Gonçalo Tavares - The Neighborhood

In this way, besides not having any parts of his body outside the bed, he felt he was getting through the night more quickly.

As soon as he fell asleep, he would wake up.

Mister Calvino’s Pet

Every morning, Calvino would go to the kitchen to feed Poem. The animal devoured everything: no food was disagreeable or strange — and to him everything seemed to be food.

At the end of the day, after having finished his urgent chores, Mister Calvino would stroke his fur with a delicacy and skillful distraction reminiscent of harpists. During these moments, the universe would spin more slowly, acquiring the intelligent lethargy of small felines.

Giving Poem a bath was not easy; it was almost as though the animal was determined to resist cleanliness, claiming with a bound a shameless freedom that only dirt seemed to allow. But far worse was having to give the animal an injection. It was the only time when his claws were aimed at Calvino. The creature preferred to get sick rather than be medicated.

One day, the animal fell from the second-floor window and died.

The next day Calvino adopted another one.

And gave it the same name.

A Strategic Personality

Calvino described the indefatigable activities of a lazy personality, who felt that being alive was only a pretext to rest, in the following words:

He went backward to the point where he couldn’t go back any farther. There was a precipice behind him.

Then he went forward.

But he went forward only up to the point where he once again had space behind him to be able to go backward. He wouldn’t go any farther forward. It wasn’t necessary.

He went forward just enough to be able to go backward.

Then he once again went backward until the point where he couldn’t go back any farther.

He spent days doing this.

Behind him was the precipice. Any farther forward and he would get tired.

He continued like this between here and there.

At night, in order to recover his strength, he would sleep.

He sometimes slept here, and sometimes slept there. But never any farther beyond these points.

Transporting Parallels (Saturday Mornings)

Nobody thought it odd any longer, but they couldn’t help but stare.

Every Saturday morning, Mister Calvino would walk from one end of the neighborhood to the other, carrying a single metal rod in his right hand.

However, he did not transport it in just any old fashion. Calvino would carry the metal rod exactly parallel to the ground.

“I am not merely carrying a metal rod,” Calvino would say, “I am carrying a metal rod parallel to the ground .”

This was why he held the rod firmly and precisely in the center and never relaxed his grasp. Whoever saw him leave his house in the morning could note the tension in the muscles of his right arm, a tension that sought to avoid any kind of tremor, and could also admire the way in which he unfailingly carried the metal rod parallel to the ground at any given moment.

His return trip, however, could not have been more different. Apart from the fact that he held the rod securely in his other hand, the left hand, Calvino now walked in a carefree manner, with his arm completely relaxed, shifting the rod from one side to the other, like someone who was carrying a sack that was of no importance.

Calvino had explained this right at the beginning and thus nobody was surprised at the abrupt change. If, upon leaving, Mister Calvino ensured that he carried a rod that was parallel to the ground, he brought the very same rod back on his return, but this time held diagonally, which required far less physical effort on his part.

Since the slightest of slips could transform a parallel or a perpendicular into a diagonal, anyone who transported rods that were parallel to the ground of the city was worth his weight in gold; since, above all else, this showed that a person knew how to place his hand precisely at the center of things.

“It’s only fair, it’s only fair,” thought Mister Calvino, while he continued to perfect this specific technical and metaphysical skill every Saturday morning.

Games

Since they hadn’t defined the rules, it wasn’t very clear:

“We need to define the rules to determine who won, if I did or if you did,” said Mister Duchamp to Calvino, once all the pieces had been gathered up and the game had been concluded.

“But now, after we’ve played?”

“There have to be rules,” insisted Mister Duchamp, “so that we know who’s won.”

“But who’s going to define the rules now?” asked Calvino.

“You or me.”

“Well, me or you?”

“You can begin,” suggested Mister Duchamp, “and then I’ll finish.”

“No,” retorted Calvino. “You begin; each one of us will formulate a rule alternately, and I will define the last one.”

“All right. Ten?”

“Ten rules.”

They then began, alternately, to formulate rules for the game that they had just played, each one of them trying to define the rules in such a way that, albeit a posteriori , one would emerge the victor.

“A study in Nature magazine has revealed that the Archaeopteryx, which became extinct some 147 million years ago and is considered to be the link between dinosaurs and feathered vertebrates, could fly like modern-day birds.”

So there was nothing new, thought Mister Calvino, putting down his newspaper. Contemporary sparrows and recent eagles flew like the extremely outmoded Archaeopteryx. It was said that they used exactly the same technique. Essentially, they rise up using the air (or keep stable once they reach the desired height) and don’t fall. Not falling was part of their nature, and they knew how to maintain it, which is not entirely a disaster. We could say that birds do not forget their essence: they have good memories. Ever since the age of the Archaeopteryx, they have not forgotten that particularly enviable talent of not falling, which is flying.

But one had to admire the excellent memory of the sparrow, who flew exactly like its ancestor the Archaeopteryx, though, on the other hand, one could also criticize a lack of evolution, obviously the outcome of an absence of new ideas. Thus, calling something that flew in exactly the same way as the Archaeopteryx conservative does not seem to be an outrageous insult. Conservative sparrows! Calvino exclaimed to himself. No new gestures, no unexpected progress in the past few millennia, nothing: in terms of locomotion they stuck firmly to an almost frightening monotony.