Difficult Loves

by Italo Calvino

  “All right, the title is Encyclopedia,” Bensi said in a different tone of voice, as though up till then they had been joking, and Quinto’s proposal was therefore quite irrelevant. “Or maybe that can be the subtitle. The point is to make it clear from the title down that what we are aiming at is a general phenomenology subsuming every kind of conscious activity within a single body of discourse.”

  This brought Bensi and Cerveteri into conflict, and Quinto was uncertain whose side to take. If everything was to be subsumed within a single body of discourse, should the paper only print what was already included within that body, or should it also print stuff that was still outside? Cerveteri wanted to include the stuff that was still outside. “I’d like a column called ‘A Politician Dreams,’” he said. “We’ll invite leaders from all political parties and ask them to tell us what they dream. Anyone who refuses has obviously got something to hide.”

  Bensi was overcome by one of his paroxysms of maniacal laughter. This involved bringing his face down to the level of the tablecloth and covering his eyes with one hand, as though to indicate his pained amusement at the sight of a friend losing himself in a maze from which only he, Bensi, knew the way out. “We go from ideology to dreams,” he managed to say, “not from dreams to ideology.” And then, as though succumbing to a malign temptation, he added, “All your dreams are pronged on the ideological spike like moths on a pin.”

  Cerveteri looked baffled. “Moths?” he said. “Why moths?”

  Bensi was a philosopher, Cerveteri a poet. Poet Cerveteri was a premature gray; his long, spectacled face provided a battleground on which melancholy Semitic features fought a well-matched engagement with more expressive Florentine traits, whether erudite or plebeian it was difficult to determine. The outcome was a face including both aggression and concentration, but which somehow remained deeply inexpressive, like a cyclist, say, or like someone trying to concentrate on one point in the center of an indefinite series of points. “Why did you say moths?” he repeated. “I dreamed of a moth last night. I was sitting here, in this very restaurant, and they brought me a huge moth, on a plate.” And he gestured in the manner of one raising the wing of a huge moth.

  “Christ!” said the waitress, who had come to see if they wanted dessert.

  Bensi laughed with exaggerated bitterness, the laughter of a man tired of adversaries who give themselves up unarmed. “Dream symbolism is always a deification,” he remarked. “That’s what Freud failed to understand.”

  Quinto greatly admired the incessant intellectual activity of both men. (His own mind inclined rather to relapse into a state of sleepy indifference.) And he was impressed by their breadth of cultural reference. Uncertain which part to take in the argument, the terms of which he only vaguely understood, he decided as usual to back the side most opposed to his natural inclinations, namely Bensi’s rigidly mechanistic philosophy, and to resist the appeal of Cerveteri’s fluid play of sensation. He turned ironically to Bensi and said, sneering at the poet, “Why not go the whole hog and call it The New Freud?”

  The philosopher was still in the grips of the convulsion of laughter provoked by Cerveteri and he brushed off Quinto’s joke like an irrelevant fly. It appealed to the poet, however, who took it up enthusiastically. “That’s it,” he cried. “Let’s call it Eros and Thanatos!”

  Bensi brought his hands together and rubbed them till they creaked, while his face contracted in a clenched laugh that made him turn purple. “Do you think you’re going to checkmate history with those two? The dialectical process pops out between them like a cuckoo from a clock.”

  Bensi had a round, cherubic face, like the face of those people from the hills who never really grow up. His forehead, under the babyish wave of curly hair, was so convex that it seemed about to explode. It was marked with little bumps and scratches, as though the pressure of thought made it butt into things. Bensi led with his forehead, holding it forward like a millstone, always grinding, grinding, or like a wheel, setting off a complicated system of gears, driven by an inadequately synchronized central force that made it waste itself in countless secondary motions, as for example the incessant quivering of his lips. During the discussion Quinto found himself looking now at Bensi’s eyes, now at Cerveteri’s. They both squinted, but the philosopher’s squint was extroverted; his eye seemed to fly in pursuit of ideas just on the point of vanishing from the field of human vision into some oblique, unrecognizable perspective. The poet’s was an inner squint. The pupils of his close-set, restless eyes seemed to strive to register the effect produced by external sensations in some secret, interior zone of consciousness.

  “Let’s make an anthology of obituary notices,” Cerveteri suggested. “We might make it a regular feature. Better still, what about a whole number filled with nothing but obituary notices?” And he ran his finger down the black-barred column of the obituary page in the folded paper he was holding.

  Bensi shrugged. “We’re just about to house the conscience of mankind in an electronic brain.”

  Cerveteri’s answer was a lengthy quotation in Latin.

  “Saint Augustine?”

  “Lactantius.”

  Quinto’s attention wandered and he found himself trying to overhear what people were saying at the nearby tables. There was a family to the right, or perhaps they were two different families, country people who had come in to town to meet. A woman was talking about the damage done by rain to the alfalfa fields. She obviously owned land. She was not young, but she was still of marriageable age, and as she spoke the men nodded agreement, their faces blurred with wine and food. They were farming people, perhaps, from different regions, meeting to settle the terms of a marriage. The woman was showing, in the presence of the man’s family, that she was a mature, competent person, as though to outdo the other women there by this evidence that she was much more than a mere housewife.

  Quinto felt sharply envious of everything that these people represented: the sense of interests at stake, the attachment to things, concrete and in no way ignoble passions, the desire to better oneself in more than a material sense, and in addition there was something placid and earthy and solid about them. There was a time, Quinto reflected, when you could live the life of the mind only if you owned land. But in detaching itself from its economic basis, culture had paid dearly. It depended on privilege in those days, certainly, yet it was still firmly rooted. Nowadays the intellectual belonged neither to the bourgeoisie nor to the proletariat. For that matter, even Masera could do nothing better than ask him to give a lecture.

  At another table a waitress was flirting with a couple of men in bow ties who couldn’t keep their hands at home. In between the jokes addressed to the girl, Quinto could hear words like “Italian Gas,” “General Electric,” and stock-market quotations. A pair of stock-market agents, obviously, smooth operators. At any other time he would have disliked them intensely, but in his present mood he found that they embodied his ideals: expediency, cunning, quick functional intelligence. A man who isn’t trying to make money doesn’t count, Quinto said to himself. Why, even the workers have their trade-union struggles. But we intellectuals make a distinction between the larger historical perspectives and our own interests and in the process we have lost the taste of life. We have destroyed ourselves. We don’t mean anything.

  Cerveteri had gone back to his dream. “A large moth,” he was saying. “It had big wings with minute gray, wavy markings, like a black-and-white Kandinsky – no, a Klee, perhaps. I was trying to lift these wings with my fork and they gave out a fine dust, a kind of gray powdery stuff, then disintegrated between my finger and thumb. I tried to lift the fragments to my mouth, but they turned into ashes and spread over everything, covering the plates, sinking into the wineglasses. . . .”

  My superiority over these people, Quinto reflected, is that I still have the bourgeois instincts that they have mislaid in the wear and tear of intellectual fashion. I shall stick to these instincts and in so doing save myself, whil
e they’ll crumble away. But I’ve got to start making money. Selling some land to Caisotti isn’t enough. I must start building too. I’ll use the money I get from him to put up another house next to the one he is building. . . . Quinto concentrated on the possibilities of the site that had not yet been exploited, on the ways of putting it to the best use.

  Cerveteri’s hands fluttered over the tablecloth, which was littered with crumbs, cigarette ashes, stubs crushed on plates or ashtrays, bits of orange peel tortured into strange shapes by Bensi’s nails, match sticks shredded away by Cerveteri’s fingers, toothpicks dislocated by Quinto’s hands and teeth.

  I must get into partnership with Caisotti, he said to himself. We’ll speculate in real estate together.

  7

  Quinto had an idea. Adjoining the land they were proposing to sell was a bit of garden with a bed of forget-me-nots in the middle. It was fairly level and about the same size as the flowerpottery. It too offered an excellent site for a small apartment building. But he realized that once Caisotti’s building was up, it would lose all value as a site since the law did not allow houses to be constructed right on top of one another. It’s clear, Quinto said to himself, that whichever site we sell, we’re going to reduce the value of the one immediately beside it. So the only thing to do is to go into partnership with Caisotti and build together. Let him have both sites and put up a single large building there; in return we’ll take a certain number of apartments, which will remain our property. I must talk this over with Ampelio at once.

  Quinto and his brother did not live in the same town. Their rare meetings took place in their mother’s house and it was there that they had now arranged to meet to discuss the sale.

  “I’ve got an idea,” Quinto said to Ampelio the moment he arrived. On their way from the station they stopped at the fish market and bought half a pound of limpets. When he got home, Ampelio kissed his mother hurriedly and told her about the limpets that he had bought. He had been away for six months. He was a university instructor in chemistry, and though he earned a wretched salary he hardly ever came home, not even during vacations. He had at one time been more tied to his home town that Quinto, but now he seldom showed his face there. He no longer seemed to take any pleasure in his familiar haunts and in the life he used to lead. Nobody in fact knew what his tastes were nowadays, except insofar as they were revealed by small, unexpected gestures – like this business of the limpets, for example – and even then it was hard to tell how far they were sincere.

  Quinto began telling him about the negotiations with Caisotti. As he explained, Ampelio went into the kitchen and Quinto followed him, talking. Ampelio undid the paper in which the limpets were wrapped and picked up a knife and then a lemon. He stood by the sideboard, opening cupboards and pulling out drawers with quick, confident gestures as though he had left everything in place the day before. He cut a slice of lemon and sprinkled it on the limpets without taking them out of their paper. He made a gesture indicating that Quinto was to help himself; Quinto rejected the offer vigorously – he couldn’t stand shellfish – and went on talking.

  Ampelio said nothing, giving no sign of either agreement or disapproval. Several times Quinto broke off under the impression that his brother wasn’t listening, but Ampelio would say, “And what then?” and Quinto carried on again as though nothing had happened. Ampelio had always been like this, even when he was a boy. The only difference was that in those days, Quinto, being the older brother, would lose his temper, but in time he had got used to it. Ampelio sat there at the polished kitchen table, still in the overcoat and scarf that he had been wearing even though it was late spring. He had a small black beard and was already balding; his eyes were concealed behind the thick lenses of his glasses. Quinto watched him ease the limpets out of their shells with the point of his knife and with his other hand raise the shells fringed with seaweed to his lips. The soft flesh of the limpets vanished between his lips framed by the dark beard, with a sound of breath being sucked in or else blown out, it was hard to tell which. Then he put the empty shells one on top of the other in a little pile.

  Quinto had unrolled a map. Still chewing, Ampelio glanced at it out of the corner of his eye. His mouth, surrounded by beard, was like a sea urchin turned upside down, the mouth moving among the black spines. Quinto had explained the present phase of the negotiations and told Ampelio what he had found out about Caisotti. Now, his finger on the map, he said, “I see it like this. If we build in area A, we preclude the possibility of selling area B or of building on it. This means that if we sell area A to Caisotti for its value as a building site, which I call X, we deprive area B of its value of Y. So what it comes to is that if we sell at X, we lose the chance of a possible X + Y. Or putting it the other way, we now own A + B; if we sell A, we are left with only B – Y.”

  Quinto had been mulling over this little algebraic demonstration for several days, hoping to impress his scientific brother.

  Ampelio got up, went to the sink, drank from the faucet, rinsed his mouth, and spat – one after the other. Then he said, “Obviously we’ve got to use the flowerpottery as capital to invest in any building we erect on the second site. And since the regulations don’t permit two buildings to be put up so close to each other, we must think in terms of a single large structure occupying the two plots, to be built by Caisotti, half for himself, half for us.”

  This was precisely the plan on which Quinto had been racking his brains as though it were the knottiest problem in the world. And here was Ampelio coming out with it as though it followed naturally from the facts of the situation! Quinto didn’t know what to say next. Ampelio sat down and started covering the borders of the map with figures, every now and then asking for additional information, which Quinto was never able to provide quite accurately. What was the maximum height allowed by the building code? How many apartments did Caisotti intend to put in? What was the price of cement? Quinto realized that his brother couldn’t know any more about building estimates than he did, yet there he was, rapidly jotting down figures with a confidence that Quinto envied deeply.

  “Let’s reckon eight apartments, plus a couple of shops on the ground floor,” Ampelio said, calculating the annual rents and the time it would take to amortize their capital.

  “But what about the money we need right away to pay the taxes?”

  “We’ll apply for a loan and use the prospective building as security.”

  “Oh, God!” Quinto screeched in desperation. Ampelio, as always, was composure itself. He didn’t laugh, no wrinkle creased his massive brow. For him, everything was in the sphere of the possible.

  Signora Anfossi came into the kitchen. “Well, boys, have you figured it all out? Is it all right?”

  “Yes, yes. We’re going to lose though, either way.”

  “Oh, that Caisotti, with his nasty dishonest face!”

  “It isn’t Caisotti’s doing, poor man. But we’re going to be in the red, all the same.”

  “Then why not drop the whole thing?” the Signora suggested. “That’s it, we’ll tell him we’ve changed our minds and that we’re not thinking of selling at present. As for the taxes, we’ll have to ask the bank again.”

  “No, no, Mother, look, we were just saying that what we must do is propose something much more complicated to Caisotti.”

  “More complicated? Heavens!”

  “Yes, yes, somehing very complicated. In the long run we’ll make a handsome profit.”

  Quinto bent down to talk to her, gesturing in a nervous, combative way, trying at the same time to convince her and to start an argument. Ampelio stood beside him, tall and serious, his dark beard thrust forward. He looked like a judge whose only task is to pronounce sentence.

  “Now, Mother, listen. You know the forget-me-not bed . . . .”

  8

  Quinto and Ampelio went out together. They walked rapidly along the familiar streets, talking in a way they hadn’t done for ages. It was as though they had never left home,
two brothers playing a busy part in the town’s economic life, controlling a whole network of interests: brusque, practical people, with both feet on the ground. They were play-acting and they knew it, since they were both very unlike the characters they were assuming at the moment. In the normal way, before the afternoon was over they would have relapsed into sceptical inertia and then gone their separate ways, Ampelio back to his laboratory and Quinto to his intellectual disputes, as though these were the only thing in the world that counted. Yet for the time being their present roles seemed feasible. And how fine it would have been, two brothers against the world together! So many things would have been within their grasp, they could have done so much – what exactly, they would have been hard put to it to say. Here they were, for example, on their way to Caisotti to put the proposition to him, to explore the situation, to ask him – well, to ask him something or other. Hell, why make things difficult? At present they were sizing him up. They would decide later what course of action to take.

  Caisotti did not have a telephone. He had an office upstairs: CAISOTTI BUILDING COMPANY. They rang the bell and a girl opened the door. It was a small, low room with a typewriter and some blueprints on the table. No, Caisotti wasn’t in; he was always out and about, on the job; he was hardly ever in his office.

  “When will he be back?” Shrug. “Where can we find him?” “Try at the Caffè Melina, just over there, but it’s a bit too early.” “We have to see him at once.” Shrug. “I suppose you could leave a message with me.”

  “Well, thanks anyway, Miss Shrug.” Ampelio produced this witticism, greatly to the surprise of Quinto, who had never heard his brother employ such a sarcastic, confidential tone in his family circle. He took a look at the girl. Not bad.