Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [92]
I listen hard to the network of waterflows suspended above and around me, to the vibration spreading through a forest of pipes. Above I sense the sky of the Roman Campagna crossed by conduits perched on gendy descending arches, and higher up still by clouds that vie with the aqueducts to draw up immense quantities of running water.
The point of arrival for an aqueduct is always the city, the great sponge made for absorbing and spraying, Nineveh and its gardens, Rome and its baths. A transparent city never ceases to flow within the compact thickness of stones and cement, a fine filigree of water swathes the walls and streets. Superficial metaphors define the city as an agglomerate of stone, many-sided diamond or sooty coal, but every metropolis can also be seen as a grand liquid structure, a space defined by vertical and horizontal lines of water, a stratification of locations subject to tides and floods and undertow, where the human race realizes an ideal of amphibian life that satisfies its deepest vocation.
Or perhaps it is water's deepest vocation that is realized in the city: climbing, gushing, flowing upwards. It's in their height that cities find their identity: Manhattan raising up its watertanks on top of skyscrapers, Toledo which for centuries had to draw off barrel after barrel from the Tagus way below and plod them uphill on muleback, until for the delight of the melancholy Philip II el artificio de Juanelo lurched into creaking motion and, miracle of brief duration, brought the contents of its swinging buckets up the cliff to the Alcazar.
Here I am then ready to welcome the water not as something naturally due to me but as a lovers' tryst, an encounter whose freedom and felicity are proportional to the obstacles it has had to overcome. To live in complete intimacy with water the Romans placed the baths at the centre of their public life; today this intimacy is the heart of our private life, here under this shower whose streams I have so often seen running down your skin, naiad nereid undine, thus I see you once again appearing and disappearing as the jets fan out, now that the water comes gushing in swift obedience to my call.
The Mirror, the Target
When I was a boy, I spent hours and hours in front of the mirror pulling faces. Not that I thought my face so handsome as never to tire of looking at it; on the contrary, I couldn't bear it, that face of mine, and pulling faces gave me the chance to try out different ones, faces that appeared and were immediately replaced by other faces, so that I could believe I was a different person, many people of every kind, a host of individuals who one after the other became myself, that is I became them, that is each of them became another of them, while as for me, it was as if I didn't exist at all.
Sometimes after trying three or four different faces, or ten perhaps, or twelve, I would decide that just one of these was the one I preferred, and I would try to make it come back, to arrange my features so as once again to set them in that face that had looked so good. No chance. Once a face had gone, there was no way of getting it back, of having it merge with my face again. In the attempt I would assume constandy changing faces, unknown, alien, hostile faces, which seemed to take me further and further from that lost face. Frightened, I would stop pulling faces and my old everyday face would surface again, and I thought it duller than ever.
But these exercises of mine never lasted too long. There was always a voice to bring me back to reality.