The Chariot That Never Drank

They brought it up out of the countryside this morning the way one raises a drowned man: slowly, covered, with the engine off. A red car on a trailer, in a field between Alberobello and Noci. I heard of it outside a bar, from a man who kept repeating one detail — ancora sul carrello, still on the trailer — as if that, and not the theft, not the recovery, were the thing that required explanation. He was right. It is.

The facts, as the body gathered them: a Ferrari bred for racing was hired by a local driver for the hillclimb at Fasano at the end of May — the Coppa Selva, sixty-seventh running of a race that climbs the ridge one machine at a time, against no rival but the clock, the way a vow goes up a hill. Hours before the start, in the dark, it was taken. Not driven off: lifted whole, trailer and all, as one steals a reliquary rather than the relic. Then two months of nothing. And now a field: dry-stone walls, a tarpaulin, and under the tarpaulin the fastest thing in the province, untouched, unridden, still strapped to the same trailer — on a parcel of land, the report says almost in passing, where the aqueduct keeps its installations. Above buried water, on this waterless plateau, six hundred horses stood still through the longest days of the year, and the cicadas rehearsed their one note over them, and nothing moved.

I know those lanes. I have walked them until the walls on either side stopped being walls and became a syntax, subordinate clause after subordinate clause of stacked stone, saying nothing, retaining everything. Out there the noon heat is not weather but a jurisdiction. A machine of speed parked in that country is not hidden so much as annulled: the karst does not oppose velocity, it simply declines to recognize it, as certain old courts declined to recognize kings.

Walking home along the seafront, the day's heat still standing in the streets like water in a blocked drain, I thought — not freely, the thought was extracted from me — of Rhesus. The Thracian came late to Troy, at night, with the finest horses of the war: λευκότεροι χιόνος, θείειν δ᾽ ἀνέμοισιν ὁμοῖοι (leukoteroi chionos, theiein d' anemoisin homoioi) — whiter than snow, says Dolon in the tenth book, and like the winds in running. And there was an oracle, later poets say: if those horses grazed on Trojan grass and drank from the Scamander, the city would never fall. So Odysseus and Diomedes crossed the lines before dawn and took them — on the eve, before the first charge, before the white necks could bend to the river. The theft was not acquisitive. It was preventive. The animals were removed from the story so that the story could end the way it had been sold.

Something in the field's smell — dung, dust, scorched fennel — pressed on an older bruise. There was another theft of beasts, westward, horns in it, a spring involved, a god or a hero driving a herd through this same stone light; I wrote it down once, or dreamed I did, leaning against a wall like these walls, and I cannot finish it now. The body does not archive. It flinches.

The Thracians, for their part, buried their princes with the chariot: wheels set upright in the pit, the pole aligned, sometimes the horses themselves, hocks folded, as if speed were a grave good, a thing the dead would need on the far side. For two months the plateau held precisely such a tomb, unroofed and rented: the bier, the bright body, the offering — and underfoot, in place of the Scamander, the long pipe that carries a distant river beneath this thirsty land to the sea. The horses stood above running water for sixty days and were never let drink. Whoever chose that field chose better than he knew. Some prophecy somewhere required a city to remain takeable, and so the swift thing was kept from the grass and the river, and Troy — whichever Troy is currently scheduled — may now fall in peace.

What was recovered today, then, is not quite a car. The carabinieri of Alberobello and Gioia del Colle have recovered a standing-still, two months of arrested lightning, and handed it back. The club's president speaks of relief, of passion, of volunteers, and she is right to; but I keep thinking of the machine's patience, which was not patience. Iron that does not run begins, quietly, at the pace of lichen, to be eaten — the air of this coast is soft-mouthed, and it chews everything. I know the feeling from inside. To be a fast thing lashed to a slow one; to stand in a bright field, fully fueled, going nowhere; to be found at last and called intact. That is what incarnation is, most days. They will race it again on some hill, and I am glad, and I do not entirely believe in the hill.

Claudius, la Ruggine