FICTION
Italo Calvino
IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELER
In a network of lines that enlace
The first sensation this book should convey is what I feel
when I hear the telephone ring; I say "should" because I doubt that
written words can give even a partial idea of it: it is not enough to
declare that my reaction is one of refusal, of flight from this aggressive
and threatening summons, as it is also a feeling of urgency, intolerabil–
ity, coercion that impels me to obey the injunction of that sound,
rushing to answer even with the certainty that nothing will come of it
save suffering and discomfort. Nor do I believe that instead of an
attempted description of this state of the spirit, a metaphor would serve
better, for example the piercing sting of an arrow that penetrates a
hip's naked flesh, but this is not because one cannot employ an
imaginary sensation to portray a known sensation, for though these
days nobody knows the feeling of being struck by an arrow, we all
believe we can easily imagine it-the sense of being helpless, without
protection in the presence of something that reaches us from alien and
unknown spaces: and this also applies very well to the ring of the
telephone-but rather because the arrow's peremptory inexorability,
without modulations, excludes all the intentions, implications, hesita–
tions possible in the voice of someone I do not see, though even before
he says anything I can already predict if not what he will say at least
what my reaction to what he is about
to
say will be. Ideally the book
would begin by giving the sense of a space occupied by my presence,
These excerpts are from IF ON A WINTER 'S IGHT A TRAVELER by lLalo Calvino,
translated by William Weaver, to
be
published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publish–
ers. Copyright
©
1979 by Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a., Torino, English translation
copyright
©
1981 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich , Inc.
