Whoever takes this road will never return

And now for something completely different: Italo Calvino's Italian Folktales

At a certain point the road branched off in three different directions. A stone marker stood at the beginning of each road. The first stone read: WHOEVER TAKES THIS ROAD WILL RETURN. The second stone read: GOODNESS KNOWS WHAT YOUR FATE WILL BE IF YOU TAKE THIS ROAD. The third stone read the opposite of the first: WHOEVER TAKES THIS ROAD WILL NEVER RETURN. He was about to start down the first road, but changed his mind and set foot in the second, only to backtrack and enter the third. — Italo Calvino, The Italian Folktales

As anyone who’s had a real-life conversation with me of any length will know, during the worst of the pandemic, I picked up Italo Calvino’s Italian Folktales. Or rather I plunged into them. There are 200 altogether, gathered from Milan and Florence down the bony spine of the Apennines, from the lagoons of Venice to the tiniest fishing villages of Sicily.

I think about these stories all the time. Even my dreams have changed form. I’m struck by the variation within repetition, and by the way these stories mix predestination and initiative, longing and determination, cunning and purity of heart, injustice and reconciliation, fortunes and debts, necessity and torpor, invention and faith.

Rivers of milk run through these fables, and there are dark forests with bright clearings, slumbering kingdoms, sorcerers and beggars (sometimes sorcerers in disguise), unspeakable curses and enchantments, unbreakable bonds, contrary and deadly sentinels (“if her eyes are open, she’s asleep; if closed, she’s awake”), cross old women peeled wrinkle by wrinkle, the misadventures of consecrated wafers. Bold protagonists tame by charm, calling snakes macaroni and blood wine and bile milk, thread the needle of impossible desires and futile precautions, and observe mysterious and exacting rites that must be performed without any hope of ever being understood.

There are terrible secrets that can never been revealed lest the teller turn to stone; and mothers who cut their sons in two, one half to stay home and one half to venture out into the world; and scalded lovers who vanish with bitter words: “You broke the spell and will never see me again, or only when you have wept seven bottles of tears and worn out seven pairs of iron shoes, seven iron mantles, and seven iron hats looking for me.” There’s a bed that gives birth to a little bed, and the coffer to a little coffer, and the table to a little table, when the queen bears a long-awaited child. And Death pursues an inventive young man, rattling a cart full of shoes the reaper has worn out in the hunt. 

Calvino says the folktales “fashion a dream without escapism” and spin a fantasy that is only a concentration or a magnification of reality, loaded with symbols that elude the reader’s grasp.

In other words, read it and be swept away.