The License Plate Fetishist

Next to the Spanish hotel under construction stands another hotel, close to the beach. It looks dusty and bare. No one bothered to plant a tree or a shrub around the building. There is not a soul in sight and only one car is parked outside. The car bears the Venezuelan country code, YV, and I feel the familiar thrill from my childhood. My lanky sixteen-year-old limbs cannot seem to find rest anywhere, but inside my head everything is neatly arranged. That is where I keep the license plate codes and country signs.

I had been obsessed with them since the age of eight. I knew all the codes by heart, including those of the Channel Islands. I knew that GBG stood for Guernsey and GBZ for Gibraltar, Great Britain Zone. Often the plates carried city codes as well. Deciphering them was deeply satisfying, like eating an entire Mars bar in one go, and just as easy.

I see myself again standing by the Dordrecht bridge over the Oude Maas, known to locals as the Zwijndrecht bridge, the main route connecting the Randstad with the south. Traffic moved slowly and the lanes were rather narrow. Sitting on the luggage rack of my bicycle, casually balanced with one foot on the pedal and the other resting on a small post, I watched the license plates go by. No one paid attention. Village people often stare at things or people for no apparent reason.

I kept track of the passing codes and wrote them down in a notebook until, after a year, I had nearly all the European countries, except for the Eastern Bloc, which was completely sealed off. German license plates were ideal for future Allied precision bombings, since their letter codes revealed exactly which city or region the car came from. No one understood what could possibly be interesting about that. But my father, himself a collector of everything related to tobacco, supplied me with books listing all the codes. I memorized them all.

Once I saw a car cross the bridge with the plate WAN. I could not find that code anywhere, and it troubled me for years until I discovered it belonged to Nigeria. Another torment was a television report from Africa in which, quite casually, a Jeep drove past bearing the country code KAT. There was nothing to be found about it anywhere. I lay awake at night because of it. Until I read in the newspaper that the Congolese province of Katanga had declared itself an independent state.

But I had never seen a car from Venezuela before. I might have wondered how complicated it must be to ship such a car to Spain, but I am too tired for that. The door is unlocked. It is broad daylight, so what do I care. I stretch out on the back seat and fall asleep at once. When I wake up, it is already dark. I am astonished that the Venezuelan never noticed me sleeping in his car for hours. Either I am invisible, or he spent the entire day alone in that bare hotel, thinking about Caracas.