Why Read the Classics? by Italo Calvino Page B

narrate a story all in the one colour? The simplest system is to have all the characters dressed in that colour, as in the black tale which tells of a woman who always dressed in black, because she had been the handmaid of a king who always dressed in black, because he had met a stranger dressed in black, who had told him of a place in China whose inhabitants all dressed in black …
    Elsewhere the link is simply symbolic, based on the meaning attributed to each colour: yellow is the colour of the sun, therefore of kings; so the yellow tale will tell of a king and will end in a seduction, which is compared to the forcing of a casket which contains gold.
    Surprisingly the white tale is the most erotic one, bathed as it is in a milky light in which we see girls moving ‘with breasts like hyacinths and legs of silver’. But it is also the tale of chastity, as I shall try to explain, though everything is lost in a summary of it. A young man, who amongst his many claims to perfection has that of being chaste, sees his garden being invaded by beautiful young girls who dance there. Two of them, after whipping him when they take him for a thief (a certain masochistic element is not excluded here), recognise him as the owner, kiss his hands and his feet and invite him to choose for himself the girl that he likes best. He spies on the girls as they bathe, makes his choice and (still with the help of the two guardians or ‘policewomen’ who guide his every move in the story) meets up with his favourite girl on his own. But in this and in each successive encounter something always happens at the crucial moment which prevents them consummating their relationship: the floor of the room subsides, or a cat trying to catch a little bird lands on the two embracing lovers, or a mouse gnaws through the stalk of a pumpkin on a pergola and the thud of the pumpkin falling puts the young man off his stroke, and so on until the moralising conclusion: the young man realises that first he has to marry the girl because Allah does not want him to commit a sin.
    This motif of constant coitus interruptus is one that is also common in popular tales in the West, where however it is always treated grotesquely: in one of Basile’s
cunti
(tales) the unforeseen interruptions are remarkably similar to those in Nezami’s tale, but out of it emerges a hellish picture of human squalor, scatology and sexual phobia. Nezami on the other hand paints a visionary world full of erotic tension and trepidation which is both sublimated and enriched with psychological chiaroscuro, where the polygamous dream of a paradise full of houris alternates with the reality of a couple’s intimacy, while the unbridled licentiousness of the figurative language is an appropriate style for the upheavals of youthful inexperience.
    [1982]

Tirant lo Blanc
    The hero of the earliest Spanish chivalric romance, Tirant lo Blanc, makes his first appearance asleep on his horse. The horse stops to drink from a stream, Tirant wakes up and sees sitting by the stream a hermit with a white beard reading a book. Tirant tells the hermit of his intention to enter the chivalric order, and the hermit, a former knight, offers to instruct the young man in the rules of the order:
    ‘Hijo mío,’ dijo el ermitaño
,
‘toda la orden está escrita en ese

libro, que algunas veces leo para

recordar la gracia que Nuestro Señor

me ha hecho en este mundo, puesto

que honraba y mantenía la orden de

caballería con todo mi poder.’
(‘My son,’ said the hermit, ‘the entire rules of the order are written in that book, which I sometimes read in order to recall the favour which Our Lord has done me in this world, since I used to honour and maintain the order of chivalry with all my might.’)
    Right from its opening pages this first Spanish chivalric romance seems to want to warn us that every such text presupposes a preexisting chivalric book which the hero has to read in order to become a knight: ‘Tot