The Road to San Giovanni

by Italo Calvino

  The kitchen, which should be the happiest place in the house (NB: when I copy out this page, I mustn’t forget to put in an attractive description here: the sparkling wall units, the hum of electrical appliances, the lemony smell of the detergent for the cutlery), is now seen by women as a place of oppression and by men as a place of remorse. The simplest solution would be the interchangeability of roles: husband and wife cook together, or take turns, or one partner cooks while the other does the cleaning, or vice versa. But the fact is that this solution is hampered by prejudice (and here I leave our universal discussion to return to the presentation of the individual case of my own daily experience) in the sense that the others consider me so incapable of handling oven and burners that no sooner do I stand there ready to do something than everybody else moves away telling me that what I’m doing is wrong or clumsy or pointless or even dangerous. Like all prejudices, this one is easy to pass on: my daughter is still a little girl, but if we’re alone together in the kitchen she is already finding reasons for criticizing everything I do and saying she prefers to do it all herself (after which she will give a detailed account of my shortcomings to her mother). And just as such a lack of faith in my capacities has always discouraged me from learning, so it discredits me as a possible teacher: thus does the knowledge accumulated over generations approach me only to pass me by and exclude me.

  None of the above would matter if I didn’t feel that this deficiency of mine were considered a crime, and related to other things I do that are likewise criminal. If I can’t cook it’s because I’m not worthy to cook (this is the burden of the argument against me and it weighs heavily), as the unworthy alchemist can never obtain gold nor the unworthy knight win the joust. Even my attempts to pitch in are frowned upon, seen not as a demonstration of goodwill but as hypocrisy, a smokescreen, a histrionic exhibition. I cannot save myself by Works, but only by the Grace which has not and will not be conceded. If I manage to make an omelette, it is not the first step towards progress and interior growth: no, because there’s no way that’s a Real Omelette, it’s a forger’s hoax, a charlatan’s trick. Cooking is God’s trial, something I have failed once and for all, undeserving of initiation. All I can do is seek out other ways to justify my presence on this earth.

  Without false modesty, I think I can say that the field of action that best suits my talents is that of transportation. Going from one place to another, transporting an object, be it heavy or light, for distances either long or short: whenever I find myself in this situation I feel at peace with myself, as one who is able to attribute usefulness, or at least a goal, to his actions, and for as long as the journey lasts I experience a rare sensation of inner freedom, my mind wanders far and wide, my thoughts soar upward. I am happy, for example, to “run errands”, to go and buy bread, butter, greens, the paper, stamps. I say “run errands” so as to establish a continuity between these duties I now have as head of the household and those that used to be entrusted to me when I was a boy: I could say “do the shopping”, but this would imply initiative, choice, risks: assessing and comparing ever higher prices, discussing cuts of meat with the butcher, picking up ideas from the products on display, the greens, the early fruit from abroad, the cheeses. Of course “doing the shopping” is what I would most enjoy, at least in theory; in practise I can’t hope to compete with those who move about the shops much more naturally than I do, with such sharpness of eye, such experience and imagination, such practical sense and personal flair. Hence it’s wiser for me to limit my relationship with the marketplace to emergency stopgap expeditions: carrying a piece of paper with a list of the things I have to ask for (“un grand pot de crème fraîche”) and their weight (“une livre de tomates”), and sometimes even the price, just as when they sent me “to run errands” as a boy.

  In Paris the shopping basket hangs mainly from male hands, or at least that’s how it looks to an Italian used to seeing the shops in his own country mostly frequented by women, and here one gets back to appreciating how carrying food is the primary duty in home management. So that my agricultural past resurfaces now in a metropolitan context, and I recall the image of my father laden with baskets, proud to be carrying the produce of his land back home with his own hands, as a sign of his feeling that he was “master”, first and foremost in the sense of “master of himself”, of his self-sufficient, Robinson Crusoe independence, an independence even in respect to those paid hands whom he would resort to only for what he couldn’t do with his own or with those of his ever reluctant sons.

  Is it, then, the mule track of the rejected farmer’s vocation that I retrace in my memory as I walk along this street in the Fourteenth Arrondissement, between the grocer’s and the baker’s and the greengrocer’s? No, it’s another road, which I used to walk as an adolescent: the one that took me from our villa to the town, when being sent to “run errands” was a pretext for getting out of the house, and sometimes I would pretend I had forgotten something so as to be able to go out again. But more often than not I didn’t even need to pretend, I was so scatterbrained and so uninterested in the real purpose of my trip, and they would have to repeat what I was supposed to buy and its weight and price over and over to get it into my head, and count out the exact money for me.

  It was a short-range Mercury who guided my steps and who still guides them today, partial reflection of the god who mediates and connects the profusion of the world, and who, unfortunately, only rarely rewards my devotion by illuminating me with his full silvery light. Or, when I am going down towards the gods of the underworld, towards the murky recesses where life’s leftovers are tossed away, it’s the psycho-pomp Mercury who walks before me, guiding my burden of dead weights down to the banks of the municipal Acheron.

  I come back to the kitchen with the small bin empty and replace the sheet of newspaper still lining it with a fresh sheet of newspaper. I particularly enjoy this little job because I am happy to find a further use for the newspapers, to allow them an extra lease on life beyond their instant obsolescence. Object of an unsatisfied love, or just a neurotic obsession, the newspaper is something I always buy, leaf through quickly and then put away, but it upsets me to throw it out right away, I am always hoping that it may prove useful later on, may still have something to tell me. The moment of resurrection comes, of course, when I pull out a sheet from the heap of old newspapers to line the poubelle and headlines appear all creased up in the concave perspective of the bucket demanding an immediate second reading as I arrange the rectangular surface of the paper to cover the inside of the cyclinder as best it can, tucking in the flaps around the rim. The Le Monde format is ideal for the little bin, while the larger Italian dailies usually end up lining the big poubelle. If carefully applied, the newspaper lining will still be sticking to the container after it has been emptied by the éboueurs, and tomorrow, when I go to recover my empty poubelle, this large pavis of writing in the language of Dante will enable me to distinguish my bin from its other sister poubelles abandoned on the same pavement.

  I’ve been writing this piece on and off for three or four years now, and since I started there have been all sorts of changes in, amongst other things, the way poubelles are managed. The newspaper lining is already a thing of the past: like everybody else, I’m now using those plastic bags that have transformed the image of urban rubbish, hiding it away in smooth shiny wrappings, a step forward that I hope no one, no matter how nostalgic for the past or hostile to plastic, will want to criticize, even if the rubbish does continue to be recognizable as such despite its packaging and the heaps on the pavements in the days when we have a grève des éboueurs are no less putrid. (On the contrary, I would say that whatever it really contains, even the brighest plastic bag makes us think of rubbish these days, since it is always the stronger image that asserts itself over the more anodyne.)

  Another fundamental reform: the kitchen sink drain has been fitted with a broyeur, or waste disposal unit, which can chop up a considerable amount of food leftover
s (excluding, curiously, artichoke leaves, whose fibres get stuck in the unit’s teeth and clog it up), so that our rubbish has changed too, in the sense that it contains less organic waste.

  And then, we have replaced the kitchen bin too, the green one, with a new one made of white plastic which has a lid you raise and lower with a pedal and contains a bucket you can lift out. So that now it’s only the bucket I carry down and empty in the big bin, or rather, not even the bucket, but the bag – again plastic – that I pull out of the bucket, replacing it with a new one. (There’s an art to getting the bag to stick to the rim of the bucket, holding it so that it grips all round and won’t slip down, but then you have to get out the air left underneath which lifts the bottom, blowing it out like a sail.)

  The full bag, on the other hand, I tie up with the tape provided on the bottom of the bag: a clever idea, this tape, and, like every small invention that simplifies life’s difficulties, welcome. (There’s an art to tying an overfull bag while simultaneously holding it up in the air, this because you have to pull it out of the bin to pull off the tape, and once it is out you don’t know where to put it down or how to prevent the rubbish from spilling out onto the floor.) So now I carry off this bag tied with a bow like a Christmas present and drop it into the big poubelle, which, once again, is lined with a big grey plastic bag.

  Of course these won’t be the last developments in the long series of transformations our habits have undergone and will undergo as we adapt to the times, always assuming that our times themselves don’t end. The reform that seems to be most pressing and important will be that of separating the rubbish according to its qualities and different destinies, incineration or recycling, so that at least part of what we have wrung from the treasures of the world may not be lost forever but discover the path of regeneration and re-use, the eternal return of the ephemeral.

  One of the materials that could run out and whose salvaging is of particular concern to me, is paper, fond daughter of the forest, living space of the writing and reading man. I realize now that I should have begun this piece by distinguishing and comparing two types of domestic rubbish, cooking leftovers and writing leftovers, the rubbish bin and the wastepaper basket. And distinguishing and comparing the different destinies of what cooking and writing do not throw away, the products themselves, in one case something eaten, assimilated in our bodies, in the other something that, once finished, is no longer a part of me and of which it is impossible to say whether it will become food for another’s reading, for a mental metabolism, or what transformations it will undergo in passing through other minds, how many of its calories it will transmit and whether it will set them in circulation again, and how. Writing, no less than throwing things away, involves dispossession, involves pushing away from myself a heap of crumpled-up paper and a pile of paper written all over, neither of the two being any longer mine, but deposited, expelled.

  All that’s left to me and belongs to me is a sheet of paper dotted with a few sparse notes, on which over the last few years under the title La Poubelle Agréée I have been jotting down the ideas that cropped up in my mind and that I planned to develop at length in writing, theme of purification of dross throwing away is complementary to appropriating the hell of a world where nothing is thrown away one is what one does not throw away identification of oneself rubbish as autobiography satisfaction of consumption defecation theme of materiality, of starting again, agricultural world cooking and writing autobiography as refuse transmission for preservation and still other notes whose thread and connective reasoning I can no longer make out, theme of memory expulsion of memory lost memory preserving and losing what is lost what one hasn’t had what one had too late what we carry around from the past what does not belong to us living without carrying around anything from the past (animal): perhaps one carries around more living for the work one produces; one loses oneself: there is the work that doesn’t work, I am no longer there.

  [Paris, 1974-76]

  FROM THE OPAQUE

  If they had asked me then what shape the world is, I would have said it is a slope, with irregular shifts in height, with protrusions and hollows, so that somehow it’s as if I were always on a balcony, looking out over a balustrade, whence I see the contents of the world ranged to the right and to the left at various distances, on other balconies or theatre boxes above or below, a theatre whose stage opens on the void, on the high strip of sea against the sky crossed by winds and clouds

  ____

  and likewise if they ask me now what shape the world is, if they ask that self that dwells within me and preserves the first impression of things, I shall have to answer that the world is arranged on so many balconies irregularly deployed so as to look out over one great balcony that opens on the void of the air, on the windowsill that is the short strip of sea against the vast sky, and the real self within me is still looking out from that parapet, the real self within the presumed inhabitant of worldly shapes more complex or more simple but all derived from this shape, shapes far more complex and at the same time far more simple since all are contained or can be deduced from those first sudden drops and slopes, from that world of lines oblique and broken amongst which the horizon is the only continuous straight line.

  So I shall begin by saying that the world is made up of broken and oblique lines, with segments that tend to protrude from the corners of each level, like the agave plants that often grow along the brink, and with vertical ascending lines like the palm trees that shade gardens and terraces above those where they are rooted,

  and I refer here to the palms of the past when palms would usually be high and houses low, the houses likewise cutting vertically across the line of the shifts of height, standing half on the level below and half on the level above, with two ground floors one below and one above, and likewise even now that houses are usually higher than any palm tree, and trace longer vertical ascending lines amid the oblique and broken lines of the ground levels, it is still true that they have two or more ground floors and that however high they may rise there is always a ground level higher than their roofs,

  with the result that in the shape of the world I am now describing the houses appear as if one were looking down on their roofs from above, the city is a tortoise down there at the bottom, its chequered shell in relief, and this not because I am not accustomed to seeing houses from below, on the contrary I can always close my eyes and sense the houses behind me tall and oblique without depth almost, but in that case it takes only a single house to conceal the other possible houses, I can’t see the city higher up and I don’t know if it is still there, every house above me is a vertical board painted pink and resting on the slope, all the depth flattened in one direction but without expanding in the other, the properties of space vary according to the direction I am looking in with relation to my particular orientation

  Obviously to describe the shape of the world the first thing to do is to establish my position, I don’t mean my location but my orientation, because the world I am talking about differs from other possible worlds in this sense: that whatever the time of day or night one always knows where east and west are, and thus I shall begin by saying that I am looking southwards, which is the same as saying that I have my face towards the sea, which is the same as saying that I have my back to the mountain, because this is the position in which I usually surprise that self that dwells within myself, even when my external self is orientated in a completely different fashion or not orientated at all as is often the case, since for me every orientation starts from that initial orientation, which implies my always having the east to my left and the west to my right, and only by setting out from there can I locate myself in relation to space, and verify the properties of space and its dimensions

  So if they had asked me how many dimensions space has, if they asked that self which still does not know the things one learns so as to have a code of conventions in common with others, and first among these the convention according to which each of us stands
at the meeting point of three infinite dimensions, skewered by one dimension that goes in through the chest and out from the back, by another that runs through us from shoulder to shoulder, and by a third that pierces the skull to come out from the feet, an idea one accepts only after considerable resistance and frequent rejections, but then pretends to have always known because everybody else is pretending to have always known it, if I were to answer on the basis of what I had really learnt by looking around me, about the three dimensions which with standing in the middle of them turn out to be six dimensions, in front behind above below right left, by observing them as I was saying with my face to the sea and my back to the mountain,

  the first thing to say is that the in-front-of-me dimension does not exist as such, since immediately below me there opens the void, which then becomes the sea which then becomes the horizon which then becomes the sky, so that one might even say that the in-front-of-me dimension corresponds to the above-me dimension, to the dimension which comes out from the centre of all our skulls when we’re standing upright and which is immediately lost in the empty zenith,

  then I would pass on to the behind-me dimension which never goes far behind because it encounters a wall a cliff a rugged or bushy slope, since I always have my back towards the mountain which is to the north, hence I might say that even this dimension doesn’t exist as such or gets confused with the subterranean dimension of the below, with the line that supposedly comes out from under your feet and which of course doesn’t come out at all since between the soles of your shoes and the floor-boards below there simply isn’t the space for it to come out,