“It’s just like this, but backward.”
This was Calvino’s favorite method of enlightening people.
However, he had had no time to enlighten the nice gentleman. It’s just as I told you, but backward. He did not feel guilty. Not at alclass="underline" to ensure that people got lost in the neighborhood was an act of generous compassion. Just like someone who takes great pleasure in showing people a film or a book they liked, Calvino likewise knew that if people went directly to their destination, without any detours, they would never have the opportunity to see and discover corners that only men who are completely lost discover.
Apart from which, he had known for a long time that it was an intolerant world.
It was possible to spend an entire day telling lies, but it was impossible to spend it telling the truth. All personal and social relationships, and relations between nations, would collapse.
Calvino also knew that a sentence did not have enough space to accommodate the truth; this was not something that could be written or spelled out, but was something that just happened. Like an earthquake or a chance encounter with an old friend at a street corner. Calvino knew that the truth was illiterate.
And there, quite literally, upon turning the corner, was an old friend: the city museum.
Well, since he was in front of the museum, why not go in?
But that was a strange museum.
Anyone who enters a place where musical instruments are on display has the unpleasant sensation of being deaf. Calvino slowly smacked his right ear three times, and then the left one. No, this had to be seen.
There was an exhibition of musical instruments and, in another room, paintings (in glass cases) on display for the blind.
It was as though sensory organs had fallen to the ground and the museum director had mixed up locations and functions while restoring them.
In another hall, photographs of great artists from past centuries were on display.
“A simple calculation,” thought Calvino, “would allow us to detect an insoluble enigma: the number of people who were considered to be ‘great artists’ after they were dead is far greater than the number of people who, in preceding years, when they were still alive, were considered to be ‘great artists.’”
The only rational conclusion that can be derived from this is that death is good for art. If all artists were immortal, it is quite likely that we would not yet have a single “great artist.”
“It could even be said that it is just as well that they are not immortal,” thought Calvino.
A hair in a painting! — how that fascinated him! Just like a cook tends to insistently leave a hirsute hallmark on the product of his art, painters do the same. It was another kind of signature.
This remarkable event — a painter who had left one of his hairs on the painting as though crushed upon the thick paint, an eighteenth-century hair — caused an internal digression in Calvino’s mental perambulations that made him think of a children’s tale. The story went something like this:
A princess was brushing the hair of the king, her father, when she found a flea in his locks. The king told her, “Don’t kill it, it will grow and could be useful.” Well, the flea grew and slowly transformed itself into a prince. The princess fell in love; married him; and when, years later, they began to grow old, she noticed that her husband was now just like her father. The erstwhile prince, who was now the king, had a daughter who, at that precise moment, was brushing his hair. This second-generation princess also found a flea and asked her father, the king, “Do I kill it or do I let it grow?” The king was about to respond, but he was suddenly interrupted by the queen, who yelled at her daughter, “Kill it immediately!”
Yes, a fine answer, thought Calvino: kill it immediately! But if all the world’s problems were merely conjugal ones everything would be a lot easier. In fact, the main problem was something quite different.
Above all, it was a question of quantifying the uncontrollable. This was the big question. To quantify what could not be described.
“I do not know how to give names to what I see, but I can do some calculations.” This was what Calvino sometimes thought.
Or better still, “I do not know how to give names to the things I see, but I can count them.”
Counting, instead of understanding or explaining.
For example, if at that precise moment Calvino was surrounded by various unknown things whose functions and reasons for existing he was unaware of, he could always calm himself down by counting them: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight: eight things that I do not know!
And this reassuringly familiar number, eight, would calm him down. One, two, three … eight monsters. “In such situations, at least we have the counting under control,” thought Calvino.
But suddenly, without having been summoned, the world appeared right before him once again. Calvino almost fell over.
On the sidewalk, an iron manhole cover that was not in its usual place had narrowly missed causing him to fall. Calvino stopped and looked inside the hole: various kinds of pipes, in circular or other kinds of trajectories, as though someone had built a sports facility for the water to have fun before it gushed out of taps and became merely useful.
He immediately remembered the relationship that a certain man had with holes.
This man had first looked up and had then looked sideways in both directions, confirming that there was no danger.
Then, completely safe, he let himself fall.
Well, but it wasn’t the right moment to let himself fall.
Calvino then did something that we can describe as seven initiatives to close one single thing.
However, the manhole cover would not fit into the hole that had been made for it. He then amiably handed over the heavy iron cover to a policeman, placing it in his hands, but not without first briefly exchanging a few words with him:
“This is yours.”
“No, it’s yours.”
“Mine? No. It’s yours.”
The discussion with the policeman had, however, left him with a mild albeit persistent pain in his thumb. It had been a mistake to engage in an intellectual discussion with a manhole cover in one’s hands — he would never repeat such an error.
In fact, it was almost as though his thumb had been stricken intellectually. He now moved it forward and backward, then to the right and then to the left, to check if, essentially, some malfunction or rupture had taken place.
It had been man’s ability to manipulate his thumb that had enabled human beings to conquer the world — Mister Calvino was well aware of this — but the thumb that could be used against evil also served for detailed amorous trajectories. And this mixture, this confusion between good and evil, pleasure and pain, was far from being the only one in the world.
“How do you do, ma’am?”
Mister Calvino was always very courteous. However, that meeting could not help but remind him of a slightly unpleasant story. That of an uncommonly ugly woman who was prevented (at the frontier) from proceeding, since they accused her — and the crime was plain to see — of wanting to traffic in frights.
And since they no longer wanted her in her homeland, the woman in question stayed forever in a no-man’s-land, between two nations, a neutral site that tolerated emptiness, tedium, fealty, and other assorted horrors of our civilization more easily.