Under the Radiant Sun and the Crescent Moon: Italo Calvino's Storytelling

218 Pages·2000·11.25 MB·English

by  Angela M. Jeannet

UNDER THE RADIANT SUN
AND THE CRESCENT MOON
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ANGELA M. JEANNET
Under the Radiant Sun
and the Crescent Moon
Italo Calvino's Storytelling
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2000
Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada
ISBN 0-8020-4724-6
Printed on acid-free paper
(po)
Toronto Italian Studies
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Jeannet, Angela M
Under the radiant sun and the crescent moon : Italo Calvino's storytelling
(Toronto Italian studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8020-4724-6
i. Calvino, Italo - Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. II. Series.
PQ48O9.A45Z75 2000 853'.914 000-930428-4
This volume was published with financial assistance from Franklin &
Marshall College.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its
publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts
Council.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its pub-
lishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing
Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
Contents
The City of Crossed Destinies: A Preface in the Form of a Story vii
Historical Notes xi
Introduction xiii
1 Literature and Doubt 3
2 Surveyors 35
3 Survivors, or The Pastoral Denied 65
4 Telling Stories 101
5 Between Garbage and Cosmos 134
6 Under the Crescent Moon 155
Bibliographical Information 179
Index 191
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The City of Crossed Destinies:
A Preface in the Form of a Story
The city was grey under a cold sky. Piles of sandbags stacked geometri-
cally rose to great heights around even taller buildings. Behind them,
she was told, there were famous monuments, the Baptistry, palaces,
the Cathedral's marble sculptures, bronze and gold doors, the land-
marks she imagined only vaguely; they were ghosts of themselves,
like the houses and woods that hover in a landscape shrouded by fog.
When the alerts sounded mournfully and shrill in mid-morning all over
the city (the dark streets batted the sound back and forth, and then let it
die away in the mist of the hills), streams of people came out of the
buildings to plunge into deep, meandering caves.
She left her classroom with her professor and her schoolmates
through the darkened halls teeming with bodies. One of the children
vomited once, he was so frightened. But she felt excited, she liked the
people's white faces, the noise, the rushing, the civilian guards shep-
herding people into the shelters, and the loneliness of the streets after
the last siren had long ceased to sound. She did not go to the shelter,
usually; she liked to find herself alone, to be the last one to say goodbye
to the city. Once she saw waves of Flying Fortresses arrive in formation,
very high, a geometric grid of steel moving steadily through wisps of
clouds. The roar of the engines rumbled through the blue sky, and she
looked at the planes with detached curiosity. When the bombs fell, unex-
pected, the air shrank out of her lungs, and she felt like she was suffo-
cating. That was the time she ran to the shelter, and banged on the
locked doors, and someone opened them, as clouds of dust rose,
majestic, from the collapsed apartment buildings.
Steps in the street, a marching platoon, at times, a low-pitched song. He
viii A Preface in the Form of a Story
despised those moments, and the sadness of the immense distance he
felt from the shrouded city, the emaciated people, the frightening sing-
ers, and from the other life he had once lived, elsewhere. Years before,
so it seemed, in a city where cafes and offices were filled with young
journalists and artists, who were his friends. The aroma of coffee envel-
oped long-ago conversations. The streets, then, shone in the evening;
crystal windows and lamps exchanged a myriad of colours with reflected
brightness. But now, coffee did not exist any more, unless you could
afford the black market price of a few grains, rare dark gems. People he
knew were gone. And he could not leave his hiding place, except some-
times at dusk, briefly, in terror.
He returned to his manuscript that performed the magic of making him
forget the present; it took him back to another time, to the southern vil-
lage of his earlier exile, to that light-blinded, courteous, desperate land
that Christ had never visited.
He was not going to stay in this city. Too dangerous, now that the war
was going into an uncontrollable rampage, like a terrified bull. He
thought of his house in San Remo, and the terraced hills, dry and steep
above the sea. His parents' place was very near the war zone. Again he
tried not to remember his days in conquered France, as a teenage Fas-
cist, months before; he tried to avoid the feeling of shame those days
elicited that made him vaguely sick at his stomach.
The university in this city was really not functioning, and he was not
going to stay; he was going back to San Remo. The front was approach-
ing, moving up along the entire stretch of the peninsula, destroying
everything in its path. Goodbye studies, goodbye natural sciences,
botany, forestry. This city was covered by a shroud, the people were
tight-lipped, and spoke only to those they knew well. Germans and Fas-
cists were everywhere. What could he do in a city that was waiting for
the onslaught as if for a storm, hoping to re-emerge on the other side
without being destroyed?
The cafes: that's what he had liked in this city. But now a pall had
descended on it. At night, streets and piazzas were dark, lonely, and
during the day they were filled with armed men; this was a city gripped
by fear. Once, you could sit in the cafe at the edge of this large square,
which actually was one of the dullest in the city, and wait for the group of
friends who would invariably arrive, each in his own good time. That's
where his life really was. Literature and music and art were the topics of
A Preface in the Form of a Story ix
leisurely banter; and how to make ends meet, if one did not have a job
because one lacked the party identification card. Poetry still got written
and published, and journals still appeared irregularly, keeping jealous
guard over the culture they had elaborated through the years of repres-
sion. What could one do, now? You had to endure, he thought, you had
to wait for the infernal dance to stop, count the wounded and the dead,
and go on.
She had to stay put for a while. The rooms her friend had provided for
her and her children were cramped, but they were safe. She had
changed her name, she was numb and totally concentrated on the sur-
vival of her little tribe. Now she was writing a note to a distant friend,
after moving north from Rome, to tell her people further up north that
she had found a haven, and that she was not going to leave her secret
shelter in this beautiful city that looked back at her from under its ban-
dages and shrouds. She was finishing writing the note that she was
going to give to a young woman who would be her courier. 'I have lost
him,' she was writing her people, 'I am here with our children.' She would
not sign her name; once again in her life, she had to deny her existence,
she could not say, 'Yours, Natalia.'
One day, that winter, five people crossed, at different times of the day, a
vast rectangular space overlooked in the distance by the geometric pat-
terns of a church's marble fa9ade, and by the ever present mountain of
grey sandbags: Piazza Santa Croce, in Florence.
In late morning, a young man pedalled a bicycle swiftly in a diagonal
line across the square. He observed the pattern his wheels drew, as
they cut across the grid of streets reiterated by the pattern of dark-green
and pink lines that cut the white marble of the church at straight angles.
He looked, then pedalled away, disappearing into a narrow street at the
west end of the square.
Around noon, a woman appeared at the corner of a street at the
extreme east end of that same square, pulling a little flock of children
gently by the hand in an absent-minded way. They moved along slowly,
and seemed intent on drawing another set of diagonal lines across the
square, which intersected at four different points the two wavy lines left
by the wheels of the cyclist, who was by then gone.
In the afternoon, well after the alert was over, a girl of about eleven
walked purposefully across the square toward the steps leading to the
church that rose high upon them. Her feet followed a line that laid across