Numbers in the Dark

by Italo Calvino

  MYSELF: King Montezuma, that was Europe’s first real encounter with the ‘other’. Less than thirty years had passed since Columbus had discovered the New World, and so far it had been nothing but tropical islands and mud-hut villages … Now the first colonial expedition of a white army was meeting not the famous ‘savages’, survivors of a prehistoric golden age, but a complex and wealthy civilization. And it was precisely at that first meeting between our world and yours – I say your world as an example of every other possible world – that something irreparable happened. This is what I ask myself, what I ask you, King Montezuma. Faced with the unexpected, you were prudent, but hesitant and submissive too. And your approach certainly didn’t spare your people or your country the massacres and ruin that have been going on for centuries. Had you met those first conquistadores with determined resistance perhaps that would have been enough to get the relationship between the two worlds going along different lines, to give it a different future. Warned by your resistance, the Europeans would perhaps have been more prudent and respectful. Perhaps there was still time for you to root out the dangerous weeds just sprouting in European minds: the conviction that they had the right to destroy everything that was alien to them, to plunder the world’s riches, to spread the uniform stain of misery and wretchedness across every continent. Then the history of the world would have taken a different path, you understand, King Montezuma, you do see, Montezuma, what a modern European is telling you, a man coming to terms with the end of a supremacy in which so many remarkable talents were turned to evil ends, in which everything we thought and did in the conviction that it was a universal good, bore the hallmark of a limitation … Answer a man who feels he is, like yourself, a victim, and like yourself responsible …

  MONTEZUMA: You too speak as though reading from a book long written. For us, at that time, the only thing written was the book of our gods, the prophecies that could be read in a hundred ways. Everything had to be deciphered, the first thing we had to do with every new fact was to find a place for it in the order that upholds the world and outside of which there is nothing. Everything we did was a question waiting for an answer. And for every answer to have a further reliable confirmation I had to formulate my questions in two ways: one in one sense and the other in the opposite sense. I asked a question by making war and I asked a question by making peace. That’s why I led the people in their resistance and at the same time stood beside Cortés as he cruelly subdued them. You say we didn’t fight? Mexico City rebelled against the Spanish; rocks and arrows rained down from every roof. It was then my subjects stoned me to death, when Cortés sent me to appease them. Then the Spanish got reinforcements; the rebels were massacred; our peerless city was destroyed. The answer from that book I had been trying to decipher was: no. That is why you see my shadow creeping stooped about these ruins, as it has ever since that day.

  MYSELF: But you were as alien to the Spanish as they were to you. You were the other, the incomprehensible, the unimaginable for them. The Spanish had to decipher you as much as you them.

  MONTEZUMA: You appropriate things for yourselves; the order that upholds your world is one of appropriation; all you had to understand was that we had something which, as you saw it, was more worthy of appropriation than anything else, while for us it was just an attractive material for jewellery and ornaments: gold. Your eyes sought gold, gold, gold; your thoughts circled like vultures around that one object of desire. For us on the other hand the order behind the world consisted in giving. Giving so that the gods’ gifts might go on being heaped upon us, so that the sun might go on rising every morning slaking its thirst on the blood that issues forth …

  MYSELF: The blood, Montezuma! I was afraid of mentioning it, and now you bring it up yourself, the blood of human sacrifice …

  MONTEZUMA: That again. That. And what about yourselves? Let’s add it up, let’s add up the victims of your civilization and ours …

  MYSELF: No, no, Montezuma, that argument won’t wash, you know I’m not here to justify Cortés and his men, you certainly won’t catch me playing down the crimes that our civilization has committed and still commits, but now it’s your civilization we’re talking about! Those young people lain on the altar, the stone knives dashing out the heart, the blood showering all around …

  MONTEZUMA: And so? So what? Men of every time and clime toil to but one end: to keep the world together, to prevent it from falling apart. It’s just the way they do it that differs. In our cities, all lakes and gardens, that sacrifice of blood was as necessary as turning the soil, as channelling the water of the rivers. In your cities, all wheels and cages, the sight of blood is terrifying, I know. But how many more lives are ground to pulp in your cogs!

  MYSELF: Okay, every culture has to be understood from within, that much I’ve understood, Montezuma, the times of the Conquest that destroyed your temples and gardens are behind us now. I know that in many respects yours was a model culture, but by the same token I’d like you to admit its monstrous side: that prisoners of war had to meet that fate …

  MONTEZUMA: Why would we have gone to war otherwise? Our wars were courteous and playful in comparison with yours, a game. But a game with a necessary end: to decide whose destiny it was to lie on their backs on the altar in the sacrificial festivals and bare their breasts to the obsidian blade brandished by the Great Sacrificer. That fate could befall any of us, for the good of all. What good do your wars do? Every time they happen the reasons you come up with are banal pretexts: conquests, gold.

  MYSELF: Or not allowing ourselves to be dominated by others, not ending up like yourselves under the Spanish! If you had killed Cortés’s men, no, I’ll go further, listen carefully to what I’m going to say, Montezuma, if you had cut their throats one by one on the altar as sacrifices, well then I would have understood, because your survival as a people was at stake, your perpetuation through history …

  MONTEZUMA: See how you contradict yourself, white man? Kill them … I wanted to do something far more important: conceive them. If I could have conceived the Spanish, brought them into my manner of thinking, been sure of their true nature, whether gods or evil demons it didn’t matter which, or beings like ourselves subject to divine or demonic will, in short if I could have made of them – inconceivable as they were – something my mind could dwell on and grasp, then, and only then, would I have been able to have them as my allies or enemies, to recognize them as persecutors or victims.

  MYSELF: For Cortés, on the other hand, everything was clear. He didn’t worry about this kind of thing. He knew what he wanted, the Spaniard did.

  MONTEZUMA: It was the same for him as for me. The real victory he sought to gain over me was the same: that of conceiving me.

  MYSELF: And did he succeed?

  MONTEZUMA: No. It may seem that he had his way with me: he tricked me many times, he sacked my treasures, he used my authority as a shield, he sent me to die stoned by my own subjects: but he didn’t succeed in possessing me. What I was remained forever beyond his imagining, unattainable. His reasoning never managed to trap my reasoning in its net. That is why you come back to meet me amidst the ruins of my empire – of your empires. That is why you come asking me questions. Four and more centuries after my defeat you are no longer sure you conquered me. Real wars and real peace don’t take place on earth, but between the gods.

  MYSELF: Montezuma, now you’ve explained why it was impossible for you to win. The war between the gods means that behind Cortés’s marauders lay the idea of the West, lay history that never stands still, that presses on, swallowing up those civilizations for whom time has stopped still.

  MONTEZUMA: You too superimpose your gods on the facts. What is this thing you call history? Perhaps all you mean is the absence of equilibrium. Whereas when men live together in such a way as to establish a lasting equilibrium you say history has stopped. If you had managed to be less enslaved to this history of yours, you wouldn’t be coming to reproach me for not having stopped you in t
ime. What do you want from me? You’ve realized that you don’t know what it is, this history of yours, and you are wondering if it mightn’t have had a different course. And to your mind, I should have been the one giving history this different course. But how? By thinking the way you think? You too feel the need to classify everything new with the names of your gods, everything that turns your world upside down, and you are never sure whether those gods are real gods or evil spirits, and you are quick to become their prisoners. The laws of the material world seem clear to you, yet that doesn’t mean you stop expecting that from behind those laws the design that shapes the world’s destiny will reveal itself. Yes, it’s true, at the beginning of your sixteenth century the fate of the world was not yet settled perhaps. Your civilization of perpetual motion still didn’t know where it was going – as today it no longer knows where it can go – and we, the civilization of permanence and equilibrium, might still have swallowed it up in our harmony.

  MYSELF: It was too late! You Aztecs would have had to land near Seville and invade the Extremadura, not vice versa! History does have a sense, a direction that can’t be changed!

  MONTEZUMA: A direction that you want to impose on it, white man! Otherwise the world would crumble under your feet. I too had a world that sustained me, a world that was not your world. I too hoped that the sense of everything would not be lost.

  MYSELF: I know why it mattered to you. Because if the sense of your world had been lost, then the mountains of skulls piled in the ossuaries of your temples would have had no sense either, and your altar stones would have become no more than butchers’ slabs stained with the blood of innocent human beings!

  MONTEZUMA: Now look with the same eyes on your own carnage, white man.

  Before You Say ‘Hello’

  I hope you’re still by the phone, that if someone else calls you’ll ask him to hang up at once so as to keep the line free: you know my call could get through any moment. I’ve already dialled your number three times, but my signal got lost in bottlenecks of circuitry, whether here, in the city I’m calling from, or there in your city’s network, I don’t know. The lines are busy everywhere. All Europe is calling all Europe.

  Only a few hours have passed since I said goodbye to you, in a mad rush; the trip is always the same, I do it mechanically every time, as though in trance: a taxi waiting for me in the street, a plane waiting for me at the airport, a company car waiting for me at another airport, then here I am, hundreds and hundreds of miles away from you. This is the moment that matters most for me: I have just put down my luggage, I still haven’t taken off my coat, and already I’m lifting the receiver, dialling your city’s area code, then your number.

  My finger pushes each number slowly towards the end of the dial, I concentrate on the pressure of my fingertip as if it were that that determined the exactness of the journey each number must accomplish following a series of required steps far far away from each other and from us, until they set the bell ringing by your bed. It’s rare for the operation to succeed first go: I don’t know how long the labours of index finger thrust in dial will last, nor the uncertainties of ear glued to dark shell. To contain my impatience I remember a time not long ago when it was the invisible vestal virgins of the exchange who had the job of guaranteeing the continuity of this fragile flow of sparks, of fighting invisible battles against invisible fortresses: every internal impulse urging me to communicate was mediated procrastinated filtered through an anonymous and daunting procedure. Now that a network of automatic connections extends across entire continents and every subscriber can call every other subscriber at will without asking anybody’s help, I must resign myself to paying for this extraordinary freedom with an expense of nervous energy, repetition of movements, time-wasting, growing frustration. (And to paying for it again in the form of extremely expensive bills, but the relationship between the act of telephoning and the experience of the cruel prices is not a direct one: the bills arrive every three months, a single direct-dial long distance call is drowned in an overall figure that generates the same stupor as those natural disasters in the face of which our resolve immediately finds the alibi of inevitability.) So great is the temptation the facility to telephone constitutes, that telephoning is becoming ever more difficult, even impossible. Everybody telephones everybody at every possible moment, and nobody can speak to anybody, signals go wandering up and down automatic search circuits, beating their wings like crazed butterflies, without managing to slip into a free line, each subscriber goes on firing off numbers into the exchanges convinced that it’s no more than a temporary local hitch. The truth is that the vast majority of calls are made without people having anything to say to each other, hence it hardly matters whether they get through or not, all they do is harm those few who really would have something to say.

  Certainly I can’t claim as much. If I am in such a hurry to phone you after a few hours apart, it’s not because there’s something vital I forgot to tell you, nor am I impatient to re-establish that intimacy broken off at the moment of my leaving. If I tried to tell you something of the kind, I would immediately sense your sarcastic smile, or hear your voice icily calling me a liar. You’d be right: the last hours before I leave are full of silences and uneasiness between us; so long as I’m at your side the distance is insuperable. But that’s precisely why I can’t wait to call you: because it’s only in a long-distance call, or better still an international call, that we can hope to achieve that state usually defined as ‘togetherness’. That is the real reason for my journey, for my constant hopping about the map, the secret justification I should say, the one I give myself, without which I could only think of my professional activities as inspector of the European operations of a multinational company as a meaningless routine: I leave so as to be able to phone every day, because for you I have always been, as for me you have always been, at the other end of a wire, or rather a coaxial copper conductor cable, at the other pole of a tenuous modulated-frequency current that flows through the subsoil of the continents and across the ocean bed. And when we don’t have this wire between us to make contact, when it is our lustreless physical presence that occupies the sensory field, immediately everything between us becomes commonplace superfluous automatic, gestures words facial expressions reciprocal reactions of pleasure or intolerance, all that direct contact can transmit between two people and which as such can also be said to be transmitted and received to perfection, always bearing in mind the rudimentary equipment human beings have at their disposal for communicating with each other; in short physical presence may be a wonderful thing for both of us, but hardly to be compared with the vibrational frequencies you get through the electronic switching system of a great telephone network, nor with the emotional intensity such frequencies can arouse in us.

  The more the exchange is precarious, risky, insecure, the stronger the emotions are. If we are not satisfied with our exchanges when we are together, it is not because they are going badly, but because they are going how they have to go. Whereas now I find myself holding my breath as yet again I grind out the series of numbers on the rotating dial, draw in through my ear the ghostly sounds that surface in the receiver: a drumming engaged signal in the background, so vague as to have me hoping it’s a chance interference that has nothing to do with us; or a muffled sputtering of charges that could be heralding the success of a complicated operation or at least an intermediate phase of that operation, or once again the ruthless silence of darkness and the void. In some unidentifiable point of the circuitry my call has lost its way.

  I pick up the receiver and get the dial tone again, then with redoubled slowness repeat the first numbers of the code, numbers that do no more than find a way out of the city network, then the national network. In some countries there’s a special tone at this point to let you know that the first part of the operation has succeeded; if you don’t hear the trill of a little musical jingle there’s no point in going on with the other numbers: you have to wait for a line
to come free. At home they sometimes give you a very short whistle that comes at the end of the code, or halfway through: but not for all codes and not on every occasion. In short, whether you’ve heard that little whistle or not you can’t be sure of anything: when they give the all-clear signal the line may be deaf or dead, or it may turn out to be unexpectedly live without having given any signs of life earlier on. So it’s best not to be put off whatever happens, to dial the number down to the last digit and wait. Assuming that the engaged signal doesn’t explode halfway through, to tell you you’re wasting your time. But all the better if it does: I can hang up immediately, saving myself another pointless wait, and try again. Generally, though, having embarked on the exasperating business of tracing a dozen figures in the dial’s rotations, I’m left with no indication as to the results of my efforts. What straits is my signal negotiating right now? Is it still stuck in the recorder of the exchange here in town, waiting its turn in a line of calls? Has it already been translated into commands for the selector switches, divided in groups of digits that are heading off to look for the way to successive intermediate exchanges? Or did it fly straight to the network of your city, your local area, without encountering so much as an obstacle, only to be caught there like a fly in a spider’s web, reaching out towards your unreachable telephone?

  The earpiece tells me nothing, and I don’t know whether I’ll have to accept defeat and hang up, or whether all of a sudden a light rustling crackle will tell me my call has found a free line, has set off like an arrow and in a few seconds will be waking your bell like an echo.

  It’s in this silence of circuitry that I speak to you. I’m well aware that when our voices finally get to meet along the wire we will have only banal and awkward comments to make; I’m not calling to say anything to you, nor because I imagine you have anything to say to me. We phone each other because it’s only in these long-distance calls, this groping for each other along cables of buried copper, cluttered relays, the whirling contact points of clogged selector switches, only in this probing the silence and waiting for an echo that one prolongs that first call from afar, that cry that went up when the first great crack of the continental drift yawned beneath the feet of a human couple, when the depths of the ocean opened up to separate them, while, torn precipitously apart, one on one bank and one on the other, the couple strove with their cries to stretch out a bridge of sound that might keep them together yet, cries that grew ever fainter until the roar of the waves overwhelmed all hope.