Free Hermit in Paris by Italo Calvino Page A

horse-fair.
    But Where Is the City?
    The truth is that you can go around by car for hours and not find what should be the city centre; in places like Cleveland the city tends to disappear, spreading out across an area that is as large as one of our provinces. There is still a downtown, that is to say a centre, but it is only a centre with offices. The middle classes live in avenues of small two-storey houses that are all the same, even though no two are alike, with a few metres of green lawn in front and a garage for three or four cars depending on the number of adults in the family. You cannot go anywhere without a car, because there is nowhere to go. Every now and again, at a crossroads in these avenues, there is a shopping-centre for doing the shopping. The middle classes never leave this zone, the children grow up without knowing anything except this world populated by small, well-off families like their own, who all have to change their car once a year because if they have last year’s model they lose face with their neighbours. The man goes out every morning to work and returns at 5 p.m., puts on his slippers and watches TV.
    The poor areas are exactly the same, the little houses are identical, only instead of just one family two or three families live in them, and the building, usually of wood, deteriorates in the space of a few years. What four or five years ago was an elegant suburb is now in the hands of the well-off, black middle classes. The Jews have left their poor ghetto because now in Cleveland they are all more or less rich, and their previous houses have now all become slums for blacks. The churches remain – I mean the buildings – the synagogues in the ex-Jewish areas have now turned into Baptist churches for blacks, but they have retained the candelabra on the windows and the archivolts. The movement of races from one area to another in these big cities is constant: where the Italians once were now you find Hungarians, and so on. The Puerto Ricans have not yet reached the Midwest, they are still concentrated in New York, but here in the last few years there has been a huge amount of Mexican immigration. But the curious feature is that now on the bottom rung of the immigration ladder are the internal migrants, the poor whites from Virginia who come to work up here in the factories, and since they were the last to arrive, they find themselves below the blacks, and their racism and hatred of the anti-segregationist Yankees intensifies.
    The Gold Family
    In Cleveland I am the guest of the Golds, a typical Midwestern Jewish family. Herbert’s father came here from Russia as a boy, became a labourer and greengrocer, and only after the last war did he succeed in becoming the richest hotel owner in Cleveland, but he still lives modestly in his little house, gives a lot of money to Israel which he visits every year, is totally philistine and Americanized, but as in many Jewish families he is proud of having a famous intellectual in the family and totally tolerant of his way of life. His wife is the typical American-Jewish mother, one of this country’s great institutions, her Jewish cuisine is excellent, the whole family including the four children exude an extraordinary serenity, the satisfaction of having made it, and she is also Woman of Valour of the state of Israel. Of her children, the eldest is a lawyer and has his office in the hotel (tax consultancy, of course) and the youngest helps his father in the hotel, and besides Herbert there is another son who wants to be a writer, Sidney, who is the real character in the family: he was a manual worker until recently, and also worked at Ford’s in Detroit, but he always quits jobs, is half-Communist, wants to be a writer like his brother, and for the time being his father is keeping him (he is thirty-five) because he realizes that to have sons who are writers gives him extra prestige among his fellow citizens. But Sidney is not sharp like Herb, he is naïve