Tomorrow, he would turn the page again. And over the course of the following days he would continue to do so until the end of the volume.
Mister Calvino Takes a Walk
He sometimes got excited with ideas, not with the world. For Mister Calvino, having a life did not mean merely passing through the turbulent experiences inherent to human closeness and distance. For him, whoever did not have his own thoughts, did not have his own life. Calvino could feel an idea passing through his head just as he could feel the cold on his neck. Of course, this sensation was not tangible like a piece of furniture, it was an ephemeral feeling, but nonetheless an exciting one.
On certain days, his brain got him sufficiently excited, and thus he could avoid other circumstantial emotions. At least those were controllable.
In fact, he clearly remembered the misfortune that had befallen a friend of his. Since his face was paralyzed, this friend always seemed to be laughing, irrespective of what happened.
Mister Calvino suddenly recalled that, according to one historian, a king — whose name was Mahmud — had invaded India seventeen times during a twenty-nine-year reign.
He had taken a vow to invade India every year, but reality does not always conform to the plans of a human heart.
“During a lifetime,” thought Calvino, “doing everything seemed to be a lot, and it was impossible to quantify everything and for this very reason it was impossible to verify it. If you couldn’t manage it, at least you could try to do half of everything, which had the additional advantage of being an exact number.” So, unlike the prognostications of some overly young writers, Calvino decided at that very moment that he wouldn’t do everything, he would instead do half of everything.
Well, he had just woken up and, since he did not have any predefined tasks, he had the entire day at his disposaclass="underline" as though on a platter. To begin with, he would take care of imperfectly describing exactitude. He found it essential to have an initial irregularity, a false step, the inability to understand a part, an expectation created by a surprising fact.
He looked around him.
Nothing. Everything was just as it was meant to be.
He then remembered an absurd dialogue:
“I am sad because I have a sad face.”
“And that’s the only reason?”
“Yes.”
But what was this? Human beings were not so simple. Being sad was not just an official physiognomy (thought Calvino), it was more than that.
The previous afternoon, for example, Calvino had climbed up on a stool.
“Where are you?” asked the blind Mister Bettini, who had gone to visit him.
“On top of a stool,” answered Mister Calvino.
At that point, just like someone who was merely inquiring what time it was, Mister Bettini then asked, in his habitually brusque fashion, “From where you are, can you clearly distinguish the Gods from the sheep that are grazing?”
“What?” said Calvino, utterly stupefied.
Why had he remembered this now? He had no idea.
The human memory was not a simple storehouse of old things to which he had the key. Oh well. He proceeded without finding a satisfactory explanation.
In fact, he felt that on certain days he was a rather strange personality.
He saw himself as a pilgrim, but he had no goal and neither did he have a map.
He wanted to go directly to a place where he felt lost, with no detours.
Early in the morning, as though he were talking about the world, Calvino said of the only machine he had at home, “As it is, it never worked, and now it’s got spoiled!”
However, to make up for it, it was almost noon. Time was passing by.
Calvino, it must be added, did not like to stop (to see shop windows?!) — he liked to walk.
He did not like to accelerate or slow down his pace.
When he was late, he did not speed up. He would simply arrive late.
And he hated waiting. Therefore, when he knew that he was early for a meeting he did not change his route, but instead changed his trajectory within it. He did not stop. He walked down the same street, but in a different way.
When he was very early, he would do this
And when he was really very, very early, he would do this
He was now walking down the street at a merry pace, as though the (faceless) muscles in his legs had a millimetric technique of being in a good or bad mood. In fact, his legs were in a good mood, there was just no other way of describing it.
At that moment a pair of lovers walked by him, who, in between nibbling each other’s lips and murmuring words less than a centimeter away from each other, were having a great deal of fun in that minuscule space between them, where someone had undoubtedly built an amusement park that was invisible to other people.
Calvino particularly noted the impeccably stupid face of the man in question. “He lacks ideas,” he thought, “but for the time being he is not missing them: he’s in love.”
Subsequently, Calvino’s attention was captured by the beating of his heart, as though it were a sort of regular and monotonous music. With his hand on his breast he carefully listened to that wearying music, aware that, after all, this was what allowed him to stay alive. The repetition saved the organism from inside, but on the outside it was indispensable to be prepared for surprises, invasions, defeats, sudden leaps, and other perils.
In a certain way, Calvino did not remember the novelties that were in store for him tomorrow — and this cheered him up immensely. He had forgotten what was going to happen the following day — and this lack of recollection, which is commonly called an inability to predict the future — was a kind of existential reference.
Of course, he never made errors like this:
Buying a (very expensive) ticket, to enter a place where there was no space.
Suddenly, however, he was interrupted. When one is thinking (thought Calvino) one is interrupted as though one was doing nothing at all, people talk to one as though they were talking to an idler:
“Sir … where is rue Le Grand?”
Calvino immediately replied, “First right, then second left. Then go up the street till the end and there it is. It’s a long walk,” he murmured, sympathetically, to the lost man.
The man thanked him and went away.
Calvino had no idea where rue Le Grand was located.
Calvino did not have enough words to go a day without making things up (some people called this lying). He shrugged his shoulders. It was not a question of revenge, since Calvino was not someone who harbored such feelings. It was simply a reaction to a refined rudeness, this mania that the world had, of disorientingly interrupting, at all hours of the day, those who were lost in their thoughts with requests for clarifications.