City by Alessandro Baricco Read Free Book Online

the more idiotic the thing that grabs you is, the more it sticks, with its wonder, as if there had to be a dose of deceit, of deliberate deceit, as if everything had to be false, at least for a while, to succeed in becoming something like a
revelation.
It’s the same with books, or films. Any more bogus than that and you’d die, and if you go to see who’s behind there you can bet that you will find only solemn sons of bitches, but meanwhile inside you see things that, walking around on the street, you dream of but in real life you’ll never find. Real life never
speaks.
It’s a game of skill, you win or you lose, they make you play it to distract you, so you won’t think. My mother used that ploy. When I didn’t stop crying, she dragged me over to a machine that was all lights and signs. It was a lovely machine—it looked like a slot machine or something. It had been set up by a company that made margarine, and had been very carefully designed. There were six cookies on a plate, some made with butter and some with margarine. You tasted them, one by one, and every time you had to say if the cookie was made with margarine or butter. In those days margarine was rather exotic, people didn’t really know what it was; they thought it was healthier than butter and basically gross. That was the problem. So the company came up with that machine, and the game was this: if you thought the cookie was made with butter you pressed the red button, and if it seemed to taste like margarine you pressed the blue one. It was fun. And I stopped crying. No doubt about it. I stopped crying. Not that something had changed in my mind: I still had stuck inside me that sensation of piercing, painful amazement, and in fact I would never again be without it, because when a child discovers there’s a place that is his place, when
his
home flashes before him for a second, and the
meaning
of a Home, and, above all, the idea that such a House
exists
, then it’s forever, you’ve been screwed to the very end, there’s no going back, you will always be someone who’s passing through by chance, with a piercing, painful sense of amazement, and so you’re always happier than others and always sadder, with all those things to laugh and cry about, as you wander. In this particular case, anyway, I stopped crying. It worked. I ate cookies, I pushed buttons, the lights went on, and I wasn’t crying anymore. My mother was happy, she thought it was over, she didn’t understand, but I did, I understood it all perfectly, I knew that nothing was over, that it would never be over, but, still, I wasn’t crying, and I was playing with butter and margarine. You know, there were so many times, later, when I felt that sensation inside again . . . It seems as if I’d never felt anything else since. With my mind somewhere else, I stood there pressing blue and red buttons, trying to guess. A game of skill. They make you play it to distract you. As long as it works, why not? Among other things, when the Ideal Home Exhibition was over that year, the margarine company announced that a hundred and thirty thousand people had played the game, and that only 8 percent of the contestants had guessed right about all six cookies. They announced it rather triumphantly. I think that was more or less my success rate. I mean that if I think of all the times I tried to guess, pushing the blue and red buttons of this life, I must have hit it right more or less 8 percent of the time—it seems to me a plausible percentage. I say this not at all triumphantly. But it must have gone more or less like that. As I see it.
    Shatzy turned to Gould, who had not missed a line.
    â€œHow’s that?”
    â€œMy father isn’t a colonel.”
    â€œNo?”
    â€œGeneral.”
    â€œOK, general. And the rest?”
    â€œIf you keep going at this rate by the time you finish I won’t need a governess