The Watcher and Other Stories

by Italo Calvino

  As far as I was concerned, I had no ideals, nor did I want to have any; I only wanted to write an article he would like, to keep my job, which was no better or worse than another, and to continue my life, no better or worse than any other possible life. I knew Cordá’s opinions (“If everyone followed our example, atmospheric purity would already be...”) and his favorite expressions (“We are not Utopians, mind you, we are practical men who...”), and I would write the article just as he wished, word for word. What else could I write? What I thought with my own mind? That would produce a fine article, all right! A fine optimistic vision of a functional, productive world! But I had only to turn my mood inside out (which wasn’t hard for me because it was like attacking myself) to summon the impetus necessary for an inspired editorial by our President.

  “We are now on the threshold of a solution to the problem of volatile wastes,” I wrote, “a solution which will be more quickly achieved”—and I could already see the President’s satisfied look—“as the active inspiration given Technology by Private Initiative”—at this point Cordá would raise one hand, to underline my words—“is implemented by intelligent action on the part of the Government, always so prompt...”

  I read this piece aloud to Signor Avandero. Resting his neat little hands on a white sheet of paper in the center of his desk, Avandero looked at me with his usual, inexpressive politeness.

  “Well? Don’t you like it?” I asked him.

  “Oh, yes, yes indeed,” he hastened to say.

  “Listen to the ending: ‘To answer the catastrophic predictions from some quarters concerning industrial civilization, we once more affirm that there will not be (nor has there ever been) any contradiction between an economy in free, natural expansion and the hygiene necessary to the human organism’”—from time to time I glanced at Avandero, but he didn’t raise his eyes from that white sheet of paper—“‘between the smoke of our productive factories and the green of our incomparable natural beauty...’ Well, what do you say to that?”

  Avandero stared at me for a moment with his dull eyes, his lips pursed. “I’ll tell you: your article does express very well what might be called the substance of our Institute’s final aim, yes, the goal toward which all its efforts are directed...”

  “Hmm...” I grumbled. I must confess that from a punctilious character like my colleague I expected a less tortuous approval.

  I presented the article to Commendatore Cordá on his arrival a couple of days later. He read it with care, in my presence. He finished reading, put the pages in order, and seemed about to reread it from the beginning, but he only said: “Good.” He thought for a moment, then repeated: “Good.” Another pause, and then: “You’re young.” He warded off an objection I had no intention of making. “No, that’s not a criticism, believe me. You are young, you have faith, you look far ahead. However, if I may say so, the situation is serious, yes, more serious than your article would lead the reader to believe. Let’s speak frankly: the danger of air pollution in the big cities is huge, we have the analyses, the situation is grave. And precisely because it is grave, we are here to solve it. If we don’t solve it, our cities, too, will be suffocated by smog.”

  He had risen and was pacing back and forth. “We aren’t hiding the difficulties from ourselves. We aren’t like the others, especially those who are in a position which should force them to think about this, and who instead don’t give a damn. Or worse: try to block our efforts.”

  He stood squarely in front of me, lowered his voice: “Because you are young, perhaps you believe everybody agrees with us. But they don’t. We are only a handful. Attacked from all sides, that’s the truth of it. All sides. And yet we won’t give up. We speak out. We act. We will solve the problem. This is what I would like to feel more strongly in your article, you understand?”

  I understood perfectly. My insistent pretense of holding opinions contrary to my own had carried me away, but now I would be able to give the article just the right emphasis. I was to show it to the President again in three days’ time. I rewrote from beginning to end. In the first two thirds of it I drew a grim picture of the cities of Europe devoured by smog, and in the final third I opposed this with the image of an exemplary city, our own, clean, rich in oxygen, where a rational complex of sources of production went hand in hand with... etcetera.

  To concentrate better, I wrote the article at home, lying on my bed. A shaft of sunlight fell obliquely into the deep courtyard, entered through the panes, and I saw it cut across the air of my room with a myriad of impalpable particles. The counterpane must be impregnated with them; in a little while, I felt, I would be covered by a blackish layer, like the slats of the blind, like the railing of the balcony.

  When I read the new draft to Signor Avandero, I had the impression he didn’t dislike it. “This contrast between the situation in our cities and that in others,” he said, “which you no doubt expressed according to our President’s instructions, has really come off quite well.”

  “No, no, the President didn’t mention that to me, it was my own idea,” I said, a bit annoyed despite myself because my colleague didn’t believe me capable of any initiative.

  Cordà’s reaction, on the other hand, took me by surprise. He laid the typescript on the desk and shook his head. “We still don’t understand each other,” he said at once. He began to give me figures on the city’s industrial production, the coal, the fuel oil consumed daily, the traffic of vehicles with combustion engines. Then he went on to meteorological data, and in every case he made a summary comparison with the larger cities of northern Europe. “We are a great, foggy industrial city, you realize; therefore smog exists here, too, we have no less smog than anywhere else. It is impossible to declare, as rival cities here in our own country try to do, that we have less smog than foreign cities. You can write this quite clearly in the article, you must write it! We are one of the cities where the problem of air pollution is most serious, but at the same time we are the city where most is being done to counteract the situation! At the same time, you understand?”

  I understood, and I also understood that he and I would never understand each other. Those blackened façades of the houses, those dulled panes of glass, those window sills on which you couldn’t lean, those human faces almost erased, that haze which now, as autumn advanced, lost its humid, bad-weather stink and became a kind of quality of all objects, as if each person and each thing had less shape every day, less meaning or value. Everything that was, for me, the substance of a general wretchedness, for men like him was surely the sign of wealth, supremacy, power, and also of danger, destruction, and tragedy, a way of feeling filled—suspended there—with a heroic grandeur.

  I wrote the article a third time. It was all right, at last. Only the ending (“Thus we are face to face with a terrible problem, affecting the destiny of society. Will we solve it?”) caused him to raise an objection.

  “Isn’t that a bit too uncertain?” he asked. “Won’t it discourage our readers?”

  The simplest thing was to remove the question mark and shift the pronoun. “We will solve it.” Just like that, without any exclamation point: calm self-confidence.

  “But doesn’t that make it seem too easy? As if it were just a routine matter?”

  We agreed to repeat the words. Once with the question mark and once without. “Will we solve it? We will solve it.”

  But didn’t this seem to postpone the solution to a vague future time? We tried putting it in the present tense. “Are we solving it? We are solving it.” But this didn’t have the right ring.

  Writing an article always proceeds in the same way. You begin by changing a comma, and then you have to change a word, then the word order of a sentence, and then it all collapses. We argued for half an hour. I suggested using different tenses for the question and the answer: “Will we solve it? We are solving it.” The President was enthusiastic and from that day on his faith in my talents never wavered.

  ONE NIGHT the teleph
one woke me, the special, insistent ring of a long-distance call. I turned on the light: it was almost three o’clock. Even before making up my mind to get out of bed, rush into the hall, and grope for the receiver in the dark, even before that, at the first jolt in my sleep, I already knew it was Claudia.

  Her voice now gushed from the receiver and it seemed to come from another planet; with my eyes barely open I had a sensation of sparks, dazzle, which were instead the shifting tones of her unceasing voice, that dramatic excitement she always put into everything she said, and which now arrived even here, at the end of the squalid hall in Signorina Margariti’s apartment. I realized I had never doubted Claudia would find me; on the contrary, I had been expecting nothing else for all this time.

  She didn’t bother to ask what I had been doing in the meanwhile, or how I had ended up there, nor did she explain how she had traced me. She had heaps of things to tell me, extremely detailed things, and yet somehow vague, as her talk always was, things that took place in environments unknown and unknowable to me.

  “I need you, quickly, right away. Take the first train....”

  “Well, I have a job here.... The Institute...”

  “Ah, perhaps you’ve run into Senator... Tell him...”

  “No, no, I’m just the...”

  “Darling, you will leave right away, won’t you?”

  How could I tell her I was speaking from a place full of dust, where the blinds’ slats were covered with a gritty black grime, and there were cat’s prints on my collar, and this was the only possible world for me, while hers, her world, could exist for me, or seem to exist, only through an optical illusion? She wouldn’t even have listened, she was too accustomed to seeing everything from above and the wretched circumstances that formed the texture of my life naturally escaped her. What was her whole relationship with me if not the outcome of this superior distraction of hers, thanks to which she had never managed to realize I was a modest provincial newspaperman without a future, without ambitions? And she went on treating me as if I were part of high society, the world of aristocrats, magnates, and famous artists, where she had always moved and where, in one of those chance encounters that occur at the beach, I had been introduced to her one summer. She didn’t want to admit it, because that would mean admitting she had made a mistake; so she went on attributing talents to me, authority, tastes I was far from possessing; but my real, fundamental identity was a mere detail, and in mere details she did not want to be contradicted.

  Now her voice was becoming tender, affectionate: this was the moment that—without even confessing it to myself—I had been waiting for, because it was only in moments of amorous abandon that everything separating us disappeared and we discovered we were just two people, and it didn’t matter who we were. We had barely embarked on an exchange of amorous words when, behind me, a light came on beyond a glass door, and I could hear a grim cough. It was the door of my fellow tenant, the police sergeant, right there, beside the telephone. I promptly lowered my voice. I resumed the interrupted sentence, but now that I knew I was overheard, a natural reserve made me tone down my loving expressions, until they were reduced to a murmuring of neutral phrases, almost unintelligible. The light in the next room went off, but from the other end of the wire protests began: “What did you say? Speak louder! Is that all you have to tell me?”

  “But I’m not alone...”

  “What? Who’s with you?”

  “No, listen, you’ll wake up the tenants, it’s late...”

  By now she was in a fury, she didn’t want explanations, she wanted a reaction from me, a sign of warmth on my side, something that would burn up the distance between us. But my answers had become cautious, whining, soothing. “No, Claudia, you see, I... don’t say that, I swear, I beg you, Claudia, I...” In the sergeant’s room the light came on again. My love talk became a mumble, my lips pressed to the receiver.

  In the courtyard the kitchen workers were rolling the empty beer drums. Signorina Margariti, in the darkness of her room, began chatting, punctuating her words with brief bursts of laughter, as if she had visitors. The fellow tenant uttered a Southern curse. I was barefoot, standing on the tiles of the hall, and from the other end of the wire Claudia’s passionate voice held out her hands to me, and I was trying to run toward her with my stammering, but each time we were about to cast a bridge between us, it crumbled to bits a moment later, and the impact of reality crushed and denied all our words of love, one by one.

  AFTER THAT first time, the telephone took to ringing at the oddest hours of the day and night, and Claudia’s voice, tawny and speckled, leaped into the narrow hall, with the heedless spring of a leopard who doesn’t know he is throwing himself into a trap, and since he doesn’t know, he manages, with a second leap, as he came, to find the path out again: and he hasn’t realized anything. And I, torn between suffering and love, joy and cruelty, saw her mingling with this scene of ugliness and desolation, with the loud-speaker of the “Urbano Rattazzi” which blurted out: “Noodle soup,” with the dirty bowls in Signorina Margariti’s sink, and I felt that by now even Claudia’s image must be stained by it all. But no, it ran off, along the wire, intact, aware of nothing, and each time I was left alone with the void of her absence.

  Sometimes Claudia was gay, carefree, she laughed, said senseless things to tease me, and in the end I shared in her gaiety, but then the courtyard, the dust saddened me all the more because I had been tempted to believe life could be different. At other times, instead, Claudia was gripped by a feverish anxiety and this anxiety then was added to the appearance of the place where I lived, to my work as managing editor of Purification, and I couldn’t rid myself of it, I lived in the expectation of another, more dramatic call which would waken me in the heart of the night, and when I finally did hear her voice again, surprisingly different, gay or languid, as if she couldn’t even remember the torment of the night before, rather than liberated, I felt bewildered, lost.

  “What did you say? You’re calling from Taormina?”

  “Yes, I’m down here with some friends, it’s lovely, come right away, catch the next plane!”

  Claudia always called from different cities, and each time, whether she was in a state of anxiety or of exuberance, she insisted that I join her at once, to share that mood with her. Each time I started to give her a careful explanation of why it was absolutely impossible for me to travel, but I couldn’t continue because Claudia, not listening to me, had already shifted to another subject, usually a harangue against me, or else an unpredictable hymn of praise, for some casual expression of mine which she found abominable or adorable.

  When the allotted time of the call was up and the day or night operator said: “Three minutes. Do you wish to continue?” Claudia would shout: “When are you arriving, then?” as if it were all agreed. I would stammer some answer, and we ended by postponing final arrangements to another call she would make to me or I was to make to her. I knew that in the meanwhile Claudia would change all her plans and the urgency of my trip would come up again, surely, but in different circumstances which would then justify further postponements; and yet a kind of remorse lingered in me, because the impossibility of my joining her was not so absolute, I could ask for an advance on my next month’s salary and a leave of three or four days with some pretext; these hesitations gnawed at me.

  Signorina Margariti heard nothing. If, crossing the hall, she saw me at the telephone, she greeted me with a nod, unaware of the storms raging within me. But not the fellow tenant. From his room he heard everything and he was obliged to apply his policeman’s intuition every time the phone’s ring made me jump. Luckily, he was hardly ever in the house, and therefore some of my telephone conversations even managed to be self-confident, nonchalant, and, depending on Claudia’s humor, we could create an atmosphere of amorous exchange where every word took on a warmth, an intimacy, an inner meaning. On other occasions, however, she was in the best of moods and I was instead blocked, I answered only in monosylla
bles, with reticent, evasive phrases: the sergeant was behind his door, a few feet from me; once he opened it a crack, stuck out his dark, mustachioed face, and examined me. He was a little man, I must say, who in other circumstances wouldn’t have made the least impression on me; but there, late at night, seeing each other face to face for the first time, in that lodginghouse for poor wretches, I making and receiving amorous long-distance calls of half an hour, he just coming off duty, both of us in our pajamas, we undeniably hated each other.

  Often Claudia’s conversation included famous names, the people she saw regularly. First of all, I don’t know anybody; secondly, I can’t bear attracting attention; so if I absolutely had to answer her, I tried not to mention any names, I used paraphrases, and she couldn’t understand why and it made her angry. Politics, too, is something I’ve always steered clear of, precisely because I don’t like making myself conspicuous; and now, besides, I was working for a government-sponsored Institute and I had made it a rule to know nothing of either party; and Claudia—God knows what got into her one evening—asked me about certain Members of Parliament. I had to give her some kind of answer, then and there, with the sergeant behind the door. “The first one... the first name you mentioned, of course...”

  “Who? Whom do you mean?”

  “That one, yes, the big one, no, smaller...”

  In other words, I loved her. And I was unhappy. But how could she have understood this unhappiness of mine? There are those who condemn themselves to the most gray, mediocre life because they have suffered some grief, some misfortune; but there are also those who do the same thing because their good fortune is greater than they feel they can sustain.

  I TOOK my meals in certain fixed-price restaurants, which, in this city, are all run by Tuscan families, all of them related among themselves, and the waitresses are all girls from a town called Altopascio, and they spend their youth here, but with the thought of Altopascio constantly in their minds, and they don’t mingle with the rest of the city; in the evening they go out with boys from Altopascio, who work here in the kitchens of the restaurants or perhaps in factories, but still sticking close to the restaurants as if they were outlying districts of their village; and these girls and these boys marry and some go back to Altopascio, others stay here to work in their relatives’ or their fellow townsmen’s restaurants, saving up until one day they can open a restaurant of their own.