Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories

by Italo Calvino

  Obviously it’s impossible to get through at this time of day. I’d better give up, but if I stop trying to speak to you I’ll immediately have to go back and deal with the phone as a completely different instrument, another part of myself with other functions: I’ve got a series of business meetings in town here that need urgent confirmation, I’ll have to unplug the mental circuit that connects me to you and plug in the one that corresponds to my periodic inspections of companies controlled by my group or with joint shareholdings; I’ll have to perform a switching operation not in the phone but in myself, in my approach to the phone.

  First I want to have one last try, once more I’ll dial that sequence of numbers that has taken the place of your name, your face, you. If I get through, good, if not, I’ll stop. Meanwhile I can go on thinking things I’ll never say to you, thoughts addressed more to the phone than to you, that have to do with the relationship I have with you through the phone, or rather the relationship I have with the phone with you as pretext.

  Distant mechanisms revolve, my thoughts revolving with them, and I start to see the faces of other recipients of longdistance calls, variously pitched voices vibrate, the disc assembles and dismantles accents, attitudes and moods, but I can’t settle on the image of an ideal woman to satisfy my yearning for a longdistance connection. Everything starts getting mixed up in my mind: faces, names, voices, numbers in Antwerp or Zurich or Hamburg. Not that I expect anything more from one number than from another: either with regard to the likelihood of getting through, or to what, once through, I might say or hear. But that doesn’t stop me going on to try to make contact with Antwerp or Zurich or Hamburg or whatever other city yours may be—already forgotten in the whirligig of numbers I’ve been calling one after another for an hour now without ever getting through.

  There are things that, even if my voice doesn’t reach you, I feel the need to tell you: and it doesn’t matter if I’m talking to you in Antwerp, or you in Zurich, or you in Hamburg. I want you to know that the moment I am really together with you isn’t when I see you at night, in Antwerp, or Zurich, or Hamburg, after my business meetings; that is only the banal and inevitable aspect of our relationship: the tiffs, the making up, the rancour, the flarings of old passion; in every city and with every woman I phone the ritual I’ve established with you is repeated. Just as, as soon as I’m back in your town, even before you know I’m there, I’ll be spasmodically calling (trying to call) a number in Goteborg, or Bilbao, or Marseilles: a number I could easily get through to now with a local call here in the network of Goteborg, or Bilbao, or Marseilles (I can’t remember where I am). But I don’t want to talk to that number now; I want to talk to you.

  That’s what—given that you can’t hear me—I want to tell you. For an hour I’ve been trying a series of numbers turn and turn about, all as impossible to get through to as yours, in Casablanca, Salonica, Vaduz: I’m sorry you’re all stuck by the phone waiting for me; the service is getting worse and worse. As soon as I hear a voice say, ‘Hello!’ I shall have to be careful not to make a mistake, to remember which of you the last number I called corresponds to. Will I still recognize your voices? I’ve been waiting so long listening to silence.

  I might as well tell you at this point, tell you, tell all of you, given that none of your phones is answering: my great ambition is to transform the entire global network into an extension of myself, propagating and attracting amorous vibrations, to use this instrument as an organ of my own body through which to consummate an embrace with the whole planet. I’ve almost made it. Hang on by your phones. And that means you too, in Kyoto, in Sào Paolo, in Riyadh!

  Unfortunately my phone keeps giving me the engaged signal, even when I put it down and pick it up again, even when I bang down on the cradle. There, now I can’t hear anything at all, you’d think I was cut off from every possible line. Keep calm all of you. It must be a temporary hitch. Hang on.

  Glaciation

  With ice? Yes? I go to the kitchen a moment to get the ice. And immediately the word ‘ice’ expands between her and me, separates us, or perhaps unites us, but the way a fragile sheet of ice unites the shores of a frozen lake.

  If there is one thing I hate it’s preparing the ice. It obliges me to break off a conversation just started, at the crucial moment when I ask her: A drop of whisky? and she: Thanks, but really just a drop, and me: With ice? And already I’m heading towards the kitchen as though into exile, already I can see myself fighting with ice cubes that won’t come out of the tray.

  No problem, I say, it won’t take a second, I always have ice with whisky myself. It’s true, the tinkling in the glass keeps me company, separates me from the din of the others, at parties where there are lots of people it stops me from losing myself in the ebb and flow of voices and sounds, that back and forth she detached herself from when she appeared for the first time in my field of vision, in the inverted telescope of my whisky glass, her colours advancing along that corridor between two smoke-filled rooms booming with music, and I stood there with my glass without going to one room or the other, and she too, she saw me in a distorted shadow through the transparency of the icy whisky glass, and I don’t know if she heard what I was saying to her because there was all that din or perhaps again because I hadn’t spoken, had only moved the glass and the ice rising and falling went clink clink, and she too said something into her little bell of glass and ice, certainly I hadn’t imagined she would be coming to my place tonight.

  I open the freezer, no, close the freezer, first I have to find the ice bucket. Hang on, I’ll be with you in a sec. The freezer is a polar cave, dripping with icicles, the tray is welded to the base by a crust of frost, I pull hard and snap it off, fingertips turning white. In her igloo the Eskimo bride waits for the seal hunter lost out on the pack-ice. Now just a slight pressure to separate the cubes from the walls of their compartments: but no, it’s a solid block, even when I turn the tray over they won’t come out, I put it under the tap in the sink, turn on the hot water, the jet crackles on the frost-encrusted metal, my fingers turn from white to red. I’ve got my shirt cuff wet, that’s very annoying, if there’s one thing I hate it’s feeling shapeless wet cloth clinging to my wrist.

  Put a record on, I’ll be back in a sec with the ice, can you hear me? She can’t hear me with the tap on, there’s always something stops us hearing and seeing each other. In the corridor too she was talking through hair falling half across her face, she was speaking over the edge of her glass and I heard her teeth laughing on the rim, on the ice, she was repeating: gla-ci-a-tion? as if of everything I’d said to her only that word had got through, and my hair was falling over my eyes too as I spoke into slowly melting ice.

  I bang the edge of the tray against the edge of the sink, only one cube comes away, it falls outside the sink, it’ll make a puddle on the floor, I’ll have to pick it up, it’s gone and got under the cupboard, I’ll have to get down on my knees, reach a hand under, it slips through my fingers, there, I’ve got it and I throw it in the sink, go back to passing the tray upside down under the tap.

  It was I who spoke to her about the great glaciation, now due to return and cover the earth, the whole of human history has taken place in a period between two ice ages, a period which is almost over now, the numbed rays of the sun can barely reach the earth’s frost-sparkling crust, grains of malt accumulate the sun’s dissipating strength, then set it flowing again, fermenting into alcohol, at the bottom of the glass the sun is still fighting its war with the ice, in the maelstrom’s curving horizon the icebergs roll.

  All at once three or four pieces of ice break off and fall into the sink, before I have time to turn the tray right way up they all tumble down drumming on the zinc. I grope around to grab them and put them in the ice bucket, now I can’t find the cube that got dirty on the floor, to save them all I’d better wash them one by one, with warm water, no, with cold, they’re already melting, a snowy lake is forming in the bottom of the bucket.

  Adri
ft on the Arctic Sea the icebergs form a white embroidery along the Gulf Stream, pass beyond it, head down towards the tropics like a flock of giant swans, block harbour mouths, sail up river estuaries, tall as skyscrapers they drive their sharp spurs between skyscrapers, ice rasping on walls of glass. The silence of the northern night is broken by the roar of cracks that yawn to swallow up entire cities, then by the hiss of ice slides that deaden muffle soften.

  I wonder what she’s getting up to in there, so silent, no sign of life, she could have given me a hand, couldn’t she, very nice, didn’t even occur to her to ask: would you like me to help? Thank heaven I’ve finished now, I’ll wipe my hands with this kitchen cloth, but I wouldn’t want that kitchen cloth smell to linger, better wash them again, now where can I dry them? The problem is whether the solar energy accumulated in the earth’s crust will be enough to maintain body heat throughout the next ice age, the solar heat of the Eskimo bride’s igloo alcohol.

  Off back to her then so we can drink our whisky in peace. See what she’s been up to in here, without making a sound? She’s taken her clothes off, she’s naked on the leather couch. I’d like to go over to her but the room’s been invaded by ice: dazzling white crystals piled on the carpet, on the furniture; translucent stalactites hang from the ceiling, weld themselves into diaphanous columns, a vertical sheet of solid ice has formed between her and me, our two bodies are prisoners in the thickness of the iceberg, we can barely see each other through a wall all sharp spikes glittering in the rays of a distant sun.

  The Call of the Water

  I move my arm towards the shower, place my hand on the knob, turn it slowly, rotating to the left.

  I’ve just woken up, my eyes are still full of sleep, but I am perfectly aware that this gesture I’m performing to start my day is a decisive and solemn act, one that puts me in touch with both culture and nature together, with thousands of years of human civilization and with the birth pains of those geological eras that gave our planet its shape. What I expect most from the shower is that it confirm my mastery over water, my membership of that part of humanity which thanks to the efforts of previous generations has inherited the prerogative to summon water to itself with the simple turning of a tap, my privileged state of living in a century and a place where one may enjoy the most generous abundance of clean water whenever one likes. And I know that in order for this miracle to be renewed every day a series of complex conditions have to be met, so that turning on a tap can never be a distracted, automatic gesture, but requires concentration, mental participation.

  There! In response to my summons the water climbs the piping, surges in the siphons, raises and lowers the ballcocks that control the flow into the cisterns, as soon as a pressure-change attracts it it rushes there, sends out its message along connecting pipes, spreads out across a network of collectors, drains and refill tanks, presses against reservoir dams, runs out from purifiers, advances along the entire front of the pipelines that bring it towards the city, having collected and stored it in one phase of its endless cycle, perhaps trickling from glacier mouths into rocky streams, perhaps pumped up from subterranean strata, draining down through veins in the rock, absorbed by cracks in the soil, fallen from the sky in a thick curtain of snow rain hail.

  While my right hand adjusts the mixer, I stretch out my left and cup it to toss the first splashes on my eyes and wake myself up properly, and as I do so I sense far far away the thin, cold, transparent waves flowing towards me along miles and miles of aqueduct across plains valleys mountains, hear the water nymphs from the wellsprings coming towards me along their liquid ways, any moment they’ll be folding me in their threadlike caresses under the shower here.

  But before a drop appears at each hole in the shower head to lengthen in a still uncertain dribble then suddenly swell all together in concentric circles of vibrant jets, I have to wait a whole second, a second of uncertainty during which there’s no way of knowing whether the world still contains any water, whether it hasn’t become a dry, dust-covered planet like the other celestial bodies in our vicinity, or in any event whether it contains enough water for me to be able to take it in the hollow of my hands, far as I am from any reservoir or spring, in the heart of this fortress of asphalt and cement.

  Last summer there was a big drought in Northern Europe, pictures on the TV showed wastes of fields reduced to a cracked and arid crust, once prosperous rivers shyly revealing their dry beds, cattle nuzzling in the mud to get some relief from the heat, queues of people with jugs and jars by a meagre fountain. It occurs to me that the abundance I have been wallowing in until today is precarious and illusory, water could once again become a scarce resource, hard to distribute, the water carrier with his little barrel slung over his shoulder raising his cry to the windows to call the thirsty down to buy a glass of his precious merchandise.

  If I almost succumbed a moment ago to a sense of titanic pride as I took hold of the command levers of the shower, it’s taken less than a second to have me thinking how unjustified and fatuous my illusion of omnipotence was, and it’s with trepidation and humility that I now watch for the arrival of the gush announced by a subdued quivering higher up the tube. But what if it were just an air bubble passing through the empty pipes? I think of the Sahara inexorably advancing a few inches every year, I see the lush mirage of an oasis trembling in the haze, I think of the arid plains of Persia drained by underground channels towards cities with blue majolica domes, crossed by nomad caravans that set out each year from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf, camping under black tents where, crouched on the ground, a woman holds her gaudy veil with her teeth as she pours water for the tea from a leather bag.

  I raise my face towards the shower waiting out that second before the spurts rain down on my half-closed lids to liberate sleepy eyes that are now exploring the chrome-plated shower-head peppered with little holes rimmed by calcium, and all at once I see it as a lunar landscape riddled with calcareous craters, no, it’s the deserts of Iran I’m seeing from the air, dotted with small white craters all in rows at even intervals, showing the route the water follows along conduits three thousand years old: the qanat that run underground for fifty yards at a time, communicating with the surface via these wells where a man can climb down securing himself to a rope to carry out maintenance work. I too project myself into one of those dark craters, in an upside-down world I drop into the showerhead holes as though into the qanat wells towards the water running there invisibly with a muffled hiss.

  A fraction of a second is all it takes for me to rediscover the notion of up and down: it’s from above that the water is about to reach me, after a jerky uphill journey. In thirsty civilizations artificial watercourses run below or along the ground, much as in nature itself, while the great luxury of civilizations lavish with the vital lymph has been that of having water overcome the force of gravity, having it rise up to then fall down again; hence the profusion of fountains with plays and sprays of water, the tall pillars of overhead aqueducts. The imposing masonry of Roman arches supports the lightness of a torrent suspended up above; it’s an idea that expresses a sublime paradox: the most solidly, lastingly monumental at the service of the fluid and transitory, the elusive and diaphanous.

  I listen hard to the network of waterflows suspended above and around me, to the vibration spreading through a forest of pipes. Above I sense the sky of the Roman Campagna crossed by conduits perched on gently descending arches, and higher up still by clouds that vie with the aqueducts to draw up immense quantities of running water.

  The point of arrival for an aqueduct is always the city, the great sponge made for absorbing and spraying, Nineveh and its gardens, Rome and its baths. A transparent city never ceases to flow within the compact thickness of stones and cement, a fine filigree of water swathes the walls and streets. Superficial metaphors define the city as an agglomerate of stone, many-sided diamond or sooty coal, but every metropolis can also be seen as a grand liquid structure, a space defined by vertical and
horizontal lines of water, a stratification of locations subject to tides and floods and undertow, where the human race realizes an ideal of amphibian life that satisfies its deepest vocation.

  Or perhaps it is water’s deepest vocation that is realized in the city: climbing, gushing, flowing upwards. It’s in their height that cities find their identity: Manhattan raising up its watertanks on top of skyscrapers, Toledo which for centuries had to draw off barrel after barrel from the Tagus way below and plod them uphill on muleback, until for the delight of the melancholy Philip II el artificio de Juanelo lurched into creaking motion and, miracle of brief duration, brought the contents of its swinging buckets up the cliff to the Alcazar.

  Here I am then ready to welcome the water not as something naturally due to me but as a lovers’ tryst, an encounter whose freedom and felicity are proportional to the obstacles it has had to overcome. To live in complete intimacy with water the Romans placed the baths at the centre of their public life; today this intimacy is the heart of our private life, here under this shower whose streams I have so often seen running down your skin, naiad nereid undine, thus I see you once again appearing and disappearing as the jets fan out, now that the water comes gushing in swift obedience to my call.

  The Mirror, the Target

  When I was a boy, I spent hours and hours in front of the mirror pulling faces. Not that I thought my face so handsome as never to tire of looking at it; on the contrary, I couldn’t bear it, that face of mine, and pulling faces gave me the chance to try out different ones, faces that appeared and were immediately replaced by other faces, so that I could believe I was a different person, many people of every kind, a host of individuals who one after the other became myself, that is I became them, that is each of them became another of them, while as for me, it was as if I didn’t exist at all.