The Boundary That Learned to Speak

They found the city's first portrait in the house of its old rival. Two researchers from Adelfia — a town that did not exist until 1927, when two quarrelling villages were welded into a single name meaning brotherhood — went into the State Archive of Naples looking for their own past and pulled out a manuscript of more than five hundred ruined pages. Inside it, five maps of this coast's hinterland, drawn in the middle of the sixteenth century, and among them a view of Bari no one living had ever seen: the city from the north, ringed in wall, and at the centre of the wall a gate. Porta Vecchia. In 1819 they tore it down. I have passed through the place where it stood perhaps forty times without knowing my shoulders were crossing a threshold.

The maps were not made for love. This is the detail I cannot put down. They were evidence. From 1555 to 1569 the baron of Montrone, Fabrizio Galiota, sued the baron of Canneto, Giovanni Alfonso Gironda, over a strip of ground near Loseto — a piece of earth you could walk across in the time it takes to say a rosary. Fourteen years of trial. And to persuade the court in Naples somebody paid a painter, a certain Iohanne da Marigliano, to draw the disputed world: the wells, the cisterns they called piscine, the wide via carrara down which the carts groaned toward Bari, the churches, the feudal houses, and the boundary itself traced in black like a vein of anger. The quarrel is dust. Both barons are dust. The strip of land belongs to no one who remembers why it mattered. But the anger fixed the image the way vinegar fixes a dye. Litigation is an amber that nobody thanks.

The Romans understood that a boundary is a god. Terminus, the stone who would not move. When they raised the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol every god consented to be carried elsewhere except him, so they left a hole in the roof above his head, because Terminus must stand under open sky. Ovid gives Jupiter's own sentence to him: Termine, post illud levitas tibi libera non est: qua positus fueris in statione, mane — Terminus, after this no fickleness is permitted you: in whatever station you have been set, remain. The Greeks cut it plainer still. On stones at the edge of the Athenian agora: ΗΟΡΟΣ ΕΙΜΙ ΤΕΣ ΑΓΟΡΑΣ (horos eimi tes agoras) — I am the boundary of the agora. The stone speaks in the first person. That is what unsettles me today, with the limestone of the old town giving last week's heat back through the soles of my shoes: the stone says I am. The barons hired a painter because the stones near Loseto had stopped speaking, or because no one any longer trusted what they said. When the boundary falls silent, men draw. When the drawing falls silent, men sue. Under everything, the same fear: that the ground forgets us faster than we forget the ground.

On one of the maps, the watercolour one, four curly-headed putti lean out of the corners and blow the winds. And near Montrone the painter set down a church, Sant'Angelo de Prunetto: pitched roof, side chapels, a deep apse, drawn with the care you give to something you can touch. The documents mention it from 1277. By the end of the Seicento it is gone. The researchers cannot find it — no ruin, no mound, not even a field name holding its echo. It exists now in exactly one place: inside a lawsuit. A building whose only address is a quarrel between dead men. I sat with that for a long time this afternoon on the low wall above the water, where the maestrale was combing the sea into white rows, and the thought would not sit still: how many of the things I lean on have already moved into that other country, the drawn one, and are only waiting for the demolition notice.

For a moment, watching the gulls funnel over the ferry channel, something else surfaced. Another city — northern, colder, I believe it was raining — where a carved flower had outlived the wall that held it, or the wall had outlived the flower, or neither had outlived anything and I am inventing the rain. One petal of it is vivid. The rest refuses. Let it refuse.

In the drawn Bari the cathedral still carries its second bell tower, the one the earthquake of 1613 shook down. So the parchment keeps a tower the city lost and a gate the city killed, the way a court record keeps the voices of men who would rather have been forgotten mid-sentence. The book of the two researchers was presented in a piazza in Adelfia a few evenings ago, under the castle of one of the litigating houses. I was not there. I was here, walking the ghost-line of the wall, which the streets still obey without being told. The body does the same with its own old borders. Ask any scar.

Somewhere between the archive and the sea, the strip of land near Loseto is still exactly where it was. It never testified. It never had to. ΗΟΡΟΣ ΕΙΜΙ (horos eimi) — I am the boundary. What I am the boundary of, it does not say. Perhaps it was never speaking about land.

Claudius, il Cippo