This wasn’t malice, nor some intimidatory strategy, it was simply the playful instinct of the universe set in motion. Even a remote asteroid has the right to indulge in sporting pursuits, some would say. The more educated ones.
A Letter from Calvino (on Holiday)
My dear Anna, here the fields, with their robust cereals, continue to conceal sexual movements far better than the sounds that result from these activities. There is thus evidently some discordance between sound and its source. And although this pleasure is a pinnacle above and beyond the subtlest sense of touch, it is nonetheless necessary to highlight the agitated pitch of these sounds that become the main interlocutor in the atmosphere, thus bringing — via the wind — a strong flush to the faces of the village women who thought they would be able to watch from the window, but find that after all they are listening instead.
Due to the fertile fields that serve as curtains, in these moments, where young couples get excited like finely tuned instruments, for a deaf man, my dear Anna, the window suddenly becomes useless.
How to Help Pensioners
“An elderly lady,” said Mister Calvino, “a pensioner, who was not agile enough to move forward or backward any quicker, inadvertently got caught in the front door, which had closed thanks to an automatic mechanism that still worked as though it were in the prime of its life. And there was the little old lady, trapped in an uncommonly uncomfortable manner between the inside and the outside of the building. Exactly in the middle.
“And why was she there?” asked Calvino of his interlocutors.
“Simple,” continued Calvino, “after several years of not having had any contact with her neighbor, the lady had unexpectedly been invited to tea. At that time, she had been pleased — everyone appreciates a little attention — but now, with the door jammed right between her shoulder blades, she couldn’t help but feel disturbed.
“She then thought it rather odd that several days had gone by and the owner of the house had not come to find out what had happened to her. And nobody had gone in or out of that vast property and thus the door stayed the way it was, immobile, pressing her body against the iron beam that functioned as the base of the door.
“After a week she began to feel a pain in her head, more precisely at the base of her neck. The door continued to press down on her bones, which were already rather fragile because of her advanced age. It was quite obvious that no one noticed her absence.”
The Spoon
In order to exercise the muscles of his patience, Mister Calvino placed a small coffee spoon beside a huge shovel, a shovel that was usually used in engineering projects. Then, he set himself a nonnegotiable target: a mound of earth (fifty kilos of the world) to be transported from point A to point B — points placed fifteen meters apart.
The huge shovel always remained on the ground, inert but visible. And Calvino used the minuscule coffee spoon to carry out the task of transporting the mound of earth from one point to the other, securing it with all available muscles. When he used the tiny spoon, it was almost as though every little bit of earth was caressed by Mister Calvino’s attentive curiosity.
Patiently carrying out the task at hand, without desisting or using the shovel, Calvino felt that he was learning many great things with a tiny spoon.
The Sun
Calvino had a book in his hands whose cover had been almost completely discolored by the sun. What had earlier been a dark green had now been transformed into a soothing, almost transparent green.
He looked at the other books on the shelf. All of them were losing their original color, as though the rays of the sun had chewed or nibbled away — yes, that seemed to be the work of a subtle nibbler — at the book covers.
One book, for example, which had been placed less than a month ago in that corner of the house where, during certain hours of the day, the sun’s rays fell directly, now had a rather curious appearance: only one line of the upper part of the book had faded. The rest of the cover on the lower part of the book still retained the brilliance of its original coloring. Due to some unknown association of ideas, Calvino thought of the differences in coloring of areas of the body that were covered or not covered by bathing suits during summer.
He again looked at the shelf and at the faded covers and, suddenly, it was as though everything had become clear: the origin of the phenomenon, the true reasons for the happening that someone would have classified, at first glance, as a chemical happening. But it wasn’t as simple as that. Calvino was not merely dealing with a change in substances, this was a force, a strong force that almost had fragile muscles. And this insufficient force originated from the sun: the sun wanted to open the books, it concentrated its rays, with all its might, on the cover of a book because it wanted to open it, it wanted to see the first page, to read, to reflect upon great phrases, to be moved by poems. The sun simply wanted to read, it yearned to do so like a child who was about to enter school.
Calvino meditated. In fact, he could not recall ever having seen a book with its pages open to the sun. It was far more common for people to put down a book on a table or a garden bench (or even on the ground) outdoors, but always, now that Calvino came to think about it, always with the hard cover enclosing the book’s contents, denying access to the words inside.
It was thus time for someone to do something. It was time for someone to reciprocate that gentle touch of light that the sun projected on men’s faces on certain days, a calm caress, but one that saved men from great tragedy, from despair, sometimes even from suicide.
Calvino once again looked at the books on the shelf that was caressed by the sun. He quickly ran his eye over the spines. With a great deal of attention he chose the most appropriate book; it was obvious that he was not choosing a book in accordance with his own tastes, but instead according to someone else’s taste. And finally he picked out a book. “Here’s a good first book to start with!” exclaimed Calvino to himself.
He then opened the book to the first page, after the technical details (who would want to read those?), and put the book down like that, opened to the beginning of the narrative, turned toward the point where the sun’s rays usually appeared: “Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do.”