The Watcher and Other Stories

Italo Calvino

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780544279575
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Italienische Literatur

This collection of three long stories by the author of Cosmicomics "demonstrates clearly his talent for transforming the mundane into the marvelous" ( The New York Times ). Italo Calvino is widely recognized as one of postwar Italy's greatest fiction writers and one of the twentieth century's greatest fabulists. This collection of three stories showcases his range and virtuosity. In the title story, an Italian Communist poll watcher is stationed at a hospital in Turin, where nuns guide the hands of invalids to their preferred candidate in a special election. In "Smog, " a city's cooperative laundry facility reveals a harbinger of social purification. And in "The Argentine Ant, " the citizens of a provincial seaside town struggle against a government-controlled infestation. "Like Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez, Italo Calvino dreams perfect dreams for us." —John Updike, New Yorker

The Watcher

Translated by William Weaver

I

AMERIGO ORMEA left his house at five thirty in the morning. It looked like rain. To reach the polls where he was to act as an election watcher, Amerigo followed a series of narrow, arcaded streets, still paved with old cobblestones, along the walls of humble buildings, densely inhabited, no doubt, but still without any sign of life on that Sunday at dawn. Unfamiliar with the neighborhood, Amerigo deciphered the street names on the sooty signs—names perhaps of forgotten benefactors—tilting his umbrella to one side and raising his face into the rain dripping from the eaves.

The members of the opposition (Amerigo Ormea belonged to a left-wing party) generally considered rain on election day a good omen. This notion dated from the first postwar election, when people still believed that in bad weather many Christian Democrat voters—people with no great interest in politics, old people, disabled, infirm, or living in country areas with poor roads—wouldn’t stick their noses out of their front doors. But Amerigo didn’t share this illusion: it was 1953 now, and in all the elections in subsequent years he had seen that, rain or shine, the organization to get out the vote always worked. And today of all days, when the parties in the coalition government had to put over a new election law (“the swindle law,” as the other parties had christened it), whereby if the coalition got 50-plus-1 per cent of the votes it would receive two-thirds of the seats in Parliament . . . For his part, Amerigo had learned that change, in politics, conies through long and complex processes, and you couldn’t hope for change overnight, as if it were a stroke of luck; for him, as for so many others, acquiring experience had meant becoming slightly pessimistic.

On the other hand, there was the moral question: you had to go on doing as much as you could, day by day. In politics, as in every other sphere of life, there are two important principles for a man of any sense: don’t cherish too many illusions, and never stop believing that every little bit helps. Amerigo didn’t seek the limelight; in his profession, he preferred to remain the right man in the right place, not pushing himself forward. And in public life, as in his work, he wasn’t what you could call a “politician,” either in the good sense or the pejorative. (Because the word “politician” did have a good meaning or a pejorative one, depending on how you looked at it: Amerigo was well aware of this.) He was a paid-up member of the party, true enough, and though he could hardly be considered an “activist,” as his nature tended toward a quiet life, he never hung back when there was something useful to be done that lay within his capacities. At the local cell, they considered him a sound man, with a good background; and now they had appointed him a poll watcher, a modest assignment, but a serious, necessary job, especially at this particular polling place, which was set up inside a great religious institution. Amerigo had accepted willingly. Now it was raining. His shoes would stay wet all day.

II

GENERIC TERMS like “left-wing party” and “religious institution” are not used here to avoid calling things by their real name but because even declaring, d’emblée, that Amerigo Ormea’s party was the Communist party and the polls were located inside Turin’s famous “Cottolengo Hospital for Incurables” would represent a more apparent than real progress toward precision. Each of us, according to his own knowledge and experience, attributes to the word “Communism” or the word “Cottolengo” various and even contradictory values, so even more precision would be required: the role of the party in that situation would have to be defined, in the Italy of those years, and Amerigo’s position within the party; and as for “Cottolengo,” otherwise known as the “Little Home of Divine Providence”—assuming that everyone knows the function of that enormous hospital, to shelter unfortunates, the afflicted, the mentally deficient, the deformed, even creatures who are hidden, whom no one can see—then it would be necessary to define Cottolengo’s place in the citizens’ pious sentiments, the respect it inspired even in those furthest from any religious feeling, and at the same time the quite different place it had come to occupy in pre-electoral polemics, almost as a synonym of fraud, of embezzlement, of prevarication.

In fact, ever since the vote had become obligatory in the period following the Second World War, hospitals, asylums, and convents had served as great reservoirs of votes for the Christian Democrat party, and at Cottolengo, above all, at each election instances were discovered of idiots being led to vote, or dying old women, or men paralyzed with arteriosclerosis, in any case, people unable to make logical distinctions. As a result of these instances, there was a crop of anecdotes, ranging from the burlesque to the pathetic: the voter who ate his ballot, the one who, finding himself in a booth with that piece of paper in his hand, thought he was in a latrine and behaved accordingly, or the line of slightly brighter retarded voters who entered the polls chanting the name of the candidate and his number on the ballot: “One two three: Quadrello! One two three: Quadrello!”

Amerigo knew all these stories and he felt no curiosity or amazement at them; he knew that a sad, nervous day was ahead of him; as he wandered in the rain, looking for the entrance number marked on the little card from City Hall, he felt he was stepping over the frontier of his world.

The institution sprawled among poor, crowded neighborhoods, covering as much space as a whole quarter of the city, including a complex of asylums and hospitals and homes for the aged, schools, convents, virtually a city within the city, surrounded by walls and governed by different rules. Its outline was irregular, a body that had become gradually extended through new bequests and constructions and enterprises: from over the walls rose the roofs of buildings, spires, treetops, and smokestacks. Where the public street separated one part of the institution from another, they were joined by overhead passages, as in certain ancient factories, which had sprung up according to the dictates of practical utility and not of beauty; these were the same, bounded by bare walls and gates. The factory idea went beyond the external resemblance: the same practical talents, the same spirit of private enterprise of the founders of the big industries had also inspired—though expressing the succor of outcasts rather than production and profit—the simple priest who between 1832 and 1842 had founded and organized and operated, despite difficulties and hostility, this monument to charity on the scale of the nascent industrial revolution; and even his name—Cottolengo, that simple rustic family name—had lost all individual connotation and had come to denote a world-famous institution.

. . .In the cruel speech of the poor, that name had become, by a natural process, a mocking epithet, meaning cretin, idiot, even abbreviated, in the Turin way, to its first syllables: cutu. In other words, that name “Cottolengo” united an image of misfortune with an image of comedy, of the ridiculous (as often happens, in popular speech, to the names of madhouses and prisons), and also an image of kindly providence, of the power of organization, and now, too, through its electoral function, an image of obscurantism, of the medieval, of bad faith. . . .

Each meaning faded into the next, and on the walls the rain was soaking the election posters, suddenly aged, as if their aggressiveness had died with the last evening of the political battle among meetings and billposters, the night before last, and as if these posters were already reduced to a patina of paste and cheap paper, where, layer upon layer, the symbols of the opposing parties could be read, transparently. At times the world’s complexity seemed to Amerigo a superimposition of clearly distinct strata, like the leaves of an artichoke; at other times, it seemed a clump of meanings, a gluey dough.

Even in his calling himself a “Communist” (and in this journey he was making for the party, in the dawn as damp as a sponge) you couldn’t tell how much was duty handed down from generation to generation (between the walls of those ecclesiastical buildings, Amerigo saw himself—half ironically and half seriously—as a final, anonymous heir of eighteenth-century rationalism, though with only a remnant of that heritage which had never borne much fruit in the city where Pietro Giannone was kept in irons) and how much was the outcome of another chapter of history, barely a century old, but already bristling with obstacles and restrictions: the advance of the socialist proletariat (then it was through the “inner contradictions of the bourgeoisie” or the “self-awareness of the declining class” that the class struggle had managed to bestir even the ex-bourgeois Amerigo), or the more recent incarnation of that class struggle, only about forty years old, as Communism had become an international power and the revolution meant discipline, preparation for responsibility, bargaining among powers even where the party wasn’t in power (then Amerigo was attracted by this game many of whose rules seemed established and inscrutable and obscure, though you often felt you were helping establish them), or else, within this participation in the Communist movement, there was a faint reservation about general questions that led Amerigo to choose the more limited and modest party assignments as if recognizing that they were the most surely useful, and even in them he was always prepared for the worst, while trying to remain serene in his (another generic term) pessimism (also partly hereditary, that sigh-filled family air that marks the Italians of the non-Catholic minority, which, every time it wins, realizes it has lost), but always subordinate to a coexistent, stronger optimism, that optimism without which he wouldn’t have been a Communist (then we should have said: a hereditary optimism, in the Italian minority which thinks it has won each time it loses; in short, the optimism and the pessimism were, if not the same thing, then opposite sides of the same artichoke leaf), and, simultaneously, subordinate to its opposite, the old Italian skepticism, a gift for adapting to circumstances and waiting (in other words, that minority’s age-old enemy: and then everything became mixed up again because a man who sets out to make war on skepticism cannot be skeptical about his victory, cannot resign himself to losing, otherwise he is identified with the enemy), and above all, having finally understood what wasn’t really so hard to understand: that this is only one corner of the immense world and that decisions are made—we won’t say elsewhere, because “elsewhere” is everywhere—but on a vaster scale (and even here there were reasons for pessimism and reasons for optimism, but the former came more spontaneously to mind).

III

TO TRANSFORM a room into a polling place (a room that is usually a schoolroom or a courtroom, a refectory, a gymnasium, or a municipal office) only a few objects are required—those sheets of unpainted planed wood, which form the booth; that wooden box, also unpainted, which is the ballot box; the materials (register, packs of ballots, pencils, ballpoint pens, a stick of sealing wax, string, strips of gummed paper) which are given to the chairman at the moment that the “polls are legally opened”—and a special arrangement of the tables found on the spot. Bare rooms, in other words, anonymous, with whitewashed walls; and objects even more bare and anonymous; and those citizens, there at the table—chairman, clerk, watchers, perhaps some “district representatives”—also assume the impersonal appearance of their function.

When the voters begin to arrive, the scene becomes animated: the variousness of life enters with them, each one individualized by gestures too awkward or too brisk, voices too loud or too meek. But there is a moment, beforehand, when the election officials are alone, sitting there counting the pencils, a moment that rends the heart.

Especially where Amerigo was: the room assigned to this poll—one of the many established inside Cottolengo, because each district comprises about five hundred voters, and in all of Cottolengo there are thousands—was on normal days a parlor where relatives visited the inmates, and there were wooden benches all around the walls (Amerigo drove from his mind the facile images the place prompted: peasant parents waiting with baskets of fruit, sad conversations) and the tall windows overlooked a courtyard, irregular in shape, among pavilions and arcades, a bit like a barracks, a bit like a hospital (some women, who seemed too large, pushed carts, moved huge cans; they wore black skirts like the peasant women of long ago, black wool shawls, black bonnets, blue aprons; they moved swiftly in the fine rain that was still falling; Amerigo gave them a brief glance, then came away from the windows).

He didn’t want to succumb to the room’s squalor, and to avoid that he concentrated on the squalor of their electoral equipment—that stationery, those files, the little official book of regulations which the chairman consulted at the slightest doubt, and he was already nervous before they began—because, for Amerigo, this squalor was rich, rich in signs, in meanings, perhaps even contradictions.

Democracy presented itself to the citizens in this humble, gray, unadorned dress; to Amerigo there were moments when this seemed sublime; in Italy, which had always bowed and scraped before every form of pomp, display, sumptuousness, ornament, this seemed to him finally the lesson of an honest, austere morality, and a perpetual, silent revenge on the Fascists, on those who had thought they could feel contempt for democracy precisely because of its external squalor, its humble accounting; now they had fallen into the dust with all their gold fringe and their ribbons, while democracy, with its stark ceremony of pieces of paper folded over like telegrams, of pencils given to callused or shaky hands, went ahead.

There, around him, were the other officials, commonplace people, most of them (it seemed to him) mustered on the recommendation of Catholic Action but some (besides himself) from the Communist and Socialist parties (he still hadn’t distinguished them), performing a common task, a rational, secular service. There they were, dealing with little practical problems: how to draw up the report on “Voters registered at other districts”; how to go over the tally for the district, taking into account the list of “Deceased Voters” that had arrived at the last moment. There they were, now using matches to melt some wax to seal the ballot box, and then they didn’t know how to snip off the extra length of string, so they decided to bum it with a match. . . .

In these actions, in this identifying themselves with their temporary duties, Amerigo promptly recognized the true meaning of democracy, and he thought of the paradox of their being there together, some believers in a divine order, in an authority which is not of this earth, and then his own companions, well aware of the bourgeois deceit of the whole business; in short, two kinds of people who should have had little faith in the rules of democracy, and yet each side convinced they were its most zealous guardians, its very incarnation.

Two of the watchers were women: one, wearing a little orange sweater, seemed a factory worker or a clerk, about thirty, with a red, freckled face; the other was fiftyish, with a white blouse, a large locket with a portrait hanging over her bosom, perhaps a widow, an elementary school-teacher, to judge by her appearance. Who would think, Amerigo said to himself, now determined to see everything in the best possible light, that women have enjoyed their civil rights for so few years? They looked as if, daughter following mother, they had never done anything but prepare for elections. And what’s more, it’s the women who show the most common sense, good at little practical problems, helping the men, who are more self-conscious.

Following this train of thought, Amerigo was already content, as if it were all going for the best (apart from the dark prospects of the elections, apart from the fact that the ballot boxes were in an asylum, where they had been unable to hold political meetings, or stick up posters, or sell newspapers), as if this were already the victory, in the old struggle between State and Church, as if this were the triumph of a lay religion of civic duty, over . . .

Over what? Amerigo looked around once again, as if seeking the tangible presence of a contrary force, an antithesis, but he could grasp nothing, he could no longer set the affairs of the polls against the atmosphere that surrounded them: in the quarter of an hour he had been there, things and places had become homogeneous, joined in a sole, anonymous, administrative grayness, the same in police stations and regional offices as in the great charitable institutions. And like a man who, diving into cold water, has forced himself to believe that the pleasure of diving is in that sensation of cold, and then, swimming, has found within himself a new warmth and, with it, the sense of how cold and hostile the water really is, so Amerigo, after all his mental efforts to transform the polls’ squalor into a precious value, had gone back to his first impression—of an alien, cold place—and he felt that this was the correct view.

In those years, Amerigo’s generation (or rather, that part of his generation that had lived in a certain way during the years after ’40) had discovered the resources of a previously unknown attitude: nostalgia. And so, in his memory, he began to contrast the scene before his eyes with the atmosphere of Italy after the liberation, in those few years whose most vivid recollection now was the way everyone had taken part in political affairs and actions, in the problems of that moment, serious and elemental (these were thoughts of the present: then he had lived as if the atmosphere of those times was natural, as everyone did, enjoying it—after all that had happened—angry at things that were wrong, without ever thinking they could be set right); he remembered how people looked then, all of them seeming equally poor, and interested in universal questions more than in private ones; he remembered the makeshift party offices, ...