Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories

by Italo Calvino

  Mariamirella is there in the half-light, with her sailor’s beret and pompom and her heart-shaped mouth. I open the door and she’s already prepared a whole speech to make as soon as she’s in, it doesn’t matter what she actually says, only that we talk without a break as I lead her down the dark corridor to my room.

  It ought to be a long speech, so as not to get stuck in the middle of my room without having anything left to say. The room offers no prompts, hopeless in its squalor: the metal bedstead, titles of unknown books in the little bookcase.

  ‘Come and look out of the window, Mariamirella.’

  The window is a French window with a waist-high railing but no balcony; you have to go up two steps to it and it feels as if we were climbing and climbing. Outside, a reddish sea of tiles. We look at the roofs stretching off all around as far as the eye can see, the stumpy chimneys suddenly puffing rags of smoke, the ridiculous balustrades on cornices where no one can ever look out, the low walls enclosing empty spaces on top of tumbledown houses. I put a hand on her shoulder, a hand that hardly feels like mine, swollen almost, as if we were touching each other through a layer of water.

  ‘Seen enough?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Down then.’

  We go down and close the window. We’re underwater, we fumble with vague sensations. The mammoth roams about the room, ancient human fear.

  ‘So?’

  I’ve taken off her sailor’s beret and tossed it on the bed.

  ‘No. I’m off now anyway.’

  She puts it back on her head, I grab it and throw it up in the air, flying, now we’re running after each other, playing with gritted teeth, love, this is love one for another, a scratching biting longing one for another, punching too, on the shoulders, then a weary weary kiss: love.

  Now we’re smoking sitting face to face: the cigarettes are huge between our fingers, like things held underwater, big sunken anchors. Why aren’t we happy?

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asks Mariamirella.

  ‘The mammoth,’ I tell her.

  ‘What’s that?’ she asks.

  ‘A symbol,’ I tell her.

  ‘What of?’ she says.

  ‘I don’t know what of,’ I tell her. ‘A symbol.’

  ‘Look,’ I tell her, ‘one evening I was sitting on a river bank with a girl.’

  ‘Called?’

  ‘The river was called the Po, and the girl Enrica. Why?’

  ‘Oh nothing: I like to know who you’ve been with.’

  ‘Okay, so we were sitting on the grassy river bank. It was autumn, in the evening, the banks were dark already and coming down the river was the shadow of two men rowing standing up. In town the lights were going on and we were sitting on the bank the other side of the river, and we were full of what they call love, that rough discovering and seeking of each other, that sharp taste of one another, you know, love. And I was full of sadness and solitude, that evening on the bank of rivers and their black shadows, the sadness and solitude of new loves, the sadness and nostalgia of old loves, the sadness and desperation of future loves. Don Juán, sad hero, ancient burden, he was full of sadness and solitude and nothing else.’

  ‘Is it the same with me too?’ Mariamirella asks.

  ‘What if you spoke a bit, now, if you said what you know?’

  I started to shout with rage; sometimes when you speak you hear what might be an echo, it drives you crazy.

  ‘What do you expect me to say? All this stuff… you men… I don’t understand.’

  That’s how it is: everything women have been told about love has been wrong. They’ve been told all sorts of things, but all wrong. And their experiences, all imprecise. And yet, they trust the things they’re told, not the experiences. That’s why they’re so wrong-headed.

  ‘I’d like, you see, us girls,’ she says. ‘Men: things you read, things they whisper in your ear from when you’re a little girl. You learn that that is more important than anything else, the aim of everything else. Then, you see, I realized that you never get to that, really to that. It’s not more important than everything else. I wish it didn’t exist at all, any of it, that you didn’t have to think about it. Yet you’re always expecting it. Maybe you have to become a mother to get to the real sense of everything. Or a prostitute.’

  There: it’s great. We all have our secret explanations. You only have to reveal your secret explanation and she’s not a stranger any more. We lie cuddled up together like two big dogs, or river gods.

  ‘You see,’ Mariamirella says, ‘maybe I’m afraid of you. But I don’t know where to hide. There’s nothing on the horizon, only you. You’re the bear and the cave. That’s why I’m cuddled up in your arms now, so that you can protect me from my fear of you.’

  And yet, it’s easier for women. Life flows in them, a great river, in them, the perpetuators, nature is sure and mysterious, in them. Once there was the Great Matriarchy, the history of peoples flowed as simply as that of plants. Then the conceit of the drones: a rebellion, and we had civilization. That’s what I think, but I don’t believe it.

  ‘Once I found I couldn’t make it with a girl,’ I tell her, ‘on a meadow in the mountains. The mountain was called Mount Bignone and the girl Angela Pia. A big meadow, amongst the bushes, I remember, and a cricket jumping on every leaf. That trilling of crickets, so high, no escape. She couldn’t really understand why I got up then and said that the last cable car was about to leave. Because it was a place you got to by cable car: and going over the pylons you felt yourself go empty inside and she said: “It’s like when you kiss me.” That was quite a relief, I remember.’

  ‘You shouldn’t tell me this sort of thing,’ Mariamirella says. ‘There’d be no more bear nor cave either. All I’d be left with was fear, all around.’

  ‘You see, Mariamirella,’ I tell her, ‘we mustn’t separate things from thoughts. The curse of our generation has been just that: not being able to do what we thought. Or not being able to think what we did. I’ll give you an example: years ago (I’d changed my age on my identity card because I wasn’t old enough), I went to a woman in a brothel. The brothel was at 15, via Calandra and the woman was called Derna.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Derna. We had the empire then and the only novelty was that the women in the brothels were called Derna, Adua, Harrar, Dessié.’

  ‘Dessié?’

  ‘Even Dessié, as I recall. You want me to call you Dessié from now on?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, to go back to that time, with this Derna. I was young and she was big and hairy. I ran away. I paid what I had to pay and ran away: down the stairs I had the impression everybody came out of their rooms to look at me and laugh. But that’s not important: the thing is that as soon as I was home that woman became a thought, something mental, and I wasn’t afraid of her any more. I began to want her, want her terribly… That’s the point: for us things thought are different from the things themselves.’

  ‘Right,’ says Mariamirella, ‘I’ve already thought of everything possible, I’ve lived hundreds of lives with my thoughts. Of marrying, of having lots of children, of having abortions, of marrying someone rich, of marrying someone poor, of becoming a high society lady, of becoming a prostitute, a dancer, a nun, a roast-chestnut seller, a star, an MP, an ambulance driver, a sportswoman. Hundreds of lives with all their details. And they all ended happily. But in real life none of those things I think ever happens. So every time I find myself imagining things, I get scared and try to stop the thoughts, because if I dream something it will never come true.’

  She’s a nice girl, Mariamirella; by nice girl I mean she understands the difficult things I say and immediately makes them easy. I’d like to give her a kiss, but then I think that if I kissed her I’d think of kissing the thought of her and she’d think of being kissed by the thought of me, so I do nothing about it.

  ‘Our generation must reconquer the things themselves, Mariamirella,’ I say. ‘Think and do thi
ngs at the same time. Not do things without thinking them through. We have to put an end to this difference between the things we think and the things themselves. Then we’ll be happy.’

  ‘Why is it like this?’ she asks me.

  ‘Well, it’s not like this for everybody,’ I tell her. ‘When I was a boy I lived in a big villa, with balustrades high as if flying over the sea. And I spent my days behind those balustrades, I was a loner as a child, and for me everything was a strange symbol, the spacing of the dates hanging from the tufts on the stalks, the crooked arms of the cactuses, the strange patterns in the gravel of the paths. Then there were the grown-ups, whose job it was to deal with things, real things. All I had to do was discover new symbols, new meanings. I’ve stayed that way my whole life, I still live in a castle of meanings, not things, I still depend on the others, the “grown-ups”, the ones who handle things. But there are people who’ve worked at lathes ever since they were children. At a tool that makes things. That can have no other meaning than the things it makes. When I see a machine I look at it as if it were a magic castle, I imagine tiny men turning amongst the cogs. A lathe. God knows what a lathe is. Do you know what a lathe is, Mariamirella?’

  ‘A lathe, I’m not sure, right now,’ she says.

  ‘They must be really important, lathes. They should teach everybody to use them, instead of teaching you to use a rifle, a rifle is just another symbolic thing, with no real purpose.’

  ‘I’m not interested in lathes,’ she says.

  ‘See, it’s easier for you: you’ve got your sewing machines to save you, your needles and whatnot, gas rings, typewriters even. You’ve only got a few myths to escape from; everything’s a symbol for me. But what is definite is, we’ve got to reconquer things.’

  I’m caressing her, very softly.

  ‘So, am I a thing?’ she asks.

  ‘Ugh,’ I say.

  I’ve found a small dimple on one shoulder, above the armpit, soft, with no bone beneath, like the dimples in cheeks. I speak with my lips on the dimple.

  ‘Shoulder like cheek,’ I say. It’s incomprehensible.

  ‘What?’ she asks. But she doesn’t care in the least what I say to her.

  ‘Race like June,’ I say, still in the dimple. She doesn’t understand what I’m doing, but she likes it and laughs. She’s a nice girl.

  ‘Sea like arrival,’ I say, then take my mouth from her dimple and put my ear there to listen to the echo. All I hear is her breathing and, buried far away, her heart.

  ‘Heart like train,’ I say.

  There: now Mariamirella isn’t the Mariamirella in my mind, plus a real Mariamirella: she’s Mariamirella! And what we’re doing now isn’t something mental plus something real: the flight above the roofs, and the house swaying high like the palm trees at the window of my house in the village, a great wind has taken our top floor and is carrying it across the skies and the red ranks of rooftiles.

  On the shore by my village, the sea has noticed me and is welcoming me like a big dog. The sea—gigantic friend with small white hands that scratch the shingle—all at once it sweeps over the buttress of the breakwaters, rears its white belly and leaps over the mountains, here it comes bounding along cheerfully like a huge dog with the white paws of the undertow. The crickets fall silent, all the lowlands are flooded, fields and vineyards, till just one peasant raises his fork and shouts: the sea disappears, as though drunk by the land. Bye bye, sea.

  Going out, Mariamirella and I start running as fast as we can down the stairs, before the landlady appears at the barred window and tries to understand everything, looking us in the eyes.

  Wind in a City

  Something, but I couldn’t understand what. People walking along level streets as if they were going uphill or down, lips and nostrils twitching like gills, then houses and doors in flight and the street corners sharper than usual. It was the wind: later on I realized.

  Turin is a windless city. The streets are canals of motionless air fading into infinity like screaming sirens: motionless air, glassy with frost or soft with haze, stirred only by the trams skimming by on their rails. For months I forget there is such a thing as wind; all that’s left is a vague need.

  But all it takes is for a gust rising from the bottom of a street one day, rising and coming to meet me, and I remember my windblown village beside the sea, the houses ranged above and below each other, and the wind in the middle going up and down, and streets of steps and cobbles, and slashes of blue windy sky above the alleyways. And home with the shutters banging, the palm trees groaning at the windows, and my father’s voice shouting on the hilltop.

  I’m like that, a wind man, who needs friction and headway when he’s walking, needs suddenly to shout and bite the air when he’s speaking. When the wind lifts in town, spreading from suburb to suburb in tongues of colourless flame, the town opens up before me like a book, it’s as though I could recognize everybody I see, I feel like yelling, ‘Hey there!’ to the girls, the cyclists, like shouting out what I’m thinking, waving my hands.

  I can’t stay in when there’s wind. I live in a rented room on the fifth floor; beneath my window the trams roll in the narrow street day and night, as if rattling headlong across my room; night-time, trams far away shriek like owls. The landlady’s daughter is a secretary, fat and hysterical: one day she smashed a plate of peas in the passageway and shut herself in her room screaming.

  The toilet looks out on the courtyard; it’s at the end of a narrow corridor, a cave almost, its walls damp and green and mouldy: maybe stalactites will form. Beyond the bars on the window the courtyard is one of those Turin courtyards trapped under layers of decay with iron balcony railings you can’t lean on without getting rust all over you. One above the other, the protruding cages of the toilets make a sort of tower: toilets with mould-soft walls, marshy at the bottom.

  And I think of my own house high above the sea amid the palm trees, my own house so different from all other houses. And the first difference that comes to mind is the number of toilets it had, toilets of every variety: in bathrooms gleaming with white tiles, in gloomy cubby-holes, Turkish toilets, ancient water-closets with blue friezes fabling round the bowls.

  Remembering all this I was wandering round the city smelling the wind. When I go and run into a girl I know: Ada Ida.

  ‘I’m happy: the wind!’ I tell her.

  ‘It gets on my nerves,’ she answers. ‘Walk with me a bit: just till there.’

  Ada Ida is one of those girls who run into you and immediately start telling you their life stories and what they think about things, even though they hardly know you: girls with no secrets, except for things that are secrets to them too; and even for those secrets they’ll find words, everyday words that sprout effortlessly, as if their thoughts budded ready-clothed in a tissue of words.

  ‘The wind gets on my nerves,’ she says. ‘I shut myself in the house and kick off my shoes and wander round the rooms barefoot. Then I get a bottle of whisky an American friend gave me and drink. I’ve never managed to get drunk on my own. There’s a point where I burst into tears and stop. I’ve been wandering about for a week not knowing what to do with myself.’

  I don’t know how she does it, Ada Ida, how any of them do it, all those men and women who manage to be intimate with everybody, who find something to say to everybody, who get involved in other people’s affairs and let them get involved in theirs. I say: ‘I’m in a room on the fifth floor with the trams like owls at night. The toilet is green with mould; with moss and stalactites, and a winter fog like over a marsh. I think up to a point people’s characters depend on the toilets they have to shut themselves up in every day. You get home from the office and you find the toilet green with mould, marshy: so you smash a plate of peas in the passage and you shut yourself in your room and scream.’

  I haven’t been very clear, this isn’t really how I had thought of it, Ada Ida certainly won’t understand, but before my thoughts can turn into spoken words they have
to go through an empty space and they come out false.

  ‘I do more cleaning in the toilet than anywhere else in the house,’ she says, ‘every day I wash the floor; I polish everything. Every week I put a clean curtain on the window, white, with embroidery, and every year I have the walls repainted. I feel if I stopped cleaning the toilet one day it would be a bad sign, and I’d let myself go more and more till I was desperate. It’s a small dark toilet, but I keep it like a church. I wonder what kind of toilet the managing director of Fiat has. Come on, walk with me a bit, till the tram.’

  The great thing about Ada Ida is that she accepts everything you say, nothing surprises her, any subject you bring up, she’ll go on with it, as if it had been her idea in the first place. And she wants me to walk with her as far as the tram.

  ‘Okay, I’ll come,’ I tell her. ‘So, the managing director of Fiat had them build him a toilet that was a big lounge with columns and drapes and carpets, aquariums in the walls. And big mirrors all round reflecting his body a thousand times. And the john had arms and a back to lean on and it was high as a throne; it even had a canopy over it. And the chain for flushing played a really delightful carillon. But the managing director of Fiat couldn’t move his bowels. He felt intimidated by all those carpets and aquariums. The mirrors reflected his body a thousand times while he sat on that john, high as a throne. And the managing director of Fiat felt nostalgic for the toilet in his childhood home, with sawdust on the floor and sheets of newspaper skewered on a nail. And so he died: intestinal infection after months without moving his bowels.’

  ‘So he died,’ Ada Ida agrees. ‘Just so, he died. Do you know any other stories like that? Here comes my tram. Get on with me and tell me another.’