Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [88]
Obviously it's impossible to get through at this time of day. I'd better give up, but if I stop trying to speak to you I'll immediately have to go back and deal with the phone as a completely different instrument, another part of myself with other functions: I've got a series of business meetings in town here that need urgent confirmation, I'll have to unplug the mental circuit that connects me to you and plug in the one that corresponds to my periodic inspections of companies controlled by my group or with joint shareholdings; I'll have to perform a switching operation not in the phone but in myself, in my approach to the phone.
First I want to have one last try, once more I'll dial that sequence of numbers that has taken the place of your name, your face, you. If I get through, good, if not, I'll stop. Meanwhile I can go on thinking things I'll never say to you, thoughts addressed more to the phone than to you, that have to do with the relationship I have with you through the phone, or rather the relationship I have with the phone with you as pretext.
Distant mechanisms revolve, my thoughts revolving with them, and I start to see the faces of other recipients of longdistance calls, variously pitched voices vibrate, the disc assembles and dismantles accents, attitudes and moods, but I can't settle on the image of an ideal woman to satisfy my yearning for a longdistance connection. Everything starts getting mixed up in my mind: faces, names, voices, numbers in Antwerp or Zurich or Hamburg. Not that I expect anything more from one number than from another: either with regard to the likelihood of getting through, or to what, once through, I might say or hear. But that doesn't stop me going on to try to make contact with Antwerp or Zurich or Hamburg or whatever other city yours may be — already forgotten in the whirligig of numbers I've been calling one after another for an hour now without ever getting through.
There are things that, even if my voice doesn't reach you, I feel the need to tell you: and it doesn't matter if I'm talking to you in Antwerp, or you in Zurich, or you in Hamburg. I want you to know that the moment I am really together with you isn't when I see you at night, in Antwerp, or Zurich, or Hamburg, after my business meetings; that is only the banal and inevitable aspect of our relationship: the tiffs, the making up, the rancour, the flarings of old passion; in every city and with every woman I phone the ritual I've established with you is repeated. Just as, as soon as I'm back in your town, even before you know I'm there, I'll be spasmodically calling (trying to call) a number in Goteborg, or Bilbao, or Marseilles: a number I could easily get through to now with a local call here in the network of Goteborg, or Bilbao, or Marseilles (I can't remember where I am). But I don't want to talk to that number now; I want to talk to you.
That's what - given that you can't hear me - I want to tell you. For an hour I've been trying a series of numbers turn and turn about, all as impossible to get through to as yours, in Casablanca, Salonica, Vaduz: I'm sorry you're all stuck by the phone waiting for me; the service is getting worse and worse. As soon as I hear a voice say, ‘Hello!’ I shall have to be careful not to make a mistake, to remember which of you the last number I called corresponds to. Will I still recognize your voices? I've been waiting so long listening to silence.
I might as well tell you at this point, tell you, tell all of you, given that none of your phones is answering: my great ambition is to transform the entire global