The beach umbrella next to ours was empty. I went to the sun-scorched shack on which MANAGEMENT was written to see if I could rent the umbrella for the entire month. The beach attendant consulted the reservations list, then told me: “No, I’m sorry. It’s been rented since June to a man from Milan.” I have good eyes and spotted the name Simpson next to No. 75.
There can’t be many Simpsons in Milan: I hoped it wasn’t him, Mr. Simpson, the NATCA agent. Not that I don’t like him, not at all. But our privacy is very important to me and my wife, and vacations are vacations, and any revenant from the business world ruins them for me. Furthermore, his particular intolerance, his puritanical rigidity, which revealed itself all too clearly during the duplicator incident, had put something of a damper on our relationship, so having him as my neighbor on the beach was not exactly desirable. But the world is small: three days later under beach umbrella No. 75 Mr. Simpson appeared in person. He had with him a very voluminous beach bag, and I had never seen him so embarrassed.
I have known Simpson for many years, and I know that like all first-class salesmen and middlemen, he can be astute and ingenious; and he is also sociable, loquacious, good-humored, and a lover of good food. Instead, the Simpson that fate placed next to me was reticent and nervous: he seemed to be sitting on a fakir’s bed of nails rather than on a beach chair facing the Adriatic. During our very brief conversation he contradicted himself. He told me that he loved beach life, that he had been coming to Rimini for many years; right afterward, he told me he didn’t know how to swim, that he found roasting himself in the sun a great nuisance and a waste of time.
The next day he vanished. I made my way over to the attendant: Simpson had relinquished his beach umbrella. His behavior began to interest me. I went around to the various bathhouses, handing out tips and cigarettes, and in less than two hours I had learned (and I wasn’t surprised) that he had looked for and found a beach umbrella at the Sirio bathhouse, at the far end of the beach.
I became convinced that the puritanical Mr. Simpson, who was very married and had a daughter of marriageable age, was in Rimini with a young woman: this suspicion so intrigued me that I decided to spy on his movements from a terrace overlooking the beach. I have always loved this activity, seeing without being seen, especially from an elevated position. My hero is Peeping Tom, who preferred to die rather than give up peering at Lady Godiva through the slats of venetian blinds. Spying on other people, regardless of what they are doing or about to do, and of any ultimate discovery, gives me a profound sensation of power and gratification, perhaps an atavistic memory of the extended periods of waiting endured by our hunter ancestors, reproducing the vital emotions of chase and ambush.
In Simpson’s case, however, some discovery seemed probable. The hypothesis of a young woman soon went by the wayside as there were no girls in sight; nevertheless, my man’s behavior was peculiar. He lay stretched out on his chair reading (or pretending to read) the newspaper, but everything he did indicated that he was devoting himself to an exploratory activity not all that different from my own. At regular intervals he emerged from his inertia, searched around in his bag, and extracted a gadget similar to a home movie camera, or a small video camera, like the ones used in television: he would point it obliquely toward the sky, press a button, and then write something in a notebook. Was he photographing something or someone? I watched more closely. Yes, it was at least possible; there are cameras fitted with prism lenses for filming at an angle, in such a way as not to cause suspicion in the person one is trying to capture on film, and they’re hardly novel, especially on a beach.
By the afternoon, I was no longer in doubt: Simpson was photographing the bathers passing in front of him. Sometimes he would move down to the water’s edge, and, if he found an interesting subject, he would aim at the sky and take a picture. He didn’t seem to show a preference for the more beautiful bathers, or for bathers of any kind; he photographed randomly, adolescents, old matrons, gray-haired, bony gentlemen, stocky youths, both male and female, from Romagna. After every photograph, he methodically took off his sunglasses and wrote something in his notebook. I had failed to comprehend one particular detail: he had two identical photographic apparatuses, one for men, the other for women. By now I was certain. This was not an innocuous case of senile mania (I would have given a great deal, by the way, to be as senile as Simpson by the time I turned sixty) but something big, at least as big as Simpson’s embarrassment when he first saw me, and his haste to change beach umbrellas.
From that moment, my idle voyeurism changed to focused attention not dissimilar to his own. Simpson’s maneuvers became a challenge to my intellect, like a difficult chess problem, or, better yet, one of nature’s mysteries. I was determined to figure it out.
I bought a decent set of binoculars, but they didn’t help much; in fact, they made me even more confused. Simpson was taking notes in English, using many abbreviations, his handwriting terrible; nevertheless, I managed to determine that every page of the notebook was divided into three columns, and each of these had a heading: “Vis. Eval.,” “Meter,” and “Obs.” Evidently, this was an experimental job for NATCA, but what?
In the evening, I went back to the hotel in a terrible mood. I told my wife about what I was up to: women often have a surprising intuition for these things. But my wife, for different and inexplicable reasons, was also in a bad mood. She said that in her opinion Simpson was a dirty old man and that the whole thing didn’t interest her in the least. I forgot to mention that there was bad blood between my wife and Simpson, which had begun a year earlier, when Simpson was selling the duplicators, and my wife was afraid that I would buy one and duplicate her, and had prepared herself to be jealous of herself. But then she thought the whole thing over and gave me a striking piece of advice: Blackmail him. Threaten to denounce him to the beach police.
Simpson swiftly capitulated. I began by telling him that I was unfavorably impressed by his running off, and by his lack of trust in me, and that by now our long friendship should have assured him of my capacity for discretion, but I immediately saw that my preamble was pointless. Simpson was the same old Simpson: he was dying to tell me everything down to the last detail; evidently he had been sworn to secrecy by his company, and had been waiting for a case of force majeure to induce him to break his silence. For him a sufficient force majeure was the first indication, however vague and clumsy, that I would report him to the police.
He contented himself with a brief declaration of discretion on my part, after which his eyes lit up and he told me that the two apparatuses he had with him were not cameras but Calometers. Two calorimeters? No, two Calometers, two beauty gauges. One for men and one for women.
“It’s from our new line: a small experimental series. The first models have been entrusted to our oldest and most dependable employees,” he told me without false modesty. “They instructed us to test them in various environmental conditions and with different subjects. We were not given the particular technical details of how they work (you know, they’re worried about the usual patent issues), firmly insisting instead upon what they call the philosophy* of the apparatus.”
“A beauty gauge! That seems rather bold to me. What is beauty? Do you know? Did they explain it to you over there, at the headquarters, in Fort . . . what’s it called?”
“Fort Kiddiwanee. Yes, they posed the question, but you know the Americans—I should say, ‘we Americans,’ right? But so many years have passed!—the Americans are much simpler than we are. They might have had doubts up until yesterday, but today everything is clear: beauty is that which the Calometer measures. Pardon me; what electrician worries about knowing the inner essence of difference in potential? Difference in potential is what a voltmeter measures; everything else is useless complication.”
“Precisely. The voltmeter is used by electricians and is an instrument they need for their work. Who needs the Calometer? Over the years, NATCA has earned a good reputation for its office machines, merchandise that is solid and sensible, that calculates, duplicates, composes, translates. I don’t understand why it’s dedicating itself now to the construction of such . . . frivolous machines. Frivolous or philosophical: there’s no in-between. I would never buy a Calometer, what the devil could it possibly be used for?”
Mr. Simpson became radiant. He put his left forefinger on his nose, forcefully pushing it to the right, then said, “Do you know how many pre-orders we already have? No fewer than forty thousand in the States alone, and the advertising campaign hasn’t even begun. I will be able to confide further details to you in a few days when some legal issues have been cleared up concerning possible uses of the device. But you couldn’t possibly think that NATCA would be capable of inventing and launching a model without intensive market research! Furthermore, the idea has tempted even our—how shall I put it?—colleagues behind the Iron Curtain. You didn’t know? It’s a bit of high-level gossip that got into the newspapers (but only referring generically to a ‘new device of strategic importance’), and made the rounds of all our affiliates, even raising some concerns. The Soviets deny it, as usual; but we have solid evidence that three years ago one of our industrial designers passed the basic idea of the Calometer as well as one of its initial designs to the Ministry of Education in Moscow. It’s already no secret that NATCA is a nest of crypto-Communists, intellectuals, and rebels.
“Luckily for us, the entire affair ended up in the hands of the bureaucrats and Marxist theoreticians of aesthetics. Thanks to the former, a couple of years were lost; thanks to the latter, the type of device they will produce over there can in no way compete with ours. It’s destined for other uses, it seems, that have more to do with a Calogonometer, which measures beauty from the angle of social function, and is of no interest to us at all. Our point of view is very different, more concrete. Beauty, I was about to say, is a pure number, a relationship, or rather an amalgam of relationships. I don’t, however, want to take credit for the work of others; everything I am telling you can be found in the Calometer’s publicity brochure—and expressed far more eloquently—which is already available in America and in the process of being translated. You know, I’m just a small engineer, and nearly atrophied from twenty years of commercial activity, however prosperous. Beauty, according to our philosophy, is relative to a model, and changes at will, according to the discretion of the latest fashion, or perhaps the discretion of any observer, and there are no privileged observers. The discretion of an artist, a cult leader, or even simply of a single client. Therefore, every Calometer must first be calibrated by its user, and the calibration is a delicate and fundamental task. For example, the apparatus that you see has been calibrated according to Fantesca, by Sebastiano del Piombo.”1
“So, if I have understood correctly, we’re dealing with a differential apparatus?”
“Yes. Naturally, we can’t assume that every user will have advanced and differentiated tastes: not every man possesses a defined feminine ideal. Therefore, in this initial phase of trial and commercial introduction, NATCA is focusing on three models: a blank* model that comes already calibrated at no charge and according to a sample chosen by the client, and two models of standard calibration, for the respective measurement of female and male beauty. As an experiment, for the entire current year the model for female measurement, called Paris, will be calibrated according to Elizabeth Taylor’s features, and the model for male measurement (which, for now, has not had many orders) on Raf Vallone’s2 features. Which reminds me, I received a confidential letter just this morning from Fort Kiddiwanee, Oklahoma. They tell me that so far they haven’t found an adequate name for the male model and have announced a competition among us, the senior staff. Naturally, the prize will be a Calometer, any one of the three. You, being a cultured person, might want to throw your hat in the ring? I would be happy to enter you in the competition under my name . . .”
I don’t profess to think that Semiramis is a very original name, or very pertinent; clearly the imagination and the culture of the other contestants were even more sluggish than my own. I won the competition, or, rather, I let Simpson win; he then gave me as a gift the blank model of the Calometer, which made me happy for a month.
I tried out the device, just as it was when sent to me, but to no avail. It registered 100 no matter what object was put before it. I sent it back to the branch it came from and had it calibrated to a good color reproduction of the Portrait of Lunia Czechowska.3 It was returned to me with commendable speed and I tried it out under various conditions.
To express a final judgment might be premature and presumptuous; nevertheless, it seems to me that I am able to confirm that the Calometer is a notable and ingenious device. If its aim is to reproduce human judgment, this has been fully realized; however, it reproduces the judgment of an observer whose tastes are extremely limited or narrow, or, rather, that of a maniac. My device, for example, gave low marks to all feminine faces that were round and approved of elongated faces, to the point where it assigned a number of K32 to our milkwoman, deemed a local beauty, though on the plump side, and it even gave the Mona Lisa a value of K28 when I showed it a reproduction. It is, instead, extraordinarily partial to long, thin necks.
The most surprising quality (actually, under scrutiny, the only quality that distinguishes it from a banal system of photometers) is its indifference to the position and distance of its subject. I begged my wife, who got the decent result of a K75, with a mark of K79 when rested and calm and under favorable lighting conditions, to submit herself to measurement in different positions—frontal, left profile, right profile, lying down, with a hat and without, with her eyes closed and her eyes open—and the readings I took were always within five K units.
The markings changed decisively only when her face was at an angle of more than ninety degrees. If the subject is entirely turned around, and so offers the back of the neck to the device, the readings are very low.
I must here make note of the fact that my wife has a very oval and elongated face, a slender neck, and a slightly upturned nose; in my opinion, she deserved a higher rating, but my wife’s hair is black and the device had been calibrated to a honey-blond model.
If you aim the Paris at masculine faces, generally a response of less than K20 is obtained, and less than K10 if the subject has a mustache or beard. Notably, the Calometer rarely gives readings that are strictly zero; just as children do, it recognizes the human face even in the most rough or sketchy imitations. I amused myself by slowly moving the lens across an irregularly variegated surface (some wallpaper, to be precise): every jump in the gauge corresponded to a zone in which it was possible to recognize a vaguely anthropomorphic appearance. I got a zero reading only on subjects that were decidedly asymmetric or shapeless and, naturally, on uniform backgrounds.
My wife can’t stand the Calometer, but, as is her habit, she doesn’t want to, or can’t, explain to me the reason. Every time she sees me holding the apparatus, or hears me mention it, she freezes up and her mood sinks. This is unfair of her, since, as I said, she wasn’t given a bad rating: K79 is an excellent mark. At first, I thought she had extended her general distrust of the machines Simpson sold me or gave me to test, and of Simpson himself, to the Calometer; nevertheless, her silence and discomfort weighed so heavily on me that the other evening I deliberately provoked her indignation by playing around in the house with the Calometer for a good hour. And now I must admit that her opinions, even if expressed in a high-strung manner, are solid and reasonable.
In essence, my wife was outraged by the extreme submissiveness of the device. According to her, it is a conformity gauge, not a beauty gauge, and therefore an exquisitely conformist instrument. I attempted to defend the Calometer (which, according to my wife, would have been more accurately labeled a “Homeometer”) by pointing out to her that anyone who judges is a conformist, inasmuch as, consciously or not, he uses some sort of model as his point of reference. I reminded her of the Impressionists’ tempestuous debut; of public opinion’s hatred for individual innovators (in all fields), which then becomes docile love when the innovators are no longer innovators. Finally, I tried to show her that the establishment of a fashion or style, the collective “getting used to” a new form of self-expression, was exactly parallel to the calibration of the Calometer. I emphasized what I believe is the most alarming phenomenon of today’s civilization, which is that the average man, today, can also be calibrated in the most incredible ways, convinced that Swedish furniture and plastic flowers, and only those things, are beautiful; that certain tall, blue-eyed blondes, and only they, are beautiful; that only a certain toothpaste is good; a certain surgeon, the only one capable; a certain political party, the only repository of truth. I insisted that it was essentially not very sporting to denigrate a machine simply because it reproduces a human mental process. But my wife is a grievous example of Crocean education:4 she responded, “If you say so,” and didn’t appear at all convinced by my argument.
On the other hand I, too, had recently lost some of my enthusiasm for the device, but for different reasons. I had run into Simpson at a Rotary dinner: he was in a very good mood, and announced his two “grand victories” to me.
“By now, I can relax as far as my sales campaign is concerned,” he told me. “You won’t believe me, but from our entire assortment of machines, there is none easier to sell. Tomorrow I will send my monthly report to Fort Kiddiwanee; we’ll see if I don’t get a promotion! I have always said there are two major virtues in a salesman: that he understands humanity and that he has an imagination.” He assumed a confidential manner and lowered his voice: “Escort services! No one had thought of it yet, not even in America. It’s truly a spontaneous census: I had no idea there were so many. The madams all immediately understood the commercial importance of a modern catalogue, complete with an objective calometric rating: Magda, twenty-two years old, K87; Wilma, twenty-six years old, K77 . . . do you get the idea?
“I then had another thought: . . . well, it wasn’t exactly my idea, since it came about owing to circumstances. I sold a Paris to your friend Gilberto: do you know what he did? As soon as he received it, he tampered with it, and altered the calibration to himself.”
“And so?”
“Don’t you see? It’s an idea that one can plant, so to speak, spontaneously in the minds of the majority of our clients. I have already prepared a draft of the publicity flyer that I’d like to distribute in time for the holidays. Actually, if you would be so kind as to have a look at it—you know, I don’t have full confidence in my Italian. Once the trend takes off, who wouldn’t give his wife (or her husband) the gift of a Calometer calibrated to his or her photograph. You’ll see, they’ll be few who can resist the flattery of K100: just think of the witch in Snow White. Everyone likes to hear himself praised and to hear that he is right, even if it’s only from a mirror or a printed circuit board.”
I wasn’t familiar with this cynical side of Simpson’s character. We said goodbye stiffly, and I’m afraid that our friendship has been seriously compromised.
1. An early-sixteenth-century Mannerist painter of the Venetian School famous for his use of bright color combined with monumental forms.
2. An Italian leading man of the 1950s, known for his rugged good looks and often compared with Burt Lancaster. He began appearing in English-language films in 1960, with El Cid.
3. Painted in 1919 by Amedeo Modigliani, who was renowned for his portraits of women with elongated necks.
4. Benedetto Croce was a dominant figure in aesthetics, literary criticism, and philosophy during the first half of the twentieth century.