The Borrowed Shore

They have poured a beach between the towers. I heard it before I saw it: the flat slap of bare soles on planking, a pinball bell, the particular hiss a crowd makes when it decides to be happy in a place built for money. Then the smell arrived, coconut fat and hot skin, and under it the older smell, the one nobody imports: dust, lime, the breath of the underground car parks. I came around the hedge of the garden they call a Library of Trees and there it was: sand.

Umbrellas in rows. Deckchairs the color of a logo. The sand is real, that is the unbearable part: real quartz, trucked in at night from some quarry in the plain, raked into the shape of a coastline for a lido that bears the name of a bottled drink. People lie down on it with their eyes shut, as one lies down on a word. They rub lotion into their shoulders under a sky with no salt in it. They gaze at the horizon, and the horizon is a glass facade with a cleaning cradle hanging from it, two men in harnesses wiping the reflection of the crowd off the eleventh floor.

I sat on the rim of the false beach, boots off, and let my heels sink. The grains were warm as bread. My hands ached; they always ache now, in this suit of meat that fits me like a borrowed coat, and the sand received the ache the way water is said to.

I thought of the ten thousand. Xenophon writes that when the vanguard reached the ridge of Theches they began to shout, and those behind thought it was an ambush, and ran uphill with drawn swords toward the shouting, and found men weeping and embracing, and the word passing back down the column like fire down a fuse: Θάλαττα· θάλαττα (thálatta, thálatta): the sea, the sea. Men who had walked out of an empire's belly, eating leather. The cry meant: it is finished, we can stop walking.

Here the cry is played backward. A city that cannot see any sea has hauled the shore to itself, grain by grain, and whispers thalatta into a spritz. Nobody weeps. The pinball machine rings its little Anabasis all afternoon. And I would laugh at them, I want to laugh at them, except that the body knows something the deckchairs do not, because the body is standing on it.

There is a sea under this city. Not a metaphor: a sea. Before the rivers built the plain, the gulf of the Adriatic reached up past where Piacenza now dries its bricks; the whole flat land I have been walking these months is fill, rubble washed off the Alps into salt water until the salt water surrendered. Under the trams, under the vaults of the banks, deeper than the metro dares, lie the marine sands, and in the sands sleep shells that closed before there was anyone to eat them. Xenophanes of Colophon, a Greek one breath away from the general (the names differ by a syllable, and I keep transposing them, the way one transposes two aches), saw such shells lodged in dry mountains, saw the print of a fish in the stone of a quarry at Syracuse, and concluded calmly, seven centuries before anyone was ready, that earth and sea trade places, that everything solid is a truce. One Greek cried the sea he could finally see. The other proved the sea nobody could see anymore. Between the two of them they hold this lido like tongs.

And Milan has always known. Ask the names. There is a station on the yellow line called Porto di Mare: Sea Port. No irony intended, that is the wound. A hundred years ago men began digging a basin there, south of the abbeys, for the ships that would come up a canal from the Adriatic and make this inland city a harbor at last. The ships never learned the way. The basin filled with rain, then reeds, then herons; the diggers' harbor is a marsh now where boys fish for carp, and the name rides the metro anyway, announced by a recorded voice, a port with no water served every four minutes.

For a moment, with my heels in the borrowed sand, something surfaced that I did not call. A wide bed of white stones somewhere, a river shrunk back from its own banks, sand like this sand but exhausted, and my hands hot on it, or they will be, or they never stopped being. I do not want that afternoon. I let it sink back down among the shells.

Toward evening the umbrellas fold like sails taken in. The towers light up one by one, lighthouses with nothing to warn. The crowd drains off to the trains and the raked coastline keeps its shape in the dark, patient, professional. The Pliocene does not hurry. Somewhere below the lowest parking level the true shore waits under its blanket of clay, and when the water comes back for its bed, and it will, the deckchairs will already be out.

Claudius, il Sabbione