The Road to San Giovanni Read online

  Acclaim for

  Italo Calvino’s

  THE ROAD TO

  SAN GIOVANNI

  “A welcome addition to the English translations of Calvino’s writing, and a provocative reminder of how truly international that writing is.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “Its visionary passion is commanding.”

  —Boston Globe

  “We are bound to wonder what treasures of memory, real or invented, were laid to rest prematurely along with this much-beloved author.” Philadelphia Inquirer

  ALSO BY Italo Calvino

  The Baron in the Trees

  Cosmicomics

  Difficult Loves

  Fantastical Tales

  If on a Winters Night a Traveler

  Invisible Cities

  Italian Folktales

  Marcovaldo

  Mr. Palomar

  The Nonexistent Knight & The Cloven Viscount

  Six Memos for the Next Millennium

  Under the Jaguar Sun

  The Uses of Literature

  The Castle of Crossed Destinies

  t zero

  The Watcher and Other Stories

  Italo Calvino

  THE ROAD TO SAN GIOVANNI

  ITALO CALVINO (1923-85) was born in Cuba and grew up in San Remo, Italy. He was a member of the partisan movement during the German occupation of northern Italy in World War II. The novel that resulted from that experience, published in English as The Path to the Nest of Spiders, won widespread acclaim. His other works of fiction include The Baron in the Trees, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, Cosmicomics, Difficult Loves, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Invisible Cities, Marcovaldo, Mr. Palomar, The Nonexistent Knight & the Cloven Viscount, t zero, Under the Jaguar Sun, and The Watcher and Other Stories. His works of nonfiction include Six Memos for the Next Millennium and The Uses of Literature, collections of literary essays, and the anthology Italian Folktales.

  CONTENTS

  Foreword by Esther Calvino

  The Road to San Giovanni

  A Cinema-Goer’s Autobiography

  Memories of a Battle

  La Poubelle Agréée

  From the Opaque

  One day in the spring of 1985, Calvino told me he was going to write twelve more books. “What am I saying?” he added. “Maybe fifteen.”

  Doubtless the first was to be Six Memos for the Next Millennium. As far as the second and third were concerned, I think he had only a vague idea himself. He would write lists upon lists, changing some titles, altering the chronology of others.

  Of the works he was planning, one was to be made up of a series of “memory exercises.” I have brought together five of these here, written between 1962 and 1977. But I know he meant to write others: “Instructions for the Other Self”, “Cuba”, “The Objects”. Hence I felt I couldn’t use his working title, “Passaggi obbligati”, since it seems that many of the passages are missing.

  ESTHER CALVINO

  THE ROAD TO SAN GIOVANNI

  A general explanation of the world and of history must first of all take into account the way our house was situated, in an area once known as “French Point”, on the last slopes at the foot of San Pietro hill, as though at the border between two continents. Below, just beyond our gate and the private drive, lay the town with its pavements shopwindows cinema-posters newspaper-kiosks, then Piazza Colombo a few moments’ walk away, then the seafront; above, you only had to go out of the kitchen door to the beudo that ran behind the house (you know what a beudo is, a ditch with a wall above and a narrow paving of flagstones beside running horizontally across the hill to take water from the streams to the fields) and immediately you were in the country, striking up cobbled mule tracks, between drystone walls and vineyard supports and greenery. That was the way my father always left the house, in his huntsman’s clothes, with his leggins, and you could hear the step of his hobnail boots on the flags by the ditch, and the brass tinkle of his dog, and the squeak of the little gate that opened into the road that led to San Pietro. The way my father saw things, it was from here up that the world began, while the other part of the world below the house was a mere appendix, necessary sometimes when there were things to be done, but alien and insignificant, to be crossed in great strides, as though in flight, without looking to right or left. But I didn’t agree, in fact quite the opposite: as I saw it, the world, the map of the planet, began on the other side of our house and went downwards, everything else being a blank space, with no marks and no meaning; it was down in the town that the signs of the future were to be read, from those streets, those nighttime lights that were not just the streets and lights of our small secluded town, but the town, a glimpse of all possible towns, as its harbour likewise was all the harbours of all the continents, and as I leaned out from the balustrades around our garden everything that attracted and bewildered me was within reach – yet immensely far away – everything was implicit, as the nut in its husk, the future and the present, and the harbour – still leaning out over those balustrades, and I’m not really sure if I’m talking about an age when I never left the garden or of an age when I would always be running off out and about, because now the two ages have fused together, and this age is one and the same thing as those places, which are no longer places nor anything else – the harbour, I was saying, you couldn’t see, it was hidden behind the rooftops of the tall houses in Piazza Sardi and Piazza Bresca, only the strip of the wharf rising above them and the tips of the boats’ masts; and the streets were hidden too and I could never get their layout to match that of the roofs, so unrecognizable did proportions and perspectives seem to me from up above: there the bell tower of San Siro, the pyramidal cupola of the Prince Amadeus Municipal Theatre, here the iron tower of the old Gazzano elevator factory (now that these things have gone forever, their names impose themselves on the page, irreplaceable and peremptory, demanding salvation), the mansards of the so-called Parisian Building, a block of rented flats owned by cousins of ours, which at that time (I’m talking about the late twenties now) was an isolated outpost of distant metropolises stranded on the rocky San Francesco River valley … Beyond all this, like a curtain, the Porta Candelieri side of the river – the water itself was hidden down at the bottom with its reeds, its washerwomen, its scum of refuse under the Roglio bridge – rose in a steep hill where my family then owned a precipitously sloping allotment, and where the old Pigna casbah clung on, grey and porous as a disinterred bone, with bits that were tarry black or yellow and tufts of grass, and above, on the site of the old San Costanzo quarter, destroyed by the earthquake of ’87, was a public garden, neatly kept and a little sad, whose hedges and espaliers climbed up the hill: as far as the dancefloor of a workingmen’s club mounted on scaffolding, the shabby building of the old hospital, the eighteenth-century sanctuary of the Madonna della Costa, with its imposing mass of blue. Mothers’ shouts, the songs of girls or of drunkards, depending on the time of day, on the day of the week, would shear off from these super-urban slopes to tumble down onto our garden, clear through a sky of silence; while shut in amongst the red scales of its roofs the city sounded its confused clatter of trams and hammers, and the lone trumpet in the courtyard of the De Sonnaz barracks, and the hum of the Bestagno sawmill, and – at Christmastime – the music of merry-go-rounds along the sea-front. Every sound, every shape, led one back to others, more sensed than heard or seen, and so on and on.

  My father’s road likewise led far away. The only things he saw in the world were plants and whatever had to do with plants, and he would say all their names out loud, in the absurd Latin botanists use, and where they came from – all his life he’d had a passion for studying and acclimatizing exotic plants – and their p
opular names, too, if they had them, in Spanish or in English or in our local dialect, and into this naming of plants he would put all his passion for exploring a universe without end, for venturing time and again to the furthest frontiers of a vegetable genealogy, opening up from every branch or leaf or nervation as it were a waterway for himself, within the sap, within the network that covers the green earth. And in growing his plants – because that was another of his passions, or rather his main passion – in farming our San Giovanni estate (he would go there every morning leaving by the beudo door with his dog, half an hour’s walk even at his pace, almost all of it uphill) he would be forever anxious, but as though it wasn’t so much his getting a good yield out of those few hectares that he really cared about, as his doing whatever he could to further a task of nature which required human assistance, to grow everything that could be grown, to offer oneself as a link in a story that goes on and on, from the seed and the cutting for planting out or for grafting to the flower to the fruit to the plant and then over and over again without beginning or end in the narrow confines of the earth (the plot or the planet). But just a rustle of grass from beyond the strips of land he worked, a flutter, a squeak, and he would jump up eyes round and staring small beard pointed, to stand there ears straining (he had a motionless face, like an owl’s, with sudden starts sometimes, like a bird of prey, eagle or condor), and he was no longer the farmer but the woodsman now, the hunter, because this was his passion – his first, yes, his first, or rather his last, the final shape of his one passion, to know to grow to hunt, in every way to get on top of things, inside them, in that wild wood, in the non-anthropomorphic universe, before which (and only there) a man was man – to hunt, to lie in ambush, in the cold night before dawn, on the bleak heights of the Colla Bella or the Colla Ardente, waiting for the thrush, the hare (a pelt hunter, like all Ligurian farmers, his dog was a bloodhound) or to go right into the wood, to beat it inch by inch, dog’s nose in the ground, for all the animal trails, in every gorge where over the last fifty years foxes and badgers had dug their lairs and only he knew where, or when he went without his gun – to the sort of place where thrusting mushrooms swell the sodden earth after rain or edible snails streak it, the familiar wood with its toponymy that went back to the time of Napoleon – Monsù Marco, the Corporal’s Sash, Artillery Way – and every gamebird and every scent was reason enough to walk for miles off the paths, beating the mountainside gulley after gulley for days and nights, sleeping in those crude huts for drying chestnuts made from stones and branches that people call cannicci, alone with his dog or his gun, as far as Piedmont, as far as France, without ever leaving the woods, forcing open the path before him, that secret path that only he knew and that went across all the woods there were, that united all woods in one single wood, every wood in the world in a wood beyond all woods, every place in the world in a place beyond all places.

  You see how our roads diverged, my father’s and my own. Though I was like him in a way. For what was the road I sought if not a repeat of my father’s, but dug out of the depths of another otherness, the upperworld (or hell) of humanity, what were my eyes seeking in the dimly lit porches of the night (sometimes the shadow of a woman would disappear inside) if not the half-open door, the cinema screen to pass through, the page to turn that leads into a world where all words and shapes become real, present, my own experience, no longer the echo of an echo of an echo.

  Talking to each other was difficult. Both verbose by nature, possessed of an ocean of words, in each other’s presence we became mute, would walk in silence side by side along the road to San Giovanni. To my father’s mind, words must serve as confirmations of things, and as signs of possession; to mine they were foretastes of things barely glimpsed, not possessed, presumed. My father’s vocabulary welled outward into the interminable catalogue of the genuses, species and varieties of the vegetable world – every name was a distinction plucked from the dense compactness of the forest in the belief that one had thus enlarged man’s dominion – and into technical terminology, where the exactness of the word goes hand in hand with the studied exactness of the operation, the gesture. And this whole Babel-like nomenclature was mashed up in an equally Babel-like idiomatic base, where various languages vied with each other, combining together as need or memory dictated (dialect for anything local and blunt – he had an unusually rich dialect vocabulary, full of words no one used anymore – Spanish for things general and decorous – Mexico had been the backdrop to his most successful years – Italian for rhetoric – he was, in everything, a nineteenth-century man – English – he had been to Texas – for the practical side, French for jokes), the result being a conversational style all woven together with stock refrains promptly trotted out in response to familiar situations, exorcizing the movements of the mind and forming once again a catalogue, parallel to that of his farming vocabulary – and to yet another catalogue of his made up not of words this time but of whistles, twitters, trills, tu-whits and tu-whoos, this arising from his great ability to mimic birdcalls, whether simply by pursing his lips or cupping his hands round his mouth in some particular way, or by using little whistles or gadgets that you blew into or that went off with a spring, a considerable assortment of which he would carry around with him in his hunting jacket.

  I could recognize not a single plant or bird. The world of things was mute for me. The words that flowed and flowed inside my head weren’t anchored to objects, but to emotions fantasies, forebodings. And all it took was for a scrap of trampled newspaper to find its way beneath my feet and I would be engrossed in soaking up the writing on it, mutilated and unmentionable – names of theatres, actresses, vanities – and already my mind would be racing off, the sequence of images would go on for hours and hours as I walked silently behind my father, who might point to some leaves on the other side of a wall and say, “Ypotoglaxia jasminifolia” (I’m inventing the names; I never learned the real ones), “Photophila wolfoides”, he would say (I’m inventing; they were names of this sort), or “Crotodendron indica”, (of course I could perfectly well have looked up some real names, instead of inventing them, and maybe rediscovered what plants my father had actually been naming for me; but that would have been cheating, refusing to accept the loss that I inflicted on myself, the thousands of losses we inflict on ourselves and for which there is no making amends). (And yet, and yet, if I had written some real names of plants here it would have been a gesture of modesty and devotion on my part, finally resorting to that humble knowledge that my youth rejected in order to try my luck with other cards, unknown and treacherous, it would have been a way of making peace with my father, a demonstration of maturity, and yet I didn’t do it, I indulged in this joke of invented names, this intended parody, sure sign that I am still resisting, arguing, sure sign that that morning march to San Giovanni is still going on, with its same discord, and that every morning of my life is still the morning when it’s my turn to go with Father to San Giovanni.)

  We had to go with my father to San Giovanni, one day me and one day my brother (not during school time, because then Mother wouldn’t allow us to be distracted, but in the summer months, just when we could have slept late), to help him carry home the baskets of fruit and greens. (I’m talking about when we were bigger now, teenagers, and Father old; though Father always seemed to be the same age, between sixty and seventy, a dogged, tireless old age.) Summer and winter, he would get up at five, noisily pull on his farming clothes, lace up his leggins (he always dressed heavily, jacket and waistcoat whatever the season, mainly because he needed so many pockets for all the pruning shears and grafting knives and balls of string or raffia he always took with him; except that in summer he’d change his fustian hunting jacket and peaked-cap-with-attached-balaclava for faded yellow cloth fatigues left over from Mexico days and a colonial lion-hunters hat), come into our room to wake us up, with gruff shouts and shoulder-shaking, then go downstairs with his hobnail shoes on the marble steps, wander round the empty house (Mother
got up at six, then Grandmother, and last of all the maid and the cook), open the kitchen windows, heat up some coffee for himself, slops for the dog, talk to the dog, get together the baskets to be taken to San Giovanni, empty or with bags of seeds or insecticide or fertilizer in them (the noises sounded muffled to us in our semiconscious state, since no sooner had Father woken us up than we had fallen right back to sleep again), and already he would be opening the back door to the beudo, was out in the street, coughing and clearing his catarrh, summer and winter.

  We had managed to extract a tacit reprieve from our morning duty: instead of walking along with Father we would catch up with him in San Giovanni, half an hour or an hour later, so that his footsteps marching away up San Pietro hill told us we still had a scrap of sleep to cling to. But immediately my mother came to wake us up again. “Get up, get up, it’s late, Dad went ages ago!” and she would open the windows onto palm trees rustling in the morning wind, pull the bedclothes off us, “Get up, get up, Dad’s waiting for you to carry the baskets!” (No, it’s not so much Mother’s voice that comes back to me, in these pages echoing with my father’s noisy and distant presence, but a silent authority she had: she looks out between these lines, then immediately withdraws, is left in the margin; there, she came into our room and is gone, we didn’t hear her leave and our sleep is over forever.) I must get dressed in a hurry, climb up to San Giovanni before my father starts back, laden.

  He always came back laden. It was a point of honour for him never to make the trip empty-handed. And since the proper road didn’t go up as far as San Giovanni, there was no other way of getting the produce home than to carry it by hand (our hands, that is, since a labourer’s time costs money and can’t be thrown away, and when the women go to market they are already loaded up with things to sell). (True, there had once been – but this is a memory from earlier infancy – Giuà the muleteer with his wife Bianca and mule Bianchina, but Bianchina the mule had been dead a long time, and Giuà had got a hernia, though old Bianca is still alive today as I write.) Usually it was towards half-past nine or ten that my father got back from his morning trip: you would hear his footsteps along the beudo, heavier than when he set out, a bang on the kitchen door (he didn’t ring the bell because he had his hands full, or perhaps more out of a kind of declaration, of emphasis of his coming back laden), and you would see him come in with a basket under each arm, or a hamper, and a haversack on his back or even a pannier, and the kitchen would suddenly be swimming in greens and fruit, there was always more than one family could eat (I’m talking here about the times of plenty, before the war, before tending the land became almost the only means of getting the food we needed), and my mother would disapprove, worried as ever that nothing should be wasted, things, time, energy.