David Brooks

 

The Dead

 

 

 

 

 

Angels, they say, don’t know whether it is the living they are moving among, or the dead. …

R.M. Rilke, First Elegy, trans. Stephen Mitchell

 

 

 

Mid-winter sunrise, deep vermilion, etched against the dark towers, cold and fiery dawn-ball of godspeech, horns like lost geese in the depths below. Traffic gropes along streets not yet quite drained of night. On the bed beside me a woman is weeping for the waste of life. Hers. Mine. Or perhaps for some other thing entirely.

It is only later that I see them, naked like myself but out there on the tops of buildings, leaning against chimneys or airducts or standing right at the prows, like young midshipmen. Some vast invisible sea.

When I wake again it is broad, cold day. Buildings have recovered their colours. The herds of taxis bank and flow with the lights. Where there might have been something else there now are only doves, or white pigeons, coasting between the rooftops, high over the numbered avenues, beaks closed hard against the light.

 

*

 

At 6.45 a.m. there was a Moroccan woman singing somewhere below, her voice rising strong and confident from the stairwell. At first I thought it was a record, a nightclub, but at that hour? And then, at seven, the strangest sound, from above, beyond, or even from within the building itself, a courtyard I haven’t yet seen. Like the cooing of pigeons, greatly amplified, or some much larger bird being fed. (Geese. Could it have been the geese again, echoing up some atrium?)

And for almost an hour now there have been sounds of water, baths being run, ablutions, a child’s voice, far below, chattering in a language I don’t understand, the city itself at last breaking through. Motors running. street-doors slamming, a distant siren. Soon there will be the noisy garbage collection, the collection of rubble from the work down the street. Soon the woman coming to work in the Institute of Beauty, with her yapping dog….

 

*

 

Out for air after a whole day’s rain we walk to the park on the boulevard, returning along the street by the cemetery. The high roofs of the dead are just visible over the long, straight walls, some of them with their windows open, catching the last light. I think about them sitting there, in their upper storeys, with their hands on the sill, their mouths and eyes gaping, absorbing whatever they can from the thin, buttery sun.

 

*

 

Just before 6 a.m. in room 4 of the Hotel Guerini, for a couple of hours now awake and yet hearing nothing — a complete absence of cars, as if we were out in the country. Only the occasional person, very late or early, crossing the square outside. At one point a girl’s laughter, at another the sound of snoring from the next room. And the sound of her sleeping. A few moments before I rose I actually heard her dreaming, the breathing getting suddenly deeper and more rapid as she fled something or ran after it down one of the lanes or alleyways, deep in the ancient city of the mind. And then, for a few minutes, the sound of birds. At breakfast I asked her what it had been, but she was confused, remembered nothing, did not know what I was asking.

 

*

 

Walking down a dark street late at night we pass a fragment of the old walls of the city. I realise that the City of the Dead is also walled, its perimeters still intact, and that in other ways too it is, as in this, a replica of the city about it. For the City of the Dead is also divided into sectors and has its grand avenues and narrow back lanes, its parks and public spaces: there is the Avenue A, the Avenue T, the Boulevard N; there are C Street and L Street. So that the dead have their own, particular addresses. So that there are some neighbourhoods more sought after than others. So that there is an English quarter, a Jewish quarter, a Chinese. At the gatehouse I ask for the poet V and am told that he is on rue D, number 49, just a few doors down from the fountain.

 

*

 

You would think all the small birds in this place had already been trapped and eaten by the peasants, but that is another country, the official one, the one of rumour. Here everything is birds and bells, and small streets, passageways, arches, unexpected stairways and issuings. It seems like a model of the heart somehow, although every time I try to explain this the threads slip away. There is a clock in a bell tower that is thirty minutes behind, and so rings out the strangest hours, one peal for the third quarter, three for the first one, two for the hour, one, nine or ten or twelve for the half hour later. There is another that rings out the correct hours, but are they the correct hours truly? We are in different territory. Every day you feel another life waiting. Every day you feel you could step off the edge.

 

*

 

We compare our nights. No one sleeps well. No one really tells the truth of them. Jealous for what the night means to us, we are clutching at our small parcels of dark, holding them back from the light. We keep our shutters closed far into the morning, long after the sounds have begun outside. When we open them at last the day is thunderous, the sound and the colour blaze in in a wild confusion.

 

*

 

The first time I woke I heard rain approaching over the roofs, gently at first but then hard and driving overhead, tailing off again as quickly as it came, leaving the night clean. The second time light was beginning to filter through the half-open shutters. Some of it had got in already and was wrapping itself about this object and that, making the shapes of them clear. I thought I saw a lone tongue dart in, one of the tiny tongues of the dawn birds, or it may have been a lone ray of gold, shining for an instant on the surface of an urn before the earthly matter swallowed it.

 

*

 

Is it death in us, or are we waiting, in a kind of hibernation, to wake into some new state, some different spring?

Is that what we came here for, to wander about in the shadowy streets of ourselves, bear witness to them, in an alarm or amazement we can do little to explain or control?

 

*

 

A rat swims over the fine plate of Isabelle d’Este, making for the beard of green algae growing from her brother’s hand. Down the street three putti, smiling over a scene now gone, show the same vapid delight as the cloud they ride goes slowly under. The City is half below water. The builders knew this would happen. Perhaps, thinking of lost Atlantis, they even planned it so. Boats scrape against the ground-floor lintels, gondolas are garaged over sunken dining-rooms. Whatever may be left in the cellars far below now rests in inaccessible silence. No light enters them. Where once guests gathered at the foot of great staircases, amongst frescoes of Diana or the Princes of Umbria, no-one, not even if they have just dropped the most valuable jewel, attempts to dive into the polluted shadow. At night people wake and hear the water somewhere beneath them, and wonder if they have woken at all, if it isn’t the mind that is under flood, if they don’t spend half their lives under its waters.

 

*

 

In some paintings it is not a halo or nimbus but rays of gold or golden arrows descending from the sky, piercing now a bird, now a child, now a man or, more often, a woman, in all the configurations of Annunciation. In the Hermit Triptych by Joachim von Patinir the rays pour like a bizarre golden beard from about the cloud-enshrouded mouth of God, shooting down at first into a dove and then to St John the Baptist who stands up to his naked waist in a river that has also commenced in the clouds, the mind and the eye being gathered, herded by these things, so that later, in a church we had mistaken for the Pantheon, how could we be surprised to find, in a corner, behind protective glass, a painting of the Pentecost, and golden tongues, drifting down through the air, a small swarm or squadron, toward the waiting mouths of the apostles?

 

*

 

In the City of Ruins it is the unexpected eruptions of life that we look for, a bright carpet of lawn amongst the broken columns and buckling paving of a cloister, a tree burgeoning with lemons at the end of a barren stone alley, a huge-speared succulent like a still green fountain in a shaft of light amongst the crumbled mosaics and desecrated frescoes, living water bubbling from an ancient fountain. Once a child, following with his younger brother his parents as they conversed fluently with a guide in the strange language of this place, turned to me and, looking openly, spoke, in my own tongue, the one, clear, intimate word of greeting, as if he knew me and there were some treasured secret between us. All afternoon his strange beauty haunted the stone, sounds that might have been their muffled voices led me deeper and deeper into the dry, hot maze of that place, investing it with unexpected and implausible desire.

 

*

 

Although there have been countless reports about the city and the various cities within it, there appears to have been none about that city which is made up of reports of itself. This city is not always very clearly the same city, but sometimes, from some point in one’s own or someone else’s account of a city which may be but is not always this city, one glimpses — as, say, crossing a canal by bridge, one might glimpse another bridge — a fragment of the city one has earlier encountered but which, such is the labyrinth of calle, piazze, corsi and viae between that bridge and the place where one now is, one can do nothing about but accept and move on. So that the city knows — not only, but also — what it has been told it is. So that a part of what they have been told it is resides in the mind of everyone who looks at the city, and, their expectations thus moulded, shapes the city that they see.

The City is what the City was. If we are taught to see by the stories we see or hear or read, if our vision is always the product of texts — the texts we have seen, and those seen by those who have written what we have seen — then the City that is is a hole, an absence, a possibility, beyond us, as we ourselves are, as our friends are, our lovers. An edge, which now and again we think we glimpse through accident, irruption, exposure.

 

 *

 

In the poet’s house there was an alcove in a small recessed area off the entrance hall, an alcove inside an alcove. This alcove, the smaller one — the alcove within the alcove — was in fact a painting of a woman in a chapel or further alcove, a tall woman in a dress of vivid red, her arms outstretched so that the pale grey shawl she also wore formed a kind of tent over the space beneath her. In this space were several people — other women, priests, burghers of a town (such was my explanation of the waves about them) somewhere by the sea.  Many of them  — not all, since some appeared to have turned their faces to the waves — were looking up, with expressions of quiet adoration, to her own absorbed and meditative face. She was their Nurse, their Virgin, the young, strong, infinitely caring Mother they remembered from the time when they were children, before the lines entered her face and her neck bowed, before her hair thinned and turned so 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 toward her — 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 — 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 — the woman, the poet, his daughters, myself — 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 had 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…

 

*

 

It was not the City; none of them was; but when, in the Campo di Fiori, the birds lifted off the shoulders of the statue of Giovanni Bruno (it was just sunset, and the last rays of light were disappearing over the roofs of the houses) their beaks were open — 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 Guerini I dream again of water, great waves of ocean from beyond the horizon moving inexorably toward the rocks and the low, city cliffs upon which we stand, breaking at last at the harbour’s mouth, washing so high over the beach and the breakwater that we must run skipping, leaping backward 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 gale’s 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…