Six Memos for the Next Millennium by Italo Calvino Read Free Book Online

also be interpreted as an allegory of narrative time and the way in which it cannot be measured against real time. And the same significance can be seen in the reverse operation, in the expanding of time by the internal proliferations from one story to another, which is a feature of oriental storytelling. Scheherazade tells a story in which someone tells a story in which someone tells a story, and so forth. The art that enables Scheherazade to save her life every night consists of knowing how to join one story to another, breaking off at just the right moment—two ways of manipulating the continuity and discontinuity of time. It is a secret of rhythm, a way of capturing time that we can recognize from the very beginning: in the epic by meansof the metrical effects of the verse, in prose narrative by those effects that make us eager to know what comes next.
    Everybody knows the discomfort felt when someone sets out to tell a joke without being good at it and gets everything wrong, by which I mean, above all, the links and the rhythms. This feeling is evoked in one of Boccaccio's novellas (VI. 1), which is in fact devoted to the art of storytelling.
    A jovial company of ladies and gentlemen, guests of a Florentine lady in her country house, go for an after-lunch outing to another pleasant place in the neighborhood. To cheer them on their way, one of the men offers to tell a story.
    “Madonna Oretta, quando voi vogliate, io vi portero, gran parte della via che a andare abbiamo, a cavallo con una delle belle novelle del mondo.”
    Al quale la donna rispuose: “Messere, anzi ve ne priego io molto, e sarammi carissimo.”
    Messer lo cavaliere, al quale forse non stava meglio la spada allato che 1 novellar nella lingua, udito questo, co-mincio una sua novella, la quale nel vero da se era bellis-sima, ma egli or tre e quatro e sei volte replicando una medesima parola e ora indietro tornando e talvolta di-cendo: “Io non dissi bene” e spesso ne' nomi errando, un per un altro ponendone, fieramente la guastava: senza che egli pessimamente, secondo le qualita delle persone e gli atti che accadevano, profereva.
    Di che a madonna Oretta, udendolo, spesse volte veniva un sudore e uno sfinimento di cuore, come se inferma fosse stata per terminare; la qual cosa poi che piu sofferir non pote, conoscendo che il cavaliere era entrato nel pecoreccio ne era per riuscirne, piacevolemente disse: “Messer, questo vostro cavallo ha troppo duro trotto, per che io vi priego che vi piaccia di pormi a piè.”
    “Mistress Oretta, if you please, I shall carry you a great part of the way we have to go on horseback, with one of the best stories in the world.” “Sir,” she replied, “I pray you to do so; that will be most agreeable.” Hearing this, master cavalier, who perhaps fared no better with sword at side than with tale on tongue, began his story, which was indeed a very fine one. But what with his repeating of the same word three or four or six times over, his recapitulations, his “I didn't say that right,” his erring in putting one name for another, he spoiled it dreadfully. Also his delivery was very poor, quite out of keeping with the circumstances and the quality of his persons. Mistress Oretta, hearing him, was many times taken with a sweat and a sinking of the heart, as if she were sick and about to die. At last, unable to endure the torment any longer and seeing that the gentleman was entangled in a maze of his own making, she said pleasantly: “Sir, this horse of yours has too hard a trot, and I pray you to set me on my feet again.”
    The novella is a horse, a means of transport with its own pace, a trot or a gallop according to the distance and the ground it has to travel over; but the speed Boccaccio is talking about is a mental speed. The listed defects of the clumsy storyteller are above all oflFenses against rhythm, as well as being defects of style, because he does not use the expressions appropriate either to the