From a window a voice said: "Hey, mister!"
Marcovaldo raised his eyes. On the mezzanine floor of a grand villa, a boy was standing at a window, his elbows on the sill, where a dish had been set.
"Hey, mister! What are you eating?"
"Sausage and turnips!"
"Lucky you," the boy said.
"Mmm…" Marcovaldo replied, vaguely.
"Imagine! I'm supposed to eat fried brains…" Marcovaldo looked at the dish on the sill. There were fried brains, soft and curly as a pile of clouds. His nostrils twitched.
"What? Don't you like brains?" he asked the little boy.
"No. They locked me up in here to punish me, because I wouldn't eat it. But I'll throw it out of the window."
"And you like sausage?"
"Oh, yes, it looks like a snake… We never eat it at our house…"
"Then you give me your plate and I'll give you mine."
"Hurrah!" The child was overjoyed. He held out to the man his porcelain plate with heavy silver fork, and the man gave him the lunch-box with the tin fork.
And so both fell to eating: the boy at the window-sill and Marcovaldo seated on a bench opposite, both licking their lips and declaring they had never tasted such good food.
But then, behind the boy, a governess appears, with her hands on her hips.
"Well, young man! My goodness! What are you eating?"
"Sausage!" the boy says.
"And who gave it to you?"
"That gentleman there," and he pointed to Marcovaldo, who interrupted his slow and earnest chewing of a morsel of brains.
"Throw it away! The smell! Throw it away!"
"But it's good…"
"And your plate? The fork?"
"The gentleman has them…" and he pointed again to Marcovaldo, who was holding the fork in the air with a bit of half-eaten brains stuck on it.
The woman began yelling. "Thief! Thief! The silver!" Marcovaldo stood up, looked for another moment at the half-finished dish of fried brains, went to the window, set plate and fork on the sill, stared at the governess with contempt, and withdrew. He heard the clatter of the lunch-box on the pavement, the boy's crying, the rude slam of the window. He bent to pick up the lunch-box and its cover. They were a bit dented; the cover no longer fit properly. He jammed everything into his pocket and went off to work.
WINTER
8. The forest on the superhighway
Cold has a thousand shapes and a thousand ways of moving in the world: on the sea it gallops like a troop of horses, on the countryside it falls like a swarm of locusts, in the cities like a knife-blade it slashes the streets and penetrates the chinks of unheated houses. In Marcovaldo's house that evening they had burned the last kindling, and the family, all bundled in overcoats, was watching the embers fade in the stove, and the little clouds rise from their own mouths at every breath. They had stopped talking; the little clouds spoke for them: the wife emitted great long ones like sighs, the children puffed them out like assorted soap-bubbles, and Marcovaldo blew them upwards in jerks, like flashes of genius that promptly vanish.
In the end Marcovaldo made up his mind: "I'm going to look for wood. Who knows? I might find some." He stuffed four or five newspapers between his shirt and his jacket as breastplates against gusts of air, he hid a long, snaggle-tooth saw under his overcoat, and thus he went out into the night, followed by the long, hopeful looks of his family. He made a papery rustle at every step; the saw peeped out now and then above his collar.
Looking for wood in the city: easier said than done! Marcovaldo headed at once towards a little patch of public park that stood between two streets. All was deserted. Marcovaldo studied the naked trees, one by one, thinking of his family, waiting for him with their teeth chattering.
Little Michelino, his teeth chattering, was reading a book of fairy-tales, borrowed from the small library at school. The book told of a child, son of a woodsman, who went out with a hatchet to chop wood in the forest. "That's the place to go!" Michelino said. "The forest! There's wood there, all right!" Born and raised in the city, he had never seen a forest, not even at a distance.
Then and there, he worked it out with his brothers: one took a hatchet, one a hook, one a rope; they said good-bye to their Mamma and went out in search of a forest.
They walked around the city, illuminated by street-lamps, and they saw only houses: not a sign of a forest. They encountered an occasional passer-by, but they didn't dare ask him where a forest was. And so they reached the area where the houses of the city ended and the street turned into a highway.
At the sides of the highway, the children saw the forest: a thick growth of strange trees blocked the view of the plain. Their trunks were very very slender, erect or slanting; and their crowns were flat and outspread, revealing the strangest shapes and the strangest colors when a passing car illuminated them with its headlights. Boughs in the form of a toothpaste tube, a face, cheese, hand, razor, bottle, cow, tire, all dotted with a foliage of letters of the alphabet.
"Hurrah!" Michelino said. "This is the forest!"
And, spellbound, the brothers watched the moon rise among those strange shadows: "How beautiful it is…"
Michelino immediately reminded them of their purpose in coming there: wood. So they chopped down a little tree in the form of a yellow primrose blossom, cut it into bits, and took it home.
Marcovaldo came home with his scant armful of damp branches, and found the stove burning.
"Where did you find it?" he cried, pointing to what remained of a billboard, which, being of plywood, had burned very quickly.
"In the forest!" the children said.
"What forest?"
"The one by the highway. It's full of wood!"
Since it was so simple, and there was need of more wood, he thought he might as well follow the children's example, and Marcovaldo again went out with his saw. He went to the highway.
Officer Astolfo, of the highway police, was a bit shortsighted, and on night duty, racing on his motorcycle, he should have worn eyeglasses; but he didn't say so, for fear it would block his advancement.
That evening, there was a report that on the superhighway a bunch of kids was knocking down billboards. Officer Astolfo set out to inspect.
On either side of the road, the forest of strange figures, admonishing and gesticulating, accompanied Astolfo, who peered at them one by one, widening his near-sighted eyes. There, in the beam of his motorcycle's headlight, he caught a little urchin who had climbed up on a billboard. Astolfo put on the brakes. "Hey, what are you doing there? Jump down this minute!" The kid didn't move and stuck out its tongue. Astolfo approached and saw it was an ad for processed cheese, with a big child licking his lips. "Yes, of course," Astolfo said, and zoomed off.
A little later, in the shadow of a huge billboard, he illuminated a sad, frightened face. "Don't make a move! Don't try running away!" But nobody ran away. It was a suffering human face painted in the midst of a foot covered with corns: an ad for a corn remover. "Oh, sorry," Astolfo said, and dashed away.
The billboard for a headache tablet was a gigantic head of a man, his hands over his eyes, in pain. Astolfo sped past, and the headlight illuminated Marcovaldo, who had scrambled to the top with his saw, trying to cut off a slice. Dazzled by the light, Marcovaldo huddled down and remained motionless, clinging to an ear of the big head, where the saw had already reached the middle of the brow.
Astolfo examined it carefully and said: "Oh, yes. Stappa tablets! Very effective ad! Smart idea! That little man up there with the saw represents the migraine that is cutting the head in two. I got it right away!" And he went off, content.
All was silence and cold. Marcovaldo heaved a sigh of relief, settled on his uncomfortable perch, and resumed work. The muffled scrape of the saw against the wood spread through the moonlit sky.
SPRING
9. The good air
"These children," the Public Health doctor said, "need to breathe some good air, at a ce
rtain altitude; they should run through meadows…"
He was between the beds of the half-basement where the family lived, and was pressing his stethoscope against little Teresa's back, between her shoulder-blades, frail as the wings of a tiny featherless bird. The beds were two, and the four children, all ill, peeked out at the head and foot of each bed, with flushed cheeks and glistening eyes.
"On meadows like the flower-bed in the square?" Michelino asked.
"The altitude of a skyscraper?" asked Filippetto. "Air that's good to eat?" asked Pietruccio.
Marcovaldo, tall and skinny, and his wife, Domitilla, short and squat, were leaning on one elbow on either side of a rickety chest of drawers. Without moving the elbow, each raised the other arm and then dropped it, grumbling together: "Where are we supposed to find those things, six mouths to feed, loaded with debts? How are we supposed to manage?"
"The most beautiful place we can send them," Marcovaldo declared, "is into the streets."
"We'll find good air," Domitilla concluded, "when we're evicted and have to sleep under the stars."
One Saturday afternoon, as soon as they were well again, Marcovaldo took the children and led them off on a walk in the hills. The part of the city where they lived is the farthest from the hills. To reach the slopes they made a long journey on a crowded tram and the children saw only the legs of passengers around them. Little by little the tram emptied; at the windows, finally freed, an avenue appeared, climbing up. And so they reached the end of the line and set forth.
It was early spring; the trees were just budding in a tepid sun. The children looked around, slightly disoriented. Marcovaldo led them up a little path of steps, rising among the green.
"Why is there a stairway without a house over it?" Michelino asked.
"It's not a house stairway; it's like a street."
"A street… And how can the cars manage the steps?" Around them there were garden walls, with trees inside.
"Walls without a roof… Did they bomb them?"
"They're gardens… like courtyards…" the father explained. "The house is farther back, beyond those trees."
Michelino shook his head, unconvinced. "But courtyards are inside houses, not outside."
Teresina asked: "Do the trees live in these houses?"
As they climbed up, it seemed to Marcovaldo that he was gradually shedding the moldy smell of the warehouse in which he shifted packages for eight hours a day and the damp stains on the walls of his house and the dust that settled, gilded, in the cone of light from the little window, and the fits of coughing in the darkness. His children now seemed to him less sallow and frail, already somehow part of that light and that green.
"You like it here, don't you?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"There aren't any police. You can pull up the flowers, throw stones."
"What about breathing? Are you breathing?"
"No."
"The air's good here."
They chewed it. "What are you talking about? It doesn't have any taste at all."
They climbed almost to the top of the hill. At one turn, the city appeared, way down below, spread flat on the gray cobweb of the streets. The children rolled around on a meadow as if they had never done anything else in their life. A little breeze sprang up; it was already evening. In the city a few lights came on, in a confused sparkle. Marcovaldo felt again a rush of the feeling he had had as a young man, arriving in the city, when those streets, those lights attracted him as if he expected something unknown from them. The swallows plunged headlong through the air onto the city.
Then he was seized by the sadness of having to go back down there, and in the clotted landscape he figured out the shadow of his neighborhood: it seemed to him a leaden wasteland, stagnant, covered by the thick scales of the roofs and the shreds of smoke flapping on the stick-like chimney pots.
It had turned cool: perhaps he should call the children. But seeing them swinging peacefully on the lower limbs of a tree, he dismissed that thought. Michelino came over to him and asked: "Papà, why don't we come and live here?"
"Stupid, there aren't any houses; nobody lives up here!" Marcovaldo said, with irritation, because he had actually been daydreaming of being able to live up there.
And Michelino said: "Nobody? What about those gentlemen? Look!"
The air was turning gray and down from the meadows came a troop of men, of various ages, all dressed in heavy gray suits, buttoned up like pajamas, all with cap and cane. They came in bunches, some talking in loud voices or laughing, sticking those canes into the grass or carrying them, hung by the curved handle, over their arm.
"Who are they? Where are they going?" Michelino asked his father, but Marcovaldo was looking at them, silent.
One passed nearby; he was a heavy man of about forty. "Good evening!" he said. "Well, what news do you bring us, from down in the city?"
"Good evening," Marcovaldo said. "What do you mean by news?"
"Nothing. I was just talking," the man said, and stopped; he had a broad, white face, with only a splotch of pink, or red, like a shadow, over his cheekbones. "I always say that, to anybody from the city. I've been up here for three months, you understand."
"And you never go down?"
"Hmph, when the doctors decide to let me!" And he laughed briefly. "And this!" And he tapped his fingers on his chest, with some more brief laughter, a bit breathless. "They've already discharged me twice, as cured, but as soon as I went back to the factory, wham, all over again. And they ship me back up here. Some fun!"
"Them too?" Marcovaldo asked, nodding at the other men, who had scattered over the grass; and at the same time, his eyes sought Filippetto and Teresa and Pietruccio, whom he had lost sight of.
"All comrades on the same holiday," the man said, and winked. "We're let out on a pass, before taps… We go to bed early… Obviously, we can't go beyond the grounds…"
"What grounds?"
"This is part of the sanatorium. Didn't you know?"
Marcovaldo took the hand of Michelino, who had stood there listening, a bit scared. Evening was climbing up the slopes; there below, their neighborhood was no longer discernible, and it seemed not so much to have been swallowed by the shadows, but to have spread its own shadow everywhere. It was time to go back. "Teresa! Filippetto!" Marcovaldo called and started to look for them. "Sorry," he said to the man, "I don't see the other children anywhere."
The man stepped to a parapet. "They're down there," he said, "they're picking cherries."
In a ditch, Marcovaldo saw a cherry tree and around it were the men dressed in gray, pulling down the branches with their curved sticks, and picking the fruit. And Teresa and the two boys, all delighted, were also picking cherries and taking them from the men's hands and laughing with them.
"It's late," Marcovaldo said. "It's cold. Let's go home…"
The heavy man pointed the tip of his cane towards the rows of lights that were coming on, down below.
"In the evening," he said, "with this stick I take my walk in the city. I choose a street, a row of lamps, and I follow it, like this… I stop at the windows, I meet people, I say hello to them… When you walk in the city, think of it sometimes: my cane is following you…"
The children came back crowned with leaves, made by the inmates.
"This is a wonderful place, Papà!" Teresa said. "We'll come and play here again, won't we?"
"Papà!" Michelino blurted. "Why don't we come and live here, too, with these gentlemen?"
"It's late. Say good-bye to the gentlemen! Say thanks for the cherries. Come on! We're going!"
They headed home. They were tired. Marcovaldo didn't answer any questions. Filippetto wanted to be carried, Pietruccio wanted to ride piggy-back, Teresa made him drag her by the hand, and Michelino, the oldest, went ahead by himself, kicking stones.
SUMMER
10. A journey with the cows
The city noises that on summer nights come through the open windows i
nto the rooms of those who are made sleepless by the heat, the true noises of the night-time city, are audible at a certain hour, when the anonymous din of motors dies away and is silent, and from the silence, discreet, distinct, graduated according to the distance, emerge the step of a noctambulant, the rustle of a night watchman's bike, a remote muddled brawl, and a snoring from the upper floors, the groan of a sick man, the continued striking of an old clock every hour. Until, at dawn, the orchestra of alarm clocks in the working-class houses tunes up, and a tram goes by on its tracks.
And so, one night, between his wife and the children all sweating in their sleep, Marcovaldo lay with his eyes closed, to listen to as much of this powdering of frail sounds as filtered from the pavement down through the low windows into his half-basement. He heard the swift, cheerful heel of a woman who was late, the patched sole of the man who stopped irregularly to collect cigarette butts, the whistle of someone who felt alone, and every now and then a broken clash of words in a dialog between friends, enough to suggest they were talking about sports or money. But in the hot night those sounds lost all relief, they dissolved as if dampened by the sultry heat that crammed the void of the streets, and yet they seemed to want to impose themselves, to assert their dominion over that uninhabited realm. In every human presence Marcovaldo recognized sadly a brother, stuck like him, even in vacation time, to that oven of cooked and dusty cement, by debts, by the burden of the family, by the meagerness of his wages.
And as if the impossible thought of vacation had suddenly opened the gates of a dream to him, he seemed to hear a distant clank of bells, and a dog's bark, and also a brief lowing. But his eyes were open, he wasn't dreaming: and, pricking up his ears, he sought to regain a grip on those vague impressions, or a denial of them; and he actually did hear a sound as of hundreds and hundreds of steps, slow, scattered, hollow, which came closer and drowned out all other sounds, except, indeed, that rusty clanking.
Marcovaldo or The Seasons in the City Page 4