If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

by Italo Calvino

  To open the gate for me there was the gravedigger I had already met at The Star of Sweden. “I am looking for Mr. Kauderer,” I said to him.

  He answered, “Mr. Kauderer is not here. But since the cemetery is the home of those who are not here, come in.”

  I was proceeding among the gravestones when a swift, rustling shadow grazed me; it braked and got down from the seat. “Mr. Kauderer!” I exclaimed, amazed at seeing him ride around on his bicycle among the graves, his headlight turned off.

  “Ssssh,” he silenced me. “You are committing serious imprudences. When I entrusted the observatory to you, I did not suppose you would compromise yourself in an escape attempt. I must tell you we are opposed to individual escapes. You have to know how to wait. We have a more general plan to carry forward, a long-term plan.”

  Hearing him say “we” as he made a broad, sweeping gesture, I thought he was speaking in the name of the dead. It was the dead, whose spokesman Mr. Kauderer obviously was, who had declared they did not yet want to accept me among them. I felt an undeniable relief.

  “It is also your fault that I shall have to prolong my absence,” he added. “Tomorrow or the next day you will be summoned by the police chief, who will question you about the grapnel. Be very careful not to involve me in this business; bear in mind that the chief’s questions will all be aimed at making you confess something involving me. You know nothing about me, except that I am traveling and I have not told you when I will be back. You can say that I asked you to take my place in recording the readings for a few days only. For that matter, starting tomorrow, you are relieved of the duty of going to the observatory.”

  “No! Not that!” I cried, gripped by a sudden desperation, as if at that moment I had realized that only the checking of the meteorological instruments enabled me to master the forces of the universe and recognize an order in it.

  Sunday. Early in the morning, I went to the meteorological observatory, I climbed on the platform, and I stood there listening to the tick of the recording instruments, like the music of the celestial spheres. The wind sped through the morning sky, transporting soft clouds; the clouds arrayed themselves in cirrus festoons, then in cumuli; toward nine-thirty there was a rain shower, and the pluviometer collected a few centiliters; there followed a partial rainbow, of brief duration; the sky darkened again, the nib of the barograph descended, tracing an almost vertical line; the thunder rumbled and the hail rattled. From my position up there I felt as if I had the storms and the clear skies in my hand, the thunderbolts and the mists: not like a god, no, do not believe me mad, I did not feel I was Zeus the Thunderer, but a bit like a conductor who has before him a score already written and who knows that the sounds rising from the instruments correspond to a pattern of which he is the principal curator and possessor. The corrugated-iron roof resounded like a drum beneath the downpour; the anemometer spun; that universe all crashes and leaps was translatable into figures to be lined up in my ledger; a supreme calm presided over the texture of the cataclysms.

  In that moment of harmony and fullness, a creak made me look down. Huddled between the steps of the platform and the supporting poles of the shed was a bearded man, dressed in a rough, striped tunic, soaked with rain. He was looking at me with pale, steady eyes.

  “I have escaped,” he said. “Do not betray me. You must go and inform someone. Will you? This person is at the Hotel of the Sea Lily.”

  I sensed at once that in the perfect order of the universe a breach had opened, an irreparable rent.

  [4]

  Listening to someone read aloud is very different from reading in silence. When you read, you can stop or skip sentences: you are the one who sets the pace. When someone else is reading, it is difficult to make your attention coincide with the tempo of his reading: the voice goes either too fast or too slow.

  And then, listening to someone who is translating from another language involves a fluctuation, a hesitation over the words, a margin of indecision, something vague, tentative. The text, when you are the reader, is something that is there, against which you are forced to clash; when someone translates it aloud to you, it is something that is and is not there, that you cannot manage to touch.

  Furthermore, Professor Uzzi-Tuzii had begun his oral translation as if he were not quite sure he could make the words hang together, going back over every sentence to iron out the syntactical creases, manipulating the phrases until they were not completely rumpled, smoothing them, clipping them, stopping at every word to illustrate its idiomatic uses and its connotations, accompanying himself with inclusive gestures as if inviting you to be content with approximate equivalents, breaking off to state grammatical rules, etymological derivations, quoting the classics. But just when you are convinced that for the professor philology and erudition mean more than what the story is telling, you realize the opposite is true: that academic envelope serves only to protect everything the story says and does not say, an inner afflatus always on the verge of being dispersed at contact with the air, the echo of a vanished knowledge revealed in the penumbra and in tacit allusions.

  Torn between the necessity to interject glosses on multiple meanings of the text and the awareness that all interpretation is a use of violence and caprice against a text, the professor, when faced by the most complicated passages, could find no better way of aiding comprehension than to read them in the original. The pronunciation of that unknown language, deduced from theoretical rules, not transmitted by the hearing of voices with their individual accents, not marked by the traces of use that shapes and transforms, acquired the absoluteness of sounds that expect no reply, like the song of the last bird of an extinct species or the strident roar of a just-invented jet plane that shatters in the sky on its first test flight.

  Then, little by little, something started moving and flowing between the sentences of this distraught recitation. The prose of the novel had got the better of the uncertainties of the voice; it had become fluent, transparent, continuous; Uzzi-Tuzii swam in it like a fish, accompanying himself with gestures (he held his hands open like flippers), with the movement of his lips (which allowed the words to emerge like little air bubbles), with his gaze (his eyes scoured the page like a fish’s eyes scouring the seabed, but also like the eyes of an aquarium visitor as he follows a fish’s movements in an illuminated tank).

  Now, around you, there is no longer the room of the department, the shelves, the professor: you have entered the novel, you see that Nordic beach, you follow the footsteps of the delicate gentleman. You are so absorbed that it takes you a while to become aware of a presence at your side. Out of the corner of your eye you glimpse Ludmilla. She is there, seated on a pile of folio volumes, also completely caught up in listening to the continuation of the novel.

  Has she just arrived at this moment, or did she hear the beginning? Did she enter silently, without knocking? Was she already here, hidden among these shelves? (She came here to hide, Irnerio said. They come here to do unspeakable things, Uzzi-Tuzii said). Or is she an apparition summoned by the spell released through the words of the professor-sorcerer?

  He continues his recitation, Uzzi-Tuzii, and shows no sign of surprise at the presence of the new listener, as if she had always been there. Nor does he react with a start when she, hearing him pause longer than the other times, asks him, “And then?”

  The professor snaps the book shut. “Then nothing. Leaning from the steep slope breaks off here. Having written these first pages of his novel, Ukko Ahti sank into a deep depression which, in the space of a few years, led him to three unsuccessful suicide attempts and one that succeeded. The fragment was published in the collection of his posthumous writings, along with scattered verses, an intimate diary, and his notes for an essay on the incarnation of Buddha. Unfortunately, it was impossible to find any plan or sketch explaining how Ahti intended to develop the plot. Though incomplete, or perhaps for this very reason, Leaning from the steep slope is the most representative work of Cimmerian prose, for w
hat it reveals and even more for what it hides, for its reticence, withdrawal, its disappearing...”

  The professor’s voice seems about to die away. You crane your neck, to make sure he is still there, beyond the bookcase-partition that separates him from your vision, but you are no longer able to glimpse him; perhaps he has ducked into the hedge of academic publications and bound collections of reviews, growing thinner and thinner until he can slip into the interstices greedy for dust, perhaps overwhelmed by the erasing destiny that looms over the object of his studies, perhaps engulfed by the empty chasm of the brusque interruption of the novel. On the edge of this chasm you would like to take your stand, supporting Ludmilla or clinging to her; your hands try to grasp her hands....

  “Don’t ask where the rest of this book is!” It is a shrill cry that comes from an undefined spot among the shelves. “All books continue in the beyond....” The professor’s voice goes up and down; where has he got to? Perhaps he is rolling around beneath the desk, perhaps he is hanging himself from the lamp in the ceiling.

  “Continue where?” you ask, perched on the edge of the precipice. “Beyond what?”

  “Books are the steps of the threshold.... All Cimmerian authors have passed it ... Then the wordless language of the dead begins, which says the things that only the language of the dead can say. Cimmerian is the last language of the living, the language of the threshold! You come here to try to listen there, beyond.... Listen...”

  But you are no longer listening to anything, the two of you. You have also disappeared, flattened in a corner, one clinging to the other. Is this your answer? Do you want to demonstrate that the living also have a wordless language, with which books cannot be written but which can only be lived, second by second, which cannot be recorded or remembered? First comes this wordless language of living bodies—is this the premise you wish Uzzi-Tuzii would take into account?—then the words books are written with, and attempts to translate that first language are vain; then...

  “Cimmerian books are all unfinished,” Uzzi-Tuzii sighs, “because they continue beyond ... in the other language, in the silent language to which all the words we believe we read refer...”

  “Believe ... Why believe? I like to read, really to read.” It is Ludmilla who is speaking like this, with conviction and warmth. She is seated opposite the professor, dressed in a simple, elegant fashion, in light colors. Her way of living in the world, filled with interest in what the world can give her, dismisses the egocentric abyss of the suicide’s novel that ends by sinking into itself. In her voice you seek the confirmation of your need to cling to the things that exist, to read what is written and nothing else, dispelling the ghosts that escape your grasp. (Even if your embrace—confess it—occurred only in your imagination, it is still an embrace that can happen at any moment....)

  But Ludmilla is always at least one step ahead of you. “I like to know that books exist that I will still be able to read...” she says, sure that existent objects, concrete albeit unknown, must correspond to the strength of her desire. How can you keep up with her, this woman who is always reading another book besides the one before her eyes, a book that does not yet exist, but which, since she wants it, cannot fail to exist?

  The professor is there at his desk; in the cone of light from a desk lamp his hands surface, suspended, or barely resting on the closed volume, as if in a sad caress.

  “Reading,” he says, “is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid, material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead...”

  “Or that is not present because it does not yet exist, something desired, feared, possible or impossible,” Ludmilla says. “Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be....” (There, now you see the Other Reader leaning forward to peer beyond the edge of the printed page at the ships of the rescuers or the invaders appearing on the horizon, the storms....) “The book I would like to read now is a novel in which you sense the story arriving like still-vague thunder, the historical story along with the individual’s story, a novel that gives the sense of living through an upheaval that still has no name, has not yet taken shape....”

  “Well said, sister dear, I see you’re making progress!” Among the shelves a girl has appeared, with a long neck and a bird’s face, a steady, bespectacled gaze, a great clump of curly hair; she is dressed in a loose tunic and tight pants. “I was coming to tell you I had found the novel you were looking for, and it is the very one our seminar on the feminist revolution needs. You’re invited, if you want to hear us analyze it and debate it!”

  “Lotaria, you don’t mean to tell me,” Ludmilla exclaims, “that you, too, have come upon Leaning from the steep slope, the unfinished novel of Ukko Ahti, the Cimmerian writer!”

  “You are misinformed, Ludmilla. That is the novel, but it isn’t unfinished, and it isn’t written in Cimmerian but in Cimbrian; the title was later changed to Without fear of wind or vertigo, and the author signed it with a different pseudonym, Vorts Viljandi.”

  “It’s a fake!” Professor Uzzi-Tuzii cries. “It’s a well-known case of forgery! The material is apocryphal, disseminated by the Cimbrian nationalists during the anti-Cimmerian propaganda campaign at the end of the First World War!”

  Crowding behind Lotaria is the vanguard of a phalanx of young girls with limpid, serene eyes, slightly alarming eyes, perhaps because they are too limpid and serene. Among them a pale man forces his way, bearded, with a sarcastic gaze and a systematically disillusioned curl to his lips.

  “I’m terribly sorry to contradict an illustrious colleague,” he says, “but the authenticity of this text has been proved by the discovery of the manuscripts that the Cimmerians had hidden!”

  “I am amazed, Galligani,” Uzzi-Tuzii groans, “that you lend the authority of your chair in Erulo-Altaic languages and literatures to such a vulgar fraud! And, moreover, one connected with territorial claims that have nothing to do with literature!”

  “Uzzi-Tuzii, please,” Professor Galligani retorts, “don’t lower the debate to this level. You know very well that Cimbrian nationalism is quite remote from my interests, as I hope Cimmerian chauvinism is from yours. Comparing the spirit of the two literatures, I ask myself this question: who goes further in the negation of values?”

  The Cimbro-Cimmerian debate does not seem to affect Ludmilla, now occupied with a single thought: the possibility that the interrupted novel might continue. “Can what Lotaria says be true?” she asks you in a whisper. “For once I wish she were right, that the beginning the professor read had a sequel, no matter in what language....”

  “Ludmilla,” Lotaria says, “we’re going to our study group. If you want to follow the discussion of Viljandi’s novel, come along. You can invite your friend, too, if he’s interested.”

  Here you are, enrolled behind Lotaria’s banner. The group takes its place in a classroom, around a table. You and Ludmilla would like to sit as close as possible to the bundle of manuscript Lotaria is holding before her, which seems to contain the novel in question.

  “We have to thank Professor Galligani, of Cimbric literature,” Lotaria begins, “for having kindly put at our disposal a rare copy of Without fear of wind or vertigo and for personally taking part in our seminar. I would like to underline this open attitude, which is all the more admirable when you compare it with the lack of understanding in other teachers of related disciplines....” And Lotaria gives her sister a look, to make sure she doesn’t miss the hostile reference to Uzzi-Tuzii.

  To put the novel in context, Galligani is asked to supply some historical notes. “I will confine myself to recalling,” he says, “how the provinces that made up the Cimmerian state became, after the Second Wor
ld War, part of the Cimbric People’s Republic. Putting in order the documents of the Cimmerian archives, which had been scattered at the time of the fighting, the Cimbrians were able to re-evaluate the complex personality of a writer like Vorts Viljandi, who wrote both in Cimmerian and in Cimbric, but of whose works the Cimmerians published only those in their language—a scant number, for that matter. Far more important in quantity and in quality were the works in Cimbric, concealed by the Cimmerians, notably the vast novel Without fear of wind or vertigo, whose opening chapter apparently also exists in a first draft in Cimmerian, signed with the pseudonym Ukko Ahti. It is beyond dispute, in any case, that it was only after his definitive choice of the Cimbric language that the author found his genuine inspiration for this novel....

  “I won’t give you the whole history,” the professor continues, “of the variable fortunes of this book in the Cimbric People’s Republic. First published as a classic, translated also into German so that it could be disseminated abroad (this is the translation we are using now), it later suffered during the campaigns for ideological rectification, and was withdrawn from circulation and even from the libraries. We now believe, on the other hand, that its revolutionary content was far ahead of its time....”

  You are impatient, you and Ludmilla, to see this lost book rise from its ashes, but you must wait until the girls and the young men of the study group have been handed out their assignments: during the reading there must be some who underline the reflections of production methods, others the processes of reification, others the sublimation of repression, others the sexual semantic codes, others the metalanguages of the body, others the transgression of roles, in politics and in private life.