If asked to write about Calvino in another context, I’d probably start with Invisible Cities, but since this is an anthology of short stories, it has to be ‘The Distance of the Moon’, a story from Cosmicomics that exemplifies Calvino’s ability to return a reader to an earlier state, in which our wonder at an unfolding tale is childlike. No coincidence that among his accomplishments is a definitive collection of Italian folktales.
I love lists, and ‘The Distance of the Moon’ is the story that, in its description of moon milk, gave us not only ‘vegetal juices, tadpoles, bitumen, lentils, honey, starch crystals, sturgeon eggs, moulds, pollens, gelatinous matter, worms, resins, pepper, mineral salts, combustion residue’ but also ‘fingernails and cartilage, bolts, sea horses, nuts and peduncles, shards of crockery, fish-hooks, at times even a comb’.
Luminous is an overused word but it might have been coined for this story. From a luminous, irreal palette, Calvino paints a portrait of the kind of longing any of us will have known who have played our part in a love triangle (quadrangle, pentangle . . . )
First published in Cosmicomics, Giulio Einaudi (Italy) and Harcourt Brace (US), 1965. Currently available from Penguin Modern Classics, 2010
A Personal Anthology 