Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [3]
Making Do
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 tipcat.’
That was when the people rebelled and killed the lot of them.
Then without wasting time, they got back to playing tip-cat.
Dry River
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.