Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [48]
On these and other expeditions Fiorenzo was accompanied by his two eldest sons. Having grown up to this life they could imagine no other, and would run wild and voracious about the city's outskirts, akin to the mice they shared their food and games with. Ines on the other hand had developed the mentality of the lioness; she wouldn't budge from the lair where she licked their lastborn, she had lost the homely habit of tidying and cleaning, she pounced greedily on the loot that man and sons brought home, sometimes helping them to make it saleable by unstitching pieces of shoe uppers to be sold for patches to cobblers, or scraping the tobacco from the cigarette stubs; and despite their famished life, she had become fat and squat and, after her fashion, calm. The other world, of stockings and cinema, no longer called to her from hoardings whose images to her mind had completely lost their meaning, had become huge indecipherable enigmas. Day after day, when she dusted the glass of the photograph of herself wearing her bride's white veil beside Fiorenzo on their wedding day, she was no longer sure whether it was herself or her great-grandmother. Rheumatism had led to the habit of lying down all day, even when she had no pain. On her bed in broad daylight in the ramshackle house, her baby beside her, she looked up at a heavy, foggy sky and fell to singing an old tango. Thus Enrico, approaching the hovel, heard singing: he was understanding less and less.
With expert eye he took in the warped tilt of the roof, the irregular angles of the fire-mottled walls. One or two effects would not have been out of place in a seaside villa. He should bear that in mind. He remembered a paper he'd once given at a conference on urban design: It is not from the chateau that we set out upon our adventure, gentlemen, but from the shack…
Becalmed in the Antilles
You should have heard my Uncle Donald, who had sailed with Admiral Drake, when he started telling us one of his yarns.
‘Uncle Donald, Uncle Donald!’ we would shout in his ears when we caught the glint of an eye through his ever half-closed lids, ‘tell us about that time you were becalmed in the Antilles!’
What? Ah, becalmed, yes yes, truly becalmed…’ he would begin in a feeble voice. We were sailing off the Antilles, advancing at a snail's pace, sea smooth as oil, all sails unfurled to catch any rare breath of wind. And all of a sudden we're only a cannon shot away from a Spanish galleon. The galleon was hove to, so we down sails as well and there, in the middle of that dead calm, we prepare to engage. We couldn't get past them, and they couldn't pass us. But the fact of the matter is that they had no intention of advancing: they were there on purpose so as not to let us pass. Whereas we, Drake's fleet, had sailed far and wide for no other purpose than to give no quarter to the Spanish fleet, to seize the Grand Armada's treasure from papist hands and deliver it into those of her Gracious Britannic Majesty, Queen Elizabeth. Still, with that galleon's cannons to deal with, our handful of culverins weren't enough to carry the day, so we were careful not to fire the first shot. Ah yes, m'boys, that was the position of the opposing forces, get it? Those damned Spanish had provisions of water, fruit from the Antilles, open supply lines back to their ports, they could stay there as long as they liked: but they were as careful not to start shooting as we were, because the way things were going that little war with the English suited His Catholic Majesty's admirals down to the ground, whereas if the situation were to alter, as a result of a naval battle, whether won or lost, then the whole balance of power would go up