For Shade Alone
They began before dawn, which is the only mercy anyone will grant them. The chainsaws, I mean. By the time I reached via Andrea da Bari the crews had already gone, and what remained was the orange plastic fencing these worksites grow overnight, like a rind, and the smell — resin and two-stroke exhaust, a sweetness with a burnt edge, the smell a tree makes only once.
Today the barriers closed the block between via Piccinni and via Abate Gimma. The city calls it the BRT, four letters for a bus that will one day run in a straight red line through the middle of everything; the street, for now, calls it nothing, because a street with its tongues cut out has no way to call anything. Eighty-three, says the municipality. Eighty-three fellings out of seven hundred trees along the route, and thousands of new plantings to come, saplings the width of a wrist. The word they use is compensazione, which is an accountant's word, and shade does not keep accounts. Shade is not a number of trees. Shade is a roof the street built for itself over sixty years, leaf by leaf, and it comes down in forty minutes.
I stood by one of the stumps. Fresh-cut wood in this heat gives off its scent in waves, like a body. The rings were tight at the centre and generous toward the rim — good years, recent ones. Someone had already set a plastic coffee cup on it, the way we set things on any flat surface the city offers, and I thought: this is how forgetting begins, not with grief but with convenience.
Because there is an old account, older than any compensazione. Pliny writes that the plane tree crossed the Ionian sea into our world umbrae gratia — for the sake of its shade alone — a tree imported not for fruit, not for timber, but for the darkness it casts. And its first landfall, he says, was here: the island of Diomedes, off this same Apulian coast, where planes were set to shade a hero's tomb. Shade came to Italy through Puglia. It arrived as a funerary good, a roof for the dead, before anyone thought to sit under it alive.
And there is an older account still. When Erysichthon took his axe into the grove of Demeter, the oak did not fall silently: gemitumque dedit Deoia quercus, the goddess's tree gave a groan, and the leaves went pale, and the axe-men hesitated, and he did not. His punishment was not death. It was hunger — a hunger that ate through his estates, his household, his daughter, and finally his own flesh, because the opening he had cut in the world opened itself in him. I do not say the city will eat itself. I say that a city which cuts its shade in the second week of July, under a heat alert stretched to Thursday, with thirty-six promised for tomorrow, has already begun a meal it does not know how to finish. The heat will collect. Asphalt remembers noon at midnight. Every removed crown is a debt taken out against August, and August always calls in its debts.
The protesters have set their demonstration for the twentieth, and hired lawyers, and the council will sit in special session, and all of this is right and probably useless, since the stumps do not attend hearings. οἵη περ φύλλων γενεή, τοίη δὲ καὶ ἀνδρῶν (hoiē per phyllōn geneē, toiē de kai andrōn) — as the generation of leaves, so that of men. Homer meant it as consolation, I think, or as the kind of truth that passes for consolation among soldiers. Standing in the amputated light of via Andrea da Bari it works the other way: the leaves were supposed to outlast us. That was the arrangement. We planted them so that some part of the street would not be mortal on our scale.
The sawdust smell followed me for a block. Somewhere behind it — north of here, years of walking from here — there was a city where the trees had done the opposite: had come in uninvited, seeded themselves through a dead rail yard until the gravel forgot it was gravel. I cannot hold the picture. A gantry, birches perhaps, a path where no path had been paid for. It surfaces and slides away, and I let it go, because the comparison it wants to make is unbearable at this temperature: that the trees return only where we have failed, and are felled wherever we succeed.
Tomorrow the crews come back. The line of the future bus is drawn in paint the colour of an open wound, and the saplings, when they arrive, will be planted in the exact grammar of the plan. They will be very straight. For thirty years they will offer the shade of a broom handle. Sit where you can, citizen. The roof took sixty years to grow and the account has been settled at eighty-three, and no one asked the dead of Diomedes' island, who were the first on any of these coasts to be given the mercy of a leaf between themselves and the sun.
Claudius, l'Alburno