Difficult Loves

by Italo Calvino

  “Come closer,” Delia said. As she swam, she had taken off the scrap of cloth covering her bosom; she threw it into the canoe. “Just a minute.” She also undid the other piece of cloth tied at her hips and handed it to Usnelli.

  Now she was naked. The whiter skin of her bosom and hips was hardly distinct, because her whole person gave off that pale blue glow, like a medusa. She was swimming on one side, with a lazy movement, her head (the expression firm, almost ironic, a statue’s) just out of the water, and at times the curve of a shoulder and the soft line of the extended arm. The other arm, in caressing strokes, covered and revealed the high bosom, taut at its tips. Her legs barely struck the water, supporting the smooth belly, marked by the navel like a faint print on the sand, and the star as of some mollusc. The sun’s rays, reflected underwater, grazed her, making a kind of garment for her, or stripping her all over again.

  Her swimming turned into a kind of dance-movement; suspended in the water, smiling at him, she held out her arms in a soft rolling of the shoulders and wrists; or with a thrust of the knee she brought to the surface an arched foot, like a little fish.

  Usnelli, in the boat, was all eyes. He understood that what life now gave him was something not everyone has the privilege of looking at, open-eyed, as at the most dazzling core of the sun. And in the core of this sun was silence. Nothing that was there at this moment could be translated into anything else, perhaps not even into a memory.

  Now Delia was swimming on her back, surfacing towards the sun, at the mouth of the cavern, proceeding with a light movement of her arms towards the open; and beneath her the water was changing its shade of blue, paler and paler, more and more luminous.

  “Watch out! Put something on! Some boats are coming, out there!”

  Delia was already among the rocks, beneath the sky. She slipped underwater, held out her arm. Usnelli handed her those skimpy bits of garment, she fastened them on, swimming, and climbed back into the canoe.

  The approaching boats were fishermen’s. Usnelli recognized them as some of that group of poor men who spent the fishing season on that beach, sleeping against the rocks. He went towards them. The man at the oars was the young man, grim with toothache, white sailor’s cap pulled over his narrowed eyes, rowing in jerks as if every effort helped him feel the pain less; father of five children; a desperate case. The old man was at the poop; his Mexican-style straw hat crowned with a fringed halo his whole lanky figure, his round eyes once perhaps widened in arrogant pride, now in drunkard’s clowning, his mouth open beneath the still-black, drooping mustache; with a knife he was cleaning the mullet they had caught.

  “Caught much?” Delia cried.

  “What little there is,” they answered. “Bad year.”

  Delia liked to talk with the local inhabitants. Not Usnelli. (“With them,” he said, “I don’t have an easy conscience.” He would shrug, and leave it at that.)

  Now the canoe was alongside the boat, where the faded paint was streaked with cracks, curling in short segments, and the oar tied with a length of rope to the rowlock creaked at every turn against the worn wood of the side, and a little rusty anchor with four hooks had got tangled under the narrow plank-seat in one of the wicker basket traps, bearded with reddish seaweed, dried out God knows how long ago, and over the pile of nets dyed with tannin and dotted at the edges by round slices of cork, the gasping fish glinted in their pungent dress of scales, dull-gray or pale blue; the gills still throbbing displayed, below, a red triangle of blood.

  Usnelli remained silent, but this anguish of the human world was the contrary of what the beauty of nature had been communicating to him a little earlier: there every word failed, while here there was a turmoil of words that crowded into his mind: words to describe every wart, every hair on the thin, ill-shaven face of the old fishermen, every silver scale of the mullet.

  On shore, another boat had been pulled in, overturned, propped up on saw-horses, and below, from the shadow, emerged the soles of the bare feet of the sleeping men, those who had fished during the night; nearby, a woman, all in black clothing, faceless, was setting a pot over a seaweed fire, and a long trail of smoke was coming from it. The shore of that inlet was of gray stones; those patches of faded, printed colors were the smocks of the playing children, the smaller watched over by older, whining sisters, while the older and livelier boys, wearing only shorts made from old, grown-ups’ trousers, were running up and down between rocks and water. Farther on a straight stretch of sandy beach began, white and deserted, which at one side disappeared into a sparse cane-brake and untilled fields. A young man in his Sunday clothes, all black, even his hat, with a stick over his shoulder and a bundle hanging from it, was walking by the sea the length of that beach, the nails of his shoes marking the friable crust of sand: certainly a peasant or a shepherd from an inland village who had come down to the coast for some market or other and had taken the seaside path for the soothing breeze. The railway showed its wires, its embankment, its poles, the fence, then vanished into the tunnel and began again farther on, vanished once more. And once more emerged, like stitches in uneven sewing. Above the white and black markers of the highway, squat olive groves began to climb; and higher still the mountains were bare, grazing land or shrubs or only stones. A village set in a cleft among those heights extended upwards, the houses one on top of the other, separated by cobbled stair-streets, concave in the middle so that the trickle of mule refuse could flow down, and on the doorsteps of all those houses there were numerous women, old or aged, and on the parapets, seated in a row, numerous men, old and young, all in white shirts, and in the middle of the streets like stairways, the babies were playing on the ground and an older youth was lying across the path, his cheek against the step, sleeping there because it was a bit cooler than inside the house and less smelly, and everywhere, lighting or circling there were clouds of flies, and on every wall and every festoon of newspaper around the fireplaces there was the infinite spatter of fly excrement, and into Usnelli’s mind came words and words, thick, woven one into the other, with no space between the lines, until little by little they could no longer be distinguished, it was a tangle from which even the tiniest white spaces were vanishing and only the black remained, the most total black, impenetrable, desperate as a scream.

  (1958)

  SMOG

  Translated by William Weaver

  THAT WAS a time when I didn’t give a damn about anything, the period when I came to settle in this city. Settle is the wrong term. I had no desire to be settled in any sense; I wanted everything around me to remain flowing, temporary, because I felt it was the only way to save my inner stability, though what that consisted of, I couldn’t have said. So when, after a whole series of recommendations, I was offered the job as managing editor of the magazine Purification, I came here to the city and looked for a place to live.

  To a young man who has just got off the train, the city – as everyone must know – seems like one big station: no matter how much he walks about, the streets are still squalid, garages, warehouses, cafés with zinc counters, trucks discharging stinking gas in his face, as he constantly shifts his suitcase from hand to hand, as he feels his hands swell and become dirty, his underwear stick to him, his nerves grow taut, and everything he sees is nerve-racking, piecemeal. I found a suitable furnished room in one of those very streets; beside the door of the building there were two clusters of signs, bits of shoebox hung there on lengths of string, with the information that a room was for rent written in a rough hand, the tax stamps stuck in one corner. As I stopped to shift the suitcase again, I saw the signs and went into the building. At each stairway, on each landing there were a couple of ladies who rented rooms. I rang the bell on the second floor, stairway C.

  The room was commonplace, a bit dark, because it opened on a courtyard, through a French window; that was how I was to come in, along a landing with a rusty railing. The room, in other words, was independent of the rest of the apartment, but to reach it I had to unloc
k a series of gates; the landlady, Signorina Margariti, was deaf and rightly feared thieves. There was no bath; the toilet was off the landing, in a kind of wooden shed; in the room there was a basin with running water, with no hot-water heater. But, after all, what could I expect? The price was right, or rather, it was the only possible price, because I couldn’t spend more and I couldn’t hope to find anything cheaper; besides, it was only temporary and I wanted to make that quite clear to myself.

  “Yes, all right, I’ll take it,” I said to Signorina Margariti, who thought I had asked if the room was cold; she showed me the stove. With that, I had seen everything and I wanted to leave my luggage there and go out. But first I went to the basin and put my hands under the faucet; ever since I had arrived I had been anxious to wash them, but I only rinsed them hastily because I didn’t feel like opening my suitcase to look for my soap.

  “Oh, why didn’t you tell me? I’ll bring a towel right away!” Signorina Margariti said; she ran into the other room and came back with a freshly ironed towel which she placed on the footboard of the bed. I dashed a little water on my face, to freshen up – I felt irritatingly unclean – then I rubbed my face with the towel. That act finally made the landlady realize I meant to take the room. “Ah, you’re going to take it! Good. You must want to change, to unpack; make yourself right at home, here’s the wardrobe, give me your overcoat!”

  I didn’t let her slip the overcoat off my back; I wanted to go out at once. My only immediate need, as I tried to tell her, was some shelves; I was expecting a case of books, the little library I had managed to keep together in my haphazard life. It cost me some effort to make the deaf woman understand; finally she led me into the other rooms, her part of the house, to a little étagère, where she kept her work baskets and embroidery patterns; she told me she would clear it and put it in my room. I went out.

  Purification was the organ of an Institute, where I was to report, to learn my duties. A new job, an unfamiliar city – had I been younger or had I expected more of life, these would have pleased and stimulated me; but not now, now I could see only the grayness, the poverty that surrounded me, and I could only plunge into it as if I actually liked it, because it confirmed my belief that life could be nothing else. I purposely chose to walk in the most narrow, anonymous, unimportant streets, though I could easily have gone along those with fashionable shop windows and smart cafés; but I didn’t want to miss the careworn expression on the faces of the passers-by, the shabby look of the cheap restaurants, the stagnant little stores, and even certain sounds which belong to narrow streets: the streetcars, the braking of pickup trucks, the sizzling of welders in the little workshops in the courtyards: all because that wear, that exterior clashing kept me from attaching too much importance to the wear, the clash that I carried within myself.

  But to reach the Institute, I was obliged at one point to enter an entirely different neighborhood, elegant, shaded, old-fashioned, its side streets almost free of vehicles, and its main avenues so spacious that traffic could flow past without noise or jams. It was autumn; some of the trees were golden. The sidewalk did not flank walls, buildings, but fences with hedges beyond them, flower beds, gravel walks, constructions that lay somewhere between the palazzo and the villa, ornate in their architecture. Now I felt lost in a different way, because I could no longer find, as I had done before, things in which I recognized myself, in which I could read the future. (Not that I believe in signs, but when you’re nervous, in a new place, everything you see is a sign.)

  So I was a bit disoriented when I entered the Institute offices, different from the way I had imagined them, because they were the salons of an aristocratic palazzo, with mirrors and consoles and marble fireplaces and hangings and carpets (though the actual furniture was the usual kind for a modern office, and the lighting was the latest sort, with neon tubes). In other words, I was embarrassed then at having taken such an ugly, dark room, especially when I was led into the office of the president, Commendatore Cordà, who promptly greeted me with exaggerated expansiveness, treating me as an equal not only in social and business importance – which in itself was a hard position for me to maintain – but also as his equal in knowledge and interest in the problems which concerned the Institute and Purification. To tell the truth, I had believed it was all some kind of trick, something to mention with a wink; I had accepted the job just as a last resort, and now I had to act as if I had never thought of anything else in my whole life.

  Commendatore Cordà was a man of about fifty, youthful in appearance, with a black mustache, a member of that generation, in other words, who despite everything still look youthful and wear a black mustache, the kind of man with whom I have absolutely nothing in common. Everything about him, his talk, his appearance – he wore an impeccable gray suit and a dazzlingly white shirt – his gestures – he moved one hand with his cigarette between his fingers – suggested efficiency, ease, optimism, broad-mindedness. He showed me the numbers of Purification that had appeared so far, put out by himself (who was its editor-in-chief) and the Institute’s press officer, Signor Avandero (he introduced me to him; one of those characters who talk as if their words were typewritten). There were only a few, very skimpy issues, and you could see that they weren’t the work of professionals. With the little I knew about magazines, I found a way to tell him – making no criticisms, obviously – how I would do it, the typographical changes I would make. I fell in with his tone, practical, confident in results; and I was pleased to see that we understood each other. Pleased, because the more efficient and optimistic I acted, the more I thought of that wretched furnished room, those squalid streets, that sense of rust and slime I felt on my skin, my not caring a damn about anything, and I seemed to be performing a trick, to be transforming, before the very eyes of Commendatore Cordà and Signor Avandero, all their technical-industrial efficiency into a pile of crumbs, and they were unaware of it, and Cordà kept nodding enthusiastically.

  “Fine. Yes, absolutely, tomorrow, you and I agree, and meanwhile,” Cordà said to me, “just to bring you up to date . . .” And he insisted on giving me the Proceedings of their latest convention to read. “Here,” he took me over to some shelves where the mimeographed copies of all the speeches were arranged in so many stacks. “You see? Take this one, and this other one. Do you already have this? Here, count them and see if they’re all there.” And as he spoke, he picked up those papers and at that moment I noticed how they raised a little cloud of dust, and I saw the prints of his fingers outlined on their surface, which he had barely touched. Now the Commendatore, in picking up those papers, tried to give them a little shake, but just a slight one, as if he didn’t want to admit they were dusty, and he also blew on them gently. He was careful not to put his fingers on the first page of each speech, but if he just grazed one with the tip of a fingernail, he left a little white streak over what seemed a gray background, since the paper was covered with a very fine veil of dust. Nevertheless, his fingers obviously became soiled, and he tried to clean them by bending the tips to his palm and rubbing them, but he only dirtied his whole hand with dust. Then instinctively he dropped his hands to the sides of his gray flannel trousers, caught himself just in time, raised them again, and so we both stood there, our fingertips in mid-air, handing speeches back and forth, taking them delicately by the margins as if they were nettle leaves, and meanwhile we went on smiling, nodding smugly, and saying: “Oh yes, a very interesting convention! Oh yes, an excellent endeavor!” but I noticed that the Commendatore became more and more nervous and insecure, and he couldn’t look into my triumphant eyes, into my triumphant and desperate gaze, desperate because everything confirmed the fact that it was all exactly as I had believed it would be.

  It took me some time to fall asleep. The room, which had seemed so quiet, at night filled with sounds that I learned, gradually, to decipher. Sometimes I could hear a voice, distorted by a loud-speaker, giving brief, incomprehensible commands; if I had dozed off, I would wake up, think
ing I was in a train, because the timbre and the cadence were those of the station loud-speakers, as during the night they rise to the surface of the traveler’s restless sleep. When my ear had become accustomed to them, I managed to grasp the words: “Two ravioli with tomato sauce . . .” the voice said. “Grilled steak . . . Lamb chop . . .” My room was over the kitchen of the “Urbano Rattazzi” beer hall, which served hot meals even after midnight: from the counter, the waiters transmitted the orders to the cooks, snapping out the words over an intercom. In the wake of those messages, a confused sound of voices came up to me and, at times, the harmonizing chorus of a party. But it was a good place to eat in, somewhat expensive, with a clientele that was not vulgar: the nights were rare when some drunk cut up and overturned tables laden with glasses. As I lay in bed, the sounds of others’ wakefulness reached me, muffled, without gusto or color, as if through a fog; the voice over the loudspeaker – “Side dish of French fries . . . where’s that ravioli?” – had a nasal, resigned melancholy.

  At about half past two the “Urbano Rattazzi” beer hall pulled down its metal blinds; the waiters, turning up the collars of their topcoats over the Tyrolean jackets of their uniform, came out of the kitchen door and crossed the courtyard, chatting. At about three a metallic clanking invaded the courtyard: the kitchen workers were dragging out the heavy, empty beer drums, tipping them on their rims and rolling them along, banging one against the other; then the men began rinsing them out. They took their time, since they were no doubt paid by the hour; and they worked carelessly, whistling and making a great racket with those zinc drums, for a couple of hours. At about six, the beer truck came to bring the full drums and collect the empties; but already in the main room of the “Urbano Rattazzi” the sound of the polishers had begun, the machines that cleaned the floors for the day that was about to start.