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

is she?” and he went out into the courtyard again. The Mother Superior, informed, was already on her way to him; he went toward her, spoke to her as an old friend and as if he were jokingly giving her a scolding.
    He chose to continue his tour of the various polls with the Mother Superior accompanying him. A little retinue followed him, mostly local candidates of the various districts (every so often one of the men would step forward, to tell him of some difficulty) and boys acting as messengers for the party (rushing back and forth with lists of voters transferred to other institutions but still entitled to vote here, or in any case, people for whom transportation had to be arranged), and the Member would give brief orders, unleash the messengers, the chauffeurs, answering everyone, taking him by the arm or clasping his elbow, to encourage him but also to thrust him promptly away.
    At a certain point the cars for transporting voters had all gone off to collect people. A few messengers were dawdling, waiting to make another trip; the Member didn’t like to see people standing idle, so he sent them off with his own car. Thus, each of them having been given a job, his retinue had dwindled. The Member found himself alone in the courtyard, and he had to wait until his car came back. The sun filled half of the sky; but still, in spurts, a few raindrops fell from the clouds. The Member stood for some moments in the solitude that kings and the mighty feel when they have finished issuing orders and see the world revolving on its own. He cast a cold, hostile look around him.
    Amerigo was watching him through a window. And he thought: “As far as that man’s concerned, Cottolengo doesn’t even graze the lapel of his raincoat.” (Catholic pessimism about human nature could be recognized beneath the Member’s open manner, but Amerigo preferred to see it as lucid cynicism.) And he thought, too: “He’s a man who likes his food, who smokes with a cherrywood cigarette holder. Perhaps he has a dog and goes hunting. Surely he likes women. Maybe he went to bed last night with a woman who isn’t his wife.” (Perhaps it was only Catholic indulgence toward his own gray conscience, as a good bourgeois paterfamilias, that gave the man his youthful look, but Amerigo chose to see him as a pagan, epicurean spirit.) And all of a sudden his aversion was transformed into solidarity: weren’t they perhaps, the two of them, more alike than any of the others in here? Didn’t they belong to the same family, the same side, the side of earthly values, politics, practicality, power? Weren’t they both desecrating the Cottolengo fetish, one using it as an electoral machine and the other trying to unmask it in this function?
    Looking out of the window, he noticed, at another window sill, two eyes that appeared behind the pane, a head that could only reach up as far as the nose, a huge skull covered with down: a dwarf. The dwarf’s eyes were staring at the Member, and stubby little fingers were raised against the window’s glass, the wrinkled palm of a tiny hand, striking against the pane, striking twice, as if to call him. What did the dwarf have to tell the man? Amerigo wondered. What was he thinking, the dwarf, of that authoritative personage? What was he thinking, he asked himself, of us, of all of us?
    The Honorable Member turned, his gaze went to the window, lingered only a moment on the dwarf, then moved off, far away. Amerigo thought: “He has realized there is one who can’t vote.” And he thought: “He doesn’t even see him, he doesn’t deign to glance at him.” And he also thought: “There, the Member and I are on one side, and the dwarf on the other,” and he felt reassured by this.
    The dwarf rapped his little hand against the window once more, but this time the Member didn’t even turn around. Surely the dwarf had nothing to say to the man, his