A Talk with No Words

            Marco Polo’s descriptions and private talks with Kublai Khan are but creations of his mind. Each of them develop their ideas throughout dreams and pondering what will the other or himself think if he were asked a certain question. Calvino’s complex creation is exposed in chapter two while “Marco Polo could explain or imagine explaining or be imagined explaining or succeed finally in explaining to himself”, it seems every response or description somehow originates from the mind and stays within it (28). This sentence explains how very different the memoirs written in this book are, since both men form them through their imagination. They even “imagine themselves being interrupted” for the sake of the conversation.  At first, I found this relationship quite absurd, since it implied all descriptions originated in some kind of made up discussion. However, as I read on I understood the purpose of each of the cities. In one of the imaginary talks Marco Polo declares “cities like dreams, are made of desires and fears” and “everything imaginable can be dreamed” (44). So apparently what these two men have been doing is sharing their long forgotten dreams or they most covered up fears through the creation of sometimes imaginary conversations and most importantly the cities they envision in them. These truths explain the existence of cities such as Fedora where all its alternative existences are replicated in small crystal balls. Who would not like to see the future version of the city he lives in recorded in a crystal ball forever to be admired, these types of cities represent the dreams these two great men have created in theirs travels. Additionally, Marco Polo argues that the beauty of a city is not its wonders but the “answers it gives” or the “questions it asks” (44). Marco Polo slowly teaches the Great Khan to appreciate a city not by its physical aspects, but by the emotional reactions it creates, that is a city’s inner purpose.

            

             Moreover, if it were not enough with having imaginary conversations based on somewhat fictitious cities Calvino makes these talks wordless. Even when the venetian merchant learns the Tartars languages, he only gives the Khan “the fundamental information” in words, while transmitting everything else through “objects…gestures, leaps, cries… or animal sounds” (39). It would not make sense to have this envoy as the only source of intelligence regarding a certain area, but the inaccuracy of the messages was what the Khan loved about them. The Khan later explains one “could wander through them in though, become lost, stop and enjoy the cool air, or run off”: the ambiguousness of Marco Polo’s cities allows them to travel the past, and their lost futures (38).