The Complete Cosmicomics

by Italo Calvino

  ‘Is he drunk?!’ Evans exclaims, but I know that everything is under control, that it is now that everything starts to be under control, I know that in a second Simmons the radio operator will rush in here. Here he is arriving, his eyes popping out of their sockets: he almost knocks Evans down on the threshold.

  ‘Everything’s dead, Sir! I was listening to the semi-final of the boxing match and it’s all gone dead! I can’t establish radio contact with any station!’

  ‘What shall I do, Captain?’ Adams shouts into the phone. ‘The compass has gone mad!’

  Evans is as white as a sheet.

  This is the moment to make my superiority felt. ‘Calm down, everyone, we’ve run into a magnetic storm. There’s nothing to do. Commend your souls to whatever it is you believe in, and keep calm.’

  I go out on to the fo’c’sle. The sea is still, hardened to enamel by the Sun at the zenith. In this calm of the elements, the Halley has become a mass of blind iron that all the arts and genius of man are powerless to control. We are sailing in the Sun, inside a solar explosion where neither compasses nor radios are of any use. We have always been in the Sun’s control, even though we almost always managed to forget it and to think that we were sheltered from its whims.

  It was then that I saw her. I looked up to the foremast: she was up there. She was holding on to the foreyard, hanging in the air like a flag unfurling for miles and miles around, her hair flying in the wind, and her whole body flowing like her hair because it was made of the same pulviscular substance, her arms with their thin wrists and their ample shoulders, her loins sickle-shaped like a crescent moon, her breasts like a cloud covering the ship’s quarterdeck, and the spirals of her drapery mingling with the smoke from the funnel and with the sky above. All this I could see in the invisible electricization of the air; or at times it was just her face, like an aerial figurehead, the head of a monumental Medusa, with crackling eyes and locks: Rah had managed to catch up with me.

  ‘Are you there, Rah?’ I said. ‘You’ve tracked me down.’

  ‘Why did you hide down here?’

  ‘I wanted to see if there was another way of being.’

  ‘And is there?’

  ‘Here I guide boats on routes marked out with the compass, I can orientate myself with this compass, my instruments pick up radio waves, everything that happens has a reason.’

  ‘And you believe that?’

  From the radio cabin we could hear Simmons’s curses, as he tried to pick up any station at all in the crackle of electric charges.

  ‘No, but I like to act as if it was like that, to play the game right to the end,’ I said to Rah.

  ‘And when you see that it’s impossible?’

  ‘One just drifts. But we’re always ready to seize control again at any moment.’

  ‘Are you speaking to yourself, Sir?’ It was Evans who was always poking his sallow face in.

  I tried to assert myself. ‘Go and give Adams a hand, Mr Evans. The oscillations of the magnetic needle will tend to repeat themselves obeying certain constants. One can work out an approximate route, as we wait to orientate ourselves by the stars, tonight.’

  At night, the streaks of an Aurora Borealis arched up into the sky’s vault above us as though on the back of a tiger. With her flaming locks and sumptuous raiment, Rah paraded above us, hanging from the yards. Finding our bearings again was out of the question.

  ‘We’ve ended up at the Pole,’ said Adams, just to show he had some spirit; he was well aware that magnetic storms can cause an Aurora Borealis at any latitude.

  I watched Rah in the night: her gorgeous hair, her jewels, her flashing clothes. ‘You’re dressed for a ball,’ I said.

  ‘I have to properly celebrate finding you again,’ she replied.

  For me there was nothing to celebrate; I had fallen back under her old spell; my patient plan had failed. ‘You do get more and more beautiful,’ I admitted.

  ‘Why did you escape? You’ve ended up in this hole, let yourself get caught in a trap, reduced to the dimensions of a world where everything is limited.’

  ‘I am here of my own free will,’ I retorted, but I knew she would not understand. For her our life was in the freedom of space criss-crossed by rays of light, amidst the bursts of solar explosions that constantly buffeted us this way and that, outside all dimensions and forms.

  ‘Still your old game of pretending it’s you who choose, decide, determine,’ said Rah. ‘Your old flaw.’

  ‘And you? How did you get here?’ I asked. Was the ionosphere not an impregnable barrier? So often I had heard Rah graze against it like a butterfly beating its wings against the window of a room. ‘You still haven’t told me how you got in.’

  She shrugged. ‘A burst of rays, a hole in the ceiling; now here I am down to get you.’

  ‘To get me? But it’s you who are trapped. How will you get back out?’

  ‘I’ll stay here. I’m staying with you,’ she said.

  ‘Disaster, Sir!’ Simmons was racing along the deck towards me. ‘All the radio installations on board have packed up!’

  Evans was hidden behind a hatchway, and he seized the radio operator by his arm; he was saying—I worked this out from his gestures—that it was pointless to turn to me, the magnetic storm had addled my brain, that I talked to myself, staring up at the masts.

  I tried to re-establish my authority: ‘The ocean is crossed by powerful electric currents,’ I explained, ‘the tension in the wires increases, the valves go, it’s all normal . . .’ But by now they were looking at me with eyes that no longer showed any respect for my rank.

  The next day the effects of the magnetic storm had ceased to be felt all over the ocean except on board our ship, and for a wide area around. The Halley continued to drag Rah along behind it, languidly reclining in the air, hanging on by a finger to the radar, the lightning conductor or the smokestack. The compass was like a fish floundering in a tub, the radio continued to boil like a pan of chickpeas. The ships that had been sent to our aid could not find us: their instruments broke down as soon as they got close.

  At night luminous streaks hovered above the Halley; it was an Aurora Borealis all to ourselves, as though it was our flag. This was what allowed the aid ships to track us down. Without getting too close in case they got infected by what seemed a mysterious magnetic disease, they guided us into the Liverpool roadstead.

  The story began to spread through every harbour: wherever the captain of the Halley went, he carried around with him electric storms and an Aurora Borealis. Furthermore, my officers told everyone around that I had links with invisible powers. Naturally I lost the command of the Halley, and there was no way of obtaining other captaincies. Luckily, with the savings from my years of sailing I had bought an old house in the country, in Lancashire, where—as I said—I used to stay between one voyage and another, and where I could devote myself to my beloved experiments in the measurement and prediction of natural phenomena. I had filled the house with precision instruments I had made myself, among which there was a monochrome heliograph. Every time I got back on shore, I could not wait to lock myself away with all those gadgets.

  So I retired to Lancashire, with my wife Rah. Immediately the televisions of other house-owners started to go wrong, for an area of several miles around. There was no way of getting any broadcast into focus: on the screen black and white streaks whirled around as though a flea-ridden zebra had come on.

  I knew there were rumours about us but I wasn’t worried: it seemed they were annoyed above all by my experiments; they were still living in the time when my machines actually worked; maybe they did not yet suspect anything about my wife—they had never seen her, they didn’t know that in our house no device could work any more, that we did not even have electric light.

  Nevertheless, the one thing you could see coming from our windows at night was the light of candles and this gave our house a sinister air: in those days many people stayed up at night to see the flashes of th
e Aurora Borealis which had become a feature of our region; no wonder suspicions about us increased. Subsequently migrating birds could be seen losing their sense of direction: storks arrived in the middle of winter, and albatrosses swooped down on the moors.

  One day I received a visit from the vicar, the Reverend Collins.

  ‘I would like to have a word with you, Captain—’ and he gave a little cough—‘about certain phenomena which have been taking place in the parish, you know? And about certain rumours that are going around . . .’

  He was on the threshold. I invited him in. He was unable to conceal his amazement at seeing everything in pieces in our house: shards of glass, dynamo brushes, bits of nautical maps, everything in chaos.

  ‘But this is not the house I visited last Easter . . .’ he muttered.

  I too was for a second seized by a nostalgia for my ordered, well-equipped and fully functioning laboratory, which I had let him visit the previous year. (The Reverend Collins was very careful to keep courteous relations with the local inhabitants, especially with those who never set foot in church.)

  I recovered my composure. ‘Yes, well, we’ve changed the layout a bit . . .’

  The vicar immediately came to the point of his visit. All the strange things that happened after I had returned to live there, as a married man (he emphasized this phrase), were linked in public opinion with my person, or with Mrs Qfwfq (I gave a start), though nobody had yet had the good fortune, he said, to have met her. I said nothing in reply. ‘You know what people are like around here,’ the Reverend Collins went on, ‘there’s still so much ignorance, so much superstition . . . One cannot, of course, believe everything they say . . .’ And it was not clear whether he had come to apologize for the hostility of his parishioners towards me, or to establish how much truth there was in what they said. ‘There are completely groundless rumours. Just imagine what I’ve heard said: that your wife has been seen at night flying above the rooftops and swinging on the television aerials. “What?” I asked, “and what does this Mrs Qfwfq look like? Like an imp, an elf?” “No,” they replied, “she is a giantess who is always stretched out in the air like a cloud . . .’ ”

  ‘No, that’s impossible, I assure you,’ I began, though I was not quite clear what I was trying to deny. ‘Rah has to lie out because of her physical condition . . . you understand? And that is why we prefer not to socialize . . . but she stays at home . . . Rah is nearly always in the house now . . . If you want, I’ll introduce her to you . . .’

  Naturally the Reverend Collins leaped at the chance. I had to lead him to the garage, a big, old garage-cum-storehouse which at one time, when this property was a farm, had been used for threshing-machines and for drying hay. There were no windows, light filtered in through the cracks, and you could see the dust-beams hanging in the air. And in the midst of the dustclouds Rah was clearly visible. She took up the whole of the garage, lying on her side, curled up into a ball, one hand holding her knee, and the other stroking a Rutherford coil as though it was an Angora cat. She kept her head down because the ceiling was a bit low for her; her eyes were half closed on account of the sparks that showered from the copper wire of the coil each time her hand rose up to stifle a yawn.

  ‘Poor thing, shut up like this, she’s a bit bored, she’s not really used to it,’ I tried to explain, but it was something else I would have liked to articulate: the pride that filled my heart at that sight. This is what I would have said, had there been anyone able to understand me: ‘See how she’s changed: when she came here, she was a fury; who would ever have thought I’d be able to live with this tempest, to contain it and tame it?’

  Lost in such thoughts, I had almost forgotten about the vicar. I turned round. He was no longer there. He’d escaped! There he was racing away, jumping the hedges, vaulting over them with his umbrella.

  Now I’m waiting for the worst. I know that my neighbours have banded together in armed gangs, surrounding the hill. I hear the dogs barking, people shouting to each other, every now and then the rustling of leaves from a hideout where they are spying on me from a hedge. They are about to attack the house, perhaps to set it on fire: I can see a number of lit torches scattered all around. I don’t know whether they are intending to take us alive, or lynch us, or kill us off in the flames. Perhaps it’s my wife they want to burn as a witch; or maybe they have realized that she will never allow herself to be taken?

  I look at the Sun: it looks as if it has entered into a phase of tumultuous activity; the sun-spots are diminishing; bubbles that are a hundred times more bright are spreading all over it. Now I open the garage and allow the light to stream in. I wait for a more powerful explosion to fling an electric spark into space, and that way the Sun will stretch out its arms all the way here, it will rend the veil that separates us, will come and take back its daughter, and let her return to her headlong runs over the endless plains of outer space.

  Soon all the televisions in the area will start working again, the images of detergents and beautiful girls will occupy the screen again, these gangs of persecutors will disperse, everyone will go back to their ration of daily rationality. I too will be able to reassemble my laboratory, go back to the way of life I had chosen, before this enforced interruption.

  But do not think that, even with Rah on my back, I have ever strayed from the line of conduct I had set for myself; do not believe that I surrendered at any point, seeing that I could not escape from Rah, that she was too strong. I had come up with a plan that was even more difficult, to replace the one that had been forestalled by Rah, a plan that depended on Rah, or in spite of Rah, or rather because of Rah, or more accurately a plan created out of love for Rah, the only way to bring to fulfilment the love between the two of us: to plan, in the midst of that shattering of instruments, in that dustcloud of vibrations, other instruments, other measurements, other calculations that would allow us to know and control the interplanetary sun-storm that pervades and shakes and judders and conditions us, something beyond our illusory ionized umbrella. That was what I wanted. And now that she is rising like a lightning-bolt towards the sphere of fire, and I am coming back to being master of myself, I begin to gather the fragments of my machines. This is the point when I see how pathetic are the powers that I have recovered.

  My persecutors have not yet noticed anything. Here they are arriving, armed with pitchforks and rifles and sticks.

  ‘Are you happy now?’ I shout. ‘She’s not here any more! Go back to your compasses, to your television programmes! Everything is in order! Rah’s gone. But you don’t realize what you’ve lost. You don’t know what my plan was, my plan for you, you don’t know what Rah’s presence might have meant for us, disastrous, unbearable Rah, for me and for you who are about to lynch me!’

  They’ve stopped. They don’t understand what I’m saying, they don’t believe me, they don’t know whether to be afraid or be encouraged by it. In any case, I don’t understand what I’ve said either, I don’t believe myself, I don’t know whether to feel relieved either, and I’m afraid too.

  Shells and Time

  Documentation on life on Earth, which is very scarce for the Precambrian period, suddenly starts to become extremely plentiful from about 520 million years ago, for in the Cambrian and Ordovician periods living organisms begin to secrete calcareous shells that will be preserved as fossils in geological strata.

  Who do you think admitted you to that dimension in which you are all immersed, so much so that you believe you were born into it and for it, who do you think opened the breach for you? It was me—Qfwfq’s voice could be heard exclaiming, from underneath a shell—me, a lowly mollusc condemned to my moment-by-moment existence, a prisoner of an eternal present. It’s pointless you pretending to understand; you can’t guess what I’m talking about. I’m talking of time. If it hadn’t been for me, time would never have existed.

  Because, listen carefully, I had no idea what time might be like, and I didn’t even have any idea that something like
time could ever exist. Days and nights crashed over me like waves, all interchangeable, identical or marked by totally fortuitous differences, a toing and froing where it was impossible to establish any sense or norm. However, in constructing my shell, the intention I had for it was already in some sense connected with time, an intention to separate my present from the corrosive dissolution of all presents, to keep it out, to set it apart. The present landed on me with so many different aspects I could not establish any succession: waves, nights, afternoons, ebbs, winters, quarters of the moon, tides, summer heatwaves; my fear was of losing myself in all this, of splitting myself up into as many myselves as there were bits of the present that were dumped on me, layer after layer, and that for all I knew might all have been simultaneous, each one inhabited by a bit of myself that was contemporaneous with all the other bits.

  I had to start by fixing some signs in this immeasurable continuum, by establishing a series of intervals; in other words, numbers. The calcareous matter I secreted, making it whirl like a spiral on top of itself, was precisely that, something that continued uninterrupted; but meantime, at every turn of the spiral, it separated the edge of one spiral from the edge of another, so that if I wanted to count something I could start by counting these spirals. In short, what I wanted to construct was a time that belonged to me alone, regulated solely by myself, self-contained: a clock that did not have to report to anyone what it was measuring. I would have liked to construct an extremely long, unbroken shell-time, to continue my spiral without ever stopping.

  I went to it with all my strength, and of course I wasn’t the only one: at the same time, many others were trying to build their own endless shells. Whether I or someone else succeeded was not important: all it needed was for one of us to manage to make an endless spiral and time would exist, that would be time. But now I come to the most difficult thing of all to say (also the most difficult thing to reconcile with the fact that I am here speaking to you): to talk of time, that thing that never stays up, that unravels, that collapses like a bank of sand, that is as multifaceted as saline crystals, as ramified as a coral reef, as porous as a sponge (and I am not going to tell you which hole, what breach I went through to get all the way to here). The infinite spiral proved impossible to make: the shell grew and grew, and at a certain point stopped—that was it, finished. Another one started up somewhere else, thousands of shells started every second, thousands and thousands continued to grow in every phase of the winding of the spiral, and all of them sooner or later would suddenly stop, and the waves would drag away an empty container.