Numbers in the Dark

by Italo Calvino

  NEANDER: Mmm … Me if I have to go on I go on … if I have to stop I stop … if I have to eat the bear I stop and eat the bear … Afterwards I go on, the bear stops still, a bone here, on the ground, a bone there, on the ground … Behind me come the others, they come on, up to where the bear is, stopped still, the others stop, they eat the bear … My son gnaws at a bone, another son of mine gnaws at another bone, another son of mine gnaws at another bone …

  INTERVIEWER: Mr Neander is now bringing to life for us one of the culminating moments in the life of a clan of hunters: the ritual banquet after a successful hunt …

  NEANDER: My brother-in-law gnaws another bone, my wife gnaws another bone …

  INTERVIEWER: As you will have heard in Mr Neander’s own words, women were the last to help themselves at the ritual banquet, which constitutes an admission of the inferior social status to which women were condemned …

  NEANDER: Your woman you mean! First I bring the bear to my wife, my wife lights the fire beneath the bear, then I go off to pick some basil, then I get back with the basil and I say: well now, where is the bear’s thigh? and my wife says: I ate it, right? to check if it was still raw, right?

  INTERVIEWER: As early as the communities of hunters and gatherers – for this is what emerges from Mr Neander’s account – there was already a strict division of labour between men and women …

  NEANDER: Then I go off to pick some marjoram, then I get back with the marjoram and I say: well now, where’s the bear’s other thigh? and my wife says: I ate it, right? to check if it was already burnt, right? And I say: well now, you know who’s going to go and pick the oregano, don’t you? You’re going, I’m telling you, you’re going for the oregano, yes you are.

  INTERVIEWER: From this delightful little family vignette we can glean many hard facts about the life of Neanderthal man: first, his knowledge of fire and its use in cooking; second, the gathering of aromatic herbs and their gastronomic application; third, the consumption of meat in large detached portions, which would require the use of proper cutting implements and hence implies a highly developed ability to work flint. But let’s hear if our guest has anything to tell us about this himself. I will formulate the question in such a way as not to influence his response: Mr Neander, you with your stones, yes, those nice round stones you see so many of hereabouts, didn’t you ever try, I don’t know, to play with them, to bang them against each other a bit, to see if they were really that hard?

  NEANDER: What’s that you’re saying about stones? Don’t you know what you do with a stone! Clank! Clank! That’s me with a stone: clank! You get the stone, right? you put it on a big stone, you get that other stone, you lay into it, sharp, clank! you know where to hit it sharp? there! that’s where you hit it!: clank! a sharp hit! go on! ow! that way you squash your finger! Then you suck your finger, then you jump up and down, then you get hold of that other stone again, you put the stone back on the big stone, clank! You see it’s split in two, a thick splinter and a thinner splinter, one curved this way, the other curved that way, you pick up this one that’s easy to hold, this way, like this, you pick up the other with the other hand, that way, like that, and off you go: clunk! understand that you go clunk there, right there, go on! ow! you’ve stuck the point in your hand! then you suck your hand, turn round on one foot, then you get hold of the splinter again, the other splinter in the other hand, clunk!, a little splinter’s split off, ow! in your eye! you rub your eye with your hand, kick the big stone, get hold of the thick splinter again and the thin splinter, clunk! you split off another splinter right nearby, clunk! another, dunk! yet another, and you see that where they’ve split off they’ve left a nick that goes in nice and round, and then another nick, and then another nick, like that up and down all around, and then on the other side too, clunk! clunk! see how it’s coming off all around, finer and finer, sharper and sharper …

  INTERVIEWER: Our thanks to …

  NEANDER: … then you give it little taps like this, clink! clink! and you split off tiny tiny splinters, clink! clink! and you see how that leaves lots of tiny tiny teeth, clink! clink!

  INTERVIEWER: Yes, we’ve understood that perfectly. On behalf of our listeners let me thank …

  NEANDER: Understood what? Now you can hit it here once: clonk! and then afterwards you can hit it again the other side, clunk!

  INTERVIEWER: Clunk, exactly, let’s move on to another …

  NEANDER: … that way you can hold it properly in your hand, this stone, now it’s worked both sides, then the real work starts, because you get another stone and you put it on the big stone, clank!

  INTERVIEWER: And so on, very clear, what matters is how you begin. Let’s move …

  NEANDER: Oh no, once I’ve begun, I don’t want to stop, there’s always a stone on the ground that looks better than the first one, so I throw away the first and get this other and clank! clank! and lots of the splinters flying off you chuck and lots are even better to work, so I get going on those, clink! clink! and it turns out I can have all these stones come out just how I want and the more nicks I make the more other nicks I can make, where I’ve made one I make two, and then in each of these two I make another two, and in the end the whole lot breaks to bits and I chuck it in the heap of the broken splinters which is growing and growing on this side, but on the other side I’ve got a whole mountain of rocks still to be turned into splinters.

  INTERVIEWER: Now that Mr Neander has described for us this frustrating, monotonous work …

  NEANDER: Monotonous! You’re the one that’s monotonous! Do you know how to make nicks in stones, you, nicks all the same, do you know how to make the nicks monotonous? No, so what are you talking about? I know how to do it all right! And ever since I started, ever since I saw I’ve got the thumb for it, you see this thumb? this thumb that I put here and the other fingers I put there and in the middle there’s a stone, in my hand, gripped tight so it can’t slip out, ever since I saw that I was holding the stone in my hand and hitting it, like this, or like that, well since then what I can do with the stones I can do with everything, with the sounds that come out of my mouth, I can make sounds like this, a a a, p p p, ny ny ny, and so I never stop making sounds, I start speaking, I never stop speaking, I start speaking about speaking, I start working stones I can use for working stones, and meantime it occurs to me to think, I think of all the things I could think when I think, and it occurs to me I’d like to do something to have others understand things, paint some red stripes on my face for example, no reason in particular, just to let the others know I’ve put some red stripes on my face, and I think I’d like to make my wife a necklace of boar’s teeth, no reason in particular, just to have people know that my wife has a necklace of boar’s teeth, and yours doesn’t, I don’t know what you think you have that I didn’t have, I had everything I wanted, everything that was done afterwards, I’d already done, everything that was said and thought and meant was already there in what I said and thought and meant, all the complication of complication was already there, I only have to pick up this stone with my thumb and the hollow of my hand and the other four fingers that fold over it, and everything’s already there, I had everything that others had later, everything others knew and could do later I already had not because it was mine but because it was, because it was already, because it was there, whereas later others had it and knew it and could do it less and less, always a bit less than what might have been, than what there was before, what I had before, what I was before, I really was there then in everything and for everything, not like you, and everything was in everything and for everything, everything you need to be in everything and for everything, even everything wrong that came later was already there in that clank! clank! clink! clink! so what are you trying to say, what do you think you are, what do you mean thinking you’re here when you are not, or if you are it’s only because I really was and the bear was and the stones and the necklaces and the hammerings on the fingers and everything you need to be and that whe
n it’s there is there.

  Montezuma

  MYSELF: Your Majesty … Your Holiness! … Emperor! … General! … I don’t know how to address you, am obliged to resort to terms that only partially convey the prerogatives of your position, forms of address that in my modern language have lost much of their authority, sound like echoes of lost powers … As your throne high on the Mexican plateau is lost, the throne from which you reigned over the Aztecs, most august of their sovereigns, and the last too, Montezuma … Even calling you by your name is a problem for me: Motecuhzoma, it seems that’s what your name really sounded like, but in our European books it’s distorted to Moteczuma, Moctezuma … A name that some writers say means ‘sad man’. To tell the truth, it’s a name you would have well deserved, for you saw the prosperous, well-ordered empire the Aztec world then was, invaded by incomprehensible beings, armed with unheard-of instruments of death. It must have been as if our cities here were suddenly to be invaded by extra-terrestrials. But we have already imagined that moment in every possible way: or at least we think we have. And you? When did you begin to realize that you were witnessing the end of a world?

  MONTEZUMA: The end … Day rolls towards sunset … Summer rots in muddy autumn. Thus every day – every summer … You can never be certain they will return. That’s why man has to ingratiate himself with the gods. So that the sun and stars may continue to revolve over the fields of maize – one more day – one more year …

  MYSELF: You mean to say that the end of the world is always there hanging over us, that amid all the extraordinary events you were witness to in your lifetime, the most extraordinary was that everything went on, not that everything was collapsing?

  MONTEZUMA: It’s not always the same gods who reign in the sky, not always the same empires collecting their taxes in city and country. Throughout my life I honoured two gods, one present and one absent: the Blue Hummingbird, Huitzilopochtli who led us Aztecs in war, and the banished god, the Plumed Serpent, Quetzacoatl, an exile beyond the ocean, in the unknown lands of the West. One day the absent god would return to Mexico to wreak his revenge on the other gods and those peoples faithful to them. I feared the threat that hung over my empire, the upheaval that would usher in the era of the Plumed Serpent, but at the same time I looked forward to it, inwardly I was impatient that this prophecy should come to pass, even though I knew it would mean the ruin of our temples, the slaughter of the Aztecs, my own death …

  MYSELF: And you really believed that the god Quetzacoatl led the Spanish conquistadores off their ships, you recognized the Plumed Serpent in the iron helmet and black beard of Hernán Cortés?

  MONTEZUMA (a sorrowful wail)

  MYSELF: Forgive me, King Montezuma: that name reopens a wound in your heart …

  MONTEZUMA: Oh enough … This story has been told too many times. That this god was traditionally depicted as having a pale bearded face, and that seeing (he groans) the pale and bearded Cortés we supposedly thought him our god … No, it’s not that simple. Correspondences between signs are never conclusive. Everything must be interpreted: the scriptures handed down by our priests are not made of letters, like yours, but of images.

  MYSELF: You mean that your pictographic scripture and reality were each to be read in the same way: they both had to be deciphered …

  MONTEZUMA: In the images of the holy books, the bas-reliefs in the temples, the feather mosaics, every line, every frieze, every coloured stripe can have a meaning … And in the things that come to pass, the events that unfold before our eyes, every tiny detail can have a meaning that points us to the intentions of the gods: the flutter of a robe, a shadow that forms in the dust … If it is thus for all things that have names, think how many things crossed my path that had no name, things I was constantly having to ask myself the meaning of! Wooden houses appear floating on the sea, their cloth wings bellied with wind … My army lookouts try to explain everything they see in words, but how to say something if you don’t know what it is? Men land on the beaches dressed in a grey metal that glitters in the sun. They climb on beasts we have never seen before, a sort of sturdy stag but with no antlers and leaving half-moon prints on the earth. Instead of bows and spears they carry some kind of trumpet that unleashes thunder and lightning, smashing bones from afar. Which were the stranger, the images of our holy books, the small terrible gods all in profile under flashing heads of hair, or these bearded, sweaty, smelly beings? They pushed deeper into our daily space, they robbed the hens from our coops, roasted them, gnawed the flesh from the bones just as we did: yet they were so different from us, incongruous, inconceivable. What could we do, what could I do, I who had so long studied the art of interpreting ancient temple images and dream visions, but try to interpret these new apparitions? Not that the one resembled the other: but the questions I was prompted to ask in the face of the inexplicable events I was experiencing were the same as those I had asked myself when poring over gods grinding their teeth in parchment paintings or in sculpted blocks of copper plated with gold and studded with emeralds.

  MYSELF: But what lay behind your hesitation, King Montezuma? You saw that the Spanish didn’t stop advancing, that sending ambassadors with lavish gifts only aroused their greed for precious metals, that Cortés was forging alliances with those tribes who suffered your oppression, stirring them up against you, that he massacred the tribes who at your instigation laid ambushes for him, and yet at the last you welcomed him and all his soldiers as guests in the capital, and very soon you were allowing this guest to become your master, accepting that he proclaim himself protector of your shaky throne, and, with this pretext, that he hold you prisoner … Don’t tell me that you were so ingenuous as to believe in Cortés …

  MONTEZUMA: That the whites were not immortal I knew; certainly they were not the gods we had been waiting for. But they possessed powers that seemed beyond the human: arrows broke against their armour; their fiery blowpipes – or whatever devilry it was – projected darts that were always lethal. And yet, and yet, one could hardly deny that we had our superior side too, and sufficient perhaps to even the scales. When I took the Spanish to see the marvels of our capital they were so amazed! It was we who really triumphed that day, over those rude conquerors from beyond the sea. One of them said that not even reading their books of adventures had they ever imagined such splendour. Then Cortés took me hostage in the palace where I had made him my guest; not content with all the presents I gave him, he had his men dig an underground tunnel to the treasure chamber and sacked it; my destiny was twisted and thorny as a cactus. But the boorish soldiers guarding me spent their days playing dice and cheating, making vulgar noises, fighting over the gold ornaments I tossed them as tips. And I was still king. I demonstrated as much every day: I was superior to them, I, not they, was the victor.

  MYSELF: Were you still hoping to turn the tables?

  MONTEZUMA: Perhaps there was a battle going on amongst the gods in the sky. A sort of equilibrium had established itself between us, as if our destinies were held in the balance. Surrounded by gardens, our lakes flashed with the sails of the brigs they had built; their arquebuses fired volleys from the shore. There were days when I was seized by an unexpected happiness, and laughed till I cried. And days when I only cried, amidst the laughter of my prison guards. Peace shone from time to time between clouds heavy with war. Don’t forget that the foreigners were led by a woman, a Mexican woman, from a tribe hostile to our own, but of the same race. You say: Cortés, Cortés, and you think that Malitzin – Doña Marina, as you call her – was only his interpreter. No, she was Cortés’s mind, or at least half of it: there were two heads directing the Spanish expedition; the plan for the Conquest arose from the union of a noble princess from our own land and a little man who was pale and hairy. Perhaps it would have been possible – I felt it would – to establish a new era in which the invaders’ qualities – which I believed divine – would be fused with our own more ordered and refined civilization. Perhaps it would be we who absor
bed them, with all their armour and horses and mortars, to appropriate their extraordinary powers for ourselves, to have their gods sit down to eat at our gods’ banquet …

  MYSELF: Wishful thinking, Montezuma, so as not to see your prison bars! Yet you knew there was another way: you could have resisted them, beaten them, overcome the Spanish. That was the way your grandson chose when he organized a conspiracy to free you … and you betrayed him, you lent the Spanish what was left of your authority to quell your people’s rebellion … Yet Cortés only had four hundred men with him at the time, he was isolated in an unknown continent; and what’s more he had fallen out with the authorities of his own government across the sea. Of course, whether for Cortés or against, the fleet and army of Emperor Charles V’s Spain was a threat to the New Continent … Was it their intervention you were afraid of? Had you already realized that the balance of forces was crushingly against you, that defiance of Europe was hopeless?

  MONTEZUMA: I knew we weren’t equals, but not in the way you speak of, white man. The difference that held me back was not something to be weighed or measured … It was not the same as when two highland tribes – or two nations on your continent – seek to dominate each other, and courage and strength in battle decide the outcome. To fight an enemy you must move in the same space as he does, exist in the same time. Whereas we watched each other from different dimensions, without quite touching. The first time I received him, Cortés violated all the sacred rules and embraced me. The priest and dignitaries of my court covered their faces before this scandal. But to me it was as though our bodies hadn’t touched. Not because my position placed me beyond any alien contact, but because we belonged to two worlds that had never met, nor could meet.