Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [91]
While my right hand adjusts the mixer, I stretch out my left and cup it to toss the first splashes on my eyes and wake myself up properly, and as I do so I sense far, far away the thin, cold, transparent waves flowing towards me along miles and miles of aqueduct across plains valleys mountains, hear the water nymphs from the wellsprings coming towards me along their liquid ways, any moment they'll be folding me in their threadlike caresses under the shower here.
But before a drop appears at each hole in the shower head to lengthen in a still uncertain dribble then suddenly swell all together in concentric circles of vibrant jets, I have to wait a whole second, a second of uncertainty during which there's no way of knowing whether the world still contains any water, whether it hasn't become a dry, dust-covered planet like the other celestial bodies in our vicinity, or in any event whether it contains enough water for me to be able to take it in the hollow of my hands, far as I am from any reservoir or spring, in the heart of this fortress of asphalt and cement.
Last summer there was a big drought in Northern Europe, pictures on the TV showed wastes of fields reduced to a cracked and arid crust, once prosperous rivers shyly revealing their dry beds, cattle nuzzling in the mud to get some relief from the heat, queues of people with jugs and jars by a meagre fountain. It occurs to me that the abundance I have been wallowing in until today is precarious and illusory, water could once again become a scarce resource, hard to distribute, the water carrier with his little barrel slung over his shoulder raising his cry to the windows to call the thirsty down to buy a glass of his precious merchandise.
If I almost succumbed a moment ago to a sense of titanic pride as I took hold of the command levers of the shower, it's taken less than a second to have me thinking how unjustified and fatuous my illusion of omnipotence was, and it's with trepidation and humility that I now watch for the arrival of the gush announced by a subdued quivering higher up the tube. But what if it were just an air bubble passing through the empty pipes? I think of the Sahara inexorably advancing a few inches every year, I see the lush mirage of an oasis trembling in the haze, I think of the arid plains of Persia drained by underground channels towards cities with blue majolica domes, crossed by nomad caravans that set out each year from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf, camping under black tents where, crouched on the ground, a woman holds her gaudy veil with her teeth as she pours water for the tea from a leather bag.
I raise my face towards the shower waiting out that second before the spurts rain down on my half-closed lids to liberate sleepy eyes that are now exploring the chrome-plated shower-head peppered with little holes rimmed by calcium, and all at once I see it as a lunar landscape riddled with calcareous craters, no, it's the deserts of Iran I'm seeing from the air, dotted with small white craters all in rows at even intervals, showing the route the water follows along conduits three thousand years old: the qanat that run underground for fifty yards at a time, communicating with the surface via these wells where a man can climb down securing himself to a rope to carry out maintenance work. I too project myself into one of those dark craters, in an upside-down world I drop into the showerhead holes as though into the qanat wells towards the water running there invisibly with a muffled hiss.
A fraction of a second is all it takes for me to rediscover the notion of up and down: it's from above that the water is about to reach me, after a jerky uphill journey. In thirsty civilizations artificial watercourses run below or along the ground, much as in nature itself,