Read Mr Palomar (Vintage Classics) Online
Authors: Italo Calvino
Mr Palomar (Vintage Classics) (3 page)
Now all the sailboards have been pulled ashore, and the last shivering swimmer – Palomar by name – also comes out of the water. He has become convinced that the sword will exist even without him: finally he dries himself with a soft towel and goes home.
PALOMAR IN THE GARDEN
The loves of the tortoises
There are two tortoises on the patio: a male and a female. Zlak! Zlak! their shells strike each other. It is the season of their love-making.
The male pushes the female sideways, all around the edge of the paving. The female seems to resist his attack, or at least she opposes a somewhat inert immobility. The male is smaller and more active; he seems younger. He tries repeatedly to mount her, from behind, but the back of her shell is steep and he slides off.
Now he must have succeeded in achieving the right position: he thrusts with rhythmic, cadenced strokes; at every thrust he emits a kind of gasp, almost a cry. The female has her foreclaws flattened against the ground, enabling her to raise her hind part. The male scratches with his foreclaws on her shell, his neck stuck out, his mouth gaping. The problem with these shells is that there’s no way to get a hold; and, in fact, the claws can find no purchase.
Now she escapes him, he pursues her. Not that she is faster or particularly determined to run away: to restrain her he gives her some little nips on one leg, always the same one. She does not rebel. Every time she stops, the male tries to mount her; but she takes a little step forward and he topples off, slamming his member on the ground. This member is fairly long, hooked in a way that apparently makes it possible for him to reach her even though the thickness of the shells and their awkward positioning separates them. So there is no telling how many of these attacks achieve their purpose or how many fail, or how many are theater, play-acting.
It is summer; the patio is bare, except for one green jasmine in a corner. The courtship consists of making so many turns around the little patch of grass, with pursuits and flights and skirmishing not of the claws but of the shells, which strike in a dull clicking. The female tries to find refuge among the stalks of the jasmine; she believes – or wants to make others believe – that she does this to hide; but actually this is the surest way to remain blocked by the male, held immobile with no avenue of escape. Now it is likely that he has managed to introduce his member properly; but this time they are both completely still, silent.
The sensations of the pair of mating tortoises are something Mr Palomar cannot imagine. He observes them with a cold attention, as if they were two machines: two electronic tortoises programmed to mate. What does eros become if there are plates of bone or horny scales in the place of skin? But what we call eros – is it perhaps only a program of our corporeal bodies, more complicated because the memory receives messages from every cell of the skin, from every molecule of our tissues, and multiplies them and combines them with the impulses transmitted by our eyesight and with those aroused by the imagination? The difference lies only in the number of circuits involved: from our receptors billions of wires extend, linked with the computer of feelings, conditionings, the ties between one person and another . . . Eros is a program that unfolds in the electronic clusters of the mind, but the mind is also skin: skin touched, seen, remembered. And what about the tortoises, enclosed in their insensitive casing? The poverty of their sensorial stimuli perhaps drives them to a concentrated, intense mental life, leads them to a crystalline inner awareness . . . Perhaps the eros of tortoises obeys absolute spiritual laws, while we are prisoners of a machinery whose functioning remains unknown to us, prone to clogging up, stalling, exploding in uncontrolled automatisms . . .
Do the tortoises understand themselves any better? After about ten minutes of mating, the two shells separate. She ahead, he behind, they resume their circling of the grass. Now the male remains more distanced, every now and then he scratches his claws against her shell, he climbs on her for a little, but without much conviction. They go back under the jasmine. He gives her a nip or two on one leg, always in the same place.
The blackbird’s whistle
Mr Palomar is lucky in one respect: he spends the summer in a place where many birds sing. As he sits in a deck-chair and “works” (in fact, he is lucky also in another respect: he can say he is working in places and attitudes that would suggest complete repose; or rather, he suffers this handicap: he feels obliged never to stop working, even when lying under the trees on an August morning), the invisible birds among the boughs around him display a repertory of the most varied manifestations of sound; they enfold him in an acoustic space that is irregular, discontinuous, jagged; but thanks to an equilibrium established among the various sounds, none of which outdoes the others in intensity or frequency, all is woven into a homogeneous texture, held together not by harmony but by lightness and transparency. Until the hour of greatest heat, when the fierce horde of insects asserts its absolute domination of the vibrations of the air, systematically filling the dimensions of time and space with the deafening and ceaseless hammering of cicadas.
The birds’ song occupies a variable part of Mr Palomar’s auditory attention: at times he ignores it as a component of the basic silence, at other times he concentrates on distinguishing, within it, one song from another, grouping them into categories of increasing complexity: punctiform chirps; two-note trills (one note long, one short); brief, vibrato whistling; gurgles, little cascades of notes that pour down, spin out, then stop; twirls of modulation that twist upon themselves, and so on, to extended warbling.
Mr Palomar does not arrive at a less generic classification: he is not one of those people who, on hearing a bird-call, can identify the bird it belongs to. This ignorance makes him feel guilty. The new knowledge the human race is acquiring does not compensate for the knowledge spread only by direct oral transmission, which, once lost, cannot be regained or retransmitted: no book can teach what can be learned only in childhood if you lend an alert ear and eye to the song and flight of birds and if you find someone who knows how to give them a specific name. Rather than the cultivation of precise nomenclature and classification, Palomar had preferred the constant pursuit of a precision unsure in defining the modulating, the shifting, the composite. Today he would make the opposite choice, and following the train of thoughts stirred by the birds’ singing, he sees his life as a series of missed opportunities.
Among all the cries of the birds, the blackbird’s whistle stands out, unmistakable for any other. The blackbirds arrive in the late afternoon; there are two of them, a couple certainly, perhaps the same couple as last year, as every year at this season. Each afternoon, hearing a whistled summons, on two notes, like the signal of a person wishing to announce his arrival, Mr Palomar raises his head to look around for whoever is calling him. Then he remembers that this is the blackbirds’ hour. He soon glimpses them: they walk on the lawn as if their true vocation were to be earth-bound bipeds, and as if they enjoyed establishing analogies with human beings.
The blackbird’s whistle has this special quality: it is identical with a human whistle, the effort of someone not terribly skilled at whistling, but with a good reason for whistling, this once, only this once, with no intention of continuing, a person who does it with a determined, but modest and affable tone, calculated to win the indulgence of anyone who hears him.
After a while the whistle is repeated – by the same blackbird or by its mate – but always as if this were the first time it had occurred to him to whistle; if this is a dialogue, each remark is uttered after long reflection. But is it a dialogue, or does each blackbird whistle for itself and not for the other? And, in whichever case, are these questions and answers (to the whistler or to the mate) or are they confirmations of something that is always the same thing (the bird’s own presence, his belonging to this species, this sex, this territory)? Perhaps the value of this single word lies in its being repeated by another whistling beak, in its not being forgotten during the interval of silence.
Or else the whole dialogue consists of one saying to the other “I am here,” and the length of the pauses adds to the phrase the sense of a “still,” as if to say: “I am here still, it is still I.” And what if it is in the pause and not in the whistle that the meaning of the message is contained? If it were in the silence that the blackbirds speak to each other? (In this case the whistle would be a punctuation mark, a formula like “over and out.”) A silence, apparently the same as another silence, could express a hundred different notions; a whistle could too, for that matter; to speak to one another by remaining silent, or by whistling, is always possible; the problem is understanding one another. Or perhaps no one can understand anyone: each blackbird believes that he has put into his whistle a meaning fundamental for him, but only he understands it; the other gives him a reply that has no connection with what he said; it is a dialogue between the deaf, a conversation without head or tail.
But is human dialogue really any different? Mrs Palomar is also in the garden, watering the veronicas. She says, “There they are,” a pleonastic utterance (if it assumes that her husband is already looking at the blackbirds), or else (if he has not seen them) incomprehensible, but in any event intended to establish her own priority in the observation of the blackbirds (because, in fact, she was the first to discover them and to point out their habits to her husband) and to underline their unfailing appearance, which she has already reported many times.
“Sssh,” Mr Palomar says, apparently to prevent his wife from frightening them by speaking in a loud voice (useless injunction because the blackbirds, husband and wife, are by now accustomed to the presence and voices of Palomars, husband and wife) but actually to contest the wife’s precedence, displaying a consideration for the blackbirds far greater than hers.
Then Mrs Palomar says, “It’s dry again, just since yesterday,” meaning the earth in the flowerbed she is watering, a communication in itself superfluous, but meant to show, as she continues speaking and changes the subject, a far greater familiarity and nonchalance with the blackbirds than her husband has. In any case, from these remarks Mr Palomar derives a general picture of tranquility, and he is grateful to his wife for it, because if she confirms the fact that for the moment there is nothing more serious for him to bother about, then he can remain absorbed in his work (or pseudo-work or hyperwork). He allows a minute to pass, then he also tries to send a reassuring message, to inform his wife that his work (or infrawork or ultrawork) is proceeding as usual: to this end he emits a series of sighs and grumbles: “crooked . . . for all that . . . repeat . . . yes, my foot . . .”: utterances that, taken all together, transmit also the message “I am very busy,” in the event that his wife’s last remark contained a veiled reproach on the order of “you could also assume some responsibility for watering the garden.”
The premiss of these verbal exchanges is the idea that a perfect accord between a married pair allows them to understand each other without having to make everything specific and detailed; but this principle is put into practice in very different ways by the two of them: Mrs Palomar expresses herself with complete sentences, though often allusive or sibylline, to test the promptness of her husband’s mental associations and the syntony of his thoughts with hers (a thing that does not always work); Mr Palomar, on the other hand, from the mists of his inner monologue allows scattered, articulate sounds to emerge, confident that, if the obviousness of a complete meaning does not emerge, at least the chiaroscuro of a mood will.
Mrs Palomar, instead, refuses to receive these grumbles as talk, and to underline her non-participation she says in a low voice, “Sssh! . . . You’ll frighten them . . .”, applying to her husband the same shushing that he had believed himself entitled to impose on her, and confirming once more her own primacy as far as consideration for the blackbirds goes.
Having scored this point to her advantage, Mrs Palomar goes off. The blackbirds peck on the lawn and no doubt consider the dialogue of the Palomars the equivalent of their own whistles. We might just as well confine ourselves to whistling, he thinks. Here a prospect that is very promising for Mr Palomar’s thinking opens out; for him the discrepancy between human behavior and the rest of the universe has always been a source of anguish. The equal whistle of man and blackbird now seems to him a bridge thrown over the abyss.
If man were to invest in whistling everything he normally entrusts to words, and if the blackbird were to modulate into his whistling all the unspoken truth of his natural condition, then the first step would be taken towards bridging the gap between . . . between what and what? Nature and culture? Silence and speech? Mr Palomar hopes always that silence contains something more than what language can say. But what if language were really the goal towards which everything in existence tends? Or what if everything that exists were language, and has been since the beginning of time? Here Mr Palomar is again gripped by anguish.
After having listened carefully to the whistle of the blackbird, he tries to repeat it, as faithfully as he can. A puzzled silence follows, as if his message required careful examination; then an identical whistle re-echoes. Mr Palomar does not know if this is a reply to his, or the proof that his whistle is so different that the blackbirds are not the least disturbed by it and resume their dialogue as if nothing had happened.
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