Mr Palomar

by Italo Calvino

  Nothing of this can be seen by one who moves on his feet or his wheels over the city pavements. And, inversely, from up here you have the impression that the true crust of the earth is this, uneven but compact, even if furrowed by gaps whose depth cannot be known, chasms or pits or craters, whose edges seem in perspective to overlap like the scales of a pine cone, and it never even occurs to you to wonder what is hidden in their depth, because the panorama of the surface is already so vast and rich and various that it more than suffices to saturate the mind with information and meanings.

  This is how birds think, or at least this is how Mr Palomar thinks, imagining himself a bird. “It is only after you have come to know the surface of things,” he concludes, “that you venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface is inexhaustible.”

  The gecko’s belly

  On the terrace, the gecko has returned, as he does every summer. An exceptional observation point allows Mr Palomar to see him not from above, as we have always been accustomed to seeing geckos, treefrogs, and lizards, but from below. In the living room of the Palomar home there is a little show-case window and display case that opens on to the terrace; on the shelves of this case a collection of Art Nouveau vases is aligned; in the evening a 75-Watt bulb illuminates the objects; a plumbago plant trails its pale blue flowers from the wall against the outside glass; every evening, as soon as the light is turned on, the gecko, who lives under the leaves on that wall, moves onto the glass, to the spot where the bulb shines, and remains motionless, like a lizard in the sun. Gnats fly around, also attracted by the light; the reptile, when a gnat comes within range, swallows it.

  Mr Palomar and Mrs Palomar every evening end up shifting their chairs from the television set to place them near the glass; from the interior of the room they contemplate the whitish form of the reptile against the dark background. The choice between television and gecko is not always made without some hesitation; each of the two spectacles has some information to offer that the other does not provide: the television ranges over continents gathering luminous impulses that describe the visible face of things; the gecko, on the other hand, represents immobile concentration and the hidden side, the obverse of what is displayed to the eye.

  The most extraordinary thing are the claws, actual hands with soft fingers, all pad, which, pressed against the glass, adhere to it with their minuscule suckers: the five fingers stretch out like the petals of little flowers in a childish drawing, and when one claw moves, the fingers close like a flower, only to spread out again and flatten against the glass, making tiny streaks, like fingerprints. At once delicate and strong, these hands seem to contain a potential intelligence, so that if they could only be freed from their task of remaining stuck there to the vertical surface they could acquire the talents of human hands, which are said to have become skilled after they no longer had to cling to boughs or press on the ground.

  Bent, the legs seem not so much all knee as all elbow, elastic in order to raise the body. The tail adheres to the glass only along a central strip, from which the rings begin that circle it from one side to the other and make of it a sturdy and well-protected implement; most of the time it is listless, idle, and seems to have no talent or ambition beyond subsidiary support (nothing like the calligraphic agility of lizards’ tails); but when called upon, it proves well-articulated, ready to react, even expressive.

  Of the head, the vibrant, capacious gullet is visible, and the protruding, lidless eyes at either side. The throat is a limp sack’s surface extending from the tip of the chin, hard and all scales like that of an alligator, to the white belly that, where it presses against the glass, also reveals a grainy, perhaps adhesive, speckling.

  When a gnat passes close to the gecko’s throat, the tongue flicks and engulfs, rapid and supple and prehensile, without shape, capable of assuming whatever shape. In any case, Mr Palomar is never sure if he has seen it or not seen it: what he surely does see, now, is the gnat inside the reptile’s gullet: the belly pressed against the illuminated glass is transparent as if under X-rays; you can follow the shadow of the prey in its course through the viscera that absorb it.

  If all material were transparent – the ground that supports us, the envelope that sheathes our body – everything would be seen not as a fluttering of impalpable wings but as an inferno of grinding and ingesting. Perhaps at this moment a god of the nether world situated in the center of the earth with his eye that can pierce granite is watching us from below, following the cycle of living and dying, the lacerated victims dissolving in the bellies of their devourers until they, in their turn, are swallowed by another belly.

  The gecko remains motionless for hours; with a snap of his tongue he gulps down a mosquito or a gnat every now and then; other insects, on the contrary, identical to the first, light unawares a few millimeters from his mouth and he seems not to perceive them. Is it the vertical pupil of his eyes, separated at the sides of his head, that does not notice? Or does he have criteria of choice and rejection that we do not know? Or are his actions prompted by chance or by whim?

  The segmentation of legs and tail into rings, the speckling of tiny granulous plates on his head and belly give the gecko the appearance of a mechanical device; a highly elaborate machine, its every microscopic detail carefully studied, so that you begin to wonder if all that perfection is not squandered, in view of the limited operations it performs. Or is this perhaps the secret: content to be, does he reduce his doing to the minimum? Can this be his lesson, the opposite of the morality that, in his youth, Mr Palomar wanted to make his: to strive always to do something a bit beyond one’s means?

  Now a bewildered nocturnal butterfly comes within range. Will he overlook it? No, he catches this, too. His tongue is transformed into a butterfly net and he pulls it into his mouth. Will it all fit? Will he spit it out? Will he explode? No, the butterfly is there in his throat: it flutters, in a sorry state, but still itself, not touched by the insult of chewing teeth, now it passes the narrow limits of the neck, it is a shadow that begins its slow and troubled journey down along a swollen esophagus.

  The gecko, emerging from its impassiveness, gasps, shakes its convulsed throat, staggers on legs and tail, twists its belly, subjected to a severe test. Will this be enough for him, for tonight? Will he go away? Was this the peak of every desire he yearned to satisfy? Was this the nearly impossible test in which he wanted to prove himself? No, he stays. Perhaps he has fallen asleep. What is sleep like for someone who has eyes without eyelids?

  Mr Palomar is unable to move from there either. He sits and stares at the gecko. There is no truce on which he can count. Even if he turned the television back on, he would only be extending the contemplation of massacres. The butterfly, fragile Eurydice, sinks slowly into her Hades. A gnat flies, is about to light on the glass. And the gecko’s tongue whips out.

  The invasion of the starlings

  There is something extraordinary to be seen in Rome in this late autumn and it is the sky crammed with birds. Mr Palomar’s terrace is a good observation post; from it his gaze roves over roofs along a broad circle of horizon. Of these birds he knows only what he has heard people saying: they are starlings, which gather by the hundreds of thousands, coming from the north, waiting until it is time for them to leave all together for the coasts of Africa. At night they sleep on the city’s trees, and anyone who parks his car on the street along the Tiber is obliged to wash it the next morning from stem to stern.

  Where do they go during the day? What function does this prolonged stop-over in one city have in the strategy of their migration? What meaning do these immense evening assemblies have for them, this aerial pageant like a parade or the great annual maneuvers? Mr Palomar still has not managed to understand. The explanations offered are all a bit dubious, conditioned by hypotheses, wavering among various alternatives; and this is only natural, since these are rumors that pass from mouth to mouth, but even science, which should confirm or deny them, is apparently uncertain, approximate
. Things being as they are then, Mr Palomar has decided to confine himself to watching, to establishing down to the slightest detail what little he manages to see, sticking to the immediate ideas that what he sees suggests.

  In the violet sunset air he watches a very minute dust surface from one part of the sky, a cloud of flying wings. He realizes that they are thousands and thousands: the dome of the sky is invaded. What had seemed so far a serene and empty immensity proves to be all traversed by very rapid and light presences.

  A reassuring sight, the passage of migratory birds is associated in our ancestral memory with the harmonious succession of the seasons; instead, Mr Palomar feels something akin to apprehension. Can it be because this crowding of the sky reminds us that the balance of nature has been lost? Or is it because our sense of insecurity finds threats of catastrophe everywhere?

  When you think of migratory birds you usually imagine a very orderly and compact flight formation, which furrows the sky in a long host or a right-angled phalanx, like a bird-shape made up of countless birds. This image does not apply to the starlings, or at least not to these autumnal starlings in the Roman sky: this is an airy crowd that seems always about to scatter and disperse, like grains of a powder suspended in a liquid; instead, it thickens constantly as if from an invisible conduit the jet of whirling particles continues, never managing, however, to saturate the solution.

  The cloud spreads, blackening with wings outlined more sharply in the sky, a sign that they are approaching. Inside the flock Mr Palomar can already discern a perspective, for he sees some of the birds already very near, over his head, others far off, others farther still, and he continues discovering more, tinier and punctiform, for kilometers and kilometers, you would say, attributing to the distances between one and another an almost equal length. But this illusion of regularity is treacherous, because nothing is more difficult to evaluate than the density of distribution of birds in flight, where the compactness of the flock seems about to darken the sky. There, between one winged animal and the next, chasms of emptiness yawn.

  If he lingers for a few moments to observe the arrangement of the birds, one in relation to the other, Mr Palomar feels caught in a weft whose continuity extends, uniform and without rents, as if he also were part of this moving body composed of hundreds and hundreds of bodies, detached, but forming together a single object, like a cloud or a column of smoke or a jet of water, something, in other words, which even in the fluidity of its substance achieves a formal solidity of its own. But he has only to start following a single bird with his gaze and the disassociation of the elements regains the upper hand and the current which he felt transporting him, the network which he felt sustaining him, dissolve, and the effect is that of a vertigo that grips him at the pit of the stomach.

  This happens, for example, when Mr Palomar, after having convinced himself that the flock as a whole is flying towards him, directs his gaze to a bird that is, on the contrary, moving away, and from this one to another, also moving away but in a different direction; and he soon notices that all the birds that seemed to him to be approaching are in reality flying off in all directions, as if he were in the center of an explosion. But he has only to turn his eyes towards another zone of the sky and there they are, concentrated over there, in an increasingly thick and crammed vortex, as when a magnet hidden under a sheet of paper attracts iron filings, making patterns that become darker one moment, lighter the next, and in the end dissolve and leave on the white page a speckling of scattered fragments.

  Finally a form emerges from the confused flutter of wings, it advances, condenses: it is a circular shape, like a sphere, a bubble, the balloon-speech of someone who is thinking of a sky full of birds, an avalanche of wings that rolls in the air and involves all the birds flying in the vicinity. This sphere, in the uniform space, represents a special territory, a moving volume within whose confines – which still dilate and contract like an elastic surface – the flocks can go on flying, each in its own direction provided they do not alter the circular shape of the whole.

  At a certain point Mr Palomar realizes that the number of whirling creatures inside the globe is rapidly increasing as if a very swift current were decanting there a new population with the speed of sand in an hourglass. It is another gust of starlings that also assumes a spherical form, spreading out within the preceding form. But the cohesion of the flock does not seem to resist beyond certain dimensions: in fact, Mr Palomar is already observing a dispersion of birds at the edges, or rather, real gaps open and begin to deflate the sphere. He barely has time to notice it before the pattern has dissolved.

  Mr Palomar’s observations on birds succeed one another and multiply at such a pace that Mr Palomar feels the need to communicate them to his friends. His friends also have something to say on the subject, because each of them has happened to take some interest in the phenomenon already or else because some interest has been awakened in them after Mr Palomar has talked to them. It is a subject that can never be considered exhausted and when one of the friends believes he has seen something new or feels called upon to rectify a previous impression, he seems obliged to telephone the others at once. And so there is a to and fro of messages along the telephone network as the sky is criss-crossed by hosts of birds.

  “Have you noticed how they manage to avoid one another even when they are flying closest together, even when their paths intersect? You’d think they have radar.”

  “That’s not so. I’ve found lots of birds on the pavement, battered or dying or dead. They’re the victims of collisions in flight, inevitable when the density is too great.”

  “I’ve figured out why they keep flying all together in the evening over this area of the city. They’re like planes stacked up over the airport, circling until they get a permission-to-land signal. That’s why we see them flying around for such a long time; they’re waiting their turn to perch on the trees where they will spend the night.”

  “I’ve seen how they act when they light on the trees. They fly around and around in the sky, in a spiral, then one by one they dive very fast towards their chosen tree, then they brake sharply and light on the branch.”

  “No, aerial traffic jams can’t be a problem. Each bird has a tree that is his, he has his branch and his place on the branch. He can pick it out from above and he dives.”

  “Is their eyesight so sharp?”

  “Hmph.”

  The phone-calls are never long, because Mr Palomar is also impatient to get back to the terrace, as if he were afraid of missing some decisive turn of events.

  Now you would say that the birds occupy only that portion of the sky that is still struck by the rays of the setting sun. But taking a better look, you realize that the condensing and thinning out of the birds unwinds like a long ribbon, flapping in a zigzag. Where this ribbon curves the flock seems thicker, like a swarm of bees; where it stretches out, not twisting, there is only a dotting of scattered flights.

  Until the last glow vanishes in the sky, and a tide of darkness rises from the depths of the streets to submerge the archipelago of tiles and domes and terraces and garrets and loggias and spires; and the suspension of the black wings of the celestial invaders precipitates until it is confused with the grievous flight of the stupid, spattering urban pigeons.

  PALOMAR DOES THE SHOPPING

  * * *

  Two pounds of goose-fat

  The goose-fat is shown in glass jars, each containing, as the handwritten label says, “two limbs of plump goose (a leg and a wing), goose-fat, salt and pepper. Net weight: two pounds.” In the thick, soft whiteness that fills the jars the clangor of the world is muffled: a dark shadow rises from the bottom and, as in the fog of memories, allows a glimpse of the goose’s severed limbs, lost in its fat.

  Mr Palomar is standing in line in a Paris charcuterie. It is the holiday season, but here the throng of customers is usual even at less ceremonial times, because this is one of the good gastronomical shops of the city, miraculously survi
ving in a neighborhood where the leveling of mass trade, taxes, the low income of the consumers, and now the depression have dismantled the old shops, one by one, replacing them with anonymous supermarkets.

  Waiting in line, Mr Palomar contemplates the jars. He tries to find a place in his memories for cassoulet, a rich stew of meats and beans, in which goose-fat is an essential ingredient; but neither his palate’s memory nor his cultural memory is of any help to him. And yet the name, the sight, the idea attract him, awaken an immediate fantasy not so much of appetite as of eros: from a mountain of goose-fat a female figure surfaces, smears white over her rosy skin, and he already imagines himself making his way towards her through those thick avalanches, embracing her, sinking with her.

  He dispels this incongruous thought from his mind, raises his eyes to the ceiling bedecked with salamis, hanging from the Christmas wreaths like fruit from boughs in the land of Cockaigne. All around, on the marble counters, abundance triumphs in the forms developed by civilization and art. In the slices of game pâté, the pursuits and flights of the moor are fixed forever, sublimated in a tapestry of flavors. The galantines of pheasant are arrayed in gray-pink cylinders surmounted, to certify their origin, by two birdly feet like talons that jut from a coat-of-arms or from a Renaissance chest.