The Watcher and Other Stories by Italo Calvino Read Free Book Online

everything yawning at his feet. Was this what they called a “religious crisis”?
    There you are, you step out for a moment to smoke a cigarette, he thought, and you’re overcome with a religious crisis.
    But something in him resisted. Or rather, not in him, in his way of thinking, but around him, in the very things and people of Cottolengo. Girls with pigtails bustled by with baskets of sheets (toward, Amerigo thought, some secret ward of paralytics or monsters); idiots filed past, in lines, commanded by one who seemed only a shade less of an idiot than the others (these so-called “families,” he asked himself, with sudden sociological interest—how are they organized?); one corner of the courtyard was cluttered with plaster and sand and scaffoldings because they were adding another floor to one of the pavilions (how are the bequests managed? What percentage went into expenses, additions, and how much into increase of capital?). Cottolengo was, at once, the proof and the denial of the futility of action.
    Amerigo’s historical attitude was regaining strength; all is history: Cottolengo, these nuns going to change the sheets. (A history, perhaps, that has remained stationary at one point in its course, clotted, turned in on itself.) Even this world of the retarded could become different, and would certainly become so, in a different society. (Amerigo had only vague images in his mind: luminous institutions, ultramodern, model educational systems, memories of pictures seen in the newspapers, an atmosphere that was almost too clean, rather Swiss....)
    The vanity of everything and the importance of each action of each person were contained within the walls of the same courtyard. Amerigo had only to walk around it and he would encounter the same questions and the same answers a hundred times. So he might just as well go back to the polls; he had finished his cigarette; what was he waiting for? “A man who behaves well in history,” he tried to conclude, “even if the world is Cottolengo, is right.” And he added hastily: “Naturally, to be right is not enough.”
X
    A LARGE, black automobile came into the courtyard. The chauffeur, with his visored cap, hastened to open the rear door. An erect, clean-shaven, gray-haired man stepped out. He was wearing a light raincoat, the kind with many buttons and loops, and the collar half turned up. People sprang into action, the policeman saluted.
    The thin watcher asked the chairman in a low voice, ahem, since the Member of Parliament who was his party’s candidate had arrived could he step out for a moment because he wanted to go just for a moment you understand to report how things were proceeding here.
    The chairman answered in a low voice, ahem, to wait because since Members of Parliament are entitled to enter all the polling places perhaps the Honorable Member would come in here too.
    And he did come in. The Honorable Member moved through Cottolengo with self-confidence, haste, efficiency, and euphoria. He inquired about the turnout of voters, he uttered a few words of kindly greeting to the voters waiting in line, as if he were paying an official visit to a summer camp for slum children. The thin watcher went over to say something to him: probably that the Communists were making difficulties, and how was he to behave with them when they wanted to put everything on record all the time. The Member barely listened to him, because he wanted to know only what was absolutely indispensable about what went on in here, and he didn’t want to dwell on details. He made a vague, circular gesture, as if to say the machine was turning anyway, and turning well, there were millions of votes, and in these rather prickly situations, if a thing’s done promptly, well and good: otherwise, let it go, skip it and pass on!
    Then, abruptly, he asked about someone, flinging his questions to left and right: “Where is the Reverend Mother? Where