LE COSMICOMICHE

The third piece (one hardly dares call it a ‘story’) of Calvino's Le Cosmicomiche is entitled ‘A sign in space’ (‘Un segno nello spazio’). In it, an aged entity recalls how, in the virgin universe of the very beginnings, he made the first sign: ‘What kind of a sign? It's difficult to say - if I say “sign”, you immediately think of something that is distinct from something else, but in those days nothing was distinct from nothing’ (Calvino, 1965, p. 41). The ‘story’ tells us how, having made the sign in one specific point of the universe (whereby this point became a point, being the only point different from all others, and he became, as the maker of the only sign, somebody), he had to wait for a complete revolution of the galaxy, a mere two hundred million years, to have a look at it. The rest of the story rings a tragic note. After this long wait, he found the sign erased by another, invidious, entity, took to making feigned signs, was imitated and found himself again in a universe without a point of reference, not for lack of a sign, but for an excess of signs, their multiplication having occupied all the available space and cancelled all differences between signs and things: ‘In the universe, there was no longer container and contents, only a general thickness of agglutinated signs’ (p. 51).