Read Mr Palomar (Vintage Classics) Online
Authors: Italo Calvino
Mr Palomar (Vintage Classics) (6 page)
Some silent shadows are moving over the sand: a pair of lovers rises from the dune, a night fisherman, a customs-man, a boatman. Mr Palomar hears a whispering. He looks around: a few paces from him a little crowd has gathered, observing his movements like the convulsions of a madman.
PALOMAR IN THE CITY
PALOMAR ON THE TERRACE
From the terrace
“Shoo! Shoo!” Mr Palomar rushes on to the terrace to drive away the pigeons, who eat the leaves of the gazania, riddle the succulent plants with their beaks, cling with their claws to the cascade of morning-glories, peck at the blackberries, devour leaf by leaf the parsley planted in the box near the kitchen, dig and scratch in the flowerpots, spilling dirt and baring the roots, as if the sole purpose of their flights were devastation. The doves whose flying once cheered the city’s squares have been followed by a degenerate progeny, filthy and infected, neither domestic nor wild, but integrated into the public institutions and, as such, inextinguishable. The sky of Rome has long since fallen under the dominion of the over-population of these lumpen-fowl, who make life difficult for every other species of bird in the area and oppress the once free and various kingdom of the air with their monotonous, moulting, lead-gray livery.
Trapped between the subterranean hordes of rats and the grievous flight of the pigeons, the ancient city allows itself to be corroded from below and from above, offering no more resistance than it did in the past to the barbarian invasions, as if it saw not the assault of external enemies but the darkest, most congenital impulses of its own inner essence.
The city has also another soul – one of the many – that lives on the harmony between old stones and ever-new vegetation, sharing the favors of the sun. Fostering this good environmental attitude or
genius loci
, the Palomar family’s terrace, a secret island above the rooftops, dreams of concentrating under its pergola the luxuriance of the gardens of Babylon.
genius loci
, the Palomar family’s terrace, a secret island above the rooftops, dreams of concentrating under its pergola the luxuriance of the gardens of Babylon.
The luxuriance of the terrace corresponds to the desire of each member of the family. For Mrs Palomar it was natural to transfer to the plants her attention to individual things, chosen and made her own through an inner identification and thus becoming part of a composition with multiple variations, an emblematic collection; but this spiritual dimension is lacking in the other members of the family. In the daughter because youth cannot and should not become fixed on the here but only on the farther on, the over there; in the husband because he was too late in freeing himself from his youthful impatiences and in understanding (only in theory) that salvation lies solely in applying oneself to the things that there are.
The concerns of the cultivator, for whom what matters is that given plant, that given piece of ground exposed to the sun from this hour to that hour, that given disease of the leaves which must be fought in time with that given treatment, are alien to the mind modeled on the processes of industry, led to make decisions, in other words, along general lines, according to prototypes. When Palomar realized how approximate and doomed to error are the criteria of that world, where he had thought to find precision and universal norms, he slowly reverted to building for himself a relationship with the world, confining it to the observation of visible forms; but by then he was the way he was: his connection with things has remained that intermittent and labile tie of those people who seem always intent on thinking of something else, but this something else does not exist. His contribution to the burgeoning of the terrace is to run out every now and then to frighten the pigeons – “Shoo! Shoo!” – waking in himself the atavistic sense of defending the territory.
If birds other than pigeons light on the terrace, instead of driving them away Mr Palomar welcomes them, closes an eye to any possible damage done by their beaks, considers them the messengers of friendly deities. But these appearances are rare: a patrol of crows occasionally approaches, punctuating the sky with black patches, and spreading (even the language of the gods changes with the centuries) a sense of life and gaiety. Then an occasional blackbird, polite and clever; once, a robin; sparrows in their usual role of anonymous passers-by. Other feathered presences over the city allow themselves to be sighted at a greater distance: the squadrons of migratory birds, in autumn, and the acrobaties, in summer, of swallows and house martins. From time to time, white gulls, rowing the air with their long wings, venture over the dry sea of tiles, lost perhaps in following the bends of the river from its mouth, or perhaps intent on a nuptial rite, and their marine cry shrieks among the city noises.
The terrace is on two levels: a loggia or belvedere dominates the hurly-burly of the roofs over which Mr Palomar casts a bird’s-eye glance. He tries to conceive the world as it is seen by birds; unlike him, birds have the void opening beneath them, but perhaps they never look down, they see only to the side, hovering obliquely on their wings, and their gaze, like his, wherever it turns, encounters nothing but roofs, higher or lower, constructions more or less elevated but so thick that he can move but so far down. That down below, hemmed in, streets and squares exist, that the true ground is the one at ground level, he knows on the basis of other experiences; at this moment, from what he can see from up here, he would never suspect it.
The true form of the city is in this rise and fall of roofs, old tiles and new, curved and flat, slender or squat chimneys, arbors of reed matting and sheds of corrugated iron, railings, balustrades, little columns supporting pots, metal water-tanks, dormers, glass skylights, and rising above all else the rigging of TV aerials, straight or crooked, enameled or rusting, in models of successive generations, variously ramified and horned and shielded, but all of them thin as skeletons and disturbing as totems. Separated by irregular and jagged gulfs of emptiness, proletarian terraces with lines for drying laundry and with tomato plants growing in tin cans directly face residential terraces with espaliered plants growing against wooden trellises, garden furniture of white-painted cast iron, awnings; and campaniles with the bell-chamber pealing; façades of public buildings, in profile and full-face; garrets and penthouses, illegal and unpunished constructions; pipe-scaffoldings of constructions in progress or left half-finished; large windows with curtains and little WC windows; ochre walls and burnt sienna walls, walls the color of mold from whose crevices clumps of weeds spill their pendulous foliage; elevator shafts; towers with double and triple mullioned windows; spires of churches with madonnas; statues of horses and chariots; great mansions which have decayed into hovels, hovels restructured into smart bachelor apartments; and domes that make round outlines against the sky in every direction and at every distance as if to confirm the female, Junoesque essence of the city: white domes or pink or violet according to the hour and the light, veined with nervatures, crowned by lanterns surmounted by other, smaller domes.
Nothing of this can be seen by one who moves on his feet or his wheels over the city pavements. And, inversely, from up here you have the impression that the true crust of the earth is this, uneven but compact, even if furrowed by gaps whose depth cannot be known, chasms or pits or craters, whose edges seem in perspective to overlap like the scales of a pine cone, and it never even occurs to you to wonder what is hidden in their depth, because the panorama of the surface is already so vast and rich and various that it more than suffices to saturate the mind with information and meanings.
This is how birds think, or at least this is how Mr Palomar thinks, imagining himself a bird. “It is only after you have come to know the surface of things,” he concludes, “that you venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface is inexhaustible.”
The gecko’s belly
On the terrace, the gecko has returned, as he does every summer. An exceptional observation point allows Mr Palomar to see him not from above, as we have always been accustomed to seeing geckos, treefrogs, and lizards, but from below. In the living room of the Palomar home there is a little show-case window and display case that opens on to the terrace; on the shelves of this case a collection of Art Nouveau vases is aligned; in the evening a 75-Watt bulb illuminates the objects; a plumbago plant trails its pale blue flowers from the wall against the outside glass; every evening, as soon as the light is turned on, the gecko, who lives under the leaves on that wall, moves onto the glass, to the spot where the bulb shines, and remains motionless, like a lizard in the sun. Gnats fly around, also attracted by the light; the reptile, when a gnat comes within range, swallows it.
Mr Palomar and Mrs Palomar every evening end up shifting their chairs from the television set to place them near the glass; from the interior of the room they contemplate the whitish form of the reptile against the dark background. The choice between television and gecko is not always made without some hesitation; each of the two spectacles has some information to offer that the other does not provide: the television ranges over continents gathering luminous impulses that describe the visible face of things; the gecko, on the other hand, represents immobile concentration and the hidden side, the obverse of what is displayed to the eye.
The most extraordinary thing are the claws, actual hands with soft fingers, all pad, which, pressed against the glass, adhere to it with their minuscule suckers: the five fingers stretch out like the petals of little flowers in a childish drawing, and when one claw moves, the fingers close like a flower, only to spread out again and flatten against the glass, making tiny streaks, like fingerprints. At once delicate and strong, these hands seem to contain a potential intelligence, so that if they could only be freed from their task of remaining stuck there to the vertical surface they could acquire the talents of human hands, which are said to have become skilled after they no longer had to cling to boughs or press on the ground.
Bent, the legs seem not so much all knee as all elbow, elastic in order to raise the body. The tail adheres to the glass only along a central strip, from which the rings begin that circle it from one side to the other and make of it a sturdy and well-protected implement; most of the time it is listless, idle, and seems to have no talent or ambition beyond subsidiary support (nothing like the calligraphic agility of lizards’ tails); but when called upon, it proves well-articulated, ready to react, even expressive.
Of the head, the vibrant, capacious gullet is visible, and the protruding, lidless eyes at either side. The throat is a limp sack’s surface extending from the tip of the chin, hard and all scales like that of an alligator, to the white belly that, where it presses against the glass, also reveals a grainy, perhaps adhesive, speckling.
When a gnat passes close to the gecko’s throat, the tongue flicks and engulfs, rapid and supple and prehensile, without shape, capable of assuming whatever shape. In any case, Mr Palomar is never sure if he has seen it or not seen it: what he surely does see, now, is the gnat inside the reptile’s gullet: the belly pressed against the illuminated glass is transparent as if under X-rays; you can follow the shadow of the prey in its course through the viscera that absorb it.
If all material were transparent – the ground that supports us, the envelope that sheathes our body – everything would be seen not as a fluttering of impalpable wings but as an inferno of grinding and ingesting. Perhaps at this moment a god of the nether world situated in the center of the earth with his eye that can pierce granite is watching us from below, following the cycle of living and dying, the lacerated victims dissolving in the bellies of their devourers until they, in their turn, are swallowed by another belly.
The gecko remains motionless for hours; with a snap of his tongue he gulps down a mosquito or a gnat every now and then; other insects, on the contrary, identical to the first, light unawares a few millimeters from his mouth and he seems not to perceive them. Is it the vertical pupil of his eyes, separated at the sides of his head, that does not notice? Or does he have criteria of choice and rejection that we do not know? Or are his actions prompted by chance or by whim?
The segmentation of legs and tail into rings, the speckling of tiny granulous plates on his head and belly give the gecko the appearance of a mechanical device; a highly elaborate machine, its every microscopic detail carefully studied, so that you begin to wonder if all that perfection is not squandered, in view of the limited operations it performs. Or is this perhaps the secret: content to be, does he reduce his doing to the minimum? Can this be his lesson, the opposite of the morality that, in his youth, Mr Palomar wanted to make his: to strive always to do something a bit beyond one’s means?
Now a bewildered nocturnal butterfly comes within range. Will he overlook it? No, he catches this, too. His tongue is transformed into a butterfly net and he pulls it into his mouth. Will it all fit? Will he spit it out? Will he explode? No, the butterfly is there in his throat: it flutters, in a sorry state, but still itself, not touched by the insult of chewing teeth, now it passes the narrow limits of the neck, it is a shadow that begins its slow and troubled journey down along a swollen esophagus.
The gecko, emerging from its impassiveness, gasps, shakes its convulsed throat, staggers on legs and tail, twists its belly, subjected to a severe test. Will this be enough for him, for tonight? Will he go away? Was this the peak of every desire he yearned to satisfy? Was this the nearly impossible test in which he wanted to prove himself? No, he stays. Perhaps he has fallen asleep. What is sleep like for someone who has eyes without eyelids?
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