The Complete Cosmicomics

by Italo Calvino

  I was wrong. On the contrary, the most disparate meteoric fragments continued to connect with each other, in however approximate a manner, and to compose themselves into a mosaic, even though it was one with gaps. Comacchio eels, a river source on Monviso, a series of ducal palaces, many hectares of rice-fields, agricultural workers’ trade-union traditions, some Celtic and Lombard suffixes, a certain growth index in industrial productivity, were materials that were scattered and unconnected but which fused into a tightly knit network of reciprocal relationships at the very moment when suddenly a river fell to Earth, and it was the Po.

  Thus every new object that landed on our planet ended up by finding its own place as though it had always been there, as well as its relationship of interdependence with other objects, and the unreasonable presence of one thing found its reason for existing in the unreasonable presence of the others, to the point where the general disorder started to be able to be considered the natural order of things. It is in this context that one must also consider other facts which I shall barely touch on, since they belong to my private life: you’ll have gathered that I’m alluding to my divorce from Xha, and my second marriage, to Wha.

  If one considers it carefully, life with Wha also had its own harmony. All around her things seemed to follow her very own style in the way they arranged themselves, joined other things and created a space for themselves; they followed her very lack of method, her indifference towards materials and uncertainty of gestures which culminated in the end, nevertheless, in an instantaneous and clear choice which could not be disputed. In the sky flew the Erechtheum, all damaged by cosmic shipwrecks, and losing its bits: it hovered for a second above the top of Mount Lycabettos, started to glide again, grazed the square by the Acropolis where the Parthenon was later to land, and came gently to rest a bit further on.

  Sometimes it just needed a little intervention on our part to connect the detached pieces, to get the elements in the layers to match up, and in those cases Wha showed that she had a sure touch, even though it seemed she only wanted to fiddle about. As she tinkered, she would crumple the layers of sedimentary rocks into synclines and anticlines, she would change the orientation on the faces of crystals and obtain walls of feldspar, quartz, mica or slate, and between one layer and another she would hide marine fossils at different heights in order of date.

  Thus the Earth began gradually to take on the contours you know today. The shower of meteoric fragments still continues to the present, adds new details to the picture, frames it with a window, a curtain, a network of telephone wires, fills the empty spaces with bits that fit together as best they can—traffic-lights, obelisks, bars, tobacconists, apses, floods, a dentist’s surgery, a cover from the Sunday edition of the Corriere with a hunter biting a lion—and always some excess is added in the execution of superfluous details, for instance in the pigmentation of butterflies’ wings, and some incongruous elements, like a war in Kashmir, and I always have the impression that there’s something still missing which is just about to arrive, perhaps just two Saturnian verses by Naevius to fill the gap between two fragments of an epic, or the principles that govern the assembly of DNA into chromosomes, and then the picture will be complete, I will have in front of me a world that is precise and abundant, I will once more have Xha and Wha together.

  Now they are long since gone: Xha overcome by the dustcloud shower, gone for ever along with her realm of precision; Wha perhaps still crouching for fun somewhere in a hiding place in the packed storehouse of objects we’d found, and herself now unfindable. And I’m still waiting for them to come back—to reappear maybe in a thought crossing my mind—waiting to catch a glimpse of them with my eyes open or closed, but the two of them together, at the same time; all I would need is to have them both together for just one second to understand.

  The Stone Sky

  The speed with which seismic waves spread inside the terrestrial globe varies according to the depths and discontinuities between the materials that make up the Earth’s crust, mantle and core.

  You live out there, on the crust, outside—the voice of old Qfwfq could be heard from the bottom of the crater—or almost outside, because above it you’ve got that other covering of air, but still outside for those who look at you from the concentric spheres that the Earth contains, as I do as I watch you while I move in the interstices between one sphere and another. Nor are you interested in knowing that the Earth, inside, is not compact: it is discontinuous, made up of overlapping skins of different densities, right down to the core of nickel and iron, which in turn is also a system of cores one inside the other, and each one rotates independently of the others depending on the greater or lesser fluidity of the element.

  You insist on being called terrestrial, but who gave you the right to do so? Your real name should be extraterrestrials, people on the outside: terrestrials are those who live inside, as Rdix and I did, until the day you tricked her and took her away from me into that desolate outside of yours.

  As for me, I’ve always lived inside here, along with Rdix initially, and then on my own, in one of these inner earths. A stone sky rotated above our heads, one more limpid than yours, but criss-crossed, like yours, by clouds at those points where gatherings of chrome or magnesium collected. Winged shadows rise up in flight: the internal skies have their own birds, accretions of light rock describing spirals, scudding upwards until they disappear from sight. There are sudden changes of weather: when bursts of leaden rain shower down, or when we have a hail of zinc crystals, there is nowhere else to escape except to slip inside the porous holes of the spongy rock. At times the darkness is split by a fiery zigzag: not a lightning-bolt, but incandescent metal slithering down a vein in the earth.

  We believed that the sphere that supported us was the Earth, and the sky was the sphere that surrounded that first sphere: in fact, exactly the same as you do, but in our world such distinctions were always provisional, arbitrary, since the consistency of the elements changed continuously, and at a certain point we would notice that our sky was hard and compact, a boulder crushing us, whereas our earth was a sticky glue, churned up by whirlpools, pullulating with bursting bubbles. I tried to take advantage of the flows of heavier metals to get closer to the real centre of the Earth, to the core that acts as core to all other cores, and I took Rdix’s hand, to guide her in that descent. But every seepage that headed towards the core undermined other material and forced it to rise up towards the surface: at times as we plunged down we would be caught up in the wave that spurted towards the upper layers, curling around itself as it did so. So we would go back up the Earth’s radius in the opposite direction; amidst the mineral layers passages opened up that sucked us in while beneath us the rock turned solid again. In the end we found ourselves supported by another layer of ground and standing beneath another stone sky, without knowing whether we were higher or lower than the point we had started out from.

  As soon as Rdix saw the metal of a new sky above us becoming fluid, she would be seized by the urge to fly. She dived upwards, swam across the dome of one sky, then of another, then of a third sky, and would grab on to the stalactites hanging from the highest vaults. I stayed behind her, partly to encourage her game, partly to remind her to take the journey back in the opposite direction. Of course, Rdix was also convinced, like me, that the point to which we had to head was the centre of the Earth. Only once we’d reached the centre would we be able to say that the whole planet was ours. We were the progenitors of life on Earth and for this reason we had to start to make it liveable from its core outwards, gradually extending our condition to the rest of the globe. We were headed towards earthly life, that is to say life of the Earth and on the Earth; not towards what pops up from its surface and which you call life on Earth but which is just a mould spreading its spores over the apple’s wrinkled skin.

  Yours has proved to be the wrong way, a life condemned to remain for ever partial, superficial, insignificant. Rdix also knew this full well: and yet her cap
acity for being enchanted by things led her to love every state of suspension above all else, and as soon as she was allowed to soar upwards in leaps, in flights, in scaling the funnels of the underworld, you would see her seeking out the most unusual locations, the most extraordinary vantage points.

  Border areas, passages between one earthly layer and another, gave her a mild vertigo. We knew that the Earth is made up of superimposed roofs, like the skins of an enormous onion, and that every roof leads you to a roof higher up, and all of them together prefigure the final roof, the point where the Earth ceases to be Earth, where all the inside is left on this side, and beyond there is only the outside. For you this border of the Earth is identified with the Earth itself; you think the sphere is the surface that wraps it, and not its total volume; you have always lived in that flat, flat dimension and you don’t even imagine that one can live elsewhere and in a different way. For us at that time, this border was something we knew existed, but we didn’t think we could see it without leaving the Earth, a prospect which seemed to us not so much frightful as absurd. That was where everything was flung out in eruptions and bituminous spurts and smoke-holes, everything that the Earth expelled from its innards: gases, liquid mixtures, volatile elements, base matter, all types of waste. It was the world in negative, something that we could not picture even in our minds, the abstract idea of it was enough to give us a shiver of disgust, no, of anxiety; or rather a stunned sensation, a kind of—as I said—vertigo (yes, that’s it, our reactions were more complex than you might think, especially Rdix’s), into which there crept an element of fascination, a kind of attraction to the void, to anything double-faced or absolute.

  Following Rdix in these wandering whims of hers, I found myself in the mouth of an extinct volcano. Above us, beyond a kind of hourglass bottleneck, there opened up the cavity of a crater, lumpy and grey, a landscape not too different in form and substance from what we were used to in our subterranean depths; but what stopped us dead in our tracks was the fact that the Earth ended just there, it did not start to bear down on itself again in a different guise, and from that point onwards the void began, or at any rate a substance that was incomparably thinner than any we had gone through up to that point, a substance that was transparent and vibrating: blue air.

  As far as vibrations are concerned, we were ready to accept those that spread slowly across granite and basalt, the snaps, clangs, deep booms moving torpidly through the masses of molten metals or the crystalline walls. Now, though, the vibrations of the air came towards us like a crackle of tiny, sharp acoustic sparks, succeeding each other from all points of space at a speed that was unbearable for us: it was a kind of tickle that led to a restless craving. We were seized—or at least I was: from here onwards I am forced to distinguish my mental responses from Rdix’s—by the desire to retreat into the black depths of silence over which the echo of earthquakes passes softly and is lost in the distance. But Rdix, attracted as she always was by what was rare and startling, felt an impatient desire to take hold of this unique thing, whether it was good or bad.

  That was when the trap was sprung: beyond the mouth of the crater the air vibrated in a continuous manner, or rather in a continuous manner that contained several discontinuous ways of vibrating. It was a sound that filled out, then faded, then increased in volume again, and in these modulations it followed an invisible pattern that stretched out in time like a succession of full and empty intervals. Other vibrations were superimposed on these, which were sharp and well separated from one another, but they blended into a drone that sounded now sweet, now bitter. As they countered or accompanied the course of the deeper sound, they created a kind of sonorous circle or field or domain.

  My immediate instinct was to escape from that circle, and return to the padded denseness: and I slid inside the crater. But in the same instant Rdix had run up the precipice towards where the sound came from and, before I could hold her back, had gone beyond the mouth of the crater. Either that or it was an arm, something that I could imagine was an arm, a sinuous arm, that grabbed her, and dragged her out; I managed to hear a cry, her cry, one that mingled with the previous sound, in harmony with it, in a single chant which she and the unknown singer intoned and picked out on the chords of some instrument, as they descended the external slopes of the volcano.

  I don’t know if this image corresponds to what I saw or imagined: I was by then plunging down into my darkness, and the internal skies were closing over me one by one: flint vaults, aluminium roofs, atmospheres of sticky sulphur; and the variegated subterranean silence echoed around me with its muffled rumbles, and its sotto-voce thunder. The relief at finding myself far from the nauseating border with the air and from the torture of the soundwaves seized hold of me along with the desperation at having lost Rdix. So there I was, on my own: I had not been able to save her from the torture of being yanked from the Earth, and exposed to the continuous percussion of strings stretched tight in the air with which the world of the void pursues its illusions of existing. My dream of making the Earth alive by reaching its ultimate core with Rdix had failed. Rdix was a prisoner, exiled in the exposed wastelands of the outside.

  There followed a period of waiting. My eyes contemplated the landscapes densely compressed against each other that filled the globe’s volume: spindly caverns, mountain-chains that were crowded together in splinters and strips, oceans wrung out like sponges: the more I recognized our crammed, concentrated, compact world, the more I suffered because Rdix was not there to inhabit it.

  To free Rdix became my sole thought: to force the doors of the outside, invade the external with the internal, reconnect Rdix to terrestrial matter, build over her a new vault, a new mineral sky, save her from the hell of that vibrating air, that sound, that song. I espied lava gathering in the volcanic caverns, the way it pressed up the vertical conduits of the Earth’s crust: that was the way.

  The day of the eruption came, a tower of lapilli rose black in the air above decapitated Vesuvius, the lava surged through the vines along the bay, burst the doors of Herculaneum, crushed the mule-driver and his beast against the city wall, while the dog imprisoned in his collar uprooted his chain and sought refuge in the barn. I was in the middle of it: I advanced with the lava, the fiery avalanche split into tongues, rivulets, snaking eddies, and in the forefront pushing furthest ahead I was there, running to find Rdix. I knew—something warned me—that Rdix was still a prisoner of the unknown singer: wherever I heard the music of that instrument and the sound of that voice, that was where she would be.

  I was swept along by the lava flow amidst secluded gardens and marble temples. I heard a song and an arpeggio; two voices singing alternately: I recognized Rdix’s voice—but oh! how changed—as she followed that of the stranger. There was an inscription on the architrave, in Greek characters: Orpheos. I broke through the front door, overflowing the threshold. I saw her, just for an instant, beside the harp. The place was enclosed and hollow, deliberately made—you would have said—for music to gather there, as in a shell. A heavy curtain—made of leather, it seemed to me, or rather stuffed like a quilt—hid a window, thus isolating their music from the surrounding world. The minute I went in, Rdix yanked the curtain aside, revealing the open window: outside it stretched the bay dazzling with reflected light, and the city and its streets. The midday light invaded the room, the light and also the sounds: a strumming of guitars rose up on all sides and the uneven rumble of hundreds of loudspeakers, and these blended with a sharp sputtering of engines and a blaring of horns. This carapace of noise extended from there outwards over the surface of the globe, or rather over the strip that delimits your extraterrestrial existence, with aerials hoisted on roofs transforming the invisible and inaudible waves that pervade space, transistors stuck to your ears filling them at every second with the acoustic glue without which you don’t know whether you are alive or dead, jukeboxes that store and spew out sounds, and the endless siren of the ambulance collecting hour by hour those injured in
your endless carnage. Against this wall of sound the lava came to a halt. Pierced by the shafts from the network of crackling vibrations, I made one more movement forwards towards the point where I had glimpsed Rdix for a second, but Rdix had disappeared, her kidnapper too: the music by which and on which they lived was swamped by the avalanche of noise; I was no longer able to distinguish either her or her song.

  I withdrew, moving backwards through the lava flow, climbed back up the volcano’s slopes, went back to inhabit the silence, to bury myself.

  Now, you who live outside, tell me, if by any chance you happen to catch Rdix’s song amidst the thick paste of sounds that surrounds you, the song that keeps her prisoner and which at the same time is itself a prisoner of the non-sound that encloses all music; if you manage to recognize Rdix’s voice, in which the distant echo of silence still resounds, tell me, let me have news of her, you extraterrestrials, you temporary winners, so that I can return to my plans to find Rdix again and descend with her to the centre of the terrestrial world, to make life terrestrial from the centre outwards, now that it is clear that your victory is actually a defeat.

  As Long as the Sun Lasts

  Depending on their size, brightness and colour, stars have a varying evolution that can be classified according to the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. Their life can be very brief (just a few million years, for the large blue stars) or they can follow such a slow course (ten billion years, for the smaller yellow stars) that before it brings them to old age their life can last (in the case of the reddest and smallest ones) for billions of millennia. For all of them there comes a moment when, once all their hydrogen has been burned, there is nothing more left for them to do except expand and cool down (turning into Red Giants) and from that point they embark on a series of thermonuclear reactions that will bring them swiftly to extinction. The Sun, a yellow star of medium power which has already been shining for four or five billion years, has in front of it a time that is at least just as long again, before it reaches that point.