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"als asoyn ua uojag jeuowa19%3, {,Monsy autsiax0uul, image WOH] 1 OU WYBNO am “SsapayDIDY; 9Si9 “uoreio(dsa, pue_jeruounzads, # da aus ‘alaqt 9q 01 Sey Sua Hoy} weyr afoul Janeul 01 wHaas sj SUSLIVI AUV ELITLITERARY MATTERS the enemy's ity: While thus confined, ine dictated his book. a his tory of his travels, as well as & compilation of hearsay about the East, to one Rustichello fellow prisoner. Why did he entrust the setting down, ‘May we suppose that Pol could wr book t@ another 1 who came from a well-to-do famih. the language ofthe scholar, but never spoke it that he spoke Chinese. and. of course. Italian. the popular speech of his people, but never wrote it? Perhaps he wished to reach a wider audience and chose vernacular, as Dante did, but had at his disposal during the time of his confinement only a friend who wrote a French as full of Italian as an éclair with cream In any case, his history is @ work shaped by the mouth and meant for the ear, just as Iiisible Cities is, and it had ww be assembled and arranged from recollections. Ih was doubtless spo- ken to”pass the time.” to enlarge the prisoner's sequestered world and amuse his companions. Like the stories of The Decameron, of The Canterbury Tales and A Thousimd and One Nights, the recital of these cit ‘sis meant to ami use: they are designed to educate: above all. they carry their auditors out of reach of death out of sight of their confinement, and drive ennui away like a cur from a broom. Its little wonder. then, that Calvino’s book begins with a section titled "Cities and Memory” Polo spoke of astonish- ing things indeed, and was possibly as truthful as he could be when he told of the existence of paper mone, of asbestos. of coal. of spices af all kinds. and particularly when he described the amazing cities of the East. Chupter after chapter of his book simply depicts the character of this city: this province, or that. Surely his memory was spurred and directed by the questions of his listeners. just as the khan interrogates Polo in Calvino’ account {1 was a time when cities behaved like nations and went to war with a frequeney and ferocity which only the Peloponnesian War may have rivaled. Dante, traveling 100, asks for aid—"Help me 36 Invisible Cities now, memony that set down what I saw”—as he takes the steep and savage path to stand before the Gates of Hell: thkoucnt ‘TH WAY INTO THE SUFFERING CITY, THROUGH ME THE Way 10 TH ETERNAL PAIN, Florence for Dante. Venice for Polo. And Hell for us all—the invisible cit The sources of our knowledge of the East for centuries. The edition which should interest us most. pethaps. is the one in the Biblio thique Nationale (Codex 2810). It dates from the fifteenth cen tury and contains twenty by an artist who had never been east of the Danube. of course This pictorial edition was reprinted by Calvino's publisher. £in audi, during the 195¢s. My own Englished version dates from 1958. There can he little doubt that Calvino consulted the afore mentioned Italian edition when he was composing lmvisible Cities in 1971. It mas, in fact. have inspired him jas the Visconti pack of tarot cards did when he wrote The Castle of Crosed (es Jinies) although the small doubt one is duty-bound to entertain ts decisive. Still. the illustration one encounters wher the book breaks open at one ofits central sewings is of “the noble and mas: nificent city of Kin-sai.” even if its pinnacles and flags, its tin, slate, and tile roofs, its dark dormers, the water which rushes through its streets, the bridges which loop over the kind of Venice. a Veni the water streams between the buildings like windblown hat remem nels of Marco Polo remained one of the principe colored illustrations—illus:rations depict a ¢ done in Tuscan tones, a Venice where Marco Polo’ cities were certainly invisible, as any ered city, anny sought-after city, any city rendered in be. Even at this moment, words are violating our vision: vision is Vitiating our thought. The reduction of a concept to a single instance. the replacement of an individual by some generalicing name: this is an agon as old as philosophy itself. If we were watching a native dance in New Guinea. what we said in our sur prise at the appearance of « mud man. if it went beyond dizee- tions like "Look," would interfere fatally with our perception, 39LITERARY MATTERS {ust as our response to the mock attack of a camel driver disgrun: tled bv the size of his tip, if it consisted of « moral lecture, might veil his amused but businesslike eves: and what our reporter's pencil is inclined to write about the start of the dogsled race from Anchorage to Nome depends as much on presuppositions as the contest does on snow, for the truth here is simple and painful: the words which appear to reach out and envelop that clay creature. camel driver. or team of dogs have a greater inheritance from real ity than do the mud men, camels, or sled dogs innocently enjoy ing custom or the laws of physics. The most ordinary words, as We are aware, are more general, more repeatable. more far reaching in every area of implication, in their harness undeter. minably stronger than our momentary perception of sixteen happy animals who perhaps believe they are out for an afternoon run. Think of the word polis—"city”—itself:a word which will be young still when every other city is a midden or in unsieved dust. Iris the wreichedness of this truth (wretched because itis the dogs and their driver most of us admire; itis the mud man who frightens or amuses us. not newspaper account: it is an ice cream cone. not the words “ice cream.” we want to put in our mouths), it is the injustice of anv one word's overweening reality which has made this truth so invisible. What could Marco Polo's bedazzled readers do, as they fol- lowed his description of the noble and magnificent city of Kin- sai, but think of Western towers and stone cotnices and piered bridges. of Western water, when they visualized the city his words brought to life? All the cities he told about seemed exotic. mag: cal, splendid beyond belief. cities of longing, but of their—the readers—longing, and therefore clothed in the colors of the read: crs lives. The difficulty is the same for us taday when we read of the cities of desire depicted by Calvino's Polo for the khan: of Despina, for instance. the city which looks a steamship when approached on camelback and we are weary of being swaysick on the sand: then like 2 camel when seen from the sea and we are Invisible Cities anxious for the steadiness of the earth, We might imagine still another which sails its innumerable terraces into the sea like & ship. Both ki i and Despina provide us with examples of the sorry impossibility of “seemg” through words, jet alone with them, although Calvino, Polo, we, and the Great Khan Imprisoned by either walls or words. it i all the more tmpor tant to tn: to dream heyond the bricks: heyond the outer cou yard with its watchtowers, guards. guns: beyond the words w screen us from the world. beyond our own aims. fears, normal trivial aches and pains. which we nevertheless enlarge and o tify as bruises in hillsides, as knocks in walls, as cuss th mountains, as the leveling of plains. It is necessary 10 leave ous cell and see the city —see the city in the cell. as the paint end perceives some stitring shape in spit or an errant puddle—to leave for a city whose walls rise around us everywhere the same faceless as concrete and equally cold, or as difficult d lass may be and as remorseless. as resistant to experi as plastic: such surfaces refuse the past, reject the scratches whic: calendared by days the ten years Gesualdo lay in rags, cast in a corner for climbing a vine to glimpse a bathing lady: these wil no: be found here, nor the small crack we may imagine is a river. nor the wallpaper whose patterns make a map. o patches of plester damp like sweat in the pit of an arm: the mind cannot throw itself oF any image against such pitiless sameness. Avoid such cities such cells: all places where the light falls evenly as rain on dat and night alike. Cities can be cleansed even of themselves when they div not understand the true nature of their inhabitants, as was the case with one of Calvino’s “Hidden Cities.” Theodora, which cleared its skies of condors only tw ubserve the increase of serpents, and whose victory over the spiders gave the fies free reign, wine the extermination of the termites granted a kingdom to the woud worm, When, at lst, the rats and roaches and gnats and flies, Fruit flies and mosquitos and every sort of vermin 4