Italo Calvino - Marcovaldo or The Seasons in the City

And it landed in the gloved hands of a fireman, perched at the top of a portable ladder. Foiled even in that extreme act of animal dignity, the rabbit was bundled into the ambulance, which set off full-tilt towards the hospital. Also aboard were Marcovaldo, his wife, and his children, to be interned for observation and for a series of vaccine tests.

For anyone who dislikes his home and finds it inhospitable, the favorite refuge on cold evenings is the movies. Marcovaldo had a passion for Technicolor films on the wide screen, which can embrace the most vast horizons: prairies, rocky mountains, equatorial forests, islands where you live with a garland around your head. He would see the picture twice, and he never came out until they were closing the theater; and in his thoughts he continued living in those landscapes and breathing those colors. But the return home in the drizzling night, the wait at the stop for tram number 30, the realization that his life would know no other setting beyond trams, traffic-lights, rooms in the half-basement, gas stoves, drying laundry, warehouses and shipping rooms, made the film's splendor fade for him to a worn and gray sadness.

That evening, the film he had seen took place in the forests of India: steam rose in clouds from the swampy undergrowth, and serpents slithered along the lianas and climbed up the statues of ancient temples swallowed up by the jungle.

Coming out of the theater, he opened his eyes at the street, closed them again, reopened them: he saw nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not even in front of his nose. In the hours he had spent inside, fog had invaded the city, a thick, opaque fog, which engulfed things and sounds, flattened distances into a space without dimensions, mixed lights into the darkness and transformed them into glows without shape or place.

Marcovaldo headed mechanically for the stop of the 30 tram and banged his nose against the signpost. At that moment he realized he was happy: the fog, erasing the world around him, allowed him to hold in his eyes the visions of the wide screen. Even the cold was muffled, as if the city had pulled a cloud over it, like a blanket. Bundled up in his overcoat, Marcovaldo felt protected from every external sensation, suspended in the void; and he could color this void with the images of India, the Ganges, the jungle, Calcutta.

The tram arrived, evanescent as a phantom, slowly jangling; things existed just to the slight extent that sufficed; for Marcovaldo staying at the rear of the tram that evening, his back to the other passengers, as he stared beyond the panes at the empty night traversed only by undefined luminous presences and by an occasional shadow blacker than the darkness, offered the perfect situation for day-dreaming, for projecting in front of himself, wherever he went, a never-ending film on a boundless screen.

With these fantasies he lost count of the stops; all at once he asked himself where he was; he saw the tram was now almost empty; he peered out of the windows, interpreted the glimmers that surfaced, decided his stop was the next, ran to the door just in time, and got out. He looked around, seeking some reference-point. But the few shadows and lights his eyes could discern refused to form any known image. He had got off at the wrong stop and didn't know where he was.

If he met a passer-by it would be easy to ask him the way; but whether because of the loneliness of this place or because of the hour or the bad weather, there wasn't a shadow of a human being to be seen. Finally he saw one, a shadow, and waited for it to come closer. No, it was moving away; perhaps it was crossing the street, or walking down the middle of it; it might not be a pedestrian, but a cyclist, on a bicycle without a headlight.

Marcovaldo cried out: "Hey! Hey, mister! Please, can you tell me where Via Pancrazio Pancrazietti is?"

The shape moved farther away, was now almost invisible. "That way…" But there was no telling which way he had pointed.

"Right or left?" shouted Marcovaldo, but he could have been addressing the void.

An answer came, the wake of an answer: "… eft!" but it could also have been "… ight!" In any case, since there was no seeing which way the other man faced, right and left meant nothing.

Now Marcovaldo was walking towards a glow that seemed to come from the opposite sidewalk, a bit farther on. But the distance proved to be much greater: he had to cross a kind of square, with a little island of grass in the middle, and arrows (the only intelligible sign) indicating that traffic had to keep right. It was late, but surely some café was still open, some tavern; the sign he was just beginning to decipher said: Bar… Then it went out; on what must have been an illuminated window a shaft of darkness fell, like a blind. The bar was closing, and it was still-he seemed to understand at that moment-very far away.

So he might as well head for another light. As he walked, Marcovaldo didn't know if he was following a straight line, if the luminous dot he was now heading for was always the same or had doubled or trebled or changed position. The soot, a somewhat milky black, within which he moved was so fine that already he felt it infiltrating his overcoat, as if through a sieve, between the threads of the cloth, which soaked it up like a sponge.

The light he reached was the smoky entrance to a tavern. Inside, there were people seated or standing at the counter, but, because of the poor illumination or because the fog had penetrated everywhere, even here forms seemed blurred, like certain taverns you see in the movies, situated in ancient times or in distant lands.

"I was looking… maybe you gentlemen know where it is… for Via Pancrazietti…" he began saying, but there was noise in the tavern, drunks who laughed, believing him drunk, and the questions he managed to ask, the explanations he managed to obtain, were also foggy and blurred. Especially since, to warm himself, he ordered-or rather, he allowed the men standing at the counter to force on him-a quarter-liter of wine, at first, and then another half-liter, plus a few glasses which, with great slaps on the back, were offered him by the others. In short, when he came out of the tavern, his notions of the way home were no clearer than before, though, in compensation, the fog was more than ever capable of containing all continents and colors.

With the warmth of the wine inside him, Marcovaldo walked for a good quarter of an hour, with steps that constantly felt the need of stretching to the left and to the right, to gauge the width of the sidewalk (if he was still following a sidewalk), and hands that felt the need to touch continuously the walls (if he was still following a wall). The fog in his thoughts, as he walked, was gradually dispelled; but the fog outside remained dense. He remembered that at the tavern they had told him to take a certain avenue, follow it for a hundred yards, then ask again. But now he didn't know how far he had come from the tavern, or if he had only walked around the block.

The spaces seemed uninhabited, within brick walls like the confines of factories. At one corner there was surely the marble plaque with the name of the street, but the light of the lamp-post, suspended between the two lanes, didn't reach that far. To approach the words, Marcovaldo climbed up a no-parking sign. He climbed until he could put his nose on the plaque, but the letters had faded and he had no matches to illuminate them better. Above the plaque, the wall ended in a flat, broad top, and leaning out from the no-parking sign, Marcovaldo managed to hoist himself up there. He had glimpsed, set above the top of the wall, a big whitish sign. He took a few steps along the top of the wall, reaching the sign; here the street-light illuminated the black letters on the white ground, but the words: "Access to unauthorized persons strictly prohibited" gave him no enlightenment.