Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [9]
But the day's torture wasn't over yet: as I toiled home, hurrying, I could feel the loops of the bow slowly slipping over one another, the knot getting looser and looser, the laces very gradually coming undone. At first I slowed down, as though a little care would be enough to sustain the tangle's uncertain equilibrium. But I was still far from home and already the tips of the laces were trailing on the pavement, flopping this way and that. Then my walking became breathless, I was fleeing, as though from a wild terror: the terror that I would yet again come upon that man's inexorable gaze.
It was a small compact town where one went endlessly up and down the same few streets. Walking round it, you'd meet the same faces three or even four times in half an hour. Now I was marching across it as though in a nightmare, torn between the shame of being seen about with my shoelace yet again untied, and the shame of being seen bending down yet again to tie it. Eyes seemed to thicken and throng around me, like branches in a wood. I dived into the first doorway I found, to hide.
But at the back of the porch, in the half-light, hands resting on the handle of his tightly rolled umbrella, stood the man with the light-coloured eyes, and it was as though he were waiting for me.
At first I gaped in amazement, then hazarded something like a smile and pointed to my untied shoe, to stop him.
The stranger nodded with that sadly understanding expression he had.
‘That's right,’ he said, ‘they're both undone.’
If nothing else the doorway was a quieter place to do up a shoelace, and, with a step to rest my foot on, more comfortable too, though standing behind and above me I had the man with the light-coloured eyes watching, missing not one move of my fingers, and I sensed his gaze in amongst them, muddling them up. But after all I'd been through, it didn't bother me any more now; I was even whistling as I tied those damned knots for the nth time, but tying them better now, being relaxed.
All would have been well had the man kept quiet, had he not started first to clear his throat, a little uncertainly, then to say all in a rush, with decision:
I beg your pardon, but you still haven't learnt how to tie your laces.’
I turned to him, red in the face, still crouching down. I ran my tongue between my lips.
know,’ I said, Tm hopeless at tying knots. You wouldn't believe it. As a child I never wanted to make the effort to learn. I take my shoes off and put them on again without untying them. I use a bootjack. I'm hopeless at knots, I get muddled. You wouldn't believe it.’
Then the stranger said something odd, the last thing you would have thought he might ^ant to say.
‘So,’ he said, ‘how will you teach your children, if you have any, to tie their shoes?’
But the strangest part was that I thought this over a moment and then answered, as if I'd already considered the question before and settled it and stored the answer away, somehow expecting that sooner or later someone would ask me.
‘My children,’ I said, ‘will learn from others how to tie their shoes.’
Ever more absurd, the stranger came back:
‘And if, for example, the great flood should come and the whole of humanity were to perish and you were the one chosen, you and your children, to continue the human race. How would you manage, have you ever thought about that? How would you teach them their knots? Because if you don't, heaven knows how many centuries might go by before humanity manages to tie a knot, to invent it over again!’
I couldn't make head or tail of this now, the knot or the conversation.
‘But,’ I tried to object, ‘why should I of all people be the chosen one, as you put it, why me when I don't even know how to tie a knot?’
The man with the light-coloured eyes was against the light on the threshold of the door: there was something frighteningly angelic in his expression.
Why me?’ he said. ‘That's how all men answer. And all men have a knot on their shoes, something they don't know how to do; an inability that binds them to others. Society depends on this asymmetry