and then there is the dimension that extends to the left and the right and which for me corresponds more or less to the east and the west, and this dimension may indeed proceed on both sides as the world proceeds with its jagged outline in such a way that at every level one can trace an imaginary horizontal line that cuts the oblique inclination of the world, a line like those that are traced on altimetric maps and that go by the splendid name of isoheight
or like the water sluices that direct the meagre flow of the streams into horizontal ditches to irrigate the strips of arable land on slopes to either side of the hill, strips won from the land by supporting the terrain with stone walls
but even in this dimension one can’t really go very far because sooner or later whether it be to the east or the west one reaches the watershed of a headland at which either one can think of the line as losing itself in the air of the sky thus blending in with the first dimension we spoke of,
or one can have it continue on the far side like a good isoheight following the series of inlets and bays and the hollows within these inlets and bays, until it encounters promontories that advance further into the sea than other promontories, defining larger bays which enclose the inner bays, and so on and on until we have established that this pattern of inner bays and other bays, golden in the morning and blue in the evening to the west, greenish in the morning and grey in the evening to the east, goes on like this for the entire length of the seas and the continents, stretching out to enclose the whole sea in a single bay,
so that one may as well take the shape of the world to be that of the bay I have before my eyes, defined by the headland to the east of me and the headland to the west of me, and if not by a headland then by whatever it is that limits my vision to one side and the other, ridge of a hill, trunk of an olive tree, cylindrical surface of a cement tank, juniper hedge, araucaria, sun-shade, or whatever happens to form the two curtains that define the stage upon which I find myself, a tall backdrop behind me, the footlights of a bright horizon in front
I’ve gone back to using metaphors that have to do with the theatre, although in my thoughts of that time I couldn’t have associated the theatre and its velvets with that world of grasses and winds, and although even now the image that the theatre tends to bring to mind, that is of an interior that claims to contain within itself the exterior world, the piazza the fete the garden the wood the pier the war, is the exact opposite of what I am describing, that is an exterior that excludes every kind of interior
a world all outside which gives us the impression of being closed inside while being outside, since one person’s piece of ground looks out over another person’s piece of ground, these being divided not by boundary walls but by support walls, and each of us in his own piece but looking at the others each in their own, and no one ever leaving his own yet always under the gaze of the others,
a space which is exterior even when it is within an interior, hen coops rabbit hutches appearing behind metal fences, booths pergolas shelters gazebos, each pool reflecting what is above the pool, outside stairways connecting roof terraces where basil grows on window-sills in pots full of earth, a village is a pine-cone all arches and windows, the window frames the dresser across whose mirror a cloud passes
One would also have to say so as to dispel every equivocation the word theatre might give rise to, that the theatre is made in such a way that the maximum number of eyes can enjoy the maximum freedom of vision, in such a way that is that all possible vision is contained and directed as though within a single eye looking at itself, seeing itself mirrored in the iris of its own pupil,
while I speak of a world where everything can be seen and can’t be seen at the same time, in so far as everything sprouts and hides and protrudes and screens, the palms open and close like a fan on the masts of the fishing boats, the jet of a hose shoots up and waters a field of invisible anemones, half a bus turns in the half-bend of the drive and disappears amongst the spikes of the agave plant,
my gaze is shattered amongst different planes and distances, runs along an oblique strip of matting and greenhouse glass, touches a field all bristling with strings and sticks on the slope opposite, returns shortening to the close-up of a leaf hanging from the branch of a medlar tree in the middle here, moves from the cloud of a grey olive tree to a white cloud sailing in the sky, then right under my eyes enormous and green with sulphur is a tomato plant in a scaffolding of canes, then a small pantiled roof the other side of the stream where a line of persimmon trees begin, with yellowish red fruit on the branches which I can count even at this distance
and equally one would have to define what a theatre is in terms of sounds, a place of maximum audibility, a great ear that holds all vibrations and notes within itself, an ear listening to itself, at once ear and shell held to ear,
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while I on the other hand am speaking of a world where sounds break up as they ascend and descend the convolutions of the terrain and skirt around sharp corners and obstacles, soften and spread of their own accord from the distance, the conversation between two women meeting in the middle of a street of steps is lost no sooner than it rises above the baskets they carry on their heads, but the oohs, the aahs, the dear me’s are audible on the hillside opposite coming through the air like beads running down the thread of a necklace, space is formed of visible points and sound points constantly mixing together and never quite managing to coincide,
and it’s only at night that the sounds find their place in the dark, measure out their distances, the silence that they carry around them describes the space, the blackboard of the dark is dotted and sketched with sound, the speckling of a barking dog, the softly shaded collapse of an old palm frond, the dotted line of the train erased a little then emphasized a little as it enters and leaves the tunnels, and no sooner has the sound of the train gone than there’s the sea coming out like a white shadow at the point where the train disappeared, you hear it for half a minute and then no more,
and already the far and nearby cocks are hurrying to trace out the horizon that frames all the sounds drawn in the dark, before the sponge of the dawn smudges the blackboard from one corner to the other, and in the daylight you can’t tell where any of the sounds are coming from any more, the squeak of the sulphur sprayer gets tangled up with the roar of the motorbike, the drone of the electric sawmill hems in the tinkle of the merry-go-round, to the person watching from a stationary position the world flakes away fitfully before eye and ear in the landslide of space and time.
To the person watching from a stationary position the only constant element is the curve the sun describes as it rises and sets from left to right, and even where there is no sunshine we always know where the sun is, and of every thing whose distance and shape we cannot determine we can always know how the shadow at its feet moves shrinks stretches, of every colour whose colour we can’t define we can always predict how its colour will change according to the angle of the sun’s rays,
in the end the sun is no more than the relationship the world has with the sun, which does not change if one considers the concave curve the sun describes as a convex curve, it is the relationship between a source of light rays no matter whether mobile or fixed with a body or amalgam of bodies no matter whether fixed or mobile which receives those rays, that is the sun consists of the properties of the rays the world receives from it, rays that supposedly originate from a source known as the sun which blinds you if you stare at it, and which needs only a tatter of cloud to hide away behind, only a few intervening layers of denser atmosphere or water vapour to grow paler and fog over to the point that it disappears, or even just a little mist rising from the sea, so that in any case it is not the hypothetical existence of this source that matters but the manner in which its rays fall on the surfaces of the world, either directly varying in intensity inclination frequency, or indirectly along variable angles of reflection, and depending on whether they are reflected by the dazzling mirror of the sea or by the ash-gre
y earth and stones of the coast, as when in a bay the western shore is deserted by a sun that has already set but receives the reverberation of a still sunlit east
or instead of considering the source of the rays or the rays themselves or the surfaces that receive them, one might consider the dapple of shadows the places that is that the rays do not reach, how the shadow sharpens in proportion to the strength of the sun, how the morning shadow of a fig tree from being tenuous and uncertain becomes as the sun climbs a black drawing of the green tree leaf by leaf expanding at the plant’s foot, that concentration of the black to signify the polished green the fig tree encloses leaf by leaf on the side turned towards the sun, and the more the drawing on the ground concentrates its blackness the more it shrinks and shortens as if sucked in by the roots, swallowed up by the foot of the trunk and returned to the leaves, transformed into white sap in their veining and stalks, until at the moment when the sun is at its highest the shadow of the vertical trunk disappears and the shadow of the umbrella of leaves curls up beneath, on the fermented squashiness of the ripe figs that have fallen to the ground, waiting for the shadow of the trunk to sprout out again and push it towards the other side lengthening out there as if the gift of growth, which the fig tree as fruit-bearing plant has renounced, passed to this ghost plant stretched out on the ground, until the moment when other ghost plants grow so far as to cover it, the hill the ridge the coast flooding into a single lake the shadows
So I could limit my description to the dark areas that expand and shrink depending on the time of day with a rotary movement rendered streaky and uneven by the different levels and inclinations of the terrain, now swallowing up and now revealing vines, seedbeds, yellow fields of marigolds, black gardens of magnolias, red quarries of stone, markets, everywhere the shade has its rendezvous and its itineraries, here it is entitled to reign over entire valleys, there it can do no more than gather scraps of itself hidden away behind a watering can or a wheelbarrow, every place can be defined according to a scale ranging from those places never reached by the sun to those exposed to its light from dawn to dusk
Let us call those areas the sun doesn’t reach “opaque”, while those it does we can call “sunny,” or “sunshiny”. Since the world I am describing is a sort of concave amphitheatre on the south side and since it does not include the convex face of the amphitheatre, presumably looking north, it thus turns out that the opaque is extremely rare and the sunny more widespread
or choosing to resort to a metaphor taken from animal life, we are in a world that stretches and twists like a lizard so as to offer the largest possible surface area to the sun, opening up the fan of its suction-cup feet on a wall that’s growing warm, its tail retreating with threadlike jerks from the imperceptible advance of the shade, eager to have the sunny coincide with the existence of the world
eager to have the sunny coincide with the struggle for existence and that at once and with maximum profit, levelling out the declivities in the geometrical empire of the carnations whose square legions push forward into the sunshine in serried ranks, or righting the vertical walls of the apartment blocks chequered with windows that vie for the best exposure and view
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Only at the bottom of streams bristling with reeds that rustle like paper, or in sharply twisting valleys, or behind the protruding tops of the hills, and further back in the succession of spurs along the mountain chain parallel to the coast, is there that darkening of the green, that outcropping of rocks from the rain-washed earth, that nearness of a cold that rises from beneath the ground, that remoteness not only from the invisible sea but also from the fierce blue of the overarching sky, that sense of a mysterious border separating this from the open and alien world, which is the sense of having entered into the opaque reverse side of the world
so that I could define the opaque as a declaration that the world I am describing does have a reverse side, the possibility that I might find myself otherwise placed and orientated, in a different relationship with the trajectory of the sun and the dimensions of infinite space, a sign that the world presupposes a rest of the world, beyond the barrier of the mountains ranged behind my back, a world that extends into the opaque with towns and cities and highlands and watercourses and marshes, with mountain chains that conceal fog-bound plateaus, I sense this reverse side of the world hidden beyond the deep thickness of earth and rock, and immediately it becomes the vertigo roaring in my ears and thrusting me towards the elsewhere
So now this reconstruction of the world accomplished in the absence of the world ought to start over again supposing me flattened in my lizard-like immobility on the rugged sunshiny slope but at the same time supposing me thrust vertiginously towards the elsewhere, and here I would open a parenthesis to distinguish one elsewhere as absolute sunniness opening on a sea furrowed by distant ferryboats and one elsewhere as absolute opaqueness opening up before whoever looks out beyond a furthest mountain ridge
or perhaps the elsewheres converge, the ship I see leaving the shore and disappearing in the sun’s glare will drop anchor in opaque ports, will see grey banks of wharves looming from morning fog, lights still lit on the docks,
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and the hunter who follows the mule track up into the moorlands enters the wood, climbs the ridge of the mountain, skirts a sheltered hollow, sends stones rolling into the bushes hoping to flush out a flock of partridges, runs down across the meadows, climbs up a rocky crag, searches out the trail of migratory birds, searches out the summit beyond which the view of a boundless land opens up before his eyes, the watershed of all watersheds, the roof of the world, whence to lean out and gaze far away beyond the great wing of shadow, so far as to make out a golden-gated Thule, a Helsinki with its white piazza, sunny city on a bay of ice
And even if we consider the observer immobile as at the beginning, his situation with regard to the opaque and the sunny will still be a matter for debate, since that self of mine turned to face the sunny area becomes the opaque side it sees of every bridge tree roof, while the wall or slope to which I turn my back is in full sunshine, the wall blooming with bougainvillea, the slope with its tufts of spurge, the hedge of Turkish figs, the trellis of capers
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but that’s not what matters because granted I am still looking towards the mouth of whatever valley I’m in with my back turned to the tumbling shadowy stream, there is nothing to guarantee that I am about to advance further and further into the open rather than going backward into the depths of the valley, so that the correct thing to say is that the self turned towards the sunny side is nevertheless a self withdrawing into the opaque
And if departing from that initial position I consider the successive phases of that same self of mine, every step forward could just as well be a retreat, the line I trace is ever more cloaked in the opaque, and it is pointless trying to remember just where I entered the shadow, I was already there at the beginning, it is pointless searching in the depths of the opaque for an escape from the opaque, I now know that the only world that exists is the opaque the sunny being nothing more than its reverse side, the sunny that opaquely struggles to multiply itself while doing nothing more than to multiply the reverse of its own reverse
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From the opaque, from the depths of the opaque I write, reconstructing the map of a sunniness that is only an unverifiable postulate for the computations of the memory, the geometrical location of the ego, of a self which the self needs to know that it is itself, the ego whose only function is that the world may continually receive news of the existence of the world, a contrivance at the service of the world for knowing if it exists.
VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION,
English translation copyright © 1993 by Tim Parks
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Italy as La Strada di San Giovanni by Arnoldo Mondadori Editor
e, Milan, in 1990. Copyright © 1990 by Palomar S.r.l.e. Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A., Milano.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Calvino, Italo.
[Strada di San Giovanni. English]
The road to San Giovanni / Italo Calvino ; translated from the Italian by Tim Parks.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-54434-6
I. Title.
PQ4809.A45S7713 1993
853′ .914—dc20 93-3356
v3.0
The Road to San Giovanni Page 9
