Mr Palomar Read online

  The premiss of these verbal exchanges is the idea that a perfect accord between a married pair allows them to understand each other without having to make everything specific and detailed; but this principle is put into practice in very different ways by the two of them: Mrs Palomar expresses herself with complete sentences, though often allusive or sibylline, to test the promptness of her husband’s mental associations and the syntony of his thoughts with hers (a thing that does not always work); Mr Palomar, on the other hand, from the mists of his inner monologue allows scattered, articulate sounds to emerge, confident that, if the obviousness of a complete meaning does not emerge, at least the chiaroscuro of a mood will.

  Mrs Palomar, instead, refuses to receive these grumbles as talk, and to underline her non-participation she says in a low voice, “Sssh! . . . You’ll frighten them . . .”, applying to her husband the same shushing that he had believed himself entitled to impose on her, and confirming once more her own primacy as far as consideration for the blackbirds goes.

  Having scored this point to her advantage, Mrs Palomar goes off. The blackbirds peck on the lawn and no doubt consider the dialogue of the Palomars the equivalent of their own whistles. We might just as well confine ourselves to whistling, he thinks. Here a prospect that is very promising for Mr Palomar’s thinking opens out; for him the discrepancy between human behavior and the rest of the universe has always been a source of anguish. The equal whistle of man and blackbird now seems to him a bridge thrown over the abyss.

  If man were to invest in whistling everything he normally entrusts to words, and if the blackbird were to modulate into his whistling all the unspoken truth of his natural condition, then the first step would be taken towards bridging the gap between . . . between what and what? Nature and culture? Silence and speech? Mr Palomar hopes always that silence contains something more than what language can say. But what if language were really the goal towards which everything in existence tends? Or what if everything that exists were language, and has been since the beginning of time? Here Mr Palomar is again gripped by anguish.

  After having listened carefully to the whistle of the blackbird, he tries to repeat it, as faithfully as he can. A puzzled silence follows, as if his message required careful examination; then an identical whistle re-echoes. Mr Palomar does not know if this is a reply to his, or the proof that his whistle is so different that the blackbirds are not the least disturbed by it and resume their dialogue as if nothing had happened.

  They go on whistling, questioning in their puzzlement, he and the blackbirds.

  The infinite lawn

  Around Mr Palomar’s house there is a lawn. This is not a place where a lawn should exist naturally: so the lawn is an artificial object, composed from natural objects, namely grasses. The lawn’s purpose is to represent nature, and this representation occurs as the substitution of the nature proper to the area with a nature in itself natural but artificial for this area. In other words, it costs money: the lawn requires expense and endless labor to sow it, water it, fertilize it, weed it, mow it.

  The lawn is composed of dicondra, darnel and clover. This mixture, in equal parts, was scattered over the ground at sowing time. The dicondra, dwarfed and creeping, promptly got the upper hand: its carpet of soft little round leaves spreads everywhere, pleasing to the foot and to the eye. But the lawn is given its thickness by the sharp spears of darnel, if they are not too sparse and if you do not allow them to grow too much before cutting them. The clover sprouts irregularly, some clumps here, nothing there, and farther on, a whole sea of it; it grows exuberantly until it slumps, because the helix of the leaf becomes top-heavy and bends the tender stalk. The lawn-mower attends with deafening shudder to the tonsure; a light odor of fresh hay intoxicates the air; the leveled grass finds again a bristling infancy, but the bite of the blades reveals unevenness, mangy clearings, yellow patches.

  To cut its proper figure, the lawn must be a uniform green expanse: an unnatural result that lawns created by nature achieve naturally. Here, observing it point by point, you discover where the whirling jet of the hose cannot reach, and where the water falls constantly and rots the roots, and where the carefully-regulated watering fosters weeds.

  Mr Palomar is crouched on the lawn, pulling up weeds. A dandelion clings to the ground with a foundation of jagged leaves, thickly overlapping; if you tug at the stalk, it breaks off in your hand, while the roots are still sunk into the ground. With a curving movement of the hand you have to grasp the entire plant and delicately slip the roots from the earth, even if you have to pull up a bit of sod and some of the lawn’s rare blades of grass, half-smothered by their aggressive neighbor. Then you must throw the interloper in a place where it cannot put down roots again or scatter seed. When you start pulling up one weed, you immediately see another appear a bit farther on, and another, and still another. In no time that stretch of lawn, so grassy that it seemed to need only a few touches, proves to be a lawless jungle.

  Are only weeds left? Worse: the harmful grasses are so thickly interwoven with the good that you cannot just thrust in your hand and pull. A complicity seems to have been established between the sown grasses and the wild ones, a relaxing of the barriers imposed by difference of birth, a tolerance resigned to deterioration. Some spontaneous grasses, in and of themselves, do not look at all maleficent or insidious. Why not admit them to the company of those that rightfully belong to the lawn, integrating them in the community of the cultivated plants? This is the road that leads to forgetting about the “English-style lawn” and falling back on the “rustic lawn”, left to its own devices. “Sooner or later we’ll have to make up our minds and accept it,” Mr Palomar thinks, but he feels it would be a betrayal of one’s code of honor. A chicory, a borage plant spring into his field of vision. He uproots them.

  To be sure, pulling up a weed here and there solves nothing. This is how it should be done – he thinks: take a square section of the lawn, one meter by one meter, and eliminate even the slightest presence of anything but clover, darnel, or dicondra. Then move on to another square. No, perhaps not: remain perhaps with a sample square. Count how many blades of grass there are, what species, how thick, how distributed. On the basis of this calculation you would arrive at a statistical knowledge of the lawn, which, once established . . .

  But counting the blades of grass is futile: you would never learn their number. A lawn does not have precise boundaries, there is a border where the grass stops growing but still a few scattered blades sprout farther on, then a thick green clod, then a sparser stretch: are they still part of the lawn, or not? Elsewhere the underbrush enters the lawn: you cannot tell what is lawn and what is bush. But even where there is no grass, you never know at what point you can stop counting: between one little plant and the next there is always a tiny sprouting leaf that barely emerges from the earth, its root a white wisp hardly perceptible; a moment ago it could have been overlooked but soon it will also have to be counted. Meanwhile two other shoots that just now seemed barely a shade yellowish have definitively withered and must be erased from the count. Then there are the fractions of blades of grass, cut in half, or shorn to the ground, or split along the nervation, the little leaves that have lost one lobe . . . The decimals, added up, do not make an integer, they remain a minute grassy devastation, in part still alive, in part already pulp, food for others plants, humus . . .

  The lawn is a collection of grasses – this is how the problem must be formulated – that includes a subcollection of cultivated grasses and a subcollection of spontaneous grasses known as weeds; an intersection of the two subcollections is formed by the grasses which have grown spontaneously but belong to the cultivated species and are therefore indistinguishable from them. The two subcollections, in their turn, include various species, each of which is a subcollection, or rather it is a collection that includes the subcollection of its own members, which are members also of the lawn and the subcollection of those alien to the lawn. The wind blows, seeds and p
ollens fly, the relations among the collections are disrupted . . .

  Palomar has already moved to another train of thought: is “the lawn” what we see or do we see one grass plus one grass plus one grass . . .? What we call “seeing the lawn” is only an effect of our coarse and slapdash senses; a collection exists only because it is formed of discrete elements. There is no point in counting them, the number does not matter; what matters is grasping in one glance the individual little plants, one by one, in their individualities and differences. And not only seeing them: thinking them. Instead of thinking “lawn”, to think of that stalk with two clover leaves, that lanceolate, slightly humped leaf, that delicate corymb . . .

  Palomar’s mind has wandered, he has stopped pulling up weeds; he no longer thinks of the lawn: he thinks of the universe. He is trying to apply to the universe everything he has thought about the lawn. The universe as regular and ordered cosmos or as chaotic proliferation. The universe perhaps finite but countless, unstable within its borders, which discloses other universes within itself. The universe, collection of celestial bodies, nebulas, fine dust, fields of force, intersections of fields, collections of collections . . .

  PALOMAR LOOKS AT THE SKY

  * * *

  Moon in the afternoon

  Nobody looks at the moon in the afternoon, and this is the moment when it would most require our attention, since its existence is still in doubt. It is a whitish shadow that surfaces from the intense blue of the sky, charged with solar light; who can assure us that, once again, it will succeed in assuming a form and glow? It is so fragile and pale and slender; only on one side does it begin to assume a distinct outline like the arc of a sickle while the rest is all steeped in azure. It is like a transparent wafer, or a half-dissolved pastille; only here the white circle is not dissolving but condensing, collecting itself at the price of gray-bluish patches and shadows that might belong to the moon’s geography or might be spillings of the sky that still soak the satellite, porous as a sponge.

  In this phase the sky is still something very compact and concrete and you cannot be sure whether it is from its taut, uninterrupted surface that this round and whitish shape is being detached, its consistency only a bit more solid than the clouds’, or whether it is a corrosion of the basic tissue, a rift in the dome, a crevice that opens on to the void behind. The uncertainty is heightened by the irregularity of the figure that on one side is taking shape (where the rays of the setting sun arrive) and on the other lingers in a kind of penumbra. And since the border between the two zones is not sharply defined, the effect is not that of a solid seen in perspective but rather one of those little drawings of the moon on calendars, where a white outline stands within a little dark circle. There would be nothing to object to in this, if it were a moon in the first quarter and not a full, or almost full, moon. This, in fact, is what is being revealed, gradually, as its contrast with the sky becomes stronger and its circumference is being more distinctly outlined, with only a few dents on the eastern edge.

  It must be said that the sky’s blue has veered successively towards periwinkle, towards violet (the sun’s rays have become red), then towards ashen and beige, and each time the whiteness of the moon has received an impulse to emerge more firmly, and, inside it, the more luminous part has gained ground until it now covers the whole disk. It is as if the phases that the moon passes through in a month were covered inside this full or gibbous moon, in the hours between its rising and its setting, with the difference that the round form remains more or less in sight. In the midst of the circle the spots are still there, indeed their chiaroscuro becomes more distinct thanks to the luminosity of the rest, but now there is no doubt that it is the moon that bears them like stains or bruises, and they can no longer be taken for transparences of the sky’s ground, rips in the cloak of a bodiless ghost-moon.

  What remains uncertain, rather, is whether this gain in evidence and (we might as well say it) splendor is due to the slow retreat of the sky, which, as it moves away, sinks deeper and deeper into darkness, or whether, on the contrary, it is the moon that is coming forward, collecting the previously scattered light and depriving the sky of it, concentrating it all in the round mouth of its funnel.

  And, especially, these changes must not make us forget that in the meanwhile the satellite has been shifting in the sky, proceeding westwards and upwards. The moon is the most changeable body in the visible universe, and the most regular in its complicated habits: it never fails to show up for an appointment and you can always wait for it at the appointed spot; but if you leave it in one place you always find it next in another, and if you recall its face turned in a certain way, you see it has already changed its pose, a little or a lot. In any case, following it steadily, you do not realize that it is imperceptibly eluding you. Only the clouds intervene to create the illusion of a rapid dash and rapid metamorphoses, or rather, to underline vividly what would otherwise escape the eye.

  The cloud dashes. Gray at first, it becomes milky and shiny, the sky behind it has turned black, it is night, the stars are lighted, the moon is a great, dazzling mirror that flies. Who would recognize in this moon the one of a few hours ago? Now it is a lake of shininess, spurting rays all around, brimming in the darkness with a halo of cold silver, and flooding with white light the streets of the night-walkers.

  There is no doubt that what is now beginning is a splendid winter night of full moon. At this point, assured that the moon no longer needs him, Mr Palomar goes home.

  The eye and the planets

  When he learns that this year, for the entire month of April, the three “external” planets, visible to the naked eye (even his, nearsighted and astigmatic) are all three “in opposition” and therefore visible for the whole night, Mr Palomar rushes out on to the terrace.

  Because of the full moon the sky is light. Mars, though close to the great lunar mirror flooded with white light, advances imperiously with its stubborn radiance, its thick, concentrated yellow, so different from all the other yellows of the firmament that it has finally been agreed to call it red, and in moments of inspiration really to see it as red.

  Moving your gaze down, continuing eastwards an imaginary arc that should link Regulus with Spica (but Spica can hardly be seen), you encounter, quite distinct, Saturn, with its chilly whitish light, and still farther down there is Jupiter, in the moment of its greatest splendor, a vigorous yellow with a hint of green. The stars all around have paled, except Arcturus, which shines with a defiant air, a bit higher to the east.

  To enjoy most fully the triple planetary opposition it is necessary to procure a telescope. Mr Palomar, perhaps because he bears the same name as a famous observatory, can boast some friendships among astronomers, and he is allowed to put his nose beside the eyepiece of a 15cm telescope. It is rather small for scientific research; but, compared to his eyeglasses, it makes quite a difference.

  For example, in the telescope Mars proves to be a more perplexed planet than it appears to the naked eye: it seems to have many things to communicate and can bring only a small part of them into focus, as in a stammered, coughing speech. A scarlet halo protrudes around the edge; you can try to tuck it in by regulating the screw, to emphasize the crust of ice of the lower pole. Spots appear and vanish on the surface like clouds or rents in clouds; one becomes stabilized in the shape and position of Australia, and Mr Palomar is convinced that the more clearly he sees that Australia the more the lens is focused, but at the same time he realizes that he is losing other shadows of things that he thought he saw or felt obliged to see.

  In other words, it seems to him that if Mars is the planet about which, ever since the days of Schiaparelli, so many things have been said, causing alternate illusions and disappointments, this fact coincides with the difficulty of establishing relations with the planet, as with a person of difficult character. (Unless the difficulty of character is all on Mr Palomar’s side: he tries in vain to escape subjectivity by taking refuge among the celestial bodies.)<
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  Quite the opposite is the relationship he establishes with Saturn, the most exciting planet to the person viewing it through a telescope: there it is, very sharp, white, the outlines of the sphere and of the ring precise; a faint parallel, a zebra striping marks the sphere; a darker circumference distinguishes the edge of the ring. This telescope hardly picks up any other details and accentuates the geometrical abstraction of the object; the sense of an extreme difference, rather than diminishing, becomes more prominent now than to the naked eye.

  The fact that an object so different from all others, a form that achieves the maximum strangeness with the maximum simplicity and regularity and harmony, is rotating in the sky cheers life and thought.

  “If the ancients had been able to see it as I see it now,” Mr Palomar thinks, “they would have thought they had projected their gaze into the heaven of Plato’s ideas, or in the immaterial space of the postulates of Euclid; but instead, thanks to some misdirection or other, this sight has been granted to me, who fear it is too beautiful to be true, too gratifying to my imaginary universe to belong to the real world. But perhaps it is this same distrust of our senses that prevents us from feeling comfortable in the universe. Perhaps the first rule I must impose on myself is this: stick to what I see.”

  Now it seems to him that the ring is swaying slightly, or the planet is, within the ring, and both seem to rotate in place. In reality it is Mr Palomar’s head that is swaying, as he is forced to twist his neck to fit his gaze into the eyepiece of the telescope; but he takes care privately not to deny this illusion, which coincides with his expectation as it does with natural truth.