FICTION
Italo Calvino
PARK-BENCH VACATION
On his way to work each morning, Marcovaldo walked
beneath the green foliage of a square with trees, a bit of public
garden, isolated in the junction of four streets. He raised his eyes
among the boughs of the horse chestnuts,where they were at their
thickest and allowed yellow rays only to glint in the shade trans–
parent with sap; and he listened to the racket of the sparrows, tone
deaf, invisible on the branches. To him they seemed nightingales,
and he said to himself: "Oh, if I could wake just once at the twitter
of birds and not at the sound of the alarm and the crying of little
Paolino and the yelling of my wife, Domitilla!" or else: "Oh, if I
could sleep here, alone, in the midst of this cool green shade and
not in my cramped, hot room; here amid the silence, not amid the
snoring and sleepwalking of my whole family and the racing of
trams down below in the stree t; here in the na tural darkness of the
night, not in the artificial darkness of closed blinds, streaked by
the glare of headlights; oh, if I could see leaves and sky on open–
ing my eyes!" With these thoughts every day Marcovaldo began
his eight daily hours-plus overtime-as an unskilled laborer.
In one corner of the square, under a dome of horse chestnuts,
there was a remote, half-hidden bench. And Marcovaldo had
picked it as his own. On those summer nights, in the room where
five of them slept, when he couldn't get to sleep, he would dream
of the bench as a vagabond dreams of a bed in a palace. One night,
quietly, while his wife snored and the children kicked in their
sleep, he got out of bed, dressed, tucked his pillow under his arm,
left the house and went to the square.
Editor's Note: Excerpted (rom
Marcovaldo,
or
Th e seasons in the city
by!talo
Calvino. Copyright
©
1963 by Giulio Einaudi ediLOre s. p.a., T orino. English
translation by William Weaver copyright
©
1983 by Harcourt Brace Jovano–
vich, Inc., and Martin Seeker
&
Warburg Limited. A H elen and Kurt Wolff
Book. T o be published by Harcourt Brace J ovanovich, Inc.
