Difficult Loves

by Italo Calvino

  I looked beyond his shoulder: the wall behind him was a single pane of glass, a very wide window that dominated the whole expanse of the plant. In the foggy evening only a few shadows emerged; in the foreground there was the outline of a chain hoist which carried up huge buckets of – I believe – iron tailings. You could see the row of metal receptacles rise in a series of jerks, with a slight swaying that seemed to alter a bit the outline of the pile of mineral, and I thought I saw a thick cloud rise from it into the air and settle on the glass of the Commendatore’s office.

  At that moment he gave orders for the lights to be turned on; suddenly against the outside darkness the glass seemed covered by a tiny frosting, surely composed of iron particles, glistening like the stardust of a galaxy. The pattern of shadows outside was broken up; the lines of the smokestacks in the distance became more distinct, each crowned by a red puff, and over these flames, in contrast, the black, inky streak was accentuated as it invaded the whole sky and you could see incandescent specks rise and whirl within it.

  Cordà was now examining with me the Purification proofs and, immediately entering the different field of enthusiasms, receiving the mental stimulation of his position as President of the IPUAIC, he discussed the articles in our bulletin with me and with the Wafd executives. And though I had so often, in the offices of the Institute, given free rein to my natural dependent’s antagonism, mentally declaring myself on the side of the smog, the smog’s secret agent who had infiltrated the enemy’s headquarters, I now realized how senseless my game was, because Cordà himself was the smog’s master; it was he who blew it out constantly over the city, and the IPUAIC was a creature of the smog, born of the need to give those working to produce the smog some hope of a life that was not all smog, and yet, at the same time, to celebrate its power.

  Cordà, pleased with the issue, insisted on taking me home in the car. It was a night of thick fog. The driver proceeded slowly, because beyond the faint headlights you couldn’t see a thing. The President, carried away by one of his bursts of general optimism, was outlining the plans of the city of the future, with garden districts, factories surrounded by flower beds and pools of clear water, installations of rockets that would sweep the sky clear of the smoke from the stacks. And he pointed into the void outside, beyond the windows, as if the things he was imagining were already there; I listened to him, perhaps frightened or perhaps in admiration, I couldn’t say, discovering how the clever captain of industry coexisted in him with the visionary, and how each needed the other.

  At a certain point I thought I recognized my neighborhood. “Stop here, please. This is where I get out,” I said to the driver. I thanked Cordà, said good night, and got out of the car. When it had driven off, I realized I had been mistaken. I was in an unfamiliar district, and I could see nothing of my surroundings.

  At the restaurant I went on having my meals alone, sheltered behind my newspaper. And I noticed that there was another customer who behaved as I did. Sometimes, when no other places were free, we ended up at the same table, facing each other with our unfolded papers. We read different ones: mine was the newspaper everybody read, the most important in the city; surely I had no reason to attract attention, to look different from the others, by reading a different paper, or to seem (if I had read the paper of the stranger at my table) a man with strong political ideas. I had always given political opinions and parties a wide berth, but there, at the restaurant table, on certain evenings, when I put the newspaper down, my fellow diner said: “May I?” motioning to it, and offering me his own: “If you’d like to have a look at this one . . .”

  And so I glanced at his paper, which was, you might say, the reverse of mine, not only because it supported opposing ideas, but because it dealt with things that didn’t even exist for the other paper: workers who had been discharged, mechanics whose hands had been caught in their machinery (it also published the photographs of these men), charts with the figures of welfare payments, and so on. But above all, the more my paper tried to be witty in the writing of its articles and to attract the reader with amusing minor events, for example the divorce cases of pretty girls, the more this other paper used expressions that were always the same, repetitious, drab, with headlines that emphasized the negative side of things. Even the printing of the paper was drab, cramped, monotonous. And I found myself thinking: “Why, I like it.”

  I tried to explain this impression to my casual companion, naturally taking care not to comment on individual news items or opinions (he had already begun by asking me what I thought of a certain report from Asia) and trying at the same time to play down the negative aspect of my view, because he seemed to me the sort of man who doesn’t accept criticisms of his position and I had no intention of launching an argument.

  Instead, he seemed to be following his own train of thought, where my opinion of his paper must have been superfluous or out of place. “You know,” he said, “this paper still isn’t the way it should be? It isn’t the paper I’d like it to be.”

  He was a short but well-proportioned young man, dark, with carefully combed curly hair, his face still a boy’s, pale, pink-cheeked, with regular, refined features, long black lashes, a reserved, almost haughty manner. He dressed with rather fastidious care. “There’s still too much vagueness, a lack of precision,” he went on, “especially in what concerns our affairs. The paper still resembles the others too much. The kind of paper I mean should be mostly written by its readers. It should try to give scientifically exact information about everything that goes on in the world of production.”

  “You’re a technical expert in some factory, are you?” I asked.

  “Skilled worker.”

  We introduced ourselves. His name was Omar Basaluzzi. When he learned that I worked for the IPUAIC, he became very much interested and asked me for some data to use in a report he was preparing. I suggested some publications to him (things in the public domain, as a matter of fact; I wasn’t giving away any office secrets, as I remarked to him, just in case, with a little smile). He took out a notebook and methodically wrote down the information, as if he were compiling a bibliography.

  “I’m interested in statistical studies,” he said, “a field where our organization is far behind.” We put on our overcoats, ready to leave. Basaluzzi had a rather sporty coat, elegantly cut, and a little cap of rainproof canvas. “We’re very far behind,” he went on, “whereas, the way I look at it, it’s a fundamental field. . . .”

  “Does your work leave you time for these studies?” I asked him.

  “I’ll tell you,” he said (he always answered with some hauteur, in a slightly smug, ex-cathedra manner), “it’s all a question of method. I work eight hours a day in the factory, and then there’s hardly an evening when I don’t have some meeting to go to, even on Sunday. But you have to know how to organize your work. I’ve formed some study groups, among the young people in our plant. . . .”

  “Are there many . . . like yourself?”

  “Very few. Fewer all the time. One by one, they’re getting rid of us. One fine day you’ll see here” – and he pointed to the newspaper – “my own picture, with the headline: ‘Another worker discharged in reprisal.’”

  We were walking in the cold of the night; I was huddled in my coat, the collar turned up; Omar Basaluzzi proceeded calmly, talking, his head erect, a little cloud of steam emerging from his finely drawn lips, and every now and then he took his hand from his pocket to underline a point in his talk, and then he stopped, as if he couldn’t go ahead until that point had been clearly established.

  I was no longer following what he said; I was thinking that a man like Omar Basaluzzi didn’t try to evade all the smoky gray around us, but to transform it into a moral value, an inner criterion.

  “The smog . . .” I said.

  “Smog? Yes, I know Cordà wants to play the modern industrialist. . . . Purify the atmosphere. . . . Go tell that to his workers! He surely won’t be the one to purify it. . . . It’s a qu
estion of social structure. . . . If we manage to change that, we will also solve the smog problem. We, not they.”

  He invited me to go with him to a meeting of union representatives from the different plants of the city. I sat at the back of a smoky room. Omar Basaluzzi took a seat at the table on the dais with some other men, all older than he. The room wasn’t heated; we kept our hats and coats on.

  One by one, the men who were to speak stood up and took their place beside the table; all of them addressed the public in the same way: anonymous, unadorned, with formulas for beginning their speech and for linking the arguments which must have been part of some rule because they all used them. From certain murmurs in the audience I realized a polemical statement had been made, but these were veiled polemics, which always began by approving what had been said before. Many of those who spoke seemed to have it in for Omar Basaluzzi; the young man, seated a bit sideways at the table, had taken a tooled-leather tobacco pouch from his pocket and a stubby English pipe which he filled with slow movements of his small hands. He smoked in cautious puffs, his eyes slightly closed, one elbow on the table, his cheek resting in his hand.

  The hall had filled with smoke. One man suggested opening a little, high window for a moment. A cold gust changed the air but soon the fog began coming in from outside, and you could hardly see the opposite end of the room. From my seat I examined that crowd of backs, motionless in the cold, some with upturned collars, and the row of bundled-up forms at the table, with one man on his feet talking, as bulky as a bear, all surrounded, impregnated now by that fog, even their words, their stubbornness.

  Claudia came back in February. We went to have lunch in an expensive restaurant on the river, at the end of the park. Beyond the windows we looked at the shore and the trees that, with the color of the air, composed a picture of ancient elegance.

  We couldn’t understand each other. We argued on the subject of beauty. “People have lost the sense of beauty,” Claudia said.

  “Beauty has to be constantly invented,” I said.

  “Beauty is always beauty; it’s eternal.”

  “Beauty is born always from some conflict.”

  “What about the Greeks?”

  “Well, what about them?”

  “Beauty is civilization!”

  “And so . . .”

  “Therefore . . .”

  We could have gone on like this all day and all night.

  “This park, this river . . .”

  (“This park, this river,” I thought, “can only be marginal, a consolation to us for the rest; ancient beauty is powerless against new ugliness.”)

  “This eel . . .”

  In the center of the restaurant there was a glass tank, an aquarium, and some huge eels were swimming inside it.

  “Look!”

  Some customers were approaching, important people, a family of well-to-do gourmets: mother, father, grown daughter, adolescent son. With them was the maître d’hôtel, an enormous, corpulent man in frock coat, stiff white shirt; he was grasping the handle of a little net, the kind children use for catching butterflies. The family, serious, intent, looked at the eels; at a certain point the mother raised her hand and pointed out an eel. The maître d’hôtel dipped the net into the aquarium, with a rapid swoop he caught the animal and drew it out of the water. The eel writhed and struggled in the net. The maître d’hôtel went off toward the kitchen, holding the net with the gasping eel straight out in front of him like a lance. The family watched him go off, then they sat down at the table, to wait until the eel came back, cooked.

  “Cruelty . . .”

  “Civilization . . .”

  “Everything is cruel . . .”

  Instead of having them call a taxi, we left on foot. The lawns, the tree trunks, were swathed in that veil which rose from the river, dense, damp, here still a natural phenomenon. Claudia walked protected by her fur coat, its wide collar, her muff, her fur hat. We were the two shadowy lovers who form a part of the picture.

  “Beauty . . .”

  “Your beauty . . .”

  “What good is it? As far as that goes . . .”

  I said: “Beauty is eternal.”

  “Ah, now you’re saying what I said before, eh?”

  “No, the opposite.”

  “It’s impossible to discuss anything with you,” she said.

  She moved off as if she wanted to go on by herself, along the path. A layer of fog was flowing just over the earth: the fur-covered silhouette proceeded as if it weren’t touching the ground.

  I saw Claudia back to her hotel that evening, and we found the lobby full of gentlemen in dinner jackets and ladies in long, low-cut dresses. It was carnival time, and a charity ball was being held in the hotel ballroom.

  “How marvelous! Will you take me? I’ll just run and put on an evening dress!”

  I’m not the sort who goes to balls and I felt ill at ease.

  “But we don’t have an invitation . . . and I’m wearing a brown suit . . .”

  “I never need an invitation . . . and you’re my escort.”

  She ran up to change. I didn’t know where to turn. The place was full of girls wearing their first evening dress, powdering their faces before going into the ballroom, exchanging excited whispers. I stood in a corner, trying to imagine I was a shop clerk who had come there to deliver a package.

  The elevator door opened. Claudia stepped out, in a sweeping skirt, pearls on a pink bodice, a little diamond-studded mask. I couldn’t play the role of clerk any more. I went over to her.

  We went in. All eyes were on her. I found a mask to put on, a kind of clown’s face with a long nose. We started dancing. When Claudia twirled around, the other couples stepped back to watch her; as I’m a very bad dancer, I wanted to stay in the midst of the crowd, so there was a kind of hide-and-seek. Claudia complained that I wasn’t the least bit jolly, that I didn’t know how to enjoy myself.

  At the end of one dance, as we were going back to our table, we passed a group of ladies and gentlemen, standing on the dance floor. “Oh!” There I was, face to face with Commendatore Cordà. He was in full dress, with a little orange paper hat on his head. I had to stop and say hello to him. “Why, it is you, then! I thought so, but I wasn’t sure,” he said, but he was looking at Claudia, and I realized he meant he would never have expected to see me with a woman like her, I looking the same as usual, in the suit I wore to the office.

  I had to make the introductions; Cordà kissed Claudia’s hand, introduced her to the other older men who were with him, and Claudia, absent as always and superior, paid no attention to the names (as I was saying to myself: “My God! Is that who he is?” because they were all big shots in industry). Then Cordà introduced me: “And this is the managing editor of our periodical, you know, Purification, the paper I put out. . . .” I realized they were all a bit intimidated by Claudia, and they were talking nonsense. So then I felt less timid myself.

  I also realized something else was about to happen, namely that Cordà could hardly wait to ask Claudia to dance. I said: “Well then, we’ll see you later. . . .” I waved expansive good-bys and led Claudia back to the dance floor, as she said: “Wait a minute, you don’t know how to dance to this, can’t you hear the music?”

  All I could hear or feel was that, in some way not yet clear even to those men, I had spoiled their evening when I appeared at Claudia’s side, and this was the only satisfaction I could derive from the ball. “Cha cha cha . . .” I sang softly, pretending to dance with steps I didn’t know how to make, holding Claudia only lightly by the hand so that she could move on her own.

  It was carnival time; why shouldn’t I have some fun? The little toy trumpets blared, fluttering their long fringes, handfuls of confetti pattered like crumbling mortar on the backs of the tailcoats and on the bare shoulders of the women, it slipped inside the low-cut gowns and the men’s collars; and from chandelier to floor, where it collected in limp piles pushed about by the shuffling of the dancers
, streamers unrolled like strips of bare fibers or like wires left hanging among collapsed walls in a general destruction.

  “You can accept the ugly world the way it is, because you know you have to destroy it,” I said to Omar Basaluzzi. I spoke partly to provoke him, otherwise it was no fun.

  “Just a moment,” Omar said, setting down the little cup of coffee he had been raising to his lips. “We never say: It has to get worse before it can get better. We want to improve things. . . . No reformism, and no extremism. We . . .”

  I was following my train of thought: he, his. Ever since that time in the park with Claudia, I had been looking for a new image of the world which would give a meaning to our grayness, which would compensate for all the beauty that we were losing, or would save it. . . . “A new face for the world.”

  The worker unzipped a black leather briefcase and took out an illustrated weekly. “You see?” There was a series of photographs. An Asiatic race, with fur caps and boots, blissfully going to fish in a river. In another photograph there was that same race, going to school; a teacher was pointing out, on a sheet, the letters of an incomprehensible alphabet. Another illustration showed a feast day and they all wore dragon heads, and in the middle, among the dragons, a tractor was advancing with a man’s portrait over it. At the end there were two men, still in fur caps, operating a power lathe.

  “You see? This is it,” he said, “the other face of the world.”

  I looked at Basaluzzi. “You people don’t wear fur caps, you don’t fish for sturgeon, you don’t play with dragons.”

  “What of it?”

  “So your group doesn’t resemble those people in any way, except for this . . .” and I pointed to the lathe, “which you already have.”

  “No, no, it’ll be the same here as there, because it’s man’s conscience that will change, for us as it has for them, we’ll be new inside ourselves, even before we are new outside . . .” Basaluzzi said, and he went on leafing through the magazine. On another page there were photographs of blast furnaces and of workers with goggles over their eyes and fierce expressions. “Oh, there’ll be problems then, too, you mustn’t think that overnight . . .” he said. “For quite a while it’ll be hard: production . . . But a big step forward will have been made . . . . Certain things won’t happen, as they do now . . .” and he started speaking of the same things he always talked about, the problems that concerned him, day in and day out.