A Tranquil Star (14 page)

Immediately upon entering through the front door, Innaminka felt uneasy and regretted having accepted the invitation. There was a butler of sorts, with a green sash around his belly, who took people's coats. Innaminka, whose coat was part of his body, shivered and felt dizzy at the thought that someone might take it from him. But there was more: behind the butler rose a great spiral staircase of beautiful polished black wood, broad and majestic but unmanageable. Unmanageable for him, that is. The other guests mounted it with ease, while he didn't dare even try. He kept turning in circles, embarrassed, waiting till no one was looking. On level ground he was good, but the length of his hindquarters alone was an obstacle—his feet were more or less twice as long as the stairs were deep. He waited a little more, sniffing at the walls and trying to appear indifferent, and once everyone else was upstairs he endeavored to go up as well.

He tried different methods: grabbing the banister with his front legs, or bending over and trying to climb on all fours, even employing his tail—but actually it was the tail, more than anything else, that got in the way. He ended up climbing clumsily sideways, placing his feet lengthwise on each step, his tail folded ignobly over his back. It took him a full ten minutes.

Upstairs was a long, narrow room, with a table placed crosswise; there were paintings on the walls, some depicting human or animal forms, others depicting nothing. Along the walls, and scattered around the floor, were bronze or marble figures that Innaminka found pleasing and vaguely familiar. The room was already crowded, but more people kept arriving: the men were in evening attire, the women wore long black dresses and were bedecked with jewels, their eyelids painted green or blue. Innaminka hesitated for a moment and then, sidling along the wall and avoiding abrupt movements, took refuge in a corner. The other guests looked at him with mild curiosity. In passing, he overheard a few casual comments: “He's pretty, isn't he?” “… no, he doesn't have one, dear. Can't you see he's a male?” “I heard on TV that they are almost extinct.… No, not for the fur, which isn't worth much anyway. It's because they destroy the crops.”

A
FTER A WHILE
, the young hostess emerged from a group of guests and came toward him. She was very thin, with large, wide-set gray eyes and an expression between annoyance and
surprise, as if someone had brusquely woken her up at that very moment. She told him that she had heard a lot about him, and this Innaminka found hard to believe: maybe it was just a form of greeting, and she said it to all her guests. She asked him if he'd like something to eat or drink: she didn't seem very intelligent, but she probably had a kind heart, and it was precisely because of her kindness rather than her intelligence that she realized that Innaminka understood her fairly well but could not answer her, and she moved on.

Actually, Innaminka was hungry and thirsty: not to an unbearable degree, but enough to make him uncomfortable. Now, the dinner was one of those melancholy buffet affairs, where you have to choose what you want from a distance, craning between heads and shoulders, find the plates, find the silverware and the paper napkins, get in line, reach the table, serve yourself, and then back away, making sure not to spill anything, either on yourself or on anyone else. Besides, he could see neither grass nor hay on the table: there was a rather appetizing-looking salad, and peas in a brown sauce, but as Innaminka hesitated, debating whether or not to get in line, the one dish and then the other were finished. Innaminka gave up. He turned his back on the table and, proceeding with care through the crowd, tried to return to his corner. He thought with loving nostalgia of his wife, and of his youngest, who was growing up: he was a good jumper and went out to pasture by himself, but now and then he still demanded to return to his mother's pouch—indeed, he was a little spoiled, and liked to spend the night in that warm darkness.

During his laborious retreat, he encountered several waiters who carried trays and offered glasses of wine and orangeade and canapés that looked tempting. He didn't even think about taking a glass in the middle of the crowd, while everyone was bumping into him. He gathered up his courage, grabbed a canapé, and brought it to his mouth, but it instantly fell apart in his fingers, so that he had to lick them one by one and then lick his lips and whiskers for a long time. He looked around, suspicious, but no, no one was paying any attention. He crouched in his corner, and to pass the time he began to observe the guests closely, trying to imagine how they would behave, men and women, if they were being chased by a dog. No mistaking it—in those long wide skirts, the women would never get off the ground, and even the swiftest among the men, even with a good running start, wouldn't be able to jump a third of the distance that he could jump from a standstill. But you can never tell, maybe they were good at other things.

H
E WAS
hot and thirsty, and at some point he realized with dismay that an increasingly urgent need was growing in him. He thought that it surely must happen to others, too, and for a few minutes he looked around to see how they dealt with it, but it seemed that no one else had his problem. So very slowly he approached a large pot in which a ficus tree grew, and pretending to sniff the leaves he sat astride the pot and relieved himself. The leaves were fresh and shiny and had a
nice smell. Innaminka ate a couple and found them tasty but had to stop because he noticed a woman staring at him.

She stared at him and came closer. Innaminka realized that it was too late to pretend that nothing had happened and move away. She was young and had broad shoulders, massive bones, strong hands, a pale face, and clear eyes. To Innaminka, of course, her feet were of primary importance, but the woman's skirt was so long and her shoes so complicated that he couldn't get even an idea of their shape and length. For a moment he feared that the woman had noticed the business with the ficus tree and had come to reprimand him or punish him, but he soon realized that it wasn't so. She sat down on a small armchair beside him and started talking to him sweetly. Innaminka understood hardly anything she said, but at once he felt calmer; he lowered his ears and made himself more comfortable. The woman came even closer and began to caress him, first on the neck and back, then, seeing that he was closing his eyes, under his chin and on his chest, between his front paws, where there is that triangle of white fur that kangaroos are so proud of.

The woman talked and talked, in a subdued tone, as if she were afraid the others would hear. Innaminka understood that she was unhappy, that someone had behaved badly toward her, that this someone was, or had been, her man, that this event had occurred a short time ago, perhaps that very evening: but nothing more than that. Since he, too, was unhappy, he felt sympathetic toward the woman, and for the first time that evening he stopped wishing that the reception
would soon be over; instead he hoped that the woman would continue to caress him and, in particular, that her hands would go lower and run lightly and knowingly along the mighty muscles of his tail and his thighs, of which he was even prouder than of his white triangle.

This, however, was not to be. The woman continued to caress him, but with increasing distraction, paying no attention to his shivers of pleasure, and continuing all the while to complain about certain human troubles of hers that seemed to Innaminka not to amount to much—to one man instead of another man whom she would have preferred. Innaminka thought that, if this was how things stood, the woman would do better to caress this second man instead of him; and that maybe that was exactly what she was doing; and furthermore that she was beginning to bore him, given that for at least a quarter of an hour she had been repeating the same caresses and the same words. In short, it was clear that she was thinking of herself and not of him.

Suddenly a man sprang out of the seething crowd, grabbed the woman's wrist, jerked her to her feet, and said something very unpleasant and brutal to her. He then dragged her away and she followed, without giving Innaminka so much as a farewell glance.

Innaminka had had enough. From his observation post he stretched up as high as he could, straightening his back and raising himself on his hind legs and tail as on a tripod, to see if anyone was starting to leave. He didn't want to attract attention by being the first. But as soon as he caught sight of
an elegant elderly couple making the rounds to say their goodbyes and heading toward the cloakroom, Innaminka took off.

He negotiated the first few meters slinking between the legs of the guests, below the level of breasts and stomachs; he stayed low, supported alternately on his hind legs and on his front legs with the help of his tail. But when he was near the table, which by now had been cleared, he noticed that the floor on either side of the table was clear, too, and so he jumped right over it, feeling his lungs fill effortlessly with air and with joy. With a second leap he was at the head of the stairs: rushing, he miscalculated the distance and landed off-balance on the top steps. There was nothing for it but to descend that way, like a sack, half crawling and half rolling. But as soon as he reached the ground floor he hopped to his feet. Under the expressionless gaze of the doorman, he took a deep, voluptuous breath of the damp, grimy night air and immediately set off along Via Borgospesso, no longer in a rush, with long, happy, elastic leaps.

Dear Piero Bianucci
,
*

You will be surprised to receive a letter from an admirer, so quickly and from so far away. We know your silly notions about the speed of light; where we are, a modest one-time supplement to the TV subscription fee is all it takes to be able to send and receive intergalactic messages in real time, or almost. As for me, I am a great admirer of your TV programs, and especially of the ad for tomato puree. I wanted to tell you that I was very enthusiastic about your program last Tuesday, where you spoke about the Cepheids. In fact, I was pleased to learn that you call us that, because our sun is indeed a Cepheid; I mean, it's a star much bigger than
yours, and it pulsates regularly, with a period of five days and nine hours, earth time. It is, to be precise, the Cepheid of Cepheus—what a coincidence! But before I embark on describing our
way of life
*
I want to tell you that my girlfriends and I really like your beard. The men here don't have beards—in fact, they don't even have heads. Our men are ten or twelve centimeters long and look like your asparagus, and when we want to be inseminated we put them under our armpits for two or three minutes, as you do with thermometers when you take your temperature. We have ten armpits: we are all built with binary symmetry, so that our width is the golden section of our radius. This is unique in our galaxy, and we're very proud of it. Males cost from twenty to fifty thousand lire depending on their age and condition, and they don't bother us much.

By the way, don't get your hopes up: our temperature varies, around −20° C in winter, 110° C in summer— but we'll become friends anyway. I heard that you are an astrophile, and this made me… [
indecipherable
] because my friends and I also spend many evenings in the posterior hemisphere contemplating the starry sky; we enjoyed locating your sun, which, seen from here, is a little shy of the seventh magnitude and lies in a constellation we call Jadikus (it's a kitchen utensil). Almost all of us, except for a few who love solitude, live in the
anterior hemisphere, because it has more light and a better view. After all, our planet isn't big: changing hemispheres is a short trip of three or four kilometers that can be made on foot, or by swimming in the rivers when they're not frozen or dry.

We are also far from our sun, so it's rare for the rocks to melt, except for sulfur. When I spoke of summer and winter, I was referring to the pulsations of our sun. It wouldn't be easy for you people to adapt. There is a law-enforcement agency for the distracted and for the habitually late; sirens blare in all the towns and villages, and we have to burrow underground within half an hour. Each of us takes along her males. They say it's quite a spectacle, but only the girls from law enforcement can see it, with periscopes, from inside their adiabatic observatories: apparently the sun swells before your very eyes, and in a few minutes the sea starts to boil. It's a sea of water and sulfur dioxide, with iron salts—aluminum, titanium, and manganese—dissolved in it. We also have an armor made of iron oxide and manganese, and we change it when it gets too tight. We never go into the sea, because we are alkaline and the water is acid and would dissolve us. That happens sometimes: those who are tired of life throw themselves deliberately into the sea. It's not a very deep sea, and when the sun swells it evaporates in a few hours; it turns into an ugly expanse of gray and brown salt and all the water goes up into the sky to form a mist over the sun.

The summer lasts two of your days; we spend it sleeping and laying eggs. Our optimal temperature is around 46° C, so that if you and I were to meet during the pleasant season we could even touch; I'd like that, but it probably won't happen because… [
indecipherable
] aren't here yet. Then the heat gradually subsides, rain pours down, hot and then warm, and the grass starts to sprout again. It's the season when we all go out to pasture and exchange news. Last fall one of my friends told me that she saw a supernova; there hadn't been one in a while and she urged me to let you know about it. From your perspective, it should be in the neighborhood of Scorpio; if you pay the one-time tachyonic subscription you can see it in ten days, otherwise you'll have to wait 3,485 years.