Mr Palomar

by Italo Calvino

  Through the gelatine sheaths the thick beauty-spots of black truffle stand out, aligned like buttons on a Pierrot’s tunic, like the notes of a score, dotting the roseate, variegated beds of pâtés de foie gras, of head-cheese, terrines, galantines, fans of salmon, artichoke hearts garnished like trophies. The leading motive of the little truffle discs unifies the variety of substances like the black of dinner-jackets at a masked ball, distinguishing the festive dress of the foods.

  Gray and opaque and sullen, on the contrary, are the people who make their way among the counters, shunted by salesladies in white, more or less elderly, brusquely efficient. The splendor of the salmon canapés radiant with mayonnaise disappears, swallowed by the dark shopping-bags of the customers. Certainly every one of these men and women knows exactly what he wants, heads straight for his objective with a decisiveness admitting no hesitancy; and rapidly he dismantles mountains of vol-au-vents, white puddings, cervelats.

  Mr Palomar would like to catch in their eyes some reflection of those treasures’ spell, but the faces and actions are only impatient and hasty, of people concentrated on themselves, nerves taut, each concerned with what he has and what he does not have. Nobody seems to him worthy of the pantagruelian glory that unfolds in those cases, on the counters. A greed without joy or youth drives them; and yet a deep, atavistic bond exists between them and those foods, their consubstance, flesh of their flesh.

  He realizes he is feeling something closely akin to jealousy: he would like the duck and hare pâtés, from their platters, to show they prefer him to the others, recognizing him as the only one deserving of their gifts, those gifts that nature and culture have handed down for millennia and that must not now fall into profane hands! Is not the sacred enthusiasm that he feels pervading him perhaps a sign that he alone is the elect, the one touched by grace, the only one worthy of the deluge of good things brimming from the cornucopia of the world?

  He looks around, waiting to hear the vibration of an orchestra of flavors. No, nothing vibrates. All those delicacies stir in him imprecise, blurred memories; his imagination does not instinctively associate flavors with images and names. He asks himself if his gluttony is not chiefly mental, aesthetic, symbolic. Perhaps, for all the sincerity of his love of galantines, galantines do not love him. They sense that his gaze transforms every food into a document of the history of civilization, a museum exhibit.

  Mr Pilomar wishes the line would advance more rapidly. He knows that if he spends a few more hours in this shop, he will end up convincing himself that he is the profane one, the alien, the outsider.

  The cheese museum

  Mr Palomar is standing in line in a cheese shop, in Paris. He wants to buy certain goat cheeses that are preserved in oil in little transparent containers and spiced with various herbs and condiments. The line of customers moves along a counter where samples of the most unusual and disparate specialties are displayed. This is a shop whose range seems meant to document every conceivable form of dairy product; the very sign, “Spécialités froumagères,” with that rare archaic or vernacular adjective, advises that here is guarded the legacy of a knowledge accumulated by a civilization through all its history and geography.

  Three or four girls in pink smocks wait on the customers. The moment one of the girls is free she deals with the first in line and asks him to express his wishes; the customer names or, more often, points, moving about the shop towards the object of his specific and expert appetites.

  At that moment the whole line moves forward one place; and the person who till then had been standing beside the “Bleu d’Auvergne” veined with green now finds himself at the level of the “Brin d’amour”, whose whiteness holds strands of dried straw stuck to it; the customer contemplating a ball wrapped in leaves can now concentrate on a cube dusted with ash. At each move forward, some customers are inspired by new stimuli and new desires: they may change their minds about what they were about to ask for or may add a new item to the list; and there are also those who never allow themselves to be distracted even for a moment from the objective they are pursuing – every different, fortuitous suggestion serves only to limit, through exclusion, the field of what they stubbornly want.

  Palomar’s spirit vacillates between contrasting urges: the one that aims at complete, exhaustive knowledge and could be satisfied only by tasting all the varieties; and the one that tends towards an absolute choice, the identification of the cheese that is his alone, a cheese that certainly exists even if he cannot recognize it (cannot recognize himself in it).

  Or else, or else: it is not a matter of choosing the right cheese, but of being chosen. There is a reciprocal relationship between cheese and customer: each cheese awaits its customer, poses so as to attract him, with a firmness or a somewhat haughty graininess, or on the contrary, by melting in submissive abandon.

  There is a hint of complicity hovering in the air: the refinement of the taste buds, and especially of the olfactory organs, has its moments of weakness, of loss of class, when the cheeses on their platters seem to proffer themselves as if on the divans of a brothel. A perverse grin flickers in the satisfaction of debasing the object of one’s own gluttony with lowering nicknames: crottin, boule de moine, bouton de culotte.

  This is not the kind of acquaintance that Mr Palomar is most inclined to pursue: he would be content to establish the simplicity of a direct physical relationship between man and cheese. But as in place of the cheeses he sees names of cheeses, concepts of cheeses, meanings of cheeses, histories of cheeses, contexts of cheeses, psychologies of cheeses, when he does not so much know as sense that behind each of these cheeses there is all that, then his relationship becomes very complicated.

  The cheese shop appears to Palomar the way an encyclopedia looks to an autodidact; he could memorize all the names, venture a classification according to the forms – cake of soap, cylinder, dome, ball – according to the consistency – dry, buttery, creamy, veined, firm – according to the alien materials involved in the crust or in the heart – raisins, pepper, walnuts, sesame seeds, herbs, molds – but this would not bring him a step closer to true knowledge, which lies in the experience of the flavors, composed of memory and imagination at once. Only on the basis of that could he establish a scale of preferences and tastes and curiosities and exclusions.

  Behind every cheese there is a pasture of a different green under a different sky: meadows caked with salt that the tides of Normandy deposit every evening; meadows scented with aromas in the windy sunlight of Provence; there are different flocks with their stablings and their transhumances; there are secret processes handed down over the centuries. This shop is a museum: Mr Palomar, visiting it, feels, as he does in the Louvre, behind every displayed object the presence of the civilization that has given it form and takes form from it.

  This shop is a dictionary; the language is the system of cheeses as a whole: a language whose morphology records declensions and conjugations in countless variants, and whose lexicon presents an inexhaustible richness of synonyms, idiomatic usages, connotations and nuances of meaning, as in all languages nourished by the contribution of a hundred dialects. It is a language made up of things; its nomenclature is only an external aspect, instrumental; but, for Mr Palomar, learning a bit of nomenclature remains still the first measure to be taken if he wants to stop for a moment the things that are flowing before his eyes.

  From his pocket he takes a notebook, a pen, begins to write down some names, marking beside each name some feature that will enable him to recall the image to his memory; he tries also to make a synthetic sketch of the shape. He writes “Pavé d’Airvault” and notes “green mold”, draws’a flat parallelopiped and to one side notes “4cm. circa”; he writes “St-Maure”, notes “gray granular cylinder with a little shaft inside” and draws it, measuring it at a glance as about “20 cm.”; then he writes “Chabicholi” and draws another little cylinder.

  “Monsieur! Hoo there! Monsieur!” A young cheese-girl, dressed in pink, is s
tanding in front of him, as he is occupied with his notebook. It is his turn, he is next; in the line behind him everyone is observing his incongruous behavior, heads are being shaken with those half-ironic, half-exasperated looks with which the inhabitants of the big cities consider the ever-increasing number of the mentally retarded wandering about the streets.

  The elaborate and greedy order that he intended to make momentarily slips his mind; he stammers; he falls back on the most obvious, the most banal, the most advertised, as if the automatons of mass civilization were waiting only for this moment of uncertainty on his part in order to seize him again and have him at their mercy.

  Marble and blood

  The reflections the butcher’s shop inspires in someone entering with a shopping-bag involve information handed down for centuries in various branches of learning: expertise in meats and cuts, the best way of cooking each piece, the rites that allay remorse at the ending of other lives in order to sustain one’s own. Butchering wisdom and culinary learning belong to the exact sciences, which can be checked through experimentation, bearing in mind the habits and techniques that vary from one country to another; sacrificial learning, on the other hand, is dominated by uncertainty, and moreover, it fell into oblivion centuries ago, but still it weighs obscurely on the conscience, an unexpressed demand. A reverent devotion for everything that concerns meat guides Mr Palomar, who is preparing to buy three steaks. Amid the marble slabs of the butcher’s shop he stands as if in a temple, aware that his individual existence and the culture to which he belongs are conditioned by this place.

  The line of customers moves slowly along the high marble counter, past the shelves and the trays where the cuts of meat are aligned, each with its name and price on a tag stuck into it. The vivid red of the beef precedes the light pink of the veal, the dull red of the lamb, the dark red of the pork. Vast ribs blaze up, round tournedos whose thickness is lined by a ribbon of lard, slender and agile counter-filets, steaks armed with their invincible bone, massive rolled-roasts all lean, chunks for boiling with layers of fat and of red meat, roasts waiting for the string that will force them to enfold themselves; then the colors fade: veal escalopes, loin chops, pieces of shoulder and breast, cartilage; and then we enter the realm of legs and shoulders of lamb; farther on some white tripe glows, a liver glistens blackly . . .

  Behind the counter, the white-smocked butchers brandish their cleavers with the trapezoidal blade, their great knives for slicing and those for flaying, saws for severing bones, pounders with which they press the snaky pink curls into the funnel of the grinding machine. From hooks hang quartered carcases to remind you that your every morsel is part of a being whose living completeness has been arbitrarily torn asunder.

  On the wall a chart shows an outline of a bull, like a map covered with frontier lines that mark off the areas of consuming interest, involving the entire anatomy of the animal excepting only horns and hooves. The map of the human habitat is this, no less than the planisphere of the planet; both are protocols that should sanction the rights man has attributed to himself, of possession, division, and consumption without residue of the terrestrial continents and of the loins of the animal body.

  It must be said that the man-beef symbiosis has, over the centuries, achieved an equilibrium (allowing the two species to continue multiplying) though it is asymmetric (it is true that man takes care of feeding cattle, but he is not required to give them himself to feed on), and has guaranteed the flourishing of what is called human civilization, which at least in part should be called human-bovine (coinciding in part with the human-ovine and in smaller part with the human-porcine, depending on the alternatives of a complicated geography of religious prohibitions). Mr Palomar shares in this symbiosis with a clear conscience and full agreement: though he recognizes in the strung-up carcase of the beef the person of a disemboweled brother, and in the slash of the loin chop the wound that mutilates his own flesh, he knows that he is a carnivore, conditioned by his alimentary background to perceive in a butcher’s shop the premiss of gustatory happiness, to imagine, observing these reddish slices, the stripes that the flame will leave on the grilled steaks and the pleasure of the tooth in severing the browned fiber.

  One sentiment does not exclude another: Mr Palomar’s mood as he stands in line in the butcher’s shop is at once of restrained joy and of fear, desire and respect, egotistic concern and universal compassion, the mood that perhaps others express in prayer.

  PALOMAR AT THE ZOO

  * * *

  The giraffe race

  Visiting the Vincennes zoo, Mr Palomar stops at the giraffes’ yard. Every now and then the adult giraffes start running, followed by the baby giraffes; they charge almost to the fence, wheel around, repeat the dash two or three times, then stop. Mr Palomar never tires of watching the giraffes’ race, fascinated by their unharmonious movements. He cannot decide whether they are galloping or trotting, because the stride of their hind legs has nothing in common with that of their forelegs. The forelegs arch loosely to the breast, then unfold to the ground, as if unsure which of numerous articulations they should employ at that given moment. The hind legs, much shorter and stiff, follow in leaps and bounds, somewhat obliquely, as if they were of wood, or crutches stumbling along, but also as if playing, aware of being comical. Meanwhile the outstretched neck sways up and down, like the arm of a crane, with no possible relationship between the movement of the legs and the movement of the neck. The withers also give a jolt, but this is simply the movement of the neck that jerks the rest of the spinal column.

  The giraffe seems a mechanism constructed by putting together pieces from heterogeneous machines, though it functions perfectly all the same. Mr Palomar, as he continues observing the racing giraffes, becomes aware of a complicated harmony that commands that unharmonious trampling, an inner proportion that links the most glaring anatomical disproportions, a natural grace that emerges from those ungraceful movements. The unifying element comes from the spots on the hide, arranged in irregular but homogeneous patterns: they agree, like a precise graphic equivalent, with the animal’s segmented movements. The hide should not be considered spotted, but rather a black coat whose uniformity is broken by pale veins that open in a lozenge design: an unevenness of pigmentation that preannounces the unevenness of the movements.

  At this point Mr Palomar’s little girl, who has long since tired of watching the giraffes, pulls him towards the penguins’ cave. Mr Palomar, in whom penguins inspire anguish, follows her reluctantly and asks himself why he is so interested in giraffes. Perhaps because the world around him moves in an unharmonious way, and he hopes always to find some pattern in it, a constant. Perhaps because he himself feels that his own advance is impelled by uncoordinated movements of the mind, which seem to have nothing to do with one another and are increasingly difficult to fit into any pattern of inner harmony.

  The albino gorilla

  In the Barcelona zoo there exists the only example known in the world of the great albino ape, a gorilla from equatorial Africa. Mr Palomar picks his way through the crowd that presses into the animal’s building. Beyond a sheet of plate glass, “Copito de Nieve” (“Snowflake”, as they call him), is a mountain of flesh and white hide. Seated against a wall, he is taking the sun. The facial mask is a human pink, carved by wrinkles; the chest also reveals a pink and glabrous skin, like that of a human of the white race. With its enormous features, a sad giant’s, that face turns every now and then towards the crowd of visitors beyond the glass, less than a meter from him, a slow gaze charged with desolation and patience and boredom, a gaze that expresses all the resignation at being the way he is, sole exemplar in the world of a form not chosen, not loved, all the effort of bearing his own singlarity, and the suffering at occupying space and time with his presence so cumbersome and evident.

  The glass looks on to an enclosure surrounded by high masonry walls, which give it the appearance of a prison yard but actually it is the “garden” of the gorilla’s house-cag
e; from its soil rises a short, leafless tree and an iron ladder like those in a gymnasium. Farther back in the yard there is the female, a great black gorilla carrying a baby in her arms: the whiteness of the coat cannot be inherited, “Copito de Nieve” remains the only albino of all gorillas.

  White and motionless, the great ape suggests to Mr Palomar’s mind an immemorial antiquity, like mountains or like the pyramids. In reality the animal is still young and only the contrast between the pink face and the short snow coat that frames it and, especially, the wrinkles all around the eyes give him the look of an old man. For the rest, the appearance of “Copito de Nieve” shows fewer resemblances to humans than that of other primates: in place of a nose, the nostrils dig a double chasm; the hands, hairy and – it would seem – not very highly articulated, at the end of the very long and stiff arms, are actually still paws, and the gorilla uses them as such when he walks, pressing them to the ground like a quadruped.

  Now these arm-paws are pressing a rubber tire against his chest. In the enormous void of his hours, “Copito de Nieve” never abandons the tire. What can this object be for him? A toy? A fetish? A talisman? Palomar feels he understands the gorilla perfectly, his need for something to hold tight while everything eludes him, a thing with which to allay the anguish of isolation, of difference, of the sentence to being always considered a living phenomenon, not only by the visitors to the zoo but also by his own females and his children.

  The female also has an old tire, but for her it is an object of normal use, with which she has a practical relationship, without problems: she sits in it as if it were an easychair, sun-bathing and de-lousing her infant. For “Copito de Nieve”, on the contrary, the contact with the tire seems to be something affective, possessive, and somehow symbolic. From it he can have a glimpse of what for man is the search for an escape from the dismay of living: investing oneself in things, recognizing oneself in signs, transforming the world into a collection of symbols; a first daybreak of culture in the long biological night. To do this the gorilla possesses only an old tire, an artefact of human production, alien to him, lacking any symbolic potentiality, naked of meanings, abstract. Looking at it, you would not say that much could be derived from it. And yet what, more than an empty circle, can contain all the symbols you might want to attribute to it? Perhaps identifying himself with it, the gorilla is about to reach, in the depths of silence, the springs from which language burst forth, to establish a flow of relationships between his thoughts and the unyielding, deaf evidence of the facts that determine his life . . .