Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories

by Italo Calvino

  Sometimes after trying three or four different faces, or ten perhaps, or twelve, I would decide that just one of these was the one I preferred, and I would try to make it come back, to arrange my features so as once again to set them in that face that had looked so good. No chance. Once a face had gone, there was no way of getting it back, of having it merge with my face again. In the attempt I would assume constantly changing faces, unknown, alien, hostile faces, which seemed to take me further and further from that lost face. Frightened, I would stop pulling faces and my old everyday face would surface again, and I thought it duller than ever.

  But these exercises of mine never lasted too long. There was always a voice to bring me back to reality.

  Fulgenzio! Fulgenzio! Where’s Fulgenzio sneaked off to? Typical! I know how that idiot spends his days well enough! Fulgenzio! Caught you in front of the mirror pulling faces! Again!

  Frenetically I would improvise guilty, caught-red-handed faces, soldiers’ standing-at-attention faces, obedient, good-boy faces, moron-from-birth faces, gangster faces, angel faces, monster faces, one after the other.

  Fulgenzio, how many times do we have to tell you not to get so wrapped up in yourself! Look outside the windows! See how nature burgeons sprouts rustles whirrs blossoms! See how the busy town seethes pulsates throbs churns produces! Every member of my family would raise an arm to point me to something out there in the landscape, something that as they saw it would have the power to attract me excite me give me the energy that—as they saw it of course—I lacked. I would look and look, my eyes would follow their pointing fingers, I would try to get interested in what father mother aunts uncles grandmothers grandfathers older brothers older sisters younger brothers and sisters once twice third removed cousins teachers supervisors supply teachers school-friends and holiday friends were suggesting to me. But I couldn’t find absolutely anything extraordinary in things as they were.

  But perhaps there were other things hidden behind these things, and those, yes, those might interest me, indeed I was extremely curious about them. Sometimes I would see something, or someone, or some woman appear and disappear, I wasn’t quick enough to identify what or whom, and at once I would race off after them. It was the hidden side of everything that intrigued me, the hidden side of houses, the hidden side of gardens, the hidden side of streets, the hidden side of towns, the hidden side of televisions, the hidden side of dishwashers, the hidden side of the sea, the hidden side of the moon. But when I managed to get to that hidden side, I realized that what I was looking for was the hidden side of the hidden side, or rather, the hidden side of the hidden side of the hidden side, no; the hidden side of the hidden side of the hidden side of the hidden side…

  Fulgenzio, what are you doing? Fulgenzio, what are you looking for? Are you looking for somebody, Fulgenzio? I didn’t know what to answer.

  Sometimes, at the back of the mirror, behind my reflection, I thought I saw a presence I wasn’t quick enough to identify and which immediately hid. I tried to study not myself in the mirror but the world behind me: nothing caught my attention. I was about to turn away when, there, I would see it peep out from the opposite side of the mirror. I would always catch it with the corner of my eye in the place where I least expected it, but as soon as I tried to get a good look it had gone. Despite the speed of its movements this creature was flowing and soft, as if swimming underwater.

  I left the mirror and started to look for the spot where I’d seen the presence disappear. ‘Ottilia! Ottilia!’ I called it, because I liked that name and thought a girl I liked could have no other. ‘Ottilia! Where are you hiding?’ I always had the impression she was near, there in front, no: there behind, no; there round the corner, but I always arrived a second after she’d gone. ‘Ottilia! Ottilia!’ But if they had asked me: who is Ottilia? I wouldn’t have known what to say.

  Fulgenzio, a person has to know what he wants! Fulgenzio, you can’t always be so vague about your plans! Fulgenzio, you must set yourself an end to achieve—an objective—an aim—a target—you must press on to your goal—you must learn your lesson, you must win the competition, you must earn a lot and save a lot!

  I aimed at where I planned to get to, I concentrated my strength, I tensed my will, but my point of arrival was departing, my energies were centrifugal, my will tended only to distend. I gave it all I’d got, I worked hard to study Japanese, to get my astronaut’s diploma, to win the weight-lifting championship, to collect a billion in hundred-lire pieces.

  You keep right on on the path you’ve chosen, Fulgenzio! And I stumbled. Fulgenzio, don’t wander from the line you’ve set yourself! And I muddled myself up in zigzags and ups and downs. Leap over the obstacles, my son! And the obstacles fell on me.

  In the end I was so disheartened that not even the faces in the mirror were any help. The mirror wouldn’t reflect my face any more and not even a shadow of Ottilia, just an expanse of scattered stones as though on the surface of the moon.

  To strengthen my character I took up archery. My thoughts and actions must become like arrows that dart through the air along the invisible line that ends in an exact point, the centre of all centres. But my aim was no good. My arrows never hit the bull’s eye.

  The target seemed as far away as another world, a world that was all precise lines, sharp colours, regular, geometric, harmonious. The inhabitants of that world must make only precise and sudden movements, with nothing vague about them; for them there could be only straight lines, compass-drawn circles, set square corners…

  The first time I saw Corinna, I realized that that perfect world was made for her, while I was still excluded.

  Corinna would shoot her bow and wham! wham! wham! one after another the arrows thudded into the centre.

  ‘Are you a champion?’

  ‘Of the world.’

  ‘You know how to bend your bow in so many different ways and every time the arrow’s trajectory takes it right to the target. How do you do it?’

  ‘You think that I’m here and the target there. No: I’m both here and there, I’m the archer and I’m the target that draws the archer’s arrow to it, and I’m the arrow that flies and the bow that releases the arrow.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘If you become like me, you will understand.’

  ‘Can I learn too?’

  ‘I can teach you.’

  In the first lesson Corinna said to me: ‘To give your eye the steadiness you lack you must look at the target a long time, intensely. Just look at it, stare, until you lose yourself in it, until you convince yourself there’s nothing else in the world than that target, and that you are in the centre of the centre.’

  I gazed at the target. The sight of it had always communicated a feeling of certainty; but now, the more I looked, the more this certainty was overcome by doubts. There were moments when the red areas seemed to rise in relief against the green, others when the green areas seemed to be higher while the red sank back. Gaps opened up between the lines, precipices, chasms, the centre was in the bottom of a gorge or on the tip of a steeple, the circles opened up dizzying perspectives. I felt that a hand would come out from between the lines of the pattern, an arm, a person… Ottilia! I immediately thought. But I was quick to banish the idea. It was Corinna I had to follow, not Ottilia, her image was enough to make the target dissolve like a soap bubble.

  In the second lesson Corinna said: ‘It’s when it relaxes that the bow releases the arrow, but to do that it must first be properly tensed. If you want to become precise as a bow you have to learn two things: to concentrate yourself within yourself and to leave every tension outside.’

  I tensed and relaxed myself like a bowstring. I went wham! but then I also went whim! and whum!, I vibrated like a harp, the vibrations spread through the air, they opened parentheses of emptiness whence the winds sprung. Between the whim! and the whum! a hammock was swinging. I climbed spirally screwing myself through space and it was Ottilia I saw rocking herself in the hamm
ock amongst arpeggios. But the vibrations faded. I fell.

  In the third lesson Corinna said to me: ‘Imagine you are an arrow and run towards the target.’

  I ran, I cut through the air, I persuaded myself I was like an arrow. But the arrows I was like were arrows that wandered off in every direction but the right one. I ran to gather the fallen arrows. I pressed on into desolate, stony wastes. Was it my own reflection in a mirror? Was it the moon?

  Amid the stones I found my blunted arrows, stuck in the sand, twisted, featherless. And there in the midst of them all was Ottilia. She was walking about calmly as though in a garden, gathering flowers and snatching at butterflies.

  Me—Why are you here, Ottilia? Where are we? On the moon?

  Ottilia—We are on the hidden side of the target.

  Me—Is this where all the bad shots go?

  Ottilia—Bad? No shot is ever bad.

  Me—But the arrows don’t have anything to hit here.

  Ottilia—Here the arrows put down roots and become forests.

  Me—All I can see is junk, fragments, rubble.

  Ottilia—Lots of rubble piled up makes a skyscraper. Lots of skyscrapers piled up make rubble.

  Corinna—Fulgenzio! Where have you got to? The target!

  Me—I’ve got to go, Ottilia. I can’t stay here with you. I’ve got to aim for the other side of the target.

  Ottilia—Why?

  Me—Everything’s out of shape here, opaque, formless…

  Ottilia—Look carefully. From very very very close. What can you see?

  Me—A granulous, pitted, bumpy surface.

  Ottilia—Go between bump and bump, grain and grain, crack and crack. You’ll find the gate to a garden, with green flowerbeds and clear pools. I’m there at the bottom.

  Me—Everything I touch is rough, arid, cold.

  Ottilia—Pass your hand slowly over the surface. It’s a cloud soft as whipped cream…

  Me—Everything’s uniform, muted, compact.

  Ottilia—Open your eyes and ears. Hear the bustle of the city, see the glitter of windows and bright shop displays, and bugling and bell-ringing, and people white and yellow and black and red, dressed in green and blue and orange and saffron.

  Corinna—Fulgenzio! Where are you!

  But this time I couldn’t tear myself away from Ottilia’s world, from the city that was cloud and garden too. Here, instead of going straight, the arrows turned and twirled along invisible lines that tangled and untangled and coiled themselves up and unwound, but in the end always hit the target, though perhaps a different target from the one you expected.

  The strange thing about it was this: the more I realized the world was complicated interlocking inextricable the more it seemed to me that the things I really needed to understand were few and simple, and if I understood them, everything would be clear as the lines in a pattern. I would have liked to say this to Corinna, or to Ottilia, but it was a while now since I’d seen them, either of them, and, here’s another strange thing, thinking about them I often confused the one with the other.

  I hadn’t looked at myself in the mirror for a long time now. One day when I happened to walk by a mirror I saw the target, with all its fine colours. I tried to put myself in profile, three quarter profile: I was still seeing the target. ‘Corinna!’ I cried. ‘Here, Corinna! Look: I’m just the way you wanted me!’ But then I thought that what I was seeing in the mirror wasn’t just myself, but the world too, so I would have to look for Corinna there, amongst those coloured lines. And Ottilia? Perhaps Ottilia was there too appearing and disappearing. And when I gazed at the target-mirror long enough, was it Corinna or Ottilia I saw peeping out from between concentric circles?

  Sometimes I get the impression I’ve run into her, one or the other of them, in the city streets, and that she wants to say something to me, but it happens when two subway trains pass in opposite directions, and Ottilia’s image—or Corinna’s?—comes towards me and flits away, followed by a series of extremely rapid faces framed in the windows, like the faces I once pulled in the mirror.

  The Other Eurydice

  You have won, men of without, you have recast the stories to suit yourselves, to condemn us of within to the role you like to give us, the role of powers of darkness and of death, and the name you have given us, Hades, is laden with tones of doom. Truly, if all should forget what really happened between us, between Eurydice and Orpheus and myself, Pluto, a story quite the reverse of the one you tell, if no one at all now remembers that Eurydice was one of us and that she never did live on the surface of the Earth until Orpheus snatched her away from me with his deceitful music, then our ancient dream of making the Earth a living sphere will be lost for ever.

  Even now hardly anyone still remembers what we meant by making the Earth live: not what you imagine, content with your dustcloud life set down on the border between water, earth and air. I wanted life to expand outwards from the centre of the Earth, to spread upwards through its concentric spheres, to circulate around its metals, liquid and solid. Such was Pluto’s dream. It was the only way the Earth might have become an enormous living organism, the only way we could have avoided that condition of precarious exile to which life has been forcibly reduced, the dull weight of an inanimate ball of stone beneath, and above, the void. You can no longer even imagine that life might have been something different from what now goes on without, or rather, almost without, since above you and the Earth’s crust, there is always the other tenuous crust of the air. Still, there’s no comparing this to the succession of spheres in whose interstices we creatures of the depths have always lived, and from which we still rise up to throng your dreams. The Earth is not solid inside, but disjointed, made up of superimposed layers of different densities one below the other, right down to the iron and nickel nucleus, which again is a system of nuclei one inside the other, each rotating separately from the others according to the greater or lesser liquidity of its element.

  I don’t know what right you have to call yourself terrestrial creatures. Your true name would be extra-terrestrials, people who live without: we who live within are the terrestrials, myself and Eurydice for example, until the day you tricked her and took her away from me, to your desolate without.

  This is the realm of Pluto, since it is here that I have always lived, together with Eurydice at first, then alone, in one of these lands within. A sky of stone wheeled above our heads, clearer than your sky and crossed, like yours, by clouds, gathering suspensions of chrome and magnesium. Winged shadows take flight: these skies within have their birds, concretions of light rock tracing out spirals that wind upwards and out of sight. The weather is subject to brusque changes: when showers of leaden rain beat down, or zinc crystals hail, there’s nothing for it but to worm your way into the shelter of some porous rock. Sometimes a fiery streak zigzags through the dark: it’s not lightning, but an incandescent metal snaking down through a vein.

  We thought of the Earth as the internal sphere where we happened to be, the sky as the sphere that surrounded that sphere: the same way you do really, except that here these distinctions were always temporary, arbitrary, since the consistency of the elements was constantly changing, and sometimes we would realize that our sky was hard and solid, a millstone crushing us, while the earth was a sticky glue of whirling eddies and bubbling gasses. I tried to take advantage of the downward melt of heavier elements to get closer to the true centre of the Earth, the nucleus of all nuclei, and I held Eurydice by the hand, leading her in the descent. But every downward infiltration that opened a way towards the centre, would displace other material and force it back towards the surface: sometimes, as we sank down we would be caught by the upward gushing tide and whirled along on the crest of its wave. So we went back up the terrestrial radius; passages would open in the mineral layers and suck us in and beneath us the rock would harden again. Until we found ourselves standing on another soil with another stony sky above our heads, hardly knowing if we were higher or lower tha
n the point we had set out from.

  No sooner did she see the metal of a new sky liquefy above us than Eurydice was seized by a yearning to fly. She flung herself upwards, swam across the dome of a first sky, then another, then a third, grabbing on to the stalactites that hung from the highest vaults. I followed, partly to join in her game and partly to remind her that we were supposed to be going in the opposite direction. Of course, Eurydice was as convinced as I was that the place we must get to was the centre of the Earth. Only by reaching the centre could we call the whole planet our own. We were the forefathers of terrestrial life and hence we had to begin to make the Earth live from its nucleus, gradually irradiating our condition throughout the globe. Terrestrial life was our goal, a life of the earth and in the earth; not what sprouts on the surface and which you think you can call terrestrial life, when it is no more than a mould that spreads its stains on the wrinkly peel of the apple.

  We could already see the plutonic cities we meant to found rising under basalt skies, surrounded by walls of jasper, spherical, concentric cities sailing on oceans of mercury, washed by rivers of incandescent lava. What we wanted was a living-body-city-machine that would grow and grow until it filled the whole globe, a telluric machine that would use its boundless energy in ceaseless self-construction, combining and transforming all substances and shapes, performing, with the speed of a seismic shock the work that you without have had to pay for with centuries of sweat. And this city-machine-living-body would be inhabited by beings like ourselves, giants stretching out their powerful arms across wheeling skies to embrace giantesses, who, with the rotating of concentric earths, would expose themselves in ever new attitudes giving rise to ever new couplings.

  These minglings, these vibrations were to give birth to a realm of diversity and completeness, a realm of silence and of music. Constant vibrations, propagating themselves at varying slownesses, according to the depth and discontinuity of the materials, would ruffle the surface of our great silence, transforming it into the ceaseless music of the world, harmonizing the deep voices of the elements.