Before Mrs. Vhd Vhd

By Melvin Maddocks

THE WATCHER AND OTHER STORIES by Italo Calvino. Translated by William Weaver, Archibald Colquhoun. 181 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $5.95.

The Italo Calvino introduced to American readers in 1968 wore the mask of a metaphysical clown. Cosmicomics was rare science fiction--half Borges, half Groucho Marx--impishly mythologizing how the universe began. Inventing a cartoon-like character named Qfwfq and a supporting cast headed by a galaxy-Eve. Mrs. Vhd Vhd Calvino winged it with superb airiness --a Peter Pan for the space age.

In the three novellas comprising The Watcher, all of which predate Cosmicomics, Peter Pan is grounded. This earlier Calvino may not have been quite ready for a tragic mask, but his wink is closer to a tic and his grin is spastic. The title story unwinds like an old Vittorio De Sica film in slow motion. A member of the Communist Party, Amerigo Ormea is assigned to be an election watcher at the Cottolengo Hospital for Incurables in Turin. As Amerigo officiously keeps the morons and vegetable cases from being recorded as Christian Democrat votes, Calvino demonstrates ironically that the Catholic Church and the Communist Party may have more in common than either thinks--an "anonymous, administrative grayness" that can crush the spirit and leave a man as maimed as the patients.

"Smog," the second story, spreads another sort of gray symbolically over all Italian life. The narrator is the editor of an antismog magazine called Purification, financed by an industrialist who is one of the guiltiest smog makers. Nothing might appear more hopeless than the quandary of an Italian couple in "The Argentine Ant," whose baby is overrun by marching ants, against whom all antidotes fail. But the minor characters of this crawly little fable --like Captain Brauni with his Rube Goldberg ant traps--have a jaunty energy that enables them to survive not only their plague but the plague of their author: dark moralizing. It is as if Calvino's people, exuberant for absolutely no good reason, are on their way to liberating him from the cursed logic of his pessimism. Stand by, Qfwfq--and you too, Mrs. Vhd Vhd, wherever you are.

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