Italo Calvino Marcovaldo, Ch. 1- Mushrooms in the city 依塔羅卡爾維諾小說選 馬可瓦多-城市裡的蘑菇 3/7

 Tuesday March April May June

3/7 

IC-Marcovaldo, Ch. 1- Mushrooms in the city

 Italo Calvino

worksheet link= https://www.onlinereadfreebooks.com/en/Marcovaldo-791745/1

 

Italo Calvino

Marcovaldo, Ch. 1- Mushrooms in the city

依塔羅卡爾維諾小說選

馬可瓦多-城市裡的蘑菇

 

 

SPRING

 

Mushrooms in the city

  The wind, coming to the city from far away, brings it unusual gifts, noticed by only a few sensitive souls, such as hay-fever victims, who sneeze at the pollen from flowers of other lands.

  One day, to the narrow strip of ground flanking a city avenue came a gust of spores from God knows where; and some mushrooms germinated. Nobody noticed them except Marcovaldo, the worker who caught his tram just there every morning.

 This Marcovaldo possessed an eye ill-suited to city life: billboards, traffic-lights, shop-windows, neon signs, posters, no matter how carefully devised to catch the attention, never arrested his gaze, which might have been running over the desert sands. Instead, he would never miss a leaf yellowing on a branch, a feather trapped by a roof-tile; there was no horsefly on a horse's back, no worm-hole in a plank, or fig-peel squashed on the sidewalk that Marcovaldo didn't remark and ponder over, discovering the changes of season, the yearnings of his heart, and the woes of his existence.

  Thus, one morning, as he was waiting for the tram that would take him to Sbav and Co., where he was employed as an unskilled laborer, he noticed something unusual near the stop, in the sterile, encrusted strip of earth beneath the avenue's line of trees; at certain points, near the tree trunks, some bumps seemed to rise and, here and there, they had opened, allowing roundish subterranean bodies to peep out.

Bending to tie his shoes, he took a better look: they were mushrooms, real mushrooms, sprouting right in the heart of the city! To Marcovaldo the gray and wretched world surrounding him seemed suddenly generous with hidden riches; something could still be expected of life, beyond the hourly wage of his stipulated salary, with inflation index, family grant, and cost-of-living allowance.

  On the job he was more absent-minded than usual; he kept thinking that while he was there unloading cases and boxes, in the darkness of the earth the slow, silent mushrooms, known only to him, were ripening their porous flesh, were assimilating underground humors, breaking the crust of clods. "One night's rain would be enough," he said to himself, "then they would be ready to pick." And he couldn't wait to share his discovery with his wife and his six children.

  "I'm telling you!" he announced during their scant supper.

  "In a week's time we'll be eating mushrooms! A great fry! That's a promise!"

And to the smaller children, who did not know what mushrooms were, he explained ecstatically the beauty of the numerous species, the delicacy of their flavor, the way they should be cooked; and so he also drew into the discussion his wife, Domitilla, who until then had appeared rather incredulous and abstracted.

  "Where are these mushrooms?" the children asked. "Tell us where they grow!"

  At this question Marcovaldo's enthusiasm was curbed by a suspicious thought: Now if I tell them the place, they'll go and hunt for them with the usual gang of kids, word will spread through the neighborhood, and the mushrooms will end up in somebody else's pan! And so that discovery, which had promptly filled his heart with universal love, now made him wildly possessive, surrounded him with jealous and distrusting fear.

  "I know where the mushrooms are, and I'm the only one who knows," he said to his children, "and God help you if you breathe a word to anybody."

The next morning, as he approached the tram stop, Marcovaldo was filled with apprehension. He bent to look at the ground and, to his relief, saw that the mushrooms had grown a little, but not much, and were still almost completely hidden by the earth.

  He was bent in this position when he realized there was someone behind him. He straightened up at once and tried to act indifferent. It was the street-cleaner, leaning on his broom and looking at him.

  This street-cleaner, whose jurisdiction included the place where the mushrooms grew, was a lanky youth with eyeglasses. His name was Amadigi, and Marcovaldo had long harbored a dislike of him, perhaps because of those eyeglasses that examined the pavement of the streets, seeking any trace of nature, to be eradicated by his broom.

  It was Saturday; and Marcovaldo spent his free half-day circling the bed of dirt with an absent air, keeping an eye on the street-cleaner in the distance and on the mushrooms, and calculating how much time they needed to ripen.

That night it rained: like peasants who, after months of drought, wake up and leap with joy at the sound of the first drops, so Marcovaldo, alone in all the city, sat up in bed and called to his family: "It's raining! It's raining!" and breathed in the smell of moistened dust and fresh mold that came from outside.

At dawn—it was Sunday—with the children and a borrowed bask

et, he ran immediately to the patch. There were the mushrooms, erect on their stems, their caps high over the still-soaked earth. "Hurrah!"—and they fell to gathering them.

  "Papà! Look how many that man over there has found," Michelino said, and his father, raising his eyes, saw Amadigi standing beside them, also with a basket full of mushrooms under his arm.

  "Ah, you're gathering them, too?" the street-cleaner said. "Then they're edible? I picked a few, but I wasn't sure... Farther down the avenue some others have sprouted, even bigger ones... Well, now that I know, I'll tell my relatives; they're down there arguing whether it's a good idea to pick them or not..." And he walked off in a hurry.

  Marcovaldo was speechless: even bigger mushrooms, which he hadn't noticed, an unhoped-for harvest, being taken from him like this, before his very eyes. For a moment he was almost frozen with anger, fury, then—as sometimes happens—the collapse of individual passion led to a generous impulse. At that hour, many people were waiting for the tram, umbrellas over their arms, because the weather was still damp and uncertain. "Hey, you! Do you want to eat fried mushrooms tonight?" Marcovaldo shouted to the crowd of people at the stop. "Mushrooms are growing here by the street! Come along! There's plenty for all!" And he walked off after Amadigi, with a string of people behind him.

 They all found plenty of mushrooms, and lacking baskets, they used their open umbrellas. Somebody said: "It would be nice to have a big feast, all of us together!" But, instead, each took his own share and went home.

  They saw one another again soon, however; that very evening, in fact, in the same ward of the hospital, after the stomach-pump had saved them all from poisoning. It was not serious, because the number of mushrooms eaten by each person was quite small.

  Marcovaldo and Amadigi had adjacent beds; they glared at each other.

Q and A for Matt/teacher, not students=

 

1q What was "in the city"? (see chapter title)

 

Answer= "Mushrooms"

 

2q How did the protagonist get to Sbav & Co.? 

 

Answer= By tram

 

3q Did the mushrooms indicate "hidden riches" to Marcovaldo? 

 

Answer= yes.

 

4q Who saw Marcovaldo as he waited for his tram?

 

Answer= "the street cleaner."

 

5q On Sunday, what kind of basket did the children have?

 

Answer= a "borrowed" one.

BQ Who does the street cleaner, who found some bigger mushrooms, tell?

Answer= His arguing "relatives"

3/14- 3/21 

 

#2 of IC= If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (2)=

worksheet link= https://www.onlinereadfreebooks.com/en/If-on-a-Winter-s-Night-a-Traveler-401104/1

 

Italo Calvino

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

依塔羅卡爾維諾小說選

如果在冬夜,一個旅人

[2]

  You have now read about thirty pages and you’re becoming caught up in the story. At a certain point you remark: “This sentence sounds somehow familiar. In fact, this whole passage reads like something I’ve read before.” Of course: there are themes that recur, the text is interwoven with these reprises, which serve to express the fluctuation of time. You are the sort of reader who is sensitive to such refinements; you are quick to catch the author’s intentions and nothing escapes you. But, at the same time, you also feel a certain dismay; just when you were beginning to grow truly interested, at this very point the author feels called upon to display one of those virtuoso tricks so customary in modem writing, repeating a paragraph word for word. Did you say paragraph? Why, it’s a whole page; you make the comparison, he hasn’t changed even a comma. And as you continue, what develops? Nothing: the narration is repeated, identical to the pages you have read!

  Wait a minute! Look at the page number. Damn! From page 32 you’ve gone back to page 17! What you thought was a stylistic subtlety on the author’s part is simply a printers’ mistake: they have inserted the same pages twice. The mistake occurred as they were binding the volume: a book is made up of sixteen-page signatures; each signature is a large sheet on which sixteen pages are printed, and which is then folded over eight times; when all the signatures are bound together, it can happen that two identical signatures end up in the same copy; it’s the sort of accident that occurs every now and then. You leaf anxiously through the next pages to find page 33, assuming it exists; a repeated signature would be a minor inconvenience, the irreparable damage comes when the proper signature has vanished, landing in another copy where perhaps that one will be doubled and this one will be missing. In any event, you want to pick up the thread of your reading, nothing else matters to you, you had reached a point where you can’t skip even one page.

Here is page 31 again, page 32 ... and then what comes next? Page 17 all over again, a third time! What kind of book did they sell you, anyway? They bound together all these copies of the same signature, not another page in the whole book is any good.

  You fling the book on the floor, you would hurl it out of the window, even out of the closed window, through the slats of the Venetian blinds; let them shred its incongruous quires, let sentences, words, morphemes, phonemes gush forth, beyond recomposition into discourse; through the panes, and if they are of unbreakable glass so much the better, hurl the book and reduce it to photons, undulatory vibrations, polarized spectra; through the wall, let the book crumble into molecules and atoms passing between atom and atom of the reinforced concrete, breaking up into electrons, neutrons, neutrinos, elementary particles more and more minute; through the telephone wires, let it be reduced to electronic impulses, into flow of information, shaken by redundancies and noises, and let it be degraded into a swirling entropy. You would like to throw it out of the house, out of the block, beyond the neighborhood, beyond the city limits, beyond the state confines, beyond the regional administration, beyond the national community, beyond the Common Market, beyond Western culture, beyond the continental shelf, beyond the atmosphere, the biosphere, the stratosphere, the field of gravity, the solar system, the galaxy, the cumulus of galaxies, to succeed in hurling it beyond the point the galaxies have reached in their expansion, where spacetime has not yet arrived, where it would be received by nonbeing, or, rather, the not-being which has never been and will never be, to be lost in the most absolutely guaranteed undeniable negativity. Merely what it deserves, neither more nor less.

  But no. Instead you pick it up, you dust it off; you have to take it back to the bookseller so he will exchange it for you. You know you are somewhat impulsive, but you have learned to control yourself. The thing that most exasperates you is to find yourself at the mercy of the fortuitous, the aleatory, the random, in things and in human actions—carelessness, approximation, imprecision, whether your own or others’. In such instances your dominant passion is the impatience to erase the disturbing effects of that arbitrariness or distraction, to re-establish the normal course of events. You can’t wait to get your hands on a nondefective copy of the book you’ve begun. You would rush to the bookshop at once if shops were not closed at this hour. You have to wait until tomorrow.

  You spend a restless night, your sleep is an intermittent, jammed flow, like the reading of the novel, with dreams that seem to you the repetition of one dream always the same. You fight with the dreams as with formless and meaningless life, seeking a pattern, a route that must surely be there, as when you begin to read a book and you don’t yet know in which

direction it will carry you. What you would like is the opening of an abstract and absolute space and time in which you could move, following an exact, taut trajectory; but when you seem to be succeeding, you realize you are motionless, blocked, forced to repeat everything from the beginning.

 

The next day, as soon as you have a free moment, you run to the bookshop, you enter, holding the book already opened, pointing your finger at a page, as if that alone were enough to make clear the general disarray. “You know what you sold me?...Look here.... Just when it was getting interesting...”

  The bookseller maintains his composure. “Ah, you, too? I’ve had several complaints already. And only this morning I received a form letter from the publisher. You see? ‘In the distribution of the latest works on our list a part of the edition of the volume If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino has proved defective and must be withdrawn from circulation. Through an error of the bindery, the printed signatures of that book became mixed with those of another new publication, the Polish novel Outside the town of Malbork by Tazio Bazakbal. With profound apologies for the unfortunate incident, the publisher will replace the spoiled copies at the earliest possible moment, et cetera.’ Now I ask you, must a poor bookseller take the blame for the negligence of others? We’ve been going crazy all day. We’ve checked the Calvinos copy by copy. There are a number of sound volumes, happily, and we can immediately replace your defective Traveler with a brand-new one in mint condition.”

  Hold on a minute. Concentrate. Take all the information that has poured down on you at once and put it in order. A Polish novel. Then the book you began reading with such involvement wasn’t the book you thought but was a Polish novel instead. That is the book you are now so anxious to procure. Don’t let them fool you. Explain clearly the situation. “No, actually I don’t really give a damn about that Calvino any more. I started the Polish one and it’s the Polish one I want to go on with. Do you have this Bazakbal book?”

 “If that’s what you prefer. Just a moment ago, another customer, a young lady, came in with the same problem, and she also wanted to exchange her book for the Polish. There, you see that pile of Bazakbal on the counter, right under your nose? Help yourself.”

  “But will this copy be defective?”

  “Listen. At this point I’m not swearing to anything. If the most respected publishing firms make such a muddle, you can’t trust anything any more. I’ll tell you exactly what I told the young lady. If there is any further cause for complaint, you will be reimbursed. I can’t do more than that.”

  The young lady. He has pointed out a young lady to you. She is there between two rows of bookshelves in the shop, looking among the Penguin Modern Classics, running a lovely and determined finger over the pale aubergine-colored spines. Huge, swift eyes, complexion of good tone and good pigment, a richly waved haze of hair.

And so the Other Reader makes her happy entrance into your field of vision, Reader, or, rather, into the field of your attention; or, rather, you have entered a magnetic field from whose attraction you cannot escape. Don’t waste time, then, you have a good excuse to strike up a conversation, a common ground, just think a moment, you can show off your vast and various reading, go ahead, what are you waiting for?

  “Then you, too, ha ha, the Pole,” you say, all in one breath. “But that book that begins and then gets stuck there, what a fraud, because it happened to you, too, I’m told; and the same with me, you know? Having given it a try, I’m dropping this one and taking this other, but what a coincidence, the two of us.”

  Hmm, perhaps you could have coordinated it a bit better, but you have at least expressed the main ideas. Now it’s her turn.

  She smiles. She has dimples. She is even more attractive to you.

  She says: “Ah, indeed, I was so anxious to read a good book. Right at the beginning, this one, no, but then it began to appeal to me.... Such a rage when I saw it broke off. And it wasn’t that author. It did seem right away a bit different from his other books. And it was really Bazakbal. He’s good, though, this Bazakbal. I’ve never read anything of his.”

  “Me either,” you can say, reassured, reassuring.

 “A bit too unfocused, his way of telling a story, too much so for me. I rather enjoy that sense of bewilderment a novel gives you when you start reading it, but if the first effect is fog, I’m afraid the moment the fog lifts my pleasure in reading will be lost, too.”

  You shake your head pensively. “In fact, there is that risk.”

 “I prefer novels,” she adds, “that bring me immediately into a world where everything is precise, concrete, specific. I feel a special satisfaction in knowing that things are made in that certain fashion and not otherwise, even the most commonplace things that in real life seem indifferent to me.”

  Do you agree? Then say so. “Ah, yes, that sort of book is really worthwhile.”

  And she continues: “Anyway, this is also an interesting novel, I can’t deny that.”

  Go on, don’t let the conversation die. Say something; just keep talking. “Do you read many novels? You do? So do I, or some at least, though nonfiction is more in my line....” Is that all you can think of? Now what? Are you stopping? Good night! Aren’t you capable of asking her: Have you read this one? And this? Which of the two do you like better? There, now you have something to talk about for half an hour.

 The trouble is that she’s read many more novels than you have, especially foreign ones, and she has an orderly memory, she refers to specific episodes; she asks you, “And do you remember what Henry’s aunt says when...” and you, who unearthed that title because you know the title and nothing more, and you liked letting her believe you had read it, now have to extricate yourself with generic comments, like “It moves a bit slowly for me,” or else “I like it because it’s ironic,” and she answers, “Really? You find it ironic? I wouldn’t have said...” and you are upset. You launch into an opinion on a famous author, because you have read one of his books, two at most, and without hesitation she attacks frontally the opera omnia, which she seems to know perfectly, and if she does have some doubts, that’s worse still, because she asks you, “And the famous episode of the cut photograph: is it in that book or the other one? I always get them mixed up....” You make a guess, since she gets mixed up. And she says; “Why, what are you talking about? That can’t be right...” Well, let’s say you both get mixed up.

  Better to fall back on your reading of yesterday evening, on the volume you are both now clutching in your hands, which should repay you for your recent disappointment. “Let’s hope,” you say, “that we’ve got a perfect copy this time, properly bound, so we won’t be interrupted right at the climax, as happens...” (As happens when, how? What do you mean?) “I mean, let’s hope we get to the end satisfactorily.”

  “Oh, yes,” she answers. Did you hear that? She said, “Oh, yes.” It’s your turn now, it’s up to you to make a move.

 “Then I hope I’ll meet you again, since you’re also a customer here; that way we could exchange our impressions after reading the book.” And she answers, “With pleasure.”

  You know where you want to arrive, it is a fine net you are spreading out. “The funniest thing would be if, just as we had thought we were reading Italo Calvino and it turned out to be Bazakbal, now that we hope to read Bazakbal we open the book and find Italo Calvino.”

  “Oh, no! If that happens, we’ll sue the publisher!”

  “Listen, why don’t we exchange telephone numbers?” (This is what you were aiming at, O Reader, moving around her like a rattlesnake!) “That way, if one of us finds something wrong with his copy, he can ask the other for help.... If there are two of us, we have a better chance of putting together a complete copy.”

  There, you have said it. What is more natural than that a solidarity, a complicity, a bond should be established between Reader and Reader, thanks to the book?

  You can leave the bookshop content, you, a man who thought that the period when you could still expect something from life had ended. You are bearing with you two different expectations, and both promise days of pleasant hopes; the expectation contained in the book—of a reading experience you are impatient to resume—and the expectation contained in that telephone number—of hearing again the vibrations, at times treble and at times smoldering, of that voice, when it will answer your first phone call in a short while, in fact tomorrow, with the fragile pretext of the book, to ask her if she likes it or not, to tell her how many pages you have read or not read, to suggest to her that you meet again...

  Who you are, Reader, your age, your status, profession, income: that would be indiscreet to ask. It’s your business, you’re on your own. What counts is the state of your spirit now, in the privacy of your home, as you try to re-establish perfect calm in order to sink again into the book; you stretch out your legs, you draw them back, you stretch them again. But something has changed since yesterday. Your reading is no longer solitary: you think of the Other Reader, who, at this same moment, is also opening the book; and there, the novel to be read is superimposed by a possible novel to be lived, the continuation of your story with her, or better still, the beginning of a possible story. This is how you have changed since yesterday, you who insisted you preferred a book, something solid, which lies before you, easily defined, enjoyed without risks, to a real-life experience, always elusive, discontinuous, debated. Does this mean that the book has become an instrument, a channel of communication, a rendezvous? This does not mean its reading will grip you less: on the contrary, something has been added to its powers.

  This volume’s pages are uncut: a first obstacle opposing your impatience. Armed with a good paper knife, you prepare to penetrate its secrets. With a determined slash you cut your way between the title page and the beginning of the first chapter. And then...

 Then from the very first page you realize that the novel you are holding has nothing to do with the one you were reading yesterday.

  Outside the town of Malbork

  An odor of frying wafts at the opening of the page, of onion in fact, onion being fried, a bit scorched, because in the onion there are veins that turn violet and then brown, and especially the edge, the margin, of each little sliver of onion becomes black before golden, it is the juice of the onion that is carbonized, passing through a series of olfactory and chromatic nuances, all enveloped in the smell of simmering oil. Rape oil, the text specifies; everything here is very precise, things with their nomenclature and the sensations that things transmit, all the victuals on the fire at the same time on the kitchen stove, each in its vessel exactly denominated, the pans, the pots, the kettles, and similarly the operations that each preparation involves, dusting with flour, beating the egg, slicing the cucumbers in fine rounds, larding the hen to be roasted. Here everything is very concrete, substantial, depicted with sure expertise; or at least the impression given to you, Reader, is one of expertise, though there are some foods you don’t know, mentioned by name, which the translator has decided to leave in the original; for example, schoëblintsjia. But on reading schoëblintsjia you are ready to swear to the existence of schoëblintsjia, you can taste its flavor distinctly even though the text doesn’t say what that flavor is, an acidulous flavor, partly because the word, with its sound or only with its visual impression, suggests an acidulous flavor to you, and partly because in the symphony of flavors and words you feel the necessity of an acidulous note.

  As Brigd kneads the ground meat into the flour moistened with egg, her firm red arms dotted with golden freckles become covered with particles of white dust with bits of raw meat stuck to them. Every time Brigd’s torso moves back and forth at the marble table, her skirts rise an inch or two behind and show the hollow between her calf and femoral biceps, where the skin is whiter, crossed by a fine, pale-blue vein. The characters take on form gradually in the accumulation of minute details and precise movements, but also of remarks, shreds of conversation, as when old Hunder says, “This year’s doesn’t make you jump the way last year’s did,” and after a few lines you understand he means the red pepper; and “You’re the one who jumps less with every passing year!” Aunt Ugurd says, tasting something with a wooden spoon and adding a pinch of cinnamon to the pot.

  Every moment you discover there is a new character, you don’t know how many people there are in this immense kitchen of ours, it’s no use counting, there were always many of us, at Kudgiwa, always coming and going: the sum never works out properly because different names can belong to the same character, indicated according to the circumstances by baptismal name, nickname, surname or patronymic, and even by appellations such as “Jan’s widow,” or “the apprentice from the corn shop.” But what counts are the physical details that the novel underlines—Bronko’s gnawed nails, the down on Brigd’s cheeks—and also the gestures, the utensils that this person or that is handling—the meat pounder, the colander for the cress, the butter curler—so that each character already receives a first definition through this action or attribute; but then we wish to learn even more, as if the butter curler already determined the character and the fate of the person who is presented in the first chapter handling a butter curler, and as if you, Reader, were already prepared, each time that character is introduced again in the course of the novel, to cry, “Ah, that’s the butter-curler one!” thus obligating the author to attribute to him acts and events in keeping with that initial butter curler.

  Our kitchen at Kudgiwa seemed to be made deliberately so that at any hour many persons would be found in it, each intent on cooking himself something, one hulling chick peas, another putting the tench in marinade, everybody seasoning or cooking or eating something, and when they went away, others came, from dawn till late at night, and that morning I had come down at this early hour and already the kitchen was in full operation because it was a different day from the others: Mr. Kauderer had arrived the night before with his son, and he would be going away this morning, taking me in the son’s place. I was leaving home for the first time: I was to spend the whole season on Mr. Kauderer’s estate, in the province of Pëtkwo, until the rye harvest, to learn the working of the new drying machines imported from Belgium; during this period Ponko, youngest of the Kauderers, would stay with us and acquire the techniques of grafting rowans.

  The usual smells and noises of the house crowded around me that morning as if in farewell: I was about to lose everything I had known till then, and for such a long period—so it seemed to me—that when I came back nothing would be as it had been before, nor would I be the same I. And hence this farewell of mine was as if forever: to the kitchen, the house, to Aunt Ugurd’s knödel; so this sense of concreteness that you perceived from the very first lines bears in it also the sense of loss, the vertigo of dissolution, and you realize that you perceived this, too, alert Reader that you are, from the first page, when, though pleased with the precision of this writing, you sensed that, to tell the truth, everything was slipping through your fingers; perhaps it was also the fault of the translation, you told yourself, which may very well be faithful but certainly doesn’t render the solid substance those terms must have in the original language, whatever it may be. Each sentence, in short, wants to convey to you both the solidity of my relationship with the Kudgiwa house and my regret at losing it, and further—perhaps you didn’t realize it, but if you think back you’ll see this is exactly the case—the drive to break away from it, to run toward the unknown, to turn the page, far from the acidulous odor of the schoëblintsjia, to begin a new chapter with new encounters in the endless sunsets beyond the Aagd, on the Pëtkwo Sundays, at the festivities in the Cider Palace.

  The portrait of a girl with short-cropped black hair and a long face had emerged for a moment from Ponko’s little trunk; then he immediately hid it under an oilskin jacket. In the bedroom beneath the dovecote, which had till now been mine and from today on would be Ponko’s, he was unpacking his things and arranging them in the drawers I had just emptied. I watched him in silence, sitting on my already closed little trunk, mechanically hammering at a stud that stuck out, a bit crooked; we had said nothing to each other after a grunted hello; I followed him in all his movements, trying to be thoroughly aware of what was going on: an outsider was taking my place, was becoming me, my cage with the starlings would become his, the stereoscope, the real Uhlan helmet hanging from a nail, all my things that I couldn’t take with me remained to him; or, rather, it was my relationship with things, places, people, that was becoming his, just as I was about to become him, to take his place among the things and people of his life.

  That girl... “Who is that girl?” I asked, and with an ill-advised movement I reached out to uncover and grasp the photograph in its carved wooden frame. This girl was different from the girls in these parts who all have round faces and braids the color of bran. It was not until this moment that I thought of Brigd; in a flash I saw Ponko and Brigd, who would dance together on the Feast of Saint Thaddeus, Brigd who would mend Ponko’s woolen gloves, Ponko who would give Brigd a marten captured with my trap. “Let go of that picture!” Ponko yelled and grabbed both my arms with iron fingers. “Let go! This minute!”

  “To remind you of Zwida Ozkart,” I managed to read on the picture. “Who is Zwida Ozkart?” I asked, and already a fist had struck me full in the face, and already with fists clenched I had flung myself on Ponko and we were rolling on the floor trying to twist each other’s arms, knee each other, break ribs.

  Ponko’s body had heavy bones, his arms and legs hit sharply, the hair I tried to grab in order to throw him backward was a brush as stiff as a dog’s coat. While we were clutching each other I had the sensation that in this struggle the transformation was taking place, and when he rose he would be me and I him, but perhaps I am thinking this only now, or it is only you, Reader, who are think

ing it, not I; indeed, in that moment wrestling with him meant holding tight to myself, to my past, so that it wouldn’t fall into his hands, even at the cost of destroying it, it was Brigd I wanted to destroy so she wouldn’t fall into Ponko’s hands, Brigd, with whom I had never thought I was in love, and I didn’t think I was even now, but once, only once, I had rolled with her, one on top of the other almost like now with Ponko, and she and I were biting each other on the pile of peat behind the stove, and now I felt that I had already been fighting for her against a Ponko still in the future, that I was already fighting him for both Brigd and Zwida. I had been seeking to tear something from my past so as not to leave it to my rival, to the new me with dog’s hair, or perhaps already I had been trying to wring from the past of that unknown me a secret to add to my past or to my future.

  The page you’re reading should convey this violent contact of dull and painful blows, of fierce and lacerating responses; this bodiliness of using one’s own body against another body, melding the weight of one’s own efforts and the precision of one’s own receptivity and adapting them to the mirror image of them that the adversary reflects. But if the sensations reading evokes remain scant compared to any sensation really experienced, it is also because what I am feeling as I crush Ponko’s chest beneath my chest or as I block the twisting of an arm behind my back is not the sensation I would need to declare what I would like to declare, namely the amorous possession of Brigd, of the firm fullness of that girl’s flesh, so different from the bony solidity of Ponko, and also the amorous possession of Zwida, of the melting softness I imagine in Zwida, the possession of a Brigd I feel already lost and of a Zwida who has only the bodiless substance of a photograph under glass. In the tangle of male limbs opposing and identical, I try in vain to clasp those female ghosts that vanish in their unattainable difference; and I try at the same time to strike myself, perhaps the other self that is about to take my place in the house or else the self most mine that I want to snatch away from that other, but which I feel pressing against me and which is only the alienness of the other, as if that other had already taken my place and any other place, and I were erased from the world.

  The world seemed alien to me when in the end I broke away from my adversary with a furious push and stood up, planting my feet on the floor. Alien was my room, the small trunk that was my luggage, the view from the little window. I feared I could no longer establish a relationship with anyone or anything. I wanted to go find Brigd, but without knowing what I wanted to say to her or do to her, what I wanted to have her say to me or do to me. I headed toward Brigd thinking of Zwida: what I sought was a two-headed figure, a Brigd-Zwida, just as I was double-faced moving away from Ponko, trying in vain with my saliva to remove a spot of blood from my corduroy suit—my blood or his, from my teeth or from Ponko’s nose.

  And double-faced as I was, I heard and saw, beyond the door of the big room, Mr. Kauderer standing, making a broad horizontal gesture to measure the space before him and saying, “And so I found them before me, Kauni and Pittö, twenty-two and twenty-four years old, with their chests tom open by wolf bullets.”

  “When did it happen?” my grandfather asked. “We knew nothing about it.”

  “Before leaving we attended the octave service.”

  “We thought things had long been settled between your family and the Ozkarts. That after all these years you had buried the hatchet, that the whole horrible business between you was over.”

  Mr. Kauderer’s eyes, which had no lashes, kept staring into the void; nothing moved in his gutta-percha-yellow face. “Between Ozkarts and Kauderers peace lasts only from one funeral to the next, and the hatchet is not buried, but our dead are buried and we write on their graves: This was the Ozkarts’ doing.”

  “And what about your bunch, then?” Bronko asked, a man who called a spade a spade.

  “The Ozkarts also write on their graves: This was the Kauderers’ doing.” Then, rubbing one finger over his mustache, he said, “Here Ponko will be safe, at last.”

  It was at this point that my mother clasped her hands and said, “Holy Virgin, will our Gritzvi be in danger? They won’t take it out on him?”

  Mr. Kauderer shook his head but didn’t look her in the face. “He isn’t a Kauderer! We’re the ones who are in danger, always!”

  The door opened. From the hot urine of the horses in the yard a cloud of steam rose in the icy, glassy air. The stableboy stuck his flushed face inside and announced, “The buggy is ready!”

  “Gritzvi! Where are you? Hurry up!” Grandfather shouted.

  I took a step forward, toward Mr. Kauderer, who was buttoning up his felt greatcoat.

Q and A for Matt/teachers, not students=

1q Does the protagonist "watch TV"? 

Answer= "No, I don't want to watch TV"

2q What does he prefer to do?

Answer= read Italo Calvino's new novel.

3q Does the protagonist let anything distract him from reading?

Answer= no, he deals with it first.

4q Is it easy for the protagonist to find a book to read?

Answer= no, he's got many lists.

5q What is "the principle object of his attention"?  (the protagonist, 4 things)

"the perforations of electronic cards, the burners of a kitchen stove, the controls

of a bulldozer, and a patient stretched out on the operating table."

BQ Where does the novel begin?

Answer= "a railway station".

 

3/28

IC- #3/15- Italian Folktales, p. 3 (3rd page)

worksheet link= https://www.onlinereadfreebooks.com/en/Italian-Folktales-282101/2

Italo Calvino

Italian Folktales

依塔羅卡爾維諾小說選

義大利童話

In contrast to the Sicilian folktale which unfolds in a somewhat limited gamut of themes and often from a realistic starting point (how many hungry families go out into the country looking for plants to make soup!), the Tuscan folktale proves a fertile ground for the most varied cultural influences. My favorite Tuscan source is Gherardo Nerucci’s Sessanta novelle popolari Montanesi, 1880 (Sixty Popular Tales from Montale—a village near Pistoia), written in an odd Tuscan vernacular. In one of these a certain Pietro di Canestrino, a laborer, told, in La Regina Marmotta (“The Sleeping Queen”), the most Ariosto-like tale to come from the mouth of a man of the people. The story is an uncertain byproduct of the sixteenth-century epic, not in its plot (which in its broad outline is reminiscent of a well-known folktale) nor in its fanciful geography (which also dates back to the ballads of chivalry) but in its manner of narrating, of creating magic through the wealth of descriptions of gardens and palaces (much more complete and literary in the original text than in my own highly abridged reconstruction, where I sought to avoid any appreciable divergence from the general tone of the present book). The original description of the queen’s palace even includes a list of famous beauties of the past, introduced as statues: . . . and these statues represented many famous women, alike in dress, but different in countenance, and they included Lucretia of Rome, Isabella of Ferrara, Elizabeth and Leonore of Mantua, Varisilla Veronese with her beautiful face and unusual features; the sixth, Diana of Regno Morese and Terra Luba, the most renowned for her beauty in Spain, France, Italy, England, and Austria, and whose royal blood was the purest . . . ” and so forth.

The book of the sixty Montale stories appeared in 1880, when many of the most important Italian collections of folktales had already been published, but the lawyer Gherardo Nerucci (1828–1906, somewhat older than the other folklorists of the “scientific” generation) had begun collecting tales much earlier, in 1868. Many of the sixty stories were already in the anthologies of his colleagues; some of the most beautiful tales in the Imbriani and Comparetti collections are his. Nerucci was not concerned with comparatist storytelling (his interest in popular tales was linguistic), but it is plain that the Montale stories are based, often, on literary sources. To be sure, this village also produced its share of obscure and prehistoric tales, such as Testa di Bufala (“Buffalo Head”) which simply clamors for ethnological interpretation. There were also tales that appear strangely modern and “invented,” like La novellina delle scimmie (“The Little Tale of the Monkeys”) but a great many of the stories have the same themes and plots as popular poems (going back to the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries) and as the Arabian Nights; these (with only the settings transposed) are so faithful to the French eighteenth-century translation by Galland (allowing for an adaptation to suit Western taste) as to exclude the possibility of influences stemming from long ago, via who knows what oral paths from the Orient. These were unquestionably directly plucked from literature and transposed into folklore quite recently. Thus, when the widowed Luisa Ginanni repeats from beginning to end the plot of Boccaccio’s Andreuccio da Perugia, I believe that it derives not from the popular tradition that was the source of Boccaccio’s story, but from a direct version in dialect of the most picaresque story in the Decameron.

 Thus, with Boccaccio, we come close to defining the spirit in which Pistoia country people told stories. It would appear that in this region the link has been established (or that Nerucci perceived it) between a fiaba (fairy tale) and a novella (short story); the transition between the narrative of magic and the narrative of fortune or individual bravery has been pinpointed. The tale of magic flows smoothly into a mundane, “bourgeois” story, short story or novel of adventure, or tear-jerking account of a damsel in distress. Let us take, for example, Il figliuolo del mercante di Milano (“The Son of the Merchant of Milan”) which belongs to a very old and obscure type of folktale: the youth who draws from his adventures—always the same, in which a dog, poisoned food, birds play a role—a riddle in nonsense rhyme. He puts it to a princess who is reputed to be a riddle-solver, and thus wins her hand. In Montale, the hero is not the usual predestined character, but a young man of initiative, ready to run risks; he knows how to capitalize on his winnings and profit from his losses. The proof is that—and it is very odd behavior in a fairy-tale hero—instead of marrying the princess, he releases her from all obligation to him in exchange for economic gain. This happens not just once, but twice in succession: the first time in exchange for a magic object (more exactly, the permission to win it himself), and the second, even more practical, in exchange for a steady income. The supernatural origin of Menichino’s success is quite overshadowed by his true native ability to make the most of these magic powers and retain all profits for himself. But Menichino’s outstanding trait is sincerity, the ability to win people’s trust: the hallmark of a businessman.

Nerucci’s favorite storyteller is the widow Luisa Ginanni. Of all the Montale storytellers, she knows the greatest number (three-quarters of the collection originate with her); often her imagery is quite striking, but there is no great difference between her voice and that of others. In a style full of verbal invention Nerucci intended to show us the richness of the unusual vernacular that results when the people of Montale speak in Italian—a harsh, mangled, violent Tuscan. Whereas with most of the other texts my task was somehow to enhance the stylistic color, with Nerucci’s my rewriting had to tone it down; there were, consequently, unavoidable losses.

  Rewriting Tuscan texts from a vernacular not so different from current Italian was for me a difficult task. The odds were stacked against me. And the hardest ones—for the simple reason that they are the most beautiful and already have a distinct style—were those fifteen or so tales I singled out from Nerucci. (On the other hand, in the case of the Sicilian texts from Pitrè’s collection, the more beautiful they were, the easier my task turned out to be; I translated them literally or freely, as the text required.)

As I have already indicated, Tuscany and Sicily have the choicest selection of folktales, both in quantity and quality. And immediately after, with its own special interpretation of a world of fantasy, is Venice, or rather, the entire range of Venetian dialects. The outstanding name here is Domenico Giuseppe Bemoni, who published (in 1873, 1875, 1893) several booklets of Venetian tales. These fables are remarkable for their limpidity and poetic power; although well-known types recur in them they always somehow evoke Venice, her spaces and light, and in one way or another they all impart an aquatic flavor; the sea, canals, voyages, ships, or the Levant figure in them. Bemoni does not give the names of the narrators, nor do we know how faithful he was to the original tales; but there is a distinct harmony overlying the gentle tones of the dialect and the atmosphere pervading various folktales, qualities which I hope are reflected in my transcription of the seven tales I singled out from his collection (stories 29 through 35).

  In the same period, Bologna’s contribution, through Carolina Coronedi-Berti, was a copious, first-rate anthology (1874), written in a dialect brimming over with zest and consisting of well-rounded, well-told stories shrouded in a somewhat hallucinatory ambience and set in familiar landscapes. Although the names of the storytellers are not given, one is often conscious of a feminine presence, who tends, at times, to be sentimental, at others to be dashing.

  In Giggi Zanazzo’s Roman collection (1907), the tale becomes a pretext for verbal entertainment. It is based upon knavish and suggestive modes of speech and makes for rewarding and pleasant reading.

The Abruzzi have to their credit two very fine collections: the two volumes by Gennaro Finamore (1836–1923), a teacher and medical doctor. He collected texts in dialect from various localities and transcribed them with great linguistic precision; a vein of melancholy poetry occasionally emerges from these texts. The other Abruzzi anthology is the work of the archeologist Antonio De Nino (1836–1907), a friend of D’Annunzio’s, who recast the tales in Italian in very brief stories interspersed with sh

ort ballads and refrains in dialect in a playful and childlike style—a method of doubtful value from the scientific point of view as well as from mine. But the book contains many unusual stories (although a number of them are culled from the Arabian Nights) and curious ones (see my Gobba, zoppa e collotorto, “Hunchback Wryneck Hobbler”), that have an underlying irony and playfulness.

  Eight of the best tales I ran into are in Apulian dialect, in Pietro Pellizzari’s book, Fiabe e canzoni popolari del contado di Maglie in terra d’Otranto (Popular Fables and Songs from the Country of Maglie in Terra d’Otranto, 1881). They are familiar types, but written in a language so witty, in so racy a style, with such enjoyment of grotesque malformation, that they give the impression of having been conceived in that very language, like the excellent I cinque capestrati (“Five scapegraces”) the plot of which can be found in its every detail in Basile.

 In Calabria (mainly in the village of Palmi) Letterio Di Francia, the scholarly author of a history of storytelling, transcribed a collection, Fiabe e novelle calabresi (Calabrian Fables and Short Stories) published in 1929 and 1931, complete with the fullest and most precise notes ever recorded in Italian. The author names the different outstanding narrators, among whom there is a certain Annunziata Palermo. Calabrian storytelling exhibits a rich, colorful, complex imagination, but within it the logic of the plot is often lost, leaving only the unraveling of the enchantment.

  Characteristics of the Italian Folktale

  Can one speak of the Italian folktale? Or must the question of the folktale be dealt with in terms of a remote age that is not only prehistoric but also pregeographic?

  The disciplines concerned with studying the relationships between the folktale and the rites of primitive societies yield surprising, and for me, convincing results, as in Propp’s Historical Roots of Russian Fairy Tales (1946), and it seems to me that the origins of the folktale are to be found in these rites. But having arrived at this conclusion there are still many unanswered questions. Was the birth and development of folklore a parallel and similar phenomenon throughout the world as the proponents of polygenesis claim? In view of the complexity of certain types that explanation may be too simple. Can ethnology explain every motif, every narrative complex throughout the world? Evidently not. Therefore, quite apart from the question of the ancient sources of folktales, the importance of the life which every folktale has had during a historical period must be recognized: storytelling as entertainment means the passage of the tale from narrator to narrator, from country to country, often by means of a written version, a book, until the story has spread over the entire area where it is to be found today.

  Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, Tuscany, through its ballads and popular verses, often imitative of folklore motifs, must have defined and diffused the most successful categories. The ballad has its own history, distinct from that of the folktale, but the two cross: the ballad draws its motifs from the tale and in turn adapts the tale to suit its motif.

  We must be careful not to “medievalize” the folktale too much. The ethnological view plucks the fable from the décor given it by a romantic taste, and has accustomed us to see the castle as the hut where initiations to the hunt took place, to regard the princess as a sacrificial offering to the dragon for agricultural necessities, the wizard as the sorcerer of the clan. Moreover, one need only glance at any collection faithful to the oral tradition to understand that the people (namely those of the nineteenth century unfamiliar either with the illustrations of children’s books or with Disney’s Snow White) do not visualize the folktales in terms of images which seem natural to us. In these stories description is almost always minimal, the terminology is general. Italian folklore tells of palaces, not castles. It rarely speaks of a prince or princess but rather of the son or daughter of the king. The names of supernatural beings such as ogres or witches are drawn from the most ancient pagan background of the locality. The names of these beings are not classified with any precision, not only because of the diversity of the dialects—for example, in Piedmont the masca (witch) is the mamma-draga (mother dragon) in Sicily, and in Romagna the om salbadgh (wild man) is the nanni-orcu (orca) in Puglia—but also because of the confusion that arises within the confines of a dialect; for example, in Tuscany mago (sorcerer) and drago (dragon) are often confused and used interchangeably.

  Nevertheless, the medieval stamp on the popular tale remains strong and enduring. These stories abound in tournaments to win the hands of princesses, with knightly feats, with devils, and with distortions of hallowed traditions. Therefore, one must examine as a prime occurrence in the historical life of the fable that moment of osmosis between folktale and the epic of chivalry, the probable source of which was Gothic France, whence its influence spread into Italy via the popular epic. That substratum of pagan and animistic culture which at the time of Apuleius had taken on the trappings and names of classical mythology, subsequently fell under the influence of the feudal and chivalrous imagination, of the institutions, ethics, and religious beliefs of the Middle Ages.

  At a certain point this amalgam blends with yet another, a wave of images and transfigurations of oriental origin which had spread from the south when contacts with and threats from the Saracens and Turks were at their height. In the numerous sea stories I have included, the reader will see how the notion of the world divided between Christian and Muslim takes the place of the arbitrary geography of the folktale. The folktale clothes its motifs in the habits of diverse societies. In the West the imprint of feudalism prevailed (notwithstanding certain nineteenth-century touches in the south such as an English lord) while in the Orient the bourgeois folktale of the fortunes of Aladdin or of Ali Baba dominated.

  One of the few folktales, perhaps—according to Stith Thompson the only one—that can be considered of “probable Italian origin,” is that of the love of three oranges (as in Gozzi) or of the three lemons (as in Basile) or of the three pomegranates (as in the version I chose). The tale abounds in metamorphoses in baroque (or Persian?) taste altogether worthy of Basile’s inventive powers or of those of a visionary weaver of rugs. It consists of a series of metaphors strung into a story—ricotta and blood, fruit and girl; a Saracen woman who looks at her image in a well, a girl in a tree who turns into a dove, the dove’s drops of blood from which a tree suddenly grows and, completing the circle, the fruit out of which the girl emerges. I should like to have given this folktale greater prominence but having examined numerous popular versions I did not find one that could be considered the frame story. I have included two versions, one (no. 107) integrated with some others is from Abruzzi and represents the most classic form of the tale, the other (no. 8) is a curious variation from Liguria. However, I must say in this instance, Basile is unrivaled and I refer the reader to his tale, the last in the Pentamerone.

  In this very mysterious story of transformations, with its precise rhythm, its joyous logic at work, I think I perceive a characteristic of the popular elaboration of the Italian folktale. There is a genuine feeling for beauty in the communions or metamorphoses of woman and fruit, of woman and plant in the two beautiful companion pieces of the Ragazza mela (“Apple Girl”) from Florence (no. 85) and the Rosmarina (“Rosemary”) from Palermo (no. 161). The secret lies in the metaphorical link: the image of the freshness of the apple and of the girl or of the pears beneath which the girl is hidden in order to increase the weight of the basket (no. 11) in the story “The Little Girl Sold with the Pears.”

  The natural cruelties of the folktale give way to the rules of harmony. The continuous flow of blood that characterizes the Grimms’ brutal tales is absent. The Italian folktale seldom displays unbearable ferocity. Although the notion of cruelty persists along with an injustice bordering on inhumanity as part of the constant stuff of stories, although the woods forever echo with the weeping of maidens or of forsaken brides with severed hands, gory ferocity is never gratuitous; the narrative does not dwell on the torment of the victim, not even under

pretense of pity, but moves swiftly to a healing solution, a part of which is a quick and pitiless punishment of the malefactor—or more often the malefactress—to be tarred and burned in the grim tradition of witches’ pyres, or, as in Sicily, being thrown from a window and then burned.

  A continuous quiver of love runs through Italian folklore. In speaking of the Sicilian tales, I mentioned the popularity of the Cupid and Psyche type found not only in Sicily but also in Tuscany and more or less everywhere. The supernatural bridegroom is joined in an underground dwelling. Neither his name nor his secret must be divulged lest he vanish. A lover is produced by sorcery from a basin of milk; a bird in flight is wounded by an envious rival who puts ground glass in a basin or tacks on a window ledge where the bird will alight. There is the serpent- or swine-king who at night turns into a handsome youth for the bride who respects him, while the wax of the candle lighted by curiosity thrusts him back under the evil spell. In the story of Bellinda and the monster a curious sentimental relationship develops between them. In those cases where the suffering partner is the man, it is the bewitched bride who comes silently at night to join him in the deserted palace; it is the fairy love of Liombruno who must remain a secret, it is the girl-dove who recovers her wings and flies. These stories differ but they tell of a precarious love that unites two incompatible worlds, and of a love tested by absence; stories of unknowable lovers who unite only in the moment in which they are lost to one another.

  Fairy tales are rarely structured along the simple and basic lines we associate with a love story in which the characters fall in love and encounter obstacles to their marriage. This theme is developed only occasionally in some melancholy tales from Sardinia, a land where girls used to be courted from their windows. The countless tales of the conquest or liberation of a princess always deal with someone never seen, a victim to be released by a test of valor, or a stake to be won in a joust to fulfill a destiny, or else someone falls in love with a portrait or the sound of a name or envisages the beloved in a drop of blood on a white portion of ricotta. These are abstract or symbolic romantic attachments that savor of witchcraft or of malediction. However, the most positive and deeply felt loves in folklore are not these, but rather those in which the beloved is first possessed and then conquered.

 

Q and A for Matt/teacher, not students=

1q Which parts of Italy does Italo Calvino mention?

Answer= "Tuscany and Sicily."

2q "3 oranges or..."? what?

Answer= "pomegranates"

3q He speaks of "apples" and what?

Answer= "pears"

4q "A bird" and what creature?

Answer= "a serpent king".

5q How does one win a princess in Sardinia?

Answer= winning "a test of valor" or "a joust"

BQ What's used interchangeably in Puglia?

Answer= "wild man" & "orca"

4/4- 4/18 

IC- #4/15-  THE ROAD TO SAN GIOVANNI, below=

worksheet link= https://www.onlinereadfreebooks.com/en/The-Road-to-San-Giovanni-676204/1

Italo Calvino

The Road to San Giovanni

依塔羅卡爾維諾小說選

聖喬凡尼之路

  A general explanation of the world and of history must first of all take into account the way our house was situated, in an area once known as “French Point”, on the last slopes at the foot of San Pietro hill, as though at the border between two continents. Below, just beyond our gate and the private drive, lay the town with its pavements shopwindows cinema-posters newspaper-kiosks, then Piazza Colombo a few moments’ walk away, then the seafront; above, you only had to go out of the kitchen door to the beudo that ran behind the house (you know what a beudo is, a ditch with a wall above and a narrow paving of flagstones beside running horizontally across the hill to take water from the streams to the fields) and immediately you were in the country, striking up cobbled mule tracks, between drystone walls and vineyard supports and greenery. That was the way my father always left the house, in his huntsman’s clothes, with his leggins, and you could hear the step of his hobnail boots on the flags by the ditch, and the brass tinkle of his dog, and the squeak of the little gate that opened into the road that led to San Pietro. The way my father saw things, it was from here up that the world began, while the other part of the world below the house was a mere appendix, necessary sometimes when there were things to be done, but alien and insignificant, to be crossed in great strides, as though in flight, without looking to right or left. But I didn’t agree, in fact quite the opposite: as I saw it, the world, the map of the planet, began on the other side of our house and went downwards, everything else being a blank space, with no marks and no meaning; it was down in the town that the signs of the future were to be read, from those streets, those nighttime lights that were not just the streets and lights of our small secluded town, but the town, a glimpse of all possible towns, as its harbour likewise was all the harbours of all the continents, and as I leaned out from the balustrades around our garden everything that attracted and bewildered me was within reach – yet immensely far away – everything was implicit, as the nut in its husk, the future and the present, and the harbour – still leaning out over those balustrades, and I’m not really sure if I’m talking about an age when I never left the garden or of an age when I would always be running off out and about, because now the two ages have fused together, and this age is one and the same thing as those places, which are no longer places nor anything else – the harbour, I was saying, you couldn’t see, it was hidden behind the rooftops of the tall houses in Piazza Sardi and Piazza Bresca, only the strip of the wharf rising above them and the tips of the boats’ masts; and the streets were hidden too and I could never get their layout to match that of the roofs, so unrecognizable did proportions and perspectives seem to me from up above: there the bell tower of San Siro, the pyramidal cupola of the Prince Amadeus Municipal Theatre, here the iron tower of the old Gazzano elevator factory (now that these things have gone forever, their names impose themselves on the page, irreplaceable and peremptory, demanding salvation), the mansards of the so-called Parisian Building, a block of rented flats owned by cousins of ours, which at that time (I’m talking about the late twenties now) was an isolated outpost of distant metropolises stranded on the rocky San Francesco River valley … Beyond all this, like a curtain, the Porta Candelieri side of the river – the water itself was hidden down at the bottom with its reeds, its washerwomen, its scum of refuse under the Roglio bridge – rose in a steep hill where my family then owned a precipitously sloping allotment, and where the old Pigna casbah clung on, grey and porous as a disinterred bone, with bits that were tarry black or yellow and tufts of grass, and above, on the site of the old San Costanzo quarter, destroyed by the earthquake of ’87, was a public garden, neatly kept and a little sad, whose hedges and espaliers climbed up the hill: as far as the dancefloor of a workingmen’s club mounted on scaffolding, the shabby building of the old hospital, the eighteenth-century sanctuary of the Madonna della Costa, with its imposing mass of blue. Mothers’ shouts, the songs of girls or of drunkards, depending on the time of day, on the day of the week, would shear off from these super-urban slopes to tumble down onto our garden, clear through a sky of silence; while shut in amongst the red scales of its roofs the city sounded its confused clatter of trams and hammers, and the lone trumpet in the courtyard of the De Sonnaz barracks, and the hum of the Bestagno sawmill, and – at Christmastime – the music of merry-go-rounds along the sea-front. Every sound, every shape, led one back to others, more sensed than heard or seen, and so on and on.

  My father’s road likewise led far away. The only things he saw in the world were plants and whatever had to do with plants, and he would say all their names out loud, in the absurd Latin botanists use, and where they came from – all his life he’d had a passion for studying and acclimatizing exotic plants – and their pop

ular names, too, if they had them, in Spanish or in English or in our local dialect, and into this naming of plants he would put all his passion for exploring a universe without end, for venturing time and again to the furthest frontiers of a vegetable genealogy, opening up from every branch or leaf or nervation as it were a waterway for himself, within the sap, within the network that covers the green earth. And in growing his plants – because that was another of his passions, or rather his main passion – in farming our San Giovanni estate (he would go there every morning leaving by the beudo door with his dog, half an hour’s walk even at his pace, almost all of it uphill) he would be forever anxious, but as though it wasn’t so much his getting a good yield out of those few hectares that he really cared about, as his doing whatever he could to further a task of nature which required human assistance, to grow everything that could be grown, to offer oneself as a link in a story that goes on and on, from the seed and the cutting for planting out or for grafting to the flower to the fruit to the plant and then over and over again without beginning or end in the narrow confines of the earth (the plot or the planet). But just a rustle of grass from beyond the strips of land he worked, a flutter, a squeak, and he would jump up eyes round and staring small beard pointed, to stand there ears straining (he had a motionless face, like an owl’s, with sudden starts sometimes, like a bird of prey, eagle or condor), and he was no longer the farmer but the woodsman now, the hunter, because this was his passion – his first, yes, his first, or rather his last, the final shape of his one passion, to know to grow to hunt, in every way to get on top of things, inside them, in that wild wood, in the non-anthropomorphic universe, before which (and only there) a man was man – to hunt, to lie in ambush, in the cold night before dawn, on the bleak heights of the Colla Bella or the Colla Ardente, waiting for the thrush, the hare (a pelt hunter, like all Ligurian farmers, his dog was a bloodhound) or to go right into the wood, to beat it inch by inch, dog’s nose in the ground, for all the animal trails, in every gorge where over the last fifty years foxes and badgers had dug their lairs and only he knew where, or when he went without his gun – to the sort of place where thrusting mushrooms swell the sodden earth after rain or edible snails streak it, the familiar wood with its toponymy that went back to the time of Napoleon – Monsù Marco, the Corporal’s Sash, Artillery Way – and every gamebird and every scent was reason enough to walk for miles off the paths, beating the mountainside gulley after gulley for days and nights, sleeping in those crude huts for drying chestnuts made from stones and branches that people call cannicci, alone with his dog or his gun, as far as Piedmont, as far as France, without ever leaving the woods, forcing open the path before him, that secret path that only he knew and that went across all the woods there were, that united all woods in one single wood, every wood in the world in a wood beyond all woods, every place in the world in a place beyond all places.

  You see how our roads diverged, my father’s and my own. Though I was like him in a way. For what was the road I sought if not a repeat of my father’s, but dug out of the depths of another otherness, the upperworld (or hell) of humanity, what were my eyes seeking in the dimly lit porches of the night (sometimes the shadow of a woman would disappear inside) if not the half-open door, the cinema screen to pass through, the page to turn that leads into a world where all words and shapes become real, present, my own experience, no longer the echo of an echo of an echo.

  Talking to each other was difficult. Both verbose by nature, possessed of an ocean of words, in each other’s presence we became mute, would walk in silence side by side along the road to San Giovanni. To my father’s mind, words must serve as confirmations of things, and as signs of possession; to mine they were foretastes of things barely glimpsed, not possessed, presumed. My father’s vocabulary welled outward into the interminable catalogue of the genuses, species and varieties of the vegetable world – every name was a distinction plucked from the dense compactness of the forest in the belief that one had thus enlarged man’s dominion – and into technical terminology, where the exactness of the word goes hand in hand with the studied exactness of the operation, the gesture. And this whole Babel-like nomenclature was mashed up in an equally Babel-like idiomatic base, where various languages vied with each other, combining together as need or memory dictated (dialect for anything local and blunt – he had an unusually rich dialect vocabulary, full of words no one used anymore – Spanish for things general and decorous – Mexico had been the backdrop to his most successful years – Italian for rhetoric – he was, in everything, a nineteenth-century man – English – he had been to Texas – for the practical side, French for jokes), the result being a conversational style all woven together with stock refrains promptly trotted out in response to familiar situations, exorcizing the movements of the mind and forming once again a catalogue, parallel to that of his farming vocabulary – and to yet another catalogue of his made up not of words this time but of whistles, twitters, trills, tu-whits and tu-whoos, this arising from his great ability to mimic birdcalls, whether simply by pursing his lips or cupping his hands round his mouth in some particular way, or by using little whistles or gadgets that you blew into or that went off with a spring, a considerable assortment of which he would carry around with him in his hunting jacket.

  I could recognize not a single plant or bird. The world of things was mute for me. The words that flowed and flowed inside my head weren’t anchored to objects, but to emotions fantasies, forebodings. And all it took was for a scrap of trampled newspaper to find its way beneath my feet and I would be engrossed in soaking up the writing on it, mutilated and unmentionable – names of theatres, actresses, vanities – and already my mind would be racing off, the sequence of images would go on for hours and hours as I walked silently behind my father, who might point to some leaves on the other side of a wall and say, “Ypotoglaxia jasminifolia” (I’m inventing the names; I never learned the real ones), “Photophila wolfoides”, he would say (I’m inventing; they were names of this sort), or “Crotodendron indica”, (of course I could perfectly well have looked up some real names, instead of inventing them, and maybe rediscovered what plants my father had actually been naming for me; but that would have been cheating, refusing to accept the loss that I inflicted on myself, the thousands of losses we inflict on ourselves and for which there is no making amends). (And yet, and yet, if I had written some real names of plants here it would have been a gesture of modesty and devotion on my part, finally resorting to that humble knowledge that my youth rejected in order to try my luck with other cards, unknown and treacherous, it would have been a way of making peace with my father, a demonstration of maturity, and yet I didn’t do it, I indulged in this joke of invented names, this intended parody, sure sign that I am still resisting, arguing, sure sign that that morning march to San Giovanni is still going on, with its same discord, and that every morning of my life is still the morning when it’s my turn to go with Father to San Giovanni.)

  We had to go with my father to San Giovanni, one day me and one day my brother (not during school time, because then Mother wouldn’t allow us to be distracted, but in the summer months, just when we could have slept late), to help him carry home the baskets of fruit and greens. (I’m talking about when we were bigger now, teenagers, and Father old; though Father always seemed to be the same age, between sixty and seventy, a dogged, tireless old age.) Summer and winter, he would get up at five, noisily pull on his farming clothes, lace up his leggins (he always dressed heavily, jacket and waistcoat whatever the season, mainly because he needed so many pockets for all the pruning shears and grafting knives and balls of string or raffia he always took with him; except that in summer he’d change his fustian hunting jacket and peaked-cap-with-attached-balaclava for faded yellow cloth fatigues left over from Mexico days and a colonial lion-hunters hat), come into our room to wake us up, with gruff shouts and shoulder-shaking, then go downstairs with his hobnail shoes on the marble steps, wander round the empty house (Mother g

ot up at six, then Grandmother, and last of all the maid and the cook), open the kitchen windows, heat up some coffee for himself, slops for the dog, talk to the dog, get together the baskets to be taken to San Giovanni, empty or with bags of seeds or insecticide or fertilizer in them (the noises sounded muffled to us in our semiconscious state, since no sooner had Father woken us up than we had fallen right back to sleep again), and already he would be opening the back door to the beudo, was out in the street, coughing and clearing his catarrh, summer and winter.

  We had managed to extract a tacit reprieve from our morning duty: instead of walking along with Father we would catch up with him in San Giovanni, half an hour or an hour later, so that his footsteps marching away up San Pietro hill told us we still had a scrap of sleep to cling to. But immediately my mother came to wake us up again. “Get up, get up, it’s late, Dad went ages ago!” and she would open the windows onto palm trees rustling in the morning wind, pull the bedclothes off us, “Get up, get up, Dad’s waiting for you to carry the baskets!” (No, it’s not so much Mother’s voice that comes back to me, in these pages echoing with my father’s noisy and distant presence, but a silent authority she had: she looks out between these lines, then immediately withdraws, is left in the margin; there, she came into our room and is gone, we didn’t hear her leave and our sleep is over forever.) I must get dressed in a hurry, climb up to San Giovanni before my father starts back, laden.

  He always came back laden. It was a point of honour for him never to make the trip empty-handed. And since the proper road didn’t go up as far as San Giovanni, there was no other way of getting the produce home than to carry it by hand (our hands, that is, since a labourer’s time costs money and can’t be thrown away, and when the women go to market they are already loaded up with things to sell). (True, there had once been – but this is a memory from earlier infancy – Giuà the muleteer with his wife Bianca and mule Bianchina, but Bianchina the mule had been dead a long time, and Giuà had got a hernia, though old Bianca is still alive today as I write.) Usually it was towards half-past nine or ten that my father got back from his morning trip: you would hear his footsteps along the beudo, heavier than when he set out, a bang on the kitchen door (he didn’t ring the bell because he had his hands full, or perhaps more out of a kind of declaration, of emphasis of his coming back laden), and you would see him come in with a basket under each arm, or a hamper, and a haversack on his back or even a pannier, and the kitchen would suddenly be swimming in greens and fruit, there was always more than one family could eat (I’m talking here about the times of plenty, before the war, before tending the land became almost the only means of getting the food we needed), and my mother would disapprove, worried as ever that nothing should be wasted, things, time, energy.

  (That life is partly waste was something my mother would not accept: I mean that it is partly passion. Hence she never left the garden where every plant was labelled, the house swathed in bougainvillea, the study with its herbariums and the microscope undere the glass dome. Always sure of herself, methodical, she transformed passions into duties and lived on those. But what pushed my father up the road to San Giovanni every morning – and me downwards along my own road – was not so much the duty of the hardworking landowner, the altruism of the agricultural innovator – and in my case not so much those definitions of duty that I would gradually impose on myself – but passion, fierce passion, pain of existence – what else could have forced him to scramble up through woods and wilderness and me to plunge into a labyrinth of walls and printed paper? – desperate confrontation with that which lies outside of ourselves, waste of self set against the waste of the world in general.)

  My father never attempted to save energy, only time: he wouldn’t shirk the steeper slope if it was the shorter. Depending on what stretches of mule track you chose, what shortcuts and bridges, there were all kinds of ways of getting from our house to San Giovanni: the route my father took was doubtless the result of long experience and numerous improvements and second thoughts; but by now it had become like the stairs at home, a series of steps you could climb with your eyes closed, taking up barely an instant of mental space, as if impatience had abolished both distance and effort. He only had to think: “Now I’ll go to San Giovanni” (he’d suddenly remembered that a strip of Jerusalem artichokes hadn’t been watered, that some aubergine seeds should be sprouting their first leaves) and it was as if he’d already been transported there, already he was seething inside with the scolding he was planning to give his workers or day labourers and the words would be bursting from his breast in an avalanche of insults for men and women alike, insults whose obscenity had lost all the warmth of complicity to become as austere and compact as a stone wall. This impatience, this intolerance at finding himself anywhere but on his own land, would sometimes seize him halfway through the day, when he’d already got back from his regular morning inspection at San Giovanni and changed into his town clothes, his starched collar, the waistcoat with the silver chain, a red fez he had bought in Tripolitania and wore in the house and the office to cover his bald head, and all of a sudden, in the middle of doing something else, he would think – because it was the estate that was always on his mind – of some job that hadn’t been finished up at San Giovanni or that hadn’t been done properly or of some worker who for lack of instructions might be standing idle, and immediately we would see him get up from his desk, go upstairs to his room, come down all togged up from hunting hat to leggins, untie the dog and go out by the door to the beudo, even in the hottest moments of a summer afternoon, staring straight ahead of him, the sun beating down.

  From the beudo you went out onto the brick and cobbled steps of Salita San Pietro. Here you would meet old folks from the Giovanni Marsaglia Home in their grey caps with red initials (including, as everybody knew, Russian princes fallen upon hard times, lords who had gambled away fortunes on the Riviera) and nuns leading lines of little girls from the holiday camps for the Milanese and people climbing up to visit sick relatives in the New Hospital. The housing in this area – there was a stretch of paved road now – was the result of various stages of sedimentation: like everywhere else the place had once been a stretch of fields watched over by farmhouses; then at the turn of the century a few expensive villas had sprung up, their gardens waving with palms, like the house we lived in (my parents’ first purchase on their return from America) and another a little further up the hill, built Indian style, all spindly steeples and domes, called “Palais d’Agra” (a name I always found mysterious until I read Kipling’s Kim), and yet another converted into a municipal quarantine station, its shutters always closed; later on, the wealthy residential districts of the town moved elsewhere and the area was taken over by more modest little houses, homely cottages wth small pieces of land used for seedbeds and sheds for chickens or rabbits. So that as far as the Baragallo bridge you were walking through a district that was half rural but already under fierce attack from the town, the remains of the traditional agricultural life (an old olive mill where water and moss roared on rusted wheels; a winery, stained purple, with vats and presses) rubbing shoulders with garages, flower wholesalers, sawmills, brick storage yards, an electric-power plant full of windows that loomed bright empty and humming in the mornings before dawn, and beyond all these the huge rectangle of the housing project, first and only completed lot of a planned village, an “achievement of the Regime” begun with enthusiasm and left without sequel, but sufficing to remind you that this was already the Europe of the masses.

  At the Baragallo bridge we would leave the road, which went on towards Madonna della Costa (we only walked that way when we went to see Uncle Quirino, nicknamed Titin, in the Calvinos’ eighteenth-century house, its old pink stucco rising from a grey cloud of olive trees on top of the hill where my great-grandparents had once had their brick kilns), and follow the river. Immediately something changed, and the first sign of it was this: that as far as Baragallo, people, like people on suburban streets anywhere, didn’t so much as look at one another, whereas after Baragallo everybody greeted everybody else as they passed by, even people they didn’t know, with a loud “Mornin,” or some other generic expression indicating recognition of the existence of their fellow man, like: “Keep it up, keep it up,” or “Aren’t we carrying a lot today,” or a comment on the weather, “Looks like rain to me,” messages of consideration and friendship full of discretion, spoken as they went along, without stopping, almost to themselves, barely raising their eyes. My father too would change after Baragallo; that nervous impatience that had marked his step so far would disappear, likewise his irritation when he shouted at the dog or tugged on the leash; now he would look around more calmly, the dog would usually be let loose and the shouts and whistles and fingersnapping directed its way were more good-natured, even affectionate. This feeling of being back in more isolated, familiar places had its effect on me too, but at the same time I would also feel uneasy at no longer being able to think of myself as the anonymous passerby of the street; from now on I was “one of the professor’s boys,” subjected to the scrutiny of every eye.

  On the other side of a wooden fence pigs shrieked and fought with each other (an unusual sight in our part of the world), bred by a Piedmontese family who had set up the kind of dairy farm typical of their home country. (On the way up we would already have passed by old Spirito driving his cart loaded with milk churns for his customers.) Opposite the pig farm the road gave onto a rocky stream, and there would be a row of women leaning over a sort of long raised trough washing clothes. Further on you could choose between two different paths, depending on whether or not you went back across the river over an ancient humpbacked bridge. If you didn’t go over the bridge you followed some ditches and shortcuts running beside strips of farmland until you reached the San Giovanni mule track via a flight of recently built (or restored) steps which climbed so sharp and steep in bright sunlight it took your breath away. (After the last war, someone wrote an obscenity in huge tarred letters on a wall at the top of the steps, in mockery of those climbing up carrying things, perhaps to reawaken an instinct of rebellion, or just seeking confirmation of his own hopelessness.) Then the mule track pushed on toward San Giovanni on the flat for a good while; the sea was behind us; on the other side of the river, the Tasciaire bank was slashed by a huge long gorge, testimony to an old landslide, a splash of blue in the splintered, earth-coloured stone. After rounding one particular bend you’d be able to see the little valley of San Giovanni opening up obliquely from the end of the main valley and so sharply lit that you could make out each separate strip of land and –where the olives didn’t cloud your view – who was working there, and the smoke from the red roofs of the barns.

  We liked to use this rou

te going down; climbing up we found the other more attractive: having crossed the bridge, you climbed the hill along the Tasciaire mule track, likewise steep and exposed to the sun, but twisting and varied and paved with old, crooked, worn-out stones, so that it seemed painless and homely by comparison. Then you left the track to follow a long beudo which ran across the side of the valley halfway up, just below that huge gorge you could see from the other side. The beudo was raised over the farmed strips and you had to watch your step so as not to slip and sometimes you had to hang on to the crooked, bulging wall beside. The dog usually found that the safest way to go was in the ditch, padding along in the water. Here and there fig trees rose from the strips on either side and a green shadow shaded the beudo; some farmhouses had been built right up against it and walking along you could almost be inside them, mixed up in the lives of those families, all out at work since dawn, women and men and children digging the earth of their strip with dull blows from their magaiu (a three-pronged fork), or, using their magaiu again to “turn in the water”, which meant knocking down the earth bank of the ditch and building other banks to lead the water twisting and turning through the seedbeds.

  Further on, the beudo disappeared into a dense thicket of rustling reeds, and we had reached the river. This had to be forded with a zigzag of jumps across white stepping-stones following a pattern we knew by heart but which could always change when rainy days swelled the river and carried off one of the stones. Climbing up away from the river you cut across between the strips along private paths till you reached a shortcut that was itself half a stream, and as with the other path you now joined the San Giovanni mule track, but at a point much further on.

  The nearer we got to San Giovanni, the more my father would be overcome by a new tension, which wasn’t just a last burst of impatience to arrive at the only place he felt was his own, but also a sort of remorse at having been away for so long, his conviction that something must have been lost or have gone wrong during his absence, his urgency to cancel out everything in his life that was not San Giovanni, and at the same time a feeling that since San Giovanni was not the whole world but merely a corner of the world besieged by the rest, it would always spell despair for him.

  But all it took was for someone at the top of a strip, pruning or spreading sulphate on the vines, to call down, “Professore, if you please, could I ask you a question?” and go on to ask advice about mixtures of fertilizers, the best time to make graftings, or about insecticides or the new seeds the Farming Consortium had in, and my father would stop and, cheering up, relaxing, exclamatory, a bit long-winded, explain the whys and wherefores. In short, all he wanted was a sign that civil cohabitation was possible in this world of his, a cohabitation prompted by a passion for improvement and informed by natural reason; but then he would immediately be oppressed again by reminders that all was precarious and beset by danger and once more the fury was upon him. And one of these reminders was myself, the fact that I belonged to that other, metropolitan and hostile part of the world, the painful awareness that he couldn’t count on his children to consolidate this ideal San Giovanni civilization of his, which thus had no future. So that the last stretch of the path was covered in an unwarranted hurry, as though it were the edge of a blanket he could use to tuck himself away inside San Giovanni; and hurrying along like this we went by a decrepit olive mill inhabited by two even more decrepit old women, over the concrete bridge that went back across the river (the track began to climb a little again here), past Regin’s house – he was a relative of ours and a customs officer whose dog would resume an interminable quarrel with our own, barking and leaping up (the track became steep here) – through the field of another relative, Bartumelìn, who had spent his youth in Peru (his wife, who we saw rinsing clothes in the washing trough, was a Peruvian Indian, a fat woman exactly like our own local women both in features and speech), (and here we began the last part of the climb, the steepest), past the field of two lanky muleteers who at some point replaced their mule with a stocky draught ox … My father’s breast heaved not with tiredness but with insults and scoldings: we had arrived at San Giovanni, now we were on home ground.

  What I ought to do now is recount every step and every gesture and every change of mood there on our land, except that everything loses its precision in my memory at this point, as if having reached the end of our climb with its rosary of images I would become wrapt in a kind of bewildered limbo, which lasted until it was time to pick up the baskets and set off down the path back home. I’ve already said that our daily duty consisted above all in helping father to bring back the baskets. Or rather, we were supposed to help him with everything, so as to learn how to run an estate, so as to be like him, as sons ought to be like their fathers, but soon both he and we understood that we weren’t going to learn anything, and the idea of training us for the farm was tacitly dropped, or put off until we were older and wiser, as if we had been granted an extension to our childhood. Hence carrying the baskets was the only thing that was certain, the only duty accepted as undeniably necessary. The job wasn’t, I should say, without its pleasure: having carefully balanced up my load, a wicker pannier on my back, a basket under one arm – with luck the other arm would be free, so the weight could be swapped about – I would set off head down, with a kind of fury, a bit like my father; and as I walked, relieved of any duty to pay attention to the world around me or to decide what to do, all my energy being employed in the effort of getting my load home and planting my feet along a path unchanging as a train track, my mind was at once protected and free to wander where it would. We plunged ourselves into this “humper’s” task with exaggerated effort, myself, my brother, and my father too; since for him as for us it seemed it was no longer the creativity of growing things, the experimentation and the risk that drew him to San Giovanni, so much as the transportation and accumulation of things, this antlike toiling, a question of life or death (and in fact it almost was that now: the interminable years of the war had begun; amid the general penury, our family had, thanks to the land in San Giovanni, entered a phase of agricultural self-sufficiency, or “autarky”, as they used to say then), and if we weren’t there to help him Father would come down overloaded – “like a mule” was the traditional image – flaunting his burden, perhaps partly so as to have our desertion weigh on us; but even if one or both of his sons went with him, we would all come down equally heavy laden, bow-legged, mute, gazing at the ground, each absorbed in his own thoughts, inscrutable.

  Our gloom was at odds with the generous contents of our baskets. These were concealed (with that typical peasant diffidence towards prying eyes) under a layer of broad vine or fig leaves, yet with our swaying steps the loose covering would get lost along the way and the green trunks of zucchini would emerge, the “nun’s-thigh” pears and the bunches of Saint Jeannet grapes, the first figs, the tough down of the chayote, the purple-green spines of the artichokes, the cobs of sweet corn to boil and munch on, the potatoes, the tomatoes, the big bottles of milk and wine, and sometimes a spindly rabbit, already skinned, with everything being carefully arranged so that the hard things wouldn’t bruise the soft and there was still enough space left for a bunch of oregano, or sweet marjoram or basil. (To my distracted eyes those baskets seemed insignificant then, as the basic materials of life always seem banal to the young, yet now that I have but a smooth sheet of white paper in their place, I struggle to fill them with name upon name, to cram them with words, and in remembering and arranging these names I spend more time than I spent gathering and arranging the things themselves, more passion … – no, not true: I imagined as I set out to describe the baskets that I would reach the crowning moment of my regret, and instead nothing, what came out was a cold, predictable list: and it’s pointless my trying to kindle a halo of feeling behind it with these words of commentary: all remains as it was then, those baskets were already dead then and I knew it, ghosts of a concreteness that had already disappeared, and I was already what I am, a citizen

of cities and of history – still without either city or history and suffering for it – a consumer – and victim – of industrial products – a candidate for consumerism, a freshly designated victim – and already the lots were cast, all the lots, our own and everybody else’s, yet what was this morning fury of my childhood, the fury that still persists in these not entirely sincere pages? Could everything perhaps have been different – not very different but just enough to make the difference – if those baskets hadn’t even then been so alien to me, if the rift between myself and my father hadn’t been so deep? Might everything that is happening now perhaps have taken a different slant, in the world, in the history of civilization – the losses not have been so absolute, the gains so uncertain?)

  The table where we laid the fruit and vegetables and filled the baskets to take back home was under the fig tree next to the old Cadorso farmhouse where the farm stewards’ family lived and where the faded Masonic emblem that the old Calvinos used to put on their houses was still visible over the door. Our vineyard took up the lower part of the estate, with fruit trees planted between the rows of vines; further up were the grapefruit trees, and above them the olives. And there, in the shade of the tall, green avocado (or aguacate) plants, the apple of my father’s eye, was the house he had built himself, the Villa” where we would live through the worst days of the war; with a model cellar and a stall for white Swiss goats on the ground floor. Our property ended at the piazza with the church of San Giovanni (where they hoisted the Cockaigne pole every twenty-fourth of June and the town band would play), then began again on the other side after a stretch of mule track, taking in a whole small valley which had a plantation of palms for funeral wreaths at the bottom, then fruit and greens further up, with a farmhouse known as Cason Bianco (where we kept sheep for a while), and a spring hidden amongst rocks green with maidenhair fern, and a limestone cavern, and a rock cave, and a fish pond, and other wonders, which were no longer wonders for me but have once again become so, now that in place of all this, stretching away in squalid and ferocious geometry, with neatly squared walls and terraces all at the same inclination, stands a carnation plantation—grey expanse of stalks in a grid of poles and wires, opaque glass of greenhouses, cylindrical cement tanks—and everything that once was is gone, everything that seemed to be there but was already only an illusion, an unaccountable stay of execution.

  Since it was in the shade for part of the day, the valley of San Giovanni was at that time thought to be unsuitable for the mass cultivation of flowers and hence had preserved the traditional look of the countryside. And likewise all the farms my father walked through every morning, as if he had chosen the route on purpose to avoid the uniform, grey expanses of the carnation fields which now hemmed in the city from Poggio to Coldirodi, as if, despite working professionally in the floriculture business himself, he felt secretly remorseful about it, realized that this thing he had hoped and worked for did, yes, mean economic and technical progress for our backward agriculture, but also destruction of wholeness and harmony, loss of variety, subordination to money. And that was why he separated those hours in San Giovanni from the rest of his day, why he tried to set up a modern estate that wouldn’t be hostage to a monoculture, made investments whose recovery was always uncertain, increasing the number of crops, the imported varieties, the irrigation piping, all so as to find some other way forward he could offer, one that would preserve both the spirit of the place and the drive for progress. What he wanted to achieve was a relationship with nature, one of struggle and dominion: to get his hands on nature, to change it, to mould it, while still feeling it alive and whole beneath.

  And me? I imagined my mind was elsewhere. What was nature? Grass, plants, green places, animals. I lived in the midst of it and wanted to be elsewhere. When it came to nature, I was cold, reserved, sometimes hostile. I didn’t realize that I too was seeking a relationship, more fortunate perhaps than my father’s, a relationship that literature would give me, restoring meaning to everything, so that all at once everything would become true and tangible and possessable and perfect, everything in a world that was already lost.

  Where is it my father’s shouting from, telling me to bring the hose and do some watering, with everything so dry? From one strip comes the sound of old Sciaguato’s fork thumping and thumping in the earth. Something is moving up in those trees: Mumina’s girl has climbed up to pick a basket of cherries. I run over with the hose coiled on my shoulder, but I can’t see my father amongst the rows of plants and I get the wrong strip. I have to bring the hook for pulling down the branches of the cherry tree, the sulphate dispenser, the sticky tape for grafting, but I don’t know my own land, I get lost. (Now, from the vantage point of hindsight, I can see every strip, every path, now I could point out the way for myself as I run through the vines, but it’s too late, everybody’s gone now.)

  I wish the baskets were already packed, so that we could get on home and go to the sea. The sea is over there, in a triangular cleft in the valley, V-shaped; but it’s as if it were miles and miles away, the sea alien to my father and to all the people we meet on our morning walks.

  Now we’re walking home. I’m bowed down under my pannier. The sun is high; from the nearest paved road, on San Giacomo Hill, comes the drone of a truck; here in the valley the grey of the olives and the chuckle of the stream deaden colour and sound. On the slope opposite smoke rises from the earth: someone has lit a stubble fire. My father is talking about the way olive trees blossom. I’m not listening. I look at the sea and think I’ll be down on the beach in an hour. On the beach the girls toss balls with their smooth arms, they dive into the sparkle, shout, splash, on scores of canoes and pedal-boats.

 Gennaio, 1962

 Q and A for Matt/teachers, not students=

1q What kind of "Point" was it?

Answer= "French."

2q What Piazzas are mentioned?

Answer="Sardi" & "Bresca."

3q What Collas are mentioned? ("Colla" means glue or paste)

Answer= "Bella" & "Ardente"

4q How were "chestnuts" dried?

Answer= "in crude huts of stone and branches."

5q Was it easy to talk on the road to San Giovanni"?

Answer= "Talking....was difficult."

BQ Does the author know the names of plants?

Answer= no

4/25-5/2 

IC #5/15- Invisible Cities, CITIES & MEMORY • 1 (Chapter 1), 2 (Chapter 2)

worksheet link= https://www.onlinereadfreebooks.com/en/Invisible-Cities-594427/1

Italo Calvino

Invisible Cities, CITIES & MEMORY

依塔羅卡爾維諾小說選

看不見的城市

1

  Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his. In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them. There is a sense of emptiness that comes over us at evening, with the odor of the elephants after the rain and the sandalwood ashes growing cold in the braziers, a dizziness that makes rivers and mountains tremble on the fallow curves of the planispheres where they are portrayed, and rolls up, one after the other, the despatches announcing to us the collapse of the last enemy troops, from defeat to defeat, and flakes the wax of the seals of obscure kings who beseech our armies’ protection, offering in exchange annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides, and tortoise shell. It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing. Only in Marco Polo’s accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites’ gnawing.

  CITIES & MEMORY • 1

  LEAVING THERE AND proceeding for three days toward the east, you reach Diomira, a city with sixty silver domes, bronze statues of all the gods, streets paved with lead, a crystal theater, a golden cock that crows each morning on a tower. All these beauties will already be familiar to the visitor, who has seen them also in other cities. But the special quality of this city for the man who arrives there on a September evening, when the days are growing shorter and the multicolored lamps are lighted all at once at the doors of the food stalls and from a terrace a woman’s voice cries ooh!, is that he feels envy toward those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that time.

  CITIES & MEMORY • 2

  WHEN A MAN rides a long time through wild regions he feels the desire for a city. Finally he comes to Isidora, a city where the buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made, where the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third, where cockfights degenerate into bloody brawls among the bettors. He was thinking of all these things when he desired a city. Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories.

  CITIES & DESIRE • 1

  THERE ARE TWO ways of describing the city of Dorothea: you can say that four aluminum towers rise from its walls flanking seven gates with spring-operated drawbridges that span the moat whose water feeds four green canals which cross the city, dividing it into nine quarters, each with three hundred houses and seven hundred chimneys. And bearing in mind that the nubile girls of each quarter marry youths of other quarters and their parents exchange the goods that each family holds in monopoly – bergamot, sturgeon roe, astrolabes, amethysts – you can then work from these facts until you learn everything you wish about the city in the past, present, and future. Or else you can say, like the camel driver who took me there: “I arrived here in my first youth, one morning, many people were hurrying along the streets toward the market, the women had fine teeth and looked you straight in the eye, three soldiers

on a platform played the trumpet, and all around wheels turned and colored banners fluttered in the wind. Before then I had known only the desert and the caravan routes. In the years that followed, my eyes returned to contemplate the desert expanses and the caravan routes; but now I know this path is only one of the many that opened before me on that morning in Dorothea.”

  CITIES & MEMORY • 3

  IN VAIN, GREAT-hearted Kublai, shall I attempt to describe Zaira, city of high bastions. I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades’ curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; but I already know this would be the same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past: the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper’s swaying feet; the line strung from the lamppost to the railing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen’s nuptial procession; the height of that railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn; the tilt of a guttering and a cat’s progress along it as he slips into the same window; the firing range of a gunboat which has suddenly appeared beyond the cape and the bomb that destroys the guttering; the rips in the fish net and the three old men seated on the dock mending nets and telling each other for the hundredth time the story of the gunboat of the usurper, who some say was the queen’s illegitimate son, abandoned in his swaddling clothes there on the dock.

  As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.

  CITIES & DESIRE • 2

  AT THE END of three days, moving southward, you come upon Anastasia, a city with concentric canals watering it and kites flying over it. I should now list the wares that can profitably be bought here: agate, onyx, chrysoprase, and other varieties of chalcedony; I should praise the flesh of the golden pheasant cooked here over fires of seasoned cherry wood and sprinkled with much sweet marjoram; and tell of the women I have seen bathing in the pool of a garden and who sometimes – it is said – invite the stranger to disrobe with them and chase them in the water. But with all this, I would not be telling you the city’s true essence; for while the description of Anastasia awakens desires one at a time only to force you to stifle them, when you are in the heart of Anastasia one morning your desires waken all at once and surround you. The city appears to you as a whole where no desire is lost and of which you are a part, and since it enjoys everything you do not enjoy, you can do nothing but inhabit this desire and be content. Such is the power, sometimes called malignant, sometimes benign, that Anastasia, the treacherous city, possesses; if for eight hours a day you work as a cutter of agate, onyx, chrysoprase, your labor which gives form to desire takes from desire its form, and you believe you are enjoying Anastasia wholly when you are only its slave.

  CITIES & SIGNS • 1

  YOU WALK FOR days among trees and among stones. Rarely does the eye light on a thing, and then only when it has recognized that thing as the sign of another thing: a print in the sand indicates the tiger’s passage; a marsh announces a vein of water; the hibiscus flower, the end of winter. All the rest is silent and interchangeable; trees and stones are only what they are.

  Finally the journey leads to the city of Tamara. You penetrate it along streets thick with signboards jutting from the walls. The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things: pincers point out the tooth-drawer’s house; a tankard, the tavern; halberds, the barracks; scales, the grocer’s. Statues and shields depict lions, dolphins, towers, stars: a sign that something – who knows what? – has as its sign a lion or a dolphin or a tower or a star. Other signals warn of what is forbidden in a given place (to enter the alley with wagons, to urinate behind the kiosk, to fish with your pole from the bridge) and what is allowed (watering zebras, playing bowls, burning relatives’ corpses). From the doors of the temples the gods’ statues are seen, each portrayed with his attributes – the cornucopia, the hourglass, the medusa – so that the worshiper can recognize them and address his prayers correctly. If a building has no signboard or figure, its very form and the position it occupies in the city’s order suffice to indicate its function: the palace, the prison, the mint, the Pythagorean school, the brothel. The wares, too, which the vendors display on their stalls are valuable not in themselves but as signs of other things: the embroidered headband stands for elegance; the gilded palanquin, power; the volumes of Averroes, learning; the ankle bracelet, voluptuousness. Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages: the city says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse, and while you believe you are visiting Tamara you are only recording the names with which she defines herself and all her parts.

  However the city may really be, beneath this thick coating of signs, whatever it may contain or conceal, you leave Tamara without having discovered it. Outside, the land stretches, empty, to the horizon; the sky opens, with speeding clouds. In the shape that chance and wind give the clouds, you are already intent on recognizing figures: a sailing ship, a hand, an elephant. . . .

  CITIES & MEMORY • 4

  BEYOND SIX RIVERS and three mountain ranges rises Zora, a city that no one, having seen it, can forget. But not because, like other memorable cities, it leaves an unusual image in your recollections. Zora has the quality of remaining in your memory point by point, in its succession of streets, of houses along the streets, and of doors and windows in the houses, though nothing in them possesses a special beauty or rarity. Zora’s secret lies in the way your gaze runs over patterns following one another as in a musical score where not a note can be altered or displaced. The man who knows by heart how Zora is made, if he is unable to sleep at night, can imagine he is walking along the streets and he remembers the order by which the copper clock follows the barber’s striped awning, then the fountain with the nine jets, the astronomer’s glass tower, the melon vendor’s kiosk, the statue of the hermit and the lion, the Turkish bath, the café at the corner, the alley that leads to the harbor. This city which cannot be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember: names of famous men, virtues, numbers, vegetable and mineral classifications, dates of battles, constellations, parts of speech. Between each idea and each point of the itinerary an affinity or a contrast can be established, serving as an immediate aid to memory. So the world’s most learned men are those who have memorized Zora.

  But in vain I set out to visit the city: forced to remain motionless and always the same, in order to be more easily remembered, Zora has languished, disintegrated, disappeared. The earth has forgotten her.

  CITIES & DESIRE • 3

  DESPINA CAN BE reached in two ways: by ship or by camel. The city displays one face to the traveler arriving overland and a different one to him who arrives by sea.

  When the camel driver sees, at the horizon of the tableland, the pinnacles of the skyscrapers come into view, the radar antennae, the white and red wind-socks flapping, the chimneys belching smoke, he thinks of a ship; he knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a vessel that will take him away from the desert, a windjammer about to cast off, with the breeze already swelling the sails, not yet unfurled, or a steamboat with its boiler vibrating in the iron keel; and he thinks of all the ports, the foreign merchandise the cranes unload on the docks, the taverns where crews of different flags break bottles over one another’s heads, the lighted, ground-floor windows, each with a woman combing her hair.

  In the coastline’s haze, the sailor discerns the form of a camel’s withers, an embroidered saddle with glitterin

g fringe between two spotted humps, advancing and swaying; he knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a camel from whose pack hang wineskins and bags of candied fruit, date wine, tobacco leaves, and already he sees himself at the head of a long caravan taking him away from the desert of the sea, toward oases of fresh water in the palm trees’ jagged shade, toward palaces of thick, whitewashed walls, tiled courts where girls are dancing barefoot, moving their arms, half-hidden by their veils, and half-revealed.

  Each city receives its form from the desert it opposes; and so the camel driver and the sailor see Despina, a border city between two deserts.

  CITIES & SIGNS • 2

  TRAVELERS RETURN FROM the city of Zirma with distinct memories: a blind black man shouting in the crowd, a lunatic teetering on a skyscraper’s cornice, a girl walking with a puma on a leash. Actually many of the blind men who tap their canes on Zirma’s cobblestones are black; in every skyscraper there is someone going mad; all lunatics spend hours on cornices; there is no puma that some girl does not raise, as a whim. The city is redundant: it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind.

  I too am returning from Zirma: my memory includes dirigibles flying in all directions, at window level; streets of shops where tattoos are drawn on sailors’ skin; underground trains crammed with obese women suffering from the humidity. My traveling companions, on the other hand, swear they saw only one dirigible hovering among the city’s spires, only one tattoo artist arranging needles and inks and pierced patterns on his bench, only one fat woman fanning herself on a train’s platform. Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.

  THIN CITIES • 1

  ISAURA, CITY OF the thousand wells, is said to rise over a deep, subterranean lake. On all sides, wherever the inhabitants dig long vertical holes in the ground, they succeed in drawing up water, as far as the city extends, and no farther. Its green border repeats the dark outline of the buried lake; an invisible landscape conditions the visible one; everything that moves in the sunlight is driven by the lapping wave enclosed beneath the rock’s calcareous sky.

Consequently two forms of religion exist in Isaura.

  The city’s gods, according to some people, live in the depths, in the black lake that feeds the underground streams. According to others, the gods live in the buckets that rise, suspended from a cable, as they appear over the edge of the wells, in the revolving pulleys, in the windlasses of the norias, in the pump handles, in the blades of the windmills that draw the water up from the drillings, in the trestles that support the twisting probes, in the reservoirs perched on stilts over the roofs, in the slender arches of the aqueducts, in all the columns of water, the vertical pipes, the plungers, the drains, all the way up to the weathercocks that surmount the airy scaffoldings of Isaura, a city that moves entirely upward.

  Sent off to inspect the remote provinces, the Great Khan’s envoys and tax-collectors duly returned to Kai-ping-fu and to the gardens of magnolias in whose shade Kublai strolled, listening to their long reports. The ambassadors were Persians, Armenians, Syrians, Copts, Turkomans; the emperor is he who is a foreigner to each of his subjects, and only through foreign eyes and ears could the empire manifest its existence to Kublai. In languages incomprehensible to the Khan, the envoys related information heard in languages incomprehensible to them: from this opaque, dense stridor emerged the revenues received by the imperial treasury, the first and last names of officials dismissed and decapitated, the dimensions of the canals that the narrow rivers fed in times of drought. But when the young Venetian made his report, a different communication was established between him and the emperor. Newly arrived and totally ignorant of the Levantine languages, Marco Polo could express himself only with gestures, leaps, cries of wonder and of horror, animal barkings or hootings, or with objects he took from his knapsacks – ostrich plumes, pea-shooters, quartzes – which he arranged in front of him like chessmen. Returning from the missions on which Kublai sent him, the ingenious foreigner improvised pantomimes that the sovereign had to interpret: one city was depicted by the leap of a fish escaping the cormorant’s beak to fall into a net; another city by a naked man running through fire unscorched; a third by a skull, its teeth green with mold, clenching a round, white pearl. The Great Khan deciphered the signs, but the connection between them and the places visited remained uncertain; he never knew whether Marco wished to enact an adventure that had befallen him on his journey, an exploit of the city’s founder, the prophecy of an astrologer, a rebus or a charade to indicate a name. But, obscure or obvious as it might be, everything Marco displayed had the power of emblems, which, once seen, cannot be forgotten or confused. In the Khan’s mind the empire was reflected in a desert of labile and interchangeable data, like grains of sand, from which there appeared, for each city and province, the figures evoked by the Venetian’s logogriphs.

  As the seasons passed and his missions continued, Marco mastered the Tartar language and the national idioms and tribal dialects. Now his accounts were the most precise and detailed that the Great Khan could wish and there was no question or curiosity which they did not satisfy. And yet each piece of information about a place recalled to the emperor’s mind that first gesture or object with which Marco had designated the place. The new fact received a meaning from that emblem and also added to the emblem a new meaning. Perhaps, Kublai thought, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind’s phantasms.

  “On the day when I know all the emblems,” he asked Marco, “shall I be able to possess my empire, at last?”

  And the Venetian answered: “Sire, do not believe it. On that day you will be an emblem among emblems.”

  2

  “The other ambassadors warn me of famines, extortions, conspiracies, or else they inform me of newly discovered turquoise mines, advantageous prices in marten furs, suggestions for supplying damascened blades. And you?” the Great Khan asked Polo. “You return from lands equally distant and you can tell me only the thoughts that come to a man who sits on his doorstep at evening to enjoy the cool air. What is the use, then, of all your traveling?”

  “It is evening. We are seated on the steps of your palace. There is a slight breeze,” Marco Polo answered. “Whatever country my words may evoke around you, you will see it from such a vantage point, even if instead of the palace there is a village on pilings and the breeze carries the stench of a muddy estuary.”

  “My gaze it that of a man meditating, lost in thought – I admit it. But yours? You cross archipelagoes, tundras, mountain ranges. You would do as well never moving from here.”

  The Venetian knew that when Kublai became vexed with him, the emperor wanted to follow more clearly a private train of thought; so Marco’s answers and objections took their place in a discourse already proceeding on its own, in the Great Khan’s head. That is to say, between the two of them it did not matter whether questions and solutions were uttered aloud or whether each of the two went on pondering in silence. In fact, they were silent, their eyes half-closed, reclining on cushions, swaying in hammocks, smoking long amber pipes.

  Marco Polo imagined answering (or Kublai Khan imagined his answer) that the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there; and he retraced the stages of his journeys, and he came to know the port from which he had set sail, and the familiar places of his youth, and the surroundings of home, and a little square of Venice where he gamboled as a child.

  At this point Kublai Khan interrupted him or imagined interrupting him, or Marco Polo imagined himself interrupted, with a question such as: “You advance always with your head turned back?” or “Is what you see always behind you?” or rather, “Does your journey take place only in the past?”

  All this so that Marco Polo could explain or imagine explaining or be imagined explaining or succeed finally in explaining to himself that what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveler’s past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

  Marco enters a city; he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his; he could now be in that man’s place, if he had stopped in time, long ago; or if, long ago, at a crossroads, instead of taking one road he had taken the opposite one, and after long wandering he had come to be in the place of that man in that square. By now, from that real or hypothetical past of his, he is excluded; he cannot stop; he must go on to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him, or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else’s present. Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.

  “Journeys to relive your past?” was the Khan’s question at this point, a question which could also have been formulated: “Journeys to recover your future?”

  And Marco’s answer was: “Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.”

  CITIES & MEMORY • 5

  IN MAURILIA, THE traveler is invited to visit the city and, at the same time, to examine some old postcards that show it as it used to be: the same identical square with a hen in the place of the bus station, a bandstand in the place of the overpass, two young ladies with white parasols in the place of the munitions factory. If the traveler does not wish to disappoint the inhabitants, he must praise the postcard city and prefer it to the present one, though he must be careful to contain his regret at the changes within definite limits: admitting that the magnificence and prosperity of the metropolis Maurilia, when compared to the old, provincial Maurilia, cannot compensate for a certain lost grace, which, however, can be appreciated only now in the old postcards, whereas befor

e, when that provincial Maurilia was before one’s eyes, one saw absolutely nothing graceful and would see it even less today, if Maurilia had remained unchanged; and in any case the metropolis has the added attraction that, through what it has become, one can look back with nostalgia at what it was.

  Beware of saying to them that sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves. At times even the names of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voices’ accent, and also the features of the faces; but the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place. It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old postcards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one.

  CITIES & DESIRE • 4

  IN THE CENTER of Fedora, that gray stone metropolis, stands a metal building with a crystal globe in every room. Looking into each globe, you see a blue city, the model of a different Fedora. These are the forms the city could have taken if, for one reason or another, it had not become what we see today. In every age someone, looking at Fedora as it was, imagined a way of making it the ideal city, but while he constructed his miniature model, Fedora was already no longer the same as before, and what had been until yesterday a possible future became only a toy in a glass globe.

  The building with the globes is now Fedora’s museum: every inhabitant visits it, chooses the city that corresponds to his desires, contemplates it, imagining his reflection in the medusa pond that would have collected the waters of the canal (if it had not been dried up), the view from the high canopied box along the avenue reserved for elephants (now banished from the city), the fun of sliding down the spiral, twisting minaret (which never found a pedestal from which to rise).

  On the map of your empire, O Great Khan, there must be room both for the big, stone Fedora and the little Fedoras in glass globes. Not because they are all equally real, but because all are only assumptions. The one contains what is accepted as necessary when it is not yet so; the others, what is imagined as possible and, a moment later, is possible no longer.

  CITIES & SIGNS • 3

  THE MAN WHO is traveling and does not yet know the city awaiting him along his route wonders what the palace will be like, the barracks, the mill, the theater, the bazaar. In every city of the empire every building is different and set in a different order: but as soon as the stranger arrives at the unknown city and his eye penetrates the pine cone of pagodas and garrets and haymows, following the scrawl of canals, gardens, rubbish heaps, he immediately distinguishes which are the princes’ palaces, the high priests’ temples, the tavern, the prison, the slum. This – some say – confirms the hypothesis that each man bears in his mind a city made only of differences, a city without figures and without form, and the individual cities fill it up.

  This is not true of Zoe. In every point of this city you can, in turn, sleep, make tools, cook, accumulate gold, disrobe, reign, sell, question oracles. Any one of its pyramid roofs could cover the leprosarium or the odalisques’ baths. The traveler roams all around and has nothing but doubts: he is unable to distinguish the features of the city, the features he keeps distinct in his mind also mingle. He infers this: if existence in all its moments is all of itself, Zoe is the place of indivisible existence. But why, then, does the city exist? What line separates the inside from the outside, the rumble of wheels from the howl of wolves?

  THIN CITIES • 2

  NOW I SHALL tell of the city of Zenobia, which is wonderful in this fashion: though set on dry terrain it stands on high pilings, and the houses are of bamboo and zinc, with many platforms and balconies placed on stilts at various heights, crossing one another, linked by ladders and hanging sidewalks, surmounted by cone-roofed belvederes, barrels storing water, weather vanes, jutting pulleys, and fish poles, and cranes.

  No one remembers what need or command or desire drove Zenobia’s founders to give their city this form, and so there is no telling whether it was satisfied by the city as we see it today, which has perhaps grown through successive superimpositions from the first, now undecipherable plan. But what is certain is that if you ask an inhabitant of Zenobia to describe his vision of a happy life, it is always a city like Zenobia that he imagines, with its pilings and its suspended stairways, a Zenobia perhaps quite different, a-flutter with banners and ribbons, but always derived by combining elements of that first model.

  This said, it is pointless trying to decide whether Zenobia is to be classified among happy cities or among the unhappy. It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it.

  TRADING CITIES • 1

  PROCEEDING EIGHTY MILES into the northwest wind, you reach the city of Euphemia, where the merchants of seven nations gather at every solstice and equinox. The boat that lands there with a cargo of ginger and cotton will set sail again, its hold filled with pistachio nuts and poppy seeds, and the caravan that has just unloaded sacks of nutmegs and raisins is already cramming its saddlebags with bolts of golden muslin for the return journey. But what drives men to travel up rivers and cross deserts to come here is not only the exchange of wares, which you could find, everywhere the same, in all the bazaars inside and outside the Great Khan’s empire, scattered at your feet on the same yellow mats, in the shade of the same awnings protecting them from the flies, offered with the same lying reduction in prices. You do not come to Euphemia only to buy and sell, but also because at night, by the fires all around the market, seated on sacks or barrels or stretched out on piles of carpets, at each word that one man says – such as “wolf,” “sister,” “hidden treasure,” “battle,” “scabies,” “lovers” – the others tell, each one, his tale of wolves, sisters, treasures, scabies, lovers, battles. And you know that in the long journey ahead of you, when to keep awake against the camel’s swaying or the junk’s rocking, you start summoning up your memories one by one, your wolf will have become another wolf, your sister a different sister, your battle other battles, on your return from Euphemia, the city where memory is traded at every solstice and at every equinox.

  . . . Newly arrived and quite ignorant of the languages of the Levant, Marco Polo could express himself only by drawing objects from his baggage – drums, salt fish, necklaces of warthogs’ teeth – and pointing to them with gestures, leaps, cries of wonder or of horror, imitating the bay of the jackal, the hoot of the owl.

  The connections between one element of the story and another were not always obvious to the emperor; the objects could have various meanings: a quiver filled with arrows could indicate the approach of war, or an abundance of game, or else an armorer’s shop; an hourglass could mean time passing, or time past, or sand, or a place where hourglasses are made.

  But what enhanced for Kublai every event or piece of news reported by his inarticulate informer was the space that remained around it, a void not filled with words. The descriptions of cities Marco Polo visited had this virtue: you could wander through them in thought, become lost, stop and enjoy the cool air, or run off.

  As time went by, words began to replace objects and gestures in Marco’s tales: first exclamations, isolated nouns, dry verbs, then phrases, ramified and leafy discourses, metaphors and tropes. The foreigner had learned to speak the emperor’s language or the emperor to understand the language of the foreigner.

  But you would have said communication between them was less happy than in the past: to be sure, words were more useful than objects and gestures in listing the most important things of every province and city – monuments, markets, costumes, fauna and flora – and yet when Polo began to talk about how life must be in those places, day after day, evening after

evening, words failed him, and little by little, he went back to relying on gestures, grimaces, glances.

  So, for each city, after the fundamental information given in precise words, he followed with a mute commentary, holding up his hands, palms out, or backs, or sideways, in straight or oblique movements, spasmodic or slow. A new kind of dialogue was established: the Great Khan’s white hands, heavy with rings, answered with stately movements the sinewy, agile hands of the merchant. As an understanding grew between them, their hands began to assume fixed attitudes, each of which corresponded to a shift of mood, in their alternation and repetition. And as the vocabulary of things was renewed with new samples of merchandise, the repertory of mute comment tended to become closed, stable. The pleasure of falling back on it also diminished in both; in their conversations, most of the time, they remained silent and immobile.

=Q and A for Matt/ teachers, not students=

1q "A golden......." what?.

Answer= "cock/rooster"

2q What kind of evening was it?

Answer= a September one

3q   CITIES & MEMORY • 2=  Which city does he mention?

Answer= "Isidora"

4q It's "the city of..." what?

Answer= "his dreams"

5q How does he, as an old man, see young Isidora?

Answer= "Desires are already memories."

BQ CITIES & DESIRE 1= How many gates are in Dorothea?

Answer=7.

5/9- 5/16

IC-#6/15- Fantastic Tales= Ch. I. The Visionary Fantastic of the Nineteenth Century

worksheet link= https://www.onlinereadfreebooks.com/en/Fantastic-Tales-Visionary-and-Everyday-899042/1

Italo Calvino

Fantastic Tales

The Visionary Fantastic of the Nineteenth Century

依塔羅卡爾維諾小說選

奇幻故事-十九世紀的幻夢

 

 I

  The Visionary Fantastic of the Nineteenth Century

  JAN POTOCKI

  The Story of the Demoniac Pacheco

  (Histoire du démoniaque Pacheco, 1803)

  The macabre, the spectral, the demonic, the vampiric, the erotic, and the perverse: all the ingredients (hidden or manifest) of visionary Romanticism appear in this extraordinary book, the Manuscrit trouvé a Saragosse, published in French by the Polish count Jan Potocki (1761–1815). Mysterious in origin and literary fortune and just as mysterious in terms of its content, this book disappeared for more than

a century (it was, of course, too scandalous to circulate freely), and only in 1958 was it reprinted in its original form, for which thanks must be given to Roger Callois, a great connoisseur of the fantastic no matter what its historical period or country of origin.

  An ideal prelude to the century of Hoffmann and Poe, Potocki could not be left out of this anthology: but since his is a book in which stories are interpolated into each other (a bit like The Thousand and One Nights,) to form a long novel from which it is difficult to separate one tale from another, I was forced to make—and right at the outset—an exception to the rule the rest of this anthology tries to respect. I am including here a chapter from Potocki’s book, while the norm will be to offer complete and independent stories.

  The text starts just after the beginning of the novel (the second chapter). Alphonse van Worden, an officer in Napoleon’s army, is in Spain, where he sees a gallows and two hanged men (the de Zoto brothers). Then he finds two extremely beautiful Arabian sisters who tell him their story, which is replete with a disturbing eroticism. Alphonse makes love to both, but during the night he has strange visions, and at dawn finds himself embracing the cadavers of the two hanged men.

  This theme of the embrace of two sisters (and occasionally with their mother) is repeated in the book several times in the stories of different characters, and it always happens that the man who thinks himself the luckiest of lovers wakes up in the morning under the gallows amid corpses and vultures. A charm linked to the constellation Gemini is the key to the novel.

  Still in the early phase of the development of a new literary genre, Potocki knows exactly where to go: the fantastic is the exploration of the obscure zone where the most unrestrained passions of desire and the terrors of guilt mix together. It is an evocation of ghosts that change form just as they do in dreams—with ambiguity and perversion.

  EVENTUALLY I REALLY did awaken. The sun was burning my eyelids. I opened them with difficulty. I saw the sky. I saw that I was out in the open. But my eyes were still heavy with sleep. I was no longer sleeping, but I was not yet awake. A succession of images of torture passed through my mind. I was appalled by them. Jerked out of my slumber, I sat up …

  How shall I find words to express the horror that seized me? I was lying under the gallows of Los Hermanos. The bodies of Zoto’s two brothers were not strung up, they were lying by my side. I had apparently spent the night with them. I was lying on pieces of rope, bits of wheels, the remains of human carcasses and on the dreadful shreds of flesh that had fallen away through decay.

  I thought I was still not properly awake and was having a bad dream. I closed my eyes again and searched my memory, trying to recall where I had been the day before … Then I felt claws sinking into my sides. I saw that a vulture had settled on me and was devouring one of my bedmates. The pain of its grip awakened me fully. I saw that my clothes were by me, and I hurriedly put them on. When I was dressed, I tried to leave the gallows enclosure, but found the door nailed shut and made vain attempts to break it open. So I had to climb those grim walls. I succeeded in doing so, and clinging to one of the gallows posts, I began to survey the surrounding countryside. I easily got my bearings. I was actually at the entrance to the Los Hermanos valley, and not far from the banks of the Guadalquivir.

  While I continued to look around, I saw two travellers near the river, one of whom was preparing a meal and the other holding the reins of two horses. I was so delighted to see these men that my first reaction was to call out to them, “Agour, agour,” which means “Good-day,” or “Greetings,” in Spanish.

  The two travellers, who saw the courtesies being extended to them from the top of the gallows, seemed undecided for a moment; but suddenly they mounted their horses, urged them to the fastest gallop, and took the road to Alcornoques.

  I shouted at them to stop, to no avail. The more I shouted, the more they spurred on their mounts. When I lost sight of them, it occurred to me to quit my position. I jumped to the ground, hurting myself a little.

  Hunched low and limping, I reached the banks of the Guadalquivir and found there the meal that the two travellers had abandoned. Nothing could have been more welcome, for I felt very exhausted. There was some chocolate that was still cooking, some sponhao steeped in Alicante wine, some bread and eggs. I set about restoring my strength, after which I began to reflect on what had happened to me during the night. My memories were very confused, but what I well recalled was having given my word of honour to keep it secret, and I was strongly resolved to abide by my promise. Once having decided on this, it only remained for me to consider what I needed to do for the moment—in other words, which road I should take—and it seemed to me that the laws of honour obliged me more than ever to go via the Sierra Morena.

  People will perhaps be surprised to find me so concerned with my reputation, and so little concerned with the events of the previous day, but this way of thinking was again a result of the education I had received; this will be seen from the continuation of my story. For now, I return to the account of my journey.

  I was extremely curious to know what the evil spirits had done with my horse, which I had left at Venta Quemada, and since in any case it was on my way, I determined to go by there. I had to walk the whole length of the Los Hermanos valley and that of the Venta, which did not fail to tire me and to make me greatly wish to find my horse. I did indeed find it; it was in the same stable where I had left it and seemed groomed, well cared for, and well fed. I did not know who could have taken this trouble, but I had seen so many extraordinary things that this in addition did not for long detain me. I would have set off straight away, had I not had the curiosity to visit the inside of the tavern once more. I relocated the bedroom where I had slept, but no matter how hard I looked, I could not find the room where I had seen the beautiful African women. I tired then of looking for it any longer. I mounted my horse and continued on my way.

  When I woke up under the Los Hermanos gallows, the sun was already half-way through its course. It took me two hours to reach the Venta. So when I had covered another couple of leagues, I had to think of a shelter for the night, but seeing none, I rode on. Eventually I saw in the distance a Gothic chapel, with a hut that appeared to be the home of a hermit. All this was off the main road, but since I was beginning to feel hungry, I did not hesitate to make this detour in order to come by some food. When I arrived, I tied my horse to a tree. Then I knocked at the door of the hermitage and saw a monk with the most venerable face emerge from it. He embraced me with fatherly tenderness, then he said to me:

  “Come in, my son. Quickly. Do not spend the night outside. Fear the temptor. The Lord has withdrawn his hand from above us.”

  I thanked the hermit for his goodness towards me, and I told him that I was in dire need of something to eat.

  He replied: “O my son, think of your soul! Go to the chapel. Prostrate yourself before the Cross. I will see to the needs of your body. But you will have a frugal meal, such as one would expect from a hermit.”

  I went to the chapel and prayed sincerely, for I was not a freethinker and was even unaware there were any; this again was a result of my education.

  The hermit came to fetch me after a quarter of an hour and led me to the hut, where I found a place laid for me (everything was reasonably clean). There were some excellent olives, chards preserved in vinegar, sweet onions in a sauce, and rusks instead of bread. There was also a small bottle of wine. The hermit told me that he never drank any, but that he kept some in the house to celebrate the Mass. So I drank no more wine than the hermit, but the rest of the supper gave me great pleasure. While I was doing justice to it, I saw a figure, more terrifying than anything I had yet seen, come into the hut. It was a man. He looked young, but was hideously thin. His hair stood on end, one of his eyes was gouged out, and there was blood issuing from it. His tongue hung out of his mouth and dripped a frothy spittle. His body was clad in a fairly good black habit, but this was his only garment; he wore neither stockings

nor shirt.

  This hideous individual said not a word, and went and crouched in a corner, where he remained as still as a statue, his one eye fixed on a crucifix he held in his hand. When I had finished my meal, I asked the hermit who this man was.

  The hermit replied: “My son, this man is possessed of the devil, and I am exorcising him. His terrible story is good evidence of the fatal power that the Angel of Darkness is usurping in this unhappy land. His experience might be helpful to your salvation, and I am going to instruct him to give an account of it.”

  Then, turning towards the possessed man, he said to him: “Pacheco, Pacheco, in the name of your Redeemer, I command you to tell your story.”

  Pacheco gave a horrible cry and began with these words:

  THE STORY OF THE DEMONIAC PACHECO

  I was born in Córdoba, where my father lived in more than comfortable circumstances. My mother died three years ago. My father seemed at first to miss her a great deal, but after a few months, having had occasion to make a trip to Seville, he fell in love with a young widow, called Camille de Tormes. This person did not enjoy a very good reputation, and several of my father’s friends tried to stop him from seeing her, but despite the trouble they were prepared to go to, the wedding took place two years after the death of my mother. The ceremony took place in Seville, and a few days later my father returned to Cordoba with Camille, his new wife, and a sister of Camille, whose name was Inesille.

  My new stepmother answered perfectly to the poor opinion in which she was held, and started out in my father’s house by trying to win my love. She did not succeed in this. Yet I did fall in love, but with her sister Inesille. Indeed, my passion soon became so great that I went and threw myself at my father’s feet and asked him for the hand of his sister-in-law.

With kindness, my father raised me to my feet, then said to me: “My son, I forbid you to think of this marriage, and I do so for three reasons. First, it would be unseemly for you to become, as it were, your father’s brother-in-law. Secondly, the holy canons of the Church do not approve these kinds of marriages. Thirdly, I do not want you to marry Inesille.”

  Having given me his three reasons, my father turned his back on me and left.

  I retired to my bedroom, where I gave way to despair. My stepmother, whom my father immediately informed of what had hapened, came to find me and told me I was wrong to torture myself; that if I could not become Inesille’s husband, I could be her cortejo, that is to say, her lover, and that she would see to it; but at the same time, she declared her love for me and made much of the sacrifice she was making by yielding me to her sister. I listened only too avidly to these words that flattered my passion, but Inesille was so modest it seemed to me impossible that she could ever be persuaded to respond to my love.

  Meanwhile, my father decided to journey to Madrid, with the intention of securing the post of corregidor of Cordoba, and he took with him his wife and sister-in-law. He was to be away for no more than two months, but this time seemed very long to me, because I was separated from Inesille.

  When the two months were almost over, I received a letter from my father, in which he instructed me to go to meet him and wait for him at Venta Quemada, where the Sierra Morena began. It would have been no easy decision to travel by way of the Sierra Morena a few weeks earlier, but as it happened, Zoto’s two brothers had just been hanged. His gang was disbanded and the roads were supposed to be fairly safe.

  So I set out for Córdoba at about ten o’clock in the morning, and I spent the night at Andujar, where the landlord was one of the most talkative in Andalusia. I ordered a lavish supper at the inn, of which I ate some and kept the rest for my journey.

  The next day I dined at Los Alcornoques on what I had saved from the day before, and that same evening I reached Venta Quemada. I did not find my father there, but as he had instructed me in his letter to wait for him, I determined to do so, all the more willingly since I was in a roomy and comfortable hostel. The innkeeper who ran it at that time was a certain Gonzalez of Murcia, quite a decent fellow although a big-talker, who, sure enough, promised me a supper worthy of a Spanish grandee. While he busied himself preparing it, I went for a stroll along the banks of the Guadalquivir, and when I returned to the hostel, there I found a supper that was indeed not at all bad.

  When I had eaten, I told Gonzalez to make up my bed. Then I saw that he was flustered: he said things that did not make a great deal of sense. Finally he confessed that the inn was haunted by ghosts, that he and his family spent every night at a small farm on the banks of the river, and he added that if I wanted to sleep there too, he would have a bed made up for me next to his own.

  This proposal seemed to me quite unwarranted. I told him that he could go to sleep wherever he wanted to, and that he should send my men to me. Gonzalez obeyed, and withdrew, shaking his head and shrugging his shoulders.

  My servants arrived a moment later. They too had heard talk of ghosts and tried to urge me to spend the night at the farm. Responding to their advice rather churlishly, I ordered them to make up my bed in the very room where I had supped. They obeyed me, albeit reluctantly, and when the bed was made, again they beseeched me, with tears in their eyes. Genuinely irritated by their admonitions, I allowed myself a display of emotion that put them to flight, and since it was not my custom to have my servants undress me, I easily managed without them in getting ready for bed. However, they had been more thoughtful than my behaviour towards them merited: by my bed, they had left a lighted candle, an extra candle, two pistols and a few books to read to keep myself awake; but the truth is I was no longer sleepy.

  I spent a couple hours alternately reading and tossing in my bed. Eventually I heard the sound of a bell or a clock striking midnight. I was surprised, because I had not heard the other hours strike. Soon the door opened, and I saw my stepmother enter. She was in her nightgown and held a candlestick in her hand. She tiptoed over to me with her finger on her lips, as though to impose silence upon me. Then she rested her candlestick on my bedside table, sat down on my bed, took one of my hands and spoke to me in these words:

  “My dear Alphonse, the time has come when I can give you the pleasures I promised you. We arrived at this tavern an hour ago. Your father has gone to sleep at the farm, but since I knew that you were here, I obtained leave to spend the night here with my sister Inesille. She is waiting for you, and preparing herself to refuse you nothing. But I must inform you of the conditions I have laid on your happiness. You love Inesille, and I love you. I am willing to bring you together, but I cannot bring myself to leave you alone with each other. I shall share your bed. Come!”

  My stepmother gave me no time to reply. She took me by the hand and led me along corridor after corridor, until we reached a door where she set about looking through the keyhole.

  When she had looked long enough, she said to me; “Everything is going well, see for yourself.”

  I took her place at the keyhole, and there indeed was the lovely Inesille in her bed, but she was far from showing the modesty I had always seen in her. The expression in her eyes, her agitated breathing, her flushed complexion, her posture—everything about her was clear evidence she was awaiting a lover.

  After letting me have a good look, Camille said to me: “My dear Pacheco, stay at this door. When the time is right, I shall come to let you know.”

  When she had gone in, I put my eye to the keyhole again and saw a thousand things I find hard to describe. First, Camille undressed with some deliberation, then getting into bed with her sister, she said to her:

  “My poor Inesille, is it really true that you want to have a lover? Poor child, you do not know how he will hurt you. First he will flatten you, press himself upon you, and then he will crush you, tear you.

  When Camille considered her pupil sufficiently indoctrinated, she came and opened the door to me, led me to her sister’s bed, and lay down beside us.

  What shall I say of that fateful night? I exhausted its pleasures and crimes. For a long time I fought against sleep and nature, the more to protract my diabolical gratification. At last I fell asleep, and I awoke the next day beneath the gallows on which Zoto’s brothers were hanged, lying between their vile corpses.

  HERE THE HERMIT interrupted the demoniac and said to me: “Well now, my son! What do you think of that? I believe you would have been very frightened to find yourself lying between two hanged men?”

  I replied: “Father, you insult me. A gentleman must never be afraid, and still less when he has the honour of being a captain in the Walloon Guards.”

  “But my son,” said the hermit, “have you ever heard tell of such an adventure befalling anybody?”

  I hesitated for a moment, after which I replied: “Father, if this adventure befell Signor Pacheco, it might have befallen others. I will be better able to judge if you would kindly tell him to continue his story.”

  The hermit turned to the demoniac, and said to him: “Pacheco, Pacheco! In the name of your Redeemer, I order you to continue your story.”

  Pacheco uttered a dreadful howl and continued in these words:

  I WAS HALF dead when I left the gibbet. I dragged myself off without knowing where I was going. At last I met some travellers who took pity on me and brought me back to Venta Quemada. There I found the innkeeper and my servants, who were greatly worried about me. I asked them if my father had slept at the farm. They replied that no one had come.

  I could not bear to stay any longer at the Venta, and I set out again on the road to Andujar. I did not arrive there until after sunset. The inn was full, a bed was made up for me in the kitchen, and I lay down in it. But I was unable to sleep, for I could not banish from my mind the horrors of the night before.

  I had left a lighted candle on the k

itchen hearth. Suddenly it went out, and at once I felt what seemed a deathly shudder that made my blood run cold.

  Someone pulled off my blanket. Then I heard a little voice saying: “It is Camille, your stepmother, I am cold, dear heart. Make room for me under your blanket.”

  Then another little voice said: “And this is Inesille. Let me get into your bed. I am cold, I am cold.”

  Then I felt an icy hand take hold of my chin. I summoned up all my strength to say out loud: “Avaunt, Satan!”

  Then the little voices said to me: “Why are you chasing us away? Are you not our darling husband? We are cold. We are going to make a little fire.”

  Sure enough, soon after I saw flames in the kitchen hearth. The flames became brighter and I saw not Inesille and Camille but Zoto’s two brothers, hanging in the fireplace.

  This sight scared the life out of me. I leapt out of bed. I jumped through the window and started to run through the countryside. For a moment I was able to cherish the fond belief that I had escaped these horrors; but I turned round and saw that I was being followed by the two hanged men. I started to run again, and I saw that the hanged men were left behind. But my joy was short-lived. These detestable creatures began to cartwheel and in an instant were upon me. I ran on, until finally my strength deserted me.

  Then I felt one of the hanged men seize me by the heel of my left foot. I tried to shake him off, but his brother cut in front of me. He appeared before me, rolling his eyes dreadfully, and sticking out a tongue as red as an iron drawn from the fire. I begged for mercy; in vain. With one hand he grabbed me by the throat, and with the other he tore out the eye I am now missing. In the place where my eye had been, he stuck his burning-hot tongue. With it he licked my brain and made me howl with pain.

  Then the other hanged man, who had seized my left leg, also wanted to leave his mark on me. First he began by tickling the sole of the foot he was holding. Then the monster tore the skin off it, separated all the nerves, bared them, and set to playing on them as though on a musical instrument; but since I did not render a sound that pleased him, he began to twist them, as one tunes a harp. Finally he began to play on my leg, of which he had fashioned a psaltery. I heard his diabolical laughter; while pain wrung dreadful howls out of me, the wailings of hell joined voice. But when it came to my hearing the damned gnashing their teeth, I felt as though they were grinding my every fibre. In the end I lost consciousness.

  The next day shepherds found me in the countryside and brought me to this hermitage, where I have confessed all my sins and here at the foot of the Cross I have found some relief from my ills.

  AT THIS POINT the demoniac uttered a dreadful howl and fell silent.

  Then the hermit spoke and said to me: “Young man, you see the power of Satan, pray and weep. But it is late. We must part company. I do not propose that you sleep in my cell, for Pacheco’s screams during the night might disturb you. Go and sleep in the chapel. There you will be under the protection of the Cross, which triumphs over evil spirits.”

  I told the hermit I would sleep wherever he wanted me to. We carried a little trestle bed to the chapel. I lay down on it and the hermit wished me good-night.

  When I was alone, Pacheco’s story came back to me. I found in it a great deal of similarity with my own adventures, and I was still reflecting on it when I heard the chimes of midnight. I did not know whether it was the hermit ringing the bell, or whether I was again dealing with ghosts. Then I heard a scratching at my door. I went to the door and asked: “Who goes there?”

  A little voice answered: “We are cold, open up and let us in, it is your darling wives here.”

  “Yes, yes, of course, you damnable gallows’ fodder,” I replied, “return to your gibbet and let me sleep.”

  Then the little voice said: “You jeer at us because you are inside a chapel, but come outside a while.”

  “I am just coming,” I instantly replied.

  I went to fetch my sword and tried to get out, but found the door locked. I told the ghosts, who made no response. I went to bed and slept until it was light.

 

Q and A for Matt= 

 

1q  Who was "the demoniac"?

 

Answer= "Pacheco."

 

2q What year was it, the French book?

 

Answer= "1803."

 

3q Who "led him to the hut"? 

 

Answer= "the hermit"

 

4q  What kind of "meal" did the hermit give him?

 

Answer= "a frugal meal."

 

5q Where is "Alcornoques"?

 

Answer= According to "www.wikipedia.org," it's in the Cadiz region in the south of Spain= https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Province_of_C%C3%A1diz

 

BQ What horoscope sign is mentioned?

 

Answer= "A charm linked to the constellation Gemini is the key to the novel."

 

5/23 

IC-#7/15- The Watcher and Other Stories

worksheet link= https://www.onlinereadfreebooks.com/en/The-Watcher-and-Other-Stories-245366/1

Italo Calvino

The Watcher and Other Stories

依塔羅卡爾維諾小說選

守望者和其他故事

  I

  AMERIGO ORMEA left his house at five thirty in the morning. It looked like rain. To reach the polls where he was to act as an election watcher, Amerigo followed a series of narrow, arcaded streets, still paved with old cobblestones, along the walls of humble buildings, densely inhabited, no doubt, but still without any sign of life on that Sunday at dawn. Unfamiliar with the neighborhood, Amerigo deciphered the street names on the sooty signs—names perhaps of forgotten benefactors—tilting his umbrella to one side and raising his face into the rain dripping from the eaves.

  The members of the opposition (Amerigo Ormea belonged to a left-wing party) generally considered rain on election day a good omen. This notion dated from the first postwar election, when people still believed that in bad weather many Christian Democrat voters—people with no great interest in politics, old people, disabled, infirm, or living in country areas with poor roads—wouldn’t stick their noses out of their front doors. But Amerigo didn’t share this illusion: it was 1953 now, and in all the elections in subsequent years he had seen that, rain or shine, the organization to get out the vote always worked. And today of all days, when the parties in the coalition government had to put over a new election law (“the swindle law,” as the other parties had christened it), whereby if the coalition got 50-plus-1 per cent of the votes it would receive two-thirds of the seats in Parliament... For his part, Amerigo had learned that change, in politics, conies through long and complex processes, and you couldn’t hope for change overnight, as if it were a stroke of luck; for him, as for so many others, acquiring experience had meant becoming slightly pessimistic.

  On the other hand, there was the moral question: you had to go on doing as much as you could, day by day. In politics, as in every other sphere of life, there are two important principles for a man of any sense: don’t cherish too many illusions, and never stop believing that every little bit helps. Amerigo didn’t seek the limelight; in his profession, he preferred to remain the right man in the right place, not pushing himself forward. And in public life, as in his work, he wasn’t what you could call a “politician,” either in the good sense or the pejorative. (Because the word “politician” did have a good meaning or a pejorative one, depending on how you looked at it: Amerigo was well aware of this.) He was a paid-up member of the party, true enough, and though he could hardly be considered an “activist,” as his nature tended toward a quiet life, he never hung back when there was something useful to be done that lay within his capacities. At the local cell, they considered him a sound man, with a good background; and now they had appointed him a poll watcher, a modest assignment, but a serious, necessary job, especially at this particular polling place, which was set up inside a great religious institution. Amerigo had accepted willingly. Now it was raining. His shoes would stay wet all day.

= Q and A for Matt/teachers, not students=

1q What's "Amerigo"'s first name? 

Answer= "Ormea."

2q What kind of weather is mentioned in the story?

Answer= "It looked like rain."

3q Where was he going?

Answer= "to the polls" (voting/elections)

4q Was this kind of weather considered "a good omen"?

Answer=  Yes, generally.

5q What year was it, in this book?

Answer= :"1953."

BQ= Did Amerigo, the story's protagonist, "seek the limelight" (fame)?

Answer= No, he didn't. "Amerigo didn't seek the limelight."

5/30

IC-#8/15- T Zero, Ch. 1- The Soft Moon

worksheet link= https://www.onlinereadfreebooks.com/en/T-Zero-935278/1

Italo Calvino

T Zero

依塔羅卡爾維諾小說選

零時間

Ch. 1- The Soft Moon

  According to the calculations of H. Gerstenkorn, later developed by H. Alfven, the terrestrial continents are simply fragments of the Moon which fell upon our planet. According to this theory, the Moon originally was a planet gravitating around the Sun, until the moment when the nearness of the Earth caused it to be derailed from its orbit. Captured by terrestrial gravity, the Moon moved closer and closer, contracting its orbit around us. At a certain moment the reciprocal attraction began to alter the surface of the two celestial bodies, raising very high waves from which fragments were detached and sent spinning in space, between Earth and Moon, especially fragments of lunar matter which finally fell upon Earth. Later, through the influence of our tides, the Moon was impelled to move away again, until it reached its present orbit. But a part of the lunar mass, perhaps half of it, had remained on Earth, forming the continents.

  She was coming closer,—Qfwfq recalled,—I noticed it as I was going home, raising my eyes between the walls of glass and steel, and I saw her, no longer a light like all the others that shine in the evening: the ones they light on Earth when at a certain hour they pull down a lever at the power station, or those of the sky, farther away but similar, or at least not out of harmony With the style of all the rest—I speak in the present tense, but I am still referring to those remote times—I saw her breaking away from all the other lights of the sky and the streets, standing out in the concave map of darkness, no longer occupying a point, perhaps a big one on the order of Mars and Venus, like a hole through which the light spreads, but now becoming an out-and-out portion of space, and she was taking form, not yet clearly identifiable because eyes weren't used to identifying it, but also because the outlines weren't sufficiently precise to define a regular figure. Anyway I saw it was becoming a thing.

  And it revolted me. Because it was a thing that, though you couldn't understand what it was made of, or perhaps precisely because you couldn't understand, seemed different from all the things in our life, our good things of plastic, of nylon, of chrome-plated steel, duco, synthetic resins, plexiglass, aluminum, vinyl, formica, zinc, asphalt, asbestos, cement, the old things among which we were bom and bred. It was something incompatible, extraneous. I saw it approaching as if it were going to slip between the skyscrapers of Madison Avenue (I'm talking about the avenue we had then, beyond comparison with the Madison of today), in that corridor of night sky glowing with light from above the jagged line of the cornices; and it spread out, imposing on our familiar landscape not only its light of an unsuitable color, but also its volume, its weight, its incongruous substantiality. And then, all over the face of the Earth—the surfaces of metal plating, iron armatures, rubber pavements, glass domes—over every part of us that was exposed, I felt a shudder pass.

  As fast as the traffic allowed, I went through the tunnel, drove toward the Observatory. Sibyl was there, her eye glued to the telescope. As a rule she didn't like me to visit her during working hours, and the moment she saw me she would make a vexed face; but not that evening: she didn't even look up, it was obvious she was expecting my visit. "Have you seen it?" would have been a stupid question, but I had to bite my tongue to keep from asking it, I was so impatient to know what she thought about it all.

  "Yes, the planet Moon has come still closer," Sibyl said, before I had asked her anything, "the phenomenon was foreseen."

  I felt a bit relieved. "Do you foresee that it'll move away again?" I asked.

  Sibyl still had one eyelid half closed, peering into the telescope. "No," she said, "it won't move away any more."

  I didn't understand. "You mean that the Earth and the Moon have become twin planets?"

  "I mean the Moon isn't a planet any more and the Earth has a Moon."

  Sibyl had a casual way of dismissing matters; it irritated me every time she did it. "What kind of thinking is that?" I complained. "One planet's just as much a planet as the others, isn't it?"

  "Would you call this a planet? I mean, a planet the way the Earth's a planet? Look!" And Sibyl moved from the telescope, motioning me to approach it. "The Moon could never manage to become a planet like ours."

  I wasn't listening to her explanation: the Moon, enlarged by the telescope, appeared to me in all its details, or rather many of its details appeared to me at once, so mixed up that the more I observed it the less sure I was of how it was made, and I could only vouch for the effect this sight caused in me, an effect of fascinated disgust. First of all, I could note the green veins that ran over it, thicker in certain zones, like a network, but to tell the truth this was the most insignificant detail, the least showy, because what you might call the general properties eluded the grasp of my glance, thanks perhaps to the slightly viscous glistening that transpired from a myriad of pores, one would have said, or opercula, and also in certain points from extended tumefactions of the surface, like buboes or suckers. There, I'm concentrating again on the details, a more picturesque method of description apparently, though in reality of only limited efficiency, because only by considering the details within the whole—such as the swelling of the sublunar pulp which stretched its pale external tissues but made them also fold over on themselves in inlets or recesses looking like scars (so it, this Moon, might also have been made of pieces pressed together and stuck on carelessly)—it is, as I say, only by considering the whole, as in diseased viscera, that the single details can also be considered: for example, a thick forest as of black fur which jutted out of a rift.

  "Does it seem right to you that it should go on revolving around the Sun, like us?" Sibyl said. "The Earth is far stronger: in the end it'll shift the Moon from its orbit and make it turn around the Earth. We'll have a satellite."

  I was quite careful not to express the anguish I was feeling. I knew how Sibyl reacted in these cases: assuming an attitude of blatant superiority, if not of down

right cynicism, acting like a person who is never surprised by anything. She behaved this way to provoke me, I believe (that is, I hope; I would certainly have felt even greater anguish at the thought that she acted out oè real indifference).

  "And ... and..." I started to say, taking care to formulate a question that would show nothing but objective curiosity and yet would force Sibyl to say something to appease my anxiety (so I still hoped for this from her, I still insisted that her calm reassure me), "...and will we always have it in sight like this?''

  "This is nothing," she answered. "It'll come even closer." And for the first time, she smiled. "Don't you like it? Why, seeing it there like that, so different, so far from any known form, and knowing that it's ours, that the Earth has captured it and is keeping it there ... I don't know, I like it, it seems beautiful to me."

  At this point I no longer cared about hiding my mood. "But won't it be dangerous for us?" I asked.

  Sibyl tensed her lips in the expression of hers I liked least. "We are on the Earth, the Earth has a force which means it can keep planets around itself, on its own, like the Sun. What can the Moon oppose, in the way of mass, field of gravity, orbit stability, consistency? Surely you don't mean to compare the two? The Moon is all soft, the Earth is hard, solid, the Earth endures."

  "What about the Moon? If it doesn't endure?"

  "Oh, the Earth's force will keep it in its place."

  I waited till Sibyl had finished her shift at the Observatory, to drive her home. Just outside the city there is that cloverleaf where all the superhighways spread out, rushing over bridges that cross one another in spiral patterns, held up by cement pillars of different heights; you never know in what direction you're going as you follow the white arrows painted on the asphalt, and now and then you find the city you're leaving suddenly facing you, coming closer, patterned with squares of light among the pillars and the curves of the spiral. There was the Moon just above us: and the city seemed fragile to me, suspended like a cobweb, with all its little tinkling panes, its threadlike embroidery of light, under that excrescence that swelled the sky.

  Now, I have used the word "excrescence" to indicate the Moon, but I must at once fall back on the same word to describe the new thing I discovered at that moment: namely, an excrescence emerging from that Moon excrescence, stretching toward the Earth like the drip of a candle.

  "What's that? What's happening?" I asked, but by now a new curve had set our automobile journeying toward the darkness.

  "It's the terrestrial attraction causing solid tides on the Moon's surface," Sibyl said. "What did I tell you? Call that consistency?"

  The unwinding of the superhighway brought us again face to face with the Moon, and that candle dripping had stretched still farther toward the Earth, curling at its tip like a mustache hair, and then, as its point of attachment thinned to a peduncle, it had almost the appearance of a mushroom.

  We lived in a cottage, in a line with others along one of the many avenues of a vast Green Belt. We sat down as always on the rocking chairs on the porch with a view of the back yard, but this time we didn't look at the halfacre of glazed tiles that formed our share of green space; our eyes were staring above, magnetized by that sort of polyp hanging over us. Because now the Moon's drippings had become numerous, and they extended toward the Earth like slimy tentacles, and each of them seemed about to start dripping in its turn a matter composed of gelatin and hair and mold and slaver.

  "Now I ask you, is that any way for a celestial body to disintegrate?" Sibyl insisted. "Now you must realize the superiority of our planet. What if the Moon does come down? Let it come: the time will come also for it to stop. This is the sort of power the Earth's field of gravity has: after it's attracted the Moon almost on top of us, all of a sudden it stops the Moon, carries it back to a proper distance, and keeps it there, making it revolve, pressing it into a compact ball. The Moon has us to thank if it doesn't fall apart completely!"

  I found Sibyl's reasoning convincing, because to me, too, the Moon seemed something inferior and revolting; but her words still couldn't relieve my apprehension. I saw the lunar outcrops writhing in the sky with sinuous movements, as if they were trying to reach or enfold something: there was the city, below, where we could see a glow of light on the horizon with the jagged shadow of the skyline. Would it stop in time, the Moon, as Sibyl had said, before one of its tentacles had succeeded in clutching the spire of a skyscraper? And what if, sooner, one of these stalactites that kept stretching and lengthening should break off, plunge down upon us?

  "Something may come down," Sibyl admitted, without waiting for a question from me, "but what does that matter? The Earth is all sheathed in waterproof, crushproof, dirtproof materials; even if a bit of this Moon mush drips onto us, we can clean it up in a hurry."

  As if Sibyl's assurance had enabled me to see something that had surely been taking place for a while, I cried: "Look, stuff is coming down!" and I raised my arm to point out a suspension of thick drops of a creamy pap in the air. But at that same moment a vibration came from the Earth, a tinkling; and through the sky, in the direction opposite to the falling clumps of planetary secretion, a very minute flight of solid fragments rose, the scales of the Earth's armor which was being shattered: unbreakable glass and plates of steel and sheaths of nonconducting material, drawn up by the Moon's attraction as in an eddy of grains of sand.

  "Only minimal damage," Sibyl said, "and just on the surface. We can repair the gaps in no time. It's only logical that the capture of a satellite should cost us some losses: but it's worth it, there's simply no comparison!"

  That was when we heard the first crack of a lunar meteorite falling to the Earth: a very loud ‘‘splat!," a deafening noise and, at the same time, a disgustingly spongy one, which didn't remain alone but was followed by a series of apparently explosive splashes, of flabby whip strokes falling on every side. Before our eyes became accustomed to perceiving what was falling, a little time went by: to tell the truth, I was the slow one because I expected the pieces of the Moon to be luminous too; whereas Sibyl already saw them and commented on them in her contemptuous tone but also with an unusual indulgence: "Soft meteorites, now really, who's ever seen such a thing? Stuff worthy of the Moon ... interesting, though, in its way..."

  One remained stuck on the wire hedge, half crushed under its weight, spilling over on the ground and immediately mixing with it, and I began to see what it was, that is I began to assemble some sensations that would allow me to form a visual image of what I had before me, and then I became aware of other, smaller spots scattered all over the tile pavement: something like a mud of acid mucus which penetrated into the terrestrial strata, or rather a kind of vegetal parasite that absorbed everything it touched, incorporating it into its own gluey pulp, or else like a serum in which colonies of whirling and ravenous micro-organisms were agglomerated, or else a pancreas cut in pieces trying to join together again, opening like suckers the cells of its cut edges, or else...

  I would have liked to close my eyes and I couldn't; but when I heard Sibyl's voice say: "Of course, I find it revolting too, but when you think that the fact is finally established: the Earth is definitely different and superior and we're on this side, I believe that for a moment we can even enjoy sinking into it, because anyway afterward..." I wheeled around toward her. Her mouth was open in a smile I had never seen before: a damp smile, slightly animal...

  The sensation I felt on seeing her like that became confused with the fear caused almost at the same moment by the fall of the great lunar fragment, the one that submerged and destroyed our cottage and the whole avenue and the residential suburb and a great part of the county, in a single, hot, syrupy, stunning blow. After digging through the lunar matter all night, we managed to see the sky again. It was dawn; the storm of meteorites was over; the Earth around us was unrecognizable, covered by a deep layer of mud, a paste of green proliferations and slippery organisms. Of our former terrestrial materials not a trace was visible. T

he Moon was moving off in the sky, pale, also unrecognizable: narrowing my eyes, I could see it was covered with a thick mass of rubble and shards and fragments, shiny, sharp, clean.

  The sequel is familiar. After hundreds of thousands of centuries we are trying to give the Earth its former natural appearance, we are reconstructing the primitive terrestrial crust of plastic and cement and metal and glass and enamel and imitation leather. But what a long way we have to gol For a still incalculable amount of time we will be condemned to sink into the lunar discharge, rotten with cholorophyll and gastric juices and dew and nitrogenous gases and cream and tears. We still have much to do, soldering the shiny and precise plates of the primordial terrestrial sheath until we have erased—or at least concealed—the alien and hostile additions. And with today's materials, too, concocted haphazardly, products of a corrupt Earth, trying in vain to imitate the prime substances, which cannot be equaled.

  The true materials, those of the past, are said to be found now only on the Moon, unexploited and lying there in a mess, and they say that for this reason alone it would be worthwhile going there: to recover them. I don't like to seem the sort who always says disagreeable things, but we all know what state the Moon is in, exposed to cosmic storms, full of holes, corroded, worn. If we go there, we'll only have the disappointment of learning that even our material of the old days—the great reason and proof of terrestrial superiority—was inferior goods, not made to last, which can no longer be used even as scrap. There was a time when I would have been careful not to show suspicions of this sort to Sibyl. But now, when she's fat, disheveled, lazy, greedily eating cream puffs, what can Sibyl say to me, now? 

=Q and A for Matt/teachers, not students=

1q Who is the protagonist of this story?

Answer= "Qfwfq." (a nonsense/ made up name)

2q What sort of materials are mentioned here (13 items)?

Answer= "  plastic, nylon, chrome-plated steel, duco, synthetic resins, plexiglass, aluminum, vinyl, formica, zinc, asphalt, asbestos, cement,..."

3q Who did "Qfwfq" speak with?

Answer= "Sibyl."

4q What are Sibyl and Qfwfq talking about?

Answer= "the moon"

5q What is "the lunar discharge" composed of? (6 items)

Answer= " cholorophyll (2 l's is ok) and gastric juices and dew and nitrogenous gases and cream and tears." 

BQ  How does the author describe Sibyl? (think of 4 adj's)

Answer=  "she's fat, disheveled, lazy, greedily eating cream puffs."

6/6 

IC-#9/15- The Baron in the Trees, Ch. 1

woksheet link = https://www.onlinereadfreebooks.com/en/The-Baron-in-the-Trees-698400/1

Italo Calvino

The Baron in the Trees

依塔羅卡爾維諾小說選

樹上的男爵

 } 1 {

  It was on the fifteenth of June, 1767, that Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò, my brother, sat among us for the last time. And it might have been today, I remember it so clearly. We were in the dining room of our house at Ombrosa, the windows framing the thick branches of the great holm oak in the park. It was midday, the old traditional dinner hour followed by our family, though by then most nobles had taken to the fashion set by the sluggard Court of France, of dining halfway through the afternoon. A breeze was blowing from the sea, I remember, rustling the leaves. Cosimo said: "I told you I don't want any, and I don't!" and pushed away his plateful of snails. Never had we seen such disobedience.

  At the head of the table was the Baron Arminio Piovasco di Rondò, our father, wearing a long wig over his ears in the style of Louis XIV, unfashionable like so much else about him. Between me and my brother was the Abbé Fauchelefleur, the family almoner and tutor of us two boys. We were facing our mother, the Baroness Corradina di Rondò, nicknamed the Generalessa, and our sister Battista, a kind of stay-at-home-nun. At the other end of the table, opposite our father, sat, dressed in Turkish robes, the Cavalier Avvocato Enea Silvio Carrega, lawyer, administrator and waterworks supervisor of our estates, and our natural uncle, being the illegitimate brother of our father.

  A few months before, Cosimo having reached the age of twelve and I of eight, we had been admitted to the parental board; I had benefited by my brother's promotion and been moved up prematurely, so that I should not be left to eat alone. "Benefited" is perhaps scarcely the word, for really it meant the end of our carefree life, Cosimo's and mine, and we were homesick for the meals in our little room, alone with the Abbé Fauchelefleur. The Abbé was a dry, wrinkled old man, with a reputation as a Jansenist; and he had in fact escaped from his native land, the Dauphin to avoid trial by the Inquisition. But the rigor of character for which he was so often praised, the severe mental discipline that he imposed on himself and others, was apt to yield to a deep-rooted urge toward apathy and indolence, as if his long meditations with eyes staring into space had but brought on him a great weariness and boredom, and in every little difficulty now he had come to see a fate not worth opposing. Our meals in the Abbé's company used to begin, after many a prayer, with ordered ritual, silent movements of spoons, and woe to anyone who raised his eyes from his plate or made the slightest sucking noise with the soup; but by the end of the first dish the Abbé was already tired, bored, looking into space and smacking his lips at every sip of wine, as if only the most fleeting and superficial sensations could get through to him; by the main dish we were using our hands, and by the end of the meal were throwing pear cores at each other, while the Abbé every now and again let out one of his languid ". . . Oooo bien! . . . Oooo alors."

  Now, at table with the family, up surged the intimate grudges that are such a burden of childhood. Having our father and mother always there in front of us, using knives and forks for the chicken, keeping our backs straight and our elbows down—what a strain it all was!—not to mention the presence of that odious sister of ours, Battista. So began a series of scenes, spiteful exchanges, punishments, retaliations, until the day when Cosimo refused the snails and decided to separate his fate from ours.

  These accumulating family resentments I myself only noticed later; then I was eight, everything seemed a game, the battle between us boys and grownups was the same as in all families, and I did not realize that my brother's stubbornness hid something much deeper.

  Our father the Baron was a bore, it's true, though not a bad roan: a bore because his life was dominated by conflicting ideas, as often happens in periods of transition. The turbulence of the times makes some people feel a need to bestir themselves, but in the opposite direction, backwards rather than forwards; so, with things boiling up all around him, our father had set his heart on regaining the lapsed title of Duke of Ombrosa, and thought of nothing but genealogies and successions and family rivalries and alliances with grandees near and far.

  Life at our home was like a constant dress rehearsal for an appearance at court, either the Emperor of Austria's, King Louis', or even the court of those mountaineers from Turin. When, for instance, a turkey was served, our father would watch us like a hawk, to see if we carved and boned it according to royal rules, and the Abbé scarcely dared touch a morsel lest he make some error of etiquette, for, poor man, he had to add his own rebukes to our father's. And we saw now a deceitful side of the Cavalier Carrega; he would smuggle away whole legs under the folds of his Turkish robe, to munch them bit by bit later, at his ease, hidden in the vineyard; and we could have sworn (although we never succeeded in catching him in the act—his movements were so quick) that he came to table with a pocketful of stripped bones, to be left on the table in place of the hunks of turkey he whisked away. Our mother the Generalessa did not worry us, as even when serving herself at table she used brusque military manners, "So! Noch ein wenig! Gut!" and no one found fault with her: she held us not to etiquette, but to discipline, supporting the Baron with parade-ground orders, "Sitz ruhig! And wipe your nose!" The only person really at ease was Battista, the nun of tile house, who would sit shredding her chicken with precise deliberation, fiber by fiber, using some sharp little knives, rather like a surgeon's scalpels, which she alone had. The Baron, who should have held her up to us as an example, did not dare look at her, for, with her staring eyes under the starched coif, her narrow teeth set tight in her yellow rodent's face, she frightened him too. So it can be seen why our family board brought out all the antagonisms, the incompatibilities, between us, and all our follies and hypocrisies too; and why it was there that Cosimo's rebellion came to a head. That is why I have described it at some length—and anyway it is the last set table we shall find in my brother's life, that's sure.

  It was also the only place where we would meet the grownups. The rest of the day our mother spent in her apartments, doing lace and embroidery and petit point; for in truth it was only in these traditionally womanly o

ccupations that the Generalessa could vent her warrior's urge. The lace and embroidery were usually in the designs of geographical maps; our mother would stretch them over cushions or tapestry and stick in pins and tiny flags, showing the disposition of battles in the Wars of Succession, which she knew by heart. Or she would embroider cannons, with the trajectories from the muzzle and the line of flight and the signs of anglings, for she was highly competent in ballistics, and also had at her disposal the entire library of her father the General, with treatises on military lore and atlases and tables of fire. Our mother was a Von Kurtewitz-Konradine, daughter of General Konrad von Kurtewitz, who, twenty years before, had commanded the Empress Maria Theresa's troops, which had occupied our area. A widower, the General had taken her around with him from camp to camp; there was nothing exciting about that, for they traveled well equipped, put up at the best castles, with a suite of servants, and she had spent her days making lace on a cushion. All the stories people told of her going into battle with him were legends. She had always been an ordinary little woman with a rosy face and a snub nose, in spite of that inherited zest for things military, which was perhaps a way of showing up her husband.

  Our father was one of the few nobles in our parts who had been on the side of the Empire in that war; he had greeted General von Kurtewitz with open arms, put our retainers at his disposal, and even shown his great devotion to the Imperial cause by marrying Konradine—all this with an eye to that duchy; and he was considerably put out when the Imperial troops soon moved on, as usual, and the Genoese came down on him for taxes. But he had gained a good wife, the Generalessa, as she began to be called after the death of her father on the Provence expedition (when Maria Theresa sent her a golden collar on a cushion of brocade), a wife with whom he nearly always got along, even if she, born and bred in camps, thought of nothing but armies and battles and criticized him for being just an ineffectual schemer.

  But at heart they were still living in the times of the Wars of Succession, she with her artillery, he with his genealogical trees; she dreaming of a career for us boys in some army, no matter which; he, on the other hand, seeing us married to a grand duchess and electress of the Empire. . . With all this, they were excellent parents, but so absent-minded that Cosimo and I were usually left to our own devices during our childhood. Who can say if that was a good thing or a bad? Cosimo's life was so uncommon, mine so ordinary and modest, and yet our childhood was spent together, both of us indifferent to the manias of adults, both trying to find paths unbeaten by others.

  We clambered about the trees (those innocent games come back to me now as a first initiation, an omen; but who could even have thought it then?), we followed the mountain streams, jumping from rock to rock, exploring caves on the seashore, and we would slide down the marble banisters in the house. It was one of these slides that caused the first serious rift between Cosimo and our parents, for he was punished—unjustly, he declared—and since then harbored a grudge against the family (or society? or the world in general?) which was to express itself later in his decision of that fifteenth of June.

  As a matter of fact, we had already been warned against sliding down the marble banisters, not out of fear that we might break a leg or an arm, for that never worried our parents—which was, I think, why we never broke anything—but because they feared that since we were growing up and gaining weight, we might knock over the busts of ancestors placed by our father on the banisters at the turn of every flight of stairs. Cosimo had, in fact, once brought down a bishop, a great-great-great-grandfather, miter and all; he was punished, and since then he had learned to brake just before reaching the turn of a flight and jump off within a hair's-breadth of running into a bust. I learned this trick too, for I copied all he did, except that I, ever more careful and timid, jumped off halfway down, or slid the rest bit by bit, with constant little brakes. One day he was flying down the banisters like an arrow when who should be coming up but the Abbé Fauchelefleur, meandering from stair to stair, with his breviary open in front of him, and his gaze fixed on space like a hen's. If only he had been half asleep as usual! But no, he was in one of those sudden moods that occasionally came over him, of extreme attention and awareness. He saw Cosimo, and thought: Banisters, bust, he'll hit it, they'll blame me too (at every escapade of ours he used to be blamed also for not keeping an eye on us), and he flung himself on the banister to catch my brother. Cosimo banged into the Abbé, dragged him down the banister too (the old man was just skin and bones), found he could not brake, and hit with double force the statue of our ancestor Cacciaguerra Piovasco the Crusader; they all landed in a heap at the foot of the stairs—the Crusader in smithereens (he was plaster), the Abbé and Cosimo. There followed endless recriminations, a beating, his being locked in our room on bread and cold minestrone. And Cosimo, who felt innocent because the fault had not been his but the Abbé's, came out furiously with the phrase: "Fie on all your ancestors, Father!"—a portent of his mission as a rebel.

  Our sister felt the same at heart. She, too, though the isolation in which she lived had been forced on her by our father after that affair of the Marchesino della Mela, had always been a rebellious and lonely soul. What happened with the Marchesino, none of us ever really knew. How, as the son of a family hostile to ours, had he ever got into the house? And why? It could only be to seduce, no, rather to rape our sister, said my father in the long quarrel which ensued between the families. We boys, in fact, could never succeed in picturing that freckled simpleton as a seducer, least of all of our sister, who was certainly much stronger than him, and famous for beating the stable hands at competitions of physical strength. And then, why was it he who shouted for help, not her? And how did the servants who rushed to the scene, led by our father, come to find him with his breeches torn to strips as if by the talons of a tiger? The Della Mela family refused even to admit that their son had made an attempt on Battista's virtue or to agree to a marriage between them. So our sister was eventually confined to the house, dressed up as a nun, though without taking any vows even as a tertiary, in view of her rather dubious vocation.

  Her evil schemes found expression in cooking. She was a really excellent cook, for she had the primary gifts in the culinary art: diligence and imagination; but when she put her hand to it, no one ever knew what surprise might appear at table. Once she made some paté toast, really exquisite, of rats' livers; this she never told us until we had eaten them and pronounced them good; and some grasshoppers' claws, crisp and sectioned, laid on an open tart in a mosaic; and pigs' tails baked as if they were little cakes; and once she cooked a complete porcupine with all its quills—who knows why, probably just to give us all a shock at the raising of the dish cover, for even she, who usually ate everything, however odd, that she had prepared herself, refused to taste it, though it was a baby porcupine, rosy and certainly tender. In fact, most of these horrible dishes of hers were thought out just for effect, rather than for any pleasure in making us eat disgusting food with her. These dishes of Battista's were works of the most delicate animal or vegetable jewelry; cauliflower heads with hares' ears set on a collar of fur; or a pig's head from whose mouth stuck a scarlet lobster as if putting out its tongue, and the lobster was holding the pig's tongue in its pincers as if they had torn it out. And finally the snails; she had managed to behead I don't know how many snails, and the heads, those soft little equine heads, she had inserted, I think with a toothpick, each in a wire-mesh; they looked, as they came on the table, like a flight of tiny swans. Even more revolting than the sight of these delicacies was the thought of Battista's zealous determination in preparing them, of those thin hands of hers tearing the little creatures to pieces.

  It was as a protest against this macabre fantasy of our sister's that my brother and I were incited to show our sympathy with the poor tortured creatures, and our disgust, too, for the flavor of cooked snails—a revolt really against everything and everybody; and from this, not surprisingly, stemmed Cosimo's gesture and all that followed after.

  We had devised a plan. When the Cavalier brought home a basket full of eatable snails, these were put into a barrel in the cellar, so they should starve, or eat only bran and so be purged. When we moved the planks covering these barrels an inferno was revealed: snails moving up the staves with a languor which was already a presage of their death agony, amid remnants of bran, streaks of opaque clotted slime and multicolored excrement, mementos of the good old days of open air and grass. Some of them were right outside their shells with heads extended, and waving horns; some all curled up, showing a different pair of antennae. Others were grouped like village gossips, others shut and sleeping, others dead, with their shells upside down. To save them from meeting that sinister cook, and to save us from her ministrations too, we made a hole in the bottom of the barrel, and from there traced as hidden a trail as we could, with bits of chopped grass and honey, behind barrels and various tools in the cellar, to draw the snails toward a little window facing an uncultivated grassy field.

  Next day we went down into the cellar to see the results, and we inspected the walls and passage by candlelight—"One here! . . . And another there!. . . And just see where this one got to!" Already there was an almost continuous line of snails moving from the barrel over the flagstones and walls toward the little window, following our trail. "Quick, snaily-wailies! Hurry up, out!" we could not help shouting at them, seeing the creatures moving along so slowly, now and then going around and around in circles over the rough cellar walls, attracted by occasional fly-droppings and mildew. But the cellar was dark and cluttered; we hoped no one would notice them, and that they would all have time to escape.

  But that restless creature, our sister Battista, used to spend the nights wandering around the house in search of mice, holding a candelabra, with a musket under her arm. That night she went down into the cellar, and the candlelight shone on a lost snail on the ceiling, with its trail of silvery slime. A shot rang out. We all started in our beds, but soon dropped our heads back onto the pillows, used as we were to the night hunts of our resident nun. But Battista, having destroyed the snail and brought down a hunk of plaster with her instinctive shot, now began to shout in that strident voice of hers: "Help! They're all escaping! Help!" Half-dressed servants hurried to her, our father came armed with a saber, the Abbé without his wig; the Cavalier did not even find out what was happening, but ran off into the woods to avoid the fuss and went to sleep in a haystack.

Everyone began hunting the snails all over the cellar by the light of torches—no one with any real will, but stubbornly, so as not to admit being disturbed for nothing. They found the hole in the barrel, and at once realized we had made it. Our father came with the coachman's whip and seized us from bed. Then, our backs, buttocks and legs covered with violet weals, we were locked into the squalid little room used as a prison.

  They kept us there three days, on bread, water, lettuce, beef rinds and cold minestrone (which, luckily, we liked). Then, as if nothing had happened, we were brought out for our first family meal at midday on that fifteenth of June; and what should the kitchen superintendent, our sister Battista, have prepared for us but snail soup and snails as a main course! Cosimo refused to touch even a mouthful. "Eat up or we'll shut you in the little room again!" I yielded and began to chew the wretched mollusks (a cowardice on my part which had the effect of making my brother feel more alone than ever, so that his leaving us was also partly a protest against me for letting him down; but I was only eight years old, and then how can I compare my own strength of will, particularly as a child, to the superhuman tenacity which my brother showed throughout his life?).

  "Well?" said our father to Cosimo.

  "No, and no again!" exclaimed Cosimo, and pushed his plate away.

  "Leave the table!"

  But Cosimo had already turned his back on us all and was leaving the room.

  "Where are you going?"

  We saw him through the glass door as he picked up his tricorn and rapier.

  "I know where I'm going!" And he ran out into the garden.

  In a little while we watched him, from the windows, climbing up the holm oak. He was dressed up in the most formal clothes and headdress, because our father insisted on his appearing at table this way in spite of his twelve years of age—powdered hair with a ribbon around the queue, three-cornered hat, lace stock and ruffles, green tunic with pointed tails, purple breeches, rapier, and long white leather gaiters halfway up his legs, the only concession to a mode of dressing more suitable to our country life. (I, being only eight, was exempted from powdered hair except on gala occasions, and from the rapier, which I should have liked to wear.) So he climbed up the knobby old tree, moving his arms and legs along the branches with the sureness and speed which came to him from years of our practicing together.

  I have mentioned that we used to spend hours and hours on the trees, and not for ulterior motives as most boys, who go up only in search of fruit or birds' nests, but for the pleasure of getting over difficult parts of the trunks and forks, reaching as high as we could, and finding a good perch on which to pause and look down at the world below, to call and joke at those passing by. So I found it quite natural that Cosimo's first thought, at that unjust attack on him, was to climb up the holm oak, to us a familiar tree spreading its' branches to the height of the dining room windows through which he could show his proud offended air to the whole family.

  "Vorsicht! Vorsicht! Now he'll fall down, poor little thing!" anxiously exclaimed our mother, who would not have turned a hair at seeing us under cannon fire, but was nevertheless in agony over our games.

  Cosimo climbed up to the fork of a big branch, where he could settle comfortably, and sat himself down there, his legs dangling, his arms crossed with hands tucked under his elbows, his head buried in his shoulders, his tricorn hat tilted over his forehead.

  Our father leaned out the window. "When you're tired of being up there, you'll change your mind!" he shouted.

  "I'll never change my mind," exclaimed my brother from the branch.

  "You'll see as soon as you come down!"

  "I'll never come down again!" And he kept his word.

 

=Q and A for Matt/teachers, not students= 

1q Who's  "in the Trees," from the title?

Answer= "The Baron."

2q In the story, what year was it?

Answer= "1767"

3q And which month?

Answer= "June"

4q  Which date of days?

Answer= "the 15th."

5q Which "Abbe" (French= for "Abbey")?

Answer= "Fauchelefleur" (meaning= something like a faucet + flower).

BQ In the story, which kind of food didn't he like?

Answer= "the flavor of cooked snails."

6/13 

IC- #10/#15- Numbers in the Dark and other stories, 1943–1958, The Man Who Shouted Teresa

Numbers in the Dark=  1943-1958, The Man Who Shouted Teresa=

IC- #10/#15- Numbers in the Dark and other stories,   1943–1958,    The Man Who Shouted Teresa: link= https://www.onlinereadfreebooks.com/en/Numbers-in-the-Dark-and-Other-Stories-956669/1

Italo Calvino

Numbers in the Dark and other stories

依塔羅卡爾維諾小說選

黑暗中的數字及其他故事

 The Man Who Shouted Teresa

  I stepped off the pavement, walked backwards a few paces looking up, and, from the middle of the street, brought my hands to my mouth to make a megaphone and shouted towards the top stories of the block: ‘Teresa!’

  My shadow took fright at the moon and huddled between my feet.

  Someone walked by. Again I shouted: ‘Teresa!’ The man came up to me and said: ‘If you don’t shout louder she won’t hear you. Let’s both try. So: count to three, on three we shout together.’ And he said: ‘One, two, three.’ And we both yelled, ‘Tereeeesaaa!’

  A small group of friends passing by on their way back from the theatre or the café saw us calling out. They said: ‘Come on, we’ll give you a shout too.’ And they joined us in the middle of the street and the first man said one two three and then everybody together shouted, ‘Te-reee-saaa!’

  Somebody else came by and joined us; a quarter of an hour later there were a whole bunch of us, twenty almost. And every now and then somebody new came along.

  Organizing ourselves to give a good shout, all at the same time, wasn’t easy. There was always someone who began before three or who went on too long, but in the end we were managing something fairly efficient. We agreed that the ‘Te’ should be shouted low and long, the ‘re’ high and long, the ‘sa’ low and short. It sounded great. Just a squabble every now and then when someone was out.

  We were beginning to get it right, when somebody, who, if his voice was anything to go by, must have had a very freckly face, asked: ‘But are you sure she’s at home?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘That’s bad,’ another said. ‘Forgotten your key, have you?’

  ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I have my key.’

  ‘So,’ they asked, ‘why don’t you go on up?’

  ‘Oh, but I don’t live here,’ I answered. ‘I live on the other side of town.’

  ‘Well then, excuse my curiosity,’ the one with the freckly voice asked carefully, ‘but who does live here?’

  ‘I really wouldn’t know,’ I said.

  People were a bit upset about this.

  ‘So could you please explain,’ somebody with a very toothy voice asked, ‘why you are standing down here calling out Teresa?’

  ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ I said, ‘we can call another name, or try somewhere else. It’s no big deal.’

  The others were a bit annoyed.

  ‘I hope you weren’t playing a trick on us?’ the freckly one asked suspiciously.

  ‘What?’ I said, resentfully, and I turned to the others for confirmation of my good faith. The others said nothing, indicating they hadn’t picked up the insinuation.

  There was a moment’s embarrassment.

  ‘Look,’ someone said good-naturedly, ‘why don’t we call Teresa one last time, then we’ll go home.’

  So we did it again. ‘One two three Teresa!’ but it didn’t come out very well. Then people headed off home, some one way, some the other.

  I’d already turned into the square, when I thought I heard a voice still calling: ‘Tee-reee-sa!’

  Someone must have stayed on to shout. Someone stubborn.

 Q and A for Matt/ teachers, not students=

1q What did the man in the story shout?

Answer= "Teresa!"

2q   Who shouted along with him?

Answer= "Someone walking by." (some man)

3q Who "saw us calling out"?

Answer= " A small group of friends passing by on their way back from the theatre or the café saw us calling out"

4q Is "Teresa" the correct name to call out?

Answer= "  'As far as I’m concerned,’ I said, ‘we can call another name, or try somewhere else. It’s no big deal.’

5q Did they shout "Teresa" one last time, then they went home?

Answer= yes

BQ Who "stayed on"?

Answer= "Someone stubborn."

6/20

IC-#11/15- Mr. Palomar, Ch. 1- PALOMAR ON THE BEACH- Reading a wave

worksheet link= https://www.onlinereadfreebooks.com/en/Mr-Palomar-188782/1

Italo Calvino

Mr. Palomar

依塔羅卡爾維諾小說選

帕洛瑪先生

PALOMAR ON THE BEACH

  * * *

  Reading a wave

  The sea is barely wrinkled, and little waves strike the sandy shore. Mr Palomar is standing on the shore, looking at a wave. Not that he is lost in contemplation of the waves. He is not lost, because he is quite aware of what he is doing: he wants to look at a wave and he is looking at it. He is not contemplating, because for contemplation you need the right temperament, the right mood, and the right combination of exterior circumstances; and though Mr Palomar has nothing against contemplation in principle, none of these three conditions applies to him. Finally it is not “the waves” that he means to look at, but just one individual wave: in his desire to avoid vague sensations, he establishes for his every action a limited and precise object.

  Mr Palomar sees a wave rise in the distance, grow, approach, change form and color, fold over itself, break, vanish, and flow again. At this point he could convince himself that he has concluded the operation he had set out to achieve, and he could go away. But it is very difficult to isolate one wave, separating it from the wave immediately following it, which seems to push it and at times overtakes it and sweeps it away; just as it is difficult to separate that one wave from the wave that precedes it and seems to drag it towards the shore, unless it turns against its follower as if to arrest it. Then if you consider the breadth of the wave, parallel to the shore, it is hard to decide where the advancing front extends regularly and where it is separated and segmented into independent waves, distinguished by their speed, shape, force, direction.

  In other words, you cannot observe a wave without bearing in mind the complex features that concur in shaping it and the other, equally complex ones that the wave itself originates. These aspects vary constantly, so each wave is different from another wave, even if not immediately adjacent or successive; in other words there are some forms and sequences that are repeated, though irregularly distributed in space and time. Since what Mr Palomar means to do at this moment is simply to see a wave, that is, to perceive all its simultaneous components without overlooking any of them, his gaze will dwell on the movement of the wave that strikes the shore, until it can record aspects not previously perceived; as soon as he notices that the images are being repeated, he will know he has seen everything he wanted to see and he will be able to stop.

  A nervous man who lives in a frenzied and congested world, Mr Palomar tends to reduce his relations with the outside world; and to defend himself against the general neurasthenia he tries to keep his sensations under control insofar as possible.

  The hump of the advancing wave rises more at one point than at any other and it is here that it becomes hemmed in white. If this occurs at some distance from the shore, there is time for the foam to fold over upon itself and vanish again, as if swallowed, and at the same moment invade the whole, but this time emerging again from below, like a white carpet rising from the bank to welcome the wave that is arriving. But just when you expect that wave to roll over the carpet, you realize it is no longer wave but only carpet, and this also rapidly disappears, to become a glinting of wet sand that quickly withdraws, as if driven back by the expansion of the dry, opaque sand that moves its jagged edge forward.

  At the same time the indentations in the brow of the wave must be considered, where it splits into two wings, one stretching towards the shore from right to left and the other from left to right, and the departure-point or the destination of their divergence or convergence is this negative tip, which follows the advance of the wings but is always held back, subject to their alternate overlapping until another wave, a stronger wave, overtakes it, with the same problem of divergence-convergence, and then a wave stronger still, which resolves the knot by shattering it.

  Taking the pattern of the waves as model, the beach thrusts into the water some faintly-hinted points, prolonged in submerged sandy shoals, shaped and destroyed by the currents at every tide. Mr Palomar has chosen one of these low tongues of sand as his observation-point, because the waves strike it on either side, obliquely, and overrunning the half-submerged surface, they meet their opposites. So to understand the compos

ition of a wave, you have to consider these opposing thrusts, which to some extent are counterbalanced and to some extent are added together, to produce a general shattering of thrusts and counter-thrusts in the usual spreading of foam.

  Mr Palomar now tries to limit his field of observation; if he bears in mind a square zone of, say, ten meters of shore by ten meters of sea, he can carry out an inventory of all the wave-movements that are repeated with varying frequency within a given time-interval. The hard thing is to fix the boundaries of this zone, because if, for example, he considers as the side farthest from him the outstanding line of an advancing wave, as this line approaches him and rises it hides from his eyes everything behind it; and thus the space under examination is overturned and at the same time crushed.

  In any case Mr Palomar does not lose heart and at each moment he thinks he has managed to see everything to be seen from his observation-point, but then something always crops up that he had not borne in mind. If it were not for his impatience to reach a complete, definitive conclusion of his visual operation, looking at waves would be a very restful exercise for him and could save him from neurasthenia, heart attack, and gastric ulcer. And it could perhaps be the key to mastering the world’s complexity by reducing it to the simplest mechanism.

  But every attempt to define this model must take into account a long wave that is arriving in a direction perpendicular to the breakers and parallel to the shore, creating the flow of a constant, barely-surfacing crest. The shifts of the waves that ruffle towards the shore do not disturb the steady impulse of this compact crest that slices them at a right angle; and there is no knowing where it comes from or where it then goes. Perhaps it is a breath of east wind that stirs the sea’s surface against the deep drive that comes from the mass of water far out at sea, but this wave born of air, in passing, receives also the oblique thrusts from the water’s depth and redirects them, straightening them in its own direction and bearing them along. And so the wave continues to grow and gain strength until the clash with contrary waves gradually dulls it and makes it disappear, or else twists it until it is confused in one of the many dynasties of oblique waves slammed, with them, against the shore.

  Concentrating the attention on one aspect makes it leap into the foreground and occupy the square, just as, with certain drawings, you have only to close your eyes and when you open them the perspective has changed. Now in the overlapping of crests moving in various directions the general pattern seems broken down into sections that rise and vanish. In addition, the reflux of every wave also has a power of its own that hinders the oncoming waves. And if you concentrate your attention on these backward thrusts it seems that the true movement is the one that begins from the shore and goes out to sea.

  Is this perhaps the real result that Mr Palomar is about to achieve? To make the waves run in the opposite direction, to overturn time, to perceive the true substance of the world beyond sensory and mental habits? No, he feels a slight dizziness, but it goes no farther than that. The stubbornness that drives the waves towards the shore wins the match: in fact, the waves have swelled considerably. Is the wind about to change? It would be disastrous if the image that Mr Palomar has succeeded painstakingly in putting together were to shatter and be lost. Only if he manages to bear all the aspects in mind at once can he begin the second phase of the operation: extending this knowledge to the entire universe.

  It would suffice not to lose patience, as he soon does. Mr Palomar goes off along the beach, tense and nervous as when he came, and even more unsure about everything.

= Q and A for Matt/teachers, not students=

1q What is "reading a wave"?

Answer= It's "looking at a wave."

2q  What's another way of saying this?

Answer= "In other words...to perceive all its simultaneous components without overlooking any of them."

3q What kind of world was it? (2 adj's)

Answer= "frenzied and congested."

4q What kind of "shoals" are in the story? (1 adj.)

Answer= "sandy" ones.

5q How much sea in "the square zone"? 

Answer= "10 meters of sea"

BQ= How much, then, of the shore?

Answer= "10 meters of shore."