The Watcher and Other Stories by Italo Calvino

skimpy issues, and you could see that they weren’t the work of professionals. With the little I knew about magazines, I found a way to tell him—making no criticisms, obviously—how I would do it, the typographical changes I would make. I fell in with his tone, practical, confident in results; and I was pleased to see that we understood each other. Pleased, because the more efficient and optimistic I acted, the more I thought of that wretched furnished room, those squalid streets, that sense of rust and slime I felt on my skin, my not caring a damn about anything, and I seemed to be performing a trick, to be transforming, before the very eyes of Commendatore Cordà and Signor Avandero, all their technical-industrial efficiency into a pile of crumbs, and they were unaware of it, and Cordà kept nodding enthusiastically.
    â€œFine. Yes, absolutely, tomorrow, you and I agree, and meanwhile,” Cordà said to me, “just to bring you up to date...” And he insisted on giving me the Proceedings of their latest convention to read. “Here,” he took me over to some shelves where the mimeographed copies of all the speeches were arranged in so many stacks. “You see? Take this one, and this other one. Do you already have this? Here, count them and see if they’re all there.” And as he spoke, he picked up those papers and at that moment I noticed how they raised a little cloud of dust, and I saw the prints of his fingers outlined on their surface, which he had barely touched. Now the Commendatore, in picking up those papers, tried to give them a little shake, but just a slight one, as if he didn’t want to admit they were dusty, and he also blew on them gently. He was careful not to put his fingers on the first page of each speech, but if he just grazed one with the tip of a fingernail, he left a little white streak over what seemed a gray background, since the paper was covered with a very fine veil of dust. Nevertheless, his fingers obviously became soiled, and he tried to clean them by bending the tips to his palm and rubbing them, but he only dirtied his whole hand with dust. Then instinctively he dropped his hands to the sides of his gray flannel trousers, caught himself just in time, raised them again, and so we both stood there, our fingertips in mid-air, handing speeches back and forth, taking them delicately by the margins as if they were nettle leaves, and meanwhile we went on smiling, nodding smugly, and saying: “Oh yes, a very interesting convention! Oh yes, an excellent endeavor!” but I noticed that the Commendatore became more and more nervous and insecure, and he couldn’t look into my triumphant eyes, into my triumphant and desperate gaze, desperate because everything confirmed the fact that it was all exactly as I had believed it would be.
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    IT TOOK me some time to fall asleep. The room, which had seemed so quiet, at night filled with sounds that I learned, gradually, to decipher. Sometimes I could hear a voice distorted by a loud-speaker, giving brief, incomprehensible commands; if I had dozed off, I would wake up, thinking I was in a train, because the timbre and the cadence were those of the station loud-speakers, as during the night they rise to the surface of the traveler’s restless sleep. When my ear had become accustomed to them, I managed to grasp the words: “Two ravioli with tomato sauce...” the voice said. “Grilled steak... Lamb chop...” My room was over the kitchen of the “Urbano Rattazzi” beer hall, which served hot meals even after midnight: from the counter, the waiters transmitted the orders to the cooks, snapping out the words over an intercom. In the wake of those messages, a confused sound of voices came up to me and, at times, the harmonizing chorus of a party. But it was a good place to eat in, somewhat expensive, with a clientele that was not vulgar: the nights were rare when some drunk cut