The Watcher and Other Stories by Italo Calvino

Author:Italo Calvino
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

ONE NIGHT the telephone woke me, the special, insistent ring of a long-distance call. I turned on the light: it was almost three o’clock. Even before making up my mind to get out of bed, rush into the hall, and grope for the receiver in the dark, even before that, at the first jolt in my sleep, I already knew it was Claudia.

Her voice now gushed from the receiver and it seemed to come from another planet; with my eyes barely open I had a sensation of sparks, dazzle, which were instead the shifting tones of her unceasing voice, that dramatic excitement she always put into everything she said, and which now arrived even here, at the end of the squalid hall in Signorina Margariti’s apartment. I realized I had never doubted Claudia would find me; on the contrary, I had been expecting nothing else for all this time.

She didn’t bother to ask what I had been doing in the meanwhile, or how I had ended up there, nor did she explain how she had traced me. She had heaps of things to tell me, extremely detailed things, and yet somehow vague, as her talk always was, things that took place in environments unknown and unknowable to me.

“I need you, quickly, right away. Take the first train....”

“Well, I have a job here.... The Institute...”

“Ah, perhaps you’ve run into Senator... Tell him...”

“No, no, I’m just the...”

“Darling, you will leave right away, won’t you?”

How could I tell her I was speaking from a place full of dust, where the blinds’ slats were covered with a gritty black grime, and there were cat’s prints on my collar, and this was the only possible world for me, while hers, her world, could exist for me, or seem to exist, only through an optical illusion? She wouldn’t even have listened, she was too accustomed to seeing everything from above and the wretched circumstances that formed the texture of my life naturally escaped her. What was her whole relationship with me if not the outcome of this superior distraction of hers, thanks to which she had never managed to realize I was a modest provincial newspaperman without a future, without ambitions? And she went on treating me as if I were part of high society, the world of aristocrats, magnates, and famous artists, where she had always moved and where, in one of those chance encounters that occur at the beach, I had been introduced to her one summer. She didn’t want to admit it, because that would mean admitting she had made a mistake; so she went on attributing talents to me, authority, tastes I was far from possessing; but my real, fundamental identity was a mere detail, and in mere details she did not want to be contradicted.

Now her voice was becoming tender, affectionate: this was the moment that—without even confessing it to myself—I had been waiting for, because it was only in moments of amorous abandon that everything separating us disappeared and we discovered we were just two people, and it didn’t matter who we were.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.