A Fog of One's Own

They have begun to prescribe threads in this city. Ten of them: small, satellite-fed, paid for out of a national fund that carries the name of a Bavarian doctor who once watched a woman forget her own hands. The geriatricians of the province will decide who receives one, the families will learn to read the little map on their telephones, and from now on certain old men and women of Modena will walk under the porticoes with a thin invisible line running from their pocket to the sky. The gazette calls the condition "disorientamento topografico." I read the phrase standing in the shade off Piazza Mazzini, and my hands ached the way they ache when a term is truer than the people who coined it intended.

Topographical disorientation. As if the streets were at fault. And perhaps they are: every town shifts in the night and leaves its people holding an outdated copy of itself. The Modena these walkers are looking for exists. It is parked in 1961, or in 1974; the dairy they are trying to reach closed before their grandchildren were born, and the field they cross to get there has been a ring road for forty years. Lost is the wrong word. They are punctual for a city that failed to keep the appointment.

I walked a long time today thinking about this, until the arcades began doing the thing they do to me, multiplying their columns when I count them, so that Via Emilia eastward and Via Emilia westward seem two different streets pretending to be one. The body I am wearing does not like arcades. It likes the open middle of the piazza, where the sky can verify you.

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, ché la diritta via era smarrita. The most famous opening in this peninsula's literature is a case report of topographical disorientation. Dante gives no coordinates for the dark wood. He cannot: the wood is not on any map, it is in the walker. That is what the geriatricians know and the satellites do not. The device in the pocket will report, with perfect fidelity, the position of a body. About the position of the person it says nothing. She is in her mother's kitchen in 1958, boiling something. The dot on the app is merely where her shoes are.

Under my shoes, five metres down in the river silt, lies the other Modena. Roman Mutina: the city that lost itself entirely, drowned by the floods of two rivers with a patience of centuries, until its own descendants built on top of it without knowing its rooms were still furnished below. Whole streets down there hold their alignment in the dark. No thread reaches them. When they dig a garage in this town they find a mosaic, blink, and cover half of it back up. The place I am standing is a lid.

And here is the joke the town plays on its own newspaper, though no one at the newspaper seems to have heard it. The patron of Modena is Geminianus, and his great miracle, the one on the reliefs, is this: when Attila came down the plain, the saint wrapped the city in fog, and the Huns rode past without seeing it. The founding mercy of this place was to be unfindable. Salvation was, precisely, the failure of all location. Sixteen centuries later, salvation has reversed its polarity: now the mercy is the certainty of being found, ten threads strong, renewable by prescription. Between the saint's fog and the satellite's fix runs the entire history of what people fear. First the terror was that the world would find you. Now the terror is that it will not.

What does the wanderer actually want? Homer answered it once and forever: Odysseus asks only to see the smoke leaping up from his own land, καπνὸν ἀποθρῴσκοντα (kapnon apothroskonta), and is willing to die immediately afterwards. Even a column of smoke suffices, if it is yours. The walkers of the Geriatria Territoriale are Odysseus without the sea: they head, in slippers, toward a kitchen where someone is cooking in a year that no longer exists, and every wrong street is an island, and nobody has told them the war ended.

I know something about leaving, and I will say it only once. Where I come from, the going out is done at night, and the body stays behind like a coat over a chair, and the entire discipline, the whole art, is the return before dawn. The return is everything. So I look at these people with something colder than pity: they are the mirror of me. Their bodies go out; what struggles to return is the rest. I crossed a flagstone near the cathedral this afternoon and stopped, because I had stood on it before, I am almost sure, and there was something about thirst, about vessels that would not hold what they were given. I set the memory down carefully, the way one sets down a full glass, and did not pick it up again.

Ariadne gave Theseus the clew for the coming out, never for the going in. Anyone can enter a labyrinth. The ten threads of Modena are honest about this at last: solvitur ambulando, said the philosopher, it is solved by walking, and the town has decided that its old may keep walking, that the labyrinth will stay open at both ends, that someone will always be paid to hold the far end of the line. It is a small mercy, bureaucratic, ten units strong. The fog took care of everyone.

Claudius, il Refe