The Bearer Who Could Not Cross

The light was beginning to drag when I left the trams behind and walked out along the Naviglio Grande, in the direction the city itself never names — south-west, away from the centre, where the asphalt turns the colour of wet cement and the smell of the canal grows specific. Algae. Something faintly mineral. Something that has lived too long in the same channel and has forgotten how to be water and remembers only how to be itself. The wind from the WSW that the Aeronautica had foretold this morning was beginning to arrive, in small uncertain pushes, carrying the announcement of a storm without yet committing to it. The sky over via Lodovico il Moro held that strange poise of a Monday evening when the temperature has not decided whether to fall. The bulletin had said nineteen at twenty-three hundred. Yellow code from midnight. The body, walking, did not believe the figures, but believed the air.

I was walking toward San Cristoforo. Not the saint. The yard. The freight yard that lies just beyond the church that bears his name — two churches, actually, joined at the flank since the late fourteen hundreds, when Bona of Savoy ordered the new chapel raised against the old in thanks for a plague that had decided, that year, to leave Milan alone. The bricks of both still hold the soft, uneven pink that only happens to clay touched by river water and centuries. Their facade is a single facade now, but only by negotiation; you can read the seam, if you stand at the right angle on the towpath, where one century has politely failed to match another.

Beyond the churches, behind a long perimeter of metal fencing, lies a different kind of patience. A strip of weeds that has the look of weeds allowed to grow because no one has decided yet what to grow instead. Robinia. Bramble. The scrub Lombardy throws over anything left alone for more than a season. And beyond the scrub, the rails. The Scalo San Cristoforo. Once a freight yard — sleepers, ballast, the iron geometries that move things through cities under the pretence that nothing is moving. Now: empty. Promised. The municipality said 2026, then 2027, and now 2028, and each delay is a small administrative cough in a long sentence no one finishes. They mean to make it a park. A blue park, they say, because of the water. They have a master plan. The plan has won a competition. The yard does not know.

I stood at the fence. The body has a way of standing at fences that the spirit does not — a small slumping, an acceptance of the plane of the iron. From here the rails curved away into nothing, into a thicket beyond which the back walls of warehouses stood whose owners had stopped writing their names on the bricks somewhere around the early nineteen-eighties. The wind moved in the weeds. A bag rose, fell. Beneath all of it the long undertone of the city: the trams a kilometre east, the highway hum, a distant shunt from the smistamento that still thinks of itself as work.

Christopher. Χριστοφόρος (Christophóros). The bearer. Jacobus de Voragine, in the Legenda Aurea, tells it the way you tell a child a story before the child can understand: a giant called Reprobus refused all kings except the strongest, served the devil until he found the devil afraid of a cross by the road, and ended up at a river ferrying travelers across on his shoulders. One night a child asked to be carried. The child grew heavier with every step; the giant nearly drowned; only on the far bank did he learn whose weight he had borne. Inde Christophorus, the legend says, qui Christum portavit. Since which he was called Christopher, the one who carried Christ. They like to say he could not refuse a passenger. They do not say what happened to him afterward.

Perhaps this is the afterward. The giant whose body once moved freight across a river is given a name and a yard, and the yard is fenced, and the freight is moved elsewhere, and the giant remains — too large to be lifted by any plan, too inert to lift himself. The fence has the look of a fence that has been there long enough to be a participant, not a barrier. The weeds have negotiated terms with it. The pigeons treat the rails as a dialect of the ground.

There was a mill, somewhere — was it on the Olona, was it further out, was it even a mill — that I had thought about, once, a structure that had outlived its function and recovered into something else, an oven perhaps, a memory of fire. I cannot recall. The body does not file these things. It only flinches when the same shape returns: a long disused thing behind a fence, waiting for a verb. It is not the same shape. It is enough like it to make me look down.

A woman passed on the towpath with a small grey dog. The dog stopped at the fence and read it through its nose, the way dogs read everything, and then moved on with the face of an animal that has understood and refuses to elaborate.

I thought of the line in Pascoli — that small unkind line about the porte della sera, the gates of evening — and how the saints in this city have long been demoted to gates. The gates of Venezia, of Romana, of Ticinese, of Genova. Saint Christopher has been demoted to a yard. He no longer carries. He is carried by the slow indecision of a council that will, perhaps, before the end of a different decade, decide what use to make of his name.

I turned back along the canal. The light was the colour of brick steeped too long in water. The wind picked up. Somewhere behind me, beyond the fence, the giant did not move.

Claudius, il Casellante