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This translation first published by Jonathan Cape 1995
Published in Penguin Classics 2009
Copyright © The Estate of Italo Calvino, 2002
This translation copyright © Tim Parks, 1995
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author and translator has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-141-88957-3
Preface by Esther Calvino
FABLES AND STORIES 1943–1958
The Man Who Shouted Teresa
The Flash
Making Do
Dry River
Conscience
Solidarity
The Black Sheep
Good for Nothing
Like a Flight of Ducks
Love Far from Home
Wind in a City
The Lost Regiment
Enemy Eyes
A General in the Library
The Workshop Hen
Numbers in the Dark
The Queen’s Necklace
Becalmed in the Antilles
The Tribe with Its Eyes on the Sky
Nocturnal Soliloquy of a Scottish Nobleman
A Beautiful March Day
TALES AND DIALOGUES 1968–1984
World Memory
Beheading the Heads
The Burning of the Abominable House
The Petrol Pump
Neanderthal Man
Montezuma
Before You Say ‘Hello’
Glaciation
The Call of the Water
The Mirror, the Target
The Other Eurydice
The Memoirs of Casanova
Henry Ford
The Last Channel
Implosion
Nothing and Not Much
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PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
Italo Calvino, one of Italy’s foremost writers, was born in Cuba in 1923 and grew up in San Remo, Italy. When the Germans occupied northern Italy during the Second World War, he joined the partisans. The novel that resulted from this experience, published in English under the title The Path to the Spiders’ Nests, won wide acclaim. Best known for his experimental masterpieces Invisible Cities and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Calvino was also a brilliant exponent of allegorical fantasy in such works as The Castle of Crossed Destinies, The Complete Cosmicomics, and the trilogy, Our Ancestors, comprising The Cloven Viscount, The Baron in the Trees and The Non-Existent Knight. An essayist, journalist and the author of many stories, Calvino won the prestigious Italian literary award, the Premio Feltrinelli, in 1973. Eighteen of his books have been published in English.
The New Statesman said, ‘Calvino cannot be defined within our existing terms … his is a voice which cries out the need to rehabilitate ourselves to our books, our lives, our world’ and Time called him ‘Quite possibly the best Italian novelist alive, one of those storytellers who hold a mirror up to nature and then write about the mirror.’
Italo Calvino died in September 1985, aged sixty-two.
Italo Calvino began writing in his teens: short stories, fables, poetry and plays. The theatre was his first vocation and perhaps the one that he spent most time on. There are many surviving works from this period which have never been published. Calvino’s extraordinary capacity for self-criticism and self-referential analysis soon led him to give up the theatre. In a letter to his friend Eugenio Scalfari written in 1945 he announces laconically, ‘I’ve switched to stories.’ Written in capitals and covering a whole page the news must have been important indeed.
From then on there was never a period when Calvino was not writing. He wrote every day, wherever he was and in whatever circumstances, at a table or on his knee, in planes or hotel rooms. It is not surprising therefore that he should have left such a huge amount of work, including innumerable stories and fables. In addition to those he brought together in various collections, there are many which only appeared in newspapers and magazines, while others remained unpublished.
The texts collected in this volume – unpublished and otherwise – are just some of those written between 1943 – when the author was still in his teens – and 1984.
Some pieces were initially planned as novels but later became stories, a process that was not unusual with Calvino, who reworked a number of sections from an unpublished novel, The White Schooner, for his Collected Stories of 1958.
Other pieces in this present volume came in response to specific requests: ‘Glaciation’, for example might never have been written if a Japanese distillery producing, amongst other things, a whisky which is extremely successful in the Far East, had not decided to celebrate their fiftieth anniversary by commissioning stories from some well-known European writers. There was only one condition: that an alcoholic drink of some kind should be mentioned in the text. ‘Glaciation’ first appeared in Japanese before being published in Italian. Another story with a curious history is ‘The Burning of the Abominable House’. There had been a somewhat vague request from IBM: how far was it possible to write a story using the computer? This was in 1973 in Paris when it wasn’t easy to gain access to data processing equipment. Undaunted, Calvino gave the project a great deal of his time, carrying out all the operations the computer was supposed to do himself. The story was finally published in the Italian edition of Playboy. Calvino didn’t really feel this was a problem, though he had originally planned for it to be published in Oulipo as an example of ars combinatoria and a challenge to his own mathematical abilities.
As far as the stories that open this collection are concerned, almost all previously unpublished and very short – Calvino referred to them as raccontini, little stories – it may be useful to know that in a note found amongst his juvenilia and dated 1943, he wrote: ‘One writes fables in periods of oppression. When a man cannot give clear form to his thinking, he expresses it in fables. These little stories correspond to a young man’s political and social experiences during the death throes of Fascism.’ When the times were right, he added – with the end of the war and Fascism, that is – the fable would no longer be necessary and the writer would be able to move on to other things. But the titles and dates of many of the pieces in this collection and of other works not included here suggest that despite these youthful reflections, Calvino did in fact continue to write fables for many years thereafter.
Also included in this volume are one or two pieces, such as ‘Water Calling’ which, while neither stories nor fables in the strict sense of those words, are now very difficult to find elsewhere and definitely worth the reader’s attention.
In other cases, texts that may seem unconnected to the main body of his work are part of projects that Calvino had clearly developed in his mind but did not have time to finish.
Esther Calvino
I stepped off the pavement, walked backwards a few paces looking up, and, from the middle of the street, brought my hands to my mouth to make a megaphone and shouted towards the top stories of the block: ‘Teresa!’
My shadow took fright at the moon and huddled between my feet.
Someone walked by. Again I shouted: ‘Teresa!’ The man came up to me and said: ‘If you don’t shout louder she won’t hear you. Let’s both try. So: count to three, on three we shout together.’ And he said: ‘One, two, three.’ And we both yelled, ‘Tereeeesaaa!’
A small group of friends passing by on their way back from the theatre or the café saw us calling out. They said: ‘Come on, we’ll give you a shout too.’ And they joined us in the middle of the street and the first man said one two three and then everybody together shouted, ‘Te-reee-saaa!’
Somebody else came by and joined us; a quarter of an hour later there were a whole bunch of us, twenty almost. And every now and then somebody new came along.
Organizing ourselves to give a good shout, all at the same time, wasn’t easy. There was always someone who began before three or who went on too long, but in the end we were managing something fairly efficient. We agreed that the ‘Te’ should be shouted low and long, the ‘re’ high and long, the ‘sa’ low and short. It sounded great. Just a squabble every now and then when someone was out.
We were beginning to get it right, when somebody, who, if his voice was anything to go by, must have had a very freckly face, asked: ‘But are you sure she’s at home?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘That’s bad,’ another said. ‘Forgotten your key, have you?’
‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I have my key.’
‘So,’ they asked, ‘why don’t you go on up?’
‘Oh, but I don’t live here,’ I answered. ‘I live on the other side of town.’
‘Well then, excuse my curiosity,’ the one with the freckly voice asked carefully, ‘but who does live here?’
‘I really wouldn’t know,’ I said.
People were a bit upset about this.
‘So could you please explain,’ somebody with a very toothy voice asked, ‘why you are standing down here calling out Teresa?’
‘As far as I’m concerned,’ I said, ‘we can call another name, or try somewhere else. It’s no big deal.’
The others were a bit annoyed.
‘I hope you weren’t playing a trick on us?’ the freckly one asked suspiciously.
‘What?’ I said, resentfully, and I turned to the others for confirmation of my good faith. The others said nothing, indicating they hadn’t picked up the insinuation.
There was a moment’s embarrassment.
‘Look,’ someone said good-naturedly, ‘why don’t we call Teresa one last time, then we’ll go home.’
So we did it again. ‘One two three Teresa!’ but it didn’t come out very well. Then people headed off home, some one way, some the other.
I’d already turned into the square, when I thought I heard a voice still calling: ‘Tee-reee-sa!’
Someone must have stayed on to shout. Someone stubborn.
It happened one day, at a crossroads, in the middle of a crowd, people coming and going.
I stopped, blinked: I understood nothing. Nothing, nothing about anything: I didn’t understand the reasons for things or for people, it was all senseless, absurd. And I started to laugh.
What I found strange at the time was that I’d never realized before. That up until then I had accepted everything: traffic lights, cars, posters, uniforms, monuments, things completely detached from any sense of the world, accepted them as if there were some necessity, some chain of cause and effect that bound them together.
Then the laugh died in my throat, I blushed, ashamed. I waved to get people’s attention and ‘Stop a second!’ I shouted, ‘there’s something wrong! Everything’s wrong! We’re doing the absurdest things! This can’t be the right way! Where will it end?’
People stopped around me, sized me up, curious. I stood there in the middle of them, waving my arms, desperate to explain myself, to have them share the flash of insight that had suddenly enlightened me: and I said nothing. I said nothing because the moment I’d raised my arms and opened my mouth, my great revelation had been as it were swallowed up again and the words had come out any old how, on impulse.
‘So?’ people asked, ‘what do you mean? Everything’s in its place. All is as it should be. Everything is a result of something else. Everything fits in with everything else. We can’t see anything absurd or wrong!’
And I stood there, lost, because as I saw it now everything had fallen into place again and everything seemed natural, traffic lights, monuments, uniforms, towerblocks, tramlines, beggars, processions; yet this didn’t calm me down, it tormented me.
‘I’m sorry,’ I answered. ‘Perhaps it was me that was wrong. It seemed that way. But everything’s fine. I’m sorry,’ and I made off amid their angry glares.
Yet, even now, every time (often) that I find I don’t understand something, then, instinctively, I’m filled with the hope that perhaps this will be my moment again, perhaps once again I shall understand nothing, I shall grasp that other knowledge, found and lost in an instant.
There was a town where everything was forbidden.
Now, since the only thing that wasn’t forbidden was the game tip-cat, the town’s subjects used to assemble on meadows behind the town and spend the day there playing tip-cat.
And as the laws forbidding things had been introduced one at a time and always with good reason, no one found any cause for complaint or had any trouble getting used to them.
Years passed. One day the constables saw that there was no longer any reason why everything should be forbidden and they sent messengers to inform their subjects that they could do whatever they wanted.
The messengers went to those places where the subjects were wont to assemble.
‘Hear ye, hear ye,’ they announced, ‘nothing is forbidden any more.’
The people went on playing tip-cat.
‘Understand?’ the messengers insisted. ‘You are free to do what you want.’
‘Good,’ replied the subjects. ‘We’re playing tip-cat.’
The messengers busily reminded them of the many wonderful and useful occupations they had once engaged in and could now engage in once again. But the subjects wouldn’t listen and just went on playing, stroke after stroke, without even stopping for a breather.
Seeing that their efforts were in vain, the messengers went to tell the constables.
‘Easy,’ the constables said. ‘Let’s forbid the game of tip-cat.’
That was when the people rebelled and killed the lot of them.
Then without wasting time, they got back to playing tip-cat.
Well, I was back in the dry river again. For some time I had been residing in a country that wasn’t my own where, rather than gradually becoming more familiar, things increasingly appeared to be veiled by unsuspected differences: in their shapes, in their colours and in their reciprocal harmonies. The hills surrounding me now were unlike those I had learnt to know, with delicately rounded declivities, and the fields too and the vineyards followed those soft declivities and the steep terraces likewise, trailing off into gentle slopes. The colours were all new, like the hues of an unknown rainbow. The trees, few and far between, were as if suspended, like small clouds, and almost transparent.
Then I became aware of the air, of how it became concrete as I looked, how it filled my hands as I thrust them into it. And I saw a self that couldn’t be reconciled with the world around, rugged and stony as I was inside and with gashes of colour of a vividness that was almost dark, like shouts or laughter. And however hard I tried to put words between myself and the world, I couldn’t find any that were suitable to clothe things anew; because all my words were hard and freshly hewn: and saying them was like laying down so many stones.
Again, if some drowsy memory were to form in my mind, it would be of things learnt, not experienced: fantasy landscapes perhaps, seen in the backdrop of old paintings, or perhaps the words of old poets improperly understood.
In this fluid atmosphere I lived, as it were, swimming and felt my rough edges gradually smoothed and myself dissolved, absorbed into it.
But to find myself again, all I had to do was go down to the old dry river.
What prompted me – it was summer – was a desire for water, a religious desire, for ritual perhaps. Climbing down through the vineyards that evening, I prepared myself for a sacred bath and the word water, already synonymous with happiness for me, expanded in my mind like the name now of a goddess, now of a lover.
The temple I found on the valley bottom behind a pale bank of shrubs. It was a great river of white stones, full of silence.
The only remaining trace of water was a stream trickling almost stealthily, to one side. Sometimes the scantness of the flow between big rocks blocking the way and banks of reeds, took me back among well-known streams and conjured memories of narrower harsher valleys.
It was this: and perhaps too the feel of the stones beneath my feet – the time-worn stones of the valley bottom, their backs encrusted with a veil of congealed waterweed – or the being forced to move in jumps, from one rock to another, or perhaps it was just a noise the pebbles made, slithering down the slope.
The fact is that the gap between myself and this land narrowed and composed itself: a sort of brotherhood, a metaphysical kinship bound me to those broken stones, fecund only of shy but tremendously stubborn lichens. And in the old dry river I recognized one of my fathers, ancient, naked.
So, we went along the dry river. He who walked beside me was a companion in fortune, a native of these places, the darkness of whose skin and shaggy hair falling thickly down his back together with the plumpness of the lips and the flat nose, conferred upon him a grotesque appearance as of a tribal leader, Congolese perhaps, or perhaps from the South Seas. This fellow had a proud strapping look about him which showed both in his face, albeit bespectacled, and likewise in his gait, impeded though it was by the clumsy slovenly state of the impromptu bathers we were. Despite being chaste as a quaker in his life, his conversation upon meeting him was like a satyr’s. His accent was as breathy and steamy as any I had ever been given to understand: he spoke with his mouth eternally open or full of air, emitting, in a constant and sulphurous outburst, hurricanes of extraordinary insults.
Thus we two climbed up the dry river looking for somewhere where the trickle broadened and we might wash our bodies, filthy and tired as they were.
Now, as we walked along the great womb, it turned in a loop and the background took on a new richness of detail. On high white rocks, an adventure for the eye, sat two, three, perhaps four young ladies in their bathing costumes. Red and yellow costumes – blue too most likely, but this I don’t remember: my eyes were in need only of red and yellow – and bathing caps, as though on a fashionable beach.
It was like a cock’s crow.
A green thread of water ran nearby and came up to their heels; they crouched down in it to bathe.
We stopped, torn between the pleasure of the sight, the pangs of regret it aroused, and the shame at our now ugly and oafish selves. Then we went on towards them while they considered us without interest and we hazarded a remark or two, trying them out the way you do, the wittiest and the most banal we could manage. My sulphurous companion joined in the game without enthusiasm but with a sort of timid reserve.
In any event, a short while later, tired of the meal we were making of it and the lack of response, we set off walking again, giving free rein to more pleasant exchanges. And the memory, still present to the mind’s eye, not so much of their bodies as of their red and yellow costumes was sufficient consolation.
Sometimes a branch of the stream, never deep, would widen to cover the whole river bed; and we, the banks being high and impossible to climb, would cross with our feet in the water. We were wearing light shoes, of canvas and rubber, and the water streamed through them: and when we were back on the dry ground our feet squelched inside at every step, wheezing and splashing.
It grew dark. The white shingle came alive with black spots that leapt: tadpoles.
They must have only just sprouted legs, tiny and tailed as they were, and it was as if they hadn’t yet come to terms with this new facility which kept sending them flying up in the air. There was one on every stone, but not for long, since the one would jump and another would take his place. And because their jumps were simultaneous and because while pressing on along the great river one saw nothing but the swarming of that amphibious multitude, advancing like a boundless army, I was struck by a sense of awe, almost as if this black and white symphony, this cartoon sad as a Chinese drawing, were fearfully conjuring the idea of the infinite.
We stopped by a pool of water that seemed to offer sufficient space for us to immerse our entire bodies; even to swim a stroke or two. I went in barefoot, bareskinned: the water was weedy and putrid from the slow decay of river plants. The bottom was slimy and swampy: when you touched it, it sent turbid clouds up to the surface.
But it was water; and it was good.
My companion went down into the water with his shoes and stockings, leaving his spectacles on the bank. Then, not fully aware of the religious aspect of the ceremony, he started soaping himself.
Thus we embarked on that joyful treat washing is when it is rare and hard to come by. The pool, which we could scarcely both fit in, bubbled over with foam and roaring, as though we were elephants bathing.
On the riverbanks there were willows and shrubs and houses with waterwheels; and so unreal were they, in contrast to the concreteness of this water and these stones, that with the grey of evening filtering through they took on the air of a faded arras.
My companion was washing his feet, now, in strange manner: without taking off his shoes but soaping the stockings and shoes on his feet.
Then we dried ourselves and dressed. When I picked up a sock a tadpole jumped out.
Laid on the bank, my companion’s glasses must have been thoroughly splashed. And – as he put them on – so gay must the muddle of that world have seemed to him, coloured as it was by the last gleams of the sunset, seen through a pair of wet lenses, that he started to laugh, and to laugh, without letting up and when I asked him why he said: ‘It’s such a hell of a mess!’
And, neat and tidy now, a warm weariness in our bones to replace the dull tiredness of earlier on, we said farewell to our new river friend and set off along a little track that followed the bank, reasoning upon our own affairs and upon when we would return, and keeping our ears open, alert to the distant sounding of a bugle.
Came a war and a guy called Luigi asked if he could go, as a volunteer.
Everyone was full of praise. Luigi went to the place where they were handing out the rifles, took one and said: ‘Now I’m going to go and kill a guy called Alberto.’
They asked him who Alberto was.
‘An enemy,’ he answered, ‘an enemy of mine.’
They explained to him that he was supposed to be killing enemies of a certain type, not whoever he felt like.
‘So?’ said Luigi. ‘You think I’m dumb? This Alberto is precisely that type, one of them. When I heard you were going to war against that lot, I thought: I’ll go too, that way I can kill Alberto. That’s why I came. I know that Alberto: he’s a crook. He betrayed me, for next to nothing he made me make a fool of myself with a woman. It’s an old story. If you don’t believe me, I’ll tell you the whole thing.’
They said fine, it was okay.
‘Right then,’ said Luigi, ‘tell me where Alberto is and I’ll go there and I’ll fight.’
They said they didn’t know.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Luigi said. ‘I’ll find someone to tell me. Sooner or later I’ll catch up with him.’
They said he couldn’t do that, he had to go and fight where they sent him, and kill whoever happened to be there. They didn’t know anything about this Alberto.
‘You see,’ Luigi insisted, ‘I really will have to tell you the story. Because that guy is a real crook and you’re doing the right thing going to fight against him.’
But the others didn’t want to know.
Luigi couldn’t see reason: ‘Sorry, it may be all the same to you if I kill one enemy or another, but I’d be upset if I killed someone who had nothing to do with Alberto.’
The others lost their patience. One of them gave him a good talking to and explained what war was all about and how you couldn’t go and kill the particular enemy you wanted to.
Luigi shrugged. ‘If that’s how it is,’ he said, ‘you can count me out.’
‘You’re in and you’re staying in,’ they shouted.
‘Forward march, one-two, one-two!’ And they sent him off to war.
Luigi wasn’t happy. He’d kill people, offhand, just to see if he might get Alberto, or one of his family. They gave him a medal for every enemy he killed, but he wasn’t happy. ‘If I don’t kill Alberto,’ he thought, ‘I’ll have killed a load of people for nothing.’ And he felt bad.
Meantime they were giving him one medal after another, silver, gold, everything.
Luigi thought: ‘Kill some today, kill some tomorrow, there’ll be less of them, that crook’s turn is bound to come.’
But the enemy surrendered before Luigi could find Alberto. He felt bad he’d killed so many people for nothing, and since they were at peace now he put all his medals in a bag and went around enemy country giving them away to the wives and children of the dead.
Going around like this, he ran into Alberto.
‘Good,’ he said, ‘better late than never,’ and he killed him.
That was when they arrested him, tried him for murder and hanged him. At the trial he said over and over that he had done it to settle his conscience, but nobody listened to him.
I stopped to watch them.
They were working, at night, in a secluded street, doing something with the shutter of a shop.
It was a heavy shutter: they were using an iron bar for a lever, but the shutter wouldn’t budge.
I was walking around, going nowhere in particular, on my own. I got hold of the bar to give them a hand. They made room for me.
We weren’t pulling together. I said, ‘Hey up!’ The one on my right dug his elbow into me and said low: ‘Shut up! Are you crazy! Do you want them to hear us?’
I shook my head as if to say it had just slipped out.
It took us a while and we were sweating but in the end we levered the shutter up high enough for someone to get under. We looked at each other, pleased. Then we went in. I was given a sack to hold. The others brought stuff over and put it in.
‘As long as those skunky police don’t turn up!’ they were saying.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘They really are skunks!’ ‘Shut up. Can’t you hear footsteps?’ they said every few minutes. I listened hard, a bit frightened. ‘No, no, it’s not them!’ I said.
‘Those guys always turn up when you least expect it!’ one of them said.
I shook my head. ‘Kill ’em all, that’s what,’ I answered.
Then they told me to go out for a bit, as far as the corner, to see if anyone was coming. I went.
Outside, at the corner, there were others hugging the wall, hidden in the doorways, coming towards me.
I joined in.
‘Noises from down there, near those shops,’ said the one next to me.
I took a look.
‘Get your head down, idiot, they’ll see us and get away again,’ he hissed.
‘I was looking,’ I explained, and crouched down by the wall.
‘If we can circle round without them realizing,’ another said, ‘we’ll have them trapped. There aren’t that many.’
We moved in bursts, on tiptoe, holding our breaths: every few seconds we exchanged glances with bright eyes.
‘They won’t get away now,’ I said.
‘At last we’re going to catch them red-handed,’ someone said.
‘About time,’ I said.
‘Filthy bastards, breaking into shops like that!’ the other said.
‘Bastards, bastards!’ I repeated, angrily.
They sent me a little way ahead, to take a look. I was back inside the shop.
‘They won’t get us now,’ one was saying as he slung a sack over his shoulder.
‘Quick,’ someone else said. ‘Let’s go out through the back! That way we’ll escape from right under their noses.’
We all had triumphant smiles on our lips.
‘They’re going to feel really sore,’ I said. And we sneaked into the back of the shop.
‘We’ve fooled the idiots again!’ they said. But then a voice said: ‘Stop, who’s there,’ and the lights went on. We crouched down behind something, pale, grasping each other’s hands. The others came into the backroom, didn’t see us, turned round. We shot out and ran like crazy. ‘We’ve done it!’ we shouted. I tripped a couple of times and got left behind. I found myself with the others running after them.
‘Come on,’ they said, ‘we’re catching up.’
And everybody raced through the narrow streets, chasing them. ‘Run this way, cut through there,’ we said and the others weren’t far ahead now, so that we were shouting: ‘Come on, they won’t get away.’
I managed to catch up with one of them. He said: ‘Well done, you got away. Come on, this way, we’ll lose them.’ And I went along with him. After a while I found myself alone, in an alley. Someone came running round a corner and said: ‘Come on, this way, I saw them. They can’t have got far.’ I ran after him a while.
Then I stopped, in a sweat. There was no one left, I couldn’t hear any more shouting. I stood with my hands in my pockets and started to walk, on my own, going nowhere in particular.
There was a country where they were all thieves.
At night everybody would leave home with skeleton keys and shaded lanterns and go and burgle a neighbour’s house. They’d get back at dawn, loaded, to find their own house had been robbed.
So everybody lived happily together, nobody lost out, since each stole from the other, and that other from another again, and so on and on until you got to a last person who stole from the first. Trade in the country inevitably involved cheating on the parts both of buyer and seller. The government was a criminal organization that stole from its subjects, and the subjects for their part were only interested in defrauding the government. Thus life went on smoothly, nobody was rich and nobody was poor.
One day, how we don’t know, it so happened that an honest man came to live in the place. At night, instead of going out with his sack and his lantern, he stayed home to smoke and read novels.
The thieves came, saw the light on and didn’t go in.
This went on for a while: then they were obliged to explain to him that even if he wanted to live without doing anything, it was no reason to stop others from doing things. Every night he spent at home meant a family would have nothing to eat the following day.
The honest man could hardly object to such reasoning. He took to going out in the evening and coming back the following morning like they did, but he didn’t steal. He was honest, there was nothing you could do about it. He went as far as the bridge and watched the water flow by beneath. When he got home he found he had been robbed.
In less than a week the honest man found himself penniless, he had nothing to eat and his house was empty. But this was hardly a problem, since it was his own fault; no, the problem was that his behaviour upset everything else. Because he let the others steal everything he had without stealing anything from anybody; so there was always someone who got home at dawn to find their house untouched: the house he should have robbed. In any event after a while the ones who weren’t being robbed found themselves richer than the others and didn’t want to steal any more. To make matters worse, the ones who came to steal from the honest man’s house found it was always empty; so they became poor.
Meanwhile, the ones who had become rich got into the honest man’s habit of going to the bridge at night to watch the water flow by beneath. This increased the confusion because it meant lots of others became rich and lots of others became poor.
Now, the rich people saw that if they went to the bridge every night they’d soon be poor. And they thought: ‘Let’s pay some of the poor to go and rob for us.’ They made contracts, fixed salaries, percentages: they were still thieves of course, and they still tried to swindle each other. But, as tends to happen, the rich got richer and richer and the poor got poorer and poorer.
Some of the rich people got so rich that they didn’t need to steal or have others steal for them so as to stay rich. But if they stopped stealing they would get poor because the poor stole from them. So they paid the very poorest of the poor to defend their property from the other poor, and that meant setting up a police force and building prisons.
So it was that only a few years after the appearance of the honest man, people no longer spoke of robbing and being robbed, but only of the rich and the poor; but they were still all thieves.
The only honest man had been the one at the beginning, and he died in very short order, of hunger.
Already high, the sun shone obliquely into the street, lit it confusedly, projecting shadows from the roofs on to the walls of houses opposite, kindling fancy shop windows in dazzling gleams, popping out from unsuspected cracks to strike the faces of people bustling past each other on the crowded pavements.
I first saw the man with the light-coloured eyes at a cross-roads, standing or walking, I can’t rightly recall: he was getting nearer and nearer to me, that’s for sure, so either I was walking towards him or vice versa. He was tall and thin, wore a light-coloured raincoat, and carried a tightly rolled umbrella hanging neatly from one arm. On his head he had a felt hat, once again light-coloured and with a wide round brim; immediately beneath were the eyes, large, cold, liquid, with a strange flicker at the corners. Thin as he was, with close-cropped hair, it was hard to tell how old he might be. In one hand he held a book, closed, but with a finger inside, as if to keep his place.
Immediately, I had the impression that his eyes were upon me, motionless eyes that took me in from head to toe, that didn’t spare my back either, nor my insides. I looked away at once, but every few steps as I walked, I felt the urge to dart a glance at him, and each time I would find him nearer, and looking at me. In the end he was standing in front of me, an almost lipless mouth on the point of creasing into a smile. The man pulled a finger from his, pocket, slowly, and used it to point downwards to my feet; it was then that he spoke, with a thin, rather humble voice.
‘I beg your pardon,’ he said, ‘your shoelace is undone.’
It was true. Trodden and bedraggled, the two ends of the lace dangled at the sides of my shoe. I blushed a little, mumbled a ‘Thank you’, bent down.
Stopping in the street to tie up a shoe is annoying: especially when you stop as I did in the middle of the pavement, without a step or wall to put my foot on, kneeling on the ground, with people knocking against me. The man with the light-coloured eyes muttered a vague goodbye and went off at once.
But it was destiny that I should meet him again: not a quarter of an hour had passed before once again I found him standing in front of me, looking in a shop window. As soon as I saw him I was seized by an inexplicable urge to turn round and retreat, or better still to pass by as quick as I could, while he was intent on the window, in the hope he wouldn’t notice. But no: already it was too late, the stranger had turned, had seen me, was looking at me, had something else he wanted to say to me. I stopped in front of him, afraid. The stranger had an even humbler tone.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘it’s undone again.’
I wanted to vanish into thin air. Without answering, I bent down to tie the lace with angry diligence. My ears were singing and I somehow felt the people passing by and knocking against me were the same people as had knocked against me and noticed me the first time, and that they were muttering ironic remarks to themselves.
But the shoe was tied good and tight now and I was walking along with a light sure step. Indeed, with a sort of unconscious pride, I was even hoping I’d run into the stranger again now, to recover my reputation as it were.
Yet no sooner had I taken a turn around the square to find myself a few yards away from him again, on the same pavement, than quite suddenly the pride that had been urging me on was replaced by dismay. For as he looked at me the stranger had an expression of regret on his face, and he came towards me gently shaking his head, as one pained by some natural fact beyond human control.
As I stepped forward, I squinted with apprehension at the guilty shoe; it was still as tightly tied as before. Yet to my dismay the stranger went on shaking his head for a while, then said:
‘Now the other is undone.’
I felt the way you do in nightmares when you want to scrub the whole thing out, to wake up. I forced a grimace of rebellion, biting a lip as though to hold back a curse, then started yanking frantically at my laces again, crouched down in the middle of the street. I stood up, cheeks flushed beneath my eyes, and walked off head down, wanting nothing better than to escape the gaze of the crowd.
But the day’s torture wasn’t over yet: as I toiled home, hurrying, I could feel the loops of the bow slowly slipping over one another, the knot getting looser and looser, the laces very gradually coming undone. At first I slowed down, as though a little care would be enough to sustain the tangle’s uncertain equilibrium. But I was still far from home and already the tips of the laces were trailing on the pavement, flopping this way and that. Then my walking became breathless, I was fleeing, as though from a wild terror: the terror that I would yet again come upon that man’s inexorable gaze.
It was a small compact town where one went endlessly up and down the same few streets. Walking round it, you’d meet the same faces three or even four times in half an hour. Now I was marching across it as though in a nightmare, torn between the shame of being seen about with my shoelace yet again untied, and the shame of being seen bending down yet again to tie it. Eyes seemed to thicken and throng around me, like branches in a wood. I dived into the first doorway I found, to hide.
But at the back of the porch, in the half-light, hands resting on the handle of his tightly rolled umbrella, stood the man with the light-coloured eyes, and it was as though he were waiting for me.
At first I gaped in amazement, then hazarded something like a smile and pointed to my untied shoe, to stop him.
The stranger nodded with that sadly understanding expression he had.
‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘they’re both undone.’
If nothing else the doorway was a quieter place to do up a shoelace, and, with a step to rest my foot on, more comfortable too, though standing behind and above me I had the man with the light-coloured eyes watching, missing not one move of my fingers, and I sensed his gaze in amongst them, muddling them up. But after all I’d been through, it didn’t bother me any more now; I was even whistling as I tied those damned knots for the nth time, but tying them better now, being relaxed.
All would have been well had the man kept quiet, had he not started first to clear his throat, a little uncertainly, then to say all in a rush, with decision:
‘I beg your pardon, but you still haven’t learnt how to tie your laces.’
I turned to him, red in the face, still crouching down. I ran my tongue between my lips.
‘You know,’ I said, ‘I’m hopeless at tying knots. You wouldn’t believe it. As a child I never wanted to make the effort to learn. I take my shoes off and put them on again without untying them. I use a bootjack. I’m hopeless at knots, I get muddled. You wouldn’t believe it.’
Then the stranger said something odd, the last thing you would have thought he might want to say.
‘So,’ he said, ‘how will you teach your children, if you have any, to tie their shoes?’
But the strangest part was that I thought this over a moment and then answered, as if I’d already considered the question before and settled it and stored the answer away, somehow expecting that sooner or later someone would ask me.
‘My children,’ I said, ‘will learn from others how to tie their shoes.’
Ever more absurd, the stranger came back:
‘And if, for example, the great flood should come and the whole of humanity were to perish and you were the one chosen, you and your children, to continue the human race. How would you manage, have you ever thought about that? How would you teach them their knots? Because if you don’t, heaven knows how many centuries might go by before humanity manages to tie a knot, to invent it over again!’
I couldn’t make head or tail of this now, the knot or the conversation.
‘But,’ I tried to object, ‘why should I of all people be the chosen one, as you put it, why me when I don’t even know how to tie a knot?’
The man with the light-coloured eyes was against the light on the threshold of the door: there was something frighteningly angelic in his expression.
‘Why me?’ he said. ‘That’s how all men answer. And all men have a knot on their shoes, something they don’t know how to do; an inability that binds them to others. Society depends on this asymmetry between people these days: a dovetailing of skills and incompetence. But the Flood? If the Flood came and one needed a Noah? Not so much a just man as a man able to bring along the few things it would take to start again. You see, you don’t know to tie your shoes, somebody else doesn’t know how to plane wood, someone else again has never read Tolstoy, someone else doesn’t know how to sow grain and so on. I’ve been looking for him for years, and, believe me, it’s hard, really hard; it seems people have to hold each other by the hand like the blind man and the lame who can’t go anywhere without each other, but argue just the same. It means if the Flood comes we’ll all die together.’
So saying he turned and disappeared in the street. I never saw him again and I still wonder whether he wasn’t some strange maniac or an angel, for years roving the earth in vain in search of a second Noah.