ITALO CALVINO
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within my range disappear, with their broad steps and columned
entrances and their corridors and waiting rooms, and files and circulars
and dossiers, but also with their division chiefs, their director-generals,
their vice-inspectors, their acting heads, their permanent and tempo–
rary staff; but I did this because I believe their existence is damaging or
superfluous to the harmony of the whole.
It
is that time of day when droves of employees leave the over–
heated offices, button up their overcoats with their fake-fur collars, and
pile into buses. I blink, and they have vanished: only some scattered
passersby can be discerned, far off, in the deserted streets from which I
have also scrupulously eliminated automobiles and trucks and buses . I
like to see the surface of the street bare and smooth as a bowling alley.
Then I abolish barracks, guard-houses, police stations: all people
in uniform vanish as if they had never existed. Perhaps I've let things
get out of hand; I realize that firemen have suffered the same fate, and
mail-carriers, municipal street-cleaners, and other categories which
might deservedly have hoped for a different treatment; but what's done
is done: no use splitting hairs. To avoid trouble, I quickly abolish fires,
garbage, and also mail, which after all never brings anything but
problems.
I check to make sure that hospitals, clinics, rest homes have not
been left standing: to erase doctors, nurses , patients seems to me the
only possible health. Then courts, with their complement of magis–
trates, lawyers, defendants and injured parties; prisons, with prisoners
and guards inside. Then I erase the University with the entire faculty,
the Academy of sciences, letters, and arts, the Museum, the Library,
monuments and curators, theaters, movies, televisions, newspapers.
If
they think respect for culture is going to stop me, they're wrong.
Then come the economic structures, which for too long a time
have continued to enforce their outrageous claim to decide our lives .
What do they think they are? One by one, I dissolve all shops,
beginning with the ones selling prime necessities and ending with
those selling superfluities, luxuries: first I clear the display windows of
goods, then I erase the counters, shelves, salesgirls, cashiers, floor–
walkers. The crowd of customers is momentarily bewildered, hands
extended into the void, as shopping carts evaporate; then the customers
themselves are also swallowed up by the vacuum. From consumer I
work back
to
producer: I abolish all industry, light and heavy, I wipe
out raw materials and sources of energy. What about agriculture? Away
with that, too! And to prevent anyone from saying I want to regress
towards primitive societies, I also eliminate hunting and fishing.
Nature ... Aha! Don ' t think I haven 't caught on: this nature
