Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [13]
Just a few days before the end of the war, the English decided to drop things by parachute. The partisans walked to Piedmont, they marched for two days and lit fires at night in the middle of the fields. The English dropped overcoats with gold buttons, but it was already spring, and bundles of old Italian rifles from the first African war. The partisans picked them up and pranced wildly round the fire like so many Negroes. Natale danced and shouted amongst them, and was happy.
Love Far from Home
Occasionally a train sets off along the seafront and on that train there's me, leaving. Because I don't want to stay in my sleepy, cabbage-patch village, puzzling out the licence plates of out-of-town cars like a kid down from the mountains sitting on the wall of a bridge. I'm off, bye bye village.
In the world, beyond my village, there are other towns, some on the sea, others, why I don't know, lost in the depths of the lowlands, on the banks of railways that arrive, how I don't know, after breathless journeys through endless stretches of countryside. Every so often I get off in one of these towns and I always have the look of the first-time traveller, pockets stuffed with newspapers, eyes smarting with dust.
At night in my new bed I turn off the light and listen to the trams, then think of my room in my village, so distant in the night it seems impossible that two places so far apart could exist at the same moment. And, where I'm not sure, I fall asleep.
In the morning, outside the window, there's so much to explore: if it's Genoa, streets that go up and down and houses above and below and a rush of wind between them; if it's Turin, straight streets that never end, looking out over the railings of the balconies, with a double row of trees fading away beyond into white skies; if it's Milan, houses that turn their backs on you in fields of fog. There must be other towns, other things to explore: one day I'll go and see.
But in every town the room is always the same, it seems the landladies must send the furniture on from town to town as soon as they know I'm coming. Even my shaving kit on the marble dresser top looks as if I'd found it there when I arrived rather than putting it there myself, it has such an air of inevitability, doesn't seem mine at all. I could live years in one of these rooms after other years in other and absolutely similar rooms, without ever managing to feel it was mine or make my mark on it. Because my suitcase is always ready for the next journey, and no town in Italy is the right town, no town has work to offer, no town would be good enough even if you did find work because there's always another and better town where you hope to go to work one day. So I put my stuff in the drawers exactly how it was in my suitcase, ready to be packed again.
Days and weeks go by and a girl begins to come to the room. I could say it was always the same girl because at first there's no difference between one girl and the next, they're strangers and you communicate with them following a prescribed ritual. You have to spend a bit of time and do a lot of things with this girl for you both to understand the whys and wherefores; and then begins the season of enormous discoveries, the real, perhaps the only exciting season of love. Then, spending still more time and doing still more things with this girl, you realize that the other girls were like this too, that I too am like this, we all are, and everything she does is boring, as if repeated in a thousand mirrors. Bye bye, girlfriend.
The first time a girl comes to see me, let's say it's Mariamirella, I hardly do anything all afternoon: I go on with a book I'm reading, then realize that for the last twenty pages I've been looking at the letters as though they were pictures; I write, but really I'm doodling all over the white paper and all the