Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories by Italo Calvino Read Free Book Online

I do nothing about it.
    ‘Our generation must reconquer the things themselves, Mariamirella,’ I say. ‘Think and do things at the same time. Not do things without thinking them through. We have to put an end to this difference between the things we think and the things themselves. Then we’ll be happy.’
    ‘Why is it like this?’ she asks me.
    ‘Well, it’s not like this for everybody,’ I tell her. ‘When I was a boy I lived in a big villa, with balustrades high as if flying over the sea. And I spent my days behind those balustrades, I was a loner as a child, and for me everything was a strange symbol, the spacing of the dates hanging from the tufts on the stalks, the crooked arms of the cactuses, the strange patterns in the gravel of the paths. Then there were the grown-ups, whose job it was to deal with things, real things. All I had to do was discover new symbols, new meanings. I’ve stayed that way my whole life, I still live in a castle of meanings, not things, I still depend on the others, the “grown-ups”, the ones who handle things. But there are people who’ve worked at lathes ever since they were children. At a tool that makes things. That can have no other meaning than the things it makes. When I see a machine I look at it as if it were a magic castle, I imagine tiny men turning amongst the cogs. A lathe. God knows what a lathe is. Do you know what a lathe is, Mariamirella?’
    ‘A lathe, I’m not sure, right now,’ she says.
    ‘They must be really important, lathes. They should teach everybody to use them, instead of teaching you to use a rifle, a rifle is just another symbolic thing, with no real purpose.’
    ‘I’m not interested in lathes,’ she says.
    ‘See, it’s easier for you: you’ve got your sewing machines to save you, your needles and whatnot, gas rings, typewriters even. You’ve only got a few myths to escape from; everything’s a symbol for me. But what is definite is, we’ve got to reconquer things.’
    I’m caressing her, very softly.
    ‘So, am I a thing?’ she asks.
    ‘Ugh,’ I say.
    I’ve found a small dimple on one shoulder, above the armpit, soft, with no bone beneath, like the dimples in cheeks. I speak with my lips on the dimple.
    ‘Shoulder like cheek,’ I say. It’s incomprehensible.
    ‘What?’ she asks. But she doesn’t care in the least what I say to her.
    ‘Race like June,’ I say, still in the dimple. She doesn’t understand what I’m doing, but she likes it and laughs. She’s a nice girl.
    ‘Sea like arrival,’ I say, then take my mouth from her dimple and put my ear there to listen to the echo. All I hear is her breathing and, buried far away, her heart.
    ‘Heart like train,’ I say.
    There: now Mariamirella isn’t the Mariamirella in my mind, plus a real Mariamirella: she’s Mariamirella! And what we’re doing now isn’t something mental plus something real: the flight above the roofs, and the house swaying high like the palm trees at the window of my house in the village, a great wind has taken our top floor and is carrying it across the skies and the red ranks of rooftiles.
    On the shore by my village, the sea has noticed me and is welcoming me like a big dog. The sea—gigantic friend with small white hands that scratch the shingle—all at once it sweeps over the buttress of the breakwaters, rears its white belly and leaps over the mountains, here it comes bounding along cheerfully like a huge dog with the white paws of the undertow. The crickets fall silent, all the lowlands are flooded, fields and vineyards, till just one peasant raises his fork and shouts: the sea disappears, as though drunk by the land. Bye bye, sea.
    Going out, Mariamirella and I start running as fast as we can down the stairs, before the landlady appears at the barred window and tries to understand everything, looking us in the eyes.

Wind in a City
    Something, but I couldn’t understand what. People walking along level streets as if they were going