Calvino - The Road to San Giovanni

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 couldnt use his working title, Passaggi obbligati, since it seems that many of the passages are missing.

E STHER C ALVINO

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 huntsmans 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 didnt 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 reachyet immensely far awayeverything was implicit, as the nut in its husk, the future and the present, and the harbourstill leaning out over those balustrades, and Im not really sure if Im 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 elsethe harbour, I was saying, you couldnt 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 (Im 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 riverthe water itself was hidden down at the bottom with its reeds, its washerwomen, its scum of refuse under the Roglio bridgerose 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 workingmens 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 superurban 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, andat Christmastimethe music of merry-go-rounds along the seafront. Every sound, every shape, led one back to others, more sensed than heard or seen, and so on and on.

My fathers 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 fromall his life hed had a passion for studying and acclimatizing exotic plantsand their popular 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 plantsbecause that was another of his passions, or rather his main passionin farming our San Giovanni estate (he would go there every morning leaving by the