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

settled between your family and the Ozkarts. That after all these years you had buried the hatchet, that the whole horrible business between you was over."
    Mr. Kauderer's eyes, which had no lashes, kept staring into the void; nothing moved in his gutta-percha-yellow face. "Between Ozkarts and Kauderers peace lasts only from one funeral to the next, and the hatchet is not buried, but our dead are buried and we write on their graves: This was the Ozkarts' doing."
    "And what about your bunch, then?" Bronko asked, a man who called a spade a spade.
    "The Ozkarts also write on their graves: This was the Kauderers' doing." Then, rubbing one finger over his mustache, he said, "Here Ponko will be safe, at last."
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    It was at this point that my mother clasped her hands and said, "Holy Virgin, will our Gritzvi be in danger? They won't take it out on him?"
    Mr. Kauderer shook his head but didn't look her in the face. "He isn't a Kauderer! We're the ones who are in danger, always!"
    The door opened. From the hot urine of the horses in the yard a cloud of steam rose in the icy, glassy air. The stableboy stuck his flushed face inside and announced, "The buggy is ready!"
    "Gritzvi! Where are you? Hurry up!" Grandfather shouted.
    I took a step forward, toward Mr. Kauderer, who was buttoning up his felt greatcoat.
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    [3]
    The pleasures derived from the use of a paper knife are tactile, auditory, visual, and especially mental. Progress in reading is preceded by an act that traverses the material solidity of the book to allow you access to its incorporeal substance. Penetrating among the pages from below, the blade vehemently moves upward, opening a vertical cut in a flowing succession of slashes that one by one strike the fibers and mow them down—with a friendly and cheery crackling the good paper receives that first visitor, who announces countless turns of the pages stirred by the wind or by a gaze—then the horizonal fold, especially if it is double, opposes greater resistance, because it requires an awkward backhand motion—there the sound is one of muffled laceration, with deeper notes. The margin of the pages is jagged, revealing its fibrous texture; a fine shaving—also known as "curl"—is detached from it, as pretty to see as a wave's foam on the beach. Opening a path for yourself, with a sword's blade, in the barrier of pages becomes linked with the thought of how much the word contains and conceals: you cut your way through your reading as if through a dense forest.
    The novel you are reading wants to present to you a corporeal world, thick, detailed. Immersed in your reading, you move the paper knife mechanically in the depth of the volume: your reading has not yet reached the end of the first chapter, but your cutting has already gone far ahead. And there, at the moment when your attention is gripped by the suspense, in the middle of a decisive sentence, you turn the page and find yourself facing two blank sheets.
    You are dazed, contemplating that whiteness cruel as a wound, almost hoping it is your dazzled eyesight casting a blinding glare on the book, from which, gradually, the
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    zebra rectangle of inked letters will return to the surface. No, an intact blank really reigns on the two sides that confront each other. You turn another page and find the next two are printed properly. Blank, printed; blank, printed; and so on until the end. The large sheets were printed only on one side, then folded and bound as if they were complete.
    And so you see this novel so tightly interwoven with sensations suddenly riven by bottomless chasms, as if the claim to portray vital fullness revealed the void beneath. You try jumping over the gap, picking up the story by grasping the edge of the prose that comes afterward, jagged like the margin of the pages separated by the paper knife. You can't get your bearings: the characters have changed, the settings, you don't understand what it's about, you find names of people and don't know