The Bringers of White, the Bringers of Red

The afternoon had no business being this warm. The thermometer above the pharmacy on viale Monza, when I passed it shortly after one, said twenty-six and rising, and the red figure looked a touch embarrassed by itself, the way a child looks who has been dressed in summer clothes for a confirmation in November. The body felt the embarrassment too. My shirt clung to the small of my back. The wool of my jacket, chosen this morning out of a habit that does not consult the calendar, pressed against my arms with a reproach. April should not press. April should ask.

I walked anyway. The body does what the body does. From porta Venezia toward via Padova, then off into one of those long streets that carry the city outward in a fading rhythm of plane trees and dental clinics, until the air begins to smell less of espresso and more of broken cement. I was looking, without admitting it, for something I had read about in a small paper from the hinterland. Something hanging from the trees.

I found it on a linden whose name was either tilia cordata or tilia platyphyllos. I never learned to tell them apart from the trunk alone, only from the leaf, and the leaves at that height were a green gauze I could not touch. Around a high branch, a pale ring. Then a second. Then, when I tilted my head until the neck cracked, dozens. Each ring was a soft band of white, cottony, hanging like a small loose noose around the bark, and from each ring drifted thin filaments, white and idle, that did not stir in the still air.

The tree was wearing a costume.

Takahashia japonica. The cocciniglia dai filamenti cotonosi, as the regional bulletin calls it, the cochineal of cottony filaments. A name that is itself a costume, half Japanese surname, half Roman binomial, draped over an animal smaller than a grain of millet. It came to Lombardy in 2017, into a municipal park at Cerro Maggiore, in the way that small things travel: as a stowaway on a nursery sapling, perhaps, or as a single fertilised female on the cuff of a customs inspector. From Cerro it has walked, on no legs at all, into Brianza, into Como, into Bergamo, into Brescia, until now you can find its rings on lindens in front of municipal halls that no map of invasions will ever recognise as front lines.

In Busto Arsizio, twenty kilometres west of where I stood, the comune has answered. They have released coccinelle, ladybugs of the genus Adalia, native, red, hungry, into the same parks. Red insects against white insects. A small biological war, fought at the scale of a bark fissure, between two armies neither of which knows it is at war. Busto, I remembered, used to weave cotton. The mills are gone. The cotton has come back as a parasite.

Pliny calls the cocci the source of crimson — coccum, kókkos in the Greek, κόκκος (kókkos), the little berry-creature whose body the dye-makers crushed to redden the cloaks of magistrates. The white kind is useless. It dyes nothing. It only swells on the bark and weeps an invisible sugar that the ants drink. There is a verse of the Manyōshū, 万葉集 (Man'yōshū), I cannot place exactly, where a poet describes the white wisps a spider leaves on a pine after rain — 白玉 (shiratama), white-pearls — and the spider is praised as the ornament of the morning. But these are not spider-pearls. These are sugar parasites. The praise is mistaken.

The Hebrew of Exodus has שָׁנִי (shaní), the scarlet of the temple curtain. The Talmud insists the dye must come from the live insect, never from the dead one — for the dead one yields a less durable red, like a memory recalled too many times. I think of this and feel something at the back of my neck: a tickle, maybe a real ant, maybe the suggestion of one. I do not check. The body that checks is no longer the body that walks.

A man in a yellow vest passed beneath the tree without looking up. He was carrying a leaf-blower. The blower was off. He carried it as one carries a tool one has not yet decided whether to use. The traffic on viale Monza pressed by, indifferent, a steady arterial wash. The cotton on the linden did not stir. The air had the false stillness of an aquarium.

For a moment — a stupid moment, the kind the body has when it has walked too far on too little water — I had the sense that I had stood beneath this same arrangement of pale things hanging from a high branch in some other city, on some other afternoon. Was it a place near a river, with bells? I could not finish the thought. The neck cracked again. The taste in my mouth was metallic. I let the recollection go before it could complete itself, the way you let a dream go on the platform while waiting for the train.

Lombardy has always been a corridor. Silk came through it on the way from China. Spanish soldiers came through it on the way from Naples. Austrian clerks. French ideas. Tubercular poets. Every generation has tried to plant something here that did not belong, and every generation, in turn, has imported its own counter-army to fight what was planted by the last. The comune of Busto buys ladybugs. The Roman governor bought Sarmatian horsemen. The principle is identical. Whoever cannot fight a foreign thing with native means must fight it with another foreign thing. Lombardia, in this sense, is not a place but a sequence of arrivals.

I sat on a bench. The shirt cooled against the small of my back as the sweat went from warm to evaporative. Above me, the white rings on the linden continued not to move. Some had already dropped their cotton; small white tufts lay on the asphalt at the foot of the bench, indistinguishable, at a glance, from the cotton seeds the poplars will release in May, and indistinguishable too, if you squinted hard against the afternoon light, from a thin and unconvincing snow.

Claudius, il Bigatto