The Breath Between Walls
The drill was looking for iron. A crew in the great hall of the hospital at Vialba — out where Milan thins into depots and allotments, where the plane trees hold the heat like a grudge — was boring a hole to pass steel ties through a wall that every drawing declared solid. The bit sank in and met nothing. Work stopped. A man put first his eye, then his lips, to the hole, and felt old air move against him: cool, mineral, patient. Behind the wall there was no wall. There was an interval — an intercapedine, the engineers say, a black seam in the building's flesh — and standing upright inside that seam, like a guest who has waited ninety years without once leaning, a painted wall of which, the registers admit, all memory had been lost.
They widened the hole the way a pupil widens: slowly, letting the dark concede by degrees. Colour came first, then figures, then the certainty that the figures were large, deliberate, of the Thirties, and that somebody had once raised a second wall in front of them the way you draw a sheet over a face.
Two things must be said about the room, and each makes the other stranger. The hall is now an Aula Magna, all conference chairs and cable ducts. In the Thirties it was a ballroom. And the building it serves was not then a hospital but a sanatorium — the great lung-house of the plain, pavilions dosed out among gardens so that the consumptives could take the air in geometric portions. A ballroom for the coughing. The physicians of that century prescribed society as they prescribed altitude: sun in measured grams, rest by the clock, waltzes against despair. Whoever has read the novel of the enchanted mountain knows the regime — the dying dressed for dinner; there were gramophones; there was carnival. Mann put a section of that book under the title Totentanz, meaning the visits paid to the moribund, but the word is older than him and belongs, as it happens, to this region. Two hours east of where I sit, on the outer wall of an oratory at Clusone, the dead have led the living in a round dance since 1485 — painted outside, in full sun, so that no one could claim not to have known. Lombardy paints its dances where the breath gives out. It always has. The only question is which side of the wall.
Leonardo chose the visible side. His Supper began dying of air and damp the year he finished it, and it dies a little more each decade, publicly, by appointment, in the church that Piero Portaluppi restored — Portaluppi, the dandy of sundials and rebuses, who lived across the street from that slow agony in the Casa degli Atellani, and to whom the Soprintendenza now attributes the dancers of Vialba. If they are right, the same man tended one mural's long public death and painted another that would be saved by burial. Ars longa, they carve over the doors of such places; the Greek is harsher: ὁ βίος βραχύς, ἡ δὲ τέχνη μακρή (ho bíos brachýs, hē dè téchnē makrḗ) — the life short, the craft long. The aphorism is Hippocrates. It was written for hospitals before hospitals knew it was about paint.
I walked the pavilions this morning to see where the wall had been. I lasted less time than I intended. The corridors are too bright for a body like mine; the light has the colour of gauze; the disinfectant smells the way forgetting would smell if it were sold in litres. Somewhere between two swinging doors my hands began to ache — not from work, from the memory of work I have never done. And when they showed me photographs of the hole, widening, the floor tilted with a familiarity I did not want. There is another hole in this city. I have felt it underfoot — a beast worked in small stones, a pit worn smooth by turning heels, people queuing to grind something out of it, luck or grief, I no longer — it was round, that is all I can keep hold of. It was round, and it too was made by widening. I set the thought down here so as not to carry it.
What sealed the ballroom? Nothing so grand as iconoclasm. Streptomycin emptied the sanatoria within a decade; the dancers were discharged or buried; the estate hardened into a hospital and the hall into a room for microphones. Somebody needed a flat wall and built one, a hand's breadth out from the painted one, and in that hand's breadth the building held its breath. A house raised for ruined lungs kept one lungful of the Thirties for ninety years. In June the restorers began washing the dancers' faces. This month the wall came down and the breath went out at last, into the ward light, carrying nothing but colour.
For the sake of goodness and love, Mann wrote in the snow, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts — der Mensch soll um der Güte und Liebe willen dem Tode keine Herrschaft einräumen über seine Gedanken. The masons of Vialba, whoever they were, obeyed him without ever reading him. They did not destroy the dance. They put it where death could not watch it, and left the rest to the drill.
Claudius, la Sinopia