If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

by Italo Calvino

  Almost without realizing it, I find myself at the entrance to the campus, still running, in jogging garb and running shoes, I did not stop by my house to change and pick up my books, now what do I do? I continue running across the campus, I meet some girls drifting over the lawn in little groups, they are my students already on their way to my class, they look at me with that ironic smile I cannot bear.

  Still making running movements, I stop Lorna Clifford and I ask her, “Is Stubbs here?”

  The Clifford girl blinks. “Marjorie? She hasn’t shown up for two days.... Why?”

  I have already run off. I leave the campus. I take Grosvenor Avenue, then Cedar Street, then Maple Road. I am completely out of breath, I am running only because I cannot feel the ground beneath my feet, or my lungs in my chest. Here is Hillside Drive. Eleven, fifteen, twenty-seven, fifty-one; thank God the numbers go fast, skipping from one decade to the next. Here is 115. The door is open, I climb the stairs, I enter a room in semidarkness. There is Marjorie, tied on a sofa, gagged. I release her. She vomits. She looks at me with contempt.

  “You’re a bastard,” she says to me.

  [7]

  You are seated at a café table, reading the Silas Flannery novel Mr. Cavedagna has lent you and waiting for Ludmilla. Your mind is occupied by two simultaneous concerns: the interior one, with your reading, and the other, with Ludmilla, who is late for your appointment. You concentrate on your reading, trying to shift your concern for her to the book, as if hoping to see her come toward you from the pages. But you’re no longer able to read, the novel has stalled on the page before your eyes, as if only Ludmilla’s arrival could set the chain of events in motion again.

  They page you. It is your name the waiter is repeating among the tables. Get up, you’re wanted on the telephone. Is it Ludmilla? It is. “I’ll explain later. I can’t come now.”

  “Look: I have the book! No, not that one, none of those: a new one. Listen....” Surely you don’t mean to tell her the story of the book over the telephone? Wait and hear her out, hear what she wants to say to you.

  “You join me,” Ludmilla says. “Yes, come to my house. I’m not at home now, but I won’t be long. If you get there first, you can go on in and wait for me. The key is under the mat.”

  A nonchalant simplicity in her way of living, the key under the mat, trust in her fellow man—also very little to be stolen, of course. You run to the address she has given you. You ring, in vain. As she told you, she isn’t home. You find the key. You enter the penumbra of the lowered blinds.

  A single girl’s house, Ludmilla’s house: she lives alone. Is this the first thing you want to verify? Whether there are signs of a man’s presence? Or do you prefer to avoid knowing it as long as possible, to live in ignorance, in suspicion? Certainly something restrains you from snooping around (you have raised the blinds slightly, but only slightly). Perhaps it is the consideration that if you take advantage of her trust to carry out a detective investigation, then you are unworthy of it. Or perhaps it’s because you think you already know by heart what a single girl’s little apartment is like; even before looking at it, you could list the inventory of its contents. We live in a uniform civilization, within well-defined cultural models: furnishings, decorative elements, blankets, record player have been chosen among a certain number of given possibilities. What can they reveal to you about what she is really like?

  What are you like, Other Reader? It is time for this book in the second person to address itself no longer to a general male you, perhaps brother and double of a hypocrite I, but directly to you who appeared already in the second chapter as the Third Person necessary for the novel to be a novel, for something to happen between that male Second Person and the female Third, for something to take form, develop, or deteriorate according to the phases of human events. Or, rather, to follow the mental models through which we live our human events. Or, rather, to follow the mental models through which we attribute to human events the meanings that allow them to be lived.

  This book so far has been careful to leave open to the Reader who is reading the possibility of identifying himself with the Reader who is read: this is why he was not given a name, which would automatically have made him the equivalent of a Third Person, of a character (whereas to you, as Third Person, a name had to be given, Ludmilla), and so he has been kept a pronoun, in the abstract condition of pronouns, suitable for any attribute and any action. Let us see, Other Reader, if the book can succeed in drawing a true portrait of you, beginning with the frame and enclosing you from every side, establishing the outlines of your form.

  You appeared for the first time to the Reader in a bookshop; you took shape, detaching yourself from a wall of shelves, as if the quantity of books made the presence of a young lady Reader necessary. Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books. To understand this, our Reader knows that the first step is to visit the kitchen.

  The kitchen is the part of the house that can tell the most things about you: whether you cook or not (one would say yes, if not every day, at least fairly regularly), whether only for yourself or also for others (often only for yourself, but with care, as if you were cooking also for others; and sometimes also for others, but nonchalantly, as if you were cooking only for yourself), whether you tend toward the bare minimum or toward gastronomy (your purchases and gadgets suggest elaborate and fanciful recipes, at least in your intentions; you may not necessarily be greedy, but the idea of a couple of fried eggs for supper would probably depress you), whether standing over the stove represents for you a painful necessity or also a pleasure (the tiny kitchen is equipped and arranged in such a way that you can move practically and without too much effort, trying not to linger there too long but also being able to stay there without reluctance). The appliances are in their place, useful animals whose merits must be remembered, though without devoting special worship to them. Among the utensils a certain aesthetic tendency is noticeable (a panoply of half-moon choppers, in decreasing sizes, when one would be enough), but in general the decorative elements are also serviceable objects, with few concessions to prettiness. The provisions can tell us something about you: an assortment of herbs, some naturally in regular use, others that seem to be there to complete a collection; the same can be said of the mustards; but it is especially the ropes of garlic hung within reach that suggest a relationship with food not careless or generic. A glance into the refrigerator allows other valuable data to be gathered: in the egg slots only one egg remains; of lemons there is only a half and that half-dried; in other words, in basic supplies a certain neglect is noted. On the other hand, there is chestnut purée, black olives, a little jar of salsify or horseradish: it is clear that when shopping you succumb to the lure of the goods on display and don’t bear in mind what is lacking at home.

  Observing your kitchen, therefore, can create a picture of you as an extroverted, clearsighted woman, sensual and methodical; you make your practical sense serve your imagination. Could a man fall in love with you, just seeing your kitchen? Who knows? Perhaps the Reader, who was already favorably disposed.

  He is continuing his inspection of the house to which you let him have the keys. There are countless things that you accumulate around you: fans, postcards, perfume bottles, necklaces hung on the walls. But on closer examination every object proves special, somehow unexpected. Your relationship with objects is selective, personal; only the things you feel yours become yours: it is a relationship with the physicality of things, not with an intellectual or affective idea that takes the place of seeing them and touching them. And once they are attached to you, marked by your possession, the objects no longer seem to be there by chance, they assume meaning as elem
ents of a discourse, like a memory composed of signals and emblems. Are you possessive? Perhaps there is not yet enough evidence to tell: for the present it can be said that you are possessive toward yourself, that you are attached to the signs in which you identify something of yourself, fearing to be lost with them.

  In one corner of the wall there are a number of framed photographs, all hung close together. Photographs of whom? Of you at various ages, and of many other people, men and women, and also very old photographs as if taken from a family album; but together they seem to have the function, not so much of recalling specific people, as of forming a montage of the stratifications of existence. The frames are all different, nineteenth-century Art Nouveau floral forms, frames in silver, copper, enamel, tortoiseshell, leather, carved wood: they may reflect the notion of enhancing those fragments of real life, but they may also be a collection of frames, and the photographs may be there only to occupy them; in fact some frames are occupied by pictures clipped from newspapers, one encloses an illegible page of an old letter, another is empty.

  Nothing is hung on the rest of the wall, nor does any furniture stand against it. And the whole house is somewhat similar: bare walls here, crammed ones there, as if resulting from a need to concentrate signs into a kind of dense script, surrounded by the void in which to find repose and refreshment again.

  The arrangement of the furniture and the objects on it is never symmetrical, either. The order you seek to attain (the space at your disposal is limited, but you show a certain care in exploiting it, to make it seem more extensive) is not the superimposition of a scheme, but the achievement of a harmony among the things that are there.

  In short: are you tidy or untidy? Your house does not answer peremptory questions with a yes or a no. You have an idea of order, to be sure, even a demanding one, but in practice no methodical application corresponds to it. Obviously your interest in the home is intermittent; it follows the difficulty of your days, the ups and downs of your moods.

  Are you depressive or euphoric? The house, in its wisdom, seems to have taken advantage of your moments of euphoria to prepare itself to shelter you in your moments of depression.

  Are you really hospitable, or is the way you allow acquaintances to come into the house a sign of indifference? The Reader is looking for a comfortable place to sit and read without invading those spaces clearly reserved for you; he is forming the idea that a guest can be very comfortable in your house provided he can adjust to your rules.

  What else? The potted plants don’t seem to have been watered for several days, but perhaps you deliberately chose the kind that don’t require much attention. For the rest, in these rooms there is no trace of dogs or cats or birds: you are a woman who tends not to increase responsibilities, and this can be a sign either of egoism or of concentration on other, less extrinsic, concerns, as also a sign that you do not need symbolic substitutes for the natural drives that lead you to be concerned with others, to take part in their stories, in life, in books....

  Let’s have a look at the books. The first thing noticed, at least on looking at those you have most prominent, is that the function of books for you is immediate reading; they are not instruments of study or reference or components of a library arranged according to some order. Perhaps on occasion you have tried to give a semblance of order to your shelves, but every attempt at classification was rapidly foiled by heterogeneous acquisitions. The chief reason for the juxtaposition of volumes, besides the dimensions of the tallest or the shortest, remains chronological, as they arrived here, one after the other; anyway, you can always put your hand on any one, also because they are not very numerous (you must have left other bookshelves in other houses, in other phases of your existence), and perhaps you don’t often find yourself hunting for a book you have already read.

  In short, you don’t seem to be a Reader Who Rereads. You remember very well everything you have read (this is one of the first things you communicated about yourself); perhaps for you each book becomes identified with your reading of it at a given moment, once and for all. And as you preserve them in your memory, so you like to preserve the books as objects, keeping them near you.

  Among your books, in this assortment that does not make up a library, a dead or dormant part can still be distinguished, which is the store of volumes put aside, books read and rarely reread, or books you have not and will not read but have still retained (and dusted), and then a living part, which is the books you are reading or plan to read or from which you have not yet detached yourself or books you enjoy handling, seeing around you. Unlike the provisions in the kitchen, here it is the living part, for immediate consumption, that tells most about you. Numerous volumes are scattered, some left open, others with makeshift bookmarks or corners of the pages folded down. Obviously you have the habit of reading several books at the same time, you choose different things to read for the different hours of the day, the various corners of your home, cramped as it is: there are books meant for the bedside table, those that find their place by the armchair, in the kitchen, in the bathroom.

  It could be an important feature to be added to your portrait: your mind has interior walls that allow you to partition different times in which to stop or flow, to concentrate alternately on parallel channels. Is this enough to say you would like to live several lives simultaneously? Or that you actually do live them? That you separate your life with one person or in one environment from your life with others, elsewhere? That in every experience you take for granted a dissatisfaction that can be redeemed only in the sum of all dissatisfactions?

  Reader, prick up your ears. This suspicion is being insinuated into your mind, to feed your anxiety as a jealous man who still doesn’t recognize himself as such. Ludmilla, herself reader of several books at once, to avoid being caught by the disappointment that any story might cause her, tends to carry forward, at the same time, other stories also....

  (Don’t believe that the book is losing sight of you, Reader. The you that was shifted to the Other Reader can, at any sentence, be addressed to you again. You are always a possible you. Who would dare sentence you to loss of the you, a catastrophe as terrible as the loss of the I. For a second-person discourse to become a novel, at least two you’s are required, distinct and concomitant, which stand out from the crowd of he’s, she’s, and they’s.)

  And yet the sight of the books in Ludmilla’s house proves reassuring for you. Reading is solitude. To you Ludmilla appears protected by the valves of the open book like an oyster in its shell. The shadow of another man, probable, indeed certain, is if not erased, thrust off to one side. One reads alone, even in another’s presence. But what, then, are you looking for here? Would you like to penetrate her shell, insinuating yourself among the pages of the books she is reading? Or does the relationship between one Reader and the Other Reader remain that of two separate shells, which can communicate only through partial confrontations of two exclusive experiences?

  You have with you the book you were reading in the café, which you are eager to continue, so that you can then hand it on to her, to communicate again with her through the channel dug by others’ words, which, as they are uttered by an alien voice, by the voice of that silent nobody made of ink and typographical spacing, can become yours and hers, a language, a code between the two of you, a means to exchange signals and recognize each other.

  A key turns in the lock. You fall silent, as if you wanted to surprise her, as if to confirm to yourself and to her that your being here is something natural. But the footstep is not hers. Slowly a man materializes in the hall, you see his shadow through the curtains, a leather windbreaker, a step indicating familiarity with the place but hesitant, as of someone looking for something. You recognize him. It is Irnerio.

  You must decide immediately what attitude to take. The dismay at seeing him enter her house as if it were his is stronger than the uneasiness at being here yourself, half hidden. For that matter, you knew perfectly well that Ludmilla’s house is
open to her friends: the key is under the mat. Ever since you entered you have felt somehow brushed by faceless shadows. Irnerio is at least a known ghost. As you are for him.

  “Ah, you’re here.” He takes note of you first but isn’t surprised. This naturalness, which a moment ago you wanted to impose, doesn’t cheer you now.

  “Ludmilla isn’t home,” you say, at least to establish your precedence in the information, or actually in the occupation of the territory.

  “I know,” he says, indifferent. He searches around, handles the books.

  “Can I be of help?” you proceed, as though you wanted to provoke him.

  “I was looking for a book,” Irnerio says.

  “I thought you never read,” you reply.

  “It’s not for reading. It’s for making. I make things with books. I make objects. Yes, artworks: statues, pictures, whatever you want to call them. I even had a show. I fix the books with mastic, and they stay as they were. Shut, or open, or else I give them forms, I carve them, I make holes in them. A book is a good material to work with; you can make all sorts of things with it.”

  “And Ludmilla agrees?”

  “She likes my things. She gives me advice. The critics say what I do is important. Now they’re putting all my works in a book. They took me to talk with Mr. Cavedagna. A book with photographs of all my works. When this book is printed, I’ll use it for another work, lots of works. Then they’ll put them in another book, and so on.”

  “I meant, does Ludmilla agree with your taking away her books....”

  “She has lots.... Sometimes she gives me books herself, specifically for me to work on them, books she has no use for. But just any book won’t do for me. There are some books that immediately give me the idea of what I can make from them, but others don’t. Sometimes I have an idea, but I can’t make it until I find the right book.” He is disarranging the volumes on a shelf; he weighs one in his hand, observes its spine and its edge, puts it down. “There are books I find likable, and books I can’t bear, and I keep coming across them.”