reminder that we generate shit.

There is something symptomatic about the modern car as a bubble. The interior is the private temple: climate-controlled, with music on demand and the (repulsive) smell of pine air freshener. The exterior—the hood, the road, the common space—is the dump. The implicit message of the driver is clear: “Let the neighborhood smell, let the street see it, but do not let it contaminate my two square meters of well-being. Do not let it stain even a finger of mine. Do not let me lose a single second of my valuable time.”

We have become intolerant to discomfort, to waiting, and to that which is ugly. We do not have five minutes to take the trash down at the proper time; in the evening and on foot. Haste and productivity are the religion of the multitasking society, that of killing two birds with one stone whenever possible. It is the sublimation of the middle class of what they call quiet luxury, of those horrible houses with uniformized wannabe architecture where everything is white and beige, depersonalized, aseptic, dead. Without a bit of color. Or life.

We externalize the filth, we speed up our pace, and we drive while glancing sideways at an alien waste that, paradoxically, has come out of our own kitchen. If only it were so easy to get rid of what makes us smell bad inside; it would be enough to take it out to the hood, accelerate, and hope that the speed would take it away. The driver is rotten. Perhaps we all are already.