Difficult Loves and Other Stories by Italo Calvino

Author:Italo Calvino [Calvino, Italo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Classics, General
ISBN: 9781784874841
Google: 8RSTx5IzzTUC
Goodreads: 38717469
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2010-12-22T22:00:00+00:00

A PLUNGE INTO REAL ESTATE

Translated by D. S. Carne-Ross

1

HE RAISED his eyes from the book (he always read in the train) and rediscovered the landscape piece by piece. The wall, the fig tree, the quarry with its chain of buckets, the reeds, the cliffs – he had seen them all his life but only now, because he was returning did he really become aware of them. Every time he came home to the Riviera, Quinto renewed contact in this fashion. But he had been away so much, come back so often, the thing had been going on for years; what was the fun of it when he already knew the scene by heart? All the same, he still hoped for some chance discovery as he sat there with one eye on the book and the other on the landscape. But now he was simply confirming familiar impressions.

Yet every time there was something that checked the pleasure he took in this exercise and made him look down at the page on his lap, something irritating that he couldn’t quite pin down. It was the houses, that was it, all these new houses that were going up, apartment buildings six or eight stories high, their massive white flanks standing out like barriers propping the crumbling slope of the coast and putting out as many windows and balconies as they could toward the sea. The Riviera was gripped by a fever of cement. An apartment building here, the identical window boxes of geraniums on every balcony; there a building that had just gone up, the windows still marked with white, waiting for the Milanese families who wanted a place by the sea; a little farther on, some scaffolding, and below, the cement mixer in action and a sign advertising the local real estate office.

In the little towns on the terraced hillsides the new buildings played piggyback with one another, while in their midst the owners of the old houses added another story and craned their necks to see out. The town where Quinto lived had once been surrounded by shady gardens of eucalyptus trees and magnolias, where retired English colonels and elderly spinsters leaned over the hedges and exchanged Tauchnitz editions and watering cans. Now the bulldozers were churning up the soil with its rotting leaves and its gravel from the garden paths, picks were demolishing the two-story residences, the ax was at the broad-leaved palm trees, which fell with a papery scrunch from the sky so soon to be filled by the desirable, three-room, all-convenience, sunny homes of tomorrow.

When he came home, Quinto had once been able to look out over the roofs of the new town and the poorer quarters down by the sea front and the harbor. In between were the crowded houses of the old part of town, with their moldy, lichenous walls, lying between the hill to the west, where the olive groves clustered thickly above the gardens, and to the east, the green swarm of villas and

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