Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories by Italo Calvino Page A

says, ‘I’ve arrived.’
    ‘It’s a marvellous story,’ I tell her, ‘but it takes a while to tell.’
    ‘I’ve arrived,’ says Ada Ida. ‘He must be home already.’
    ‘He who?’
    ‘I’m with this guy who works at RIV. He’s fishing mad. He’s filled the flat with fishing rods and artificial flies.’
    ‘Everything real is rational,’ I say. ‘It was a marvellous story. Tell me what trams I have to get to get back.’
    ‘The twenty-two, the seventeen, the sixteen,’ she says. ‘Every Sunday we go to the Sangone. The other day, a trout this big.’
    ‘Are you singing in your mind?’
    ‘No. Why?’
    ‘Just asking. Twenty-two, twenty-seven, thirteen.’
    ‘Twenty-two, seventeen, sixteen. He likes to fry the fish himself. There, I can smell it. It’s him frying.’
    ‘And the oil? Are your rations enough? Twenty-six, seventeen, sixteen.’
    ‘We do swaps with a friend. Twenty-two, seventeen.’
    ‘Twenty-two, seventeen, fourteen?’
    ‘No: eight, fifteen, forty-one.’
    ‘Right: I’m so forgetful. Everything is rational. Bye, Ada Ida.’
    I get home after an hour in the wind, getting all the trams wrong and arguing by numbers with the drivers. I go in and there are peas and broken bits of plate in the passage, the fat secretary has locked herself in her room, she’s screaming.

The Lost Regiment
    A regiment in a powerful army was supposed to be parading through the city streets. Since the crack of dawn the troops had been lined up in parade formation in the courtyard of the barracks.
    The sun was already high in the sky and the shadows shortened at the feet of the scrawny saplings in the courtyard. Under their freshly polished helmets, soldiers and officials were dripping with sweat. High up on his white horse, the colonel gave a sign: the drums rolled, the whole band began to play and the barracks gate swung slowly on its hinges.
    Beyond you could see the city now, under a blue sky crossed by soft clouds, the city with its chimneys shedding wisps of smoke, its balconies with their washing lines bristling with pegs, glints of sunshine reflected in dressing-table mirrors, flyscreen curtains catching the earrings of ladies with their shopping, an ice-cream cart complete with sunshade and glass box for cones, and, tugged at the end of a long string by a group of children, a kite with red paper rings for a tail which skims along the ground, then lifts in jerks and straightens against the soft clouds in the sky.
    The regiment had begun to advance to the beat of the drums, with a great stamping of boots on the paving and rattling of artillery; but on seeing the city before them, so quiet and good-natured, minding its own business, the soldiers felt indiscreet somehow, intrusive, the parade suddenly seemed out of place, it struck a wrong note, people could really do without it.
    One of the drummers, a certain Pre Gio Batta, pretended to proceed with the roll he’d begun but in fact only skimmed the skin of his drum. What came out was a subdued tippety-tap, but not just from him: it was general; because at exactly the same moment all the other drummers did what Pre did. Then the trumpets came out with no more than a sighed solfeggio, because nobody was putting any puff into it. Glancing about uneasily, soldiers and officials stopped with one leg in the air, then put it down very softly, and resumed their parade on tiptoe.
    So without anybody having given an order, the long, very long column, proceeded on tiptoe with slow restrained movements, and a muffled, swishing shuffle. Walking beside those cannons, so incongruous here, the artillerymen were suddenly overtaken by a sense of shame: some tried to pretend indifference, walking along without ever looking at the guns, as if they were there by purest chance; others stuck as close to the guns as they could, as though to hide them, to save people from such a rude and disagreeable sight, or they put covers over them, capes, so that they wouldn’t be