Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [15]
That's how it is: everything women have been told about love has been wrong. They've been told all sorts of things, but all wrong. And their experiences, all imprecise. And yet, they trust the things they're told, not the experiences. That's why they're so wrong-headed.
‘I'd like, you see, us girls,’ she says. ‘Men: things you read, things they whisper in your ear from when you're a litde girl. You learn that that is more important than anything else, the aim of everything else. Then, you see, I realized that you never get to that, really to that. It's not more important than everything else. I wish it didn't exist at all, any of it, that you didn't have to think about it. Yet you're always expecting it. Maybe you have to become a mother to get to the real sense of everything. Or a prostitute.’
There: it's great. We all have our secret explanations. You only have to reveal your secret explanation and she's not a stranger any more. We lie cuddled up together like two big dogs, or river gods.
‘You see,’ Mariamirella says, ‘maybe I'm afraid of you. But I don't know where to hide. There's nothing on the horizon, only you. You're the bear and the cave. That's why I'm cuddled up in your arms now, so that you can protect me from my fear of you.’
And yet, it's easier for women. Life flows in them, a great river, in them, the perpetuators, nature is sure and mysterious, in them. Once there was the Great Matriarchy, the history of peoples flowed as simply as that of plants. Then the conceit of the drones: a rebellion, and we had civilization. That's what I think, but I don't believe it.
Once I found I couldn't make it with a girl,’ I tell her, ‘on a meadow in the mountains. The mountain was called Mount Bignone and the girl Angela Pia. A big meadow, amongst the bushes, I remember, and a cricket jumping on every leaf. That trilling of crickets, so high, no escape. She couldn't really understand why I got up then and said that the last cable car was about to leave. Because it was a place you got to by cable car: and going over the pylons you felt yourself go empty inside and she said: “It's like when you kiss me.” That was quite a relief, I remember.’
‘You shouldn't tell me this sort of thing,’ Mariamirella says. There'd be no more bear nor cave either. All I'd be left with was fear, all around.’
Tou see, Mariamirella,’ I tell her, Ve mustn't separate things from thoughts. The curse of our generation has been just that: not being able to do what we thought. Or not being able to think what we did. I'll give you an example: years ago (I'd changed my age on my identity card because I wasn't old enough), I went to a woman in a brothel. The brothel was at 15, via Calandra and the woman was called Derna.’
What?’
‘Derna. We had the empire then and the only novelty was that the women in the brothels were called Derna, Adua, Harrar, Dessie.’
‘Dessie?’
‘Even Dessie, as I recall. You want me to call you Dessie from now on?’
‘No.’
Well, to go back to that time, with this Derna. I was young and she was big and hairy. I ran away. I paid what I had to pay and ran away: down the stairs I had the impression everybody came out of their rooms to look at me and laugh. But that's not important: the thing is that as soon as I was home that woman became a thought, something mental, and I wasn't afraid of her any more. I began to want her, want her terribly… That's the point: for us things thought are different from the things themselves.’
‘Right,’ says Mariamirella, I've already thought of everything possible, I've lived hundreds of lives with my thoughts. Of marrying, of having lots of children, of having abortions, of marrying someone rich, of marrying someone poor, of becoming a high society lady, of becoming a prostitute, a dancer, a nun, a roast-chestnut seller, a star, an MP, an ambulance driver, a sportswoman. Hundreds of lives with all their details. And they all ended happily. But in real life none of those things I think ever happens. So every time I find myself imagining