Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories

by Italo Calvino

  If there is nothing that needs correcting in the world memory, the only thing left to do is to correct reality where it doesn’t agree with that memory. Just as I cancelled the existence of my wife’s lover from the punchcards, so I must cancel him from the world of the living. Which is why I am now pulling out my gun and pointing it at you, Müller, why I’m squeezing the trigger, killing you.

  Beheading the Heads

  1

  I must have arrived in the capital the day before a festival. They were building platforms in the squares, hanging up flags, ribbons, palmfronds. There was hammering everywhere.

  ‘The national festival?’ I asked the man behind the bar.

  He pointed to the row of portraits behind him. ‘Our heads of state,’ he said. ‘It’s the festival of the heads of state, the leaders.’

  I thought it might be the presentation of a newly elected government. ‘New?’ I asked.

  Amid the banging of the hammers, loudspeakers being tested, the screeching of cranes lifting platforms, I was forced to keep things short if I was to be understood, and yell almost.

  The man behind the bar shook his head: they weren’t new, they’d been around for a while.

  I asked: ‘The anniversary of when they came to power?’

  ‘Something like that,’ explained a customer beside me. ‘The festival comes round periodically and it’s their turn.’

  ‘Their turn for what?’

  ‘To go on the platform.’

  ‘What platform? I’ve seen so many, one at every street corner.’

  ‘Each has his own platform. We have lots of leaders.’

  ‘And what do they do? Speak?’

  ‘No, speak, no.’

  ‘They go on the platform, and then what?’

  ‘What do you think they do? They wait a bit, while things are being prepared, then the ceremony is over in a couple of minutes.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘We watch.’

  There was a lot of coming and going in the bar. The carpenters and the workers unloading things from trucks to decorate the platforms—axes, blocks, baskets—stopped by to have a beer. Whenever I asked someone a question it was always someone else who answered.

  ‘It’s a sort of re-election, then? A confirmation of their jobs, you could say, their mandate?’

  ‘No, no,’ they corrected me, ‘you don’t understand? It’s the end. Their time is up.’

  ‘And so?’

  ‘So they stop being heads, living up there: and they fall down.’

  ‘So why do they go up on the platforms?’

  ‘With the platforms you can see better how the head falls, the jump it makes, cleanly cut, and how it ends up in the basket.’

  I was beginning to understand, but I wasn’t quite sure. ‘The heads’ heads, you mean? The leaders’? In the baskets?’

  They nodded. ‘Right. The beheading. That’s it. Beheading the heads.’

  I’d only just arrived, I didn’t know anything about it, I hadn’t read anything in the papers.

  ‘Just like that, tomorrow, all of a sudden?’

  ‘When the day comes it comes,’ they said. ‘This time it falls midweek. There’s a holiday. Everything’s shut.’

  An old man added, pontificating: ‘When the fruit is ripe you gather it, and a head you behead. You wouldn’t leave fruit to rot on the branches, would you?’

  The carpenters had been getting on with their work: on some of the platforms they were erecting the scaffolding for grim guillotines; on others they were anchoring blocks for use with axes and placing comfortable hassocks beside (one of the assistants was testing the arrangement by putting his head on the block to check that the height was right); elsewhere people were setting up things that looked like butcher’s benches, with channels for the blood to run off. Waxed cloth was being stretched on the platform boards, and sponges were already in place to clean up any splashes. Everybody was working away enthusiastically; you could hear laughter and whistling.

  ‘So you’re happy? Did you hate them? Were they bad leaders?’

  ‘No, what gave you that idea?’ they exchanged looks of surprise. ‘They were good. Or rather, no better and no worse than anyone else. Well, you know what they’re like: heads of state, leaders, commanders… to get one of those jobs…’

  ‘Still,’ one of them said, ‘I liked this lot.’

  ‘Me too. And me,’ others agreed. ‘I never had anything against them.’

  ‘So aren’t you sad they’re killing them?’ I said.

  ‘What can you do? If someone agrees to be a leader he knows how he’ll end up. He could hardly expect to die in his bed!’

  The others laughed. ‘That’d be a fine thing! Someone rules, commands, then, as if nothing had happened, stops and goes back home.’

  Someone said: ‘Everybody would want to be leader then, I’m telling you! Even me, look, I’d be up for it, here I am!’

  ‘Me too, me too,’ lots of them said, laughing.

  ‘Well I wouldn’t,’ said one man with glasses. ‘Not on those terms. What would be the point?’

  ‘Right. There’d be no point in being boss on those terms,’ several of them agreed. ‘It’s one thing doing a job like that when you know what to expect, and quite another… but how could you do it otherwise?’

  The man with the glasses, who must have been the best educated, explained: ‘Authority over others is indivisible from the right of those others to have you climb the scaffold and do away with you, one day in the not too distant future… What authority would a leader have without the aura of this destiny around him, if you couldn’t read it in his eyes, his sense of his end, for every second of his mandate? Civil institutions depend on this dual aspect of authority; no civilization has ever used any other system.’

  ‘And yet,’ I objected, ‘I could quote you cases…’

  ‘I mean: real civilization,’ insisted the man with glasses, ‘I’m not talking about barbarian interregnums, however long they may have lasted in the history of peoples.’

  The pontificating old man, the one who’d talked about fruit on branches, was muttering something to himself. He exclaimed: ‘The head commands so long as it’s attached to the neck.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ the others asked. ‘Do you mean that if for example a leader went beyond his term and, just for the sake of argument, didn’t get his head cut off, he’d stay there ruling, his whole life long?’

  ‘That’s how things used to be,’ the old man agreed, ‘in the times before it was clear that whoever chose to be leader chose to be beheaded in the not too distant future. Those who had power hung on to it…’

  I could have interrupted at this point, quoted some examples, but no one would listen to me.

  ‘So? What did people do?’ they asked the old man.

  ‘They had to cut their heads off willy-nilly, with brute force, against their wishes! Not on appointed days, but when they just couldn’t put up with them any more. That’s what used to happen before things were organized, before the leaders accepted…’

  ‘Oh, we’d just like to see them try not to accept!’ the others said. ‘Oh we’d like to see that!’

  ‘It’s not the way you think,’ interrupted the man with the glasses. ‘It’s not true that the leaders are forced to undergo execution. Say that and you miss the real meaning of our statutes, the real relationship that binds our leaders to the rest of the people. Only heads of state can be beheaded, hence you can’t wish to be a head without also wishing for the chop. Only those who feel they have this vocation can become heads of state, only those who already feel themselves beheaded the moment they take up a position of authority.’

  Little by little the customers in the bar had thinned out, each going back to his work. I realized that the man with the glasses was talking exclusively to me.

  ‘That’s what power is,’ he went on, ‘this waiting for the end. All the authority one has is no more than advance notice of the blade hissing through the
air, crashing down in a clean cut, all the applause you get is no more than the beginning of that last applause that greets your head as it rolls down the waxed surface of the scaffold.’

  He took off his glasses to clean them on his handkerchief. I realized his eyes were full of tears. He paid for his beer and left.

  The man behind the bar bent down to my ear. ‘He’s one of them,’ he said. ‘See?’ He pulled out a pile of portrait posters from under the bar. ‘Tomorrow I have to take those ones down and stick up these.’ The first picture showed the man with the glasses, an ugly enlargement from a passport photo. ‘He’s been elected to succeed the ones on their way out. Tomorrow he’ll be taking over. It’s his turn, now. If you ask me it’s not right to tell him the day before. You heard the way he was talking about it? Tomorrow he’ll be watching the executions as if they were already his own. They’re all like that, the first days; they get upset, excited, they make a big deal of it. “Vocation”: what pompous words they come out with!’

  ‘And afterwards?’

  ‘He’ll get used to it, like everybody else. They have so much to do, they don’t think about it any more, until their day comes around. But then: who can see into a leader’s mind. They give the impression they’re not thinking about it. Another beer?’

  2

  Television has changed a lot of things. Once power was remote, distant figures puffed up on a platform, or portraits assuming expressions of conventional pride, symbols of an authority that could barely be related to any flesh and blood individual. Now, with television, the physical presence of politicians is something immediate and familiar to us; their faces, blown up on the screen, visit the homes of private citizens every day; quietly sunk in their armchairs, at leisure, everybody can pore over the slightest movement of the features, the irritated twitch of eyelids under spotlights, the nervous moistening of the lips between one word and the next… In its death throes in particular, that face, so well known from the many close-ups of formal or speech-making postures on both solemn and festive occasions, betrays itself completely: it is at that moment more than any other that the simple citizen feels his leader is his, is something that will always belong to him. But even before that, in all the preceding months, every time the citizen saw the leader appear on the small screen, strutting about his duties—opening some building project, for example, or pinning medals on worthies’ chests, or just climbing down the steps of aeroplanes waving an open hand—he was already searching that face for painful spasms, trying to imagine the convulsions that would precede rigor mortis, to guess from the delivery of his speeches and toasts how the death rattle would sound. It is in this that the public man’s ascendance over the crowd consists: he is the man who will have a public death, the man whose death we are sure to be there for, all together, and that is why so long as he lives he will enjoy our interested, anticipatory concern. We can no longer imagine what it was like in the past, in times when public men died in private: we laugh today when we hear that they described some of their erstwhile procedures as democratic; for us democracy can only begin once we are sure that on the appointed day the television cameras will frame the death throes of our ruling classes to the last man, and then, as an epilogue to the same programme (though many will switch off their sets at this point), the investiture of the new faces who are to rule (and to live) for a similar period. We know that in other times just as today the mechanics of power were based on killings, on slaughters whether slow or sudden, but aside from rare exceptions the victims then were shadowy folk, subordinates, hard to identify; often the massacres went unreported, were officially ignored, or given specious justifications. Only this now definitive conquest, this unification of the roles of torturer and victim, in continuous rotation, has allowed us to quench every last flicker of hatred and pity in our minds. The close-ups of the mouth yawning open, of the carotid throbbing in the starched collar, of the raised hand that clutches and tears at a breast sparkling with medals, are watched by millions of viewers with the serene absorption of one observing the movement of the heavenly bodies in their recurrent cycles, a spectacle all the more reassuring the more alien we find it.

  3

  You don’t want to kill us already, do you?

  The words were pronounced by Virghilij Ossipovic with a slight trembling in his voice that contrasted with the almost bureaucratic though often harsh and polemical tone of the discussion so far and thus broke the tension in the meeting of the ‘Volja i Raviopravie’ movement. Virghilij was the youngest member of the Executive Committee; a thin down of hair darkened a prominent lip; locks of blond hair fell over his oblong grey eyes; those red-knuckled hands, their wrists always sticking out from shirt sleeves that were too short had not trembled when they primed the bomb beneath the Tsar’s carriage.

  Grass-roots activists took up all the places round the low, smoky basement room; most of them sitting on benches and stools, others crouched on the ground, others on their feet leaning against the wall, arms folded. The Executive Committee sat in the centre, eight boys bent over a table laden with paper, like a group of students intent on the final slog before the summer exams. To the repeated interruptions fired at them by the activists from all four corners of the room, they answered without turning or raising their heads. Every now and then a wave of protest or agreement swept through the meeting and—since many got to their feet and pressed forward—seemed to converge from the walls on the table, there to wash over the backs of the Executive Committee.

  Liborij Serapionovic, the heavily bearded secretary, had already and on several occasions pronounced the stony maxim he often resorted to to soften irreconcilable differences: ‘Where comrade parts company with comrade, there enemy joins hands with enemy’, and in reply the assembly had intoned with one voice: ‘The head still at the head after the victory, victorious and honoured the day after shall fall’—a ritual warning that the ‘Volja i Raviopravie’ activists never forgot to direct at their leaders whenever they spoke to them, and that the leaders themselves would say to each other as a form of greeting.

  The movement was struggling to establish, on the ruins of autocracy and of the Duma, an egalitarian society in which power would be regulated by the periodic execution of the elected heads. The movement’s strict rules, all the more necessary as the imperial police stepped up their repression, demanded that all activists obey Executive Committee decisions without argument; at the same time every text setting out the movement’s theory reminded the leaders that no exercise of authority was admissible unless by those who had already renounced enjoyment of the privileges of power, those who to all intents and purposes were no longer to be considered as among the living.

  The young leaders of the organization never thought of the fate that a still Utopian future held for them: for the moment it was tsarist repression that unfortunately guaranteed an ever more rapid turnover in their numbers; the danger of arrest and execution was too real and immediate for the notional future of the theory to take shape in their imaginations. A youthfully ironic, disdainful attitude served to repress in their minds what was nevertheless the distinguishing element in their doctrine. The grass-roots activists knew all this, and just as they shared the risks and hardships of the committee members, so they understood their spirit; and yet they nursed an obscure awareness of their destiny as executioners, a destiny to be fulfilled not only at the expense of the status quo, but of the future government too, and being unable to express themselves any other way, they would flaunt an insolent attitude, which, while always expressed in the formal tones of the meeting, nevertheless weighed down on their leaders like a threat.

  ‘So long as the enemy before us is the Tsar,’ Virghilij Ossipovic had said, ‘foolish is the man who would seek the Tsar in his comrade.’ It was an untimely thing to say perhaps, and certainly badly received by the noisy assembly.

  Virghilij felt a hand gripping his own; sitting on the floor at his feet was Evghenija Ephraimovna, knees pulled up in her pleated skirt, hair
knotted on her neck and hanging at the two sides of her face like spirals from a tawny coil. One of Evghenija’s hands had found its way up Virghilij’s boots to encounter the young man’s fingers closed in a fist, it had skimmed the back of that fist, as though in a consolatory caress, then dug sharp nails into it scratching slowly until they drew blood. Virghilij realized that there was a precise and stubborn determination guiding the floor of the meeting today, something that had to do with them, the leaders, in person, and that would soon be revealed.

  ‘Let none of us ever forget, comrades,’ Ignatij Apollonovic, the oldest member of the Committee and with a reputation for being a peacemaker, attempted to calm the waters, ‘what must not be forgotten… in any event, it is only right that you remind us from time to time… although,’ he added, chuckling in his beard, ‘when it comes to reminding us, Count Galitzin and his horses’ hoofs are only too reliable…’ He was alluding to the commander of the Imperial Guard who had recently torn one of their protest marches to pieces with a cavalry charge at Maneggio Bridge.

  A voice, it wasn’t clear where from, interrupted him with: ‘Idealist!’ and Ignatij Apollonovic lost his way. ‘Why’s that?’ he asked, disconcerted.

  ‘Do you think we need do no more than keep the words of our doctrine uppermost in our minds?’ said a tall lanky fellow from another part of the room, a man who had made a name for himself as one of the most militant of recent recruits. ‘You know why our doctrine can’t be confused with those of all the other movements?’

  ‘Of course we know. Because it’s the only doctrine which once it has achieved power cannot be corrupted by power!’ grumbled a shaved head bent over papers, and that was Femja, the one the others called ‘the ideologue’.

  ‘So why wait till the day we’ve got power, my lovey-dovey comrades,’ insisted the lanky fellow, ‘to put it into practice?’

  ‘Here, now!’ the cry was raised from various parts of the room. The Marianzev sisters, known as ‘the three Marias’ stepped forward between the benches, chirping ‘Excuse me! Excuse me!’ and catching their long tresses on things. Carrying tablecloths folded over their arms, humming to themselves and pushing aside the boys, it was as if they were laying table for a snack on the veranda of their house in Izmailovo.