The Watcher and Other Stories

by Italo Calvino

  The people who eat in those restaurants are what you would expect: apart from travelers, who change all the time, the habitual customers are unmarried white-collar workers, even some spinster typists, and a few students or soldiers. After a while these customers get to know one another and they chat from table to table, and at a certain point they eat at the same table, groups of people who at first didn’t know one another and then ended up by falling into the habit of always eating together.

  They all joked, too, with the Tuscan waitresses, good-natured jokes, obviously; they asked about the girls’ boyfriends, they exchanged witticisms, and when there was nothing else to talk about they started on television, saying who was nice and who wasn’t among the faces they had seen in the latest programs.

  But not me, I never said anything except my order, which for that matter was always the same: spaghetti with butter, boiled beef, and greens, because I was on a diet; and I never called the girls by name even though by then I too had learned their names, but I preferred to go on saying “Signorina” so as not to create an impression of familiarity: I had happened upon that restaurant by chance, I was just a random customer, perhaps I would continue going there every day for God knows how long, but I wanted to feel as if I were passing through, here today and somewhere else tomorrow, otherwise the place would get on my nerves.

  Not that they weren’t likable. On the contrary: both the staff and the clientele were good, pleasant people, and I enjoyed that cordial atmosphere around me; in fact, if it hadn’t existed, I would probably have felt something was lacking, but still I preferred to look on, without taking part in it. I avoided conversing with the other customers, not even greeting them, because, as everyone knows, it’s easy enough to strike up an acquaintance, but then you’re involved; somebody says: “What’s on this evening?” and you end up all together watching television or going to the movies, and after that evening you’re caught up in a group of people who mean nothing to you, and you have to tell them your business, and listen to theirs.

  I tried to sit down at a table by myself, I would open the morning or evening paper (I bought it on my way to the office and took a glance at the headlines then, but I waited to read it until I was at the restaurant), and then I read through it from beginning to end. The paper was of great use to me when I couldn’t find a seat by myself and had to sit down at a table where there was already someone else; I plunged into my reading and nobody said a word to me. But I always tried to find a free table and for this reason I was careful to put off as late as possible the hour of my meals, so I turned up there when most of the customers had already left.

  There was the disadvantage of the crumbs. Often I had to sit down at a table where another customer had just got up and left the table covered with crumbs; so I avoided looking down until the waitress came to clear away the dirty dishes and glasses, sweeping up all the remains into the cloth and changing it. At times this task was done hastily and between the top cloth and the bottom one there were bread crumbs, and they distressed me.

  The best thing, at lunchtime for example, was to discover the hour when the waitresses, thinking that by then no more customers would be coming, clean up everything properly and prepare the tables for the evening; then the whole family, owners, waitresses, cooks, dishwashers, set one big table and finally sit down to eat, themselves. At that moment I would go in, saying: “Oh, perhaps I’m too late. Can you give me something to eat?”

  “Why, of course! Sit down wherever you like! Lisa, serve the gentleman.”

  I sat down at one of those lovely clean tables, a cook went back into the kitchen, I read the paper, I ate calmly, I listened to the others laughing at their table, joking and telling stories of Altopascio. Between one dish and the next I would have to wait perhaps a quarter of an hour, because the waitresses were sitting there eating and chatting, and I would finally make up my mind to say: “An orange, please, Signorina... And they would say: “Yes sir! Anna, you go. Oh, Lisa!” But I liked it that way, I was happy.

  I finished eating, finished reading the paper, and went out with the paper rolled up in my hand, I went home, I climbed up to my room, threw the paper on the bed, washed my hands. Signorina Margariti kept watch to see when I came in and when I left, because the moment I was outside she came into my room to take the newspaper. She didn’t dare ask me for it, so she took it away in secret and secretly she put it back on the bed before I came home again. She seemed to be ashamed of this, as if of a somehow frivolous curiosity; in fact she read only one thing, the obituaries.

  Once when I came in and found her with the paper in her hand, she was deeply embarrassed and felt obliged to explain: “I borrow it every now and then to see who’s dead, you know, forgive me, but, sometimes, you know, I have acquaintances among the dead...”

  THANKS TO this idea of postponing mealtimes, for example by going to the movies on certain evenings, I came out of the film late, my head a bit giddy, to find a dense darkness shrouding the neon signs, an autumnal mist, which drained the city of dimensions. I looked at the time, I told myself there probably was nothing left to eat in those little restaurants, or in any case I was off my usual schedule and I wouldn’t be able to get back to it again, so I decided to have a quick bite standing at the counter in the “Urbano Rattazzi” beer hall, just below where I lived.

  Entering the place from the street was not just a passage from darkness to light: the very consistency of the world changed. Outside, all was shapeless, uncertain, dispersed, and here it was full of solid forms, of volumes with a thickness, a weight, brightly colored surfaces, the red of the ham they were slicing at the counter, the green of the waiters’ Tyrolean jackets, the gold of the beer. The place was full of people and I, who in the streets was accustomed to look on passers-by as faceless shadows and to consider myself another faceless shadow among so many, rediscovered here all of a sudden a forest of male and female faces, as brightly colored as fruit, each different from the rest and all unknown. For a moment I hoped still to retain my own ghostly invisibility in their midst, then I realized that I, too, had become like them, a form so precise that even the mirrors reflected it, with the stubble of beard that had grown since morning, and there was no possible refuge; even the smoke which drifted in a thick cloud to the ceiling from all the lighted cigarettes in the place was a thing apart with its outline and its thickness and didn’t modify the substance of the other things.

  I made my way to the counter, which was always very crowded, turning my back on the room full of laughter and words from each table, and as soon as a stool became free I sat down on it, trying to attract the waiter’s attention, so he would set before me the square cardboard coaster, a mug of beer, and the menu. I had trouble making them notice me, here at the “Urbano Rattazzi” over which I kept vigil night after night, whose every hour, every jolt I knew, and the noise in which my voice was lost was the same I heard rise every evening up along the rusty iron railings.

  “Gnocchi with butter, please,” I said, and finally the waiter behind the counter heard me and went to the microphone to declare: “One gnocchi with butter!” and I thought of how that cadenced shout emerged from the loud-speaker in the kitchen, and I felt as if I were simultaneously here at the counter and up there, lying on my bed in my room, and I tried to break up in my mind and muffle the words that constantly crisscrossed among the groups of jolly people eating and drinking and the clink of glasses and cutlery until I could recognize the noise of all my evenings.

  Transparently, through the lines and colors of this part of the world, I was beginning to discern the features of its reverse, of which I felt I was the only inhabitant. But perhaps the true reverse was here, brightly lighted and full of open eyes, whereas the side that counted in every way was the shadowy part, and the “Urbano Rattazzi” beer hall existed only so you could hear that distorted voice in the darkness, “One gnocchi with butter!” and the clank of the metal drums, and so the street’s mist might be pierced by the sign’s halo, by t
he square of misted panes against which vague human forms were outlined.

  ONE MORNING I was wakened by a call from Claudia, but this wasn’t long distance; she was in the city, at the station, she had just that moment arrived and was calling me because, in getting out of the sleeping car, she had lost one of the many cases that comprised her luggage.

  I got there barely in time to see her coming out of the station, at the head of a procession of porters. Her smile had none of that agitation she had transmitted to me by her phone call a few minutes before. She was very beautiful and elegant; each time I saw her I was amazed to see I had forgotten what she was like. Now she suddenly pronounced herself enthusiastic about this city and she approved my idea of coming to live here. The sky was leaden; Claudia praised the light, the streets’ colors.

  She took a suite in a grand hotel. For me to go into the lobby, address the desk clerk, have myself announced by phone, follow the bellboy to the elevator, caused endless uneasiness and dismay. I was deeply moved that Claudia, because of certain business matters of hers but in reality perhaps to see me, had come to spend a few days here: moved and embarrassed, as the abyss between her way of life and mine yawned before me.

  And yet, I managed to get along fairly well during that busy morning and even to turn up briefly at the office to draw an advance on my next pay-check, foreseeing the exceptional days that lay ahead of me. There was the problem of where to take her to eat: I had little experience of de luxe restaurants or special regional places. As a start, I bad the idea of taking her up to one of the surrounding hills.

  I hired a taxi. I realized now that, in that city, where nobody earning above a certain figure was without a car (even my colleague Avandero had one), I had none, and anyway I wouldn’t have known how to drive one. It had never mattered to me in the least, but in Claudia’s presence I was ashamed. Claudia, on the other hand, found everything quite natural, because—she said—a car in my hands would surely spell disaster; to my great annoyance she loudly made light of my practical ability and based her admiration of me on other talents, though there was no telling what they were.

  So we took a taxi; we hit on a rickety car, driven by an old man. I tried to make a joke of how flotsam, wreckage, inevitably comes to life around me, but Claudia wasn’t upset by the ugliness of the taxi, as if these things couldn’t touch her, and I didn’t know whether to be relieved or to feel more than ever abandoned to my fate.

  We climbed up to the green backdrop of hills that girdles the city to the east. The day had cleared into a gilded autumnal light, and the colors of the countryside, too, were turning gold. I embraced Claudia, in that taxi; if I let myself give way to the love she felt for me, perhaps that green and gold life would also yield to me, the life that, in blurred images (to embrace her, I had removed my eyeglasses), ran by at either side of the road.

  Before going to the little restaurant, I told the elderly driver to take us somewhere to look at the view, up higher. We got out of the car. Claudia, with a huge black hat, spun around, making the folds of her skirt swell out. I darted here and there, pointing out to her the whitish crest of the Alps that emerged from the sky (I mentioned the names of the mountains at random, since I couldn’t recognize them) and, on this side, the broken and intermittent outline of the hill with villages and roads and rivers, and down below, the city like a network of tiny scales, opaque or glistening, meticulously aligned. A sense of vastness had seized me; I don’t know whether it was Claudia’s hat and skirt, or the view. The air, though this was autumn, was fairly clear and unpolluted, but it was streaked by the most diverse kinds of condensation: thick mists at the base of the mountains, wisps of fog over the rivers, chains of clouds, stirred variously by the wind. We were there leaning over the low wall: I, with my arm around her waist, looking at the countless aspects of the landscape, suddenly gripped by a need to analyze, already dissatisfied with myself because I didn’t command sufficiently the nomenclature of the places and the natural phenomena; she ready instead to translate sensations into sudden gusts of love, into effusions, remarks that had nothing to do with any of this. At this point I saw the thing. I grabbed Claudia by the wrist, clasping it hard. “Look! Look down there!”

  “What is it?”

  “Down there! Look! It’s moving!”

  “But what is it? What do you see?”

  How could I tell her? There were other clouds or mists which, according to how the humidity condenses in the cold layers of air, are gray or bluish or whitish or even black, and they weren’t so different from this one, except for its uncertain color, I couldn’t say whether more brownish or bituminous; but the difference was rather in a shadow of this color which seemed to become more intense first at the edges, then in the center. It was, in short, a shadow of dirt, soiling everything and changing—and in this too it was different from the other clouds—its very consistency, because it was heavy, not clearly dispelled from the earth, from the speckled expanse of the city over which it flowed slowly, gradually erasing it on one side and revealing it on the other, but trailing a wake, like slightly dirty strands, which had no end.

  “It’s smog!” I shouted at Claudia. “You see that? It’s a cloud of smog!”

  But she wasn’t listening to me, she was attracted by something she had seen flying, a flight of birds; and I stayed there, looking for the first time, from outside, at the cloud that surrounded me every hour, at the cloud I inhabited and that inhabited me, and I knew that, in all the variegated world around me, this was the only thing that mattered to me.

  THAT EVENING I took Claudia to supper at the “Urbano Rattazzi” beer hall, because except for my cheap restaurants I knew no other place and I was afraid of ending up somewhere too expensive. Entering the “Urbano Rattazzi” with a girl like Claudia was a new experience: the waiters in their Tyrolean jackets all sprang to attention, they gave us a good table, they rolled over the trolleys with the specialties. I tried to act the nonchalant escort but at the same time I felt I had been recognized as the tenant of the furnished room over the courtyard, the customer who had quick meals on a stool at the counter. This state of mind made me clumsy, my conversation was dull, and soon Claudia became angry with me. We fell into an intense quarrel; our voices were drowned by the noise of the beer hall, but we had trained on us not only the eyes of the waiters, prompt to obey Claudia’s slightest sign, but also those of the other customers, their curiosity aroused by this beautiful, elegant, imposing woman in the company of such a meek-looking man. And I realized that the words of our argument were followed by everyone, also because Claudia, in her unconcern for the people around her, made no effort to disguise her feelings. I felt they were all waiting only for the moment when Claudia, infuriated, would get up and leave me there alone, making me once more the anonymous man I had always been, the man nobody notices any more than one would notice a spot of damp on the wall.

  Instead, as always, the quarrel was followed by a tender, amorous understanding; we had reached the end of the meal and Claudia, knowing I lived nearby, said: “I’ll come up to your place.”

  Now I had taken her to the “Urbano Rattazzi” because it was the only restaurant I knew of that sort, not because it was near my room; in fact, I was on pins and needles at the very thought that she might form some idea of the house where I lived just by glancing at the doorway of the building, and I had relied chiefly on her flightiness.

  Instead, she wanted to go up there. Telling her about the room, I exaggerated its squalor, to turn the whole event into something grotesque. But as she went up and crossed the landing, she noticed only the good aspects: the ancient and rather noble architecture of the building, the functional way in which those old apartments were laid out. We went in, and she said: “Why, what are you talking about? The room is wonderful. What more do you want?”

  I turned at once to the basin, before helping her off with her coat, because as usual I had soiled my hands. But not she, she moved around, her hands fluttering like feathers among th
e dusty furnishings.

  The room was soon invaded by those alien objects: her hat with its little veil, her fox stole, velvet dress, organdy slip, satin shoes, silk stockings; I tried to hang everything up in the wardrobe, put things in the drawers, because I thought that if they stayed out they would soon be covered with traces of soot.

  Now Claudia’s white body was lying on the bed, on that bed from which, if I hit it, a cloud of dust would rise, and she reached out with one hand to the shelf next to it and took a book. “Be careful, it’s dusty!” But she had already opened it and was leafing through it, then she dropped it to the floor. I was looking at her breasts, still those of a young girl, the pink, pointed tips, and I was seized with torment at the thought that some dust from the book’s pages might have fallen on them, and I extended my hand to touch them lightly in a gesture resembling a caress but intended, really, to remove from them the bit of dust I thought had settled there.

  Instead, her skin was smooth, cool, undefiled; and as I saw in the lamp’s cone of light a little shower of dust specks floating in the air, soon to be deposited also on Claudia, I threw myself upon her in an embrace which was chiefly a way of covering her, of taking all the dust upon myself so that she would be safe from it.