Last Comes the Raven by Italo Calvino

Author:Italo Calvino
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780544230873
Publisher: HMH Books
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Last Comes the Raven

The stream was a net of limpid, delicate ripples, with the water running through the mesh. From time to time, like a fluttering of silver wings, the dorsum of a trout flashed on the surface, the fish at once plunging zigzag down into the water.

“Full of trout,” one of the men said.

“If we toss a grenade in, they’ll all come floating to the top, bellies up,” said the other; he detached a grenade from his belt and started to unscrew the baseplate.

Then the boy, who had stood aside looking on, walked over, a mountain youth with an apple look to his face. “Let me have it,” he said, taking the rifle from one of the men. “What does he want to do?” the man said, intending to reclaim the rifle. But the boy was leveling it at the water, in search of a target, it seemed. If you shoot, you’ll only scare the fish away, the man started to say, but he did not have time. A trout had surfaced, flashing, and the boy had pumped a bullet into it as though having anticipated the fish’s exact point of appearance. Now, with its white underside exposed, the trout floated lifeless on the surface. “Cripes,” the men said. The boy reloaded the rifle and swung it around. The air was crisp and tensed: one could distinguish the pine needles on the opposite bank and the knitted texture of the stream. A ripple broke the surface: another trout. He fired: now it floated dead. The men glanced briefly at the fish, briefly at the boy. “He shoots well,” they said.

The boy swung the barrel again, into the air. It was curious, to think of it, that they were encompassed by air, actually cut off from other things by meters of air. But when the boy aimed the rifle, the air then became an invisible straight line stretching from the muzzle to the thing . . . to the hawk, for instance, floating above on wings that seemed scarcely to move. As he pressed the trigger, the air continued crystalline and clear as ever, but at the upper end of the line the kestrel folded its wings, then dropped like a stone. The open breech emitted a fine smell of powder.

He asked for more cartridges. The number of men watching had now swelled behind him on the bank of the stream. The cones at the top of the pine trees on the other bank—​why were they visible and yet out of reach? Why that empty span between him and them? Why were the cones, although a part of him, in the chamber of his eye—​why were they there, so distant? And yet if he aimed the rifle that empty span was clearly a deception: he touched the trigger and at that instant a cone, severed at the stem, fell. The feeling was one of caressive emptiness: the emptiness of the rifle bore, which extended off into the air and was occupied by the shot, straight to the pinecone, the squirrel, the white stone, the flowering poppy.

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