Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [89]
Unfortunately my phone keeps giving me the engaged signal, even when I put it down and pick it up again, even when I bang down on the cradle. There, now I can't hear anything at all, you'd think I was cut off from every possible line. Keep calm all of you. It must be a temporary hitch. Hang on.
Glaciation
With ice? Yes? I go to the kitchen a moment to get the ice. And immediately the word ‘ice’ expands between her and me, separates us, or perhaps unites us, but the way a fragile sheet of ice unites the shores of a frozen lake.
If there is one thing I hate it's preparing the ice. It obliges me to break off a conversation just started, at the crucial moment when I ask her: A drop of whisky? and she: Thanks, but really just a drop, and me: With ice? And already I'm heading towards the kitchen as though into exile, already I can see myself fighting with ice cubes that won't come out of the tray.
No problem, I say, it won't take a second, I always have ice with whisky myself. It's true, the tinkling in the glass keeps me company, separates me from the din of the others, at parties where there are lots of people it stops me from losing myself in the ebb and flow of voices and sounds, that back and forth she detached herself from when she appeared for the first time in my field of vision, in the inverted telescope of my whisky glass, her colours advancing along that corridor between two smoke-filled rooms booming with music, and I stood there with my glass without going to one room or the other, and she too, she saw me in a distorted shadow through the transparency of the icy whisky glass, and I don't know if she heard what I was saying to her because there was all that din or perhaps again because I hadn't spoken, had only moved the glass and the ice rising and falling went clink clink, and she too said something into her litde bell of glass and ice, certainly I hadn't imagined she would be coming to my place tonight.
I open the freezer, no, close the freezer, first I have to find the ice bucket. Hang on, I'll be with you in a sec. The freezer is a polar cave, dripping with icicles, the tray is welded to the base by a crust of frost, I pull hard and snap it off, fingertips turning white. In her igloo the Eskimo bride waits for the seal hunter lost out on the pack-ice. Now just a slight pressure to separate the cubes from the walls of their compartments: but no, it's a solid block, even when I turn the tray over they won't come out, I put it under the tap in the sink, turn on the hot water, the jet crackles on the frost-encrusted metal, my fingers turn from white to red. I've got my shirt cuff wet, that's very annoying, if there's one thing I hate it's feeling shapeless wet cloth clinging to my wrist.
Put a record on, I'll be back in a sec with the ice, can you hear me? She can't hear me with the tap on, there's always something stops us hearing and seeing each other. In the corridor too she was talking through hair falling half across her face, she was speaking over the edge of her glass and I heard her teeth laughing on the rim, on the ice, she was repeating: glaciation? as if of everything I'd said to her only that word had got through, and my hair was falling over my eyes too as I spoke into slowly melting ice.
I bang the edge of the tray against the edge of the sink, only one cube comes away, it falls outside the sink, it'll make a puddle on the floor, I'll have to pick it up, it's gone and got under the cupboard, I'll have to get down on my knees, reach a hand under, it slips through my fingers, there, I've got it and I throw it in the sink, go back to passing the tray upside down under the tap.
It was I who spoke to her about the great glaciation, now due to return and cover the earth, the whole of human history