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

Separated by irregular and jagged gulfs of emptiness, proletarian terraces with lines for drying laundry and with tomato plants growing in tin cans directly face residential terraces with espaliered plants growing against wooden trellises, garden furniture of white-painted cast iron, awnings; and campaniles with the bell-chamber pealing; façades of public buildings, in profile and full-face; garrets and penthouses, illegal and unpunished constructions; pipe-scaffoldings of constructions in progress or left half-finished; large windows with curtains and little WC windows; ochre walls and burnt sienna walls, walls the color of mold from whose crevices clumps of weeds spill their pendulous foliage; elevator shafts; towers with double and triple mullioned windows; spires of churches with madonnas; statues of horses and chariots; great mansions which have decayed into hovels, hovels restructured into smart bachelor apartments; and domes that make round outlines against the sky in every direction and at every distance as if to confirm the female, Junoesque essence of the city: white domes or pink or violet according to the hour and the light, veined with nervatures, crowned by lanterns surmounted by other, smaller domes.
    Nothing of this can be seen by one who moves on his feet or his wheels over the city pavements. And, inversely, from up here you have the impression that the true crust of the earth is this, uneven but compact, even if furrowed by gaps whose depth cannot be known, chasms or pits or craters, whose edges seem in perspective to overlap like the scales of a pine cone, and it never even occurs to you to wonder what is hidden in their depth, because the panorama of the surface is already so vast and rich and various that it more than suffices to saturate the mind with information and meanings.
    This is how birds think, or at least this is how Mr Palomar thinks, imagining himself a bird. “It is only after you have come to know the surface of things,” he concludes, “that you venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface is inexhaustible.”

The gecko’s belly
     
    On the terrace, the gecko has returned, as he does every summer. An exceptional observation point allows Mr Palomar to see him not from above, as we have always been accustomed to seeing geckos, treefrogs, and lizards, but from below. In the living room of the Palomar home there is a little show-case window and display case that opens on to the terrace; on the shelves of this case a collection of Art Nouveau vases is aligned; in the evening a 75-Watt bulb illuminates the objects; a plumbago plant trails its pale blue flowers from the wall against the outside glass; every evening, as soon as the light is turned on, the gecko, who lives under the leaves on that wall, moves onto the glass, to the spot where the bulb shines, and remains motionless, like a lizard in the sun. Gnats fly around, also attracted by the light; the reptile, when a gnat comes within range, swallows it.
    Mr Palomar and Mrs Palomar every evening end up shifting their chairs from the television set to place them near the glass; from the interior of the room they contemplate the whitish form of the reptile against the dark background. The choice between television and gecko is not always made without some hesitation; each of the two spectacles has some information to offer that the other does not provide: the television ranges over continents gathering luminous impulses that describe the visible face of things; the gecko, on the other hand, represents immobile concentration and the hidden side, the obverse of what is displayed to the eye.
    The most extraordinary thing are the claws, actual hands with soft fingers, all pad, which, pressed against the glass, adhere to it with their minuscule suckers: the five fingers stretch out like the petals of little flowers in a childish drawing, and when one claw moves, the fingers close like a flower, only to spread out again and flatten