Odd Jobs (129 page)

Italo Calvino, who began to write forty years ago in the shade of Italian neorealism, became in his fiction increasingly cerebral and schematic. But even in his early short stories, even in the grim little war anecdotes based on his youthful experiences as a Partisan in the Ligurian mountains, there was something fanciful and ideal, an underlying formalism. His new novel,
Mr. Palomar
, consists of twenty-seven small chapters, each describing observations by its hero, who is named after an observatory. Twenty-seven is three to the third power, and an afterword attached to an index of the chapters demonstrates that the possibilities for symmetry and modulation were lovingly weighed by the author:

Such a grid rivals Joyce’s intertwining schemata for
Ulysses
, which assigned each chapter not only a corresponding episode of
The Odyssey
but a particular color, an organ of the human body, an hour of the day, a dominant symbol, and a human science or art, and which furthermore carried forward this huge apparatus of multiple significance through a Thomistic system of contraries and coincidences, products and antidotes, not to mention parallels with various of Giambattista Vico’s ages of mankind and a presiding metaphysics of space and time.

Joyce’s encyclopedic and abstractifying ambitions were incongruously but fruitfully wedded to his love of life’s small talk and petty grit, and to the passionate autobiography that his elaborate designs hold. Where the autobiographical, factual impulse is less powerful, schematization runs the risk of seeming playful and automatic; and Calvino did not always dodge this gentle danger.
Invisible Cities
(1974), amid all its airy machinery, was infused with his lively civic concern and cosmopolitan reach of imagination, but
The Castle of Crossed Destinies
(1977) seemed at times to be merely playing cards, to be filling in the scheme’s blank spaces, and in
If on a winter’s night a traveler
(1981) the overlays of cleverness and the charm of the literary parodies left an afterimage that melted in the mind like a Platonic pastille.
Mr. Palomar
, though short, is a more substantial and integrated book than these last two; it undertakes a description of
existential man rather than literary man, and deals with issues of perception rather than of reading and narration.

Mr. Palomar—a man, we learn, of middle age and no definite occupation, with a wife and an apartment both in Rome and in Paris—sets himself to look at things, and focuses until he arrives at a conclusion, however small. “A nervous man who lives in a frenzied and congested world, Mr. Palomar tends to reduce his relations with the outside world; and, to defend himself against the general neurasthenia, he tries to keep his sensations under control insofar as possible.” Chapter 1.1.1, for instance—the most intense dose, as we can gauge at a glance, of the visual, descriptive mode—finds our hero on the beach, viewing the waves with a determined precision:

He tries to use the waves as an instrument wherewith “to perceive the true substance of the world beyond sensory and mental habits,” feels “a slight dizziness” instead, and goes off along the beach “tense and nervous as when he came, and even more unsure about everything.”

With 1.1.2, we enter the anthropological mode: Mr. Palomar attempts to cope visually and socially with the sight of a naked bosom, “the bronze-pink cloud of a naked female torso,” on this same beach. To stare is wrong, yet not to stare is also wrong; his reactions to this provocative sight swing from an “indiscreet and reactionary” looking away that reinforces “the convention that declares illicit any sight of the breast” to a liberal attempt to convey “detached encouragement” with a gaze that, “giving the landscape a fickle glance, will linger on the breast with special consideration, but will quickly include it in an impulse of good will and gratitude for the whole, for the sun and the sky, for the bent pines and the dune and the beach and the rocks and the clouds and the seaweed,
for the cosmos that rotates around those haloed cusps.” Thus he will signal that, “though he belongs to a human generation for whom nudity of the female bosom was associated with the idea of amorous intimacy, still he hails approvingly this change in customs.” But in walking back and forth trying to achieve just the right political adjustment in his gaze he finally succeeds in driving the possessor of the bosom off in an angry huff. It is all funny, familiar, and sociologically thoughtful. The next chapter, 1.1.3, takes us into cosmic and philosophical considerations as Palomar swims toward the swordlike reflection of the sun on the sea and ponders the dependence of this blazing phenomenon upon his own witnessing of it. Persuaded that “the sword will exist even without him,” he “dries himself with a soft towel and goes home.”

Such a cycle of three is repeated three times three times; we see Mr. Palomar on the beach, in the garden, and stargazing; on the terrace, shopping, and at the zoo; travelling, in society, and meditating. He ponders the lovemaking of tortoises, the composition of lawns, the moon in daytime, Rome’s plague of pigeons, Paris’s plethora of cheeses, an albino gorilla, a Zen sand garden, a Mexican ruin, and why we get so angry at the young. When the book heads into its last third and the 3’s pile up, the topics get increasingly heady: “The model of models,” “The universe as mirror,” “Learning to be dead.” We learn, in the bargain, a bit more about Mr. Palomar: He does not love himself, we are told, and therefore “has always taken care not to encounter himself face to face.” He thinks of death as benign insofar as it will eliminate “that patch of uneasiness that is our presence.” The middle section, under the anthropological sign of 2 and the general head of “Mr. Palomar in the City,” reads the easiest, and has a distinctly creaturely emphasis, from the colorful evocation of a butcher’s shop—“Vast ribs blaze up, round tournedos whose thickness is lined by a ribbon of lard, slender and agile contre-filets, steaks armed with their invincible bone.… Farther on some white tripe glows, a liver glistens blackly”—to the close scrutiny of a gecko, lit transparently from underneath, as it swallows a large, live butterfly: “Will it all fit? Will he spit it out? Will he explode? No, the butterfly is there in his throat: it flutters, in a sorry state but still itself, not touched by the insult of chewing teeth; now it passes the narrow limits of the neck; it is a shadow that begins its slow and troubled journey down along a swollen esophagus.”

Witty observation and artful phrasing are the rule in Calvino’s subtly arranged sets and subsets of vignettes; some add up better than others,
but none falls below a certain high level of intelligence and attentiveness. The world, as it were, is inventoried afresh, by this most generally (and genially) alert of postwar writers. Yet a melancholy, defeated tone seeps through the polish. The albino gorilla is pictured as discovering in an old rubber tire “a glimpse of what for man is the search for an escape from the dismay of living—investing oneself in things, recognizing oneself in signs, transforming the world into a collection of symbols.… We all turn in our hands an old, empty tire through which we try to reach some final meaning, which words cannot achieve.” This collection of animated essays tricked out as a novel has a certain upper limit, too; Mr. Palomar’s world offers itself as food for thought too meekly, without fighting back. As in Robert Benchley’s old humorous pieces, the bemused hero can meet no worse fate than embarrassment—looking momentarily like a fool. It would be as if Mr. Sammler, in Saul Bellow’s novel, were allowed to wander through New York thinking his thoughts and never having to cope with the menacing black pickpocket, the outrageous college radical, the distressingly sexy great-niece, the lethal Israeli son-in-law. Even in Paul Valéry’s
Monsieur Teste
, a book
Mr. Palomar
considerably resembles, there is more sense of activity and contention; Monsieur Teste has had to hack out his clearing for pure intellection with a heroic, ascetic effort, and in the assembled texts he is seen from the outside, by an admiring friend and a loving wife. “He is tall and dreadful suddenly. The machine of his monotonous acts explodes; his face sparkles; he says things that often I only half understand, but they never fade from my memory.… It took all the energy of a great body to sustain in the mind that diamond instant which is at once the idea and the Thing, both the entrance and the end.” Thus Madame Teste sees her amazing husband, whose name puns not only on the Old French
teste
for “head” but the Latin
testis
, meaning “testicle” as well as “witness.” What Signora and Signorina Palomar make of their woolgathering protector is not disclosed.

Well, Calvino might have argued, the 1980s, when he wrote
Mr. Palomar
, are not the 1890s, when Valéry created Monsieur Teste, “the very demon of possibility.” The demon of impossibility has replaced that of possibility. We live now in “the era of great numbers,” when humanity “extends in a crowd, leveled but still made up of distinct individualities like the sea of grains of sand that submerges the surface of the world.” If one such individuality chooses to pose on the sand and contemplate the waves, little will come of it for good or ill; in society, Mr. Palomar holds
his tongue, and in solitude “no longer knows where his self is to be found.” Can this diminished person be a portrait of today’s Western European intellectual? Backed off from any doctrinal certainty, concerned with words and signs since things are now properly abandoned to science, mellowed by forty years of affluence and peace, his “patch of uneasiness” affably entertains the “dismay of living.”

In this book’s last chapter, the hero contemplates his own death: “The world can very well do without him, and he can consider himself dead quite serenely, without even altering his habits.” The sadness of this modest reflection is deepened by Calvino’s own death this month, of a stroke, at the age of only sixty-one. Presumably, he had many books still to write and honors still to reap; he had become, with the death (also premature) of Roland Barthes, Europe’s leading litterateur. Thoroughly “up” on all the latest devices of thought and style, Calvino could nevertheless immerse himself for years in Italian folktales; for all his love of complication, his work had a timeless lucidity, a unique unclouded climate, like that of a fall afternoon whose coolness is the small price we must pay for its being so sunny and clear.

S
IX
M
EMOS FOR THE
N
EXT
M
ILLENNIUM
, by Italo Calvino, translated from the Italian by Patrick Creagh. 124 pp. Harvard University Press, 1988.

U
NDER THE
J
AGUAR
S
UN
, by Italo Calvino, translated from the Italian by William Weaver. 86 pp. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988.

The sudden death of Italo Calvino in 1985 left a number of his ingenious schemata uncompleted. His intended 1985–86 Norton Lectures at Harvard fall one short of the proposed
Six Memos for the Next Millennium
. The five literary values he did discuss, as exemplified in his own work and that of others, were “Lightness,” “Quickness,” “Exactitude,” “Visibility,” and “Multiplicity”; “Consistency” is the ghost of the sequence, the unformulated final virtue. The lectures are marvels of
charm, mental adroitness, and casual erudition, drawing upon literary instances in five languages and citing with special affection Italian masters such as Cavalcanti, Boccaccio, Leopardi, and Carlo Emilio Gadda, not to mention Dante. Calvino, the most civilized of postmodern creative spirits, saw his own working method as “the subtraction of weight” and spoke refreshingly of the stimulus exerted upon his imagination by science, comic strips, and folktales, along with modernist writers like Valéry, Musil, Queneau, and Jarry. Calvino read everything, and in his dazzling designs—nothing less than tours de force interested him—made the play of the mind sensuous.

Under the Jaguar Sun
titles another unfulfilled scheme—an intention, from as long ago as 1972, to write a short story for each of the five senses. The three stories he finished, though each is brilliant, are quite dissimilar in texture and approach. “A King Listens” dramatizes hearing through the interior monologue of a timeless, isolated, rather Beckettian monarch. “The Name, the Nose” relates the olfactory sense to eros and death through three interwoven narratives, those of a nineteenth-century Parisian dandy, a Seventies rock musician in London, and a nameless human animal reminiscent of the generic creatures in
Cosmicomics
. “Under the Jaguar Sun” deals with taste as a matter of Mexican cuisine—from
chiles en nogada
to ritual Aztec meals of human flesh—as it figures in the relationship of a middle-aged tourist couple; this story, the most realistic of the three, is a delicious fabrication.