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 Calvinisms:
the taverna, the castel and
the motel of crossed destinies.
In 1968, Italo Calvino attends the conference of Paolo Fabbri
entitled “The Tale of Cartomanzia and the Language
of Emblems”. Since that, the author begins to elaborate
the plan of a novel that used tarot like a machine to invent tales:
each tarot have
a narrative function, each sequence can give life to a story,
all of the stories crossing would have produced the novel.
Instead
of using the renaissance tarot Calvino prefers to use the Marseillaise
tarot deck (1761), a cruder and popular deck designed
by an illustrator called Fautier. At first, the
project reveals itself very difficult. He starts from the layout
of the text, but he doesn't succeed in designing, with the stories
already
prepared, a structure that convinces him, he won't succeed
in getting a convincing disposition and he will have to content himself
with a precarious scheme.
«...I
felt that the game worked only according to strict rules; It was necessary
an absolute rule of construction that conditioned the plot of each tale
in the other, otherwise everything was for nothing».
The result of this first attempt is subsequently published in
1973 and dismissed by the author as imperfect: « If I
persuade myself to publish "The Taverna of Cross Destinies" that
is, above all, to get rid of it. Still now, with the book in drafts,
I continue to elaborate it, to dismantle it, to rewrite it. When
the book will finally be published, I’ll be free
once for all, I hope». Nevertheless the idea of narration
as a combinatory process was never abandoned by Calvino and when, in
1969, Franco Maria Ricci proposes him to write on the tarot (the Visconti
deck created between 1450 and 1468) he accepts, but he changes methodology:
he already foresees the scheme while beginning to write the first tales. «It
was easy to build the central intersection of the plot, “the magic
square”.
It was enough to let other stories take life, which crossed each other,
and I got a kind of crossword made of figures rather than of letters,
in
which every sequence can be read in the two senses. In a week the
book of the Castle... was ready to be published».
 " The Castle of the Cross Destinies" goes out therefore
in art catalogue "Tarot. The Visconti Deck in Bergamo and
New York”. The mathematical fury of Calvino’s research
of perfect
forms, geometric stylization, and binary opposition of combining games
never exhausted and it pass through all his literary production. Moreover,
the matter of games, Calvino’s involvement in Oulipo, the connection
of his writing with the symbol and with the diagram are all elements
of a more general consideration about the projectual dimension of the
work. We know that he went back to the scheme of “The Taverna” to
adjust and modify it without never coming to solve the puzzle. « I
don't know how long I have being confined here, fixed eyes on the table
covered of figures. I don't care anymore about the days that pass, what
it happens outside, the role that I could have ¬-who knows why- in
things that happen; I know that all the ways are excluded to me except
this: to contemplate the combinations of these pictures. To contemplate:
that means to understand, to contain, to admit among all the possible
or impossible things. Nobody has succeeded in understanding what I do
till now. They say: " Have you discovered then the secret of tarot?
Can you read in my fate?" [...] If I remark that I don't practise
divination neither for me neither for the others, they don't believe
me; as soon as they look at the series of ambiguous allegories, allusive
rebus, it comes spontaneous the desire to establish a relationship between
them and the fate, between them and the continuous loss of themselves
in time and life. I don’t care of it. It is not the landslide of
the crumbled fragments of existences that I contemplate in tarot, but
something more important: all the marks without which the lived one and
the vivibile could not be thought». 
In the conclusive note to "The Castle", Calvino confesses
a certain bother for prolonged analysis of such medieval- renaissance
iconografic repertoire. He would want to apply the same method
to a modern visual material. He thinks about comics and he imagines
therefore a third book, "The Motel of the cross destinies" that
would have had to follow the precedents. But the writer stops himself
to the formulation of the idea and he leaves to others the discovery
of the combinatory rule, the narrative contrainte, the reconstruction
of the diagram, the magic square, a forest of paths.
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