// With ice? Yes? I go to the kitchen a moment to get the ice. And immediately the word 'ice' expands between her and me, separates us, or perhaps unites us, but the way a fragile sheet of ice unites the shores of a frozen lake.
If there is one thing I hate it's preparing the ice. It obliges me to break off a conversation just started, at the crucial moment when I ask her: A drop of whisky? and she: Thanks, but really just a drop, and me: With ice? And already I'm heading towards the kitchen as though into exile, already I can see myself fighting with ice cubes that won't come out of the tray.
No problem, I say, it won't take a second, I always have ice with whisky myself. It's true, the tinkling in the glass keeps me company, separates me from the din of the others, at parties where there are lots of people it stops me from losing myself in the ebb and flow of voices and sounds, that back and forth she detached herself from when she appeared for the first time in my field of vision, in the inverted telescope of my whisky glass, her colours advancing along that corridor between two smoke-filled rooms booming with music, and I stood there with my glass without going to one room or the other, and she too, she saw me in a distorted shadow through the transparency of the icy whisky glass, and I don't know if she heard what I was saying to her because there was all that din or perhaps again because I hadn't spoken, had only moved the glass and the ice rising and falling went clink clink, and she too said something into her little bell of glass and ice, certainly I hadn't imagined she would be coming to my place tonight. //
[ Calvino, I., Parks, T., Numbers in the Dark: And Other Stories, Mariner Books, 2014. / p.203-205, Glaciation ]