Read Online If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Italo Calvino
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others, define, translate into words, but which for this very reason appear to me decisive. They are announcements or presages that concern me and the world at once: for my part, not only the external events of my existence but also what happens inside, in the depths of me; and for the world, not some particular event but the general way of being of all things. You will understand therefore my difficulty in speaking about it, except by allusion.
Monday. Today I saw a hand thrust out of a window of the prison, toward the sea. I was walking on the seawall of the port, as is my habit, until I was just below the old fortress. The fortress is entirely enclosed by its oblique walls; the windows, protected by double or triple grilles, seem blind. Even knowing that prisoners are confined in there, I have always looked on the fortress as an element of inert nature, of the mineral kingdom. Therefore the appearance of the hand amazed me, as if it had emerged from the cliff. The hand was in an unnatural position; I suppose the windows are set high in the cells and cut out of the wall; the prisoner must have performed an acrobat's feat—or, rather, a contortionist's—to get his arm through grille after grille, to wave his hand in the free air. It was not a prisoner's signal to me, or to anyone else; at any rate I did not take it as such; indeed, then and there I did not think of the prisoners at all; I must say that the hand seemed white and slender to me, a hand not unlike my own, in which nothing suggested the roughness one would expect in a convict. For me it was like a sign coming from the stone: the stone wanted to inform me that our substance was common, and therefore something of what
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constitutes my person would remain, would not be lost with the end of the world; a communication will still be possible in the desert bereft of life, bereft of my life and all memory of me. I am telling the first impressions I noted, which are the ones that count.
Today I reached the belvedere from which you can glimpse, down below, a little stretch of beach, deserted, facing the gray sea. The wicker chairs with their high curved backs, like baskets, against the wind, arranged in a semicircle, seemed to suggest a world in which the human race has disappeared and things can do nothing but bespeak its absence. I felt a kind of vertigo, as if I were merely plunging from one world to another, and in each I arrived shortly after the end of the world had taken place.
I passed the belvedere again half an hour later. From one chair, its back to me, a little ribbon was flapping. I went down the steep promontory path, as far as a shelf from which the angle of vision changed. As I expected, seated in the chair, completely hidden by the wicker shields, there was Miss Zwida, in her white straw hat, her drawing pad open on her lap; she was copying a seashell. I was not pleased to see her; this morning's negative signs dissuaded me from striking up a conversation; for about three weeks now I have been encountering her alone in my walks on the cliffs and the dunes, and I want nothing more than to address her—indeed, it is with this intention that I come down from my pension every day, but every day something deters me.
Miss Zwida is staying at the Hotel of the Sea Lily; I went there to ask the desk clerk her name. Perhaps she found out; holiday people at this season in Pëtkwo are very few; the young ones could be counted on your fingers. Encountering me so often, she is perhaps expecting me to address her one day.
The motives that constitute an obstacle to a possible meeting between the two of us are several. In the first
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place, Miss Zwida collects and draws seashells; I had a beautiful collection of shells, years ago, when I was a boy, but then I gave it up and have forgotten everything: classifications, morphology, geographical distribution of the various species. A conversation with Miss Zwida would lead me inevitably to talk about seashells,
Monday. Today I saw a hand thrust out of a window of the prison, toward the sea. I was walking on the seawall of the port, as is my habit, until I was just below the old fortress. The fortress is entirely enclosed by its oblique walls; the windows, protected by double or triple grilles, seem blind. Even knowing that prisoners are confined in there, I have always looked on the fortress as an element of inert nature, of the mineral kingdom. Therefore the appearance of the hand amazed me, as if it had emerged from the cliff. The hand was in an unnatural position; I suppose the windows are set high in the cells and cut out of the wall; the prisoner must have performed an acrobat's feat—or, rather, a contortionist's—to get his arm through grille after grille, to wave his hand in the free air. It was not a prisoner's signal to me, or to anyone else; at any rate I did not take it as such; indeed, then and there I did not think of the prisoners at all; I must say that the hand seemed white and slender to me, a hand not unlike my own, in which nothing suggested the roughness one would expect in a convict. For me it was like a sign coming from the stone: the stone wanted to inform me that our substance was common, and therefore something of what
----
constitutes my person would remain, would not be lost with the end of the world; a communication will still be possible in the desert bereft of life, bereft of my life and all memory of me. I am telling the first impressions I noted, which are the ones that count.
Today I reached the belvedere from which you can glimpse, down below, a little stretch of beach, deserted, facing the gray sea. The wicker chairs with their high curved backs, like baskets, against the wind, arranged in a semicircle, seemed to suggest a world in which the human race has disappeared and things can do nothing but bespeak its absence. I felt a kind of vertigo, as if I were merely plunging from one world to another, and in each I arrived shortly after the end of the world had taken place.
I passed the belvedere again half an hour later. From one chair, its back to me, a little ribbon was flapping. I went down the steep promontory path, as far as a shelf from which the angle of vision changed. As I expected, seated in the chair, completely hidden by the wicker shields, there was Miss Zwida, in her white straw hat, her drawing pad open on her lap; she was copying a seashell. I was not pleased to see her; this morning's negative signs dissuaded me from striking up a conversation; for about three weeks now I have been encountering her alone in my walks on the cliffs and the dunes, and I want nothing more than to address her—indeed, it is with this intention that I come down from my pension every day, but every day something deters me.
Miss Zwida is staying at the Hotel of the Sea Lily; I went there to ask the desk clerk her name. Perhaps she found out; holiday people at this season in Pëtkwo are very few; the young ones could be counted on your fingers. Encountering me so often, she is perhaps expecting me to address her one day.
The motives that constitute an obstacle to a possible meeting between the two of us are several. In the first
----
place, Miss Zwida collects and draws seashells; I had a beautiful collection of shells, years ago, when I was a boy, but then I gave it up and have forgotten everything: classifications, morphology, geographical distribution of the various species. A conversation with Miss Zwida would lead me inevitably to talk about seashells,
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