The Complete Cosmicomics
Page 37
Came the day of the eruption, a tower of lapilli rose black in the air above a decapitated Vesuvius, the lava poured through the vineyards of the bay, burst the gates of Herculaneum, crushed the mule-driver and his beast against a wall, snatched the miser from his money, the slave from his chopping block; a dog trapped in his collar pulled the chain from the ground and sought refuge in the barn. I was there in the midst: I pressed forward with the lava, the flaming avalanche broke up in tongues, rivers, snakes, and at the foremost tip I was there running forward to find Eurydice. I knew—something told me—that she was still a prisoner of the unknown singer: when I heard the music of that instrument and the timbre of that voice, I would have found her too.
I rushed on, transported by the lava flow through secluded gardens towards marble temples. I heard the song and a chord; two voices alternated; I recognized Eurydice’s—but how changed!—following the stranger’s. Greek characters on the undercurve of an arch spelt: Orpheos. I broke down the door, flooded over the threshold. For just an instant I saw her, next to the harp. The place was closed and vaulted, made specially, you would have thought, so that the music could gather there, as though in a shell. A heavy curtain, of leather I had the impression, or rather padded like a quilt, closed off a window, so as to isolate their music from the world around. As soon as I went in, Eurydice wrenched the curtain aside, throwing open the window; outside was the bay dazzling with reflected light and the city and the streets. The midday sun invaded the room, the sun and the sounds: a strumming of guitars rose from every side and the throbbing roar of scores of loudspeakers, together with the jagged backfiring of car engines and the honking of horns. The armour of noise stretched out across the Earth’s crust: the cortex which circumscribes your surface lives, with its antennas bristling on the roofs, turning to sound the waves that travel unseen and unheard through space, with its radios stuck to your ears, constantly filling them with the acoustic glue without which you don’t know whether you’re dead or alive, its jukeboxes with their store of incessantly revolving sounds and the never-ending siren of the ambulance picking up the wounded of your never-ending massacres.
The lava stopped against this wall of sound. Lacerated by the barbs of that fence of crashing vibrations, I made one more move forward to the point where for a moment I had seen Eurydice, but she was gone, and gone likewise her abductor: the song by which and on which they lived was submerged by the intruding avalanche of noise, and I could no longer distinguish either her or her song.
I withdrew, climbing reluctantly back along the lava flow, up the slopes of the volcano, I returned to live in silence, to bury myself.
Now, you who live without, tell me if by chance you happen to catch Eurydice’s song in that thick paste of sounds that surrounds you, the song that holds her prisoner and is in turn prisoner of the non-song that massacres all songs, and if you should recognize Eurydice’s voice with its distant echo of the silent music of the elements, tell me, give me news of her, you extraterrestrials, temporary victors, so that I can resume my plans to bring Eurydice to the centre of terrestrial life, to restore the realm of the gods of within, of the gods who inhabit the dense compactness of things, now that the gods of without, the gods of the Olympian heights and the rarefied air, have given you all they could give, and clearly it isn’t enough.
First U.S. edition
Copyright © 2002 by The Estate of Italo Calvino
Translation of ‘The Distance of the Moon’, ‘At Daybreak’, ‘A Sign in Space’, ‘All at One Point’, ‘Without Colours’, ‘Games Without End’, ‘The Aquatic Uncle’, ‘How Much Shall We Bet?’, ‘The Dinosaurs’, ‘The Form of Space’, ‘The Light-Years’, and ‘The Spiral’ copyright © Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc. and Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1968
Translation of ‘The Soft Moon’, ‘The Origin of the Birds’, ‘Crystals’, ‘Blood, Sea’, ‘Mitosis’, ‘Meiosis’, ‘Death’, ‘t zero’, ‘The Chase’, ‘The Night Driver’, and ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ copyright © Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc. and Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1969
Translation of ‘World Memory’, ‘Nothing and Not Much’, ‘Implosion’, and ‘The Other Eurydice’ copyright © Tim Parks, 1995
Introduction and translations of ‘The Mushroom Moon’, ‘The Daughters of the Moon’, ‘The Meteorites’, ‘The Stone Sky’, ‘As Long as the Sun Lasts’, ‘Solar Storm’, and ‘Shells and Time’ copyright © Martin McLaughlin, 2009
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhco.com
Introduction and stories 24–30 first published in the United Kingdom by Penguin Books Ltd, 2009
Stories 1–23 first published in the United States by Harcourt, Inc., as Cosmicomics and t zero, 1968, 1969
Stories 31–4 first published in the United States by Pantheon Books in Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories, 1995
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows: Calvino, Italo.
[Cosmicomiche. English]
The complete cosmicomics / Italo Calvino ; Translated by Martin McLaughlin,
Tim Parks, and William Weaver.—First U.S. Edition.
pages cm.
ISBN 978-0-544-14644-0 (hardback)
I. McLaughlin, M. L. (Martin L.) translator. II. Parks, Tim, translator. III. Weaver, William, 1923–2013. translator. IV. Title.
PQ4809.A45C6513 2014
853'.914—dc23 2014001375
eISBN: 978-0-544-23194-8
v1.0914
About the Author
ITALO CALVINO (1923–1985) attained worldwide renown as one of the twentieth century’s greatest storytellers. Born in Cuba, he was raised in San Remo, Italy, and later lived in Turin, Paris, Rome, and elsewhere. Among his many works are Invisible Cities, If on a winter’s night a traveler, The Baron in the Trees, and other novels, as well as numerous collections of fiction, folktales, criticism, and essays. His works have been translated into dozens of languages.