Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [47]
‘And how long do you want to spend, combing that field,’ he asked, dropping his respectful tone.
Who says it's still in the field?’ said Fiorenzo.
‘If it's not in the field you've got it at home.’
‘That's my home,’ said the man, and pointed away from the road. ‘Come with me.’
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Fiorenzo's territory ended where the first scattered apartment blocks of the outskirts turned their backs on each other in foggy fields. And near the border, where the capitals of the most remote countries tend to be situated, was his house. All kinds of historic events and upheavals had combined to create it: the low brick walls, half in ruins, were part of an old army stable, later closed upon the decline of the cavalry; the Turkish toilet and an indelible piece of graffiti were the result of later use as an armoury for the training corps; a barred window was the sinister reminder that the place had been a prison during the civil war; it was to winkle out the last platoon of warriors that they had started that fire that had almost destroyed the place; the floor and the piping belonged to the period when it had been a camp first for the wounded and then for refugees; later a long winter plundering for firewood, roof tiles and bricks had once again demolished the place; until, evicted from their last abode, along came Fiorenzo and family with their beds and boards. He completed the effect by replacing half the roof with an old rolldown shutter found in the vicinity and apparendy twisted in some explosion. Thus Fiorenzo, his wife Ines and their four surviving children once again had a home where they could hang pictures of relatives and family allowance slips on the walls and await the birth of their fifthborn with some hope that the child would live.
If one could hardly say that the look of the building was much improved since the day the family moved in, this was because Fiorenzo's genius in inhabiting the place was closer to that of the primitive man huddling up in a cave than the industrious castaway or pioneer who strives to recreate about him something of the civilization he has left behind. Of civilization round about him Fiorenzo had all his heart could desire, but civilization was hostile, forbidden territory to him. After losing his job and having quickly forgotten the meagre skills he had somehow once managed to acquire - those of a copper pipe polisher - his hands made sluggish in a manual job that again had not lasted very long, cut out — from one day to the next and with a whole family dependent on him — from the great circular flow of money, it hadn't taken Fioren2o long to retrace man's steps back along the course of history, until, having lost the notion that if you need something you build it or grow it or make it, he now cared for nothing but what could be gathered or hunted down.
Fiorenzo now saw the city as a world of which he could not be a part, just as the hunter does not think of becoming the forest, but only of plundering its wildlife, plucking a ripe berry, procuring shelter against the rain. So for Fiorenzo the city's wealth meant the cabbage stalks left lying on the cobbles of district markets after the stalls are taken down; the edible grasses that garnish the suburban tramlines; the public benches that could be sawn up piece by piece for firewood; the lovelorn cats that would intrude on common property at night never to return. A whole city existed for his benefit, a cast-off, second- or third-hand city, half buried, excremental, made of worn-out shoes, cigarette stubs, umbrella handles. And even way down at the level of these dust-laden riches there was still a market, with its supply and demand, its speculations, its hoarders. Fiorenzo sold empty botdes, rags and catskins, thus still managing the occasional fleeting peck at the monetary cycle. The most tiring activity, but the most profitable too, was that of the mine prospectors who would dig at the bottom of a steep bank below a factory looking for scrap iron in the industrial waste there, and sometimes in a single day they would