Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories - Italo Calvino [95]
Me - Why are you here, Ottilia? Where are we? On the moon?
Ottilia - We are on the hidden side of the target.
Me - Is this where all the bad shots go?
Ottilia - Bad? No shot is ever bad.
Me - But the arrows don't have anything to hit here.
Ottilia - Here the arrows put down roots and become forests.
Me — All I can see is junk, fragments, rubble.
Ottilia - Lots of rubble piled up makes a skyscraper. Lots of skyscrapers piled up make rubble.
Connna - Fulgenzio! Where have you got to? The target!
Me — I've got to go, Ottilia. I can't stay here with you. I've got to aim for the other side of the target.
Ottilia - Why?
Me — Everything's out of shape here, opaque, formless …
Ottilia — Look carefully. From very very very close. What can you see?
Me - A granulous, pitted, bumpy surface.
Ottilia - Go between bump and bump, grain and grain, crack and crack. You'll find the gate to a garden, with green flowerbeds and clear pools. I'm there at the bottom.
Me — Everything I touch is rough, arid, cold.
Ottilia — Pass your hand slowly over the surface. It's a cloud soft as whipped cream …
Me - Everything's uniform, muted, compact.
Ottilia - Open your eyes and ears. Hear the busde of the city, see the glitter of windows and bright shop displays, and bugling and bell-ringing, and people white and yellow and black and red, dressed in green and blue and orange and saffron.
Connna - Fulgenzio! Where are you!
But this time I couldn't tear myself away from Ottilia's world, from the city that was cloud and garden too. Here, instead of going straight, the arrows turned and twirled along invisible lines that tangled and untangled and coiled themselves up and unwound, but in the end always hit the target, though perhaps a different target from the one you expected.
The strange thing about it was this: the more I realized the world was complicated interlocking inextricable the more it seemed to me that the things I really needed to understand were few and simple, and if I understood them, everything would be clear as the lines in a pattern. I would have liked to say this to Corinna, or to Ottilia, but it was a while now since I'd seen them, either of them, and, here's another strange thing, thinking about them I often confused the one with the other.
I hadn't looked at myself in the mirror for a long time now. One day when I happened to walk by a mirror I saw the target, with all its fine colours. I tried to put myself in profile, three quarter profile: I was still seeing the target. ‘Corinna!’ I cried. ‘Here, Corinna! Look: I'm just the way you wanted me!’ But then I thought that what I was seeing in the mirror wasn't just myself, but the world too, so I would have to look for Corinna there, amongst those coloured lines. And Ottilia? Perhaps Ottilia was there too appearing and disappearing. And when I gazed at the target-mirror long enough, was it Corinna or Ottilia I saw peeping out from between concentric circles?
Sometimes I get the impression I've run into her, one or the other of them, in the city streets, and that she wants to say something to me, but it happens when two subway trains pass in opposite directions, and Ottilia's image - or Corinna's? - comes towards me and flits away, followed by a series of extremely rapid faces framed in the windows, like the faces I once pulled in the mirror.
The Other Eurydice
You have won, men of without, you have recast the stories to suit yourselves, to condemn us of within to the role you like to give us, the role of powers of darkness and of death, and the name you have given us, Hades, is laden with tones of doom. Truly, if all should forget what really happened between us, between Eurydice and Orpheus and myself, Pluto, a story quite the reverse of the one you tell, if no one at all now remembers that Eurydice was one of us and that she never did live on the surface of the Earth until Orpheus snatched her away from me with his deceitful music, then our ancient dream of making the Earth