The Watcher and Other Stories

The Watcher and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

Book: The Watcher and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF
Author: Italo Calvino
papers. Swarms of nuns came to vote, hundreds at a time: first the white ones, then the black. As far as documents went, nearly all of them were in order; often the identity cards had been issued just a few days before, brand new. In the weeks before the election, the registry officers must have worked night and day to furnish documents for entire religious orders. And photographers, too: photograph after photograph, passport size, passed before Amerigo’s eyes, all the pictures equally divided into black and white spaces, the oval of the face framed by white coifs and by the trapeze of the pectoral, all framed in the black triangle of the veil. And what it meant was this: either the nuns’ photographer was a great artist, or else nuns are especially photogenic.
    Not only because of the harmony of that celebrated pictorial motif, the nun’s habit, but also because the faces came out as natural, serene, and with a good likeness. Amerigo realized that this checking the nuns’ documents was becoming, for him, a kind of spiritual repose.
    When he thought about it, it was strange: as a rule, in those little square photographs, ninety times out of a hundred the sitter has widened eyes, bloated cheeks, a mindless smile. At least that was how he always looked, and now, checking these identity cards, in photographs where he found the face tense, forced in an unnatural expression, he recognized his own lack of ease before the glass eye that transforms you into an object, his lack of detachment in his attitude toward himself, his neuroses, the impatience that prefigures death in the photographs of the living.
    But not for the nuns: they posed in front of the lens as if their faces no longer belonged to them; and so they came out perfectly. Not all of them, of course (Amerigo now read the nuns’ photographs like a fortuneteller: he could distinguish those who were still bound by earthly ambition, those moved by envy, by unextinguished passions, those who were fighting themselves and their fate): you had to cross a kind of threshold, forgetting yourself, and then the photograph recorded this immediacy, this inner peace and blessedness. Is it a sign that blessedness exists? Amerigo wondered (these problems were not familiar to him, and he tended to associate them with Buddhism, with Tibet), and, if it does exist, should it be pursued? Should it be pursued, to the detriment of other things, of other values, in order to be like these nuns?
    Or like the total idiots? They, too, in their freshly printed identity cards, were happy and photogenic. For them, too, offering an image of themselves was no problem: did this mean that the goal which a nun’s life attains, after a toilsome path, is given to idiots by nature, by chance?
    Instead, those who remain at a halfway house, the afflicted, the misfits, the retarded, the neurotic, those for whom life is difficulty and alarm, are terrible when photographed: with those taut necks, those rabbity smiles, especially the women, who still cherish a residual hope of looking pretty.
    They brought in one nun on a stretcher. She was young. Strangely, she was a beautiful woman. Dressed as if she were dead, her face, flushed, seemed composed, as in the religious pictures hung in churches. Amerigo would have preferred not to be drawn to look at her. They left her in the booth on the stretcher, with a stool nearby, so that she, too, could make her “x.” Amerigo, while she was in there, had her photograph before him, on the table. He looked at it and was frightened. Even in its features, this was the face of a drowned woman, at the bottom of a well, shouting with her eyes, as she was pulled down into the darkness. He realized that everything in her was refusal, writhing: even her lying there motionless and ill.
    Is it good to be blessed? Or is this anguish better, this tension that stiffens faces at the photographer’s flash and makes us dissatisfied with the way we are? Always
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