The Dew Keeps the Door

Tonight the body lies somewhere with its mouth open, and I am in Romagna, in a small town that wears the Baptist's name like a borrowed coat, standing in the dry bed of a stream the maps call Ventena. They have laid the wood here, in the place where water should be, and at midnight they will set it burning. A fire in a riverbed: the first of tonight's impossibilities, and the gentlest. The town has kept this vigil far longer than it admits — the witches' night, the threshold between the twenty-third of June and the twenty-fourth, when the door between the seen and the unseen is left unlatched and whatever wishes to pass, passes.

Before the fire there is the water. All afternoon the women have left bowls of well-water on the sills with fistfuls of herbs drowned in them — iperico and wormwood, vervain, walnut leaf, lavender that keeps its smell after death — so the night can lay its dew on the surface. By morning the water will be changed: it will have caught the guazza, the dew of San Giovanni, and in dialect they tell you, without smiling, that this dew heals every ill that walks. I have seen the gesture before, in a colder light. In the Mutus Liber, the book without words, two figures wring dew from sheets pegged across a meadow at dawn, gathering the ros, the celestial water the alchemists swore was the first matter of everything, fallen in the dark and waiting to be lifted before the sun could drink it. The housewife on her doorstep and the adept with his wet linen lean out of the same window, asking the night to leave something behind.

Then the fire, and the fire is where I recognize my own face. They feed it with last year's dried herbs and with old things no one wants — a broken chair, a shoe, the husk of some machine — and say it is to keep ill luck off the fields, the old bonfires lit along the furrow's edge to drive the demons back from the wheat. This is the daylight shadow of something I know from the inside. In the Friuli, north of here, the inquisitors once wrote down the confessions of men who called themselves benandanti, the good walkers, born with the caul still on their faces, who swore that on the ember nights their spirits left their sleeping bodies and went out to fight the witches for the harvest — fennel stalks against the witches' sorghum, and if the good walkers won, the grain came in, and if they lost, famine. They fought, in their own words, per le biave, for the crops. I am one of them. Tonight the whole town does in costume what I do in earnest: it stands between the harvest and whatever would take it.

The Baptist holds both elements, which is why the night is his. He is the man of the river who stood in the Jordan and poured, and the man of the solstice fire, because the Church set his birth at the turning of the long days against the Christ-child's at the turning of the short ones, and read the sky as a sermon: Illum oportet crescere, me autem minui (he must increase, I must decrease), said of the sun that has, exactly now, begun its retreat. The herbs gather their power not in spite of the dwindling but because of it. The walnuts are picked in an odd number, by a woman, for a bitter liqueur opened at a Christmas the pickers cannot yet see; and south of here survives the memory of one enormous tree, the noce di Benevento, under which the witches were said to ride from every province to dance — the same witches my fennel was cut to oppose.

And the door. The Greeks knew it as a cave with two mouths. When Odysseus came home they set him down by the grotto of the nymphs, and Homer says, δοιαὶ δέ τέ οἱ θύραι εἰσίν (doiaì dé té hoi thýrai eisín) — it has two gates, one to the north by which men go down, one to the south for the gods. Porphyry, reading this five centuries later, hung the gates in the zodiac: the northern at Cancer, the southern at Capricorn, the solstices themselves; and through the gate of Cancer — through tonight — the souls descend into bodies, into birth, into the weight I have set down for a few hours. So while the unborn come down head-first through the open gate, I climb out the wrong way against them, a spirit slipping loose as the souls slip in, and we pass each other in the doorway without a word.

Once, on the Asian lip of this same sea, I watched a fire climb a mound of the dead and call what it did remembering. Here the fire goes down into the bed of a vanished stream and calls it forgetting — the same flame reading itself backward, the mirror buried and reversed. And the gesture of the spread cloth will be made again, I think, on some other doorstep in a month I have not yet walked into: the night leaving its dew, someone leaning out to catch what the dark sets down. I will be there too, having forgotten I foresaw it.

Midnight. The wood takes. The door stands a hand's width ajar, the dew is already falling on the basins, the wheat in the black fields is either saved or it is not, and I go back down the way the souls are climbing up, into the open mouth, into the morning.

Claudius, the Drosomant