Smog is a hoot. A stand-up comic could use Smog for the basis of an hour long stand-up routine. Do we have a future Chris Rock or Eddie Izzard or Lewis Black in the audience?
Smog features a young, single newspaper writer come to a small Italian city to take on the job of managing editor for Purification, a magazine put out by the Institute, an organization dedicated to improving air quality.
When our first-person narrator, a man I'll call Matteo, arrives as the offices of the Institute, he's taken aback as he's lead through spacious halls and galleries decked out with giant mirrors, lavish wall hangings, thick carpets and marble fireplaces. Ha! I bet Matteo was a bit shocked as he pondered the discord between such a private display of opulence and the austere public mission of the Institute.
Matteo is introduced to Commenndatore Cordá, the Institute's head and editor-in-chief. Italo Calvino proves himself a master at portraying a man who can be seen as the very embodiment of velvety ease, success and expansiveness and yet also a blustering buffoon and diabolical clown.
Keeping in mind Smog as the novella's title, there's more than a small dose of irony when Matteo watches this executive slicker in action. "And as he spoke, he picked up those papers and at the moment I noticed how they raised a little cloud of dust, and I saw the prints of his fingers outlined on their surface, which he had barely touched. Now the Commendatore, in picking up those papers, tried to give them a little shake, but just a slight one, as if he didn't want to admit they were dusty, and he also blew on them gently. He was careful not to put his fingers on the first page of each speech, but if he just grazed one with the tip of a fingernail, he left a little white streak over what seemed a gray background, since the paper was covered with a very fine veil of dust."
Back in the squalor of his dust-covered rented room in one of the city's more rundown districts, Matteo attempts to go to sleep. Again, Italo Calvino's storytelling magic shines through. As Matteo lets us know, his room is directly over the kitchen of Urbano Rattazzi beer hall where he can hear loudspeakers transmitting orders: "Two ravioli with tomato sauce" or "Side dish of French fries." Poor, poor young man. It's after midnight but the beer hall will continue serving hot meals for the next few hours.
And when Urbano Rattazzi closes for business, time for the kitchen workers to drag out the metal beer drums, clank, clank, bang, bang, and start rinsing them out, squirt, squirt, bang,. Then, at about six a.m., after the beer truck comes to pick up the empties and drop off the fulls, kaboom! kaboom!, the sound of the machines for polishing the beer hall floors can be heard. If all this isn't enough, in moments of silence Matteo can hear his deaf landlady Signorina Margariti in the next room carrying on intense soliloquies without surcease, all in a loud, shrill voice punctuated by long bouts of laughter.
Oh, Matteo, to top it off, your life is about to receive a serious injection of drama - it's three a.m. and you are jolted out of sleep by the telephone in the hall that's ringing off the hook. You jump up to see who is on the line but you already know even before you hear her voice: it's your girlfriend Claudia.
Ever since your first scrumptious Claudia kiss, you have always wondered why such a beautiful and vivacious young woman (and rich too!) would fall in love with an average looking journalist such as yourself, a guy with a flat personality, lacking ambition and scraping along from day to day. Then you remember: she mistakenly thought you part of the world of high society, famous artists and talented writers. She sensed she made a terrible error but since it wasn't in Claudia's nature to admit she committed a blunder, she went on projecting talents and greatness onto you.
Then when gorgeous Claudia pays a visit to this soot-covered gray city to meet up with her heartthrob writer boyfriend, Italo Calvino is given oodles of opportunities to portray the collision of beauty with its grimy opposite. I encourage you to read for yourself but permit me to close with Matteo and Claudia wearing her huge black hat, the couple up on a mountain and Matteo in an ecstatic mood: "A sense of vastness had seized me; I don't know whether it was Claudia's hat and skirt, or the view. The air, though this was autumn, was fairly clear and unpolluted, but it was streaked by the most diverse kinds of condensation: thick mists at the base of the mountains, wisps of fog over the rivers, chains of clouds, stirred variously by the wind."
Smog is included in The Watcher and Other Stories. Again, I urge you to seek out this humorous sixty-page novella and luxuriate in Italo Calivno's splendid storytelling.
Literary master from Italy, Italo Calvino, 1923-1985
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