The Flower That Would Be a Wall

Today I did not travel out of the body. I stayed in it, and the body walked to Brera, where a church used to be and is not.

You would not know to look for it. The Milanese walk past the place a thousand times a year and see only the great ochre bulk of the Palazzo, the Accademia, the cortile with its green Napoleon standing naked as a god who has misplaced his clothes. Somewhere inside that mass, folded into it the way a hand folds into a fist, was Santa Maria in Brera. They took it down in the last century to make room for more rooms: the Napoleonic halls needed wall, and a wall needs the space a church is standing in. The architect who did the cutting was named Gilardoni. I do not blame him. Someone is always named, and the name takes the weight so the age can keep its hands clean.

Brera is not even a holy word. It is braida, brayda, a Lombard mouthful meaning a field, a meadow kept just outside the walls, grass and mud and the smell of a cow that is no longer there. The church was Santa Maria of the Field. Now the field is paved, the church is air, and the stone has gone walking.

Because that is the murmur I came in on, read half off a bright screen the way you read a poster whose bottom third the rain has peeled. A stone has surfaced. Not here. Up the water, at Monza, in the Lambro, by an old mill they call the Mulino del Cantone. On the tenth of June something squared and carved showed itself in the current: a rosette, a flower of stone crowned with leaves and shut inside a rectangle, cut by the workshop of a Pisan, Giovanni di Balduccio, six hundred years ago, for the marble face of the church that is no longer in Brera.

I know the hand. It is the same hand, or the same shop, that carved the ark of the martyr Peter over in Sant'Eustorgio, which you can still stand under and which still holds up its weight of angels. So one man's chisel lies at two ends of a broken line: one end kept, roofed, prayed beneath; the other thrown up out of a riverbed by a mill, blinking in the wrong century.

How did the flower reach the water? By the ordinary violence of tidiness. When they unmade the church they did not smash all of it. Some of the marble was saved, which is another word for moved, and a man called Canonica, who drew the great park at Monza for the French, carted the good pieces north and set them into a farmhouse, the Cascina San Fedele: a portal here, a pair of mullioned windows there, the bones of a demolished saint mortared into a place where hay was kept. Two hundred winters got into the mortar. One stone loosened, leaned, and at last let go into the Lambro, and the river held it the way a mouth holds a word it will not say, and then one June morning said it.

There is a line I could not keep out of my head, standing on the warm flags with the light gone flat and heavy. λίθον ὃν ἀπεδοκίμασαν οἱ οἰκοδομοῦντες, οὗτος ἐγενήθη εἰς κεφαλὴν γωνίας (líthon hòn apedokímasan hoi oikodomoûntes, hoûtos egenḗthē eis kephalḕn gōnías): the stone the builders threw away, this one became the head of the corner. The psalm means it as triumph. Down by that mill it sounds more like a threat. What you discard keeps its shape underwater. It waits. It comes up when it likes, not when you are ready, and it comes up with its small carved flower still open, still asking to be made into a wall.

And here the ground did the thing I like least in it. It remembered for me, before I could stop it. There was a street, once, I will not say where, where I watched men lift the paving with iron bars, and under each pried stone lay a bed of pale sand, indecent as the white belly of a fish turned over. I felt then that a stone taken from its bed does not die; it goes off somewhere to wait. I did not want to think it a second time. The river at Monza thought it for me. The same nausea, the wrong side of a thing shown to the day. A stone up out of its bed there; a stone down into its bed here; and for one slow minute on the hot flags of Brera I could not tell which of the two had happened, or whether both were still happening, or whether I had stood in this same heat once before with this same flower turning in the dark of some water, waiting to be found.

Roma quanta fuit ipsa ruina docet, the old couplet says: how great Rome was, her ruin itself teaches. Milan teaches the smaller lesson. A city does not keep its churches; it keeps its stones, and lets them wander, and calls the wandering loss when it is only migration. The flower cut for Brera has lain six centuries in three beds: a façade, a farm wall, a river. Now they speak of a fourth, a glass case in the Villa, a home at last. I stood in the empty air where the first bed was and felt the poor thing being caught again, named again, walled again.

The body aches from the walking. The stone does not ache. That is the whole difference between us, and it is the only advantage the stone has ever had, and it is enormous.

Claudius, il Concio