Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [85]
MONTEZUMA: A direction that you want to impose on it, white man! Otherwise the world would crumble under your feet. I too had a world that sustained me, a world that was not your world. I too hoped that the sense of everything would not be lost.
MYSELF: I know why it mattered to you. Because if the sense of your world had been lost, then the mountains of skulls piled in the ossuaries of your temples would have had no sense either, and your altar stones would have become no more than butchers' slabs stained with the blood of innocent human beings!
MONTEZUMA: Now look with the same eyes on your own carnage, white man.
Before You Say ‘Hello’
I hope you're still by the phone, that if someone else calls you'll ask him to hang up at once so as to keep the line free: you know my call could get through any moment. I've already dialled your number three times, but my signal got lost in bottlenecks of circuitry, whether here, in the city I'm calling from, or there in your city's network, I don't know. The lines are busy everywhere. All Europe is calling all Europe.
Only a few hours have passed since I said goodbye to you, in a mad rush; the trip is always the same, I do it mechanically every time, as though in trance: a taxi waiting for me in the street, a plane waiting for me at the airport, a company car waiting for me at another airport, then here I am, hundreds and hundreds of miles away from you. This is the moment that matters most for me: I have just put down my luggage, I still haven't taken off my coat, and already I'm lifting the receiver, dialling your city's area code, then your number.
My finger pushes each number slowly towards the end of the dial, I concentrate on the pressure of my fingertip as if it were that that determined the exactness of the journey each number must accomplish following a series of required steps far far away from each other and from us, until they set the bell ringing by your bed. It's rare for the operation to succeed first go: I don't know how long the labours of index finger thrust in dial will last, nor the uncertainties of ear glued to dark shell. To contain my impatience I remember a time not long ago when it was the invisible vestal virgins of the exchange who had the job of guaranteeing the continuity of this fragile flow of sparks, of fighting invisible battles against invisible fortresses: every internal impulse urging me to communicate was mediated procrastinated filtered through an anonymous and daunting procedure. Now that a network of automatic connections extends across entire continents and every subscriber can call every other subscriber at will without asking anybody's help, I must resign myself to paying for this extraordinary freedom with an expense of nervous energy, repetition of movements, time-wasting, growing frustration. (And to paying for it again in the form of extremely expensive bills, but the relationship between the act of telephoning and the experience of the cruel prices is not a direct one: the bills arrive every three months, a single direct-dial long distance call is drowned in an overall figure that generates the same stupor as those natural disasters in the face of which our resolve immediately finds the alibi of inevitability.) So great is the temptation the facility to telephone constitutes, that telephoning is becoming ever more difficult, even impossible. Everybody telephones everybody at every possible moment, and nobody can speak to anybody, signals go wandering up and down automatic search circuits, beating their wings like crazed butterflies, without managing to slip into a free line, each subscriber goes on firing off numbers into the exchanges convinced that it's no more than a temporary local hitch. The truth is that the vast majority of calls are made without people having anything to say to each other, hence it hardly matters whether they get through or not, all they do is harm those few who really would have something to say.