ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Italo Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923, and grew up in Italy. He was an essayist and journalist and a member of the editorial staff of Einaudi in Turin. His other novels include If on a winter’s night a traveller and The Castle of Crossed Destinies. In 1973 he won the prestigious Premio Feltrinelli. He died in 1985.
ALSO BY ITALO CALVINO
The Path to the Spiders’ Nests
Adam, One Afternoon
Our Ancestors
Marcovaldo
Cosmicomics
Time and the Hunter
The Watcher and Other Stories
Italian Folktalkes
Invisible Cities
If on a winter’s night a traveller
The Castle of Crossed Destinies
Mr Palomar
The Literature Machine
Six Memos for the Next Millennium
Under the Jaguar Sun
The Road to San Giovanni
Numbers in the Dark
Hermit in Paris
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Epub ISBN: 9781446414422
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Published by Vintage 1999
8 10 9
Copyright © Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a., Turin 1957, 1958, 1970
Difficult Loves English translation copyright ©
Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd 1983
Smog English translation copyright © Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, Inc 1971
A Plunge into Real Estate English translation copyright ©
Pocket Books 1964
First published in Great Britain by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd 1983
Published in paperback by Minerva 1993
Vintage
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A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099430889
Contents
DIFFICULT LOVES
The adventure of a soldier
The adventure of a crook
The adventure of a bather
The adventure of a clerk
The adventure of a photographer
The adventure of a traveler
The adventure of a reader
The adventure of a near-sighted man
The adventure of a wife
The adventure of the married couple
The adventure of a poet
SMOG
A PLUNGE INTO REAL ESTATE
The adventure of a soldier
IN THE compartment, a lady came and sat down, tall and buxom, next to Private Tomagra. She must have been a widow from the provinces, to judge by her dress and her veil: the dress was black silk, appropriate for prolonged mourning, but with useless frills and furbelows, and the veil went all around her face, falling from the brim of a massive, old-fashioned hat. Other places were free, Private Tomagra noticed, there in the compartment; and he had assumed the widow would surely choose one of them. But, on the contrary, despite the vicinity of a coarse soldier like himself, she came and sat right there, no doubt for some reason connected with comfortable traveling, the soldier quickly decided, a draft, or the direction of the train.
Her body was in full bloom, solid, indeed a bit square. If its high curves had not been tempered by a matronly softness, you would have said she was no more than thirty; but when you looked at her face, at the complexion both marmoreal and relaxed, the unattainable gaze beneath the heavy eyelids and the thick black brows, at the sternly sealed lips, hastily colored with a jarring red, she seemed, instead, past forty.
Tomagra, a young infantry private on his first leave (it was Easter), huddled down in his seat for fear that the lady, so ample and shapely, might not fit; and immediately he found himself in the aura of her perfume, a popular and perhaps cheap scent, but now, out of long wear, blended with natural human odors.
The lady sat down with a composed demeanor, revealing, there beside him, less majestic proportions than he had imagined when he had seen her standing. Her hands were plump, with tight, dark rings; she kept them folded in her lap, over a shiny purse and a jacket she had taken off, exposing round, white arms. At her first movement, Tomagra had shifted, to make space for a broad maneuvering of her arms; but she had remained almost motionless, slipping out of the sleeves with a few brief twitches of her shoulders and torso.
The railroad seat was therefore fairly comfortable for two, and Tomagra could feel the lady’s extreme closeness, though without any fear of offending her by his contact. All the same, Tomagra reasoned, lady though she was, she had surely not shown any sign of repugnance towards him, towards his rough uniform; otherwise she would have sat farther away. And, at these thoughts, his muscles, till now contracted and tensed, relaxed freely, serenely; indeed, without his moving, they tried to expand to their greatest extension, and his leg, its tendons taut, at first detached even from the cloth of his trousers, settled more broadly, not tightening the material that covered it, and the wool grazed the widow’s black silk. And now, through this wool and that silk, the soldier’s leg was adhering to her leg with a soft, fleeting movement, like two sharks grazing each other, and sending waves through its veins to those other veins.
It was still a very light contact, which every jolt of the train could break off and recreate; the lady had strong, fat knees, and Tomagra’s bones could sense at every jerk the lazy bump of the kneecap. The calf had raised a silken cheek that, with an imperceptible thrust, had to be made to coincide with his own. This meeting of calves was precious, but it came at a price, a loss: in fact, the body’s weight was shifted and the reciprocal support of the hips no longer occurred with the same docile abandon. In order to achieve a natural and satisfied position, it was necessary to move slightly on the seat, with the aid of a curve in the track, and also of the comprehensible need to shift position every so often.
The lady was impassive, beneath her matronly hat, her gaze fixed, lidded, and her hands steady on the purse in her lap. And yet her body, for a very long while, rested against that stretch of man: hadn’t she realized this yet? Or was she preparing to flee? To rebel?
Tomagra decided to transmit, somehow, a message to her: he contracted the muscle of his calf into a kind of hard, square fist, and then with this calf-fist, as if a hand inside it wanted to open, he quickly knocked at the calf of the widow. To be sure, this was a very rapid movement, barely time for some flicker of the tendons; but in any case, she didn’t draw back, at least not so far as he could tell. Because immediately, needing to justify that covert movement, Tomagra extended his leg as if to get a kink out of it.
Now he had to begin all over again; that patient and prudently established contact had been lost. Tomagra decided to be more courageous; as if looking for something, he stuck his hand in his pocket, the pocket towards the woman, and then, as if absently, he left it there. It had been a rapid action, Tomagra didn’t know whether he had touched her or not, an inconsequential gesture; and yet he realized what an important step forward he had made, and in what a risky game he was now involved. Against the back of his hand, the hip of the lady in black was pressing; he felt it weighing on eve
ry finger, every knuckle; now any movement of his hand would have been an act of incredible intimacy towards the widow. Holding his breath, Tomagra turned his hand inside his pocket; in other words, he set the palm towards the lady, open against her, though still in the pocket. It was an impossible position, the wrist twisted. And yet, at this point, he might just as well attempt a decisive action: and so he ventured to move the fingers of that contorted hand. There could no longer be any possible doubt: the widow couldn’t have helped but notice his maneuvering, and if she didn’t draw back, but pretended to be impassive and absent, it meant that she wasn’t rejecting his advances. When he thought about it, however, her paying no attention to Tomagra’s mobile hand might mean that she really believed he was hunting for something in that pocket: a railway ticket, a match . . . There: and if now the soldier’s fingertips, the pads, seemingly endowed with a sudden clair-voyance, could sense through those different stuffs the hems of subterranean garments and even very minute roughnesses of skin, pores and moles, if, as I said, his fingertips arrived at this, perhaps her flesh, marmoreal and lazy, was hardly aware that these were, in fact, fingertips and not, for example, nails or knuckles.
Then, with furtive steps, the hand emerged from the pocket, paused there, undecided, and, with sudden haste to adjust the trouser along the side seam, proceeded down all the way to the knee. It would have been more accurate to say it cleared a path: because to go forward, it had to dig in between himself and the woman: a route, even in its speed, rich in anxieties and sweet emotions.
It must be said that Tomagra had thrown his head back against the seat, so one might also have thought he was sleeping: this was not so much an alibi for himself as it was a way of offering the lady, in the event that his insistence didn’t irritate her, a reason to feel at ease, knowing that his actions were divorced from his consciousness, surfacing barely from the depths of sleep. And there, from this alert semblance of sleep, Tomagra’s hand, clutching his knee, detached one finger, the little finger, and sent it out to reconnoiter. The finger slid along her knee, which remained still and docile; Tomagra could perform diligent figures with the little finger on the silk of the stocking which, through his half-closed eyes, he could barely glimpse, light and curving. But he realized that the risk of this game was without reward, because the little finger, scant of surface and awkward in movement, transmitted only partial hints of sensations and was incapable of conceiving the form and substance of what it was touching.
Then he reattached the little finger to the rest of the hand, not withdrawing it, but adding to it the ring-finger, the middle-finger, the fore-finger: now his whole hand rested, inert, on that female knee, and the train cradled it in a rocking caress.
It was then that Tomagra thought of the others: if the lady, whether out of compliance or out of a mysterious intangibility, didn’t react at his boldness, facing them, there were still seated other persons who could be scandalized by that non-soldierly behavior of his, and by that possible silent complicity on the woman’s part. Chiefly to spare the lady such suspicion, Tomagra withdrew his hand, or rather he hid it, as if it were the only guilty party. But this hiding it, he later thought, was only a hypocritical pretext: in fact, abandoning it there, on the seat, he intended simply to move it closer to the lady, who occupied, in fact, such a large part of the space.
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 would be too late. 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, wedge-like between the seat and her, he pushed with an invisible movement, 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 because, as Tomagra thought, if she did accept, on the contrary, 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. Were these signals 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 this 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 moved 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 towards 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 into the hand again. 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 there was the leap to the knee, and the void.
It was the end, Private Tomagra thought, of this secret spree: and now, thinking back, he found it a truly poor thing in his memory, though he had greedily blown it up while experiencing it: a clumsy feel on 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.
In the intention, however, of withdrawing his hand, desolate, he was interrupted, as he noticed the way she held 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 trust that 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 himself, as he tried to discover something in her behavior that hinted at further condescension, and he now considered his own actions 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. Then, 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 deeper and deeper, and Tomagra then, first with timid gestures, occasionally drawing back as if he were really at the first advances and were 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, towards the bosom, large and somewhat abandoned to its own heaviness, 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.
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