Free If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino Page B

but a light little anchor: I was not therefore being asked to renounce the open-mindedness of youth, but only to linger for a moment, to reflect, to sound out the darkness of myself. "To be able to draw this object at my leisure from every point of view," Zwida said, "I should have one that I could keep with me and become familiar with. Do you think I could buy one from a fisherman?"
    "We can ask," I said.
    "Why do you not try to purchase one? I dare not do it myself, because a young lady from the city who shows interest in a crude fishermen's implement would arouse some wonder."
    I saw myself in the act of presenting her with the iron grapnel as if it were a bunch of flowers: the image in its incongruity had a strident, fierce quality. Certainly a meaning was hidden there that eluded me; and, vowing to meditate on it calmly, I answered yes.
    "I would like the grapnel with its hawser attached," Zwida specified. "I can spend hours drawing a heap of coiled rope. So ask for a very long rope: ten—no, twelve— meters."
    Thursday evening. The doctors have given me permission to consume alcoholic beverages in moderation. To celebrate the news, at sunset I entered the tavern, The Star of Sweden, to have a cup of hot rum. At the bar there were fishermen, customs agents, day laborers. Over all
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    their voices rang out the voice of one elderly man in the uniform of a prison guard, who was boasting drunkenly through the sea of chatter. "And every Wednesday the perfumed young lady slips me a hundred-crown note to leave her alone with the convict. And by Thursday the hundred crowns are already gone in so much beer. And when the visiting hour is over, the young lady comes out with the stink of jail in her elegant clothes; and the prisoner goes back to his cell with the lady's perfume in his jailbird's suit. And I'm left with the smell of beer. Life is nothing but trading smells."
    "Life and also death, you might say," interjected another drunk, whose profession, as I learned at once, was gravedigger. "With the smell of beer I try to get the smell of death off me. And only the smell of death will get the smell of beer off you, like all the drinkers whose graves I have to dig."
    I took this dialogue as a warning to be on guard: the world is falling apart and tries to lure me into its disintegration.
    Friday. The fisherman had become suspicious all of a sudden: "What do you need it for? What use do you have for a grapnel?"
    These were indiscreet questions; I should have answered, "To draw it," but I knew Miss Zwida's shyness about revealing her artistic activity in an environment incapable of appreciating it; besides, the right answer, on my part, would have been, "To think about it," so just imagine whether I would have been understood.
    "That is my business," I answered. We had started out conversing amiably, since we had met the night before at the tavern, but all of a sudden our dialogue had turned curt.
    "Go to a ship's chandler," the fisherman said, brusquely. "I do not sell my belongings."
    With the shopkeeper the same thing happened: as soon
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    as I asked my question, his face turned grim. "We can't sell such things to foreigners," he said. "We want no trouble with the police. And with a rope twelve meters long into the bargain... Not that I suspect you, but it would not be the first time somebody threw a grapnel up to the
    bars of the prison, to help a prisoner escape..."
    "Escape" is one of those words I cannot hear without abandoning myself to endless ruminations. The search for the anchor in which I am engaged seems to indicate to me an avenue of escape, perhaps of a metamorphosis, a resurrection. With a shudder I dismiss the thought that the prison is my mortal body and the escape that awaits me the separation of the soul, the beginning of a life beyond this earth.
    Saturday. It was my first outing at night after many months, and this caused me no little apprehension, especially because of the head colds to which I am