Mister Calvino carefully wiped off the letters around his mouth with his napkin, but sometimes one letter or another got away. After that lunch, for example, an A remained there, stubbornly clinging to the right side of his chin.
Calvino, looking at himself in the mirror, could not help but admire that letter’s capacity to tenaciously resist his prior energetic movements with his napkin, and he then observed that A like someone who observes a mountain-climber who was desperately clinging on so as not to fall. In fact, that letter seemed to be resisting, and almost instinctively, Calvino thought of that very word — compassion.
That day, Calvino decided to turn a blind eye. Something in that entire scene had moved him profoundly.
And he thus went out into the street fully aware that he had an A, a small A, on the right side of his chin.
Several people stared at that alphabetical eruption, and Calvino did not fail to notice how some strangers barely managed to restrain themselves from telling him: excuse me, but you have an A falling off your chin! But nobody was brave enough to do so.
He had decided he would do nothing to precipitate events: whenever circumstances decreed that the time was ripe, the A would fall off his chin. Calvino decided to leave it up to fate and the natural attrition of the world.
Problems and a Solution
Mister Calvino was very tall and his bed did not correspond to his height.
Whenever he slept thus, as in the drawing above, his head was off the bed. He felt that his ideas dripped out from his head, one by one, onto the floor, like a water pot with a hole in it. He would wake up feeling empty, with no initiative.
On the other hand, when he slept like this
his feet stuck out off the bed and he could not get rid of the feeling that he was falling. And the worst part of it was not the feeling that he was falling, but the fact that the ground never seemed to appear. He would wake up extremely tired.
Therefore, Mister Calvino always slept diagonally.
In this way, besides not having any parts of his body outside the bed, he felt he was getting through the night more quickly.
As soon as he fell asleep, he would wake up.
Mister Calvino’s Pet
Every morning, Calvino would go to the kitchen to feed Poem. The animal devoured everything: no food was disagreeable or strange — and to him everything seemed to be food.
At the end of the day, after having finished his urgent chores, Mister Calvino would stroke his fur with a delicacy and skillful distraction reminiscent of harpists. During these moments, the universe would spin more slowly, acquiring the intelligent lethargy of small felines.
Giving Poem a bath was not easy; it was almost as though the animal was determined to resist cleanliness, claiming with a bound a shameless freedom that only dirt seemed to allow. But far worse was having to give the animal an injection. It was the only time when his claws were aimed at Calvino. The creature preferred to get sick rather than be medicated.
One day, the animal fell from the second-floor window and died.
The next day Calvino adopted another one.
And gave it the same name.
A Strategic Personality
Calvino described the indefatigable activities of a lazy personality, who felt that being alive was only a pretext to rest, in the following words:
He went backward to the point where he couldn’t go back any farther. There was a precipice behind him.
Then he went forward.
But he went forward only up to the point where he once again had space behind him to be able to go backward. He wouldn’t go any farther forward. It wasn’t necessary.
He went forward just enough to be able to go backward.
Then he once again went backward until the point where he couldn’t go back any farther.
He spent days doing this.
Behind him was the precipice. Any farther forward and he would get tired.
He continued like this between here and there.
At night, in order to recover his strength, he would sleep.
He sometimes slept here, and sometimes slept there. But never any farther beyond these points.
Transporting Parallels (Saturday Mornings)
Nobody thought it odd any longer, but they couldn’t help but stare.
Every Saturday morning, Mister Calvino would walk from one end of the neighborhood to the other, carrying a single metal rod in his right hand.
However, he did not transport it in just any old fashion. Calvino would carry the metal rod exactly parallel to the ground.
“I am not merely carrying a metal rod,” Calvino would say, “I am carrying a metal rod parallel to the ground.”
This was why he held the rod firmly and precisely in the center and never relaxed his grasp. Whoever saw him leave his house in the morning could note the tension in the muscles of his right arm, a tension that sought to avoid any kind of tremor, and could also admire the way in which he unfailingly carried the metal rod parallel to the ground at any given moment.
His return trip, however, could not have been more different. Apart from the fact that he held the rod securely in his other hand, the left hand, Calvino now walked in a carefree manner, with his arm completely relaxed, shifting the rod from one side to the other, like someone who was carrying a sack that was of no importance.
Calvino had explained this right at the beginning and thus nobody was surprised at the abrupt change. If, upon leaving, Mister Calvino ensured that he carried a rod that was parallel to the ground, he brought the very same rod back on his return, but this time held diagonally, which required far less physical effort on his part.
Since the slightest of slips could transform a parallel or a perpendicular into a diagonal, anyone who transported rods that were parallel to the ground of the city was worth his weight in gold; since, above all else, this showed that a person knew how to place his hand precisely at the center of things.