There was nothing for it but to change my attitude, behaviour, style. My relationship with the universe should be the practical, factual approach of one capable of assessing the objective value of the evolution of any given thing, however immense, without letting it go to his head. That was how I hoped to come across to her, more convincing, promising, trustworthy. Did I succeed? Not a bit of it. The more I banked on solidity, on what was feasible, quantifiable, the more I felt I was coming across as a braggart, a con man.
In the end I began to see the light: there was only one thing worthy of admiration as she saw it, only one value, and that was nothingness. It wasn’t that she had a low opinion of me, but of the universe. Everything in existence carried some original defect within itself: being, to her mind, was a depressing, vulgar degeneration of non-being.
To say that this discovery upset me would be an understatement: it was an affront to all my beliefs, my craving for completeness, my immense expectations. What greater incompatibility could there be than between myself and someone with a nostalgia for nothingness? Not that she was without her reasons (my weakness for her was such that I struggled to understand them): it was true that there was an absoluteness about the void, a rigour, a presence such as to make everything that claimed to have the requisites for existence seem approximate, limited, shaky; if one starts to draw comparisons between what is and what is not, it is the poorer qualities of the former that strike you, the impurities, the flaws; in short, you can only really feel safe with nothingness. That said, how should I react? Turn my back on the whole, plunge into the void again? It was hardly possible! Once set in motion, the process by which non-being was becoming being couldn’t be stopped: the void belonged to a past that was irremediably over now.
One of the many advantages of being was that it allowed us, from the climax of our achieved fullness, to indulge in a moment’s regret for the nothingness we had lost, a moment’s melancholy contemplation of the negative fullness of the void. In that sense I could go along with Nugkta’s inclinations, indeed no one would be more capable than myself of expressing this feeling of yearning with conviction. No sooner thought than done: I rushed towards Nugkta crying: ‘Oh, if only we could lose ourselves in the boundless spaces of the void …’ (That is, I did something somehow equivalent to crying something of the like.) And how did she react? By turning away in disgust. It took me a while to realize how crude I had been and to learn that one speaks of the void (or better still doesn’t speak) with a great deal more discretion.
From then on it was one long series of crises which kept me in a state of constant agitation. How could I have been so mistaken as to seek the completeness of fullness in preference to the perfection of the void? True, the passage from non-being to being had been a considerable novelty, a sensational development, a discovery guaranteed to impress. But one could hardly claim that things had changed for the better. From a state of clarity, faultless, without stain, one had gone to a bungled, cluttered construction crumbling away on every side, held together by pure luck. How could I have been so excited by the so-called marvels of the universe? The scarcity of available materials had in many cases led to monotonous repetitive states, or again in many others to a scatter of untidy, inconsistent improvisations few of which would lead to anything at all. Perhaps it had been a false start: the veneer of what tried to pass itself off as a universe would soon fall away like a mask, and nothingness, the only true completeness possible, would once again impose its invincible absolute.
So began a time when it was only in the chinks of emptiness, the absences, the silences, the gaps, the missing connections, the flaws in time’s fabric, that I could find meaning and value. Through those chinks I would sneak glances at the great realm of non-being, recognizing it now as my only true home, a home I regretted having betrayed in a temporary clouding of consciousness, a home Nugkta had brought me to rediscover. Yes, to rediscover: for together with her, my inspiration, I would slither into these narrow passages of nothingness that crossed the compactness of the universe; together we would achieve the obliteration of every dimension, of all time, all substance, all form.
By now the understanding between myself and Nugkta should at last have been clear. What could come between us? Yet every now and then unexpected differences would emerge: it seemed I had become more severe with the world of existence than she; I was amazed to discover in her an attitude of indulgence, complicity I might almost say, with the efforts that dusty vortex was making to keep itself together. (Already there were well-formed electromagnetic fields, nuclei, the first atoms.)
Here it must be said that so long as one considered the universe as the complete expression of total fullness, it could inspire nothing but banality and rhetoric, but if one thought of it as something made from very little, a poor thing scratched together on the edge of nothingness, it excited sympathy and encouragement, or at least a benevolent curiosity as to whatever might come of it. To my surprise I found Nugkta willing to support it, to assist it, this mean, poverty-stricken, sickly universe. Whereas I was tough: ‘Give me the void! All glory and honour to nothingness!’ I insisted, concerned that this weakness of Nugkta’s might distract us from our goal. And how did Nugkta reply? With her usual mocking snorts, exactly as she had at the time of my excessive enthusiasm for the glories of the universe.
Slow as I am, only later would I come to appreciate that once again she was right. The only contact we could have with the void was through this little the void had produced as quintessence of its own emptiness; the only image we had of the void was our own poor universe. All the void we would ever know was there, in the relativity of what is, for even the void had been no more than a relative void, a void secretly shot through with veins and temptations to be something, given that in a moment of crisis at its own nothingness it had been able to give rise to the universe.
Today, after time has churned its way through billions of minutes, billions of years, and the universe is unrecognizable from what it was in those first instants, since space suddenly became transparent so that the galaxies wrap the night in their blazing spirals, and along the orbits of the solar systems millions of worlds bring forth their Himalayas and their oceans according to the cosmic seasons, and the continents throng with masses whether jubilant or suffering or slaughtering each other, turn and turn about with meticulous obstinacy, and empires rise and fall in their marble, porphyry and concrete capitals, and the markets overflow with quartered cattle and frozen peas and displays of brocade and tulle and nylon, and transistors and computers and every kind of gadget pulsate, and everybody in every galaxy is busy observing and measuring everything, from the infinitely small to the infinitely large, there’s a secret that only Nugkta and I know: that everything space and time contains is no more than that little that was generated from nothingness, the little that is and that might very well not be, or be even smaller, even more meagre and perishable. And if we prefer not to speak of it, whether for good or for ill, it is because the only thing we could say is this: poor, frail universe, born of nothing, all we are and do resembles you.
Editor’s Note
The pieces brought together in this volume originally appeared in the publications listed below. Where both manuscript and printed copy are available, preference has been given to the manuscript version.
Fables and Stories 1943–1958
‘The Man Who Shouted Teresa’, manuscript dated 12 April 1943.
‘The Flash’, manuscript dated 25 April 1943.
‘Making Do’, manuscript dated 17 May 1943; published in La Repubblica, 17 September 1986.
‘Dry River’, manuscript dated October 1943.
‘Conscience’, manuscript dated 1 December 1943.
‘Solidarity’, manuscript dated 3 December 1943.
‘The Black Sheep’, manuscript dated 30 July 1944.
‘Good for Nothing’, 1945–6, original manuscript tide; planned as a novel and adapted into a short story. It was published under the tid
e ‘What Noah Wasn’t Like’ in a small review as yet unidentified since we have only the pages with this story.
‘Like a Flight of Ducks’, Il Settimanale, II, 18, 3 May 1947.
‘Love Far from Home’, proofs with corrections in the author’s hand, 1946.
‘Wind in a City’, proofs with corrections in the author’s hand, 1946.
‘The Lost Regiment’, L’Unità, 15 July 1951, definitive version in the collection, Fourteen Stories, Mondadori, Milan 1971.
‘Enemy Eyes’ (manuscript title); L’Unità, 2 February 1952, under the tide ‘The Enemy’s Eyes’.
‘A General in the Library’ (manuscript tide); L’Unità, 30 October 1953, under the title ‘The General in the Library’.
‘The Workshop Hen’, I Racconti, Einaudi, 1954.
‘Numbers in the Dark’, I Racconti, Einaudi, 1958.
‘The Queen’s Necklace’, published under the tide ‘Fragment of a Novel’ in Everybody’s Days, Edindustria editoriale S.p.A., 1960. The author’s note states: ‘The following pages are taken from a novel I worked on between 1952 and 1954 but never finished. Through the picaresque adventures of a lost pearl necklace the novel was meant to offer a satire of various levels of society in an industrial city during the years of post-war tension.’
‘Becalmed in the Antilles’, Città aperta, I, 4–5, 25 July 1957; the author’s note of 1979 was written in response to a request from Felice Froio.
‘The Tribe with its Eyes on the Sky’, manuscript with a signed note by the author, as follows: ‘October 1957 – after the Soviet missile, before the satellite. For Città aperta, but not published.’
‘Nocturnal Soliloquy of a Scottish Nobleman’, L’Espresso, 25 May 1958; the editor’s note accompanying the publication claims, doubtless after consultation with the author. ‘In this fable the writer Italo Calvino expresses his assessment of the Italian situation on the eve of the elections. It’s a story à clef, where the MacDickinsons, or Episcopalians, represent the Christian Democrats; the MacConnollys or Methodists, the Communists, and the MacFergusons, or Presbyterians, the non-aligned centre parties. The Scottish nobleman is one of the latter’. The text here published is taken from Calvino’s typescript with corrections in the author’s hand.
‘A Beautiful March Day’, Città aperta, II, 9–10, June–July 1958.
Tales and Dialogues 1968–1984
‘World Memory’, Club degli Editori, Milan, 1968.
‘Beheading the Heads’, Il Caffè, XIV, 4, 4 August 1969; the author’s note says: ‘The following pages are sketches for chapters of a book I have been planning for some time, a book that aims to offer a new model for society with a political system based on the ritual execution of the entire governing class at regular intervals. I still haven’t decided what shape the book will have. Each of the chapters here presented could be the opening of a different book; hence the numbers given do not indicate any particular order or progression.’
‘The Burning of the Abominable House’, Playboy, Italian edition, 1973.
‘The Petrol Pump’ (manuscript title); Corriere della Sera, 21 December 1974, under the title ‘La forza delle cose’ (The Force of Circumstances).
‘Neanderthal Man’, in the collection, Impossible Interviews, Bompiani, Milan 1975.
‘Montezuma’, in the collection, Impossible Interviews, Bompiani, Milan 1975.
‘Before You Say “Hello”’, Corriere della Sera, 27 July 1975.
‘Glaciation’, text written in response to a request from the Japanese liquor producer, Suntori, first published in Japanese, then in Corriere della Sera, 18 November 1975.
‘The Call of the Water’, written as introduction to Aqueducts Past and Present, by Vittorio Gobbi and Sergio Torresella, published by Montubi, Milan, 1976.
‘The Mirror, the Target’ (manuscript title); Corriere della Sera, 14 December 1978, under the title ‘There’s a Woman behind the Target’.
‘The Other Eurydice’, September–October 1980.
‘The Memoirs of Casanova’, stories written to accompany a collection of etchings by Massimo Campigli published by Salomon and Torrini, 1981. The author’s note, in the third person, states: ‘After Invisible Cities, a catalogue of imaginary cities visited by a resurrected Marco Polo, Italo Calvino begins another series of short stories attributed once again to a famous Venetian, in this case Giacomo Casanova. Like the previous book, this too is a “catalogue”, but this time of “amours”.’ Published in La Repubblica, 15–16 August 1982.
‘Henry Ford’, typescript with corrections in the author’s hand, dated 30 September 1982. Television screenplay, never produced.
‘The Last Channel’, La Repubblica, 31 January 1984.
‘Implosion’, 13 August 1984.
‘Nothing and Not Much’, Washington Post, 3 June 1985.
THE BEGINNING
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This translation first published by Jonathan Cape 1995
Published in Penguin Classics 2009
Copyright © The Estate of Italo Calvino, 2002
This translation copyright © Tim Parks, 1995
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The moral right of the author and translator has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-141-88957-3
Numbers in the Dark Page 27
