Gonçalo Tavares - The Neighborhood

But at the same time he had a feeling that they were all inside the belly of a whale and had all been swallowed up a long time ago.

The Balloon

Sometimes Mister Calvino would walk around the city for an entire week, carrying a well-filled balloon with him. He kept up all his normal daily activities, without the slightest change in his routine: his morning walks, the loud and convincing “Good morning!” bestowed upon each person he came across in the neighborhood, the activities necessary for his job, his strictly regulated dinner and his reckless, anything goes lunch, his timetable and punctuality with their classic rigor, his conservative and discreet manner of dressing and smiling, in short, nothing changed — from the moment he got up until he went to bed — except for one thing: between the first finger and thumb of his right hand he firmly clasped, with all the precision of a watchmaker, the string of a well-filled balloon, which he carried with him throughout the day. At work, at home, in the street, at the grocer, where he periodically requested Apples that are rosier than innocent girls , at the café, irrespective of whether he was walking slowly or quickly, standing upright or sitting, Mister Calvino never let go of the balloon, perpetually ensuring that it did not burst.

Sometimes, he tied it to his wrist with a string.

At work, when it was essential to have two hands free, he would make a knot with the string around the key to a drawer, and the balloon would stay there, by his side, silent, ever present, and seemingly fulfilling the role, on his table, of the family photographs that some colleagues placed on top of their desks. When nature called, he would go into the bathroom with the balloon and, once inside, would carefully — like someone placing a fragile jar on an unstable base — wrap the string around the doorknob and you could see that he was almost tempted to say, affectionately, just like some people talk to their animals: Wait a minute .

While using public transport, during rush hour, Mister Calvino would raise the balloon above his head and would resolutely maintain his arm raised throughout the journey so that a careless movement would not burst the balloon. At home, before going to bed, he would place the balloon near his bedside table and only then would he fall asleep.

For Mister Calvino, paying an uncommon amount of attention (even if only for a few days) to an object like this was a fundamental exercise that allowed him to train his gaze about things in this world. Essentially, the balloon was a simple system of pointing toward Nothing. This system, which was commonly known as a balloon, basically surrounded a minute part of all the air in the world with a fine layer of latex. Without this colorful layer, that air, which had now almost been underlined and singled out from the rest of the atmosphere, would have gone completely unnoticed. For Calvino, choosing the color of the balloon was equivalent to attributing a color to the insignificant. Almost as though he were to decide: today the insignificant will be blue.

And the almost unbearable fragility of the balloon further obliged a set of protective gestures that reminded Calvino of the short distance that exists between the enormous and vigorous life he now had and the enormous and vigorous death that always lurked, like an unseen but noisy insect, around him at any given moment.

The Window

One of Calvino’s windows, the one that had a better view of the street, was covered by two curtains that, when they were joined, could be buttoned down the middle. One of the curtains, the one on the right, had buttons and the other curtain had the respective buttonholes.

In order to look out of that window, Calvino first had to un-button the seven buttons, one by one. Then he would pull aside the curtains with his hands and could look out and observe the world. Finally, after he had finished watching, he would pull the curtains across the window and would button up each of the buttons. It was a window that had to be buttoned.

When he opened the window in the morning, after slowly unbuttoning the buttons, he would feel an erotic intensity in these gestures, like someone who was delicately but eagerly unbuttoning the clothes of a lover.

He would then look out of the window in a different manner. As though the world was not something that was available at any given moment, but was instead something that required him, and his fingers, to carry out a set of meticulous gestures.

The world was not the same through that window.

Alphabet Soup

Mister Calvino carefully wiped off the letters around his mouth with his napkin, but sometimes one letter or another got away. After that lunch, for example, an A remained there, stubbornly clinging to the right side of his chin.

Calvino, looking at himself in the mirror, could not help but admire that letter’s capacity to tenaciously resist his prior energetic movements with his napkin, and he then observed that A like someone who observes a mountain-climber who was desperately clinging on so as not to fall. In fact, that letter seemed to be resisting, and almost instinctively, Calvino thought of that very word — compassion.

That day, Calvino decided to turn a blind eye. Something in that entire scene had moved him profoundly.

And he thus went out into the street fully aware that he had an A , a small A , on the right side of his chin.

Several people stared at that alphabetical eruption, and Calvino did not fail to notice how some strangers barely managed to restrain themselves from telling him: excuse me, but you have an A falling off your chin! But nobody was brave enough to do so.

He had decided he would do nothing to precipitate events: whenever circumstances decreed that the time was ripe, the A would fall off his chin. Calvino decided to leave it up to fate and the natural attrition of the world.

Problems and a Solution

Mister Calvino was very tall and his bed did not correspond to his height.

Whenever he slept thus, as in the drawing above, his head was off the bed. He felt that his ideas dripped out from his head, one by one, onto the floor, like a water pot with a hole in it. He would wake up feeling empty, with no initiative.

On the other hand, when he slept like this

his feet stuck out off the bed and he could not get rid of the feeling that he was falling. And the worst part of it was not the feeling that he was falling, but the fact that the ground never seemed to appear. He would wake up extremely tired.

Therefore, Mister Calvino always slept diagonally.