  “In
the twenties the 'Corriere dei Piccoli' published in Italy the most well-known
American comics of these times: Happy Hooligan, Felix the Cat, Maggie
and Jiggs, all of them renamed with Italian names: correspondently Fortunello,
Mio Mao, Petronilla and Arcibaldo. I that did not read yet could do without
words since the comic-strips were enough”
This was the first infant meeting
of the writer Italo Calvino with the American world. He confessed it in
one of his American Lectures he must give at the University of Harvard
and that were subtitled “Six proposals for next millennium”. But a little
before departing for the States, on 18th September 1985 when he was 62,
Calvino died at Siena. Why this memory?
Because at New York at the
auditorium of the Cooper Union, hundreds persons has attended the reading
of pieces of the works of Calvino and the tale of the events of his life.
At the same time, at the Italian
House Zerilli Marinò, at New York, it has been opened a photo exhibition
recalling the Liguria of his childhood and adolescence, and especially
Sanremo.
Upon one of these books, that
is the result of the omnivore encyclopaedic curiosity of Calvino, “Collezione
di sabbia” (“Sand collection”) I will pause because it gave me the opportunity
to interview the writer in his Roman house.
 It
was the first days of December 1984. The first thing I noticed going
in was five writing desks.
Calvino explained me that
they were not destined to special purposes, that there were not mysterious
symmetries between papers and tables, he wanted only to prevent accumulation
of books and papers. As a player changing chessboard, Calvino used to
leave lines and notes suspended. He would get back to one table in an
hour or tomorrow or next year.
We started talking about
the “Collezione di sabbia”. I made him notice that more than the half
of pages was about reports of exhibitions featured by the unusual: strange
collection exhibitions, about “knots and bindings”, wax dummies, maps,
tablets related with the appearance of writing, why, I asked him, this
appeal toward unusual?
“One moment - Calvino answered
- I attend all great exhibitions too. Few days ago in New York I assisted
an extraordinary exposition of Van Gogh”
- But it's evident that you
like this matter, you are comfort with whom recollects bottles of grey
sand of the Balaton Lake or the very  white
one of the Siam Golf, as it results from the title of your book 'Collezione
di sabbia' “.
“At Paris they hold an exposition
of strange collections. The display case of the sand collection seemed
to me the less striking but the most mysterious, the one having the
most to say.”
- What fascinates you the
most of these and other odd things?
“I'm interested to all straddling
several disciplines, especially when I sense anthropological components
or signs of the history of science”.
- In one of the chapters
of “Collezione di sabbia” you assert you have never felt 'a strong push
to the psychological inwardness”. Is that another of the refusals of
yours?
 “
Indeed as a writer I'm not fascinated by the psychological introspection.
It's my way to oppose to our epoch too plenty of analysis of psyche.”
- I ask you and myself: how
is it possible to set in order the Calvino of he first novels and the
one of the “Fiabe Italiane”, the Calvino of the odd collections and
the one that is enchanted by the origins of the universe in the “Cosmicomiche”?
“Do you want to tell me that
there are at least four Calvino? I add that the matter would be easy
if I had written those books in subsequent phases. The problem comes
from the fact that those different Calvino cross each other and they
overlap in the same  period”.
- Is it a problem for you
or for critics?
“For critics that must unravel
the difficulty. As for me I am inclined by temperament to experiment
new working hypothesis and I feel uneasy with any stylistic form who
possibilities I've already explored”
- As proved by the stories
of Qfwfq, the personage of the “Cosmicomiche” whose name is unpronounceable
you try to foreshadow other lives beside yours. Why do you dream different
lives?
I try to imagine where the
way I did not choose would have brought me.
So instead of thinking about
books it would be natural I wrote, it happens to me to think about the
books I do not know how to write or I cannot write, to the books another
would write. I'm always unsatisfied and in many cases the dissatisfaction
has power to incite.
I do think I must plagiarize
the great Borges: sometimes I'm a little tired of being Calvino.
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