The Complete Cosmicomics

by Italo Calvino

  At the same time another parade was crossing Manhattan. The flaky, mouldy Moon was also processing, sailing between the skyscrapers, pulled by the naked girls, and behind it came a line of beat-up cars and skeletons of lorries, in the midst of a silent crowd gradually increasing in size. Thousands of people flocked to join the throng that had been following the Moon from the early hours of the morning, people of all colours, whole families with children of every age, especially now that the procession was filing past the most crowded black and Puerto Rican areas around Harlem.

  The lunar procession zigzagged around Uptown, started down Broadway, and came quickly and silently down that street to converge with the other procession which was dragging its balloon giant along Fifth Avenue.

  At Madison Square one procession met the other; or rather, it became just one single procession. ‘The Satisfied Customer’, perhaps because of a collision with the Moon’s jagged surface, turned into a rubber rag. On the motorbikes now were the Dianas pulling the Moon with multicoloured ribbons; or more likely, since their number had at least doubled, the female motorcyclists had thrown away their uniforms and kepis. A similar transformation had overtaken the motorbikes and the cars in the parade: you could no longer tell which were old and which were new—the twisted wheels, the rusty mudguards were mixed up with bodywork as shiny as a mirror, with paintwork gleaming like enamel.

  And behind the parade, shop windows became covered with cobwebs and mould, lifts in skyscrapers started to creak and groan, posters with advertisements on them turned yellow, egg-holders in fridges filled with chicks as if they were incubators, televisions broadcast whirlwinds of atmospheric storms. The city had consumed itself at a stroke: it was a disposable city following the Moon on its last voyage.

  To the sound of the band drumming on empty petrol cans, the procession arrived at the Brooklyn Bridge. Diana lifted up her majorette’s baton: her friends twirled their ribbons in the air. The Moon made a last dash, went over the curved grillwork of the bridge, tipped towards the sea, crashed into the water like a brick, and sank downwards, sending up thousands of little bubbles to the surface.

  Meanwhile instead of letting the ribbons go, the girls had stayed attached to them, and the Moon had lifted them up, sending them flying over the parapet of the bridge: in the air they described arcs like divers and disappeared amidst the waves.

  We stood and stared, some of us on the Brooklyn Bridge, others on the jetties on the shore, gazing in astonishment, caught between the urge to dive in after them and our confidence that we would see them reappear.

  We did not have long to wait. The sea began to vibrate with waves that spread out in a circle. At the centre of this circle there appeared an island, which grew like a mountain, like a hemisphere, like a globe resting on the water, or rather raised just above it; no, like a new Moon rising in the sky. I say a Moon even though it did not resemble a Moon any more than the one we had seen plunge into the depths a few moments before. However, this new Moon had a very different way of being different: it emerged from the sea dripping a trail of green, glistening seaweed; spouts of water gushed in fountains from fields that lent it the sheen of an emerald; a steamy vegetation covered it, but not with plants. This covering seemed to be made of peacock feathers, full of eyes and shimmering colours.

  This was the landscape that we just managed to glimpse before the sphere it covered swiftly receded into the sky, and the more minute details were lost in a general impression of freshness and lushness. It was dusk: the contrasts of the colours were fading into a vibrant chiaroscuro; the lunar fields and woods were little more than contours, barely visible, on the taut surface of the shining globe. But we were just in time to see some hammocks hanging from branches, rocked by the wind, and nestling in them I saw the girls who had led us to that place. I recognized Diana, at peace at last, fanning herself with a feather punkah, and perhaps sending me a signal of recognition.

  ‘There they are! There she is!’ I shouted; we all shouted, and the happiness at having found them again was already fraught with the pain of having lost them now for ever, because the Moon rising in the dark sky sent out only the reflections of the Sun on its lakes and fields.

  We were seized by a frenzy: we began to gallop across the continent, through the savannahs and forests that had covered over the Earth again and buried cities and roads, obliterating all trace of everything that had been. And we trumpeted, lifting up to the sky our trunks and our long, thin tusks, shaking the long hair of our croups with the violent anguish that lays hold of all us young mammoths, when we realize that now is when life begins, and yet it is clear that what we desire shall never be ours.

  The Meteorites

  According to the most recent theories, the Earth was originally a tiny, cold body which later increased in size through the incorporation of meteorites and meteor dust.

  At first we were under the illusion that we could keep it clean—old Qfwfq said—since it was really small and you could sweep it and dust it every day. Of course a lot of stuff did come down: in fact you would have thought that the Earth had no other purpose in its orbiting but to gather up all the dust and rubbish hovering in space. Now it’s different, there’s the atmosphere; you look at the sky and say: ‘Oh, how clear it is, how pure!’ But you should have seen what landed on us when the planet bumped into one of those meteor storms in the course of its orbit and could not get out. It was a powder white as mothballs, which deposited itself in tiny granules, and sometimes in bigger, crystalline splinters, as though a glass lampshade had crashed down from the sky, and in the middle of it you could also find biggish pebbles, scattered bits from other planetary systems, pear cores, taps, Ionic capitals, back numbers of the Herald Tribune and Paese sera: everyone knows that universes come and go, but it’s always the same stuff that goes round. The Earth, being small and also swift (because it travelled much faster than it does now), managed to avoid a lot of it: we would see an object approaching from the depths of space, fluttering like a bird—then later we’d find out it was a sock—or sailing towards us pitching slightly, like the time we saw a grand piano; then it would come to within half a metre of us, and then nothing happened, it would go on its way without even grazing us: it was lost, perhaps for ever, in the empty darkness we left behind. But most of the time the meteoric shower would empty over us, stirring up a thick dustcloud and making a racket like empty cans; that was the moment when a convulsive agitation would seize hold of my first wife, Xha.

  Xha wanted to keep everything clean and in order; and she managed it. Of course she had to keep very busy, but the planet was still of a size to allow us to carry out a daily check, and the fact that we were the only two inhabitants—though it had the disadvantage that there was nobody to give us a hand—was also an advantage because two calm and orderly people like us do not create chaos: when they take something they put it back in its right place. Once we had repaired the damage done by the meteoric rubble, and dusted everything properly, and washed and hung out the laundry, which constantly got dirty, we had nothing more to do.

  As for the rubbish, initially Xha would wrap it up in little packages that I would chuck into the void, flinging them as high as I could: the Earth had still very little power of attraction, and in any case I had strong arms and a certain skill in throwing, so we were able to rid ourselves of items of considerable bulk and weight, forcing them back into space whence they had come. With the granules of dustcloud such an operation was impossible: even if we filled up paper bags, you could not throw them far enough away for them not to come back; they nearly always came undone in the air and we would find ourselves covered again in dust from head to toe.

  For as long as it was possible, Xha preferred to get rid of the dust by putting it inside certain cracks in the ground; then the cracks would fill up, or rather they expanded into overflowing craters. The fact was that the huge quantity of accumulated matter made the Earth swell from the inside and these cracks were actually caused by this increase in
volume. So she decided to spread out the dust in uniform layers on the planet’s surface and let it set into a smooth and continuous crust, so as not to give the impression of a solution that had been only half thought through or abandoned.

  The skill and tenacity that Xha had shown in trying to remove every granule that came to disturb the polished harmony of our world were now directed towards making the meteoric crumbs the very basis of this harmonious order, storing them up in regular layers, hiding them under a polishable surface. However, every day more powder would land on the Earth’s floor in a veil that was at times thin and at other times thickened by humps and mounds here and there; we would then instantly get to work to establish a new layered surface.

  The bulk of our planet was increasing, but thanks to the care which my wife and I—under her direction—lavished on it, it retained a shape that was without irregularities, excrescences or waste, and no shadow or stain sullied its white-naphthalene sheen. The external layers hid even those objects which landed on us all mixed up with the dustcloud and which by now we could no longer send back to the currents of the cosmos because the Earth, as it grew, had set up around itself a gravitational field too strong for my arms to overcome. Where the detritus was densest in volume we buried it underneath tumuli of dust in the shape of beautifully squared-off pyramids, not too high, arranged in symmetrical rows, so that every intrusion of the shapeless and the arbitrary was cancelled from our sight.

  When describing my first wife’s industry, I would not want to have given you the idea that there was an element of irritability, anxiety, or anything like alarm, in her scrupulosity. No, Xha was sure these meteorite showers were an accident, a temporary phenomenon, in a universe that was still in its settling-down phase. She had no doubts about the fact that our planet and the other heavenly bodies, and everything that was inside and outside of them, had to obey a precise, regular geometry of straight lines and curves and surfaces; according to her, anything that was not part of this pattern was an irrelevant leftover, and trying immediately to sweep it away or bury it was her way of minimizing its importance, even of denying its existence. Of course this is my interpretation of her ideas: Xha was a practical woman, who did not get bogged down in general statements but simply tried to do well what she saw as her duty, and did so willingly.

  Every evening, before lying down, Xha and I would walk through this terrestrial landscape that was protected with such meticulous persistence. It was a smooth, glabrous expanse, interrupted only, at regular intervals, by the stark edges of those pyramid-shaped elevations. Above us in the sky revolved planets and stars at the appropriate speed and distance, reflecting rays of light that spread a uniform sparkle over our ground. My wife waved a stick-fan to stir the always rather dusty air around our faces; I carried an umbrella to protect us from any gusts of meteoric rain. A light sprinkling of starch lent a continual freshness to Xha’s well-folded clothes; a white ribbon held her hair firm.

  These were the moments of tranquil contemplation we allowed ourselves; but they did not last long. In the morning we would get up early, and our few hours of sleep had already been enough for the Earth to be covered again with debris. ‘Hurry up, Qfwfq, there’s no time to waste!’ Xha would say as she thrust a broom into my hands, and I would set off on my usual round, while the dawn turned the narrow, bare horizon of the plain white. As I went along, I observed here and there piles of wreckage and knick-knacks; as the light increased, I would notice the opaque dusting that veiled the planet’s gleaming floor. With my broom I would sweep everything I could into a bin or a bag I carried with me, but first I would stop to study the fresh haul the night had brought us: a sculpted bull’s head, a cactus, a cartwheel, a gold nugget, a Cinerama projector. I would weigh them and run them through my hands, suck a finger pricked by the cactus, and have fun imagining that these totally incongruous objects were connected by a mysterious link which I was meant to discover. Such imaginings I could indulge in when alone: because with Xha the passion to remove, to obliterate, to throw away was so overpowering that we would never stop to look at what we were sweeping up. Instead now it was my curiosity that became the most powerful urge in my daily inspections, and I would set out every morning almost happily, whistling as I went.

  Xha and I had in a way divided up our tasks, agreed which hemisphere each would keep in order. In my hemisphere sometimes I did not remove the stuff immediately, especially when it was rather heavy, but piled it up in a corner, to be collected later in a barrow. So at times there formed what looked like piles or stacks: carpets, sand-dunes, editions of the Koran, oil-wells, an absurd lumping together of knick-knacks that didn’t match. Of course Xha would not have approved of my system, but to tell the truth I felt a kind of pleasure seeing these composite shadows looming on the horizon. At times I would even leave the piled-up stuff from one day to the next (the Earth was starting to become so big that Xha was not able to get round it all in one day), and the surprise in the morning was discovering how many new things had been added to the rest.

  One day I was contemplating a pile of broken boxes and rusty bins, over which stood a crane holding the distorted wreckage of a car, when on lowering my gaze I saw, on the threshold of a hut built with bits of metal and plywood, a girl busy peeling potatoes. She was dressed, it seemed to me, in rags: strips of cellophane, scraps of frayed scarves; in her hair she had bits of straw and wood-shavings. She was taking the potatoes from a sack and, peeling them with a penknife, she would unroll ribbons of potato-skin which piled up in a grey mass.

  I felt the need to apologize: ‘I’m sorry, you’ve found us in a bit of a mess, I’ll clean it up at once, I’ll clear everything . . .’

  The girl flung a peeled potato into a basin, and said: ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake . . .’

  ‘Perhaps if you could give me a hand . . .’ I said, or rather this was said by that part of me that was still thinking in the way it had always thought. (Just the night before, Xha and I had agreed: ‘Yes, if we could find someone to give us a hand, it would all be so different!’)

  ‘No, you,’ said the girl, yawning and stretching, ‘you help me to peel.’

  ‘We no longer know how to get rid of this stuff that lands on us,’ I explained. ‘Look at this,’ and I lifted up a barrel without a lid that I had just spotted. ‘Who knows what’s in it?’

  The girl sniffed and said: ‘Anchovies. We’ll have fish and chips.’

  She insisted I sit with her and cut the potatoes into thin strips. In the middle of that rubbish-tip she found a blackish can full of oil. She lit a fire on the ground, using wrapping material, and began to fry tiny fish and slices of potato in a rusty basin.

  ‘We can’t do this here, it’s dirty . . .’ I said, thinking of Xha’s kitchen utensils, shiny as glass.

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, come on . . .’ she replied, serving the hot fry-up in parcels of paper.

  Later I often asked myself whether I was wrong not to tell Xha that another person had landed on the Earth that day. But I would have had to own up to my laziness in letting so much stuff pile up. ‘I’ll do a good clean-up first,’ I thought, even though I realized that everything had become more difficult.

  Every day I went to visit the girl, Wha, in the middle of that avalanche of new objects with which the whole hemisphere was now overflowing. I didn’t understand how she managed to live in the midst of that confusion, and let things pile up on top of each other: lianas on top of baobab trees, Romanesque cathedrals on top of crypts, hoists above coal deposits, and more stuff again settling on top of that, chimpanzees on the lianas, sightseeing tour coaches parked on the squares in front of the Romanesque cathedrals, firedamp fumes in the galleries of the mines. I got angry every time: that wretched girl, her way of thinking was the exact opposite of mine.

  Nevertheless, at times I had to admit that I liked watching her move around in the midst of all that, with those careless gestures of hers, as though her every action happened by chance; and the surprising thing w
as seeing that, each time, everything she did turned out unexpectedly well. Wha chucked the first things she came across into the same saucepan for boiling, for instance, beans and pork rind: who would have thought it? This produced a wonderful minestrone; she would pile up pieces from Egyptian monuments one on top of the other as though they were dishes to wash—a woman’s head, two ibis wings, the body of a lion—and out came a wonderful Sphinx. In short, I was amazed to find myself thinking that—once I’d got used to it—I would end up being perfectly at ease with her.

  What I could never forgive her for was her absent-mindedness, the chaos, the way she never knew where she had left things. She forgot the Mexican volcano Paricutin in the middle of a ploughed field, and the Roman theatre at Luni amidst the terraces of a vineyard. The fact that she subsequently would find them just at the right time was not enough to assuage my irritation, because that was simply another accidental circumstance to add to the others, as if there were not enough already.

  Of course my life was not here, it was the other life, the one I lived at Xha’s side, keeping the surface of the other hemisphere level and clean. On this matter I was of the same mind as Xha: no doubt about it, I worked so that the Earth could be kept in its state of perfection; I could spend hours with Wha only because I was sure I could go back to Xha’s world, where everything worked the way it should, where you understood everything that had to be understood. I should say that with Xha I reached an internal calm underneath constant external activity, whereas with Wha I could maintain an external calm, do precisely what I wanted to do at that moment, but I paid for that peace with a constant anxiety, because I was sure that that state of things could not last.