Mr Palomar (Vintage Classics) by Italo Calvino

Author:Italo Calvino [Calvino, Italo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House UK
Published: 2010-12-14T06:00:00+00:00

PALOMAR DOES THE SHOPPING

* * *

Two pounds of goose-fat

The goose-fat is shown in glass jars, each containing, as the handwritten label says, “two limbs of plump goose (a leg and a wing), goose-fat, salt and pepper. Net weight: two pounds.” In the thick, soft whiteness that fills the jars the clangor of the world is muffled: a dark shadow rises from the bottom and, as in the fog of memories, allows a glimpse of the goose’s severed limbs, lost in its fat.

Mr Palomar is standing in line in a Paris charcuterie. It is the holiday season, but here the throng of customers is usual even at less ceremonial times, because this is one of the good gastronomical shops of the city, miraculously surviving in a neighborhood where the leveling of mass trade, taxes, the low income of the consumers, and now the depression have dismantled the old shops, one by one, replacing them with anonymous supermarkets.

Waiting in line, Mr Palomar contemplates the jars. He tries to find a place in his memories for cassoulet, a rich stew of meats and beans, in which goose-fat is an essential ingredient; but neither his palate’s memory nor his cultural memory is of any help to him. And yet the name, the sight, the idea attract him, awaken an immediate fantasy not so much of appetite as of eros: from a mountain of goose-fat a female figure surfaces, smears white over her rosy skin, and he already imagines himself making his way towards her through those thick avalanches, embracing her, sinking with her.

He dispels this incongruous thought from his mind, raises his eyes to the ceiling bedecked with salamis, hanging from the Christmas wreaths like fruit from boughs in the land of Cockaigne. All around, on the marble counters, abundance triumphs in the forms developed by civilization and art. In the slices of game pâté, the pursuits and flights of the moor are fixed forever, sublimated in a tapestry of flavors. The galantines of pheasant are arrayed in gray-pink cylinders surmounted, to certify their origin, by two birdly feet like talons that jut from a coat-of-arms or from a Renaissance chest.

Through the gelatine sheaths the thick beauty-spots of black truffle stand out, aligned like buttons on a Pierrot’s tunic, like the notes of a score, dotting the roseate, variegated beds of pâtés de foie gras, of head-cheese, terrines, galantines, fans of salmon, artichoke hearts garnished like trophies. The leading motive of the little truffle discs unifies the variety of substances like the black of dinner-jackets at a masked ball, distinguishing the festive dress of the foods.

Gray and opaque and sullen, on the contrary, are the people who make their way among the counters, shunted by salesladies in white, more or less elderly, brusquely efficient. The splendor of the salmon canapés radiant with mayonnaise disappears, swallowed by the dark shopping-bags of the customers. Certainly every one of these men and women knows exactly what he wants, heads straight for his objective with a decisiveness admitting no hesitancy; and rapidly he dismantles mountains of vol-au-vents, white puddings, cervelats.

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