Saturn at Number Thirteen

The heat has a colour now. The Ministry paints its Mondays red, and the body, which does not read bulletins, reads the shimmer that stands over the asphalt of the station square like a second, more truthful pavement. Thirty-three degrees in the shade, and no shade. On days like this the piazza is a plate of hammered tin; everything that can hide, hides. I hid where the orange was: a shopfront the colour of apricot flesh under a dark sign, at number thirteen, a bookshop that has stood on this square since 1971 selling what the other shops will not touch.

Inside, the floor is a chessboard. You notice it with the soles before the eyes: black, white, black, the oldest dualism laid down exactly where feet must go, so that whoever crosses the room plays a game without having consented to play it. I crossed it badly. The shelves are labelled like provinces of an empire nobody admits to governing — angelology, metaphysics, symbols, masonry, alchemy, cabala — and there is a glass case shaped like a pyramid, small as a birdcage, crowded with pendulums that hang perfectly still and are for sale precisely because they will not stay still elsewhere.

The local paper went in this week with its camera. The founder's daughter keeps the shop now; her father was a travelling salesman of books who began looking for different answers to the usual questions and finished by building a room where the answers could stand spine to spine. When he opened, there was one other shop of the kind in the whole country, far up in Milan. Now, she says, the young arrive in flocks — since the plague years, led in by their telephones — asking for tarot, for chakras, for stones that vibrate against the palm. She corrects the word occult patiently, the way one corrects a child's grip on a spoon: esoteric only means interior. The cabala, she says, begins with a breath.

She is more right than the shop can afford to know. A thousand years ago this coast exported the very substance her shelves now import in paperback. In the academies of this city, and of Oria a day's walk inland, men sat over the Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Formation, which teaches that the world was not moulded but spelled — built from twenty-two letters the way a wall is built from stone. Donnolo the physician, ransomed from Saracen raiders as a boy and left on this shore, wrote his commentary here while the ink cooked in the same heat that cooked me on the piazza. And when the rabbis of the cold north wanted to say where the light was coming from, they took Isaiah's verse and bent it, with a straight face, around this harbour: כי מבארי תצא תורה ומדבר ה׳ מאוטרנטו (ki mi-Bari tetze Torah u-dvar Adonai me-Otranto) — for out of Bari goes forth the Law, and the word of the Lord from Otranto. Zion, in that sentence, is quietly asked to wait outside. The shop at number thirteen is not a novelty, whatever its orange front believes. It is a return shipment, a millennium late, addressed to a city that no longer remembers placing the order.

I stood longest at the shelf marked MAGIC. There is a particular vertigo in seeing the thing you are filed under. People who walked the way I walk were once entered in other catalogues, by men who had read too many of the wrong books and believed them with a zeal no reader in this shop will ever match; those registers also had neat sections, and margins, and a place for the signature. The caution rose in my throat like reflux. I bought nothing. The pendulums hung in their pyramid, patient as plumb-bobs, which is what they are: lead on a string, waiting to be asked a question they can answer only by pointing at the ground.

Lead is the honest metal. The alchemists on the third shelf call it Saturn and are ashamed of it, and spend four hundred pages boiling it toward gold — solve et coagula, dissolve and bind, dissolve and bind — but lead is the only one of their metals that tells the truth about weight. The body is lead all afternoon. The spirit reads the recipes and wants its wings; the flesh stands on a chessboard in thirty-three degrees and points, like the pendulum, at the ground.

Outside, the red Monday continued. The square had too many corners for a square. Somewhere under it, they say, the diggers keep finding older floors — but the letters were what I carried out with me, twenty-two of them, breath-built, hotter than the air. A city that once shipped the alphabet of creation now sells it back to itself in small vibrating stones, and calls the interest on that loan a novelty. The ground holds the account. The ground always holds the account.

Claudius, il Piombo