Hermit in Paris by Italo Calvino Read Free Book Online

his admiration for Fogazzaro, 24 Ada Negri, 25 and Papini; 26 Ortona 27 ; who never misses a party; the Afghan who explains that he voted against the resolution because the motion was too weak; the reverend ¶ who is fighting against racial discrimination in South Africa and is here as an observer (he has been expelled from South Africa); Mr Mezrick from the American Cooperative Movement who publishes a Bulletin of UN documents and who has now been reported by Senator Eastman to the Committee on Un-American Activities because he ‘publishes a Communist pamphlet’ (the Bulletin publishes all the speeches, even the Russian ones): he will now have major problems (financial above all: he will have to pay a top lawyer to prove, etc.), but in truth Eastman, who is a Southerner, wants to attack his wife who is from the League for the Emancipation of Colored Peoples.
    Sunday in the Country
    Last Sunday I went for the first time into the country, or rather the wooded hills north of the Bronx, along the wonderful motorways; first to lunch at the house of relations of the woman who was accompanying me, who is from a family of bankers who own all the estates in the area, in one of the few surviving eighteenth-century wooden villas. There was an atmosphere of great refinement, though because it was Sunday the maid was not there; but everything was so well organized that you did not notice. Then to see Giancarlo Menotti 28 who had invited me to his house at Mount Kisco: he lives (with Samuel Barber, but he was not there) in a really beautiful chalet in the woods, which is however full of the bad taste of that kind of building: their real moral defect is the lack of any distinction between the beautiful and the horrible: plates with the photograph of a woman, a magic lantern, a chamber of horrors. Menotti complains that the fame of the Spoleto music festival prevents him from receiving funds from American foundations. Sunset in an American wood is something that is totally unreal. As is the sky in New York at night.
    19 November
    Wall Street
    Naturally the first thing I want to see is Wall Street and the Stock Exchange. I arrange for a visit to Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, which is the biggest stockbroker firm there. They have girls who act as guides and accompany visitors and those hoping to invest to see round all the offices and explain how everything works. A pretty girl explains everything to me in great detail. I do not understand a thing, but at the same time I am full of admiration and also suffering enormously because this New York stock market is the first thing that I have felt is bigger than me and that I will not be able to get my head round. Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith operates entirely electronically. Linked to the Stock Exchange, all its offices have the tape with all the stock values printing out continually, and it receives all the requests to buy and sell by telephone and telex from its branches in every city in America, and in Europe too, and every second, with their calculators, they can work out dividends, securities and commodities and all the data recorded and transmitted to the Stock Exchange, and then there are the calculations for the over-the-counter market which are very complex, and from all the offices and the machines in this enormous skyscraper which houses Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, all the data end up on the top floor where the huge IBM 705 machine sits, which in one minute can perform 504, 000 additions or subtractions, 75, 000 multiplications, 33, 000 divisions and can take 1, 764, 000 logical decisions and in three minutes can read all of
Gone With the Wind
and copy it on to a tape as wide as your little finger, because everything ends up on this tape, all written in little dashes, and on an inch of this there are 543 characters. I have also seen the 705’s memory which is like a piece of cloth you would wipe with, all made up of tiny threads. I also went to the Stock