Mr Palomar (Vintage Classics) by Italo Calvino Read Free Book Online

observation of the stars transmits an unstable and contradictory knowledge – Palomar thinks – the exact opposite of what the ancients were able to derive from it. Is this because his relationship with the sky is intermittent and agitated rather than a serene habit? If he forced himself to contemplate the constellations night after night and year after year, following their progress, their returns along the curved tracks of the dark vault, he would perhaps also gain in the end the notion of a continuing and unchangeable time, separated from the labile and fragmentary time of terrestrial events. But would attention to the celestial revolutions be enough to stamp this imprint on him? Or would not a special inner revolution be necessary, something he could suppose only theoretically, unable to imagine the palpable effects on his emotions and on the rhythms of his mind?
    Of the mythical knowledge of the stars he picks up only a weary glimmering; of the scientific knowledge, the echoes popularized by the newspapers. He distrusts what he knows; what he does not know keeps his spirit in a suspended state. Oppressed, insecure, he becomes nervous over the celestial charts as over the railroad timetables when he flips through them in search of a connection.
    There, a glowing arrow slices the sky. A meteor? These are the nights when you sight shooting stars most frequently. But it could also easily be a brightly-lighted commercial plane. Mr Palomar’s gaze remains alert, available, released from all certitude.
    He has been on the dark beach for an hour, seated on a deck-chair, twisting towards south or towards north, every now and then turning on the flashlight and holding the charts to his nose, after keeping them spread out on his lap; then, craning his neck backwards he begins the exploration again, setting out from the Pole Star.
    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
     
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PALOMAR ON THE TERRACE
     
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    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.
    The luxuriance of the terrace corresponds to the desire of each member of the