Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [14]
I tear up the mammoth, the bell rings: Mariamirella. I run to open the door before the landlady can appear at the barred toilet window and start shouting; Mariamirella would be frightened off.
One day the landlady will die, strangled by thieves: it's written down, there's nothing anyone can do about it. She thinks she can save herself by not going to open the door when they ring, not asking: Whoozzat callin’?’ from the barred toilet window, but it's a pointless precaution, the typesetters have already prepared the headline - Landlady Adelaide Braghetti Strangled by Unknown Killers - and are waiting for confirmation to lay out the page.
Mariamirella is there in the half-light, with her sailor's beret and pompom and her heart-shaped mouth. I open the door and she's already prepared a whole speech to make as soon as she's in, it doesn't matter what she actually says, only that we talk without a break as I lead her down the dark corridor to my room.
It ought to be a long speech, so as not to get stuck in the middle of my room without having anything left to say. The room offers no prompts, hopeless in its squalor: the metal bedstead, tides of unknown books in the litde bookcase.
‘Come and look out of the window, Mariamirella.’
The window is a French window with a waist-high railing but no balcony; you have to go up two steps to it and it feels as if we were climbing and climbing. Outside, a reddish sea of tiles. We look at the roofs stretching off all around as far as the eye can see, the stumpy chimneys suddenly puffing rags of smoke, the ridiculous balustrades on cornices where no one can ever look out, the low walls enclosing empty spaces on top of tumbledown houses. I put a hand on her shoulder, a hand that hardly feels like mine, swollen almost, as if we were touching each other through a layer of water.
‘Seen enough?’
Tes.’
‘Down then.’
We go down and close the window. We're underwater, we fumble with vague sensations. The mammoth roams about the room, ancient human fear.
‘So?’
I've taken off her sailor's beret and tossed it on the bed.
‘No. I'm off now anyway.’
She puts it back on her head, I grab it and throw it up in the air, flying, now we're running after each other, playing with gritted teeth, love, this is love one for another, a scratching biting longing one for another, punching too, on the shoulders, then a weary weary kiss: love.
Now we're smoking sitting face to face: the cigarettes are huge between our fingers, like things held underwater, big sunken anchors. Why aren't we happy?
What's the matter?’ asks Mariamirella.
‘The mammoth,’ I tell her.
What's that?’ she asks.
symbol,’ I tell her.
What of?’ she says.
I don't know what of,’ I tell her. ‘A symbol.’
‘Look,’ I tell her, ‘one evening I was sitting on a river bank with a girl’
‘Called?’
‘The river was called the Po, and the girl Enrica. Why?’
‘Oh nothing: I like to know who you've been with.’
‘Okay, so we were sitting on the grassy river bank. It was autumn, in the evening, the banks were dark already and coming down the river was the shadow of two men rowing standing up. In town the lights were going on and we were sitting on the bank the other side of the river, and we were full of what they call love, that rough discovering and seeking of each other, that sharp taste of one another, you know, love. And I was full of sadness and solitude, that evening on the bank of rivers and their black shadows, the sadness and solitude of new loves, the sadness and nostalgia of old loves, the sadness and desperation of future loves. Don Juan, sad hero, ancient burden, he was full of sadness and solitude and nothing else.’
‘Is it the same with me too?’ Mariamirella asks.
‘What if you spoke a bit, now, if you said what you know?’
I started to shout with rage; sometimes when you speak you hear what might be an echo, it drives you crazy.
‘What do you