Marcovaldo

by Italo Calvino

With gratitude to William Weaver whose translation gifted me Calvino’s stories.

Agrigento: Photo by Casey Lovegrove on Unsplash

Italo Calvino is one of three authors who score more than one entry in my long list of books that moved me. When I get to Virginia Woolf I might put three on the list, but alphabetically speaking that’s a long way off. Let me share the giddy seriousness of this second Calvino joy.

The eponymous protagonist of Marcovaldo is a serially disappointed proletarian paladin. In the writerly hands of Italo Calvino, Marcovaldo is guided into, and rarely through, eternal bemusement and poignant disappointment. In these stories Calvino pulls down the fairytale engine and rebuilds it with innovative twists that leave Marcovaldo without public accolade or recognised personal triumph.

But let’s acknowledge before setting fire to new paragraphs that Marcovaldo is well-protected by irrepressible springs of optimism and persistence. He grasps opportunities, though they slip and break. He savours fleeting delights, even as they quickly sour. It really is a matter of time. Marcovaldo, his wife Domitilla, and their four children, live in squalid, crowded, rented rooms – sometimes attics, sometimes basements – in the middle of an Italian city’s protracted revival from the shatterings of the Second World War. Under victory’s pall Marcovaldo left the rural world known to his ancestors, and hence to him, by rote; his future is, can only be, in a city, any city. And so he lives and works in the city. Yet he never comes to an understanding with it, though he steps up to meet every Calvinist twist he encounters.

The city’s rhythms wrongfoot him. He falls often.

This Marcovaldo possessed an eye ill-suited to city life: billboards, traffic lights, shop windows, neon signs, posters, no matter how carefully devised to catch the attention, never arrested his gaze. Which might have been running over the desert sands. Instead, he would never miss a leaf yellowing on a branch, a feather trapped by a roof-tile; there was no horse-fly on a horse’s back, no worm-hole in a plank, or fig-peel squashed on the sidewalk that Marcovaldo didn’t remark and ponder over, discovering the changes of season, the yearnings of his heart, and the woes of his existence. (From ‘Mushrooms in the city,’ the first story in Marcovaldo, p.1.)

Photo by chisato tanaka on flickr

Calvino and Marcovaldo share line of sight on post-war Italy. What they see is hard. Poverty is a fair price for industrialisation. Work’s utility is confined to economic value. Consumption is substituted for community. To have is to be.

Photo by G.J. Coles & Co., photographer, from State Library of Victoria collection

At six in the evening the city fell into the hands of the consumers. All during the day the big occupation of the productive public was to produce: they produced consumer goods. At a certain hour, as if a switch had been thrown, they stopped production, and, away!, they were all off, to consume. (From ‘Marcovaldo at the supermarket,’ the sixteenth story in Marcovaldo, p.84.)

This is not the recovered Italy Calvino had hoped for when at age 20 he joined the Italian Resistance. Whether as a means of securing his hopes, or as a means of salvaging them, Calvino was an active member of the Italian Communist Party for a decade after the war, until the USSR’s 1956 invasion of Hungary turned him away from direct political activism. He turned more diligently to indirect literary activism: through Marcovaldo he carried on without demagoguery or sermonising. He offered stories, not dialectic. Marcovaldo is an exemplar of Calvino’s own self-reflection that ‘[t]he conflict between the world’s choices and man’s obsession with making sense of them is a recurrent pattern in what I’ve written.’[1]

There are recurrent patterns, but there is no recurrent formula. Marcovaldo is a collection of twenty folktales Calvino wrote progressively from the early 1950s until the mid-1960s. It’s no surprise he dreamed up folktales during this period: in 1954 the Einaudi publishing house in Turin, for which Calvino worked, commissioned him to research and then write Fiabe italiane (Italian folktales), published in 1956.[2] He understood folkloric structure, and how its architecture animated moral suasion:

If we take a close look at fairy stories, we find that they present two types of social transformation… in the second type there is a young man impoverished from birth, a shepherd or a peasant, and maybe simple-minded into the bargain, who by his own courage or with the help of magic powers succeeds in marrying the princess and becoming king.[3]

Calvino tweaks the familiar folktale structure, such that Marcovaldo never succeeds to the throne. Why he does not succeed is left for the reader to weigh. There are clues, and tugs to attention. Clearly Marcovaldo does not know the rules of the city, of this post-war, urban economy. His heart, his know-what, his know-how, are aligned to seasons beyond city limits. One morning he is woken by what, to his ear, can only be a herd of cows clambering along asphalted streets. Marcovaldo jumps to the thrill of it. He runs to watch them. In truth, his instincts are akin to theirs:

Photo by motiseid on flickr

Cautiously extending their hoofs from the step at the intersections, their muzzles never betraying a jolt of curiosity, pressed against the loins of those ahead of them, the cows brought with them the odor of dung, wild flowers, milk and the languid sound of their bells, and the city seemed not to touch them, already absorbed as they were into their world of damp meadows, mountain mists and the fords of streams. (From ‘A journey with the cows,’ the tenth story in Marcovaldo, pp.46-47.)

Over the ten-year period during which they were written, two changes in the interiors of these stories caught my notice. First, Marcovaldo graduates from walking everywhere to riding a Vespa. I am glad for him. Second, false promises of economic fairness are presented with slicker puff and cant. In one of the later stories, Marcovaldo and his family visit a self-service supermarket. They have no spare cash to spend there. For them it is an exhibition. They can look at what they want and see who they want to be. On entering the supermarket, Marcovaldo takes a trolley, as does Domitilla, as do each of the children. Despite instructing the children not to put anything in their carts, for fear of having to pay, Marcovaldo cannot stop himself. After making his own selectively acquisitive way through the store he steers to a halt where his wife and children gather. His trolley is filled with merchandise. As are theirs. They have become willing participants in, rather than disenfranchised onlookers of, a bonding experience made possible by wiles and aisles of consumerism. Architect Peter Corrigan renders this economic space like so:

We recognise ‘people like us’ through the fact that they consume the same sorts of things the same sorts of ways as we do… Our similar consuming practices allow us to recognise and communicate with our ‘own kind’.[4]

Marcovaldo’s ambitions are winnowed to this: to consume in a manner that betokens his preferred place in community. What matters is not social exchange but the exchange of money for signifying goods. This is a tough call for Marcovaldo because the cultural and practical metiers he is attuned to are in another place, another time. He understands their value, and he has a loose appreciation of how they might be turned to productive use, even entrepreneurial use. in the city. But he can’t get the tweaks right enough. He is trapped.

Lurking unresolved at the tail of the stories is who is accountable for the economic and social constructs that trap Marcovaldo. Calvino leaves moral reckonings to his readers. We are encouraged to make judgements, but we are not made to judge, nor left to judge in despond. In every story there are sentences and plotlines to laugh through. Marcovaldo offers fantasy and folly, silly decisions, rueful endings. Calvino makes me read with a furrowed brow and an affectionate smile for the hero and his family:

I hope to have shown that there is such a thing as a lightness of thoughtfulness, just as we all know there is a lightness of frivolity. In fact, thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem dull and heavy.[5]

---

[1] William Weaver and Damien Pettigrew, ‘Italo Calvino, The Art of Fiction No. 130,’ The Paris Review, Issue 124, Fall 1992.

[2] ‘Italo Calvino,’ Wikipedia.

[3] Italo Calvino, ‘The Odyssey within Odysseys’, The Literature Machine, Vintage Classics, 1986, p.139.

[4] Peter Corrigan, ‘The elementary forms of the consumerist life: A sociological perspective.’ In Urban consumption, edited by Peter Newton, CSIRO Publishing, 2011, p.79.

[5] Italo Calvino, ‘Lightness’, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Penguin Modern Classics, 2009, p.10.

---

This story collection was published in 1963 as Marcovaldo ovvero Le stagioni in città (Marcovaldo, or The Seasons in the City).

I am reading from William Weaver’s translation for (I think) the first English publication of the stories by Secker and Warburg in 1983.

The collection is available today in a Vintage Classics edition.