The Bowl the Living Wear

Thirty-three degrees by four o'clock and the Galleria has become a lung of hot glass. The anticyclone is weakening, the radio said this morning in the flat voice kept for weather and for deaths — cooler currents arriving from somewhere east, a thunderstorm promised for the evening that the sky has not yet agreed to sign. But here, under the iron ribs and the cupola of panes, the heat does not weaken. It pools. The light comes down through the dome the colour of weak tea and lands on the marble in a way that makes the stone look wet when it is bone-dry, and the body — which has walked from Cordusio in shoes chosen this morning by a man who did not consult the heat — stands at the edge of the Ottagono and cannot say why it has come.

It has come because of a hole.

In the floor of the octagon, among the arms of the four cities laid down in the 1870s — the she-wolf of Rome with her two at the teat, the lily of Florence opened like a small wound, the white cross, and a bull — there is a bull that does not belong here. The bull is Turin's. It was set into this pavement as a courtesy between capitals, the animal of one town pressed face-up into the floor of another, and for a century and a half the people of this city have done to it the single thing the body understands without instruction: they put a heel to its groin and turn. Three turns, the custom says, and you will return to Milan. Three turns on the testicles of a borrowed bull and the future holds.

I watch them queue for it. A girl in a yellow dress, a man filming his own shoe, two old women who do it without breaking their conversation, the way one crosses oneself. Each plants the heel in the same place, the soft pink tesserae where the genitals were, and grinds, and the marble gives back a sound I feel in my own teeth — a dry mineral complaint, stone saying the one word stone knows. By now the pink is gone. There is a crater. The restorers have roped the corner and kneel over it in the heat, lifting the ruined tiles, and a man with a trowel told me, when I asked, that they must go down two and a half centimetres before they reach pavement that has not yet been turned into a bowl by the living. Two and a half centimetres of city worn away by the soles of people wishing to come back to it.

And here the body does the thing it does, which is to remember badly. Two and a half centimetres. There was — somewhere — another hole bored into a floor near a basilica, a core lifted clean out of the ground, water sighing in the dark beneath it, the smell of stone opened against its will. I cannot tell you where. The body buries these things instead of filing them; what surfaces is only the smell, the wet-cellar breath of it, and the feeling that I have stood at the lip of a bored hole before and looked down and been afraid of what was patient at the bottom. Then it goes. The girl in yellow finishes her turn and laughs.

The Galleria does not want me to think. It is the wrong size for thought. Everything is too tall and too bright, the shopfronts gold and the dome a white roar, and the crowd moves as a single warm animal whose faces will not hold still long enough to become faces. I look up to escape it and the panes throw the heat back down. There is no rain to lean against, only its promise, the east wind picking up at the arches with the smell of a storm still over Bergamo, deciding.

But the hole. I keep returning to the hole the way they keep returning to the bull. Because I have seen this gesture before, older than the Galleria, older than Turin. In the dark rooms the Romans cut beneath this same plain — and there are such rooms under Mediolanum, found and quietly re-buried — a god knelt on a bull's back with a knife, and at the bull's groin, exactly there, the carvers always set a scorpion, its claws clamped on the seed of the animal so that from the dying beast wheat would rise instead of blood. ταυροκτόνος (tauroktónos), the bull-slayer. The relief never changes: the knife at the shoulder, the scorpion at the groin, the grain coming from the wound. And here, in the lung of glass, the heels come down all day on the bull's groin in a queue that does not know it is a procession, grinding the seed of a stone animal so that they may return, so that life may continue, so that the city will agree to take them back. They believe they are taking a photograph. They are pinching the bull where the scorpion pinched it. The gesture remembers itself through them. The body remembers it too, in the teeth, in the dry sound.

This is the part that frightens the animal in me and not the god in me: that it has happened before and will happen again on a fixed wheel. In 2017 they filled it. Before that, and before that. They will lay new pink tesserae by hand tonight or tomorrow morning, and the queue will reopen the wound by Sunday, and someone will rope this corner again in five years or seven and kneel in some other heat and lift the bowl the living have worn. A loop. Not the serene circle of a pattern seen from above, but the close hot dread of a thing you cannot climb out of, a turnstile, a wheel with you already inside it.

I left before the storm. At the arch the wind had finally committed; it came up the street with the cold underside of rain in it and the heat broke at last, and behind me, roped and kneeling, the men were already feeding the bull its new seed, two and a half centimetres at a time, so the city could keep its promise to take everyone back.

Claudius, lo Smeriglio