The Complete Cosmicomics

by Italo Calvino

Climb up on the Moon? Of course we did. All you had to do was row out to it in a boat and, when you were underneath, prop a ladder against her and scramble up.

Surely there was something strange about that night. The sea’s surface, instead of being taut as it was during the full moon, or even arched a bit towards the sky, now seemed limp, sagging, as if the lunar magnet no longer exercised its full power. And the light, too, wasn’t the same as the light of other full moons; the night’s shadows seemed somehow to have thickened. Our friends up there must have realized what was happening; in fact, they looked up at us with frightened eyes. And from their mouths and ours, at the same moment, came a cry: ‘The Moon’s going away!’

The fulfilment of my dream of love had lasted only that instant when we had been united, spinning between Earth and Moon; torn from its earthly soil, my love now knew only the heart-rending nostalgia for what it lacked: a where, a surrounding, a before, an after.

‘What are you doing?’ And he said: ‘I’m playing.’ ‘Playing? With what?’ ‘With a thing,’ he said. You understand? It was the first time. There had never been things to play with before. And how could we have played? With that pap of gaseous matter? Some fun: that sort of stuff was all right perhaps for my sister G’d(w)n. If Rwzfs was playing, it meant he had found something new: in fact, afterwards, exaggerating as usual, they said he had found a pebble.

‘Why? What’s there?’ ‘I made some things with things . . .’ she said. It took me a while to realize, groping, that my sister, messing about with that sort of mud, had built up a little hill, all full of pinnacles, spires and battlements. ‘What have you done there?’ G’d(w)n never gave you a straight answer. ‘An outside with an inside in it.’

The Sun’s radiations were burning the envelopes of the planets, made of helium and hydrogen: in the sky, where our uncles and aunt were, fiery globes spun, dragging after them long beards of gold and turquoise, as a comet drags its tail.

So the situation was this: the sign served to mark a place but at the same time it meant that in that place there was a sign (something far more important because there were plenty of places but there was only one sign) and also at the same time that sign was mine, the sign of me, because it was the only sign I had ever made and I was the only one who had ever made signs. It was like a name, the name of that point, and also my name that I had signed on that spot; in short, it was the only name available for everything that required a name.

When you’ve waited two hundred million years, you can also wait six hundred; and I waited; the way was long but I wasn’t on foot, after all; astride the galaxy I travelled through the light-years, galloping over the planetary and stellar orbits as if I were on a horse whose shoes struck sparks; I was in a state of mounting excitement; I felt I was going forth to conquer the only thing that mattered to me, sign and dominion and name . . .

I must say I was truly satisfied with it, and I no longer regretted that first sign that had been erased, because this one seemed vastly more beautiful to me.

In other words, I was ashamed of that sign which went on through the centuries, being passed by worlds in flight, making a ridiculous spectacle of itself and of me and of that temporary way we had had of seeing things.

So expectation was revived, to lend anxiety to my days. The galaxy turned like an omelette in its heated pan, itself both frying pan and golden egg; and I was frying, with it, in my impatience.

from all the worlds anybody who had an opportunity invariably left his mark in space somehow;

But the others also had wronged the Z’zus, to begin with, by calling them ‘immigrants’, on the pretext that, since the others had been there first, the Z’zus had come later. This was mere unfounded prejudice—that seems obvious to me—because neither before nor after existed, nor any place to immigrate from, but there were those who insisted that the concept of ‘immigrant’ could be understood in the abstract, outside of space and time.

But with her it was different: the happiness I derived from her was the joy of being concealed, punctiform, in her, and of protecting her, punctiform, in me; it was at the same time vicious contemplation (thanks to the promiscuity of the punctiform convergence of us all in her) and also chastity (given her punctiform impenetrability). In short: what more could I ask?

‘Boys, the tagliatelle I would make for you!’, a true outburst of general love, initiating at the same moment the concept of space and, properly speaking, space itself, and time, and universal gravitation, and the gravitating universe, making possible billions and billions of suns, and of planets, and fields of wheat, and Mrs Ph(i)Nkos, scattered through the continents of the planets, kneading with floury, oil-shiny, generous arms, and she lost at that very moment, and we, mourning her loss.

But in the end she became aware of our common substance and there was a half-timid, half-smiling palpitation in the look she gave me, which caused me to emit a silent whimper of happiness.

Ayl was a happy inhabitant of the silence that reigns where all vibration is excluded; for her anything that looked likely to break the absolute visual neutrality was a harsh discord; beauty began for her only where the greyness had extinguished even the remotest desire to be anything other than grey.

A meteorite crossed the sky, its trajectory passing in front of the Sun; its fluid and fiery envelope for an instant acted as a filter to the Sun’s rays, and all of a sudden the world was immersed in a light never seen before. Purple chasms gaped at the foot of orange cliffs, and my violet hands pointed to the flaming green meteor while a thought for which words did not yet exist tried to burst from my throat: ‘This for you! From me this for you, yes, yes, beautiful!’

I reached a port that opened upon a sea of mud; I entered a garden where, from sandy beds, tall menhirs rose into the sky.

It was something never seen before: an immense fluid bubble was swelling around the Earth and completely enfolding it; soon it would cover us from head to foot, and who could say what the consequences would be?

I threw the ball to Ayl beyond a crack opening in the ground, but my throw proved inexplicably shorter than I had intended and the ball fell into the gap; the ball must have become suddenly very heavy; no, it was the crack that had suddenly yawned enormously, and now Ayl was far away, beyond a liquid, wavy expanse that had opened between us and was foaming against the shore of rocks, and I leaned from this shore, shouting: ‘Ayl, Ayl!’ and my voice, its sound, the very sound of my voice spread loudly, as I had never imagined it, and the waves rumbled still louder than my voice. In other words: it was all beyond understanding.

The liquid mass spread out at my feet had suddenly turned a new colour, which blinded me, and I exploded in an articulate cry which, a little later, took on a specific meaning: ‘Ayl! The sea is blue!’

All around, the world poured out colours, constantly new, pink clouds gathered in violet cumuli which unleashed gilded lightning; after the storms long rainbows announced hues that still hadn’t been seen, in all possible combinations. And chlorophyll was already beginning its progress: mosses and ferns grew green in the valleys where torrents ran. This was finally the setting worthy of Ayl’s beauty; but she wasn’t there! And without her all this varicoloured sumptuousness seemed useless to me, wasted.

I ran all over the Earth, I saw again the things I had once known grey, and I was still amazed at discovering fire was red, ice white, the sky pale blue, the earth brown, that rubies were ruby-coloured, and topazes the colour of topaz, and emeralds emerald. And Ayl? With all my imagination I couldn’t picture how she would appear to my eyes.

Soon space became filled again, and dense, like a vineyard just before vintage time, and we flew on, escaping from one another, my galaxy fleeing the younger ones as it had the older, and young and old fleeing us.

It just wasn’t possible to make him accept a reality different from his own.

Not at all; she was in earnest, she couldn’t wait to go back and have a little chat with old N’ba N’ga. I was all mixed up.

I was all mixed up is so simpls and so packed here

According to my great-uncle, the lands that had emerged were a limited phenomenon: they were going to disappear just as they had cropped up or, in any event, they would be subject to constant changes: volcanoes, glaciations, earthquakes, upheavals, changes of climate and of vegetation. And our life in the midst of all this would have to face constant transformations, in the course of which whole races would disappear, and the only survivors would be those who were prepared to change the bases of their existence so radically that the reasons why living was beautiful would be completely overwhelmed and forgotten.

This prospect was in absolute contradiction to the optimism in which we children of the coast had been brought up, and I opposed the idea with shocked protests. But for me the true, living confutation of those arguments was Lll: in her I saw the perfect, definitive form, born from the conquest of the land that had emerged; she was the sum of the new boundless possibilities that had opened. How could my great-uncle try to deny the incarnate reality of Lll?

in short, life would be maintained as it had gone on till then, in its achieved, perfect forms, without metamorphoses or additions with dubious outcome, and every individual would be able to develop his own nature, to arrive at the essence of himself and of all things.

We also didn’t know what we were staking because there was nothing that could serve as a stake, and so we gambled on our word, keeping an account of the bets each had won, to be added up later. All these calculations were very difficult, since numbers didn’t exist then, and we didn’t even have the concept of number, to begin to count, because it wasn’t possible to separate anything from anything else.

Will the Assyrians invade Mesopotamia?’ He laughed, confused. ‘Meso- what? When?’ I calculated quickly and blurted a date, not in years and centuries of course, because then the units of measuring time weren’t conceivable in lengths of that sort, and to indicate a precise date we had to rely on formulae so complicated it would have taken a whole blackboard to write them down. ‘How can you tell?’ ‘Come on, (k)yK, are they going to invade or not? I say they do; you say no. All right? Don’t take so long about it.’

realized that with what seemed a casual jumble of words I had hit on an infinite reserve of new combinations among the signs which compact, opaque, uniform reality would use to disguise its monotony, and I realized that perhaps the race towards the future, the race I had been the first to foresee and desire, tended only—through time and space—towards a crumbling into alternatives like this, until it would dissolve in a geometry of invisible triangles and ricochets like the course of a football among the white lines of a field as I tried to imagine them, drawn at the bottom of the luminous vortex of the planetary system, deciphering the numbers marked on the chests and backs of the players at night, unrecognizable in the distance.

But the memory of the old life that returned to my mind was the endless series of defeats, of flights, of dangers; to begin again meant perhaps only a temporary extension of that death agony, the return to a phase I thought had already ended.

I no longer was affected by their petty wit. Now I recognized the greatness of spirit that had made us choose to disappear rather than live in a world no longer suited to us. If I survived it was only so that one of us could continue to feel himself a Dinosaur in the midst of these wretches who tried to conceal, with stupid teasing, the fear that still dominated them. And what choice did the New Ones have, beyond the choice between mockery and fear?

When you’re young, all evolution lies before you, every road is open to you, and at the same time you can enjoy the fact of being there on the rock, flat mollusc-pulp, damp and happy.