Italo Calvino by Numbers in the Dark

Author:Numbers in the Dark
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2012-01-09T09:26:15+00:00

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ecution. Say that and you miss the real meaning of our statutes, the real relationship that binds our leaders to the rest of the people. Only heads of state can be beheaded, hence you can’t wish to be a head without also wishing for the chop. Only those who feel they have this vocation can become heads of state, only those who already feel themselves beheaded the moment they take up a position of authority.’

Little by little the customers in the bar had thinned out, each going back to his work. I realized that the man with the glasses was talking exclusively to me.

‘That’s what power is,’ he went on, ‘this waiting for the end. All the authority one has is no more than advance notice of the blade hissing through the air, crashing down in a clean cut, all the applause you get is no more than the beginning of that last applause that greets your head as it rolls down the waxed surface of the scaffold.’

He took off his glasses to clean them on his handkerchief. I realized his eyes were full of tears. He paid for his beer and left.

The man behind the bar bent down to my ear. ‘He’s one of them,’ he said. ‘See?’ He pulled out a pile of portrait posters from under the bar. ‘Tomorrow I have to take those ones down and stick up these.’ The first picture showed the man with the glasses, an ugly enlargement from a passport photo. ‘He’s been elected to succeed the ones on their way out. Tomorrow he’ll be taking over. It’s his turn, now. If you ask me it’s not right to tell him the day before. You heard the way he was talking about it? Tomorrow he’ll be watching the executions as if they were already his own. They’re all like that, the first days; they get upset, excited, they make a big deal of it. “Vocation”: what pompous words they come out with!’

‘And afterwards?’

‘He’ll get used to it, like everybody else. They have so much to do, they don’t think about it any more, until their day comes around. But then: who can see into a leader’s mind. They give the impression they’re not thinking about it. Another beer?’

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