If on an autumn’s day a walker

March 2, 2021 katbernhardt@mac.com

The train stops. It’s like no station you have ever seen. It’s in a tunnel with a silver rounded top and endless hallways with everchanging shapes of green and white geometric designs. The ceiling is shiny and so are the floors, so shiny that you imagine, but do not see, a team of constantly polishing floor scrubbers pushing their carts up and down the eternity of halls, stopping to wet their mops and swirl them in circles on the rectangles underfoot, darting out of sight whenever passengers click their heels down the gleaming tunnel. The lights have a florescence of another time. And now that you think about it, the design and white and green colors on the floors and even the ceilings remind you of the distant past. Is it the 1970s? No, further back, maybe the 60s or the even the 50s. You can imagine men in trench coats peering from side aisleways, holding open newspapers, their fedora hats tilted in a stylized way, contemplating their next move in the Cold War. You have gone back in time.

It was not what you expected. The map made it look like a small beach town that would have a quaint and very outdoor little train depot like the one you boarded when you started your journey and like the other ones along the way where the train paused to exchange passengers, to load and unload in a very open and outdoor space. What in the world is this place with none of the steamy mystery of a train station on a rainy evening with whistling locomotives and the steel odors of track?

You begin to walk the long hall and stop. How can you know which way to go? It looks the same forward as backward. There is a sprinkling of other passengers who outpace you to either side and this gives you some encouragement that they must be moving toward the entrance. There are signs just under the roof up ahead. You can’t make them out yet and you pick up your pace in eager anticipation of written instructions for a way out.

Uscita. Isn’t that the word for Exit? The arrow points straight ahead. It is clear that the briskly walking people, who look like they’ve gone a mile ahead of you, know what they are doing.

You turn a corner and now you can see, miles and miles away it seems, light at the end of the tunnel. Natural light. Meanwhile, you are surrounded by geometry. Lines on the floor in unending patterns. The rounded silver roof with straight lines of lights that seem to blast to the end of the tunnel like you are in some sort of spaceship plunging at warp speed into the universe.

Another sign adds the English word Exit next to Uscita for linguistic confirmation.

As you walk, you imagine the Writer, Italo Calvino, walking the same hallway. It can’t have looked much different when he was a young man. The design is so old. He has taken the train from Turin, he’d call it Torino, to visit his aging parents. He can’t believe the town decided to build this endless tunnel of a train station, yet it sort of appeals to him. It gives him an idea. About lines that go on forever. About the lines in tunnels that lead to a place of light, but never arrive, so that the Walker is forever walking the shiny stone floors, listening to the rapid clicking of passengers who walk faster. Do they arrive at the light? Is it just him walking an infinity, never reaching his destination?

In the Italo Calvino world of dualities, of Readers and Writers, there would be Walkers and Resters. The people who walk everywhere in the world and the people who never go anywhere and have instead made the choice to stay in one place so that they can be hosts for the foot-travelers. Like those people in Spain who are always stamping the pilgrim passports, but never making their way to Santiago de Compostela themselves.

This train station with its tunnel that never ends is the trap set by the Resters for the Walkers. The Walker walks forever and the Rester, not busy making beds, breakfasts and reservations, finally can rest. A trap. And you fell right into it.

What convoluted craziness are you thinking? Snap out of it. That’s what happens in tunnels with lines of light and green rectangles from the 1950s.

As you continue to walk, getting no closer to your goal, you notice there are mechanized belts so passengers can stand rather than walk, which only confirms how long this tunnel really is. It is the ideal Italo Calvino train station. Unexpected, geometric, hidden, surprising, confusing, mysterious, thought provoking, imaginative, clean, austere, and bright with shadows. Did he design it? You wonder.

Or, more likely, you are walking the inspiration for some of Italo Calvino’s writings and that is a wonderful thought.

At last, after what seems an eternity, the light comes closer and you are before it: the entrance to the train station, which is just as atypical as the long tunnels. It is round with the ticket windows encircling you. Even the green and white designs in the stone floors are now circular. It’s the center of the void. Looking back down the tunnel you just walked, the lines of light seem to point to the white and green circle at the very center, a bullseye, at the entrance. Looking up, there are two floors to this rotunda. The second floor is dark and mysterious with lots of shadows and a gray round balcony walkway to what appear to be offices. What clandestine plans are being made up there behind closed doors you will never know.

And then you see it and you gasp.

A phone.

My God.

A push-button, hold the receiver attached to a cord, public telephone.

You are almost certain it will begin to ring. Of course it will. Why else would it be here in this anachronism of a train station? It is becoming more and more apparent that it could only be designed by a writer. It will ring. And then, you will have to decide whether or not you are going to answer it. You know the consequences if you do. And if you don’t. If you do, there might be someone tied up somewhere who needs rescuing who you may or may not know, and in the name of human decency it doesn’t even matter if you do, and that person may or may not be glad to be rescued, and it may ruin your career because you won’t make it on time for your lecture and they’ll find out you’re mixed up in something nefarious, only you really aren’t, you just answered a telephone, but they won’t know that and you won’t know how to defend yourself. And if you don’t answer, someone could die. There’s no choice really, is there. If someone could die, what happens to you doesn’t matter very much, does it? Even if that someone is ungrateful. Even if no one cares to hear your side of the story.

Well, at least that’s how Italo Calvino wrote it. And if he designed this train station, you have no reason not to suspect that it might go the same way for you. But you aren’t a professor and you don’t have a class to teach. What would ruin you? Only you know that. Whatever it is, that’s what you imagine might happen if you pick up that phone when it rings.

You stare at it. Tempting it. Still nothing. Someone whisks past you, almost brushing your arm, picks up the red receiver, looks at you with a question mark, you shake your head, he dials and you turn toward the doors to the outside.

Outside. Air. It’s raining. Just like the train station in the Italo Calvino novel, only completely different.

You step out into the circular drive of the train station with its palm trees and green bushes and spiky plants and pencil thin trees and cacti. As you walk to the main street, you realize this is not the small town you’d pictured from the map. This is a vibrant bustling city. It may not be as easy as you thought to find the hotel.

First, the sea. Cherchez la plage, you might say. It can’t be that difficult to find. Just keep going left, opposite the station.

There are fuchia flowers and little gardens in the islands of the streets. And everywhere there are people careening around on red and black scooters, without a care in the world, darting about in their unswattable way like happy, helmeted flies.

You find the beach, deserted on a gray day in autumn, the stakes to hold the rented umbrellas looking lonely, almost like tombstones.

Further along the coast, there is a sign. Lungomare Italo Calvino. It’s his seafront. And right across the street from the sign, what do you see among the palm trees and spiky Mediterranean foliage? A phone booth. You’d thought they were extinct, but anything is possible in the city where the master of the imagined once lived.

Before you can once again ask yourself what you will do if it rings, you proceed to the seafront of Italo Calvino and enjoy the view along the coast.

In a much larger city than you anticipated, it is a miracle that you find the hotel by intuition alone, but you do. In a city that invites ambiguity, you have a delicious pizza in one of its multiplicity of pizza-producing ristorantes, you can’t even be sure which one, and go to bed early.

The next day, the sun shines on the beautiful coastal city and you walk its twisting streets. You find the movie theater where Italo Calvino would spend his afternoons. On one of the streets, you find your way into a tunnel of art, paintings and mirrors everywhere, a feeling of unendingness, and flooring that again looks like it belongs to another time. The entrance is not the exit, but you come out where you started. You see the grand casino building and next to it the little Russian Orthodox Church with intriguing eastern dome spires. Both the inside and the outside are very beautiful, ornate and many-colored. The hole in the center of the ceiling reveals the image of the always watching Jesus looking down from a tower with little windows.

If Jesus is always watching, the Writer in you says, then there is always a Reader, just as there is always a sound made when a tree falls.

You return to the pedestrian streets teaming with shopping Italians and go up hill a bit and there is a museum. Inside, you learn that Sanremo was named for Saint Romulus (San Romolo of Genoa) who founded the place so very, very long ago.

You also meet two men, both well-dressed and scholarly. One is a little more jovial. He is the one who knows enough English to converse with you. The other sits behind the desk and is a little more serious. He doesn’t know enough English to speak in the language, however, it turns out you can understand some of what he is saying if you try. The men pick up on this and begin an excited attempt to teach you Italian in one day. Ho capito (I understand). Ho fame (I am hungry). Vorrei una pizza (I would like a pizza). Grazie mille (thanks a lot). Prego (you’re welcome).

But you aren’t there to learn Italian, as much as it draws you in right away, you are there to ask about Italo Calvino.

Ah, yes, of course, he is known and remembered in Sanremo, but like a historic figure, like Gore Vidal, a name for a seafront. Most young people have heard of him, but perhaps don’t know why. The museum has some books about him. One has pictures of him as a baby at his birth place in Cuba where his botanist father was doing research. Other photographs are of his childhood in the gardens of Sanremo. You say that you will buy the book. How much? Quanto costa? 16 euros. Do they have a stamp that says Sanremo that they could put into the book? It is a gift for that ever present Other Reader who also loves Italo Calvino. They are surprised at the request, but they do have a black ink stamp that says Museo Civico di Sanremo, Palazzo Nota, Piazza Alberto Nota 2, and their email address. They mark the book; you give them the euros. Eccolo, grazie.

It turns out there is another book. This one is entirely in Italian, so there is no way you would want it. You look through the book anyway and decide that you do. Is it Italo Calvino or is it the Italian language that captivates you? Did Italo’s parents name him after the home country they missed when they were far away in Cuba?

The men give you the book without accepting payment. Instead, the man behind the desk tells you in Italian about a place, a library, where there is more information about Italo Calvino and Sanremo. The standing man translates as needed. The man behind the desk pulls out a map of Sanremo and draws the path from the museum to the library. It is on a street you already know.

The men also tell you that there is a monument to Italo Calvino outside in the piazza.

After looking around, you find it. It’s a plaque with words and a bas-relief bust of the writer. It’s on a building whose base is on a street at a lower level than the piazza and there is a railing that provides a place to stand and look at the monument at eye level. As you step closer, you see that stairs sweep down from the piazza to the lower street, providing a way to disappear, always necessary in an Italo Calvino world.

You walk down the steps along the building where Italo Calvino went to high school so many decades ago. It is now a bookstore, called La Fenice, the Phoenix, with ancient and modern books and a white-bearded man slouching at the entrance, one calf crossed over the other, a hand at his hip. You want to enter, but you have to be at the library on via Carli before the man at the museum thought it might close in just an hour. Next time.

The bookstore turns out to be part of a larger building with three sections like the broad structures of Paris: two bookends and one long part in the middle making a large courtyard in the center with flags and trees and benches and people. It looks like it is five stories high. It’s the Cristoforo Colombo Instituto di Sanremo, a school of economics, technology and science.

It opens into a piazza with cart vendors, flower sellers, and lined with restaurants and shops. You turn left and now you are on via Feraldi, a major thoroughfare, and it comes out where you started from, at the movie theater where Italo Calvino spent his boyhood afternoons. On a mission, you walk past the rounded letters of another era over its entrance, walk the pedestrian street passing shop after shop, and find via Carli just where you left it.

It’s not a long street and there is still some time. You look from left to right as you walk. There is a clothing store, restaurant, another clothing store. There’s an intriguing building at the corner. Could that be it? It appears to be a complex of offices with names listed outside of its gold door. You go inside and walk the stairs looking at the lists of business names. No. No. There is no Biblioteca here. You prepare to cross the street where there is a pet store and further along a restaurant and a hotel and across from you a church. You can see your hotel to your right. No. There is no Bibloteca here. And the street stops as it nears the coast. It must be on the block you just walked, but you don’t see a sign for it anywhere.

Based on the scratchings on the map from the man at the museum, you’ve isolated the search to one small stretch of street. You scan it slowly. First one side across at the first level, then the second, then the third. Then the other side one level at a time. Nothing.

You realize that you are in Italo Calvino’s hometown searching for a library hidden to you. Maybe there never was a library. Maybe the man sitting behind the table who spoke no English, deciding that you were a true Reader of Italo Calvino, rightly determined that there would be no greater honor than to be sent off on a search for a library that existed only in his and your imagination.

It’s time for lunch. You order something simple at an outdoor café in a courtyard and after you eat, you walk up and up and forever up into La Pigna: the pedestrian, mostly covered streets of the Old Town of Sanremo. La Pigna means “the pine cone” in Italian and it was built in medieval times to keep the people safe from attackers. Walking it today, you think that the shaded streets are also a defense against the heat and brightness of the sun and stunningly beautiful. Its cobbled stone tunnels are rounded with Gothic archways and swoop in rings, continuing up, up, up and ever up.

Eventually, you emerge and you are in a palm tree park with a bannister overlooking the city, the shoreline, the port. The hills, both urban and pastoral, ring all around. It feels like you are so very high up and yet there is even more to climb to reach the pinnacle: Sanctuario della Madonna della Costa.

Seated at a bench at the bannister is an old man and a young man in deep conversation. You imagine that they are grandfather and grandson. What are they talking about? Even if you could overhear, it would be in another language. What does an old man say to his grandson in a park over Sanremo? Or maybe they aren’t even related, but they feel like they are because the young man has known him since he was a child and stops by help with any odd jobs he needs done around his home. There is something about the way they look, an intensity, that makes you think they are in the process of solving one of the world’s problems. If only, we could hear. If only, we could understand.

Thanks to the men at the museum, you have the address to the house where Italo Calvino lived with his family and so, you walk to the other side of La Pigna and find La Villa Meridiana. The gate around the property is pink and there is a sign indicating it is for sale.

What if you bought the property, grew gardens, wrote stories, flourished, founded a writers haven? Hmmmm.

You keep going up and up because you know that there is a path Italo Calvino walked as a boy. The Road to San Giovanni. His father had the masochistic habit of cultivating gardens he needed to tend and harvest daily that were about three miles from where they lived. Italo and his brother took turns making the trip there and back again with their father, lugging heavy loads of harvest. You walk and walk, finding so many intriguing stone steps, feeling led by an unseen hand. You are probably not on the right trail. Does it matter? It’s the same idea. The levels always changing. The hills all around. The church as a beacon above. Italo Calvino would have known these places and what it felt like and the smell.

He looked to the sea, to the urban things of movie theaters and parks. His father looked to the hills, to the country things of gardens and paths. Looking different directions, there was a distance between father and son, a gap, a valley. And it’s in that valley between that you now walk.

The title Fitness Universe taunts you in a script from an older time. There is a parking lot on the top of this little building. You imagine it containing a universe of people in yoga pants and headbands who are in constant cardiovascular motion. Or is it a mental fitness, a universe of calm, smiling, stable people in casual business dress? The building looks so much like a box with the parking lot as its lid and you imagine lifting off the lid just like the men in black did in the movie of that title, peering into an entire universe of life. That is the essence of Italo Calvino: the ambiguous infinity of the organic pulse of possibility. Life is always fresh and unexpected in the Italo Calvino world. There is always something more and always something interesting. Imagination blooms from every direction.

Will you go to the choir concert in a church that you saw advertised on a posted flyer? Will you walk along the beach at sunset? Will you step into a panetteria, enjoying its Christmas displays? Will you explore the fortress? Or maybe the casino is more to your liking?

The choice is yours to make. And there is one thing that is certain. When you make your way back at last to the hotel, walking down via Carli once again, now late at night, you see the sign and door to the library.