Last Comes the Raven

by Italo Calvino

  Indeed, the hand groped around. There: like a butterfly’s lighting, the fingers already sensed her presence; and there: it was enough merely to thrust the whole palm forward gently, and the widow’s gaze beneath the veil was impenetrable, the bosom only faintly stirred by her respiration. But no! Tomagra had already withdrawn his hand, like a mouse scurrying off.

  She didn’t move; he thought, Maybe she wants this. But he also thought, Another moment and it will be too late. Or maybe she’s sitting there studying me, preparing to make a scene.

  Then, for no reason except prudent verification, Tomagra slid his hand along the back of the seat and waited until the train’s jolts, imperceptibly, made the lady slide over his fingers. To say he waited is not correct: actually, with the tips of his fingers wedgelike between the seat and her, he made an invisible push, which could also have been the effect of the train’s speeding. If he stopped at a certain point, it wasn’t because the lady had given any indication of disapproval, but, on the contrary, because Tomagra thought that if she did accept, it would be easy for her, with a half rotation of the muscles, to meet him halfway, to fall, as it were, on that expectant hand. To suggest to her the friendly nature of his attention, Tomagra, in that position beneath the lady, attempted a discreet wiggle of the fingers; the lady was looking out of the window, and her hand was idly toying with the purse clasp, opening and closing it. Was this a signal to him to stop? Was it a final concession she was granting him, a warning that her patience could be tried no longer? Was it this? Tomagra asked himself. Was it this?

  He noticed that his hand, like a stubby octopus, was clasping her flesh. Now all was decided: he could no longer draw back, not Tomagra. But what about her? She was a sphinx.

  With a crab’s oblique scuttle, the soldier’s hand now descended her thigh. Was it out in the open, before the eyes of the others? No, now the lady was adjusting the jacket she held folded on her lap, allowing it to spill to one side. To offer him cover, or to block his path? There: now the hand moved freely and unseen, it clasped her, it opened in fleeting caresses like brief puffs of wind. But the widow’s face was still turned away, distant; Tomagra stared at a part of her, a zone of naked skin between the ear and the curve of her full chignon. And in that dimple beneath the ear a vein throbbed: this was the answer she was giving him, clear, heart-rending, and fleeting. She turned her face all of a sudden, proud and marmoreal; the veil hanging below the hat stirred like a curtain; the gaze was lost beneath the heavy lids. But that gaze had gone past him, Tomagra, perhaps had not even grazed him; she was looking beyond him, at something, or nothing, the pretext of some thought, but anyway something more important than he. This he decided later, because earlier, when he had barely seen that movement of hers, he had immediately thrown himself back and shut his eyes tight, as if he were asleep, trying to quell the flush spreading over his face, and thus perhaps losing the opportunity to catch in the first glint of her eyes an answer to his own extreme doubts.

  His hand, hidden under the black jacket, had remained as if detached from him, numb, the fingers drawn back toward the wrist: no longer a real hand, now without sensitivity beyond that arboreal sensitivity of the bones. But as the truce the widow had granted to her own impassivity with that vague glance around soon ended, blood and courage flowed back into the hand. And it was then that, resuming contact with that soft saddle of leg, he realized he had reached a limit: the fingers were running along the hem of the skirt, beyond which there was the leap to the knee, and the void.

  It was the end, Private Tomagra thought, of this secret spree. Thinking back, he found it truly a poor thing in his memory, though he had greedily blown it up while experiencing it: a clumsy feel of a silk dress, something that could in no way have been denied him simply because of his miserable position as a soldier, and something that the lady had discreetly condescended, without any show, to concede.

  He was interrupted, however, in his desolate intention of withdrawing his hand when he noticed the way she was holding her jacket on her knees: no longer folded (though it had seemed so to him before) but flung carelessly, so that one edge fell in front of her legs. His hand was thus in a sealed den—​perhaps a final proof of the trust the lady was giving him, confident that the disparity between her station and the soldier’s was so great that he surely wouldn’t take advantage of the opportunity. And the soldier recalled, with effort, what had happened so far between the widow and him as he tried to discover something in her behavior that hinted at further condescension; now he considered whether his own actions had been insignificant and trivial, casual grazings and strokings, or, on the other hand, of a decisive intimacy, committing him not to withdraw again.

  His hand surely agreed with this second consideration, because before he could reflect on the irreparable nature of the act, he was already passing the frontier. And the lady? She was asleep. She had rested her head, with the pompous hat, against a corner of the seat, and she was keeping her eyes closed. Should he, Tomagra, respect this sleep, genuine or false as it might be, and retire? Or was it a consenting woman’s device, which he should already know, for which he should somehow indicate gratitude? The point he had now reached admitted no hesitation: he could only advance.

  Private Tomagra’s hand was small and plump, and its hard parts and calluses had become so blended with the muscle that it was uniform, flexible; the bones could not be felt, and its movement was made more with nerves, though gently, than with joints. And this little hand had constant and general and minuscule movements, to maintain the completeness of the contact alive and burning. But when, finally, a first stirring ran through the widow’s softness, like the motion of distant marine currents through secret underwater channels, the soldier was so surprised by it that, as if he really supposed the widow had noticed nothing till then, had really been asleep, he drew his hand away in fright.

  Now he sat there with his hands on his own knees, huddled in his seat as he had been when she came in. He was behaving absurdly; he realized that. With a scraping of heels, a stretching of hips, he seemed eager to reestablish the contacts, but this prudence of his was absurd, too, as if he wanted to start his extremely patient operation again from the beginning, as if he were not sure now of the deep goals already gained. But had he really gained them? Or had it been only a dream?

  A tunnel fell upon them. The darkness became denser and denser, and Tomagra, first with timid gestures, occasionally drawing back as if he were really at the first advances and amazed at his own temerity, then trying more and more to convince himself of the profound intimacy he had already reached with that woman, extended one hand, shy as a pullet, toward her bosom, large and somewhat abandoned to its own gravity, and with an eager groping he tried to explain to her the misery and the unbearable happiness of his condition, and his need of nothing else but for her to emerge from her reserve.

  The widow did react, but with a sudden gesture of shielding herself and rejecting him. It was enough to send Tomagra crouching in his corner, wringing his hands. But it was, probably, a false alarm caused by a passing light in the corridor, which had made the widow fear the tunnel was suddenly going to end. Perhaps; or had he gone too far, had he committed some horrible rudeness toward her, who had already been so generous toward him? No, by now there could be nothing forbidden between them; and her action, on the contrary, was a sign that this was all real, that she accepted, participated. Tomagra approached again. To be sure, in these reflections a great deal of time had been wasted; the tunnel wouldn’t last much longer, and it wasn’t wise to allow oneself to be caught by the sudden light. Tomagra was already expecting the first grayness there on the wall; the more he expected it, the riskier it was to attempt anything. Of course, this was a long tunnel; he remembered it from other journeys as very, very long. And if he took advantage immediately, he would have a lot of time ahead of him. Now it was best to wait for the end, but it never ended, and so this had perhaps been his last chance. There: now the darkness was being dispel
led, it was ending.

  They were at the last stations of a provincial line. The train was emptying; some passengers in the compartment had already got out, and now the last ones were taking down their bags, leaving. Finally they were alone in the compartment, the soldier and the widow, very close and detached, their arms folded, silent, eyes staring into space. Tomagra still had to think, Now that all the seats are free, if she wanted to be nice and comfortable, if she were fed up with me, she would move . . .

  Something restrained him and frightened him still, perhaps the presence of a group of smokers in the passage, or a light that had come on because it was evening. Then he thought to draw the curtains on the passage, like somebody wanting to get some sleep. He stood up with elephantine steps; with slow, meticulous care be began to unfasten the curtains, draw them, fasten them again. When he turned, he found her stretched out. As if she wanted to sleep: even though she had her eyes open and staring, she had slipped down, maintaining her matronly composure intact, with the majestic hat still on her head, which was resting on the seat arm.

  Tomagra was standing over her. Still, to protect this image of sleep, he chose also to darken the outside window; and he stretched over her, to undo the curtain. But it was only a way of shifting his clumsy actions above the impassive widow. Then he stopped tormenting that curtain’s snap and understood he had to do something else: show her all his own, compelling condition of desire, if only to explain to her the misunderstanding into which she had certainly fallen, as if to say to her, You see, you were kind to me because you believe we have a remote need for affection, we poor lonely soldiers, but here is what I really am, this is how I received your courtesy, this is the degree of impossible ambition I have reached, you see, here.

  And since it was now evident that nothing could manage to surprise the lady, and indeed everything seemed somehow to have been foreseen by her, Private Tomagra could only make sure that no further doubts were possible; and finally the urgency of his madness managed also to grasp its mute object: her.

  When Tomagra stood up and, beneath him, the widow remained with her clear, stern gaze (she had blue eyes), with her hat and veil still squarely on her head, and the train never stopped its shrill whistling through the fields, and outside those endless rows of grapevines went on, and the rain that throughout the journey had tirelessly streaked the panes now resumed with new violence, he had again a brief spurt of fear, thinking how he, Private Tomagra, had been so daring.

  Sleeping like Dogs

  Every time he opened his eyes he felt the acid yellow light of the big arc lamps in the ticket office glaring down at him; and he would pull up the lapels of his jacket in search of darkness and warmth. When he’d lain down he had not noticed how hard and icy the stone tiles on the floor were; now shafts of cold were infiltrating, coming up under his clothes and through the holes in his shoes, and the scarce flesh on his hips was aching, squashed between bone and stone.

  But he’d chosen a good place, quiet and out of people’s way, in that corner under the stairs, so much so that after he’d been there a little time four women’s legs came high over his head and he heard voices say, “Hey, he’s taken our place.”

  The man lying down heard, though he was not properly awake; a dribble was oozing from a corner of his mouth onto the bent cardboard of the little suitcase that was his pillow, and his hair had settled itself to sleep on its own, following the horizontal line of his body.

  “Well,” said the same voice from above the dirty knees and the spreading bell of the skirt, “let’sput our things down. At least we can get our bed ready.”

  And one of those feet, a woman’s in a boot, prodded his hips like a sniffling snout. The man pulled himself up on his elbows, blinking his stunned and aching pupils in the yellow light, while his hair, apparently taking no notice, stood straight up on its own. Then back he dropped, as if he wanted to thump his head into the suitcase.

  The women had taken the sacks off their heads. A man now came up behind, put down a roll of blankets, and began to arrange them. “Hey, you,” said the older of the women to the man lying down, “move up, you can get underneath, too, then.” No answer; he was asleep.

  “He must be dead tired,” said the younger of the two women, who was all bones, with the fleshy parts almost hanging as she bent down to spread the blankets and prop the sacks of flour underneath.

  They were three black marketeers, on their way south with full sacks and empty tins; people whose bones had grown hard from sleeping on the floor in railroad stations and traveling in cattle cars; but they had learned to organize themselves and took blankets with them, to put underneath for softness and above for warmth; the sacks and tins acted as pillows.

  The older woman tried to slip a corner of blanket under the sleeping man, but had to raise him a bit at a time because he never moved. “He must really be dead tired,” said the older woman. “Maybe he’s one of those emigrants.”

  Meanwhile, the man with them, a thin man, had got between two of the blankets and pulled an end over his eyes. “Hey, come down here; aren’t you ready?” he said to the back of the younger woman, who was still bending down arranging the sacks as pillows. The younger woman was his wife, but they knew the floors of station waiting rooms almost better than their marriage bed. The two women got underneath the blankets, and the younger one and her husband lay against each other making shivering noises, while the older one was tucking up that poor sleeping wretch. Perhaps the older one was not so old, but she was trodden down by the life she led, always lugging loads of flour and oil on her head up and down in those trains; even her dress was like a sack, and her hair went in all directions.

  The head of the sleeping man was slipping off the suitcase, which was too high and wrenched his neck; she tried to arrange him better, but his head nearly fell on the ground, so she propped his head on one of her shoulders and the man shut his lips, swallowed, settled further down on a softer part, and began snoring again.

  They were all just getting off to sleep when a trio from southern Italy arrived, a father with a black mustache and two dark, plump daughters, all three very short; they were carrying wattle baskets and their eyes were gummed with sleep under all that light. The daughters seemed to be wanting to go in one direction and the father in another, so they were quarreling, without looking one another in the face and almost without talking, except for short phrases between clenched teeth and jerky arm movements. When they found the place under the stairs already occupied by those four, they stood looking on, more stunned than ever, until two youths in puttees with coats slung over their shoulders came up to them.

  These two at once began trying to persuade the trio of southerners to put all their blankets together and make up one group with the four already there. The two youths were Venetians emigrating to France, and they made the black-market group get up and rearrange all the blankets so that the whole bunch could settle down together. It was obvious that all this was just a maneuver to get near the two girls, already half asleep; but finally they were all settled, including the older of the black-market women, who had not moved because she had that man’s head sleeping on her breast. The two Venetians had, of course, got the girls in between them, leaving the father on one side; but their hands also succeeded in reaching the other women by groping about under the blankets and coats.

  Someone was already snoring, but the father from southern Italy could not manage to doze off in spite of all the sleep weighing on him. The acid yellow light burrowed right under his lids, under the hand covering his eyes, and the inhuman calls of the loudspeakers—​“Slow train . . . platform . . . leaving . . .”—​kept him in a state of continual restlessness. He needed to urinate, too, but did not know where to go and was afraid of getting lost in that huge station. Finally he decided to wake one of the men and began shaking him; it was the unfortunate man who had been sleeping there first of all.

  “The latrine, friend, the latrine,” he said, and pulled him by an elbow, si
tting up in the middle of that heap of wrapped-up bodies.

  The sleeping man suddenly sat up with a start and opened his misty red eyes and rubbery mouth at that face bending over him: a little wrinkled face, like a cat’s, with a black mustache.

  “The latrine, friend,” said the southerner.

  The other sat there stunned, glancing around in alarm. They both kept looking at each other openmouthed, he and the man from southern Italy. The man still half asleep could not understand anything; he found that woman’s face on the floor beside him and gazed at it terror-stricken. He may have been about to let out a shriek, but then, suddenly, he buried his head in the woman’s breast again and dropped back to sleep.

  The man from southern Italy got up, overturning two or three bodies, and began moving with uncertain steps along that huge, glaringly bright and cold hall. Through the windows could be seen the limpid darkness of the night and a view of geometric iron girders. He saw a dark little man, even shorter than himself, wearing a flashy crumpled suit, come up to him with a careless air.

  “The latrine, friend,” the man from southern Italy asked him imploringly.

  “Cigarettes, American, Swiss,” answered the other, who hadn’t understood, showing the corner of a pack.

  It was Belmoretto, who spent the whole year hanging around stations and had no home or even a bed on the face of the earth, and who every now and again took a train and changed cities, wherever his uncertain trafficking in cigarettes and chewing tobacco took him. At night he ended up joining with some group sleeping in the station between trains, and so managed to lie down for an hour or two under a blanket; if not he wandered around till morning, unless he happened to run into someone who would take him home and give him a bath and some food and make him sleep with him. Belmoretto came from southern Italy, too; he was very kind to the old man with the black mustache; he took him to the latrine and waited till he had finished, so as to accompany him back. He gave him a cigarette and they smoked together, looking through eyes sandy with sleep at the trains leaving and the mounds of people sleeping on the floor down in the hall below.