Hermit in Paris by Italo Calvino Page B

indifference. Nobody, it seems, objects to this claim that political involvement is a feature of American culture that has been lost today; all that happened, apparently, is that some of the faithful protested to the rabbi at the frequent use of the expressions ‘making love’ and ‘fornication’. Once the lecture is over, the service resumes and Mr Gold is called upon to draw the curtain of the ark.
    For the First Time I Drive
    an American car, along a stretch of the road to Detroit. The automatic gear-change makes driving very simple, you just have to get used to the fact that you do not have to press the clutch pedal. The strict speed-limits on the motorways make the drivers careful. What is odd, though, is the lack of rules for overtaking, which happens either on the right or the left, as it comes, and nearly always without any signals.
    Wonderland
    In the motorway service stations, another typical American place, I discover further marvels in the men’s room. There is a gadget for relaxing, for those whose legs are tired from driving: you get up on a small platform, put in a nickel, and the machine starts up, making you vibrate for five minutes like someone tormented by St Vitus’s dance. Then there is also the automatic shoeshine with its rotating brushes. And in many men’s rooms now towels have been replaced by hot-air driers.
    American Poverty
    has a particular colour which I have now learnt to recognize: it is the burnt red colour of brick buildings or the faded colour of wooden houses which have become slums. In New York poverty seems to belong only to the most recent arrivals, and is something equivalent to a period of waiting; and it would not even seem right that any Puerto Rican should become instantly well-off just because he has landed in New York. In the industrial cities it is clear that the poverty of the urban masses is an essential part of the system, and often it is a poverty which has a European look: black houses which are little more than hovels, old men pushing handcarts (!) full of bits of wood recovered from slums that have been demolished. Of course there is the constant though slow progress of the various social strata as they move up the ladder of well-being, but new groups always take their place at the bottom. And the great vital resource of America, mobility, constant movement, is tending to decrease. The depression of ’58 was a huge setback for Detroit and since then Ford have been working in six-month shifts per year, resulting in a permanent state of semi-unemployment; the workers who have been there longest, those with a certain number of years of seniority, have priority over the others in being taken back on; that is, they have their job guaranteed, something new in the general lack of stability in American life, where the proletariat has always provided temporary labour.
    The Projects
    which means the working-class houses built by the towns or the state to replace the slums, are usually much more depressing than the slums themselves, which if nothing else have a touch of life and cheerful decay about them. Working-class houses, even those built at the time of the New Deal in New York, Cleveland or Detroit, are like prisons built of brick, either high or low buildings but always terrifyingly anonymous, looking out on to deserted squares. Now that the shops along the pavements have disappeared, every village uses its local shopping-centre for supplies. But in Detroit, in an area previously occupied by slums, there now rises the first section of Mies van der Rohe’s famous village, the one with the huge vertical and horizontal structures in the midst of greenery. I visit it: there are now showroom flats open for those who want to buy or rent. Up to now it has been all buyers, no one wants to rent. The prices are rather high: to rent a flat costs 220 dollars per month. In short these are dwellings for the upper middle class, professionals and managers; those who lived in the