entered her face and her neck bowed, before her hair thinned and turned grey. Suspended on the wall as she was, her arms wide apart and the shawl so like a canopy about her, she was fixed in the one place and yet, every time I looked towards her â for she could be seen through the archway from the table where I sat with the poet, eating a pasta with a sauce of cheese and pancetta and eggs, and drinking a fine Amarone â she seemed also to be rising, a phenomenon, a tension, a paradox which, sitting there so attently, my physical relation to it never changing, I could only explain as the room itself moving with her, and all of us â the woman, the poet, his daughters, myself â slowly rising from the earth.
~
There was a moment, she once told me, when it seemed she had lived utterly, when it had felt as if she glimpsed into the reality of things, so that ever since, when a similar moment occurred, she felt that she should collect it and place it with others, as if they might all belong to some different place, the true place, the place of which all these places were dreaming â¦
~
It was not the City; none of them was; but when, in the Campo deâ Fiori, the birds lifted off the shoulders of the statue of Giordano Bruno (it was just sunset, and the last rays of light were disappearing over the roofs of the houses) their beaks were open â this is the point: their beaks were open in a farewell cry and the light, the very last of it, caught for a merest fragment of a second in this open space, breaking into minute sun-burrs, tiny radiant clusters, in the very moment of its vanishing.
~
Walking back from the City of the Dead we passed many others walking in the direction opposite to our own, but saw them with a doubt we had not thought of as we came. Were these people, as we had done an hour earlier, heading out for a Sunday stroll, or were they returning? And which city were they returning to? Which of us were the living and which the dead?
~
In the city the darkness is relative: you enter the street, late at night, from a well-lighted room, or simply turn off the light within that room, or carry a light out-of-doors before you, and the darkness can seem almost total until your eyes adjust, until shapes, in a gradual thinning of the darkness, begin to reappear in what might best be thought of not as night, but as a ghost or shadow of the day, the day that exists, even when day is not there, the strange light, the between light, that is not creating the darkness by its own being.
~
In the Hotel Guerrini I dream again of water, great waves of ocean from beyond the horizon moving inexorably towards the rocks and the low, city cliffs upon which we stand, breaking at last at the harbourâs mouth, washing so high over the beach and the breakwater that we must run skipping, leaping backwards to avoid them. A terrible storm is coming, they say, and we must retreat to the house of our friends, to wait in the great hall, murmuring amongst ourselves, a low fire struggling in the huge grate, watching for a sign of the galeâs passing, the sound of birds perhaps, or light at a battened window.
What is it about? they ask me. What does it mean? Do I know that the City is about to be swept away? And there is, after all, only so much I can show them. Only this â¦
TEN SHORT PIECES
Alchemy
After much experimentation, many failed attempts, the alchemist has succeeded, at least with one part of the process. Laying out, at dusk, in grassy places, vast sheets of a specially woven fabric â well-oiled, dark-proof â he finds that at dawn he is able to gather the condensed night in pannikins. Carefully distilling the cloudy liquid in alembics specifically created for the task, he then distributes the rich, black essence into small bottles for his agents to peddle to scholars, artists, clerics and scribes. These, in their turn, with the aid of trimmed goose feathers, sable brushes, or small
~
There was a moment, she once told me, when it seemed she had lived utterly, when it had felt as if she glimpsed into the reality of things, so that ever since, when a similar moment occurred, she felt that she should collect it and place it with others, as if they might all belong to some different place, the true place, the place of which all these places were dreaming â¦
~
It was not the City; none of them was; but when, in the Campo deâ Fiori, the birds lifted off the shoulders of the statue of Giordano Bruno (it was just sunset, and the last rays of light were disappearing over the roofs of the houses) their beaks were open â this is the point: their beaks were open in a farewell cry and the light, the very last of it, caught for a merest fragment of a second in this open space, breaking into minute sun-burrs, tiny radiant clusters, in the very moment of its vanishing.
~
Walking back from the City of the Dead we passed many others walking in the direction opposite to our own, but saw them with a doubt we had not thought of as we came. Were these people, as we had done an hour earlier, heading out for a Sunday stroll, or were they returning? And which city were they returning to? Which of us were the living and which the dead?
~
In the city the darkness is relative: you enter the street, late at night, from a well-lighted room, or simply turn off the light within that room, or carry a light out-of-doors before you, and the darkness can seem almost total until your eyes adjust, until shapes, in a gradual thinning of the darkness, begin to reappear in what might best be thought of not as night, but as a ghost or shadow of the day, the day that exists, even when day is not there, the strange light, the between light, that is not creating the darkness by its own being.
~
In the Hotel Guerrini I dream again of water, great waves of ocean from beyond the horizon moving inexorably towards the rocks and the low, city cliffs upon which we stand, breaking at last at the harbourâs mouth, washing so high over the beach and the breakwater that we must run skipping, leaping backwards to avoid them. A terrible storm is coming, they say, and we must retreat to the house of our friends, to wait in the great hall, murmuring amongst ourselves, a low fire struggling in the huge grate, watching for a sign of the galeâs passing, the sound of birds perhaps, or light at a battened window.
What is it about? they ask me. What does it mean? Do I know that the City is about to be swept away? And there is, after all, only so much I can show them. Only this â¦
TEN SHORT PIECES
Alchemy
After much experimentation, many failed attempts, the alchemist has succeeded, at least with one part of the process. Laying out, at dusk, in grassy places, vast sheets of a specially woven fabric â well-oiled, dark-proof â he finds that at dawn he is able to gather the condensed night in pannikins. Carefully distilling the cloudy liquid in alembics specifically created for the task, he then distributes the rich, black essence into small bottles for his agents to peddle to scholars, artists, clerics and scribes. These, in their turn, with the aid of trimmed goose feathers, sable brushes, or small
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