If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino Read Free Book Online

ribs.
    Ponko's body had heavy bones, his arms and legs hitsharply, the hair I tried to grab in order to throw him backward was a brush as stiff as a dog's coat. While we were clutching each other I had the sensation that in this struggle the transformation was taking place, and when he rose he would be me and I him, but perhaps I am thinking this only now, or it is only you, Reader, who are thinking it, not I; indeed, in that moment wrestling with him meant holding tight to myself, to my past, so that it wouldn't fall into his hands, even at the cost of destroying it, it was Brigd I wanted to destroy so she wouldn't fall into Ponko's hands, Brigd, with whom I had never thought I was in love, and I didn't think I was even now, but once, only once, I had rolled with her, one on top of the other almost like now with Ponko, and she and I were
----
    biting each other on the pile of peat behind the stove, and now I felt that I had already been fighting for her against a Ponko still in the future, that I was already fighting him for both Brigd and Zwida. I had been seeking to tear something from my past so as not to leave it to my rival, to the new me with dog's hair, or perhaps already I had been trying to wring from the past of that unknown me a secret to add to my past or to my future.
    The page you're reading should convey this violent contact of dull and painful blows, of fierce and lacerating responses; this bodiliness of using one's own body against another body, melding the weight of one's own efforts and the precision of one's own receptivity and adapting them to the mirror image of them that the adversary reflects. But if the sensations reading evokes remain scant compared to any sensation really experienced, it is also because what I am feeling as I crush Ponko's chest beneath my chest or as I block the twisting of an arm behind my back is not the sensation I would need to declare what I would like to declare, namely the amorous possession of Brigd, of the firm fullness of that girl's flesh, so different from the bony solidity of Ponko, and also the amorous possession of Zwida, of the melting softness I imagine in Zwida, the possession of a Brigd I feel already lost and of a Zwida who has only the bodiless substance of a photograph under glass. In the tangle of male limbs opposing and identical, I try in vain to clasp those female ghosts that vanish in their unattainable difference; and I try at the same time to strike myself, perhaps the other self that is about to take my place in the house or else the self most mine that I want to snatch away from that other, but which I feel pressing against me and which is only the alienness of the other, as if that other had already taken my place and any other place, and I were erased from the world.
    The world seemed alien to me when in the end I broke
----
    away from my adversary with a furious push and stood up, planting my feet on the floor. Alien was my room, the small trunk that was my luggage, the view from the little window. I feared I could no longer establish a relationship with anyone or anything. I wanted to go find Brigd, but without knowing what I wanted to say to her or do to her, what I wanted to have her say to me or do to me. I headed toward Brigd thinking of Zwida: what I sought was a two-headed figure, a Brigd-Zwida, just as I was double-faced moving away from Ponko, trying in vain with my saliva to remove a spot of blood from my corduroy suit—my blood or his, from my teeth or from Ponko's nose.
    And double-faced as I was, I heard and saw, beyond the door of the big room, Mr. Kauderer standing, making a broad horizontal gesture to measure the space before him and saying, "And so I found them before me, Kauni and Pittò, twenty-two and twenty-four years old, with their chests torn open by wolf bullets."
    "When did it happen?" my grandfather asked. "We knew nothing about it."
    "Before leaving we attended the octave service."
    "We thought things had long been