Bubis’s typewriter

Bubis’s typewriter is both a practical tool and a durable link between Archimboldi and the publisher who helped shape his literary career. Archimboldi carries it through years of movement, alongside a suitcase containing clothes, paper, and the few books he is reading, before eventually throwing it from a cliff onto the rocks.

Origin and Literary Work

Bubis gave Archimboldi the typewriter, making it a tangible trace of their relationship as writer and publisher. The instrument belongs to the period when Archimboldi’s work is materially tied to the publishing house: on his last visit to review the proofs of Inheritance, he works with the copy editor and adds about one hundred pages to the original manuscript. The typewriter is not specifically identified as the machine used for those revisions, but its place among his possessions links it to the practical labor of writing.

A Portable Life

For many years, Archimboldi’s home and belongings reduce to a suitcase and the typewriter. He carries the suitcase in his right hand and the typewriter in his left. The arrangement makes the machine more than furniture or a tool stored in a permanent room: it travels with him as part of a life organized around mobility and few possessions. Clothes are discarded when they grow old; finished books are given away or left on tables. The typewriter, by contrast, remains with him.

Abandonment and Material Change

Archimboldi’s attachment to the typewriter does not last unchanged. He resists buying a computer, visiting shops to ask how the machines work but balking at the purchase at the last moment. When laptops appear, he finally buys one and becomes proficient; after modems are introduced, he replaces that computer and spends hours searching the Internet for obscure news, forgotten names, and neglected events. The old typewriter is then thrown from a cliff onto the rocks. Its abandonment is concrete and irreversible: an object carried for years is no longer kept, adapted, or passed on, but cast away.

Significance

The typewriter traces a passage from a sparse, portable writing life to Archimboldi’s adoption of newer technology. Its long presence makes the sudden disposal legible as a change in his relation to his tools and possessions, rather than as an ordinary replacement concealed by routine. The machine given by Bubis remains a personal and professional link even after Archimboldi discards it; the narrative preserves both its history of use and the stark final gesture that ends that history.