Numbers in the Dark

by Italo Calvino

  ‘So long as the enemy before us is the Tsar,’ Virghilij Ossipovic had said, ‘foolish is the man who would seek the Tsar in his comrade.’ It was an untimely thing to say perhaps, and certainly badly received by the noisy assembly.

  Virghilij felt a hand gripping his own: sitting on the floor at his feet was Evghenija Ephraïmovna, knees pulled up in her pleated skirt, hair knotted on her neck and hanging at the two sides of her face like spirals from a tawny coil. One of Evghenija’s hands had found its way up Virghilij’s boots to encounter the young man’s fingers closed in a fist, it had skimmed the back of that fist, as though in a consolatory caress, then dug sharp nails into it scratching slowly until they drew blood. Virghilij realized that there was a precise and stubborn determination guiding the floor of the meeting today, something that had to do with them, the leaders, in person, and that would soon be revealed.

  ‘Let none of us ever forget, comrades,’ Ignatij Apollonovic, the oldest member of the Committee and with a reputation for being a peacemaker, attempted to calm the waters, ‘what must not be forgotten … in any event, it is only right that you remind us from time to time … although,’ he added, chuckling in his beard, ‘when it comes to reminding us, Count Galitzin and his horses’ hoofs are only too reliable …’ He was alluding to the commander of the Imperial Guard who had recently torn one of their protest marches to pieces with a cavalry charge at Maneggio Bridge.

  A voice, it wasn’t clear where from, interrupted him with: ‘Idealist!’ and Ignatij Apollonovic lost his way. ‘Why’s that?’ he asked, disconcerted.

  ‘Do you think we need do no more than keep the words of our doctrine uppermost in our minds?’ said a tall lanky fellow from another part of the room, a man who had made a name for himself as one of the most militant of recent recruits. ‘You know why our doctrine can’t be confused with those of all the other movements?’

  ‘Of course we know. Because it’s the only doctrine which once it has achieved power cannot be corrupted by power!’ grumbled a shaved head bent over papers, and that was Femja, the one the others called ‘the ideologue’.

  ‘So why wait till the day we’ve got power, my lovey-dovey comrades,’ insisted the lanky fellow, ‘to put it into practice?’

  ‘Here, now!’ the cry was raised from various parts of the room. The Marianzev sisters, known as ‘the three Marias’ stepped forward between the benches, chirping ‘Excuse me! Excuse me!’ and catching their long tresses on things. Carrying tablecloths folded over their arms, humming to themselves and pushing aside the boys, it was as if they were laying table for a snack on the veranda of their house in Izmailovo.

  ‘What’s different about our doctrine is this,’ the lanky fellow went on with his sermon, ‘that the only way to write it is with a sharp blade on the bodies of our beloved leaders!’

  There was a mill of people and benches turning over because many in the meeting had got up and rushed forward. The ones who shoved and shouted most were the women: ‘Sit down, little boys! We want to see! Mother of God, what hotheads! We can’t see anything at all here!’ and they thrust their school-mistressy faces between the men’s backs, short hair under peaked caps lending an air of resolution.

  There was only one thing could shake Virghilij’s courage, and that was female hostility, even the slightest sign of it. He had got up, sucking the blood from Evghenija’s scratches on the back of his hand, and he had scarcely spoken those words: ‘You don’t want to kill us already, do you?’ when the door opened and in came a procession of people in white coats pushing trolleys laden with glittering surgical instruments. From that moment on something in the mood of the meeting changed. There was a sharp patter of voices, one hard on another. ‘Of course not … who said anything about killing you? … you’re our leaders … with how much we like you and everything … what would we do without you? … there’s still a long way to go … we’ll always be here beside you …’ and the lanky fellow, the girls, those who a few moments before had seemed to constitute the opposition, were now falling over each other to encourage the leaders, in reassuring, almost protective tones. ‘It’s only a little thing, significant, yes, but not serious in itself, no no no, a bit painful, for sure, but it’s so we can see you as our real leaders, our well-loved leaders, a mutilation, that’s all, when it’s done it’s done, a little mutilation every now and then, you’re not going to get mad about such a little thing, it’s what marks out the leaders of our movement, what else if not that?’

  Already the members of the Executive Committee had been immobilized by scores of strong arms. Laid on the table were gauze, basins with cotton wool, serrated knives. The smell of ether filled the room. The girls laid things out quickly and carefully, as if they’d all been practising their tasks for some time.

  ‘Now the doctor will explain everything properly. Come on, Tòlja!’

  Anatòl Spiridionovic, a medical degree begun and never finished, stepped forward holding red rubber-gloved hands high over an already obese stomach. He was a strange character, Tòlja, a man who perhaps to hide his shyness would put on a comic, infantile grin and come out with a string of witticisms.

  ‘The hand … Ah, the little handy pandy … the hand is a prehensile organ … oh yes, very useful … that’s why we have two of them … and of fingers, as a rule, we have ten … every finger is made up of three bone segments, or phalanges … or at least that’s what they’re called in our part of the world … phalanx, middle phalanx, terminal phalanx …’

  ‘Stop it. You’re getting on our nerves! What do you want to do, give us a lecture!’ People grumbled. (In the end nobody liked this Tòlja fellow.) ‘Let’s get to the real thing! Come on! Let’s get down to it!’

  The first person they brought out was Virghilij. When he realized they were only going to amputate the first phalanx of his ring finger, he recovered his nerve and bore the pain with a pride worthy of his reputation. But some of the others screamed; it took several people to hold them down; fortunately sooner or later most of them fainted. There were different amputations for different people, but generally speaking no more than two phalanges for the more important leaders (the other phalanges would be cut off later a few at a time; one had to remember there would be many of these ceremonies over the years to come). Blood loss was greater than expected; the girls mopped up carefully.

  Lined up on the tablecloth, the amputated fingers looked like small fish, throats pierced by the hook and pulled to the bank. They soon went dry and black, and, after a brief discussion as to whether they should be kept in a showcase, they were thrown in the bin.

  This system of pruning the leaders bore excellent fruit. In exchange for relatively small physical impairment, a great improvement in morale was achieved. The leaders’ authority grew with periodic mutilation. When a hand with missing fingers was raised above the barricades, the demonstrators rallied round and the lancers on their horses were submerged in a crowd they couldn’t break up. The singing, the thuds, the neighing, the shouts – ‘Volja i Raviopravie!’, ‘Death to the Tsar!’ ‘Victorious and honoured the day after shall fall!’ – ranged in the icy air, wafted over the banks of the Nevà, reached the Peter and Paul fortress, penetrated the deepest cells where imprisoned comrades beat their chains to the rhythm and stretched out their stumps through the bars.

  4

  Every time they reached out a hand to sign a document or make the kind of terse gesture that would stress something in a speech, the young leaders found themselves looking at their amputated fingers, and this had an immediate mnemonic effect, establishing an association of ideas between the organ of command and time getting shorter. More than anything else it was a practical system: the amputations could be carried out by simple students and nurses, in improvised operating rooms, with whatever instruments came to hand; if found and arrested by the ever menacing police, the punishment for a simple mutilation was not serious, or at least nowhere near as severe as those they would bring on themselves if the theory’s prescript
ions were followed to the letter. It was a time when the straightforward killing of the leaders would not have been understood, either by the authorities or public opinion; the executioners would have been condemned as murderers, the imagined motive, rivalry or revenge.

  In every local organization and at every level of the movement, a group of activists, distinct from the leaders and whose members were constantly being changed, took charge of the amputations; they established the frequency and the parts of the body, they arranged for the purchase of disinfectants, and, availing themselves of the advice of an expert or two, they themselves handled the instruments. It was a sort of committee of wise men, but with no influence over political decisions which remained strictly in the hands of the Executive Committee.

  When the leaders began to run short of fingers, they looked into the possibility of one or two anatomical variations. The first thing to attract their attention was the tongue: not only did it lend itself to further resections of slivers or fibrils, but in symbolic and mnemonic terms it was exactly what they were after: every little cut directly affected vocal and oratorical ability. But the technical difficulties inherent in the delicacy of the organ were greater than was at first thought. After an early series of operations, tongues were discarded, and the committee fell back on more obvious but less taxing mutilations: ears, noses, a tooth or two. (As far as amputation of the testicles was concerned, though not absolutely ruled out, it was almost always avoided, since it could lend itself to sexual innuendo.)

  There’s a long way to go. The hour of revolution has yet to strike. The leaders of the movement continue to subject themselves to the scalpel. When will they take power? However late it is, they will be the first leaders not to disappoint the hopes others have placed in them. Already we see them parading through flag-draped streets the day of their investiture: lurching on wooden legs if they still have one of their own intact; pushing walking frames with one arm if they still have an arm to push with, faces hidden in feathered masks to hide the more repugnant mutilations, some holding aloft their own scalps as trophies. At that point it will be clear that it’s only in what little flesh is left them that power can be incarnated, if any power there is still to be.

  The Burning of the Abominable House

  In a few hours’ time Skiller, the insurance agent, will be coming to ask me for the computer results, and I still haven’t keyed in the orders to the electronic circuits which will have to grind to a fine dust of bits both Widow Roessler’s secrets and her hardly to be recommended boarding house. Where the house once stood, between railway lines and iron stockyards, on one of those humps of wasteland our city’s suburbs leave behind like heaps of dirt that have escaped the broom, nothing is left but charred rubble now. It could have been a smart villa originally, or it may have looked no better than a ghostly hovel: insurance company reports have nothing to say on the matter; and now it has burnt down, from eaves to cellar, and the incinerated corpses of its four inhabitants have left no clue that might serve to reconstruct the events that led up to this secluded slaughter.

  Rather than the bodies, what does offer a clue is a copybook found in the ruins, entirely burnt except for its cover which was protected by a plastic folder. On the front it says: An Account of the Abominable Deeds Committed in this House and on the back there is an index with twelve entries in alphabetical order: Blackmail, Drugging, Incitement to Suicide, Knifing, Prostitution, Threatening with a Gun, Tying and Gagging, Rape, Seduction, Slander, Snooping, Strangling.

  It isn’t known which of the house’s inhabitants penned this sinister summary, nor to what end: to report the matter to the police, to confess, to defend themselves, to gratify their fascinated contemplation of evil. All we have is this index which doesn’t tell us the names of the perpetrators or the victims of the twelve deeds – criminal or merely immoral as they may be – nor does it explain the order in which they were committed, something that would offer a good start for reconstructing a story: the entries in alphabetical order refer us to page numbers obliterated by a black streak. To complete the list would require one additional word, Arson, doubtless the final deed in this grim chain of events. But who did it? In order to hide, or to destroy?

  Even if we accept that each of the twelve deeds was committed by just one person and inflicted upon just one other person, reconstruction would still be a tall order: given that there are four characters to be considered, then taken two by two we have twelve possible relationships for each of the twelve kinds of relationship listed. The number of possible combinations is thus twelve to the twelfth, meaning that we shall have to choose from a total of eight thousand eight hundred and seventy-four billion, two hundred and ninety-six million, six hundred and seventy-two thousand, two hundred and fifty-six potential solutions. It is hardly surprising that our already overworked police force has chosen not to pursue its enquiries, on the good grounds that, however many crimes may have been committed, the perpetrators doubtless died together with their victims.

  Only the insurance company is eager to know the truth: mainly on account of a fire insurance policy taken out by the owner of the house. The fact that the young Inigo, the policy holder, likewise perished in the flames only serves to make the matter more problematic: his powerful family, despite having ejected and disinherited this degenerate son, is notoriously disinclined to give up anything owed to them. Then one can level the worst possible charges (whether or not included in the abominable index) against a young man who, as a hereditary member of the British House of Lords, dragged an illustrious title down to the steps of those public squares that serve as beds to a nomadic, introspective generation, a man who was wont to soap his long hair under the water of municipal fountains. The small house he rented to the old landlady was the last property left to him, and he had taken a room there subletting from his own tenant in return for a reduction in the already low rent he charged. If he, Inigo, was the arsonist, perpetrator and victim of a criminal plan executed with the carelessness and imprecision that appear to have been typical of his way of behaving, and if the insurance company could demonstrate as much, then they wouldn’t have to pay the damages.

  But this is not the only claim the company is obliged to honour as a result of the calamity: every year Widow Roessler would renew a policy insuring her own life in favour of her adopted daughter, a fashion model familiar to anyone in the habit of leafing through the pages of the more stylish magazines. Of course Ogiva herself is likewise dead, incinerated together with the collection of wigs that would transform her features with their terrifying charm (how else describe a beautiful and delicate young woman with a completely bald skull) into those of hundreds of different and exquisitely asymmetrical faces. But it turns out that the model had a three-year-old child, entrusted to relatives in South Africa, who will waste no time in claiming the rewards of the policy, unless it can be demonstrated that it was she, Ogiva, who killed (Knifing? Strangling?) Widow Roessler. Or again, given that Ogiva had taken the trouble to insure her wig collection, the child’s guardians could claim on this policy too, unless it can be demonstrated that she was responsible for their destruction.

  Of the fourth person who died in the fire, the gigantic Uzbek wrestler, Belindo Kid, we know that in Widow Roessler he had found not only a zealous landlady (he was the only paying occupant of the boarding house) but also an agent with a keen eye for business. Indeed the old lady had recently agreed to finance the ex-middleweight champion’s seasonal tour, covering herself by insuring against the eventuality that illness, incapacity or injury might prevent him from honouring his contracts. A consortium of wrestling match organizers are now claiming damages against this policy; but had the old woman induced Belindo to suicide, perhaps by slandering him or blackmailing him or drugging him (the giant was renowned on the international scene for his impressionable character), then the company could easily have them desist.

  I can’t prevent the slow tentacles of my mind from advancing one hypothesis at a time, exploring
labyrinths of consequence that magnetic memories would run through in a nanosecond. It is from my computer that Skiller is expecting a solution, not from me.

  Of course each of the four catastrophic characters appears better suited to be perpetrator of some of the abominable deeds and victim of others. But who can rule out the notion that the most improbable alternative might be the only one possible? Take what you would suppose to be the most innocent of the twelve relationships, that implied by seduction. Who seduced whom? I have to work hard to concentrate on my permutations here: a flow of images swirls unceasingly in my mind, breaking up and re-forming as though in a kaleidoscope. I see the long fingers of the fashion model with their green and purple varnished nails skimming the listless chin, the grassy stubble of the shimmy young aristocrat, or tickling the solid predatory nape of the Uzbek champion who, aware of a remote and pleasant sensation, arches his deltoids like a purring cat. But immediately afterwards I also see the volatile Ogiva allowing herself to be seduced, captivated by the taurine flattery of the middleweight or the consuming introversion of the feckless youth. And I can also see the old widow, haunted by appetites that age may discourage but not extinguish, painting her face and dolling herself up to lure one or the other of her male prey (or both), and overcoming opposition very different in terms of weight but equally feeble in terms of character. Or I see her herself as the object of a seduction whose perversity might be due to youthful lust’s readiness to confuse life’s seasons, or alternatively to sinister calculation. Until finally, to complete the picture, the shadow of Sodom and Gomorrah unleashes the whirligig of loves between the same sex.