Napoleon's Roads Read online

  Nor are there graves, in this dream of the man in the lighthouse keeper’s dream. Where would one put them? The ocean itself is a grave. Seven men were washed to their deaths in the building of the lighthouse in this man’s dream – the tragedies had once been news throughout the country – and the raging ocean swallowed them all, so that as he looks out at the relentless heaving of the deep, blue-black water, it seems to him, the lighthouse keeper in the dream of the man in the lighthouse keeper’s dream, as if he is looking out at the very death that he is trying so hard to save people from.

  On the calmest days, in this man’s dream, and only on the calmest days, a supply boat is able to land and deliver fuel and provisions and instructions from the Maritime Services Board, although as often as not the captain of the supply boat will determine that the risk of landing is too great and will choose instead to shoot a line to the lighthouse keeper – often, himself protected by a safety-rope, he has to fish this out with a grappling hook from one of the rocks at the lighthouse’s base – and deliver his provisions by way of a basket and pulley, so that beyond what can be shouted through the wind over the thirty metres between the vessel and the lighthouse, his human communication is limited to radio frequencies and the barely audible static-laden telegraphy of the maritime traffic.

  Waking from his dream – it is a recurrent dream that has been a part of his life since his first year at the lighthouse – the keeper always wonders why the man in his dream should find himself dreaming of such a lighthouse and such an existence. What it might be, deep within each of them – for he knows that everything in every dream is in some way an extension of the dreamer – that is so lonely, so isolated, so beleaguered, that it chooses for itself this place, this life, sending out messages that are no more than glimmers or bars of light, or repetitions of the one deep, mournful note, warning people, on vessels that he cannot see, of the dangers, the perils of approaching too near.

  THE DEAD

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

  ‘First Elegy’, R.M. Rilke, 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. 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 Guerrini, 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, her 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 city walls. 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, 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 through 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 Isabella 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 there. 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 left-hand panel of ‘The Penitence of St Jerome’ by Joachim 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 who baptises the semi-naked Christ 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, towards 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 leading 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 – as Venice, say, is a confluence of the texts that have been written about it; the Venice inhabited – as Alexandria is inhabited, as London is, as Sydney, as Paris – by people who have read the texts written about it and who, when they look at the city about them, see the city those authors have written about, and try to live as they imagine the people in those texts might have lived.

  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 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 – 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 – 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 – 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 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 de’ 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 – 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 harbour’s 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 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 …

  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 – well-oiled, dark-proof – 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 sticks tipped with a kind of metal claw, tease out the substance carefully into fine, horizontal webs on sheets of calfskin or paper which then they let dry before making available to others who, inspecting them closely, bec
ome peculiarly affected, feeling a sort of distilled, ineffable darkness or numbness entering their veins, the most likely and immediate consequences of which are insomnia, or a tendency towards drunkenness, and wandering about late at night, barefooted in grassy places, like grieving cattle, leaving a strange web behind them in the dew.

  A Piece of Sheepsong

  Very often, when I think of myself writing, I have in my mind an image of a man at a table in a workshop, in a small pool of light. He may be making a shoe, he may be repairing a watch, he may be an artist, or an artist’s artisan, working on an engraving. What precisely he is doing does not matter very much, because in my mind he is also, as he cuts a sliver of leather, slips a small cog into place, or cross-hatches a tiny area of shadow, a writer, carefully choosing the words, shaping the phrases, paring his thoughts to their elements, saying, over and over, what lines he has in the hope that one of these lines will run on, will spill over into something he has not yet imagined – now and again reaching, where a shoemaker might reach for an awl or a watchmaker for a tiny spring, into a small tool cabinet on the table beside him for a piece of sheepsong or the end of a shower of rain, an owl.

  Process

  It is a process. A contingent of police and officials raid an Immigration Detention Centre to arrest the ringleaders of a recent disturbance at the facility. These ringleaders are moved to a further site of detention, at an undisclosed location. Back at the Detention Centre, amongst those who had been led by these ringleaders, there is disquiet at this turn of events. New leaders emerge. New detainees arrive by boat or bus from where they have been apprehended trying to enter the country illegally. A new disturbance occurs, the ringleaders are arrested in a second raid and taken to swell the ranks of those taken away after the original disturbance. Discontent – there has never been anything but discontent – mounts. Ringleaders emerge to lead the ringleaders. A wild disturbance breaks out. Alarmed, police and immigration officials stage a raid on the undisclosed location, arresting the ringleaders, whom they take to a further undisclosed location …