The Watcher and Other Stories by Italo Calvino Page B

with the office to be straightened out—after half a day my shirt was already dirty. I was often forced to go to the office with the cat’s prints on my collar.
    Sometimes I found his prints also on the pillowcase. He had probably remained shut inside after having followed Signorina Margariti when she came to “turn down the bed” in the evening.
    It was hardly surprising that the cat was so dirty: you only had to put your hand on the railing of the landing to find your palm striped with black. Every time I came home, as I fumbled with the keys at four padlocks or keyholes, then stuck my fingers into the slats of the shutters to open and close the French window, I got my hands so dirty that when I came into the room I had to hold them in the air, to avoid leaving prints, while I went straight to the basin.
    Once my hands were washed and dried I immediately felt better, as if I had regained the use of them, and I began touching and shifting those few objects around me. Signorina Margariti, I must say, kept the room fairly clean; as far as dusting went, she dusted every day; but there were times when, if I put my hand in certain places she couldn’t reach (she was very short and had short arms, too), I drew it out all velvety with dust and I had to go back to the basin and wash immediately.
    My books constituted my most serious problem: I had arranged them on the étagère, and they were the only things that gave me the impression this room was mine; the office left me plenty of free time and I would gladly have spent some hours in my room, reading. But books collect God knows how much dust: I would choose one from the shelf, but then before opening it, I had to rub it all over with a rag, even along the tops of the pages, and then I had to give it a good banging: a cloud of dust rose from it. Afterward I washed my hands again and finally flung myself down on the bed to read. But as I leafed through the book, it became hopeless, I could feel that film of dust on my fingertips, becoming thicker, softer all the time, and it spoiled my pleasure in reading. I got up, went back to the basin, rinsed my hands once more, but now I felt that my shirt was also dusty, and my suit. I would have resumed reading but now my hands were clean and I didn’t like to dirty them again. So I decided to go out.
    Naturally, all the operations of leaving: the shutters, the railing, the locks, reduced my hands to a worse state than ever, but I had to leave them as they were until I reached the office. At the office, the moment I arrived, I ran to the toilet to wash them; the office towel, however, was black with finger marks; as I began to dry my hands, I was already dirtying them again.
    Â 
    I SPENT my first working days at the Institute putting my desk in order. In fact, the desk assigned me was covered with correspondence, documents, files, old newspapers; until then it had obviously been a kind of clearinghouse where anything with no proper place of its own was put. My first impulse was to make a clean sweep; but then I saw there was material that could be useful for the magazine, and other things of some interest which I decided to examine at my leisure. In short, I finally removed nothing from the desk and actually added a lot of things, but not in disorder: on the contrary, I tried to keep everything tidy. Naturally, the papers that had been there before were very dusty and infected the new papers with their dirt. And since I set great store by my neatness, I had given orders to the cleaning woman not to touch anything, so each day a little more dust settled on the papers, especially on the writing materials, the stationery, the envelopes, and so on, which soon looked old and soiled and were irksome to touch.
    And in the drawers it was the same story. There dusty papers from decades past were stratified, evidence of the desk’s long career through various offices, public and private. No matter what I did at that