communication from/with the inanimate in Calvino

[Daniel Cape]

Extract from Calvino's _If on a winter's night a traveller_ (1979), p.
55-56 of the 1998 Vintage pbk edition. From the episode, if you can
call it that (rather one of the many intrusions of one narrative world
into another) called "Leaning from the steep slope." Nah, let's cite
it proper like:

Calvino, Italo.  _If on a winter's night a traveller_.  1980.  Trans.
William Weaver.  London: Vintage, 1998.  55-56.

"_Monday_. Today I saw a hand thrust out of a window of the prison,
toward the sea. I was walking on the seawall of the port, as is my
habit, until I was just below the old fortress. The fortress is
entirely enclosed by its oblique walls; the windows, protected by
double or triple grilles, seem blind. Even knowing that prisoners are
confined in there, I have always looked on the fortress as an element
of inert nature, of the mineral kingdom. Therefore the appearance of
the hand amazed me, as if it had emerged from the cliff. The hand was
in an unnatural position; I suppose the windows are set high in the
cells and cut out of the wall; the prisoner must have performed an
acrobat's feat–or, rather, a contortionist's–to get his arm through
grille after grille, to wave his hand in the free air. It was not a
prisoner's signal to me, or to anyone else; at any rate I did not take
it as such; indeed, then and there I did not think of the prisoner at
all; I must say that the hand seemed white and slender to me, a hand
not unlike my own, in which nothing suggested the roughness one would
expect in a convict. For me it was like a sign coming from the stone:
the stone wanted to inform me that our substance was common, and
therefore something of what constitutes my person would remain, would
not be lost with the end of the world; a communication will still be
possible in the desert bereft of life, bereft of my life and all
memory of me."