The Watcher and Other Stories
Italo Calvino
Language: English
Pages: 192
ISBN: 0156949520
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
same side, the side of earthly values, politics, practicality, power? Weren’t they both desecrating the Cottolengo fetish, one using it as an electoral machine and the other trying to unmask it in this function? Looking out of the window, he noticed, at another window sill, two eyes that appeared behind the pane, a head that could only reach up as far as the nose, a huge skull covered with down: a dwarf. The dwarf’s eyes were staring at the Member, and stubby little fingers were raised against
gradually extended through new bequests and constructions and enterprises: from over the walls rose the roofs of buildings, spires, treetops, and smokestacks. Where the public street separated one part of the institution from another, they were joined by overhead passages, as in certain ancient factories, which had sprung up according to the dictates of practical utility and not of beauty; these were the same, bounded by bare walls and gates. The factory idea went beyond the external resemblance:
declining class” that the class struggle had managed to bestir even the ex-bourgeois Amerigo), or the more recent incarnation of that class struggle, only about forty years old, as Communism had become an international power and the revolution meant discipline, preparation for responsibility, bargaining among powers even where the party wasn’t in power (then Amerigo was attracted by this game many of whose rules seemed established and inscrutable and obscure, though you often felt you were
every time the phone’s ring made me jump. Luckily, he was hardly ever in the house, and therefore some of my telephone conversations even managed to be self-confident, nonchalant, and, depending on Claudia’s humor, we could create an atmosphere of amorous exchange where every word took on a warmth, an intimacy, an inner meaning. On other occasions, however, she was in the best of moods and I was instead blocked, I answered only in monosyllables, with reticent, evasive phrases: the sergeant was
examined that crowd of backs, motionless in the cold, some with upturned collars, and the row of bundled-up forms at the table, with one man on his feet talking, as bulky as a bear, all surrounded, impregnated now by that fog, even their words, their stubbornness. CLAUDIA CAME back in February. We went to have lunch in an expensive restaurant on the river, at the end of the park. Beyond the windows we looked at the shore and the trees that, with the color of the air, composed a picture of