Difficult Loves

by Italo Calvino

  In moments of silence, in the heart of the night, next door, in Signorina Margariti’s room, an intense talking would suddenly burst forth, mingled with little explosions of laughter, questions and answers, all in the same falsetto female voice; the deaf woman couldn’t distinguish the act of thinking from the act of speaking aloud and at all hours of the day or even when she woke up late at night, whenever she became involved in a thought, a memory, a regret, she started talking to herself, distributing the dialogue among various speakers. Luckily her soliloquies, in their intensity, were incomprehensible; and yet they filled one with the uneasiness of sharing personal indiscretions.

  During the day, when I went into the kitchen to ask her for some hot water to shave with (she couldn’t hear a knock and I had to get within her eyeshot to make her aware of my presence), I would catch her talking to the mirror, smiling and grimacing, or seated, staring into the void, telling herself some story; then she would suddenly collect her wits and say: “Oh, I was talking to the cat,” or else, “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you; I was saying my prayers” (she was very devout). But most of the time she didn’t realize she had been overheard.

  To tell the truth she did talk to the cat often. She could make long speeches to him, for hours, and on certain evenings I heard her repeating “Pss . . . pss . . . kitty. . . here, kitty . . .” at the window, waiting for him to come back from his roaming along the balconies, roofs, and terraces. He was a scrawny, half-wild cat, with blackish fur that was gray every time he came home, as if he collected all the dust and soot of the neighborhood. He ran away from me if he even glimpsed me in the distance and would hide under the furniture, as if I had beaten him at the very least, though I never paid any attention to him. But when I was out he surely visited my room: the freshly washed white shirt which the landlady set on the marble top of the dresser was always found with the cat’s sooty paw prints on its collar and front. I would start shouting curses, which I quickly cut short because the deaf woman couldn’t hear me, and so I then went into the other room to lay the disaster before her eyes. She was sorry, she hunted for the cat to punish him; she explained that no doubt when she had gone into my room to take the shirt, the cat had followed her without her noticing him; and she must have shut him up inside and the animal had jumped up on the dresser, to release his anger at being locked in.

  I had only three shirts and I was constantly giving them to her to wash because – perhaps it was the still disordered life I led, with the office to be straightened out – after half a day my shirt was already dirty. I was often forced to go to the office with the cat’s prints on my collar.

  Sometimes I found his prints also on the pillowcase. He had probably remained shut inside after having followed Signorina Margariti when she came to “turn down the bed”in the evening.

  It was hardly surprising that the cat was so dirty: you only had to put your hand on the railing of the landing to find your palm striped with black. Every time I came home, as I fumbled with the keys at four padlocks or keyholes, than stuck my fingers into the slats of the shutters to open and close the French window, I got my hands so dirty that when I came into the room I had to hold them in the air, to avoid leaving prints, while I went straight to the basin.

  Once my hands were washed and dried I immediately felt better, as if I had regained the use of them, and I began touching and shifting those few objects around me. Signorina Margariti, I must say, kept the room fairly clean; as far as dusting went, she dusted every day; but there were times when, if I put my hand in certain places she couldn’t reach (she was very short and had short arms, too), I drew it out all velvety with dust and I had to go back to the basin and wash immediately.

  My books constituted my most serious problem: I had arranged them on the étagère, and they were the only things that gave me the impression this room was mine; the office left me plenty of free time and I would gladly have spent some hours in my room, reading. But books collect God knows how much dust: I would choose one from the shelf, but then before opening it, I had to rub it all over with a rag, even along the tops of the pages, and then I had to give it a good banging: a cloud of dust rose from it. Afterward I washed my hands again and finally flung myself down on the bed to read. But as I leafed through the book, it became hopeless, I could feel that film of dust on my fingertips, becoming thicker, softer all the time, and it spoiled my pleasure in reading. I got up, went back to the basin, rinsed my hands once more, but now I felt that my shirt was also dusty, and my suit. I would have resumed reading but once my hands were clean I didn’t like to dirty them again. So I decided to go out.

  Naturally, all the operations of leaving: the shutters, the railing, the locks, reduced my hands to a worse state than ever, but I had to leave them as they were until I reached the office. At the office, the moment I arrived, I ran to the toilet to wash them; the office towel, however, was black with finger marks; as I began to dry my hands, I was already dirtying them again.

  I spent my first working days at the Institute putting my desk in order. In fact, the desk assigned me was covered with correspondence, documents, files, old newspapers; until then it had obviously been a kind of clearinghouse where anything with no proper place of its own was put. My first impulse was to make a clean sweep; but then I saw there was material that could be useful for the magazine, and other things of some interest which I decided to examine at my leisure. In short, I finally removed nothing from the desk and actually added a lot of things, but not in disorder: on the contrary, I tried to keep everything tidy. Naturally, the papers that had been there before were very dusty and infected the new papers with their dirt. And since I set great store by my neatness, I had given orders to the cleaning woman not to touch anything, so each day a little more dust settled on the papers, especially on the writing materials, the stationery, the envelopes, and so on, which soon looked old and soiled and were irksome to touch.

  And in the drawers it was the same story. There dusty papers from decades past were stratified, evidence of the desk’s long career through various offices, public and private. No matter what I did at that desk, after a few minutes I felt impelled to go wash my hands.

  My colleague Signor Avandero, on the contrary, kept his hands – delicate little hands, but with a certain nervous hardness – always clean, well groomed, the nails polished, uniformly clipped.

  “Excuse me for asking, but,” I ventured to say to him, “don’t you find, after you’ve been here a while, I mean . . . have you noticed how one’s hands become dirty?”

  “No doubt,” Avandero answered, with his usual composed manner, “you have touched some object or paper that wasn’t perfectly dusted. If you’ll allow me to give you a word of advice, it’s always a good idea to keep the top of one’s desk completely clear.”

  In fact, Avandero’s desk was clear, clean, shining, with only the file he was dealing with at that moment and the ballpoint pen he held in his hand. “It’s a habit,” he added, “that the President feels is very important.” In fact, Commendatore Cordà had said the same thing to me: the executive who keeps his desk completely clear is a man who never lets matters pile up, who starts every problem on the road to its solution. But Cordà was never in the office, and when he was there he stayed a quarter of an hour, had great graphs and statistical charts brought in to him, gave rapid, vague orders to his subordinates, assigned the various duties to one or the other without bothering about the degree of difficulty of each assignment, rapidly dictated a few letters to the stenographer, signed the outgoing correspondence, and was off.

  Not Avandero, though. Avandero stayed in the office morning and afternoon, he created an impression of working very hard and of giving the stenographers and the typists a lot to do, but he managed never to keep a sheet of paper on his desk more than ten minutes. I simply couldn’t stomach this business; I began to keep an eye on him and I noticed that these papers, though they didn’t stay long on his desk, were soon bogged down somewhere else. Once I caught
him when, not knowing what to do with some letters he was holding, he had approached my desk (I had stepped out to wash my hands a moment) and was placing them there, hiding them under a file. Afterward he quickly took his handkerchief from his breast pocket, wiped his hands, and went back to his place, where the ballpoint pen lay parallel to an immaculate sheet of paper.

  I could have gone in at once and put him in an awkward spot. But I was content with having seen him; it was enough for me to know how things worked.

  Since I entered my room from the landing, the rest of Signorina Margariti’s apartment remained unexplored territory to me. The Signorina lived alone, renting two rooms on the courtyard, mine and another next to it. I knew nothing of the other tenant except his heavy tread late at night and early in the morning (he was a police sergeant, I learned, and was never to be seen during the day). The rest of the apartment, which must have been rather vast, was all the landlady’s.

  Sometimes I was obliged to go look for her because she was wanted on the telephone; she couldn’t hear it ring, so in the end I went and answered. Holding the receiver to her ear, however, she could hear fairly well; and long phone conversations with the other ladies of the parish sodality were her pastime. “Telephone! Signorina Margariti! You’re wanted on the telephone!” I would shout, pointlessly, through the apartment, knocking, even more pointlessly, at the doors. As I made these rounds, I got to know a series of living rooms, parlors, pantries, all cluttered with old-fashioned, pretentious furniture, with floor lamps and bric-à-brac, pictures and statues and calendars; the rooms were all in order, polished, gleaming with wax, with snowy-white lace antimacassars on the armchairs, and without even a speck of dust.

  At the end of one of these rooms I would finally discover Signorina Margariti, busy waxing the parquet floor or rubbing the furniture, wearing a faded wrapper and a kerchief around her head. I would point in the direction of the telephone, with violent gestures; the deaf woman would run and grasp the receiver, beginning another of her endless chats, in tones not unlike those of her conversations with the cat.

  Going back to my room then, seeing the basin shelf or the lampshade with an inch of dust, I would be seized by a great anger: that woman spent the whole day keeping her rooms as shiny as a mirror and she wouldn’t even wave a dustcloth over my place. I went back, determined to make a scene, with gestures and grimaces; and I found her in the kitchen, and this kitchen was kept even worse than my room: the oilcloth on the table all worn and stained, dirty cups on top of the cupboard, the floor tiles cracked and blackened. And I was speechless, because I knew the kitchen was the only place in the whole house where that woman really lived, and the rest, the richly adorned rooms constantly swept and waxed, were a kind of work of art on which she lavished her dreams of beauty; and to cultivate the perfection of those rooms she was self-condemned not to live in them, never to enter them as mistress of the house, but only as cleaning woman, spending the rest of her day amid grease and dust.

  Purification came out every two weeks and carried, as a subtitle, “of the Air from Smoke, from Chemical Exhaust, and from the Products of Combustion.” The magazine was the official organ of the IPUAIC, “The Institute for the Purification of the Urban Atmosphere in Industrial Centers.” The IPUAIC was affiliated with similar associations in other countries, which sent us their bulletins and their pamphlets. Often international conventions were held, especially to discuss the serious problem of smog.

  I had never concerned myself with questions of this sort, but I knew that putting out a magazine in a specialized field is not as hard as it seems. You follow the foreign reviews, you have certain articles translated, and with them and a subscription to a clipping agency you can quickly compile a news column; then there are those two or three technical contributors who never fail to send in a little article; also the Institute, no matter how inactive it is, always has some communication or agenda to be printed in bold type; and there is the advertiser who asks you to publish, as an article, the description of his latest patented device. Then when a convention is held, you can devote at least one whole issue to it, from beginning to end, and you will still have papers and reports left over to run in the following issues, whenever you have two or three columns you don’t know how to fill.

  The editorial as a rule was written by the President. But Commendatore Cordà, always extremely busy (he was Chairman of the Board of a number of industries, and he could only devote his odd free moments to the Institute), began asking me to draft it, incorporating the ideas that he described to me with vigor and clarity. I would then submit my draft to him on his return. He traveled a great deal, our President, because his factories were scattered more or less throughout the country; but of all his activities, the Presidency of the IPUAIC, a purely honorary position, was the one, he told me, which gave him the greatest satisfaction, “because,” as he explained, “it’s a battle for an ideal.”

  As far as I was concerned, I had no ideals, nor did I want to have any; I only wanted to write an article he would like, to keep my job, which was no better or worse than another, and to continue my life, no better or worse than any other possible life. I knew Cordà’s opinions (“If everyone followed our example, atmospheric purity would already be . . .”) and his favorite expressions (“We are not utopians, mind you, we are practical men who . . .”), and I would write the article just as he wished, word for word. What else could I write? What I thought with my own mind? That would produce a fine article, all right! A fine optimistic vision of an functional, productive world! But I had only to turn my mood inside out (which wasn’t hard for me because it was like attacking myself) to summon the impetus necessary for an inspired editorial by our President.

  “We are now on the threshold of a solution to the problem of volatile wastes,” I wrote, “a solution which will be more quickly achieved” – and I could already see the President’s satisfied look – “as the active inspiration given Technology by Private Initiative” – at this point Cordà would raise one hand, to underline my words – “is implemented by intelligent action on the part of the Government, always so prompt . . .”

  I read this piece to Signor Avandero. Resting his neat little hands on a white sheet of paper in the center of his desk, Avandero looked at me with his usual, inexpressive politeness.

  “Well? Don’t you like it?” I asked him.

  “Oh, yes, yes indeed,” he hastened to say.

  “Listen to the ending: ‘To answer the catastrophic predictions from some quarters concerning industrial civilization, we once more affirm that there will not be (nor has there ever been) any contradiction between an economy in free, natural expansion and the hygiene necessary to the human organism’” – from time to time I glanced at Avandero, but he didn’t raise his eyes from that white sheet of paper –“‘between the smoke of our productive factories and the green of our incomparable natural beauty. . . .’ Well, what do you say to that?”

  Avandero stared at me for a moment with his dull eyes, his lips pursed. “I’ll tell you: your article does express very well what might be called the substance of our Institute’s final aim, yes, the goal toward which all its efforts are directed . . .”

  “Hmm . . .” I grumbled. I must confess that from a punctilious character like my colleague I expected a less tortuous approval.

  I presented the article to Commendatore Cordà on his arrival a couple of days later. He read it with care, in my presence. He finished reading, put the pages in order, and seemed about to reread it from the beginning, but he only said: “Good.” He thought for a moment, then repeated: “Good.” Another pause, and then: “You’re young.” He warded off an objection I had no intention of making. “No, that’s not a criticism, believe me. You are young, you have faith, you look far ahead. However, if I may say so, the situation is serious, yes, more serious than your article would lead the reader to believe. Let’s speak frankly: the danger of air pollution in the big cities is huge, we have the analyses, the situation is
grave. And precisely because it is grave, we are here to solve it. If we don’t solve it, our cities, too, will be suffocated by smog.”

  He had risen and was pacing back and forth. “We aren’t hiding the difficulties from ourselves. We aren’t like the others, especially those who are in a position which should force them to think about this, and who instead don’t give a damn. Or worse: try to block our efforts.”

  He stood squarely in front of me, lowered his voice: “Because you are young, perhaps you believe everybody agrees with us. But they don’t. We are only a handful. Attacked from all sides, that’s the truth of it. All sides. And yet we won’t give up. We speak out. We act. We will solve the problem. This is what I would like to feel more strongly in your article, you understand?”

  I understood perfectly. My insistent pretense of holding opinions contrary to my own had carried me away, but now I would be able to give the article just the right emphasis. I was to show it to the President again in three days’ time. I rewrote from beginning to end. In the first two thirds of it I drew a grim picture of the cities of Europe devoured by smog, and in the final third I opposed this with the image of an exemplary city, our own, clean, rich in oxygen, where a rational complex of sources of production went hand in hand with . . . et cetera.

  To concentrate better, I wrote the article at home, lying on my bed. A shaft of sunlight fell obliquely into the deep courtyard, entered through the panes, and I saw it cut across the air of my room with a myriad of impalpable particles. The counterpane must be impregnated with them; in a little while, I felt, I would be covered by a blackish layer, like the slats of the blind, like the railing of the balcony.

  When I read the new draft to Signor Avandero, I had the impression he didn’t dislike it. “This contrast between the situation in our cities and that in others,” he said, “which you no doubt expressed according to our President’s instructions, has really come off quite well.”