ITALO CALVI NO
531
create. The night watchman, Tornaquinci, was coming along
again on his coal-black bicycle, thrusting his tickets under door–
ways, when he suddenly saw the whole fountain explode before
his eyes like a liquid firework. He nearly fell off his seat.
Trying to open his eyes as little as possible, to retain that
shred of sleep he felt he had grasped, Marcovaldo ran and flung
himself again on the bench. There, now it was as if he lay on the
bank of a stream, with the woods above him; he slept.
He dreamed of a dinner; the dish was covered as if to keep the
pas ta warm. H e uncovered it and there was a dead mouse, whi ch
stank. H e looked into hi s wife' s pla te: another dead mouse. Before
his children, more mice, smaller, but also rotting. He uncovered
the tureen and found a cat, belly in the air, and the stink woke him.
Not far away there was the garbage truck that passes at night
to empty the garbage cans. He could make out in the dim glow
from the headlights, the crane, cackling and jerking, the shadows
of men standing on the top of the mountain of refuse, their hands
guiding the receptacle attached to the pulley, emptying it into the
truck, pounding it with blows of their shovels, their voices grim
and jerky like the movement of the crane: "Higher ... let it go ...
to hell with you ... ," with metallic clashes like opaque gongs,
and then the engine picking up, slowly, only to stop a bit farther
on, as the maneuver began all over again.
But by now Marcovaldo's sleep had reached a zone where
sounds no longer arrived, and these, even so graceless and rasping,
came as if muffled in a soft halo, perhaps because of the very con–
sistency of the garbage packed into the trucks.
It
was the stink that
kept him awake, the stink sharpened by an unbearable idea of
stink, whereby even the sounds, those dampened and remote
sounds , and the image, outlined against the light, of the truck
with the crane didn't reach his mind as sound and sight but only
as stink. And Marcovaldo was delirious, vainly pursuing with his
nostrils' imagination the fragrance of a rose arbor.
The night watchman, Tornaquinci, felt sweat bathe his
forehead as he glimpsed a human form running on all fours
along a flower bed, then saw it angrily rip up some ranunculi,
then disappear. But he thought it must have been either a dog, the
responsibility of dogcatchers, or a hallucination, the responsibi–
lity of the alienist, or a werewolf, the responsibility of God knows
who but preferably not him; and he turned the corner.
