Your story in this week’s issue, “The Old Man in the Piazza,” revolves around an old man who, every day, sits at a café on the opposite side of a piazza from “our language,” who is female. How did this scenario find its way onto the page?
The truth: the old man had his origins in the crazy car chase that is the climax of the original “Pink Panther” movie. As cars zoom past in every direction, the drivers wearing gorilla outfits, etc., a gentleman impassively watches the wild goings on. I’d been thinking about him for a while, and then one day the character of our language arrived on the scene and I understood that I had the story. I truly don’t know where she came from. She just showed up.
I’m interested to hear that the “Pink Panther” movies have played a role in your literary/philosophical imagination. Does the influence go beyond this story?
I hope not.
The society where these two characters find themselves has gone through various periods: a “yes” time, in which it was impossible not to be positive and agree with others, and a time of constant argument and quarrels. The story seems to favor the latter. Do you, too?
Yes, on the whole I’m in favor of arguments. I’ve always thought that democracy is like a town square, or a bazaar, or, I guess, a piazza, in which passionate disagreements are constantly taking place. The ability to have such disagreements is what one might call “freedom.”
In the time of the “yes,” citizens were required to agree, or at least not take issue, with propositions such as “that bread and wine could transubstantiate into flesh and blood, that the immigrant population transformed at night into drooling sex monsters, that it was beneficial to raise the taxes paid by the poor, that souls could transmigrate, or that war was necessary.” Some of these arguments are somewhat familiar here in the U.S. Should we be looking for direct parallels to our society in this story?
I think all those parallels are there if you want to see them, yes. But they don’t apply only to the U.S., which is one of the reasons that (see below) I wanted the locale to be nonspecific.
What does it mean for the old man, who has been an observer for decades, to suddenly become the judge of everyone’s disputes? Why him?
I was interested in the idea of someone who has been passive and nonjudgmental for his whole life suddenly discovering the pleasure, and the corruption, of becoming active and judgmental.
Why do you think he’s so seduced by the act of passing judgment, which is, as you say, out of character?
Even the least dynamic of us can be terribly seduced by the prospect of a little power.
At one point in the story, you make clear that, although the story is set in a “piazza,” it does not take place in Italy. You don’t tell us where it is set—perhaps because it could be anywhere? Or do you have a specific spot in mind?
It sounds like a pretty Italian locale, I suppose, but I wanted it to be nonspecific. (The little square in “The Pink Panther” is actually in the Italian town of Rocca di Papa, which is about the same distance from Rome as my unnamed town is from its nearby big city, so there’s that.)
I suspect that the story is, in part, an homage to Italo Calvino. Is that true?
Yes, Calvino, but also Donald Barthelme. The tone of voice ended up being perhaps more Barthelmean than Calvinoid. For some reason, I was thinking about Barthelme’s “The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace,” which is nothing like this story, of course.
