And so, what with angles, niches, junctures, posts, Marcovaldo's route followed an irregular pattern; several times he thought the wall was ending, then discovered it continued in another direction; after so many turns he no longer knew what direction he was headed in, or rather, on which side he should jump, if he wanted to move down to the street. Jump… And what if the height had increased? He crouched on the top of a column, tried to peer down, on one side and the other, but no ray of light reached the ground: it might be a little drop of a couple of yards, or an abyss. The only thing he could do was continue advancing up where he was.
The avenue of escape was not long in appearing. It was a flat surface, a pale glimmer, next to the walclass="underline" perhaps the roof of a building, of cement-as Marcovaldo realized, when he began to walk on it-which extended into the darkness. He immediately regretted having ventured onto it; now he had lost all reference-points, he had moved away from the line of street-lights, and every step he took might bring him to the edge of the roof or, beyond it, into the void.
The void really was a chasm. From below little lights glowed, as if at a great distance, and if those were the street-lights down there, the ground must be much lower still. Marcovaldo found himself suspended in a space impossible to imagine: at times, up above, red and green lights appeared, arranged in irregular figures, like constellations. Peering at those lights, with his nose in the air, he soon took a step into the void and fell headlong.
"I'm dead!" he thought; but at the same moment he found himself seated on some soft earth; his hands touched some grass; he had fallen, unharmed, into the midst of a meadow. The low lights, which had seemed so distant to him, were a line of little bulbs at ground-level.
A peculiar place to put lights, but convenient all the same, because they marked out a path for him. His foot now was not treading on grass but on asphalt: in the midst of the meadow a broad paved street passed, illuminated by those luminous beams at ground-level. Around him, nothing: only the very high, colored lights, which appeared and disappeared.
"A paved road is sure to lead somewhere," Marcovaldo thought, and started following it. He arrived at a fork, or rather, at an intersection, where every branch of the road was flanked by those little low bulbs and huge white numbers were marked on the ground.
He lost heart. What did it matter which direction he chose to follow if, all around, there was only this flat grassy meadow and this empty fog? It was at this point that he saw, at a man's height, a movement of beams of light. A man, really a man, with his arms open, dressed-it seemed-in a yellow overall, was waving two luminous little disks like the kind station-masters wave.
Marcovaldo ran towards this man and, even before reaching him, he started saying breathlessly: "Hey, hey, listen, here in the midst of the fog, how do I-"
"Don't worry," the voice of the man in yellow replied. "Above a thousand meters there's no fog, you can proceed safely. The steps are just ahead; the others have already boarded."
The words were obscure, but heartening: Marcovaldo was particularly pleased to hear there were other people not far away; he advanced to join them, without asking further questions.
The mysteriously announced steps were a little stairway with comfortable steps and two railings, white in the darkness. Marcovaldo climbed up. On the threshold of a low doorway, a girl greeted him so cordially it seemed impossible she was actually addressing him.
Marcovaldo bowed and scraped. "My humble respects, Signorina." Steeped in cold and dampness as he was, he was dazed at finding refuge under a roof…
He entered, blinked, his eyes blinded by the light. He wasn't in a house. He was-where? In a bus, he thought, a long bus with many empty places. He sat down. As a rule, going home from work, he never took the bus, but chose the tram because the ticket cost a bit less. This time, however, he was lost in a neighborhood so remote that surely there was only a bus service. How lucky he was to have arrived in time to catch this one, no doubt the last! And what soft, comfortable seats! Marcovaldo, now that he had found out about it, would always take the bus, even if the passengers were obliged to obey some rules ("… Please," a loudspeaker was saying, "refrain from smoking and fasten your seatbelts…"), even if the roar of the motor, as it started, was excessive.
A man in uniform passed among the seats. "Excuse me, conductor," Marcovaldo said. "Do you know if there's a stop anywhere near Via Pancrazio Pancrazietti?"
"What are you talking about, sir? Our first stop is Bombay, then we go on to Calcutta and Singapore." Marcovaldo looked around. In the other places were seated impassive Indians, with beards and turbans. There were also a few women, wrapped in embroidered saris, a painted spot on their brow. The night beyond the windows was full of stars, now that the plane had passed through the thick blanket of fog, and was flying in the limpid sky of the great altitudes.
SPRING
13. Where the river is more blue?
It was a time when the simplest foods contained threats, traps, and frauds. Not a day went by without some newspaper telling of ghastly discoveries in the housewife's shopping: cheese was made of plastic, butter from tallow candles; in fruit and vegetables the arsenic of insecticides was concentrated in percentages higher than the vitamin content; to fatten chickens they stuffed them with synthetic pills that could transform the man who ate a drumstick into a chicken himself. Fresh fish had been caught the previous year in Iceland and they put make-up on the eyes to make it seem yesterday's catch. Mice had been found in several milk bottles, whether dead or alive was not made clear. From the tins of oil it was no longer the golden juice of the olive that flowed, but the fat of old mules, cleverly distilled.
At work or in the café Marcovaldo heard them discussing these things, and every time he felt something like a mule's kick in his stomach, or a mouse running down his esophagus. At home, when his wife, Domitilla, came back from the market, the sight of her shopping-bag, which once had given him such joy with its celery and eggplant, the rough, absorbent paper of the packages from the grocer or the delicatessen, now filled him with fear, as if hostile presences had infiltrated the walls of his house.
"I must bend all my efforts," he vowed to himself,
"towards providing my family with food that hasn't passed through the treacherous hands of speculators." In the morning, going to work, he sometimes encountered men with fishing-poles and rubber boots, heading for the river. "That's the way," Marcovaldo said to himself. But the river, there in the city, which collected garbage and waste and the emptying of sewers, filled him with deep repugnance. "I have to look for a place," he said to himself, "where the water is really water, and fish are really fish. There I'll drop my line."
The days were growing longer: with his motorbike, after work, Marcovaldo set to exploring the river along its course before the city, and the little streams, its tributaries. He was specially interested in the stretches where the water flowed farthest from the paved road. He proceeded along paths, among the clumps of willows, riding his motorbike as far as he could go, then-after leaving it in a bush-on foot, until he reached the stream. Once he got lost: he roamed among steep, overgrown slopes, and could find no trail, nor did he know in which direction the river lay. Then, all of a sudden, pushing some branches aside, he saw the silent water a few feet below him-it was a widening of the river, practically a calm little pool-of such a blue that it seemed a mountain lake.