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

family. For Mrs Palomar it was natural to transfer to the plants her attention to individual things, chosen and made her own through an inner identification and thus becoming part of a composition with multiple variations, an emblematic collection; but this spiritual dimension is lacking in the other members of the family. In the daughter because youth cannot and should not become fixed on the here but only on the farther on, the over there; in the husband because he was too late in freeing himself from his youthful impatiences and in understanding (only in theory) that salvation lies solely in applying oneself to the things that there are.
    The concerns of the cultivator, for whom what matters is that given plant, that given piece of ground exposed to the sun from this hour to that hour, that given disease of the leaves which must be fought in time with that given treatment, are alien to the mind modeled on the processes of industry, led to make decisions, in other words, along general lines, according to prototypes. When Palomar realized how approximate and doomed to error are the criteria of that world, where he had thought to find precision and universal norms, he slowly reverted to building for himself a relationship with the world, confining it to the observation of visible forms; but by then he was the way he was: his connection with things has remained that intermittent and labile tie of those people who seem always intent on thinking of something else, but this something else does not exist. His contribution to the burgeoning of the terrace is to run out every now and then to frighten the pigeons – “Shoo! Shoo!” – waking in himself the atavistic sense of defending the territory.
    If birds other than pigeons light on the terrace, instead of driving them away Mr Palomar welcomes them, closes an eye to any possible damage done by their beaks, considers them the messengers of friendly deities. But these appearances are rare: a patrol of crows occasionally approaches, punctuating the sky with black patches, and spreading (even the language of the gods changes with the centuries) a sense of life and gaiety. Then an occasional blackbird, polite and clever; once, a robin; sparrows in their usual role of anonymous passers-by. Other feathered presences over the city allow themselves to be sighted at a greater distance: the squadrons of migratory birds, in autumn, and the acrobaties, in summer, of swallows and house martins. From time to time, white gulls, rowing the air with their long wings, venture over the dry sea of tiles, lost perhaps in following the bends of the river from its mouth, or perhaps intent on a nuptial rite, and their marine cry shrieks among the city noises.
    The terrace is on two levels: a loggia or belvedere dominates the hurly-burly of the roofs over which Mr Palomar casts a bird’s-eye glance. He tries to conceive the world as it is seen by birds; unlike him, birds have the void opening beneath them, but perhaps they never look down, they see only to the side, hovering obliquely on their wings, and their gaze, like his, wherever it turns, encounters nothing but roofs, higher or lower, constructions more or less elevated but so thick that he can move but so far down. That down below, hemmed in, streets and squares exist, that the true ground is the one at ground level, he knows on the basis of other experiences; at this moment, from what he can see from up here, he would never suspect it.
    The true form of the city is in this rise and fall of roofs, old tiles and new, curved and flat, slender or squat chimneys, arbors of reed matting and sheds of corrugated iron, railings, balustrades, little columns supporting pots, metal water-tanks, dormers, glass skylights, and rising above all else the rigging of TV aerials, straight or crooked, enameled or rusting, in models of successive generations, variously ramified and horned and shielded, but all of them thin as skeletons and disturbing as totems.