If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

by Italo Calvino

  “Ludmilla reads one novel after another, but she never clarifies the problems. It seems a big waste of time to me. Don’t you have this impression?”

  If you start arguing, she’ll never let you go. Now she is inviting you to a seminar at the university, where books are analyzed according to all Codes, Conscious and Unconscious, and in which all Taboos are eliminated, the ones imposed by the dominant Sex, Class, and Culture.

  “Will Ludmilla be going, too?”

  No, it seems Ludmilla takes no part in her sister’s activities. But on the other hand, Lotaria is counting on your participation.

  You prefer not to commit yourself. “I’ll see, I’ll try to drop by. I can’t promise. Meanwhile, would you please tell your sister I called?... But anyway, it doesn’t matter, I’ll call back. Thanks a lot.” That’s enough, go ahead and hang up.

  But Lotaria detains you. “Look, there’s no point in your calling here again, this isn’t Ludmilla’s place, it’s mine. Ludmilla always gives my number to people she doesn’t know, she says I keep them at a distance...”

  You are hurt. Another cruel shock: the book that seemed so promising broke off; the telephone number that you also believed the beginning of something proves to be a dead end, with this Lotaria who insists on questioning you....

  “Ah, I see. Sorry.”

  “Hello? Ah, you’re the gentleman I met in the bookshop?” A different voice, hers, has taken over the telephone. “Yes, this is Ludmilla. You have blank pages, too? We might have expected as much. Another trap. Just when I was getting involved in it, when I wanted to read more about Ponko, and Gritzvi...”

  You are so happy you can’t utter a word. You say: “Zwida...”

  “What?”

  “Yes, Zwida Ozkart! I would like to know what goes on between Gritzvi and Zwida Ozkart.... Is this novel really the kind you like?”

  A pause. Then Ludmilla’s voice resumes slowly, as if she were trying to express something not easily defined. “Yes, it is. I like it very much.... Still, I wish the things I read weren’t all present, so solid you can touch them; I would like to feel a presence around them, something else, you don’t quite know what, the sign of some unknown thing....”

  “Yes, in that respect, I, too...”

  “Even though, I don’t mean to say ... here, too, the element of mystery isn’t lacking....”

  You say: “Well, look, the mystery, in my opinion, is this. It’s a Cimmerian novel, yes, Cim-mer-ian, not Polish, and the title and the author aren’t the ones they say. You didn’t realize? Let me tell you. Cimmeria, two hundred and forty thousand inhabitants, capital Örkko, principal resources peat and by-products, bituminous compounds. No, this isn’t in the novel...”

  A silence, on your part and hers. Perhaps Ludmilla has covered the receiver with her hand and is conferring with her sister. She probably has ideas of her own on Cimmeria, that one. God knows what she’ll come out with. Be careful.

  “Hello, Ludmilla.”

  “Hello.”

  Your voice turns warm, winning, insistent. “Listen, Ludmilla, I must see you, we have to talk about this thing, these circumstances, coincidences, discrepancies. I’d like to see you right away. Where are you? Where would you prefer us to meet? I’ll be there in a minute.”

  And she says, calm as ever: “I know a professor who teaches Cimmerian literature at the university. We could consult him. Let me telephone him and ask when he can see us.”

  Here you are at the university. Ludmilla has announced your visit with her to Professor Uzzi-Tuzii, at his department. Over the telephone the professor seemed delighted to put himself at the disposal of anyone taking an interest in Cimmerian authors.

  You would have preferred to see Ludmilla alone somewhere, or perhaps to pick her up at home and accompany her to the university. You suggested this to her, over the telephone, but she said no, no need for you to go out of your way, at that hour she would already be in the neighborhood on other business. You insisted; you don’t know your way around, you’re afraid of getting lost in the labyrinth of the university: wouldn’t it be better to meet in a café a quarter of an hour before? This didn’t suit her, either; you would meet directly there, “at Bothno-Ugaric Languages,” everybody knows where it is, you only have to ask. You understand by now that Ludmilla, for all her mild manner, likes to take the situation in hand and decide everything herself: your only course is to follow her.

  You arrive punctually at the university, you pick your way past the young men and girls sitting on the steps, you wander bewildered among those austere walls which students’ hands have arabesqued with outsize capital writing and detailed graffiti, just as the cavemen felt the need to decorate the cold walls of their caves to become masters of the tormenting mineral alienness, to make them familiar, empty them into their own inner space, annex them to the physical reality of living. Reader, we are not sufficiently acquainted for me to know whether you move with indifferent assurance in a university or whether old traumas or pondered choices make a universe of pupils and teachers seem a nightmare to your sensitive and sensible soul. In any case, nobody knows the department you are looking for, they send you from the basement to the fifth floor, each door you open is the wrong one, you withdraw in confusion, you seem to be lost in the book with white pages, unable to get out of it.

  A lanky young man comes forward, in a long sweater. As soon as he sees you, he points a finger at you and says, “You’re waiting for Ludmilla!”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I realized. One look is enough for me.”

  “Did Ludmilla send you?”

  “No, but I’m always wandering around, I meet this one and I meet that one, I hear something here and see something there, and I naturally put them together.”

  “Do you also know where I’m supposed to go?”

  “If you like, I’ll take you to Uzzi-Tuzii. Either Ludmilla has been there for a while already or she’ll come late.”

  This young man, so extroverted and well informed, is named Irnerio. You can call him tu, since he already calls you that. “Are you a student of the professor’s?”

  “I’m not a student of anything. I know where he is because I used to pick up Ludmilla there.”

  “Then Ludmilla’s the one who studies in the department?”

  “No, Ludmilla has always looked for places where she could hide.”

  “Who from?”

  “Oh, from everybody.”

  Irnerio’s answers are a bit evasive, but it would seem that it is chiefly her sister that Ludmilla tries to avoid. If she hasn’t arrived punctually at our appointment, it is so as not to meet Lotaria in the hall; she has her seminar at this hour.

  But you, on the contrary, believe there are some exceptions to this incompatibility between the sisters, at least as far as the telephone is concerned. You should make this Irnerio talk a bit more, see if he really is as knowledgeable as all that.

  “Are you a friend of Ludmilla’s, or of Lotaria’s?”

  “Ludmilla’s, of course. But I manage to talk with Lotaria, too.”

  “Doesn’t she criticize the books you read?”

  “Me? I don’t read books!” Irnerio says.

  “What do you read, then?”

  “Nothing. I’ve become so accustomed to not reading that I don’t even read what appears before my eyes. It’s not easy: they teach us to read as children, and for the rest of our lives we remain the slaves of all the written stuff they fling in front of us. I may have had to make some effort myself, at first, to learn not to read, but now it comes quite naturally to me. The secret is not refusing to look at the written words. On the contrary, you must look at them, intensely, until they disappear.”

  Irnerio’s eyes have broad, pale, flickering pupils; they seem eyes that miss nothing, like those of a native of the forest, devoted to hunting and gathering.

  “Then would you mind telling me why you come to the university?”

  “Why shouldn’t I? There
are people going and coming, you meet, you talk. That’s the reason I come here; I don’t know about the others.”

  You try to picture how the world might appear, this world dense with writing that surrounds us on all sides, to someone who has learned not to read. And at the same time you ask yourself what bond there may be between Ludmilla and the Nonreader, and suddenly it seems to you that it is their very distance that keeps them together, and you can’t stifle a feeling of jealousy.

  You would like to question Irnerio further, but you have arrived, by some back stairs, at a low door with a sign, DEPARTMENT OF BOTHNO-UGARIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES. Irnerio knocks sharply, says “Ciao” to you, and leaves you there.

  The door opens, barely a crack. From the spots of whitewash on the jamb, and from the cap that appears, over a fleece-lined work jacket, you get the notion that the place is closed for renovation, and there is only a painter inside or a cleaning man.

  “Is Professor Uzzi-Tuzii in?”

  The gaze that assents, from beneath the cap, is different from what you would expect of a painter: the eyes of one preparing to leap over a precipice, who is projecting himself mentally to the other side, staring straight ahead, and avoiding looking down or sideways.

  “Are you he?” you ask, though you have realized it can be no one else.

  The little man does not widen the crack. “What do you want?”

  “Excuse me, it was about some information ... We telephoned you ... Miss Ludmilla ... Is Miss Ludmilla here?”

  “There is no Miss Ludmilla here...” the Professor says, stepping back, and he points to the crammed bookshelves on the walls, the illegible names and titles on the spines and title pages, like a bristling hedge without gaps. “Why are you looking for her in my office?” And while you remember what Irnerio said, that for Ludmilla this was a place to hide, Uzzi-Tuzii seems to underline, with a gesture, the narrowness of his office, as if to say: Seek for yourself, if you think she’s here. As if he felt the need to defend himself from the charge of keeping Ludmilla hidden there.

  “We were to come together,” you say, to make everything clear.

  “Then why isn’t she with you?” And this observation, logical for that matter, is also made in a suspicious tone.

  “She’ll be here soon...” you insist, but you say it with an almost interrogative note, as if you were asking Uzzi-Tuzii to confirm Ludmilla’s habits, of which you know nothing, whereas he might know a great deal more. “You know Ludmilla, don’t you, Professor?”

  “I know ... Why do you ask me?... What are you trying to find out?...” He becomes nervous. “Are you interested in Cimmerian literature or—” And he seems to mean “or Ludmilla?” But he doesn’t finish the sentence; and to be sincere you should answer that you can no longer distinguish your interest in the Cimmerian novel from your interest in the Other Reader of that novel. Now, moreover, the professor’s reactions at the name Ludmilla, coming after Irnerio’s confidences, cast mysterious flashes of light, create about the Other Reader an apprehensive curiosity not unlike that which binds you to Zwida Ozkart, in the novel whose continuation you are hunting for, and also to Madame Marne in the novel you had begun to read the day before and have temporarily put aside, and here you are in pursuit of all these shadows together, those of the imagination and those of life.

  “I wanted ... we wanted to ask you if there is a Cimmerian author who...”

  “Be seated,” the professor says, suddenly placated, or, rather, again caught up in a more stable and persistent concern that re-emerges, dissolving marginal and ephemeral concerns.

  The room is cramped, the walls covered with shelves, plus another bookcase that, having no place to lean against, is in the midst of the room dividing the scant space, so the professor’s desk and the chair on which you are to sit are separated by a kind of wing, and to see each other you must stretch your necks.

  “We are confined in this sort of closet.... The university expands and we contract.... We are the poor stepchild of living languages.... If Cimmerian can still be considered a living language ... But this is precisely its value!” he exclaims with an affirmative outburst that immediately fades. “The fact that it is a modern language and a dead language at the same time ... A privileged position, even if nobody realizes...”

  “You have few students?” you ask.

  “Who do you think would come? Who do you think remembers the Cimmerians any more? In the field of suppressed languages there are many now that attract more attention ... Basque ... Breton ... Romany.... They all sign up for those.... Not that they study the language: nobody wants to do that these days.... They want problems to debate, general ideas to connect with other general ideas. My colleagues adjust, follow the mainstream, give their courses titles like ‘Sociology of Welsh,’ 'Psycho-linguistics of Provençal.”...With Cimmerian it can’t be done.”

  “Why not?”

  “The Cimmerians have disappeared, as if the earth had swallowed them up.” He shakes his head, apparently to summon all his patience and repeat something already said a hundred times. “This is a dead department of a dead literature in a dead language. Why should they study Cimmerian today? I’m the first to understand, I’m the first to say it: if you don’t want to come, then don’t come; as far as I’m concerned, the department could even be abolished. But to come here only to ... No, that’s too much.”

  “Only to—what?”

  “Everything. I’m forced to see everything. For weeks on end nobody comes, but when somebody does come it’s to do things that ... You could remain well away from here, I say, what could interest you in these books written in the language of the dead? But they do it deliberately, let’s go to Bothno-Ugaric languages, they say, let’s go to Uzzi-Tuzii, and so I’m involved, forced to see, to participate....”

  “In what?” you inquire, thinking of Ludmilla, who came here, who hid here, perhaps with Irnerio, with others.

  “In everything ... Perhaps there is something that attracts them, this uncertainty between life and death, perhaps this is what they feel, without understanding. They come here to do what they do, but they don’t sign up for the course, they don’t attend classes, nobody ever takes an interest in the literature of the Cimmerians, buried in the books on these shelves as if in the graves of a cemetery....”

  “I was, in fact, interested in it.... I had come to ask if there exists a Cimmerian novel that begins ... No, the best way is to tell you right off the names of the characters: Gritzvi and Zwida, Ponko and Brigd. The action begins at Kudgiwa, but perhaps this is only the name of a farm; then I believe it shifts to Pëtkwo, on the Aagd....”

  “Oh, that can be found quickly!” the professor exclaims, and in one second he is freed from his hypochondriacal fog and glows like an electric bulb. “It is unquestionably Leaning from the steep slope, the only novel left us by one of the most promising Cimmerian poets of the first quarter of our century, Ukko Ahti.... Here it is!” And with the leap of a fish swimming against rapids he aims at a precise spot on a shelf, grasps a slim volume bound in green, slaps it to dispel the dust. “It has never been translated into any other language. The difficulties, to be sure, are enough to discourage anyone. Listen: ‘I am addressing the conviction...’ No: ‘I am convincing myself to transmit ...’ You will note that both verbs are in the present progressive.”

  One thing is immediately clear to you: namely that this book has nothing in common with the one you had begun. Only some proper names are identical, a detail that is surely very odd, but which you do not stop to ponder, because gradually, from Uzzi-Tuzii’s laborious extempore translation the outline of a story is taking shape, from his toilsome deciphering of verbal lumps a flowing narrative emerges.

  Leaning from the steep slope

  I am becoming convinced that the world wants to tell me something, send me messages, signals, warnings. I have noticed this ever since I have been in Pëtkwo. Every morning I leave the Kudgiwa Pension for my usual walk as far as the harbor. I go past
the meteorological observatory, and I think of the end of the world which is approaching, or, rather, which has been in progress for a long while. If the end of the world could be localized in a precise spot, it would be the meteorological observatory of Pëtkwo: a corrugated-iron roof that rests on four somewhat shaky poles and houses, lined up on a shelf, some recording barometers, hygrometers, and thermographs, with their rolls of lined paper, which turn with a slow clockwork ticking against an oscillating nib. The vane of an anemometer at the top of a tall antenna and the squat funnel of a pluviometer complete the fragile equipment of the observatory, which, isolated on the edge of an escarpment in the municipal garden, against the pearl-gray sky, uniform and motionless, seems a trap for cyclones, a lure set there to attract waterspouts from the remote tropical oceans, offering itself already as the ideal relict of the fury of the hurricanes.

  There are days when everything I see seems to me charged with meaning: messages it would be difficult for me to communicate to others, define, translate into words, but which for this very reason appear to me decisive. They are announcements or presages that concern me and the world at once: for my part, not only the external events of my existence but also what happens inside, in the depths of me; and for the world, not some particular event but the general way of being of all things. You will understand therefore my difficulty in speaking about it, except by allusion.

  Monday. Today I saw a hand thrust out of a window of the prison, toward the sea. I was walking on the seawall of the port, as is my habit, until I was just below the old fortress. The fortress is entirely enclosed by its oblique walls; the windows, protected by double or triple grilles, seem blind. Even knowing that prisoners are confined in there, I have always looked on the fortress as an element of inert nature, of the mineral kingdom. Therefore the appearance of the hand amazed me, as if it had emerged from the cliff. The hand was in an unnatural position; I suppose the windows are set high in the cells and cut out of the wall; the prisoner must have performed an acrobat’s feat—or, rather, a contortionist’s—to get his arm through grille after grille, to wave his hand in the free air. It was not a prisoner’s signal to me, or to anyone else; at any rate I did not take it as such; indeed, then and there I did not think of the prisoners at all; I must say that the hand seemed white and slender to me, a hand not unlike my own, in which nothing suggested the roughness one would expect in a convict. For me it was like a sign coming from the stone: the stone wanted to inform me that our substance was common, and therefore something of what constitutes my person would remain, would not be lost with the end of the world; a communication will still be possible in the desert bereft of life, bereft of my life and all memory of me. I am telling the first impressions I noted, which are the ones that count.