The butterfly settled on his shadow as though it were a surface — a fine black carpet — and not just an illusion.
However, immediately afterward, the butterfly flew off, and settled on the legs of a beautiful woman, who was wearing the skimpiest of skirts; it then flew to the table and settled on the open pages of an algebra book. Calvino watched: the butterfly’s tiny feet were on a second-degree equation. Calvino looked at it, at the equation, and then at the butterfly, but the latter flew off again, this time toward the kitchen. Calvino followed it and then froze. There was a raw steak on top of the table, the butterfly circled the meat, but Calvino’s hand waved it away in time — certain combinations are unlucky. The butterfly flew out of the room. It first settled on a painting and then flew off again and came near Calvino’s left ear.
Calvino felt the colors approach his ear and smiled, he continued to smile while the butterfly entered through his ear, step by step, wing by wing, and went inside his head. Now it was inside and was flapping around his head, its small wings opened and closed delicately and Calvino felt from that moment onward he didn’t have to think of anything else, as though the world was, finally, all thought out and resolved, without the need for any human abnegation. Calvino felt happy.
However, still in his dream, Calvino woke up. A strong headache: and it seemed reluctant to go away.
Mister Calvino’s Third Dream
He was so involved in a discussion with his partner about the percentages of something that he didn’t even notice what had happened: they had been swallowed up by a whale. Inside the whale’s stomach, Calvino continued to discuss percentages. He now understood the deal they were discussing, it involved the sale of petroleum and books. Who would get what? The discussion became heated and Calvino got increasingly caught up in it; he then turned his back on his partner and went out into the street: he observed passersby walking from one side to the other. The few that were not in a hurry, the ones who stopped and also discussed percentages among themselves: 30, no, 37! no, no, 32! Everybody was arguing, Calvino couldn’t help but repeat, to himself: 43 percent, at least 43 percent!
But at the same time he had a feeling that they were all inside the belly of a whale and had all been swallowed up a long time ago.
The Balloon
Sometimes Mister Calvino would walk around the city for an entire week, carrying a well-filled balloon with him. He kept up all his normal daily activities, without the slightest change in his routine: his morning walks, the loud and convincing “Good morning!” bestowed upon each person he came across in the neighborhood, the activities necessary for his job, his strictly regulated dinner and his reckless, anything goes lunch, his timetable and punctuality with their classic rigor, his conservative and discreet manner of dressing and smiling, in short, nothing changed — from the moment he got up until he went to bed — except for one thing: between the first finger and thumb of his right hand he firmly clasped, with all the precision of a watchmaker, the string of a well-filled balloon, which he carried with him throughout the day. At work, at home, in the street, at the grocer, where he periodically requested Apples that are rosier than innocent girls, at the café, irrespective of whether he was walking slowly or quickly, standing upright or sitting, Mister Calvino never let go of the balloon, perpetually ensuring that it did not burst.
Sometimes, he tied it to his wrist with a string.
At work, when it was essential to have two hands free, he would make a knot with the string around the key to a drawer, and the balloon would stay there, by his side, silent, ever present, and seemingly fulfilling the role, on his table, of the family photographs that some colleagues placed on top of their desks. When nature called, he would go into the bathroom with the balloon and, once inside, would carefully — like someone placing a fragile jar on an unstable base — wrap the string around the doorknob and you could see that he was almost tempted to say, affectionately, just like some people talk to their animals: Wait a minute.
While using public transport, during rush hour, Mister Calvino would raise the balloon above his head and would resolutely maintain his arm raised throughout the journey so that a careless movement would not burst the balloon. At home, before going to bed, he would place the balloon near his bedside table and only then would he fall asleep.
For Mister Calvino, paying an uncommon amount of attention (even if only for a few days) to an object like this was a fundamental exercise that allowed him to train his gaze about things in this world. Essentially, the balloon was a simple system of pointing toward Nothing. This system, which was commonly known as a balloon, basically surrounded a minute part of all the air in the world with a fine layer of latex. Without this colorful layer, that air, which had now almost been underlined and singled out from the rest of the atmosphere, would have gone completely unnoticed. For Calvino, choosing the color of the balloon was equivalent to attributing a color to the insignificant. Almost as though he were to decide: today the insignificant will be blue.
And the almost unbearable fragility of the balloon further obliged a set of protective gestures that reminded Calvino of the short distance that exists between the enormous and vigorous life he now had and the enormous and vigorous death that always lurked, like an unseen but noisy insect, around him at any given moment.
The Window
One of Calvino’s windows, the one that had a better view of the street, was covered by two curtains that, when they were joined, could be buttoned down the middle. One of the curtains, the one on the right, had buttons and the other curtain had the respective buttonholes.
In order to look out of that window, Calvino first had to un-button the seven buttons, one by one. Then he would pull aside the curtains with his hands and could look out and observe the world. Finally, after he had finished watching, he would pull the curtains across the window and would button up each of the buttons. It was a window that had to be buttoned.
When he opened the window in the morning, after slowly unbuttoning the buttons, he would feel an erotic intensity in these gestures, like someone who was delicately but eagerly unbuttoning the clothes of a lover.
He would then look out of the window in a different manner. As though the world was not something that was available at any given moment, but was instead something that required him, and his fingers, to carry out a set of meticulous gestures.
The world was not the same through that window.
Alphabet Soup