The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal (16 page)

“We” have rented a house in a town “where our Uncle Augusto used to hang out. Uncle Augusto rather liked the place, though he did say, ‘You should see the ants over there…they're not like the ones here, those ants….' But we paid no attention at the time.” As the local landlady Signora Mauro shows the young couple about the house they have just rented from her, she distracts their attention from the walls with a long dissertation on the gas meter. When she has gone, the baby is put to bed and the young couple take a stroll outside. Their next-door neighbor is spraying the plants in his garden with a bellows. The ants, he explains, “as if not wanting to make it sound important.”

The young couple return to their house and find it infested with ants. The Argentine ants. The husband-narrator suddenly recalls that this country is known for them. “It comes from South America,” he adds, helpfully, to his distraught wife. Finally, they go to bed without “the feeling we were starting a new life, only a sense of dragging on into a future full of new troubles.”

The rest of the story deals with the way that the others in the valley cope with the ants. Some go in for poisons; others make fantastic contraptions to confuse or kill the insects while for twenty years the Argentine Ant Control Corporation's representative has been putting out molasses ostensibly to control (kill) the ants but many believe that this is done to
feed
the ants. The frantic young couple pay a call on Signora Mauro in her dim palatial drawing room. She is firm; ants do not exist in well-tended houses, but from the way she squirms in her chair it is plain that the ants are crawling about under her clothes.

Methodically, Calvino describes the various human responses to The Condition. There is the Christian Scientist ignoring of all evidence; the Manichaean acceptance of evil; the relentless Darwinian faith that genetic superiority will prevail. But the ants prove indestructible and the story ends with the family going down to the seaside where there are no ants; where

The water was calm, with just a slight continual change of color, blue and black, darker farthest away. I thought of the expanses of water like this, of the infinite grains of soft sand down there at the bottom of the sea where the currents leave white shells washed clean by the waves.

I don't know what this coda means. I also see no reason for it to mean. A contrast has been made between the ant-infested valley and the cool serenity of mineral and of shell beneath the sea, that other air we can no longer breathe since our ancestors chose to live upon the land.

In 1956 Calvino edited a volume of Italian fables, and the local critics decided that he was true heir to Grimm. Certainly the bright, deadly fairy tale attracts him and he returned to it with
The Baron in the Trees
(1957). Like the other two tales in the trilogy, the story is related in the first person: this time by the eponymous baron's brother. The year is 1767. The place Liguria. The Baron is Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò, who after an argument at dinner on June 15 decides to live in the trees. The response of family and friends to this decision is varied. But Cosimo is content. Later he goes in for politics; deals with Napoleon himself; becomes legend.

Calvino has now developed two ways of writing. One is literally fabulous. The other makes use of a dry, rather didactic style in which the detail is as precisely observed as if the author were writing a manual for the construction of a solar heating unit. Yet the premises of the “dry” stories are often quite as fantastic as those of the fairy tales.
^*1

“Smog” was published in 1958, a long time before the current preoccupation with man's systematic destruction of the environment. The narrator comes to a large city to take over a small magazine called
Purification
. The owner of the magazine, Commendatore Cordà, is an important manufacturer who produces the sort of air pollution that his magazine would like to eliminate. Cordà has it both ways and his new editor settles in nicely. The prevailing image of the story is smog: gray dust covers everything; nothing is ever clean. The city is very like the valley of the Argentine ants but on a larger scale, for now a vast population is slowly strangling in the fumes of its industry, of the combustion engine.

Calvino is finely comic as he shows us the publisher instructing his editor in how to strike the right tone. “We are not utopians, mind you, we are practical men.” Or, “It's a battle for an ideal.” Or, “There will not be (nor has there ever been) any contradiction between an economy in free, natural expansion and the hygiene necessary to the human organism…between the smoke of our productive factories and the green of our incomparable natural beauty….” Finally, the editorial policy is set. “We are one of the cities where the problem of air pollution is most serious, but at the same time we are the city where most is being done to counteract the situation. At the same time, you understand!” By some fifteen years, Calvino anticipated Exxon's double-talk ads on American television.

This is the first of Calvino's stories where a realistic affair takes place between a man and a woman—well, fairly realistic. We never know how the elegant and wealthy Claudia came to meet the narrator or what she sees in him; yet, periodically, she descends upon him, confuses him (“to embrace her, I had removed my glasses”). One day they drive out of the city. The narrator comments on the ugliness of the city and the ubiquitous smog. Claudia says that “people have lost the sense of beauty.” He answers, “Beauty has to be constantly invented.” They argue; he finds everything cruel. Later, he meets a proletarian who is in arms against Cordà. The narrator admires the worker Omar, admires “the stubborn ones, the tough ones.” But Calvino does not really
engage
, in Sartre's sense. He suspects that the trap we are in is too great for mere politics to spring.

The narrator begins to write about atomic radiation in the atmosphere; about the way the weather is changing in the world. Is there a connection? Even Cordà is momentarily alarmed. But then life goes on, for is not Cordà himself “the smog's master? It was he who blew it out constantly over the city,” and his magazine was “born of the need to give those working to produce the smog some hope of a life that was not all smog, and yet, at the same time, to celebrate its power.”

The story's coda resembles that of “The Argentine Ant.” The narrator goes to the outskirts of the city where the women are doing laundry. The sight is cheering. “It wasn't much, but for me, seeking only images to retain in my eyes, perhaps it was enough.”

The next year Calvino switched to his other manner.
The Nonexistent Knight
is the last of the Our Ancestors trilogy though it comes first chronologically, in the age of Charlemagne. Again a war is going on. We are not introduced to the narrator until page 34—Sister Theodora is a nun in a convent who has been assigned to tell this story “for the health of the soul.” Unfortunately, the plot is giving her a good deal of trouble because “we nuns have few occasions to speak with soldiers…. Apart from religious ceremonies, triduums, novenas, gardening, harvesting, vintaging, whippings, slavery, incest, fires, hangings, invasions, sacking, rape and pestilence, we have had no experience.”

Sister Theodora does her best with the tale of Agiluf, a knight who does not exist. What does exist is a suit of white armor from which comes the voice of Agiluf. He is a devoted knight in the service of Charlemagne who thinks him a bit much but graciously concedes, “for someone who doesn't exist, you seem in fine form.” Since Agiluf has no appetites or weaknesses, he is the perfect soldier and so disliked by all. As for Agiluf, “people's bodies gave him a disagreeable feeling resembling envy, but also a stab of pride of contemptuous superiority.” A young man (an older version of Pin, of the cloven Viscount's nephew) named Raimbaut joins the army to avenge his father's death. Agiluf gives him dull advice. There are battles. General observations. “What is war, after all, but this passing of more and more dented objects from hand to hand?” Then a meeting with a man who confuses himself with things outside himself. When he drinks soup, he becomes soup; thinks he is soup to be drunk in turn: “the world being nothing but a vast shapeless mass of soup in which all things dissolved.”

Calvino now strikes a theme which will be developed in later works. The confusion between “I”/“it” “I”/“you” the arbitrariness of naming things, of categorizing, and of setting apart, particularly when “World conditions were still confused in the era when this book took place. It was not rare then to find names and thoughts and forms and institutions that corresponded to nothing in existence. But at the same time the world was polluted with objects and capacities and persons who lacked any name or distinguishing mark.”

A triangle occurs. Raimbaut falls in love with a knight who proves to be a young woman, Bradamante. Unfortunately,
she
falls in love with Agiluf, the nonexistent knight. At this point there is rather too much plot for Sister Theodora, who strikes the professional writer's saddest note. “One starts off writing with a certain zest, but a time comes when the pen merely grates in dusty ink, and not a drop of life flows, and life is all outside, outside the window, outside oneself, and it seems that never more can one escape into a page one is writing, open out another world, leap the gap.”

But the teller finally gets a grip on the tale; closes the gap. Knightly quests are conducted, concluded. Agiluf surrenders his armor and ceases to be; Raimbaut is allowed to inhabit the armor. Bradamante has vanished, but with a fine
coup de théâtre
Sister Theodora reveals to us that
she
is Bradamante, who is now rushing the narrative to its end so that she can take the beloved white armor in her arms: aware that it now contains the young and passionate Raimbaut, her true love. “That is why my pen at a certain point began running on so. I rush to meet him…. A page is good only when we turn it and find life urging along….”

With the completion of the trilogy, Calvino took to his other manner and wrote “The Watcher,” the most realistic of his stories and the most overtly political. The narrator has a name, Amerigo Ormea. He is a poll watcher in Turin for the Communist party during the national election of 1953. Amerigo's poll is inside the vast “Cottolengo Hospital for Incurables.” Apparently the mad and the senile and even the comatose are allowed to vote (“hospitals, asylums and convents had served as great reservoirs of votes for the Christian Democrat party”). Amerigo is a serene observer of democracy's confusions, having “learned that change, in politics, comes through long and complex processes” he also confesses that “acquiring experience had meant becoming slightly pessimistic.”

In the course of the day, Amerigo observes with fine dispassion the priests and nuns as they herd their charges into the polling booths that have been set up inside the hospital. Despite the grotesqueries of the situation, Amerigo takes some pleasure in the matter-of-factness of the voting, for “in Italy, which had always bowed and scraped before every form of pomp, display, sumptuousness, ornament, this seemed to him finally the lesson of an honest, austere morality, and a perpetual, silent revenge on the Fascists… now they had fallen into dust with all their gold fringe and their ribbons, while democracy, with its stark ceremony of pieces of paper folded over like telegrams, of pencils given to callused or shaky hands, went ahead.”

But for the watcher boredom eventually sets in; it is a long day. “Amerigo felt a yearning need for beauty, which became focused in the thought of his mistress Lia.” He contemplates Lia in reverie. “What is this need of ours for beauty? Amerigo asks himself.” Apparently Calvino has not advanced much beyond the last dialogue in “Smog.” He contemplates the perfection of classical Greece but recalls that the Greeks destroyed deformed children, redundant girls. Obviously placing beauty too high in the scale of values is “a step toward an inhuman civilization, which will then sentence the deformed to be thrown off a cliff.”

When another poll watcher remarks to Amerigo that the mad all must recognize one another in Cottolengo, he slips into reverie: “They would remember that humanity could be a different thing, as in fables, a world of giants, an Olympus…. As we do: and perhaps, without realizing it, we are deformed, backward, compared to a different, forgotten form of existence….” What is human, what is real?

Calvino's vision is usually presented in fantastic terms but now he becomes unusually concrete. Since he has elected to illuminate an actual time and place (Italy between 1945 and the election of 1953), he is able to spell it out. “In those years the Italian Communist party, among its many other tasks, had also assumed the position of an ideal liberal party, which had never really existed. And so the bosom of each individual communist could house two personalities at once: an intransigent revolutionary and an Olympian liberal.” Amerigo's pessimism derives from the obvious fact that the two do not go together. I am reminded of Alexander Herzen's comment about the Latins: they do not want liberty, they want to sue for liberty.

Amerigo goes home to lunch (he has a maid who cooks and serves! Written in 1963 about the events of 1953, this is plainly a historical novel). He looks for a book to read. “Pure literature” is out. “Personal literature now seemed to him a row of tombstones in a cemetery; the literature of the living as well as of the dead. Now he sought something else from books: the wisdom of the ages or simply something that helped to understand something.” He takes a stab at Marx's
Youthful Writings
. “Man's universality appears, practically speaking, in that same universe that makes all nature man's
inorganic body
…. Nature is man's
inorganic body
precisely because it is not his human body.” Thus genius turns everything into itself. As Marx invented
Kapital
from capitalism, so Calvino turns a passage of Marx into Calvino himself: the man who drinks soup is the soup that drinks him. Wholeness is all.