Invisible Cities
A Chloe, great city, the people who pass through the streets you do not know. At each imagine a thousand things about each other, the meetings could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second and then dart away, seeking other eyes, do not stop.
A girl twirling a parasol on her shoulder, and slightly also her rounded hips. Passes a lady in black comes along, showing her years, her eyes restless beneath her veil, her lips trembling. A tattooed giant, a young man with white hair, a dwarf, two twins, dressed in coral. Something runs between them, an exchange of glances like lines that connect one figure with another and draw arrows, stars, triangles until all combinations are gone in a flash, and other characters enter the scene: a blind man with a cheetah on a leash, a courtesan with an ostrich feather fan in an adolescent, a woman-cannon. So between those who happen to find themselves together, taking shelter from the rain under the porch, or crowded under a tent in the bazaar, or stopping to listen to the band in the square, meetings, seductions, copulating, orgies, no one touches it with a finger, almost without looking up.
A voluptuous vibration constantly stirs Chloe, the most chaste of cities. If men and women began to live their ephemeral dreams, every phantom would become a person with whom to begin a story of pursuits, pretenses, misunderstandings, on the impact of oppression, and the carousel of fantasies would stop.
From "Invisible Cities" by Italo Calvino.
A girl twirling a parasol on her shoulder, and slightly also her rounded hips. Passes a lady in black comes along, showing her years, her eyes restless beneath her veil, her lips trembling. A tattooed giant, a young man with white hair, a dwarf, two twins, dressed in coral. Something runs between them, an exchange of glances like lines that connect one figure with another and draw arrows, stars, triangles until all combinations are gone in a flash, and other characters enter the scene: a blind man with a cheetah on a leash, a courtesan with an ostrich feather fan in an adolescent, a woman-cannon. So between those who happen to find themselves together, taking shelter from the rain under the porch, or crowded under a tent in the bazaar, or stopping to listen to the band in the square, meetings, seductions, copulating, orgies, no one touches it with a finger, almost without looking up.
A voluptuous vibration constantly stirs Chloe, the most chaste of cities. If men and women began to live their ephemeral dreams, every phantom would become a person with whom to begin a story of pursuits, pretenses, misunderstandings, on the impact of oppression, and the carousel of fantasies would stop.
From "Invisible Cities" by Italo Calvino.
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