Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [21]
‘Parade step!’
The drums rolled, then began to beat a measured rhythm. The regiment quickly regained its composure and was now tramping forward with aggressive self-confidence.
‘There,’ the colonel said to himself, casting a quick glance over the ranks, ‘that's a real regiment on the march.’
On the pavement a few passers-by stopped to line the road, and they looked on with the air of people who would like to be interested and maybe even take pleasure in the deployment of so much energy, but are troubled by a feeling they don't really understand, a vague sense of alarm, and in any event have too many serious things on their minds to start thinking about sabres and cannons.
Sensing these eyes on them, troops and officials were again overtaken by that slight, inexplicable uneasiness. They went on marching with their rigid parade step, but they couldn't rid themselves of the idea that they were doing these good citizens a wrong. In order not to be distracted by their presence, Infantryman Marangon Remigio kept his eyes down: when you march in columns your only concerns are keeping in line and keeping in step; the detachment can take care of everything else. But hundreds and hundreds of soldiers were doing what Infantryman Marangon was doing; in fact you could say that all of them, officials, ensigns, the colonel himself, were advancing without ever raising their eyes from the ground, faithfully following the column. Proceeding at parade step, their band at their head, the regiment was thus seen to veer to one side, leave the paved road, stray into a flowerbed in the park and push on determinedly trampling down buttercups and lilacs.
The gardeners were watering the grass and what did they see? A regiment advancing on them with eyes closed, stamping their heels on the tender grass. The poor men couldn't think how to hold their hoses without directing them at the soldiers. They ended up pointing them vertically upwards, but the long jets fell back in unsuspected directions; one watered Colonel Clelio Leon-tuomini from head to toe as he too advanced bolt upright, his eyes closed.
Showered with water, the colonel jumped and let out a shout:
Tlood! Flood! Mobilize for rescue!’ Then immediately he pulled himself together, regained command of the regiment and led them out of the gardens.
But he was a bit disappointed. That shout of, Tlood! Flood!’ had betrayed a secret and almost unconscious hope: that a natural disaster would suddenly occur, without killing anyone, but dangerous enough to call off the parade and give the regiment a chance to do all kinds of useful things for people: building bridges, organizing rescues. This alone would have soothed his conscience.
Having left the park, the regiment was now in a different part of town, not in the broad avenues where they were supposed to be parading, but in an area of narrow, quiet, winding lanes. The colonel decided he would cut through these streets to get to the square without wasting any more time.
An unusual excitement reigned in the area. Electricians were fixing the streetlamps with long portable ladders and lifting and lowering the telephone wires. Surveyors from the civil engineers were measuring the streets with ranging rods and spring-wind tape measures. The gasmen were using picks to open up big holes in the pavement. Schoolchildren were walking along in line. Bricklayers were tossing along bricks to each other, shouting: ‘Hey up, hey up!’ Cyclists went by with stepladders on their shoulders, whistling hard. And at every window a maid was standing on the sill washing the panes and wringing out wet cloths into big buckets.
Thus the regiment had to proceed with its parade down those winding streets, pushing their way through a tangle of telephone wires, tape measures, stepladders, holes in the road, and well-endowed schoolgirls, and at the same time catching bricks in flight — ‘Hey up! hey up!’ — and avoiding