Collection of Sand

by Italo Calvino

  They have been known to work, if it is true that near their dwellings ‘they are some times heard to bake Bread’ and ‘strike Hammers’. Their women weave and sew ‘strange Cobwebs’, according to some, ‘impalpable Rainbows’, according to others, or clothes similar to our own, according to others still. But also in our own kitchens, sometimes while we are sleeping, it is they who dutifully tidy up the dishes for us and put everything back in place. Their relationships with human beings consist in these little duties but also in spiteful acts and petty theft, or in throwing stones, some of them quite big, which, however, do not hurt. More seriously they kidnap babies, or wet-nurses (they are greedy for milk) who stay a certain time with them underground while up here their person has been replaced by a double or a ghostly presence.

  They also have sexual relations with humans, especially with women, but more at the level of a fleeting, lascivious game, like in dreams, without passion or drama. They are not without wars or cruelty, but they keep it all to themselves and let little of it out. They use the human language of the place where they live, but ‘they speak but little, and that by way of whistling’. ‘They are said to have many pleasant toyish Books; but the operation of these Pieces only appears in some Paroxisms of antic corybantic Jolity.’ They have moments of jubilation and edginess, but their most frequent mood is melancholic, perhaps due to their in-between nature.

  The people I am talking about are the ‘little People’ of the Siths, the subject of a book that Adelphi has published (the Italian translation of Robert Kirk’s The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, edited by Mario M. Rossi, whose essay ‘The Fairy Chaplain’, closes the book). ‘Siths’ is the name that was given in Scotland to what are called ‘fairies’ in England (there is no exact equivalent in Italian since le fate for us can only be feminine whereas a ‘fairy’ can be either male or female). In the Anglo-Germanic world they are known as ‘elfs’ or with some particular differences ‘kobolds’ or ‘goblins’, and they include all the varieties of dwarves and gnomes (often connected with mines and hidden treasures), including Tolkien’s ‘hobbits’.

  The supernatural of the Celtic peoples is swarming and intricate and multiform, difficult to put into a proper order. Or perhaps it is we Latins who see the Mediterranean world of fauns and nymphs and dryads and hamadryads as more orderly, solely because our luxuriant local mythologies have been put through the sieve of hierarchical organization and harmonization typical of Graeco-Latin culture. The power of poetic transfiguration in the Nordic imagination has given us Titania and Oberon and Puck, as well as Spenser’s The Faerie Queen. But even when transmitted through the words of the poets the kingdom of Celtic fairies communicates the pristine power of a world that is irreducibly ‘other’, that literature cannot tame entirely.

  Also in the Celtic parts of France (especially Brittany and Normandy) the ‘little people’ have ancient roots, and in literature they have left traces in the fantastic tales by Nodier and in a novel by Barbey d’Aurevilly, L’Ensorcelée (The Bewitched), where the emerging of magic-telluric apparitions is conveyed in the most disturbing way. But it is in the green fields of Ireland and the Scottish moors that this elusive race reached its highest population density. Walter Scott for Scotland (in his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft) and W. B. Yeats for Ireland (in Irish Fairy and Folktales) attempted, if not a census, at least a classification of species and families: these two geniuses brought a systematic mentality to the cult of these traditions.

  The case of Robert Kirk is different. At the end of the seventeenth century he was minister of the Presbyterian church in Aberfoyle, a village at the entrance to the Highlands. Scotland had recently been subdued by the English Crown and devastated by civil wars and the wars of religion, and such impoverished communities lived through a permanent survival crisis, as well as a crisis of cultural and religious identity. We are talking of a time and place where the survival of the old beliefs was strongly felt, the topography of the place itself was steeped in the presence of fairies, and ‘second sight’ was a common experience. But these were also times and places where the battles between Anglicanism and Presbyterianism had implications that were very much political as well as theological.

  The seventeenth century was the century of witch trials and inquisitors (both Catholic and Protestant) who saw in the various forms of the pre-Christian supernatural that still survived nothing other than the uniform presence of Satan, to be eradicated by burning. The Reverend Kirk had a strong and profound innate purity that enabled him to recognize clearly his neighbour’s innocence. He knew that his parishioners who believed in fairies and could see them were not witches and wizards; he was fond of his poor Scottish flock and knew their hallucinations and the precariousness of their existence; he was fond of the fairies, who were a poor people as well, and were perhaps on the verge of disappearing, without a physical or metaphysical place to call their own. He too certainly believed in fairies, and probably saw them, even though he restricted himself to quoting the evidence of other people.

  With the courage of innocence he wrote a treatise on the fairies’ kingdom, entitled The Secret Commonwealth, in order to say all he knew about them, which was not much, and above all to allay any suspicion of collusion with the devil in the little underground fairies and in those who saw them. (Here, in addition to the problem of the fairies’ existence there was also the question of second sight, telepathy, premonitions, phenomena which are not necessarily—indeed are rarely—connected with mediation by supernatural beings.) The quotations from Sacred Scripture with which Kirk supports his argument are inexact and never entirely relevant, but his intention is clear. He wanted to establish that ‘the little people’ had nothing to do with Christianity but neither did they have anything to do with the devil: their legal position was the same as Adam’s before the Fall, so they would be neither saved nor damned; it was a neutral, unjudgemental limbo that surrounded their sins, which were always minor and childlike, and their melancholy.

  The book that Adelphi has recently published contains Kirk’s treatise, discovered and translated by Mario Manlio Rossi, plus a substantial essay by the latter: with both erudition and passion he situates the work in the culture of its time, and explains in exhaustive terms how Kirk genuinely believed in the fairies and how there was nothing strange in that. There are thus three sources of interest in the book: the fairies themselves, the personality of this ‘chaplain of the fairies’, and the personality of the man who discovered and explained Kirk.

  Mario Manlio Rossi (1895–1971), an Italian scholar of English literature who lived in Edinburgh for many years, was a reserved academic who always went against the grain. I know little about him but I will always be in his debt, for it was through a book of his that, when I was young, I understood the greatness of Swift. Rossi argues effectively here that trials for witchcraft were not in fact a medieval throw-back but instead a typical product of modern culture. His essay is fascinating for the richness of detail that it evokes and documents in this depiction of the history of culture, but it is also readable for the polemical mood—often a bad mood—that emerges on every page, evidence of a surly temperament in which learned precision blends with parti pris. His anger has a range of targets—both Presbyterian and Anglican intolerance, witch-hunts and the opinions of all historians who have dealt with them, fairy-tales for children that censure the sexual element which is always present in popular stories—but he also attacks Empiricism, Idealism, Occultism, Folklore and above all Science, which is his bête noire. He only spares (and here I have no doubts in agreeing with him) poetry, where ‘man in flesh and blood and the fairies have the same epistemological position, the sam
e reality’.

  As I was reading the book the name of Kirk’s village, Aberfoyle, continued to ring a bell in my head. Why did it sound familiar? Of course, that was the setting of my favourite Jules Verne novel, Black Diamonds or The Child of the Cavern. It was a story that took place entirely underground, in an old, abandoned coal-mine, the hiding-place for creatures that seem to have come straight out of the Reverend Kirk’s book: a fairy-girl who has never seen the light of day, a venerable old man who resembles a ghost, a horrible bird from the abyss . . . Suddenly the Celtic visionary world infiltrates the apologia for science written by the positivist Verne, to show that, despite Mario Manlio Rossi, the same mythological lymph flows and mixes in the unfathomable tangle of ideologies that are apparently opposed to each other . . . All of this proves that the fairies know even more roads, in heaven and earth, than are dreamed of in any of our philosophies . . .

  [1980]

  The Archipelago of Imaginary Places

  On Frivola, an island in the Pacific, life is easy and frustrating. The trees are as elastic as rubber and their branches bend down to offer fruits that melt in the mouth like froth. The inhabitants rear fragile and useless horses which collapse under the slightest weight. To plough the fields, all that is needed is for the women to play on a whistle and furrows open up in the thin dust, while in order to sow men just scatter seeds to the wind. In the forests the wild beasts have soft tusks and claws and their roar is like a rustle of silk. The local currency is the agatina, which is not very prized on the currency market.

  The Diamond Islands have the property of swallowing up imprudent travellers, who are captured by their carnivorous diamonds. In order to get hold of the jewels, crafty merchants scatter bloody pieces of pork over them, which the diamonds immediately start to suck on; towards evening the vultures descend, snatch the meat in their claws and fly off with it to their nests, along with the jewels stuck to the pork. The merchants climb up to the nests, frighten off the raptors, separate the diamonds from the meat, and then sell them to unwary jewellers. That is how a ring devours a finger, or a necklace a neck.

  Capillaria, a land beneath the sea, is inhabited exclusively by self-reproducing women called Ohias: they are beautiful and majestic, two metres tall, with features like angels, soft bodies and long blonde hair framing their faces. The Ohias’ skin feels like silk, and is translucent, like alabaster: through their transparent skin you can see the bones of their skeleton, their blue lungs, their pink heart, the calm pulsing of their veins. Men are unknown there, or rather they survive as external parasites called Bullpops, formed of a cylindrical body about fifteen centimetres long, a bald, bumpy head, a human face and wiry arms and hands, but they have legs endowed with huge big toes, fins and wings. The defenceless Bullpops swim vertically like sea-horses, and the Ohias feed on them since they are greedy for their marrow, to which they attribute amongst other things properties that somehow stimulate reproduction.

  On the island of Odes the roads are living creatures and they move freely of their own accord. To travel across the island visitors just have to take up their position on a road, after finding out where it is going, and let themselves be carried along. The most famous roads in the world come to Odes as tourists for a holiday.

  London-on-Thames, which is not to be confused with its more famous namesake, is a city dug out of the top of a rock, inhabited by a tribe of gorillas whose chief believes he is the reincarnation of Henry VIII and he has five wives called Catherine of Aragon, Ann Boleyn and so on. The sixth wife is a white woman, captured by the gorillas, who stays in this role until she is substituted by another female captive.

  On the island of Dionysus there is a vineyard growing where the vines are women from the waist upwards; vine-leaves and clusters of grapes dangle from their fingers, and their hair is made of tendrils. Heaven help the traveller who allows himself to be embraced by these creatures: he immediately gets drunk, forgets his homeland, family and honour, puts down roots and becomes a vine as well.

  Malacovia is a fortified city made entirely out of iron, and built on the Danube Delta: it is in the shape of an egg, chock-full of Tartar cyclists who, as they pedal, make the iron egg go down, so it is concealed in the Delta marshes, and then back up again. The city lives, waiting for the moment when the hordes of cycling Tartars will be unleashed to invade the empire of the Czars.

  The sources of these geographical descriptions are respectively: Abbé François Coyer, The Frivolous Island (London, 1750); The Thousand and One Nights; Frigyes Karinthy, Capillaria (Budapest, 1921); Rabelais, The Fifth Book of Pantagruel; Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan and the Lion-Man; Lucian of Samosata’s True Story; Amedeo Tosetti, Pedali sul Mar Nero (Pedals by the Black Sea) (Milan, 1884).

  That, at least, is how they are cited (I take no responsibility for their veracity) in the book from which I drew this information: The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi (Toronto: Lester and Orpen Dennys, 1980). This is an enormous volume with the layout of a geographical dictionary and entries in alphabetical order (from Abaton, a city that has a variety of geographical locations, to Zuy, the Elves’ shopping centre), and it comes complete with maps and engravings like those of an old-fashioned encyclopedia.

  A book published in Canada and the product of a collaboration between an Argentine and an Italian has all the credentials for epitomizing geographical confusion. In the Library of the Superfluous, which I would like all our bookshelves to find a space for, it seems to me that a Dictionary of Imaginary Places would be an indispensable reference work.

  Every city or island or region has an entry as in an encyclopedia, and every entry begins with information on its geographical position, population and any economic resources, as well as its climate, fauna and flora. The rule behind the Dictionary is to present every place as though it really existed. This information is derived from the sources, which are given at the end of every entry: thus for Atlantis are listed Plato’s Critias and Timaeus, Pierre Benoît’s novel and also a lesser known work by Conan Doyle.

  Another rule that the authors obey is to exclude imaginary toponyms used by novelists to represent real or at least probable places: so Proust’s Balbec is not there, nor Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha. And given that the geography concerns the present and the past but not the future, the whole of futuristic science-fiction, whether extra-terrestrial or political or social fantasy, is also excluded.

  This is not a book that hooks you immediately. On the contrary, the first impression as you thumb through it is that imaginary geography is much less attractive than the geography of real places: a methodical dullness hangs over utopian cities, from Francis Bacon’s Bensalem to Cabet’s Icaria, as well as over countless eighteenth-century satirical-philosophical voyages, not to mention the edifying religious-allegorical stages along Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. And a sense of satiety, not to say lack of oxygen, accompanies the packed topographies in The Wizard of Oz, Tolkien or C. S. Lewis.

  However, as one works one’s way through the single entries one soon comes across worlds that are governed by a more evocative fantasy logic, and I have tried to provide some examples of these above; I have not quoted (because it is already well known in Italy thanks to Masolino d’Amico and Giorgio Manganelli) what remains the most elegant and ingenious invention: Abbot’s geometrical Flatland.

  It is above all minor literary fiction that reveals endless resources for creating these poetic myths; whole atlases of visionary countries flow from the pen of talented professionals in entertainment literature. The most quoted author is Edgar Rice Burroughs, not only for his cycle of Tarzan books but for a large number of works describing fantasy lands. T
aken from novels that were considered merely as page-turners and whose authors are not recorded in literary histories, many such states went on to become myths of the cinema such as the Shangri-La of Lost Horizon, the Ruritania of The Prisoner of Zenda and the Island of Count Zaroff in The Most Dangerous Game. The Dictionary also includes countries that were created directly for the screen, such as the Marx Brothers’ Freedonia in Duck Soup, and Pepperland in the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine; however, I do not see the cities from René Clair’s films of political satire.

  Italian literature is well represented, from Boiardo’s Albraca to Zavattinia in Totò il buono, even though it is not the richest in this field: still the Bastiani Fortress in Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe is there, as is Gadda’s Maradagal and Pinocchio’s Toyland. Amongst the curiosities worth mentioning I will point out two tunnels: one that leads from Greece to Naples, for the exclusive use of unhappy lovers, which is explored in Sannazaro’s Arcadia; and the other that links the Adriatic (through the valley of the river Brenta) to the Tyrrhenian Sea (leading to the Gulf of La Spezia), constructed in the fourteenth century by the Genoese in order to invade the Republic of Venice. The latter was tracked down and explored in Salgari’s novel, I naviganti della Meloria (The Sailors of the Meloria) (1903): in the novel the sailors actually found in the tunnel phosphorescent fauna consisting of jellyfish and giant molluscs.

  [1981]

  Stamps from States of Mind

  Throughout his life Donald Evans made stamps. Imaginary stamps of imaginary countries, drawn with pencils or coloured inks and painted in watercolours, but scrupulously faithful to everything one would expect from a stamp, to the point where they seemed, at first sight, genuine. He would invent the name of a country, the name of a currency, a range of imaginary sights, and would start to insert minute details into tiny quadrangles or squares (sometimes triangles), all of them framed with a white, perforated border. He would produce complete series, each of which had its year of printing and the style of the period and contained stamps of every value in their delicate little shades, selected from the usual range of colours you find in postage stamps.