Free Hermit in Paris by Italo Calvino Page B

and ineffectual and he is set to become the pathetic failure of the area, a poet and a radical.
    The Motels
    I have lived in several motels (one brand-new one in Cleveland, owned by Gold senior) which are now no longer like wooden cabins, but built with brick, with a huge carpark, surrounded by single-room apartments, often two-storey buildings, each room with a double bed (which by day becomes a divan), TV, radio-alarm, shower, kitchen, fridge, everything organized so that the minimum of service is needed: a paradise for salesmen and lovers, and less expensive than any decent hotel.
    The Elections
    In intellectuals’ houses all the talk is of the election, much more so than in New York. Violently frightened by the face of American Catholicism that I saw in Boston, where the Madonna continues to loom large over the old cradle of Puritanism (Boston is 75 percent Catholic and now lives under an Italo-Irish dictatorship), I peddle bitter anti-Kennedy propaganda, and generally find fertile terrain among the families of Jewish professors, though on the whole they see Nixon as the danger for them and often they are taken in by the idea that the rise of the Catholic Democrats, who represent nationalities who were poor and working-class until recently, has something democratic about it, and they do not know about the reactionary role performed by Spellman’s American-Irish church inside the Catholic world. Then there are some militant Democrats, like the wife of one congressman: he was a Humphrey supporter but was ready to go over to Kennedy if he won the convention; she actually lost her temper completely and chased us out of her house. (Among the middle classes here one meets even intelligent people who feel the need to proclaim constantly that everything is fine, that American culture is first-class – they quote university, theatre and library statistics just like the Soviets – as though they needed to convince themselves before others, yet on the other hand it is here in the provinces, among the same class of people, that you find the most lucid, serious and well-informed critics of American life and society.)
    The Prostitutes
    After two and a half months in which – incredibly for a European – I have never seen a prostitute on the streets, here in some black districts I rediscover the sight familiar to all Western European cities: prostitutes. There are some in white areas too, but they are usually in certain cafés, and in any case they are very few. The most astonishing thing about New York – which is the result of both Puritanism and freer female morals – is that despite its enormous size you never see a single prostitute. They exist only in provincial towns.
    Inter-racial Paternalism
    The Karamu is a community centre in Cleveland set up around thirty years ago to promote common cultural activities between whites and ‘colored’ peoples. Architecturally very beautiful, with theatres, exhibitions by black artists, craft-fairs, museums of African culture, everything in first-class taste, classrooms where every evening I see blacks concentrating on chemistry and biology lessons. I think I’m back in the USSR. I am invited by the theatre’s director, a white Jewish man who puts on stage works that involve whites and blacks (amateurs and professionals work for free, he is a professional who prefers to work in the provinces and is paid by this centre), to see the dress rehearsal of a play which opens tomorrow night. We watch the play, but it is a tearjerker, an edifying tale about society along moderate lines on the theme of race (by a black author), an instance of educational parish theatre, or rather exactly like a similar play I saw nine years ago in Leningrad in a similar small theatre run by the Komsomol in a similar pioneers’ house, but at least there the hypocrisy was different, not this paternalistic falseness beneath which this institution presents itself to me. I read a brochure about a series of