If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

by Italo Calvino

  You start to explain to him the reason for your visit. He understands at once, and doesn’t even let you continue: “You, too! The mixed-up signatures, we know all about it, the books that begin and don’t continue, the entire recent production of the firm is in turmoil, you’ve no idea. We can’t make head or tail of it any more, my dear sir.”

  In his arms he has a pile of galleys; he sets them down gently, as if the slightest jolt could upset the order of the printed letters. “A publishing house is a fragile organism, dear sir,” he says. “If at any point something goes askew, then the disorder spreads, chaos opens beneath our feet. Forgive me, won’t you? When I think about it I have an attack of vertigo.” And he covers his eyes, as if pursued by the sight of billions of pages, lines, words, whirling in a dust storm.

  “Come, come, Mr. Cavedagna, don’t take it like this.” Now it’s your job to console him. “It was just a reader’s simple curiosity, my question.... But if there’s nothing you can tell me...”

  “What I know, I’ll tell you gladly,” the editor says. “Listen. It all began when a young man turned up in the office, claiming to be a translator from the whatsitsname, from the youknowwhat...”

  “Polish?”

  “No, no, Polish indeed! A difficult language, one not many people know...”

  “Cimmerian?”

  “Not Cimmerian. Farther on. What do you call it? This person passed himself off as an extraordinary polyglot, there was no language he didn’t know, even whatchamacallit, Cimbrian, yes, Cimbrian. He brings us a book written in that language, a great big novel, very thick, whatsitsname, the Traveler, no, the Traveler is by the other one, Outside the town...”

  “By Tazio Bazakbal?”

  “No, not Bazakbal, this was the Steep slope, by whosit....”

  “Ahti?”

  “Bravo, the very one. Ukko Ahti.”

  “But ... I beg your pardon: isn’t Ukko Ahti a Cimmerian author?”

  “Well, to be sure, he was Cimmerian before, Ahti was; but you know what happened, during the war, after the war, the boundary adjustments, the Iron Curtain, the fact is that now there is Cimbria where Cimmeria used to be, and Cimmeria has shifted farther on. And so Cimmerian literature was also taken over by the Cimbrians, as part of their war reparations....”

  “This is the thesis of Professor Galligani, which Professor Uzzi-Tuzii rejects...”

  “Oh, you can imagine the rivalry at the university between departments, two competing chairs, two professors who can’t stand the sight of each other, imagine Uzzi-Tuzii admitting that the masterpiece of his language has to be read in the language of his colleague...”

  “The fact remains,” you insist, “that Leaning from the steep slope is an unfinished novel, or, rather, barely begun.... I saw the original....”

  “Leaning ... Now, don’t get me mixed up, it’s a title that sounds similar but isn’t the same, it’s something with Vertigo, yes, it’s the Vertigo of Viljandi.”

  “Without fear of wind or vertigo? Tell me: has it been translated? Have you published it?”

  “Wait. The translator, a certain Ermes Marana, seemed a young man with all the proper credentials: he hands in a sample of the translation, we schedule the title, he is punctual in delivering the pages of the translation, a hundred at a time, he pockets the payments, we begin to pass the translation on to the printer, to have it set, in order to save time.... And then, in correcting the proofs, we notice some misconstructions, some oddities.... We send for Marana, we ask him some questions, he becomes confused, contradicts himself.... We press him, we open the original text in front of him and request him to translate a bit orally.... He confesses he doesn’t know a single word of Cimbrian!”

  “And what about the translation he turned in to you?”

  “He had put the proper names in Cimbrian, no, in Cimmerian, I can’t remember, but the text he had translated was from another novel....”

  “What novel?”

  “What novel? we ask him. And he says: A Polish novel (there’s your Polish!) by Tazio Bazakbal...”

  “Outside the town of Malbork...”

  “Exactly. But wait a minute. That’s what he said, and for the moment we believed him; the book was already on the presses. We stop everything, change the title page, the cover. It was a big setback for us, but in any case, with one title or another, by one author or the other, the novel was there, translated, set, printed.... We calculated that all this to-ing and fro-ing with the print shop, the bindery, the replacement of all the first signatures with the wrong title page—in other words, it created a confusion that spread to all the new books we had in stock, whole runs had to be scrapped, volumes already distributed had to be recalled from the booksellers....”

  “There’s one thing I don’t understand: what novel are you talking about now? The one with the station or the one with the boy leaving the farm? Or—?”

  “Bear with me. What I’ve told you is only the beginning. Because by now, as is only natural, we no longer trust this gentleman, and we want to see the picture clearly, compare the translation with the original. And what do we discover next? It wasn’t the Bazakbal, either, it was a novel translated from the French, a book by an almost unknown Belgian author, Bertrand Vandervelde, entitled ... Wait: I’ll show you.”

  Cavedagna goes out, and when he reappears he hands you a little bundle of photocopies. “Here, it’s called Looks down in the gathering shadow. We have here the French text of the first pages. You can see with your own eyes, judge for yourself what a swindle! Ermes Marana translated this trashy novel, word by word, and passed it off to us as Cimmerian, Cimbrian, Polish....”

  You leaf through the photocopies and from the first glance you realize that this Regarde en bas dans l’épais-seur des ombres by Bertrand Vandervelde has nothing in common with any of the four novels you have had to give up reading. You would like to inform Cavedagna at once, but he is producing a paper attached to the file, which he insists on showing you: “You want to see what Marana had the nerve to reply when we charged him with this fraud? This is his letter....” And he points out a paragraph for you to read.

  “What does the name of an author on the jacket matter? Let us move forward in thought to three thousand years from now. Who knows which books from our period will be saved, and who knows which authors’ names will be remembered? Some books will remain famous but will be considered anonymous works, as for us the epic of Gilgamesh; other authors’ names will still be well known, but none of their works will survive, as was the case with Socrates; or perhaps all the surviving books will be attributed to a single, mysterious author, like Homer.”

  “Did you ever hear such reasoning?” Cavedagna exclaims; then he adds, “And he might even be right, that’s the rub...”

  He shakes his head, as if seized by a private thought; he chuckles slightly, and sighs slightly. This thought of his, you, Reader, can perhaps read on his brow. For many years Cavedagna has followed books as they are made, bit by bit, he sees books be born and die every day, and yet the true books for him remain others, those of the time when for him they were like messages from other worlds. And so it is with authors: he deals with them every day, he knows their fixations, indecisions, susceptibilities, egocentricities, and yet the true authors remain those who for him were only a name on a jacket, a word that was part of the title, authors who had the same reality as their characters, as the places mentioned in the books, who existed and didn’t exist at the same time, like those characters and those countries. The author was an invisible point from which the books came, a void traveled by ghosts, an underground tunnel that put other worlds in communication with the chicken coop of his boyhood....

  Somebody calls him. He hesitates a moment, undecided whether to take back the photocopies or to leave them with you. “Mind you, this is an important document; it can’t leave these offices, it’s the corpus delicti, there could be a trial for plagiarism. If you want to examine it, sit down here at this desk, and remember
to give it back to me, even if I forget it, it would be a disaster if it were lost....”

  You could tell him it didn’t matter, this isn’t the novel you were looking for, but partly because you rather like its opening, and partly because Mr. Cavedagna, more and more worried, has been swept away by the whirlwind of his publishing activities, there is nothing for you to do but start reading Looks down in the gathering shadow.

  Looks down in the gathering shadow

  It was all very well for me to pull up the mouth of the plastic bag: it barely reached Jojo’s neck, and his head stuck out. Another way would be to put him into the sack head first, but that still didn’t solve the problem, because then his feet emerged. The solution would have been to make him bend his knees, but much as I tried to help him with some kicks, his legs, which had become stiff, resisted, and in the end when I did succeed, legs and sack bent together: he was still harder to move and the head stuck out worse than before.

  “When will I manage really to get rid of you, Jojo?” I said to him, and every time I turned him around I found that silly face of his in front of me, the heart-throb mustache, the hair soldered with brilliantine, the knot of his tie sticking out of the sack as if from a sweater, I mean a sweater dating from the years when he still followed the fashion. Maybe Jojo had arrived at the fashion of those years a bit late, when it was no longer the fashion anywhere, but having envied as a young man those characters dressed like that, with their hair like that, from their brilliantine to their black patent-leather shoes with velvet saddles, he had identified that look with good fortune, and once he had made it he was too taken up with his own success to look around and notice that the men he wanted to resemble had a completely different appearance.

  The brilliantine held well; even when I pressed his skull, to push him down into the sack, his crown of hair remained spherical and split only into compact strips that stood up in an arc. The knot of his tie had gone a bit crooked; instinctively I started to straighten it, as if a corpse with a crooked tie might attract more attention than a corpse that was neat.

  “You need another sack to stick over his head,” Bernadette said, and once again I had to admit that girl’s intelligence was superior to what you would expect from one of her background.

  The trouble was that we couldn’t manage to find another large-size plastic bag. There was only one, for a kitchen garbage can, a small orange sack that could serve very well to conceal his head, but not to conceal the fact that this was a human body contained in one sack, with the head contained in a smaller one.

  But the way things were, we couldn’t stay in that basement any longer, we had to get rid of Jojo before daylight, we had already been carrying him around for a couple of hours as if he were alive, a third passenger in my convertible, and we had already attracted the attention of too many people. For instance, those two cops on their bicycles who came over quietly and stopped to look at us as we were about to tip him into the river (the Pont de Bercy had seemed deserted a moment before), and immediately Bernadette and I start slapping him on the back, Jojo slumped there, his head and hands swaying over the rail, and I cry, “Go ahead, vomit it all up, mon vieux, it’ll clear your head!” And, both of us supporting him, his arms around our necks, we carry him to the car. At that moment the gas that accumulates in the belly of corpses is expelled noisily; the two cops burst out laughing. I thought that Jojo dead had quite a different character from the living Jojo, with his finicky manners; and, alive, he wouldn’t have been so generous, coming to the aid of two friends who were risking the guillotine for his murder.

  Then we started looking for the plastic bag and the can of gas, and now all we had to find was the place. It seems impossible, in a big city like Paris, but you can waste hours looking for the right place to burn up a corpse. “Isn’t there a forest at Fontainebleau?” I say, starting the motor, to Bernadette, who has sat down beside me again. “Tell me the way; you know the road.” And I thought that perhaps when the sun had tinged the sky gray we would be coming back into the city in the line of trucks carrying vegetables, and in a clearing among the hornbeams nothing would be left of Jojo but a charred and fetid residue, and my past as well. And as well, I say, this might be the time when I can convince myself that all my pasts are burned and forgotten, as if they had never existed.

  How many times had I realized that my past was beginning to weigh on me, that there were too many people who thought I was in their debt, materially and morally—for example, at Macao, the parents of the girls of the “Jade Garden” (I mention them because there’s nothing worse than Chinese relations when it comes to not being able to get rid of them) and yet when I hired the girls I made a straightforward deal, with them and their families, and I paid cash, so as not to see them constantly turning up there, the skinny mothers and fathers in white socks, with a bamboo basket smelling of fish, with that lost expression as if they had come from the country, whereas they all lived in the port quarter. As I was saying, how many times, when the past weighed too heavily on me, had I been seized by that hope of a clean break: to change jobs, wife, city, continent—one continent after the other, until I had made the whole circle—habits, friends, business, customers. It was a mistake, but when I realized that, it was too late.

  Because in this way all I did was to accumulate past after past behind me, multiplying the pasts, and if one life was too dense and ramified and embroiled for me to bear it always with me, imagine so many lives, each with its own past and the pasts of the other lives that continue to become entangled one with the others. It was all very well for me to say each time: What a relief, I’ll turn the mileage back to zero, I’ll erase the blackboard. The morning after the day I arrived in a new country, this zero had already become a number with so many ciphers that the meter was too small, it filled the blackboard from one side to the other, people, places, likes, dislikes, missteps. Like that night when we were looking for the right place to burn up Jojo, our headlights searching among the tree trunks and the rocks, and Bernadette pointing to the dashboard: “Look. Don’t tell me we’re out of gas.” She was right. With all the things on my mind, I had forgotten to fill the tank, and now we risked ending up miles from nowhere with a broken-down car, at a time when all the service stations were closed. Fortunately, we hadn’t set fire to Jojo yet: if we had come to a halt only a short distance from the pyre, we couldn’t have run off on foot, leaving behind a car that could be identified as mine. In other words, all we could do was pour into our tank the can of gas meant to soak Jojo’s blue suit, his monogrammed silk shirt, and then beat it back to the city as fast as possible, trying to dream up another plan for getting rid of him.

  It was all very well for me to say that every time I had landed in a jam I had always extricated myself, from every lucky situation as well as from every disaster. The past is like a tapeworm, constantly growing, which I carry curled up inside me, and it never loses its rings no matter how hard I try to empty my guts in every WC, English-style or Turkish, or in the slop jars of prisons or the bedpans of hospitals or the latrines of camps, or simply in the bushes, taking a good look first to make sure no snake will pop out, like that time in Venezuela. You can’t change your past any more than you can change your name; in spite of all the passports I’ve had, with names I can’t even remember, everybody has always called me Ruedi the Swiss. Wherever I went and however I introduced myself, there has always been somebody who knew who I was and what I had done, even though my appearance has changed a lot with the passing years, especially since my head has become hairless and yellow as a grapefruit, which happened during the typhoid epidemic aboard the Stjärna, because, considering the cargo we were carrying, we couldn’t approach shore or even radio for help.

  Anyway, the conclusion to which all stories come is that the life a person has led is one and one alone, uniform and compact as a shrunken blanket where you can’t distinguish the fibers of the weave. And so if by chance I happen to dwell on some ordinary detail of an ordinary day, the
visit of a Singhalese who wants to sell me a litter of newborn crocodiles in a zinc tub, I can be sure that even in this tiny, insignificant episode there is implicit everything I have experienced, all the past, the multiple pasts I have tried in vain to leave behind me, the lives that in the end are soldered into an overall life, my life, which continues even in this place from which I have decided I must not move any more, this little house with a courtyard garden in the Parisian banlieu where I have set up my tropical-fish aquarium, a quiet business, which forces me more than any other would to lead a stable life, because you can’t neglect the fish, not even for one day, and as for women, at my age you have earned the right not to feel like getting involved in new troubles.

  Bernadette is a different story. With her I could say I had proceeded without a single error: as soon as I had learned Jojo was back in Paris and was on my trail, I didn’t delay a moment before setting out on his trail, and so I discovered Bernadette, and I was able to get her on my side, and we worked out the job together, without his suspecting a thing. At the right moment I drew the curtain aside and the first thing I saw of him—after all the years in which we had lost sight of each other—was the piston movement of his big hairy behind between her white knees; then the neatly combed hair on the back of his head on the pillow, beside her face, a bit wan, moving ninety degrees to leave me free to strike. Everything happened in the quickest and cleanest way, giving him no time to turn and recognize me, to know who had arrived to spoil his party, maybe not even to become aware of crossing the border between the hell of the living and the hell of the dead.

  It was better like that, for me to look him in the face only as a dead man. “The game’s over, you old bastard,” I couldn’t help saying to him, in an almost affectionate voice, while Bernadette was dressing him neatly, including the patent-leather-and-velvet shoes, because we had to carry him outside pretending he was so drunk he couldn’t stand on his own feet. And I happened to think of our first meeting all those years ago in Chicago, in the back of old Mrs. Mikonikos’s shop, full of busts of Socrates, when I realized that I had invested the insurance money from the faked fire in his rusty slot machines and that he and the old paralytic nymphomaniac had me in their power. The day before, looking from the dunes at the frozen lake, I had tasted such freedom as I had never felt for years, and in the course of twenty-four hours the space around me had closed again, and everything was being decided in a block of stinking houses between the Greek neighborhood and the Polish neighborhood. My life had known turning points of this sort by the dozen, in one direction or the other, but after that I never stopped trying to get even with him, and since then the list of my losses had only grown longer. Even now that the smell of corpse began to rise through his cheap cologne, I realized that the game with him wasn’t yet over, that Jojo dead could ruin me yet again as he had ruined me so often when alive.