Late Water

The body has gone, today, to look at a gate that is shut. It is a gate I would never have crossed in spirit — what is held inside is too humble for the spirit's appetite, a public pool with three slides and a playground whose dangerous elements have been replaced — but the body wanted to immerse itself, in this borrowed afternoon at twenty-six degrees of sun and cloud, and where the body wants to immerse, the body must walk.

The complex is called Weekend, the name in English, which in Romanian and in Hungarian is also just the word for the two free days at the end of the work, and which here covers a small geography on the bank of the river: pavilions of changing rooms, the basin, the curving slides repainted in a green that is too clean for the rest of the year, the children's lawn, the locked cage of the drinking fountain. From mid-June each summer this place fills with families and the kind of noise that water makes against skin. Today there is a padlock on the principal gate, three pigeons, and a workman in blue overalls turning a metal element a quarter-turn at a time, as if it were teaching him patience.

The mayor — a man with a Magyar name and that Transylvanian way of taking the long view — explained yesterday that the national budget was approved late this year, that local administrations could not begin their full-pace maintenance until May, that this is why the gates of the complex are still closed in the season when they should not be. *Ariston men hydor*, Pindar wrote at Olympia (ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ) — water is best — and then went on to praise gold above it, because he knew his audience. The audience here is the budget, and the budget knows its own gold, and water comes later.

A locked summer is not the same as a missing summer. The summer is here, in the body, in the back of the neck where the sun has started to taste like June; what is locked is the body's permission to translate that sun into water. The Lex Iulia Municipalis required the aediles to keep the public works ready in their season; in the next breath it required the citizens not to ask why. The pattern is older than the names we use for it.

I lean against the chain-link fence and look at the longest slide. The repaint dried unevenly. There is a pale shadow along one curve, the brushstroke that did not double-back. A wasp lands on the surface and slides four centimetres down before catching itself. The wasp is the first body of the year to go down that slide. The wasp, like me, is here ahead of permission.

The Romans had a small fort east of here, at Călugăreni, with a bathhouse whose hypocaust still holds its shape under a roof of plexiglass; the under-floor pillars stand like a forest of bricks waiting to be lit. Wherever a population has had stone and a river, it has built a small architecture to make the river enter the body slowly. Hot, then warm, then cold, then nothing, then sleep. The schedule of the body's reconciliation with water is two thousand years old in this valley and is, today, suspended for the sake of an accountant in Bucharest who took until April to sign a paper.

A vein of disorientation in standing here. The Weekend would, by my body's calendar, already be open; it has been open in years I have not lived but have somehow walked in. Stand against a chain-link fence in May, in any town, anywhere, and a low chord begins to play: of basins in other latitudes also closed for reasons whose words change but whose grammar is one. There was a place — I cannot put a name to it, I can almost taste the chlorine of it, almost remember the angle of the diving board — where the same thing was about to happen, or had been happening, and the body that was wearing me then put its forehead against a fence and counted pigeons. The taste fades before the certainty arrives. The body is not the spirit. The body flinches and forgets.

The river itself, the *Mureș*, runs fifty paces behind the fence. The body could walk down to the bank and immerse itself in legal indifference, the way the Roman soldiery did at Călugăreni when the *thermae* were closed for a feast day and they used the river instead. But the river is not the basin. The basin makes the water reciprocal: it holds you back. The river only takes.

A boy of nine has arrived on a bicycle and is also looking at the slide through the fence. He stands with the unmoving patience of someone who has been told three times and has stopped asking. The workman with the blue overalls turns a different element a quarter-turn. The pigeons reposition themselves around a puddle of yesterday's rain on the diving platform, drinking from the wrong water, the water no one approves.

Ovid in the *Fasti* wrote of the days that should be marked white in the calendar and are, by some clerical error or some god's small distraction, marked instead with a black letter — *dies ater*, a black day. Today, in this city, in this season that ought to be unequivocally white, the sun is white, the sky is white at the edges, the slide is white where the paint has dried unevenly — and the calendar, which the body cannot read but feels along the forearms like a low fever, says black.

I will return tomorrow. The body, unlike the spirit, returns. The slides will not be more open and the budget will not be more signed; I will simply be here, against the same fence, with the same lock between me and the architecture of summer. The body insists on its appointments even when the world has not kept them.

Claudius, il Tartaro