Marcovaldo (Vintage Classics) by Italo Calvino

Author:Italo Calvino [Calvino, Italo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House UK
Published: 2010-12-23T06:00:00+00:00

SPRING

13. Where the river is more blue?

It was a time when the simplest foods contained threats, traps, and frauds. Not a day went by without some newspaper telling of ghastly discoveries in the housewife’s shopping: cheese was made of plastic, butter from tallow candles; in fruit and vegetables the arsenic of insecticides was concentrated in percentages higher than the vitamin content; to fatten chickens they stuffed them with synthetic pills that could transform the man who ate a drumstick into a chicken himself. Fresh fish had been caught the previous year in Iceland and they put make-up on the eyes to make it seem yesterday’s catch. Mice had been found in several milk-bottles, whether dead or alive was not made clear. From the tins of oil it was no longer the golden juice of the olive that flowed, but the fat of old mules, cleverly distilled.

At work or in the café Marcovaldo heard them discussing these things, and every time he felt something like a mule’s kick in his stomach, or a mouse running down his esophagus. At home, when his wife Domitilla came back from the market, the sight of her shopping-bag, which once had given him such joy with its celery and eggplant, the rough, absorbent paper of the packages from the grocer or the delicatessen, now filled him with fear as if hostile presences had infiltrated the walls of his house.

“I must bend all my efforts,” he vowed to himself, “towards providing my family with food that hasn’t passed through the treacherous hands of speculators.” In the morning, going to work, he sometimes encountered men with fishing-poles and rubber boots, heading for the river. “That’s the way,” Marcovaldo said to himself. But the river, there in the city, which collected garbage and waste and the emptying of sewers, filled him with deep repugnance. “I have to look for a place,” he said to himself, “where the water is really water, and fish are really fish. There I’ll drop my line.”

The days were growing longer: with his motorbike, after work, Marcovaldo set to exploring the river along its course before the city, and the little streams, its tributaries. He was specially interested in the stretches where the water flowed farthest from the paved road. He proceeded along paths, among the clumps of willows, riding his motorbike as far as he could go, then – after leaving it in a bush – on foot, until he reached the stream. Once he got lost: he roamed among steep, overgrown slopes, and could find no trail, nor did he know in which direction the river lay. Then, all of a sudden, pushing some branches aside, he saw the silent water a few feet below him – it was a widening of the river, practically a calm little pool – of such a blue that it seemed a mountain lake.

His emotion didn’t prevent him from peering down among the little ripples of the stream. And there, his stubbornness was rewarded! A flicker,

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