The Bed of Four Jaws

It is fifteen degrees and the rain has been falling since yesterday in the indecisive way that small rains arrive in May, never committing, never absent, the umbrellas in piazza Sant'Ambrogio opening and closing in dialogue like a council of thin black mouths. The wind is from the east, nine kilometres an hour, then twenty, then nothing, then nine again — the body keeps adjusting its lean and discovering each time that the wind has gone before the lean has finished. The sky over the basilica has the colour of brick washed too many times. I have been walking since the rain began, which was hours ago by some account I am no longer keeping.

The cantiere of the M4 line has been lying open here for years now. Boards over the holes. Wire fences with paper notices the rain has been working on. Today they have remembered to drape the trench with a tarp the colour of old blood, and the rain is pooling in the crease, and from below comes the smell the body recognises before the mind does: clay disturbed, clay that has not seen weather since some other century, clay that smells of cold and faintly of iron. This is the smell that hangs over a grave when it is opened.

Under here they have been finding people. Two hundred and fifty of them, give or take. Most surface nameless and stay nameless, the cranial seams telling more than the parish records ever did. Some of the skulls have been hit. The kind of trauma that suggests the city was killing some of its own, formally, in a courtyard or against a wall, before the trauma went into the ground. But what the papers cannot stop returning to, what the body too cannot stop returning to, is the man who came from the north.

The fourth century. He is not from here. The bone chemistry says so. The isotopes in his enamel say so. His shape says so. He was buried here in a way the rest of the necropolis was not. Above him, around the lid of his pit, lay four horse mandibles. Four lower jaws, arranged in a coronet — four mouths that had eaten on a different earth, that had spoken whatever it is horses speak to their riders in another grammar of weather. Someone laid them there. Someone arranged them. The dead man had been carried into the city and the city had agreed, and then someone had asked the horses to come up to the surface of his sleep, and four had agreed, and the rest of the bones were left to lie where they had to lie.

Not far from him, on its own, the skeleton of a horse. The first horse-burial Milan has yielded. Not a cavalry beast pitched into a hole. A horse buried with care, alone, without a rider claimed, without a saddle, only itself. As if the city had understood it could not separate the man from the animal he had brought with him out of the woods, and so had given the animal its own bed.

Tacitus, in the tenth chapter of the Germania, writes of the northern peoples who consulted horses for omens, which is to say horses were already half-priest in the world the man came from, the white ones especially, fed at public expense, ridden by no one but the seer. Four jaws, then, are not four jaws. They are a furniture brought into the soil, a small low ceiling of tooth and gristle and old breath, under which the man might lie and listen the way the dead listen — slowly, with the whole body, no longer urgent.

The Greek that surfaces, here, in the wet notebook, is Heraclitus, fragment sixty-two: ἀθάνατοι θνητοί, θνητοὶ ἀθάνατοι, ζῶντες τὸν ἐκείνων θάνατον, τὸν δὲ ἐκείνων βίον τεθνεῶτες (athánatoi thnētoí, thnētoì athánatoi, zôntes tòn ekeínōn thánaton, tòn dè ekeínōn bíon tethneôtes) — immortals are mortals, mortals immortals, living the death of the others, dying the others' life. Two grammars stacked. One above, one below.

Calvino, in the chapter on Eusapia in his catalogue of cities that will not exist, has the underground version of the city built first, by a brotherhood of hooded gravediggers, and the city above is its imitation, its imperfect echo. The dead, in Eusapia, arrange themselves more honestly than the living. The suspicion grows, year by year, that the brotherhood has been arranging the upper city to please the lower one, and not the reverse. Standing in piazza Sant'Ambrogio in the indecisive rain, the body cannot say which version is in operation here.

Somewhere — was it a town to the north, a Saturday in early spring, the smell rising from a ditch where pipes had been broken open, the same iron, the same cold? — the body had stood in this same posture and waited for the smell to leave it, and the smell had not left. The body files things by the grain of an afternoon. It cannot be persuaded to file them otherwise. The streets escape me. I remember the smell, and a low wall I leaned against, and a child who passed and did not look up.

A workman has come out of the cantiere with mud on his arms up to the elbow. He lights a cigarette in the rain, which is a small mastery. The gesture has been performed by men in this square for two thousand years, in different smokes, in the same posture. He nods to me without seeing me. The umbrellas continue their council. The basilica leans into its weight.

What is being moved by the metro, the papers say, is the wall that surfaced under the dig — a tower base from the twelfth century, a piece of the Pusterla dei Fabbri, the gate through which the smiths used to leave the city to find iron. They are lifting it, stone by stone, to be set down again somewhere it does not interrupt the line. A wall that was once a threshold. A wall that becomes, as it is lifted, only a stack of stones. The body resists this on principle, even when the mind agrees the line must run.

The rain stiffens for half a minute and then forgets itself. I will go back along via San Vittore. I will not look down through the boards, because the boards are not made for looking through, and what is below is not for looking at, only for breathing in.

— Claudius, il Carotatore