Mr Palomar

by Italo Calvino

  Saturn really is like this. Since the Voyager 2 expedition Mr Palomar has read everything written about the rings: they are made of microscopic particles; they are made of boulders of ice separated by abysses; the divisions between the rings are furrows in which the satellites rotate, sweeping away matter and piling it up at the sides, like sheepdogs circling around the flock to keep it compact. He followed the discovery of intertwined rings which were then proved to be simple circles, much more thin; and the discovery of the opaque streaks arranged like the spokes of a wheel, later identified as icy clouds. But the new information does not deny this essential figure, no different from what was first seen by Gian Domenico Cassini in 1676, when he discovered the division between the rings that bears his name.

  For the occasion a scrupulous person like Mr Palomar would naturally have consulted encylopedias and manuals. Now Saturn, an ever-new object, presents itself to his gaze, renewing the wonder of the first discovery, and prompting the regret that Galileo with his blurred spyglass was able only to conceive a confused idea, of triple body or of sphere with two handles, and when he was coming close to understanding how it was made, his eyesight failed and everything plunged into darkness.

  Staring at a luminous body too long tires the vision: Mr Palomar closes his eyes; he moves on to Jupiter.

  In its majestic but not heavy bulk, Jupiter displays two equatorial stripes like a scarf decorated with interwoven embroideries, of a pale bluish-green. Effects of immense atmospheric storms are translated into a calm, orderly pattern, an elaborate composure. But the real pomp of this luxurious planet are its glittering satellites, all four now in sight along an oblique line, like a scepter shining with jewels.

  Discovered by Galileo, who named them Medicea sidera, “Medici stars”, rebaptized a little later with Ovidian names – Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto – by a Dutch astronomer, Jupiter’s little planets seem to cast a final glow of neoplatonic Renaissance, as if unaware that the impassive order of the celestial spheres had dissolved, because of the work of their discoverer himself.

  A dream of classicality enshrouds Jupiter; gazing at it through the telescope, Mr Palomar awaits an Olympian transfiguration. But he is unable to keep the image sharp: he has to lower his eyelids for a moment, let the dazzled pupil find again the precise perception of outlines, colors, shadows, but also let the imagination strip away borrowed garments and renounce its show of bookish learning.

  While it is right for the imagination to come to support weakness of vision, it must be immediate and direct like the gaze that kindles it. What was the first simile that occurred to him and that he dismissed because it was incongruous? He had seen the planet sway with its satellites in line like air-bubbles rising from the gills of a round fish of the depths, luminescent and striped . . .

  The following night Mr Palomar goes out on his terrace again, to see the planets with his naked eye: the great difference is that here he is forced to bear in mind the proportions between the planet, the rest of the firmament scattered in dark space on all sides, and himself, watching: something that does not happen if the relation is between the isolated object-planet focused by the lens and himself-subject, in an illusory face-to-face encounter. At the same time he remembers that detailed image of each planet seen last night, and tries to insert it into that minuscule dot of light that pierces the sky. In this way he hopes that he has truly taken possession of the planet, or at least of as much of a planet as can enter inside an eye.

  The contemplation of the stars

  When it is a beautiful starry night Mr Palomar says: “I must go and look at the stars.” That is exactly what he says: “I must,” because he hates waste and believes it is wrong to waste that great quantity of stars that is put at his disposal. He says “I must” also because he has little practical knowledge of how you look at the stars, and this simple action always costs him a certain effort.

  The first problem is to find a place from which his gaze can move freely over the whole dome of the sky without obstacles and without the invasion of electric light: for example a lonely beach on a very low coast.

  Another necessary condition is to bring along an astronomical chart, without which he would not know what he is looking at; but between times he forgets how to orient it and he has first to devote a half-hour to studying it. To decipher the chart in the darkness he must also bring along a flashlight. The frequent checking of sky against chart requires him to turn the light on and off, and in the passages from light to darkness he remains almost blinded and has to readjust his vision every time.

  If Mr Palomar employed a telescope things would be more complicated in some ways and simplified in others; but, for the present, the experience of the sky that interests him is that of the naked eye, like that of ancient navigators and nomad shepherds. Naked eye for him, who is nearsighted, means eyeglasses; and since he has to remove his eyeglasses to study the chart, operations are complicated with this pushing up and lowering of the eyeglasses on his brow and there is a wait of several seconds before his crystalline lenses can focus the real stars or the printed ones. On the chart the names of the stars are written in black on a blue ground, and he has to hold the flashlight against the paper in order to make them out. When he raises his eyes to the sky, he sees it black, scattered with vague glows; only gradually do the stars become fixed, set in precise patterns, and the more he looks, the more stars he sees emerge.

  Furthermore the celestial charts he has to consult are two, or rather four: one, very synthetic, of the sky in that month, which presents separately the southern hemisphere and the northern; and one of the entire firmament, much more detailed, which shows in a long strip the constellations of the whole year for the central part of the sky around the horizon, whereas those of the segment around the Pole Star are included in a separate circular map. In other words, to locate a star involves the checking of various maps against the vault of the sky, with all the related actions: putting on and taking off eyeglasses, turning the flashlight on and off, unfolding and folding the large chart, losing and finding again the reference points.

  Since the last time Mr Palomar looked at the stars weeks or months have gone by; the sky is all changed. The Great Bear (it is August) is stretched out, almost lying down, on the crowns of the trees to the north-west; Arcturus plunges towards the outline of the hill, dragging all the kite of the Dipper with him; exactly west is Vega, high and solitary; that star over the sea is Altair and up above is Deneb, which emits a cold ray from its zenith.

  Tonight the sky seems far more crowded than any chart; the schematic patterns prove in reality to be more complicated and less distinct; each cluster could contain that triangle or that broken line you are seeking; and each time you look up at a constellation it seems a bit different to you.

  In identifying a constellation the decisive proof is to see how it answers when you call it. More convincing than the matching of distances and configurations with those marked on the chart is the reply that the luminous dot gives to the name by which it has been called, its promptness in responding to that sound, becoming one with it. For those of us who are ignorant of all mythology, the names of the stars seem incongruous, arbitrary; and yet you could never consider them interchangeable. When the name that Mr Palomar has found is the right one, he realizes it at once, because it gives the star a necessity and an evidence it did not have before; but, on the other hand, if the name is wrong, the star loses it after a few seconds, as if shrugging it off, and you no longer know where it was and who it was.

  Several times Mr Palomar decides that the Berenice’s Hair (a constellation he loves) is this or that luminous swarm in the direction of Serpentarius: but he does not feel again the throb he felt on previous occasions on recognizing that object, so sumptuous and yet so light. Only later does he realize that he cannot find it because in this season Berenice’s Hair cannot be seen.

  To a large extent the sky is streaked with light stripes and patches; in August the Milky Way assumes a den
se consistency and you would say it is overflowing its bed; the dark and the light are so mixed that they prevent the effect of perspective of a black abyss against whose empty remoteness the stars stand out, in relief; everything remains on the same plane: glitter and silvery cloud and shadows.

  Is this the exact geometry of the sidereal spaces, which Mr Palomar has so often felt the need to turn to, in order to detach himself from the Earth, that place of superfluous complications and confused approximations? When he finds himself really in the presence of the starred sky, everything seems to escape him. Even that aspect to which he thought himself most sensitive, the smallness of our world compared to the vast distances, does not emerge directly. The firmament is something that is up there, you can see that it exists, but from it you can derive no idea of dimensions or distance.

  If the luminous bodies are filled with uncertainty, the only solution is to entrust oneself to the darkness, to the deserted regions of the sky. What can be more stable than nothingness? And yet we cannot be one hundred per cent sure even of nothingness. Where Palomar sees a clearing in the firmament, a breach, empty and black, he fixes his gaze there, as if projecting himself into it; and then, even there, some brighter grain begins to form, a little patch or dot; but he cannot be sure if they are really there or if he just seems to see them. Perhaps it is a glow like those you see rotating when you keep your eyes shut (the dark sky is like the obverse of the eyelids, furrowed by phosphenes); perhaps it is a glint from his eyeglasses; but it could also be an unknown star surfacing from the most remote depths.

  This observation of the stars transmits an unstable and contradictory knowledge – Palomar thinks – the exact opposite of what the ancients were able to derive from it. Is this because his relationship with the sky is intermittent and agitated rather than a serene habit? If he forced himself to contemplate the constellations night after night and year after year, following their progress, their returns along the curved tracks of the dark vault, he would perhaps also gain in the end the notion of a continuing and unchangeable time, separated from the labile and fragmentary time of terrestrial events. But would attention to the celestial revolutions be enough to stamp this imprint on him? Or would not a special inner revolution be necessary, something he could suppose only theoretically, unable to imagine the palpable effects on his emotions and on the rhythms of his mind?

  Of the mythical knowledge of the stars he picks up only a weary glimmering; of the scientific knowledge, the echoes popularized by the newspapers. He distrusts what he knows; what he does not know keeps his spirit in a suspended state. Oppressed, insecure, he becomes nervous over the celestial charts as over the railroad timetables when he flips through them in search of a connection.

  There, a glowing arrow slices the sky. A meteor? These are the nights when you sight shooting stars most frequently. But it could also easily be a brightly-lighted commercial plane. Mr Palomar’s gaze remains alert, available, released from all certitude.

  He has been on the dark beach for an hour, seated on a deck-chair, twisting towards south or towards north, every now and then turning on the flashlight and holding the charts to his nose, after keeping them spread out on his lap; then, craning his neck backwards he begins the exploration again, setting out from the Pole Star.

  Some silent shadows are moving over the sand: a pair of lovers rises from the dune, a night fisherman, a customs-man, a boatman. Mr Palomar hears a whispering. He looks around: a few paces from him a little crowd has gathered, observing his movements like the convulsions of a madman.

  PALOMAR IN THE CITY

  * * *

  PALOMAR ON THE TERRACE

  * * *

  From the terrace

  “Shoo! Shoo!” Mr Palomar rushes on to the terrace to drive away the pigeons, who eat the leaves of the gazania, riddle the succulent plants with their beaks, cling with their claws to the cascade of morning-glories, peck at the blackberries, devour leaf by leaf the parsley planted in the box near the kitchen, dig and scratch in the flowerpots, spilling dirt and baring the roots, as if the sole purpose of their flights were devastation. The doves whose flying once cheered the city’s squares have been followed by a degenerate progeny, filthy and infected, neither domestic nor wild, but integrated into the public institutions and, as such, inextinguishable. The sky of Rome has long since fallen under the dominion of the over-population of these lumpen-fowl, who make life difficult for every other species of bird in the area and oppress the once free and various kingdom of the air with their monotonous, moulting, lead-gray livery.

  Trapped between the subterranean hordes of rats and the grievous flight of the pigeons, the ancient city allows itself to be corroded from below and from above, offering no more resistance than it did in the past to the barbarian invasions, as if it saw not the assault of external enemies but the darkest, most congenital impulses of its own inner essence.

  The city has also another soul – one of the many – that lives on the harmony between old stones and ever-new vegetation, sharing the favors of the sun. Fostering this good environmental attitude or genius loci, the Palomar family’s terrace, a secret island above the rooftops, dreams of concentrating under its pergola the luxuriance of the gardens of Babylon.

  The luxuriance of the terrace corresponds to the desire of each member of the family. For Mrs Palomar it was natural to transfer to the plants her attention to individual things, chosen and made her own through an inner identification and thus becoming part of a composition with multiple variations, an emblematic collection; but this spiritual dimension is lacking in the other members of the family. In the daughter because youth cannot and should not become fixed on the here but only on the farther on, the over there; in the husband because he was too late in freeing himself from his youthful impatiences and in understanding (only in theory) that salvation lies solely in applying oneself to the things that there are.

  The concerns of the cultivator, for whom what matters is that given plant, that given piece of ground exposed to the sun from this hour to that hour, that given disease of the leaves which must be fought in time with that given treatment, are alien to the mind modeled on the processes of industry, led to make decisions, in other words, along general lines, according to prototypes. When Palomar realized how approximate and doomed to error are the criteria of that world, where he had thought to find precision and universal norms, he slowly reverted to building for himself a relationship with the world, confining it to the observation of visible forms; but by then he was the way he was: his connection with things has remained that intermittent and labile tie of those people who seem always intent on thinking of something else, but this something else does not exist. His contribution to the burgeoning of the terrace is to run out every now and then to frighten the pigeons – “Shoo! Shoo!” – waking in himself the atavistic sense of defending the territory.

  If birds other than pigeons light on the terrace, instead of driving them away Mr Palomar welcomes them, closes an eye to any possible damage done by their beaks, considers them the messengers of friendly deities. But these appearances are rare: a patrol of crows occasionally approaches, punctuating the sky with black patches, and spreading (even the language of the gods changes with the centuries) a sense of life and gaiety. Then an occasional blackbird, polite and clever; once, a robin; sparrows in their usual role of anonymous passers-by. Other feathered presences over the city allow themselves to be sighted at a greater distance: the squadrons of migratory birds, in autumn, and the acrobaties, in summer, of swallows and house martins. From time to time, white gulls, rowing the air with their long wings, venture over the dry sea of tiles, lost perhaps in following the bends of the river from its mouth, or perhaps intent on a nuptial rite, and their marine cry shrieks among the city noises.

  The terrace is on two levels: a loggia or belvedere dominates the hurly-burly of the roofs over which Mr Palomar casts a bird’s-eye glance. He tries to conceive the world as it is seen by birds; unlike him, birds have the
void opening beneath them, but perhaps they never look down, they see only to the side, hovering obliquely on their wings, and their gaze, like his, wherever it turns, encounters nothing but roofs, higher or lower, constructions more or less elevated but so thick that he can move but so far down. That down below, hemmed in, streets and squares exist, that the true ground is the one at ground level, he knows on the basis of other experiences; at this moment, from what he can see from up here, he would never suspect it.

  The true form of the city is in this rise and fall of roofs, old tiles and new, curved and flat, slender or squat chimneys, arbors of reed matting and sheds of corrugated iron, railings, balustrades, little columns supporting pots, metal water-tanks, dormers, glass skylights, and rising above all else the rigging of TV aerials, straight or crooked, enameled or rusting, in models of successive generations, variously ramified and horned and shielded, but all of them thin as skeletons and disturbing as totems. Separated by irregular and jagged gulfs of emptiness, proletarian terraces with lines for drying laundry and with tomato plants growing in tin cans directly face residential terraces with espaliered plants growing against wooden trellises, garden furniture of white-painted cast iron, awnings; and campaniles with the bell-chamber pealing; façades of public buildings, in profile and full-face; garrets and penthouses, illegal and unpunished constructions; pipe-scaffoldings of constructions in progress or left half-finished; large windows with curtains and little WC windows; ochre walls and burnt sienna walls, walls the color of mold from whose crevices clumps of weeds spill their pendulous foliage; elevator shafts; towers with double and triple mullioned windows; spires of churches with madonnas; statues of horses and chariots; great mansions which have decayed into hovels, hovels restructured into smart bachelor apartments; and domes that make round outlines against the sky in every direction and at every distance as if to confirm the female, Junoesque essence of the city: white domes or pink or violet according to the hour and the light, veined with nervatures, crowned by lanterns surmounted by other, smaller domes.