The Road to San Giovanni

by Italo Calvino

  Every word we think oscillates in a mental field where different languages intrude. Shoving aside the French, the English verb to agree invades the field: it is in order to respect an agreement, a pact settled by the mutual consent of the parties involved, that I am placing this object out on this pavement, with all that the international use of the English word implies.

  An agreement with whom? With the city, of course, to which I pay my annual taxe d’enlèvement des ordures ménagères and which undertakes to relieve me of this burden every day of the year – including Sundays and excluding only a few high holidays – just so long as I make the first move, namely, carry my regulation bin to this threshold at the regulation time. And in this respect I have already committed a first breach of contract, in that it is forbidden to leave rubbish out in the street during the night if it is not to be picked up before the morning: but an article of law so inhuman as to oblige me to wake before first light I feel justified in interpreting with a certain latitude, as though in a tacit agreement (there we are), especially since I live in a place where hardly anyone goes by, where a nocturnal encumbrance on the pavement does not impede the public passage. And then partly because the stronger unwritten law to which the ritual of our daily habits bows dictates that expulsion of the day’s rubbish coincide with the winding up of the same day, and that one go to sleep after having removed from the house any possible sources of unpleasant smells (as soon as the evening’s visitors are gone, quick, open the windows, rinse the glasses, empty the ashtrays; in the poubelle the layer of ash and stubs puts its seal on the accumulation of the day’s detritus the way in geological sections glacial deposits separate one era from another) not just out of a natural concern for hygiene but so that on waking up the following morning one may begin the new day without having to touch what the evening before we cast off from ourselves forever.

  Taking out the poubelle should thus be interpreted simultaneously (since this is how I experience it) as a contract and as a rite (two notions that can be brought into even closer unity in so far as every rite is a contract, but for the moment I don’t want to press ahead – contract with whom? – quite that far), a rite of purification, the abandoning of the detritus of myself, and it doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about the very detritus contained in the poubelle or whether that detritus refers us back to every other possible detritus of mine; what matters is that through this daily gesture I confirm the need to separate myself from a part of what was once mine, the slough or chrysalis or squeezed lemon of living, so that its substance might remain, so that tomorrow I can identify completely (without residues) with what I am and have. Only by throwing something away can I be sure that something of myself has not yet been thrown away and perhaps need not be thrown away now or in the future.

  The satisfaction I get out of this, then, is analogous to that of defecation, of feeling one’s guts unburdening themselves, the sensation at least for a moment that my body contains nothing but myself, and that there is no possible confusion between what I am and what is unalterably alien. Alas the unhappy retentive (or the miser) who, fearing to lose something of his own, is unable to separate himself from anything, hoards his faeces and ends up identifying with his own detritus and losing himself in it.

  If this is true, if the gesture of throwing away is the first and indispensable condition of being, since one is what one does not throw away, then the most important physiological and mental gesture is that of separating the part of me that remains from the part I must jettison to sink away into a beyond from which there is no return.

  It is thus that the purificatory rite of enlèvement des ordures ménagères can also be seen as an offering made to the underworld, to the gods of death and loss, the fulfillment of a vow (which brings us back to our contract). The content of the poubelle represents the part of our being and having which must daily sink away into darkness so that another part of our being and having may remain behind to enjoy the light of day, may truly be and truly have. Until the day when the last support of our being and having, our physical body, itself becomes dead detritus to be laid on the cart that leads to the incinerator.

  Thus this daily representation of descent below ground, this domestic and municipal rubbish funeral, is meant first and foremost to put off my own personal funeral, to postpone it if only for a little while, to confirm that for one more day I have been a producer of detritus and not detritus myself.

  Hence that state of mind at once gloomy and euphoric which one associates with carrying out the rubbish; and the way we see the men who go by emptying the bins into their pulping truck not just as emissaries of the chthonic world, gravediggers of the inanimate, Charons of a beyond of greasy paper and rusty tin, but as angels too, as indispensable mediators between ourselves and the heaven of ideas in which we undeservedly soar (or imagine we soar) and which can exist only in so far as we are not overwhelmed by the waste which every act of living incessantly produces (even the act of thinking: these thoughts of mine that you are reading being all that has been salvaged from the scores of sheets of paper now crumpled up in the bin), heralds of a possible salvation beyond the destruction inherent in all production and consumption, liberators from the weight of time’s detritus, ponderous dark angels of lightness and clarity.

  All it takes is for the dustbin men to go on strike for a few days leaving the rubbish to pile up at our doorways, and the city is transformed into a corrupted dunghill; far more quickly than anyone could have predicted we are being suffocated by our incessant production of refuse, the technological armour of our civilization turns out to be a fragile shell; medieval visions of decadence and pestilence open up once more before us.

  This is particularly true of Italy, and emblematic of a history that has been one long crisis. Bad government spreads outward through our town councils along a hundred paths both evident and obscure but it is always in the innermost recesses of the Refuse Disposal Department that scandal explodes uncontrollably. It’s as if something basically wrong were revealing itself in our relationship with our rubbish, some profound defect in the Italian mind, or rather the Catholic-Italian mind, given that shipwrecks in these particular waters are a feature of Christian Democrat administrations, perhaps due to a religious error, of moral theology and of faith too, a misguided sense of how much should be left to Providence and how much is the responsibility of man, an underestimation of the sacred nature of the operations involved in refuse removal (as in every other civic service), their considering material necessity not as an area for choice and trial but as a burden which ever since the Fall we have been able to do naught else but bear and in relation to which every shortcoming is but a venial sin to be passed over with indulgence since we will in any event be cleansed of it at the last without any justification being required beyond a gesture of formal piety (or at the civic level a vote for the right party, or faction within the party). As a result of which the ranks of our “Municipal Sanitation Staff” (a bureaucratic neologism which immediately jettisons the notion of practical service in favour of the limbo of belonging to some unspecified clerical administration) can swell beyond all limit and without regard to the council budget in order to guarantee wage packets to a plethora of hangers-on who will never be initiated into the infernal and angelic trials of the mission with which nominally they have been invested. While that great purifying instrument, the essential guts of the city, the incinerator, is profanely seen as just another opportunity for the customary kickbacks taken from council contracts and suppliers, without our being awed by its symbolic importance, without seeing ourselves judged by the looming machine, without enquiring how much of ourselves we fear or hope may be reduced to ashes.

  One has to say, however, that in Paris strikes by the éboueurs are no less frequent (éboueurs is the official name, which is to say, mud removers, this in memory of an unimaginable Paris of muddy streets rutted by carriage wheels and fouled with trodden horsedung), a result of the perpetual discontent of a recently immi
grated work force obliged to accept the lowliest and heaviest of jobs without proper contracts. Drawing a comparison with Italy, one could say that the reasons are the opposite but the results are the same: in the precarious Italian economy, the position of dustbin man is defended as a stable occupation, a job for life; in the solid French economy, refuse collection is a precarious occupation, performed by those who have not yet managed to put down roots in the city and susceptible to regulation only through the reciprocal threats of unemployment and strike.

  It is a characteristic of demons and angels that they should present themselves as strangers, visitors from another world. Thus the éboueurs materialize in the morning mists, lineaments refusing to detach themselves from the indistinct: earthy complexions – the North Africans – a sprinkling of whiskers, cap on head; or – those from black Africa – just the whites of their eyes lighting up faces lost in the dark; voices that superimpose sounds inarticulate to our ears over the muffled roar of the truck, sounds that bring relief when they filter into your morning slumber reassuring you that you can go on sleeping a little while longer because others are out there working for you. The social pyramid goes on shuffling its ethnic strata: the Italian labourer in Paris is driving his own truck now, the Spaniard has become a skilled worker, the Yugoslav a bricklayer, the lowliest labourer is Portuguese, and when you get to the man shovelling earth or sweeping the streets it is always a clumsily decolonized Africa that raises its sad eyes from the city pavement, but without catching your own, as if an insuperable distance still separated us. And in your sleep you sense that the dustcart isn’t just grinding refuse, but human lives too and social roles and privileges and it won’t stop until it has done the whole round.

  You only have any direct contact with the dustbin men just before Christmas when they come to bring you their cardboard calendar which says, Messieurs les Eboueurs du 14ème Vous Souhaitent une Bonne et Heureuse Année, and to pick up their tip. For the rest of the year the communication between us and them lies in the contents of the poubelle, a rich source of information indeed if anyone chose to consider them day by day: the empty bottles after party evenings, the wrapping paper from the shops where we’ve bought things, the pages full of crossings-out where a writer has racked his brains over his essay on poubelles. Loading the dustcart, the immigrant in his first job discovers the city as one might look at the wrong side of a carpet: he judges the wealth or the poverty of the different areas from the quality of their refuse, which then stimulates his dreams of the consumer’s destiny that awaits him.

  Here we arrive at the economic crux of what I have hitherto chosen to refer to juridically as a contract and symbolically as a rite: my relationship with the poubelle is that of the man for whom throwing something away completes or confirms its appropriation, my contemplation of the heap of peels, shells, packaging and plastic containers brings with it the satisfaction of having consumed their contents, while for the man who unloads the poubelle into the rotating crater of the dustcart it offers only an idea of the amount of goods which are denied to him, which reach him only as useless detritus.

  But perhaps (and here my essay glimpses an optimistic conclusion and immediately succumbs to the temptation), perhaps this denial is only temporary: his having been taken on as a dustbin man is the first step up a social ladder that will eventually make today’s pariah another member of the consumer society and like everybody else a producer of refuse, while others escaping from the deserts of the “developing countries” will take his place loading and unloading the bins. Thus the poubelle will be agréée for him too, for the North African or the Negro who lifts it to the mouth of the evil-smelling grinder in the morning fog, thus the grinder itself will prove not just the final destination of the industrial process of production and destruction but also the point from which one starts again from scratch, the entry point into a system that swallows up men and remakes them in its own likeness and image.

  From here our argument can follow one of two diverging paths: a history of the pariahs satisfied integration as he moves towards the conquest of Paris from the furthest frontier of the refuse dumps; or a history of revolution and the overturning of that mechanism, at least in the mind, a spreading outward of the vibrations of the truck stopped beneath my windows so far as to tremble the settled foundations of centuries of Western civilization. But both visions (both illusions) are reunited in this poubelle, agreeable to all of us but even more so to the anonymous economic process that multiplies new products fresh out of the factory and likewise their wornout remains to be thrown away, leaving us, the dustbin man and I, with the sole task of lifting up this container to fill and to empty. In the rite of throwing away, we would like, the dustbin man and I, to rediscover the promise of that cyclical completion peculiar to the agricultural process, in which – so they say – nothing was lost: what was buried in the earth sprouted up again. (There – once an essay sets off on an evocation of the archaic, who will ever be able to stop it?) Everything happened in the simplest and most regular of fashions: after their subterranean sojourn, seed, manure and sacrificial blood returned to the light with the new harvest. Of course industry multiplies its goods more than agriculture but it does so through profits and investments: the plutonian realm that has to be crossed in order for the metamorphosis to take place is the cave of money, capital, the City of Dite, inaccessible to myself and the dustbin man (privatized or state-employed though he may or shall be: by now we know that the distinction has little importance), presided over by a Supreme Board of Directors who are no longer plutonian but hyperuranium, and who deal in the abstraction of numbers whose values are enormously remote from the sticky and fermenting terrestrial melting pot to which the dustbin man and I entrust our sacrificial offerings of empty jars, our seedings of wastepaper, our participation in the arduous breakdown of synthetic materials. In vain do we pour out, the dustbin man and I, our dark cornucopia, the recycling of the leftovers can be no more than a practical accessory that does not modify the substance of the process. The pleasure of having perishable things (consumer goods) sprout again remains a privilege of the god Capital who turns the soul of those things to money and in the most favourable of circumstances leaves us their mortal remains for our use and consumption.

  But how can I infer what the man from Africa thinks and sees on emptying my poubelle? It’s myself I’m talking about, only and always myself, it’s my own mental categories I’m applying as I seek to understand the mechanism of which I am (of which we are) a part, even though we do have a common point of departure: our escape from and rejection of a primitive agricultural system now in a state of crisis. When once abundant harvests fail and famine starves the fields, the farming man – say ethnologists – is overcome by distress and remorse and looks for a way to expiate his guilt. I don’t know if this is true for the éboueur (perhaps the fellah has no memory of a time without famine; perhaps the disciple of Islam is immune to guilt complexes); but it is certainly true in my case: the remorse I carry around with me since childhood is still that of the landholder’s son who in disobedience to his father’s wishes has left the estate in alien hands, rejecting the luxuriant mythology and severe moral code in which he was educated, the abundance and variety of fruits that only the proprietor-farmer’s assiduous presence in the fields together with a single-minded stubbornness, and then efficiency and initiative in trying out new crops and techniques, can wring from the earth.

  And in this kitchen in the heart of the metropolis where my long flight has brought me, my old drama is still acting itself out. Every family is business, or rather hacienda, place of activity, place of physical and cultural survival through a system of shared labour, place where a cycle, albeit limited, of food production and consumption is enacted. And it is the rules governing my behaviour in this elementary hacienda that I am seeking to establish now, to set out in a contract or “agreement”, it is in order that I may be privately agréée that I am manoeuvring a poubelle that is publicly agréée, mys
elf agréée in the domestic context, in the tacit distribution of household tasks, in the orchestration of the daily suite that is family existence.

  Here I am, then – hang on a moment – going down to empty the poubelle. The poubelle is the instrument that serves to bring me into a harmony, to get me in tune with the world and the world in tune with me. (So the contract concerns no one but myself, it is a mutual agreement between me and myself, me and my interior law, or Kantian imperative, or superego.) But this harmony is impossible. Having taken its slow course for half a century or more, the long Crisis of the Bourgeois Family is now precipitating into its convulsive phase with the Disappearance of the Last Housemaids, ultimate prop of the institution. The division of labour between equals (as between the bear hunter and his wife the bear cooker in the primordial cave) seems to be inextricably (since the beginning of time perhaps) connected to the division of labour between unequals (masters and servants): so much so that with the latter now a matter of controversy, the former likewise turns out to be impracticable. The message, whether explicit or tacit, that the Chorus of Western Women addresses to the Chorus of Men, in this twilight of our millennium, goes like this: “I can cook once for a party, once to express myself, once to pass on a tradition, once out of necessity, and once for love, but I will not cook three hundred and sixty-five days a year just because it has been decided that my role is that of cooking and yours that of sitting down to eat.” Something fundamental has changed in the collective consciousness, but since almost nothing has changed when it comes to our actual habits, the result is a constant cloud of discontent. The man, however big a contribution he may make to the family budget, is seen as a parasite if he fails to contribute to the housework. Perhaps we will arrive at a new modus vivendi, a redistribution of roles; or perhaps no system of compensation is possible now, either inside or outside the family. Perhaps in the future not even a restaurant will let you get away with merely paying your bill; you’ll have to help peel the potatoes first and wash the dishes afterwards.