Read Online Mr Palomar (Vintage Classics) by Italo Calvino - Free Book Online Page A

out, aligned like buttons on a Pierrot’s tunic, like the notes of a score, dotting the roseate, variegated beds of pâtés de foie gras, of head-cheese, terrines, galantines, fans of salmon, artichoke hearts garnished like trophies. The leading motive of the little truffle discs unifies the variety of substances like the black of dinner-jackets at a masked ball, distinguishing the festive dress of the foods.
    Gray and opaque and sullen, on the contrary, are the people who make their way among the counters, shunted by salesladies in white, more or less elderly, brusquely efficient. The splendor of the salmon canapés radiant with mayonnaise disappears, swallowed by the dark shopping-bags of the customers. Certainly every one of these men and women knows exactly what he wants, heads straight for his objective with a decisiveness admitting no hesitancy; and rapidly he dismantles mountains of vol-au-vents, white puddings, cervelats.
    Mr Palomar would like to catch in their eyes some reflection of those treasures’ spell, but the faces and actions are only impatient and hasty, of people concentrated on themselves, nerves taut, each concerned with what he has and what he does not have. Nobody seems to him worthy of the pantagruelian glory that unfolds in those cases, on the counters. A greed without joy or youth drives them; and yet a deep, atavistic bond exists between them and those foods, their consubstance, flesh of their flesh.
    He realizes he is feeling something closely akin to jealousy: he would like the duck and hare pâtés, from their platters, to show they prefer him to the others, recognizing him as the only one deserving of their gifts, those gifts that nature and culture have handed down for millennia and that must not now fall into profane hands! Is not the sacred enthusiasm that he feels pervading him perhaps a sign that he alone is the elect, the one touched by grace, the only one worthy of the deluge of good things brimming from the cornucopia of the world?
    He looks around, waiting to hear the vibration of an orchestra of flavors. No, nothing vibrates. All those delicacies stir in him imprecise, blurred memories; his imagination does not instinctively associate flavors with images and names. He asks himself if his gluttony is not chiefly mental, aesthetic, symbolic. Perhaps, for all the sincerity of his love of galantines, galantines do not love him. They sense that his gaze transforms every food into a document of the history of civilization, a museum exhibit.
    Mr Pilomar wishes the line would advance more rapidly. He knows that if he spends a few more hours in this shop, he will end up convincing himself that he is the profane one, the alien, the outsider.

The cheese museum
     
    Mr Palomar is standing in line in a cheese shop, in Paris. He wants to buy certain goat cheeses that are preserved in oil in little transparent containers and spiced with various herbs and condiments. The line of customers moves along a counter where samples of the most unusual and disparate specialties are displayed. This is a shop whose range seems meant to document every conceivable form of dairy product; the very sign, “Spécialités froumagères,” with that rare archaic or vernacular adjective, advises that here is guarded the legacy of a knowledge accumulated by a civilization through all its history and geography.
    Three or four girls in pink smocks wait on the customers. The moment one of the girls is free she deals with the first in line and asks him to express his wishes; the customer names or, more often, points, moving about the shop towards the object of his specific and expert appetites.
    At that moment the whole line moves forward one place; and the person who till then had been standing beside the “Bleu d’Auvergne” veined with green now finds himself at the level of the “Brin d’amour”, whose whiteness holds strands of dried straw stuck to it; the customer contemplating a ball wrapped in leaves can now