Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [60]
You imagine I'm telling you all this in order to seek your complicity, Muller. But that's not the case. I feel obliged to inform you of the extreme measures I am being forced to take to make sure that information relative to everybody who might have been my wife's lover is excluded from the archives. I am not worried about any repercussions on myself; the few years that remain for me to live are a trifle compared to the eternity I am used to measuring things against; and the person I really was has already been definitively established and consigned to the punch-cards.
If there is nothing that needs correcting in the world memory, the only thing left to do is to correct reality where it doesn't agree with that memory. Just as I cancelled the existence of my wife's lover from the punchcards, so I must cancel him from the world of the living. Which is why I am now pulling out my gun and pointing it at you, Muller, why I'm squeezing the trigger, killing you.
Beheading the Heads
1
I must have arrived in the capital the day before a festival. They were building platforms in the squares, hanging up flags, ribbons, palmfronds. There was hammering everywhere.
‘The national festival?’ I asked the man behind the bar.
He pointed to the row of portraits behind him. Our heads of state,’ he said. ‘It's the festival of the heads of state, the leaders.’
I thought it might be the presentation of a newly elected government. ‘New?’ I asked.
Amid the banging of the hammers, loudspeakers being tested, the screeching of cranes lifting platforms, I was forced to keep things short if I was to be understood, and yell almost.
The man behind the bar shook his head: they weren't new, they'd been around for a while.
I asked: ‘The anniversary of when they came to power?’
‘Something like that,’ explained a customer beside me. ‘The festival comes round periodically and it's their turn.’
‘Their turn for what?’
‘To go on the platform.’
‘What platform? I've seen so many, one at every street corner.’
‘Each has his own platform. We have lots of leaders.’
‘And what do they do? Speak?’
‘No, speak, no.’
‘They go on the platform, and then what?’
What do you think they do? They wait a bit, while things are being prepared, then the ceremony is over in a couple of minutes.’
‘And you?’
We watch.’
There was a lot of coming and going in the bar. The carpenters and the workers unloading things from trucks to decorate the platforms — axes, blocks, baskets — stopped by to have a beer. Whenever I asked someone a question it was always someone else who answered.
‘It's a sort of re-election, then? A confirmation of their jobs, you could say, their mandate?’
‘No, no,’ they corrected me, ‘you don't understand? It's the end. Their time is up.’
‘And so?’
‘So they stop being heads, living up there: and they fall down.’
‘So why do they go up on the platforms?’
‘With the platforms you can see better how the head falls, the jump it makes, cleanly cut, and how it ends up in the basket.’
I was beginning to understand, but I wasn't quite sure. ‘The heads' heads, you mean? The leaders’? In the baskets?’
They nodded. ‘Right. The beheading. That's it. Beheading the heads.’
I'd only just arrived, I didn't know anything about it, I hadn't read anything in the papers.
‘Just like that, tomorrow, all of a sudden?’
‘When the day comes it comes,’ they said. ‘This time it falls midweek. There's a holiday. Everything's shut.’
An old man added, pontificating: When the fruit is ripe you gather it, and a head you behead. You wouldn't leave fruit to rot on the branches, would you?’
The carpenters had been getting on with their work: on some of the platforms they were erecting the scaffolding for grim guillotines; on others they were anchoring blocks for use with axes and placing comfortable hassocks beside (one of the assistants was testing the arrangement by putting his head on the block to check that the height was right); elsewhere people were setting up things that looked like butcher's benches, with channels for the blood to run off. Waxed cloth was being