Last Comes the Raven

by Italo Calvino

  When he woke up he saw night through the window. All around, silence. Obviously the fur shop was closed, and he wondered how he would ever get out. He listened and thought he heard a cough in the adjoining room. A light filtered through the keyhole.

  Decked with mink, silver foxes, antelopes, and a bearskin hat, he got up and slowly opened the door. The girl with the black braids was sewing, bent over a table, by the light of a lamp. Because of the value of the goods in the storeroom, Signora Fabrizia made one of the girls stay and sleep in a bed in the workroom, to give the alarm in case of theft.

  “Linda,” said Barbagallo. The girl opened her eyes wide; there, standing in the shadow, she saw a gigantic human bear with its arms entwined in an astrakhan muff. “How lovely . . .” she said.

  Barbagallo took a few steps up and down, peacocking like a model.

  Linda said, “But now I must call the police.”

  “The police!” Barbagallo was upset. “But I’m not stealing anything. What can I do with these things? Obviously I can’t go around the streets like this. I only came in here to take off my undershirt, which was prickling me.”

  They arranged that he would stay the night there and leave early in the morning. What was more, Linda knew how to wash flannel so that it would stop tickling him, and she would wash his undershirt and long johns for him.

  Barbagallo helped her to wring them out and put up the line, then hang them near the electric fire. Linda had some apples, which they ate.

  Then Barbagallo said, “Let’s see how you look in these furs.” And he made her try them all on, in all variations, with her braids up and with her hair loose, and they exchanged impressions on the softness of the various furs against the skin.

  Finally they constructed a hut entirely of furs, big enough for them both to lie under, and they went inside to sleep.

  When Linda awoke he was already up and putting on the underclothes. The dawn was showing through the window.

  “Are they quite dry?”

  “A little damp, but I must go.”

  “Do they still tickle?”

  “Not a bit. I’m as comfortable as a pope.”

  He helped Linda straighten up the storeroom, put on his military overcoat, and said good-bye to her at the door.

  Linda stood watching him as he walked away, with the white strip of pants between his overcoat and boots, and his proud tuft of hair in the cold dawn air.

  Barbagallo had no intention of asking for a suit at the archbishop’s palace; he had got a new idea—​going around the squares of the surrounding villages in his under­clothes, giving exhibitions of physical prowess.

  A Judge Is Hanged

  That morning Judge Onofrio Clerici was aware of a different atmosphere in the movement of the crowd. He crossed the city every day in a modest carriage, from his house to the courts, and down below people thronged the sidewalks, hunched shoulders wearily moving aside, swarms surrounding the black-garbed roasted-chestnut sellers, the blind shouting, “Lottery . . . millions . . . ,” books thumping mutely in the students’ square schoolbags, and snail-bitten cabbages and celery stalks sticking out of shopping bags.

  Today something different seemed to be animating those tiny people: at the edges of their eyelids cold triangles of the whites of the eyes appeared, and between their lips teeth. And the bony outlines of the hunched shoulders were more clearly marked under coats and shawls; and tips of chins protruded above the necklines of sweaters and collars; and Judge Onofrio Clerici felt a growing sense of unease.

  Already for weeks the chalk drawings on the walls of his house had been getting bigger and more numerous, drawings of gallows with hanged men dangling from them, and the hanged men always wore the tall, cylindrical judge’s hat, wide at the top with a pompom. Judge Onofrio Clerici had long been aware that people hated him, that they made a commotion in the courtroom during the sentencing, that widows giving their testimony yelled at him rather than at the prisoner; but he was sure of himself, and he hated them, too, that mangy rabble, not good at giving relevant answers when they testified, not good at sitting respectfully among the spectators, that rabble always burdened with children and debts and wrong ideas: the Italians.

  Judge Onofrio Clerici had long known who the Italians are: pregnant women carrying scabby children; youths with bluish cheeks who without a war on are good only at being unemployed and selling tobacco in the stations; old men with asthma and hernias and hands so callused they can’t hold the pen to sign the report—​a race of malcontents, whiners, and troublemakers, who if you don’t keep a tight rein on them would want everything for themselves and would install themselves everywhere, dragging their scabby tots and their hernias and trampling the roasted-chestnut shells on the sidewalks.

  Luckily they, the race of well-bred people, existed, a race with smooth, sagging skin, with hairs in their nose and their ears, with buttocks as firm as bedrock on padded armchairs, a race jingling with decorations, medals, necklaces, eyeglasses, monocles, hearing aids, dentures; a race reared over the centuries in the baroque seats of the chancelleries of ancient realms; a race that knows how to make laws and apply them and have them respected to the extent that is convenient for it; a race bound by a secret understanding, by a common discovery—​that the Italians are a wretched people, and in Italy it would be better if there were no Italians, or at least if they didn’t make so much noise.

  Judge Onofrio Clerici arrived at the courthouse, which was old, half demolished by past bombardments, and supported by scaffoldings of rotted beams, the plaster flaking and the baroque friezes of the pediment crumbling. A crowd, pressing toward the closed entrance, was, as always at trials, kept under control by guards. It had become customary to reserve the spectators’ space for the relatives and friends of the accused and for trustworthy and respectful persons, yet every time someone from the masses managed to sneak into the courtroom and find a place on the benches at the back, disturbing the hearing with protests and shut ups. The others stayed outside, resolute, making a racket, with protests and threats, and some even held up placards; and sometimes the noise reached the courtroom, making Judge Onofrio Clerici nervous and confirming him in his hatred of these insolent Italians intruding in things they didn’t understand.

  That day, however, the crowd was unusually silent and restrained, and no hostile muttering arose at the sight of Judge Onofrio Clerici as he descended from the shabby carriage and entered the courthouse through a side door.

  Inside the courthouse the feeling of uneasiness in the judge’s heart subsided a little: everyone there was friendly, judges and prosecutors and lawyers, people of the respectable race, with a smile swallowed up at the corners of their mouths and a pulsing at the sides of their throats like the gills of a frog. They were placid and by now tranquil people: in the executive and in all the high positions of the state there were people like them, with drooping eyelids and froglike throats, and gradually the insolent Italians would settle down and resign themselves to the scabs and hernias they’d tolerated for centuries now.

  As they waited for the start of the hearing and the members of the court were bundling into their black robes, a lawyer with warts on his face pulled out of his pocket an anti-Italian newspaper and, laughing heartily, showed the other officials grotesque cartoons in which the Italians were represented as clumsy and monstrous types, with visored caps and ridiculous cudgels. Only one of them didn’t laugh at the drawings: he was the new clerk, an old man with a cone-shaped head and a meek and deferential appearance. One at a time the magistrates turned eyes flushed with laughter to the sad, wrinkled face and the laughs died out in their froglike throats. That fellow is not to be trusted, thought Judge Onofrio Clerici.

  Then the members of the court entered for the trial. The trials that Judge Onofrio Clerici presided over in those days were not the usual cases against a few poor fellows who’d done burglaries. They were cases against people who had had Italians arrested and shot in the time of a war that had been, and Ju
dge Onofrio Clerici, hearing their cases described, was convinced that they were decent people, people who followed their own ideas, people who would be needed to hold off those clumsy Italians, still gaunt and threadbare, still with hunger in their bones and new grievances to bring up.

  But Judge Onofrio Clerici had in hand the laws, the laws made by them, by the men with frog throats, even when they seemed to be made on behalf of those poor Italian devils; he knew that laws can be turned inside out at will and make black say white and white black. So he would acquit everyone, and after the trials the crowd would remain in the square until late, growing agitated, and with loud cries women in mourning wept for their men who had been hanged.

  Taking his seat, Judge Onofrio Clerici examined the crowd: they seemed to be trustworthy types, men with jutting buck teeth, starched collars that cut into the scruff of their necks, eyebrows set above noses like birds of prey, and ladies with bony yellow necks supporting hats with veils. But, sharpening his gaze, the judge noted that the entire last row of benches was occupied by a rabble who had worked their way in despite the orders: pale girls with braids, cripples with their chins resting on their crutches, men with blue eyes rimmed by wrinkles, old men with eyeglasses held together with string, old women muffled in shawls. There was a little distance between that last row of benches and the next to last, and those intruders were sitting motionless, arms crossed, and they were all looking him, the judge, in the face.

  That grip of unease became tighter around the heart of Judge Onofrio Clerici. There were two guards, one on either side of the bench, certainly stationed there to protect the court from possible protests by those desperate people; but their faces were different from those of the usual guards, they were pale, melancholy faces, with locks of blond hair crushed by the band of their kepis. And then that clerk who seemed to be writing on his own account, always bent over the table.

  The accused was already in the cage, impassive, in a tidy, carefully ironed suit. He had neatly combed, dull gray hair that began low over his eyes and cheekbones, and very pale pupils that appeared lifeless in the slightly reddened hollows below eyelids without lashes or eyebrows; the lips were puffy but of the same color as the skin, and when they parted, large square incisors were visible. His beard was shaved, leaving a shadow like marble under the skin. His hands, calmly holding on to the bars, had broad flat fingers like rubber stamps.

  The trial began. The witnesses were the usual riffraff full of complaints. They shouted, especially the women, pointing their arms at the cage: “It’s him . . . I saw him with my own eyes . . . he said, Now you’ll get yours, bandits . . . only son, my Gianni . . . so he said, You don’t want to talk, well, here, dog . . .”

  People who don’t know how to give proper depositions, thought Judge Onofrio Clerici, disorderly, undisciplined people, lacking respect: after all, that man in the cage had been their superior and they hadn’t obeyed him. Now he was giving them a lesson in behavior, impassive in the cage, looking at them with those colorless pupils, denying nothing, with a faint air of boredom.

  Judge Onofrio Clerici envied his placidity. The sense of unease was increasing. Outside, the hammering of workmen in the courtyard was making him nervous. Surely they were propping up the unstable edifice: through the tall, churchlike windows of the courtroom boards and planks were visible, carried by bare arms. Why in the world are they working while we’re holding a trial here? Judge Ono­frio Clerici wondered, and several times he was on the point of sending the porter to tell them to stop, but each time something held him back.

  Through the testimony, the scene of the most serious charge was being reconstructed: the murder of men and women and old people in the square of a town that was then set on fire. Gradually the eyes of Judge Onofrio Clerici got a clear view of the pile of corpses in the middle of the square, and he interrogated painstakingly and rigorously in order to reconstruct the scene in its smallest details. The dead had been in the square for a day and a night, and no one had been able to approach them. Onofrio Clerici thought of those bony yellow bodies in their filthy rags soaked with clotted blood, big black flies resting on their lips, on their nostrils. The spectators in the last row remained calm, who knew why; and Judge Onofrio Clerici, in order to suppress the apprehension they instilled, tried to imagine them murdered, a heap of corpses, their eyes open like holes and bloody worms in their nostrils.

  “Then he approached our dead,” said one witness, a bent, bearded old man. “I saw him. And he stopped in front of them, and just like this he did to our dead what I would be disgusted to do to him: he spit.”

  Judge Onofrio Clerici saw those dead Italians, already turning yellow, livid navels exposed, skirts raised over bony legs, and he felt the saliva rising to his lips. He looked at the pale, protruding lips of the accused: he felt a secret need to see a pearl of saliva emerge from between those lips. There, at the memory, the accused parted his lips, and there, above the teeth, the large square incisors, a faint foam appeared; oh, how Judge Onofrio Clerici understood the accused man’s disgust, the disgust that had led him to spit on the dead.

  The defense counsel made his argument; it was that short potbellied man with all the warts on his face, who was so amused by the cartoons mocking the poor people. He boasted of the accused man’s fine qualities, his activities as a zealous official totally dedicated to safeguarding order; considering all the attenuating circumstances, he asked for the minimum sentence.

  Judge Onofrio Clerici didn’t know where to look during the defense’s argument. If he looked at the spectators, he was immediately agitated by the gaze of those Italians in the back, eyes interminably staring at him. And, outside, the hammering and transport of boards wouldn’t stop . . . Now, through the windows, he saw a rope, and two hands uncoiling it, as if to see how long it was. What in the world could that rope be used for?

  The public prosecutor was speaking now. He was a long-boned man, supported on the protruding angles of his hips, and he opened wide his canine jaws, crisscrossed by tendons of drool. He began to speak of the need for justice to be done for the many crimes committed in those times, and for the truly guilty to be punished; then he added that the accused was certainly not one of those, and that he could have done no less than what he had done. He ended by asking for half the sentence requested by the defense counsel.

  The spectators in the first rows applauded, with a strange sound of bones and spanking. Judge Onofrio Clerici thought, Now those people there in the back will start shouting. But they remained unmoving and intent; it wasn’t clear what was wrong with them.

  The court withdrew to the room next door to deliberate. From a window of that room the courtyard was clearly visible, and finally Judge Onofrio Clerici understood what the workmen had been doing out there with beams and rope. A gallows: they had built a gallows right in the middle of the courtyard. Now it was finished and it stood there, spare and black, with the noose dangling; the workmen had left.

  Ignorant fools, thought Judge Onofrio. They think the accused will be condemned to death, so they built a gallows. But I’ll show them! And to teach them a lesson he proposed to the court that, by means of judicial cavils that he alone knew, the accused should be acquitted. The court approved his proposal unanimously.

  It was the judge who showed the most emotion at the reading of the decision. No one batted an eye, neither the accused with his stamplike fingers clutching the bars, nor the respectable public, nor the intruders. Those pale girls with braids, those crippled soldiers, those old women in shawls were standing, heads high, with a chorus of fiery gazes.

  The clerk approached so that the judge could sign the decision; the humble sadness with which he presented the papers made it seem that he was bringing him a death sentence to sign. The papers: because under the first, well, there was a second, and the clerk exposed only the bottom edge, letting the other slide over it. And the judge signed that, too. On him were the fiery gazes from the eyeglasses mended with string, from the wrinkled blue ey
es. The judge was sweating.

  Now the clerk was sliding the first page off, farther and farther: underneath, on the second page, Judge Onofrio Clerici read: “Onofrio Clerici, judge, guilty of insulting and deriding the rest of us poor Italians for a long time, is sentenced to death, to be hanged like a dog.” Underneath, he had signed.

  The two guards with the sad fair faces had come up beside him. They didn’t touch him, however. “Judge Onofrio Clerici,” they said, “come with us.”

  Judge Onofrio Clerici turned. The guards, one on one side, one on the other, without touching him led him through a door into the deserted courtyard, to the foot of the gallows.

  “Get up on that gallows,” they said. But they didn’t push him. “Get up,” they said.

  Onofrio Clerici ascended.

  “Put your head in the noose,” they said.

  The judge put his head in the noose. The two barely looked at him.

  “Now kick the stool,” they said, and left.

  Judge Onofrio Clerici pushed aside the stool and felt the rope knotting around his neck, his throat closing up like a fist, crushing his bones. And his eyes, like big black snails, came out of the shell of their sockets, as if the light they sought could be converted to air, and meanwhile darkness was thickening around the pillars of the deserted courtyard: deserted because that wretched Italian rabble hadn’t even come to see him die.

  The Cat and the Policeman

  The roundup of hidden weapons had begun in the city sometime earlier. Policemen wearing leather helmets that gave them identical, cruel faces climbed into trucks, and off they went through the poor neighborhoods, sirens blaring, to the house of a laborer or a worker, to make a mess of underwear drawers and take apart stove pipes. On those days Agent Baravino’s heart was seized by an overwhelming anguish.