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 neighbourhood, the activities necessary for his job, his strictly regulated dinner and his reckless, anything-goes lunch, his timetable and punctuality with their classic rigour, 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 towards 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 colourful 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 colour of the balloon was equivalent to attributing a colour 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 unbutton 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.
Mister Calvino's further exploits appear in the print edition. Order now.
Translated by Roopanjali Roy.
