If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

by Italo Calvino

  “The book I’m looking for,” says the blurred figure, who holds out a volume similar to yours, “is the one that gives the sense of the world after the end of the world, the sense that the world is the end of everything that there is in the world, that the only thing there is in the world is the end of the world.”

  That’s not so!” you shout, and you hunt in the incomprehensible book for a sentence that can contradict Ludmilla’s words. But the two trains depart, move off in opposite directions.

  An icy wind sweeps the public gardens of the capital of Ircania. You are seated on a bench waiting for Anatoly Anatolin, who is to deliver to you the manuscript of his new novel, What story down there awaits its end? A young man with a long blond beard, a long black coat, and an oilcloth cap sits down beside you. “Act natural. The gardens are always under close observation.”

  A hedge protects you from alien eyes. A little bundle of pages passes from the inside pocket of Anatoly’s long overcoat to the inside pocket of your short pea jacket. Anatoly Anatolin takes out more pages from the inside pocket of his jacket. “I had to divide the pages among my various pockets, so that the bulging wouldn’t attract attention,” he says, extracting a roll of pages from an inside pocket of his vest. The wind whips a page from his fingers; he rushes to retrieve it. He is about to produce another pack of pages from the rear pocket of his trousers, but two agents in civilian clothes spring from the hedge and arrest him.

  What story down there awaits its end?

  Walking along the great Prospect of our city, I mentally erase the elements I have decided not to take into consideration. I pass a ministry building, whose façade is laden with caryatids, columns, balustrades, plinths, brackets, metopes; and I feel the need to reduce it to a smooth vertical surface, a slab of opaque glass, a partition that defines space without imposing itself on one’s sight. But even simplified like this, the building still oppresses me: I decide to do away with it completely; in its place a milky sky rises over the bare ground. Similarly, I erase five more ministries, three banks, and a couple of skyscraper headquarters of big companies. The world is so complicated, tangled, and overloaded that to see into it with any clarity you must prune and prune.

  In the bustle of the Prospect I keep meeting people the sight of whom, for various reasons, is unpleasant to me: my superiors, because they remind me of my inferior position; my inferiors, because I hate to feel possessed of an authority I consider petty, as petty as the envy, servility, and bitterness it inspires. I erase both categories, without any hesitation; out of the corner of my eye, I see them shrink and vanish in a faint wisp of fog.

  In this operation I am careful to spare passersby, outsiders, strangers who have never bothered me; indeed, the faces of some of them, if I observe them objectively, seem worthy of sincere interest. But when a crowd of strangers is all that remains from the world surrounding me, I suddenly feel lonely and disoriented, so better to erase them as well, the whole lot, and forget it.

  In a simplified world I have greater probabilities of meeting the few people I like to meet: Franziska, for example. Franziska is a friend, and when I run into her, I feel a great joy. We exchange witticisms, we laugh, we tell each other things, ordinary events but perhaps ones we do not tell other people, and when we discuss them together, they prove interesting to both of us, and before saying good-bye, we both insist we must meet again as soon as possible. Then months pass, until we run into each other in the street, by chance: festive cries, laughter, promises to get together again soon, but neither of us ever does anything to bring about a meeting; perhaps because we know that it would no longer be the same thing. In a reduced and simplified world, now that the air has been cleared of all those pre-established situations which would make the fact of my seeing Franziska more often suggest a relationship between us somehow requiring definition, perhaps eventual marriage, or, in any event, our being considered a couple, assuming a bond possibly extending to our respective families, to our forebears and descendants, to siblings and cousins, and a bond between the environment of our joint lives and our attachments in the sphere of incomes and possessions; now, having achieved the disappearance of these conditions which, all around us, silently, weighed on us and on our conversations, causing them never to last more than a few minutes, my meeting Franziska should be even more beautiful and enjoyable. So it is natural for me to try to create the circumstances most favorable to a crossing of our paths, such as the abolition of all young women wearing a pale fur like the one she wore last time, so that if I see her from a distance, I can be sure it is she, without any risk of misunderstandings or disappointments, and then the abolition of all young men who look as if they might be friends of Franziska and might conceivably be about to meet her, maybe intentionally, and delay her in pleasant conversation just when I should be the one to meet her, by chance.

  I have gone into details of a personal nature, but this should not lead anyone to believe that my abolitions are inspired primarily by my own immediate, private interests; on the contrary, I try to act in the interest of the whole (and hence also my own, but indirectly). True, to begin somewhere, I made all the public buildings that occurred within my range disappear, with their broad steps and columned entrances and their corridors and waiting rooms, and files and circulars and dossiers, but also with their division chiefs, their director-generals, their vice-inspectors, their acting heads, their permanent and temporary staff; but I did this because I believe their existence is damaging or superfluous to the harmony of the whole.

  It is that time of day when droves of employees leave the overheated offices, button up their overcoats with their fake-fur collars, and pile into buses. I blink, and they have vanished: only some scattered passersby can be discerned, far off, in the deserted streets from which I have also scrupulously eliminated automobiles and trucks and buses. I like to see the surface of the street bare and smooth as a bowling alley.

  Then I abolish barracks, guard houses, police stations: all people in uniform vanish as if they had never existed. Perhaps I’ve let things get out of hand; I realize that firemen have suffered the same fate, and postmen, municipal streetcleaners, and other categories that might deservedly have hoped for a different treatment; but what’s done is done: no use splitting hairs. To avoid trouble, I quickly abolish fires, garbage, and also mail, which after all never brings anything but problems.

  I check to make sure that hospitals, clinics, rest homes have not been left standing: to erase doctors, nurses, patients seems to me the only possible health. Then courts, with their complement of magistrates, lawyers, defendants and injured parties; prisons, with prisoners and guards inside. Then I erase the university with the entire faculty, the academy of sciences, letters, and arts, the museum, the library, monuments and curators, theaters, movies, televisions, newspapers. If they think respect for culture is going to stop me, they’re wrong.

  Then come the economic structures, which for too long a time have continued to enforce their outrageous claim to decide our lives. What do they think they are? One by one, I dissolve all shops, beginning with the ones selling prime necessities and ending with those selling superfluities, luxuries: first I clear the display windows of goods, then I erase the counters, shelves, salesgirls, cashiers, floorwalkers. The crowd of customers is momentarily bewildered, hands extended into the void, as shopping carts evaporate; then the customers themselves are also swallowed up by the vacuum. From consumer I work back to producer: I abolish all industry, light and heavy, I wipe out raw materials and sources of energy. What about agriculture? Away with that, too! And to keep anyone from saying I want to regress toward primitive societies, I also eliminate hunting and fishing.

  Nature ... Aha! Don’t think I haven’t caught on. This nature business is another fine fraud: kill it! A layer of the earth’s crust is all that has to remain, solid enough underfoot, and everywhere else, nothingness.

  I continue my walk along the Prospect, which now cannot be distinguished from the endless
plain, deserted and frozen. There are no more walls as far as the eye can see, no mountains or hills; not a river or a lake or a sea: only a flat, gray expanse of ice, as compact as basalt. Renouncing things is less difficult than people believe: it’s all a matter of getting started. Once you’ve succeeded in dispensing with something you thought essential, you realize you can also do without something else, then without many other things. So here I am walking along this empty surface that is the world. There is a wind grazing the ground, dragging with flurries of fine snow the last residue of the vanished world: a bunch of ripe grapes which seems just picked from the vine, an infant’s woolen bootee, a well-oiled hinge, a page that seems torn from a novel written in Spanish, with a woman’s name: Amaranta. Was it a few seconds ago that everything ceased to exist, or many centuries? I’ve already lost any sense of time.

  There, at the end of that strip of nothing I continue to call the Prospect, I see a slender form advancing, in a pale fur jacket: it’s Franziska! I recognize her stride in her high boots, and the way she keeps her arms hidden in her muff, and the long striped scarf flapping after her. The cold air and the cleared terrain guarantee good visibility, but I wave my arms in vain, trying to attract her attention: she can’t recognize me, we’re still too far apart. I advance, hastening my steps; at least I think I’m advancing, but I lack any reference points. Now, on the line between me and Franziska, some shadows can be discerned: they are men, men in overcoats and hats. They are waiting for me. Who can they be?

  When I have come close enough, I recognize them: they’re the men from Section D. How is it they’ve remained here? What are they doing? I thought I had abolished them, too, when I erased the personnel of all the offices. Why have they placed themselves between me and Franziska? “Now I’ll erase them!” I decide, and concentrate. Nothing doing: they’re still there between us.

  “Well, here you are,” they greet me. “Still one of us, are you? Good for you! You gave us a real hand, all right, and now everything is clean.”

  “What?” I exclaim. “Were you erasing as well?”

  Now I can understand my sensation that, this time, I had ventured further than in my previous exercises of making the world around me disappear.

  “But tell me something: weren’t you the ones who were always talking of increment, of implementing, of expansion...?”

  “Well? There’s no contradiction.... Everything is contemplated in the logic of projections.... The line of development starts again from zero.... You had also realized that the situation had come to a dead end ... was deteriorating... The only thing was to help the process along.... Tendentially, something that might seem negative in the short run, in the long run can prove an incentive....”

  “But I didn’t mean it the way you did ... I had something else in mind.... I erase in a different way...” I protest, and I think: If they believe they can fit me into their plans, they’re wrong!

  I can’t wait to go into reverse, to make the things of the world exist again, one by one or all together, to set their variegated and tangible substance, like a compact wall, against the men’s plans of general vacancy. I close my eyes and reopen them, sure of finding myself on the Prospect again, teeming with traffic, the street lamps lighted at this hour, and the final edition of the papers in the kiosks. But instead: nothing. The void all around us is more and more void, Franziska’s form on the horizon comes forward slowly, as if she had to climb the curve of the earth’s globe. Are we the only survivors? With mounting terror I begin to realize the truth: the world I believed erased by a decision of my mind that I could revoke at any moment is truly finished.

  “You have to be realistic,” the officials of Section D are saying. “Just take a look around. The whole universe is ... let’s say it’s in a transitional phase....” And they point to the sky, where the constellations have become unrecognizable, here clotted, there rarefied, the celestial map in upheaval, stars exploding one after the other, while more stars emit a final flicker and die. “The important thing is that now, when the new ones arrive, they must find Section D in perfect working order, its cadres complete, its functional structures in operation...”

  “But who are the new ones? What do they do? What do they want?” I ask, and on the frozen surface that separates me from Franziska I see a fine crack, spreading like a mysterious trap.

  “It’s too early to say. For us to say it in our terms. At present we can’t even see them. But we can be sure they’re there, and for that matter, we had been informed, even before, that they were about to arrive.... But we’re here, too, and they can’t help knowing it, we who represent the only possible continuity with what there was before.... They need us. They have to turn to us, entrust to us the practical management of what remains.... The world will begin again the way we want it...”

  No, I think, the world that I would like to begin existing again around me and Franziska can’t be yours; I would like to concentrate and think of a place in every detail, a setting where I would like to be with Franziska at this moment; for example, a café lined with mirrors, which reflect crystal chandeliers, and there is an orchestra playing waltzes and the strains of the violins flutter over the little marble tables and the steaming cups and the pastries with whipped cream. While outside, beyond the frosted windows, the world full of people and of things would make its presence felt: the presence of the world, friendly and hostile, things to rejoice in or to combat.... I think this with all my strength, but by now I know my strength isn’t enough to make it exist: nothingness is stronger and has occupied the whole earth.

  “To work out a relationship with them won’t be easy,” the Section D men continue, “and we’ll have to be on our toes, not make mistakes, not allow them to cut us out. We had you in mind, to win the new ones’ confidence. You’ve proved your ability in the liquidation phase, and of all of us you’re the least compromised with the old administration. You’ll have to introduce yourself, explain what the Section is, how they can use it, for urgent, indispensable jobs.... Well, you’ll figure out the way to make things look best....”

  “I should be going, then. I’ll go look for them...” I hasten to say, because I realize that if I don’t make my escape now, if I don’t reach Franziska immediately and save her, in a minute it will be too late; the trap is about to be sprung. I run off before the Section D men can hold me, ask me questions, give me instructions. I advance over the frozen crust toward her. The world is reduced to a sheet of paper on which nothing can be written except abstract words, as if all concrete nouns were finished; if one could only succeed in writing the word “chair,” then it would be possible to write also “spoon,” “gravy,” “stove,” but the stylistic formula of the text prohibits it.

  On the ground that separates me from Franziska I see some fissures open, some furrows, crevasses; at each moment one of my feet is about to be caught in a pitfall: these interstices widen, soon a chasm will yawn between me and Franziska, an abyss! I leap from one side to the other, and below I see no bottom, only nothingness which continues down to infinity; I run across pieces of world scattered in the void; the world is crumbling.... The men from Section D call me, they motion desperately for me to come back, not to risk going any farther.... Franziska! One more leap and I’ll be with you!

  She is here, she is opposite me, smiling, with that golden sparkle in her eyes, her small face a bit chapped from the cold. “Oh! It’s really you! Every time I walk on the Prospect I run into you! Now, don’t tell me you spend all your days out strolling! Listen: I know a café here at the comer, all lined with mirrors, and there’s an orchestra that plays waltzes. Will you invite me there?”

  [11]

  Reader, it is time for your tempest-tossed vessel to come to port. What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library? Certainly there is one in the city from which you set out and to which you have returned after circling the world from book to book. You have one hope left, that the ten novels that evaporated in your hands the moment
you began reading them can be found in this library.

  Finally a free, calm day opens before you; you go to the library, consult the catalogue; you can hardly repress a cry of rejoicing, or, rather, ten cries; all the authors and the titles you are looking for appear in the catalogue, duly recorded.

  You compile a first request form and hand it in; you are told that there must be an error of numbering in the catalogue; the book cannot be found; in any case, they will investigate. You immediately request another; they tell you it is out on loan, but they are unable to determine who took it out and when. The third you ask for is at the bindery; it will be back in a month. The fourth is kept in a wing of the library now closed for repairs. You keep filling out forms; for one reason or another, none of the books you ask for is available.

  While the staff continues searching, you wait patiently, seated at a table along with other, more fortunate, readers, immersed in their volumes. You crane your neck to left and right, to peek at the others’ books. Who knows? One of these people may be reading one of the books you are looking for.

  The gaze of the reader opposite you, instead of resting on the book open in his hands, wanders in the air. But his eyes are not absent: a fixed intensity accompanies the movements of the blue irises. Every now and then your eyes meet. At a certain point he addresses you, or, rather, he speaks as if into the void, though certainly to you:

  “Don’t be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.”