530
PARTISAN REVIEW
grim, inhaling breath, and an endless scraping, and also a scratch–
ing filled his ears completely. There is no sound more heart–
rending than that of a welding torch, a kind of muffled scream.
Without moving, huddled as he was on the bench, his face against
the crumpled pillow, Marcovaldo could find no escape, and the
noise continued to conjure up the scene illuminated by the gray
flame scattering golden sparks all around, the men hunkered on
the ground, smoked-glass visors over their faces, the torch grasped
in the hand shaken by a rapid tremor, the halo of shadow around
the tool cart, the tall trellislike apparatus that reached the wires.
He opened his eyes, turned on the bench, looked at the stars among
the boughs. The insensitive sparrows continued sleeping up there
among the leaves.
To fall asleep like a bird, to have a wing you could stick your
head under, a world of branches suspended above the earthly
world, barely glimpsed down below, muffled and remote. Once
you begin rejecting your present state, there is no knowing where
you can arrive. Now Marcovaldo, in order to sleep, needed some–
thing, but he himself didn't know quite what; at this point not
even a genuine silence would have been enough. He had to have a
basis of sound, softer than silence, a faint wind passing through
the thick undergrowth of a forest, a murmur of water bubbling up
and disappearing in a meadow.
He had an idea and he rose to his feet. It wasn't exactly an
idea, because half dazed by the sleepiness that filled him, he
couldn't form any thought properly; but it was like a recollection
that somewhere around there was something connected with the
idea of water, with its loquacious and subdued flow.
In fact, there was a fountain, nearby, a distinguished work
of sculpture and hydraulics, with nymphs, fauns, river gods, who
enlaced jets, cascades, a play of water. Only it was dry; at night, in
summer, since the aqueduct was functioning less, they turned it
off. Marcovaldo wandered around for a little while like a sleep–
walker; more by instinct than by reason he knew that a tub must
have a tap. A man who has a good eye can find what he is looking
for even with his eyes closed. He turned on the tap: from the conch–
shells, from the beards, from the nostrils of the horses, great jets
rose, the feigned caverns were cloaked in glistening mantles, and
all this water resounded like the organ of a choir loft in the great
empty square, with all the rustling and turbulence that water can
