“I understand you perfectly,” another reader interjects, raising his waxen face and reddened eyes from his volume. “Reading is a discontinuous and fragmentary operation. Or, rather, the object of reading is a punctiform and pulviscular material. In the spreading expanse of the writing, the reader’s attention isolates some minimal segments, juxtapositions of words, metaphors, syntactic nexuses, logical passages, lexical peculiarities that prove to possess an extremely concentrated density of meaning. They are like elemental particles making up the work’s nucleus, around which all the rest revolves. Or else like the void at the bottom of a vortex which sucks in and swallows currents. It is through these apertures that, in barely perceptible flashes, the truth the book may bear is revealed, its ultimate substance. Myths and mysteries consist of impalpable little granules, like the pollen that sticks to the butterfly’s legs; only those who have realized this can expect revelations and illuminations. This is why my attention, in contrast to what you, sir, were saying, cannot be detached from the written lines even for an instant. I must not be distracted if I do not wish to miss some valuable clue. Every time I come upon one of these clumps, of meaning I must go on digging around to see if the nugget extends into a vein. This is why my reading has no end: I read and reread, each time seeking the confirmation of a new discovery among the folds of the sentences.”
“I, too, feel the need to reread the books I have already read,” a third reader says, “but at every rereading I seem to be reading a new book, for the first time. Is it I who keep changing and seeing new things of which I was not previously aware? Or is reading a construction that assumes form, assembling a great number of variables, and therefore something that cannot be repeated twice according to the same pattern? Every time I seek to relive the emotion of a previous reading, I experience different and unexpected impressions, and do not find again those of before. At certain moments it seems to me that between one reading and the next there is a progression: in the sense, for example, of penetrating further into the spirit of the text, or of increasing my critical detachment. At other moments, on the contrary, I seem to retain the memory of the readings of a single book one next to another, enthusiastic or cold or hostile, scattered in time without a perspective, without a thread that ties them together. The conclusion I have reached is that reading is an operation without object; or that its true object is itself. The book is an accessory aid, or even a pretext.”
A fourth speaks up: “If you mean to insist on the subjectivity of reading, then I agree with you, but not in the centrifugal sense you attribute to it. Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings. This does not come about without some effort: to compose that general book, each individual book must be transformed, enter into a relationship with the books I have read previously, become their corollary or development or confutation or gloss or reference text. For years I have been coming to this library, and I explore it volume by volume, shelf by shelf, but I could demonstrate to you that I have done nothing but continue the reading of a single book.”
“In my case, too, all the books I read are leading to a single book,” a fifth reader says, sticking his face out from behind a pile of bound volumes, “but it is a book remote in time, which barely surfaces from my memories. There is a story that for me comes before all other stories and of which all the stories I read seem to carry an echo, immediately lost. In my readings I do nothing but seek that book read in my childhood, but what I remember of it is too little to enable me to find it again.”
A sixth reader, who was standing, examining the shelves with his nose in the air, approaches the table. “The moment that counts most for me is the one that precedes reading. At times a title is enough to kindle in me the desire for a book that perhaps does not exist. At times it is the incipit of the book, the first sentences.... In other words: if you need little to set the imagination going, I require even less: the promise of reading is enough.”
“For me, on the other hand, it is the end that counts,” a seventh says, “but the true end, final, concealed in the darkness, the goal to which the book wants to carry you. I also seek openings in reading,” he says, nodding toward the man with the bleary eyes, “but my gaze digs between the words to try to discern what is outlined in the distance, in the spaces that extend beyond the words ‘the end.’”
The moment has come for you to speak. “Gentlemen, first I must say that in books I like to read only what is written, and to connect the details with the whole, and to consider certain readings as definitive; and I like to keep one book distinct from the other, each for what it has that is different and new; and I especially like books to be read from beginning to end. For a while now, everything has been going wrong for me: it seems to me that in the world there now exist only stories that remain suspended or get lost along the way.”
The fifth reader answers you: “That story of which I spoke—I, too, remember the beginning well, but I have forgotten all the rest. It must be a story of the Arabian Nights. I am collating the various editions, the translations in all languages. Similar stories are numerous and there are many variants, but none is that story. Can I have dreamed it? And yet I know I will have no peace until I have found it and find out how it ends.”
“The Caliph Harun-al-Rashid”—this is the beginning of the story that, seeing your curiosity, he agrees to tell—“one night, in the grip of insomnia, disguises himself as a merchant and goes out into the streets of Baghdad. A boat carries him along the waters of the Tigris to the gate of a garden. At the edge of a pool a maiden beautiful as the moon is singing, accompanying herself on the lute. A slave girl admits Harun to the palace and makes him put on a saffron-colored cloak. The maiden who was singing in the garden is seated on a silver chair. On cushions around her are seated seven men wrapped in saffron-colored cloaks. ‘Only you were missing,’ the maiden says, ‘you are late’; and she invites him to sit on a cushion at her side. ‘Noble sirs, you have sworn to obey me blindly, and now the moment has come to put you to the test.’ And from around her throat the maiden takes a pearl necklace. ‘This necklace has seven white pearls and one black pearl. Now I will break its string and drop the pearls into an onyx cup. He who draws, by lot, the black pearl must kill the Caliph Harun-al-Rashid and bring me his head. As a reward I will give myself to him. But if he should refuse to kill the Caliph, he will be killed by the other seven, who will repeat the drawing of lots for the black pearl.’ With a shudder Harun-al-Rashid opens his hand, sees the black pearl, and speaks to the maiden. I will obey the command of fate and yours, on condition that you tell me what offense of the Caliph has provoked your hatred,’ he asks, anxious to hear the story.”
This relic of some childish reading should also be included in your list of interrupted books. But what title does it have?
“If it had a title I have forgotten that, too. Give it one yourself.”
The words with which the story breaks off seem to you to express well the spirit of the Arabian Nights. You write, then, He asks, anxious to hear the story in the list of titles you have asked for in vain at the library.
“May I see?” the sixth reader asks, taking the list of titles. He removes his nearsighted glasses, puts them in their case, opens another case, takes out his farsighted glasses, and reads aloud:
“If on a winter’s night a traveler, outside the town of Malbork, leaning from the steep slope without fear of wind or vertigo, looks down in the gathering shadow in a network of lines that enlace, in a network of lines that intersect, on the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon around an empty grave— What story down there awaits its end?—he asks, anxious to hear the story.”
He pushes his eyeglasses up on his brow. “Yes, a novel that begins like that...” he says, “I could swear I’ve read it.... You have only this beginning and would like to find the continuation, is that true? The trouble is that once upon a time they all began like that, all novels. There was somebody who went along a
lonely street and saw something that attracted his attention, something that seemed to conceal a mystery, or a premonition; then he asked for explanations and they told him a long story....”
“But, look here, there’s a misunderstanding,” you try to warn him. “This isn’t a book ... these are only titles ... the Traveler...”
“Oh, the traveler always appeared only in the first pages and then was never mentioned again—he had fulfilled his function, the novel wasn’t his story....”
“But this isn’t the story whose continuation I want to know....”
The seventh reader interrupts you: “Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end only in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.”
You stop for a moment to reflect on these words. Then, in a flash, you decide you want to marry Ludmilla.
[12]
Now you are man and wife, Reader and Reader. A great double bed receives your parallel readings.
Ludmilla closes her book, turns off her light, puts her head back against the pillow, and says, “Turn off your light, too. Aren’t you tired of reading?”
And you say, “Just a moment, I’ve almost finished If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino.”
Books by Italo Calvino
Visit www.hmhbooks.com to find more books by Calvino, including:
The Baron in the Trees
The Castle of Crossed Destinies
Cosmicomics
Difficult Loves
If on a winter’s night a traveler
Invisible Cities
Italian Folktales
Marcovaldo, or The seasons in the city
Mr. Palomar
The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount
t zero
Under the Jaguar Sun
The Uses of Literature
The Watcher and Other Stories
About the Author
ITALO CALVINO (1923–1985) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979). Lionized in Britain and America, he was, at the time of his death, the most-translated contemporary Italian writer.
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