Marcovaldo or The Seasons in the City

SUMMER
18. The city all to himself

For eleven months of the year the inhabitants loved their city and woe to anyone who cast aspersions: the skyscrapers, the cigarette machines, the wide-screen movie theaters, all undeniable sources of constant attraction. The only citizen to whom this feeling could not be attributed with certitude was Marcovaldo; but what he thought-first-was hard to know since he didn't have great powers of communication, and-second-it mattered so little that it made no difference.

At a certain point in the year, the month of August began. And then you witnessed a general change of feeling. Nobody loved the city anymore: even the skyscrapers and the pedestrian subways and the car-parks, till yesterday so cherished, had become disagreeable and tiresome. The inhabitants wanted only to get away as quickly as possible: and so, filling trains and clogging superhighways, by the 15th of the month all of them were actually gone. Except one. Marcovaldo was the only inhabitant not to leave the city.

He would go out to take a walk downtown, in the morning. The streets opened before him, broad and endless, drained of cars and deserted; the facades of the buildings, a gray fence of lowered iron shutters and the countless slats of the blinds, were sealed, like ramparts. For the whole year Marcovaldo had dreamed of being able to use the streets as streets, that is, walking in the middle of them: now he could do it, and he could also cross on the red light, and jay-walk, and stop in the center of squares. But he realized that the pleasure didn't come so much from doing these unaccustomed things as from seeing a whole different world: streets like the floors of valleys, or dry river-beds, houses like blocks of steep mountains, or the walls of a cliff.

To be sure, you immediately noticed the absence of something: but not the line of parked cars, or the jam at the intersection, or the flow of the crowd at the entrance to the department store, or the clump of people waiting for the tram; what was missing to fill the empty spaces and bend the squared surfaces was, say, a flood due to the bursting of water mains or an invasion of roots of the trees along the avenue which would crack the asphalt. Marcovaldo's eyes peered around seeking the emergence of a different city, a city of bark and scales and clots and nerve-systems under the city of paint and tar and glass and stucco. And there, the building which he passed every day was revealed to him, in its reality, as a quarry of porous gray sandstone; the fence of a building-site was of pine-planks still fresh, with knots that looked like buds; on the sign of the big fabric shop rested a host of little moths, asleep.

You would have said that, the moment human beings had deserted the city, it had fallen prey to inhabitants hidden till yesterday, who now gained the upper hand. For a bit Marcovaldo's stroll followed the itinerary of a file of ants, then let itself be turned aside by the flight of a bewildered scarab beetle, then lingered to accompany the twisting progress of a caterpillar. It wasn't only animals that invaded the area: Marcovaldo discovered that at the newspaper kiosks, on the northern side, a fine layer of mold had formed, that the potted trees outside restaurants made an effort to thrust their leaves beyond the frame of shadow of the sidewalk. But did the city still exist? That agglomerate of synthetic matter that confined Marcovaldo's days now proved to be a mosaic of disparate stones, each quite distinct from the others to sight and touch, in its hardness and heat and consistency.

And so, forgetting the function of sidewalks and zebra stripes, Marcovaldo was moving through the streets with a butterfly's zig-zag, when all of a sudden the radiator of a sports car going at eighty miles per hour missed his hip by a fraction of an inch. Half in fear and half because of the blast, Marcovaldo leaped up and fell back, stunned.

The car, with a great snarl, braked, almost spinning full circle. A group of young men, in shirt sleeves, jumped out. "Now they'll beat me up," Marcovaldo thought, "because I was walking in the middle of the street!"

The young men were armed with strange implements. "At last we've found him! At last!" they said, surrounding Marcovaldo. "Here he is then," said one of them, holding a silvery little stick to his mouth, "the only inhabitant left in the city on the mid-August holiday. Excuse me, sir, would you mind telling our viewers your impressions?" and he stuck the silvery stick under Marcovaldo's nose.

A dazzling glow exploded, it was hot as a furnace, and Marcovaldo was about to faint. They had trained spotlights on him, cameras, microphones. He stammered something: at every three syllables he uttered, the young man moved in, twisting the microphone towards himself. "Ah, so you mean to say that…" and he would go on talking for ten minutes.

To put it simply: they were interviewing him.

"Can I go now?"

"Of course. Thank you very much… Actually, if you have nothing else to do… and feel like earning a little something… would you mind staying here and lending us a hand?"

The whole square was topsy-turvy: trucks, sound-trucks, cameras with dollies, batteries, lamps, teams of men in overalls, trundling from one place to another, all sweating. "Here she is! She's here! She's here!" From an open August Follies began to issue orders for shooting the famous star diving into the main fountain of the city.

To Marcovaldo, the grip, they had given the job of shifting around the square the bank of floodlights on a heavy stand. The great square now buzzed with machinery and sizzling arc-lights, resounded to hammering on makeshift metal scaffoldings, shouted commands… To Marcovaldo's eyes, blinded and dazed, the everyday city had resumed the place of that other city, glimpsed for a moment, or perhaps only dreamed.