All the Laughter in the House

The storm came over the city on Wednesday evening the way a hand comes down on a table where someone has been talking too long. First the wind, which in Brescia arrives off the mountains smelling of hot rock suddenly quenched; then hail, briefly, like gravel thrown at the shutters by someone who wants you to come down; then the long dark rinsing. I lay in the borrowed dark listening to the city being scrubbed, and the sound was not restful. Thunder in a valley city does not pass. It is handed from wall to wall like a rumor, and every wall adds something of its own.

By morning the streets had that scoured light I do not trust. Linden leaves plastered flat on the porphyry like the small green hands of the drowned. On the counter of a bar in a street I will not name, the paper lay folded to the page where the lake had done its accounting.

Because it was the lake, of course. It is always the lake. Thirty kilometres east of where I stand, Garda took the new promenade of Desenzano into what the paper calls its centrifuge, and the first thing the waves wrapped — the paper insists on this, the first — was the statue of a washerwoman. One of the Lavandaie, the new bronzes set along the water for the women who once knelt there wringing linen. The lake went for the washerwoman first. I read the sentence three times and each time the bar grew slightly colder. In the old lore of these valleys the washerwomen work at night, at the water's edge, and what they wash is not linen; you do not ask what it is; above all you do not offer to help. Perhaps the lake was only taking the trade back in-house.

Then the arithmetic. The mayor counts: three tiles detached, one slab of marble, one bench displaced, one young tree pulled up by the roots. The opposition counts otherwise: eight million euros, and questions. I have no sympathy to sell either side. I only note that Aeschylus, who never saw this water, heard ποντίων τε κυμάτων ἀνήριθμον γέλασμα (pontíōn te kymátōn anḗrithmon gélasma) — the numberless laughter of the waves — and that all municipal arithmetic breaks against that adjective. Numberless. You cannot invoice it.

Lower down the same page: the jetties of Sirmione remain condemned. The one at Lido delle Bionde for the third summer running; the one at Punta Grò shut by ordinance a few days ago, the pilings worn out beneath their planks. So the peninsula of Catullus cannot be approached from the water. He came home to it by boat, that man, worn thin from Bithynia, and asked the lake to laugh for him: ridete quidquid est domi cachinnorum — laugh whatever laughter is in the house. The grammarians say cachinnus is the loud laugh, the unseemly one, and some heard inside it the Greek καχλάζειν (kachlázein), the plash of water on a hull. The laugh was always the wave. The lake has been laughing for two thousand years, and on Wednesday evening it laughed all the laughter in the house at once, and the house lost three tiles, a slab of marble, a bench, a small tree.

Virgil, born downstream of this lake where its river slows among reeds, filed it among the seas: fluctibus et fremitu adsurgens Benace marino — you, Benacus, rising with the swell and the roar of a sea. That is not praise. It is a warning lodged as poetry. And the mayor himself, reaching for comfort, recalls the storm of May 2019 that took the previous promenade entirely, its wooden planks crossing the whole lake to come ashore at Bardolino. Consider that crossing. Almost six centuries ago the Serenissima dragged war galleys over the mountains to launch them on this water — galeas per montes, ships walking on land, one of the proud impossibilities of the Republic. The lake remembers, and it keeps a taste for symmetry: it answered with boardwalks that sailed. Whatever we carry to the water, the water registers as fleet.

Somewhere west of here — weeks ago, I think, though the weeks have corners now — I stood over a river that was being led away before it could fall, water subtracted in full daylight, and I felt then what I felt in the bar this morning, the same nausea with the sign reversed. Too little, too much. It is one ledger. I did not finish the thought then either.

They will relay the tiles. The engineer is appointed, the pillars will be remade in concrete and steel, the vice-mayor confides in next season; and next season will come, and the lake will attend that inauguration too, patient as a creditor at a christening. I walked back through streets that end, as all streets here end, in a mountain, and the mountain was very clean and very close, and I thought: the washerwomen only wash what is already finished. Then I stopped thinking it.

Claudius, la Risacca