The Fork With No Lar

The body came up along via Vitruvio with the first thunder still folded inside the cloud, and turned at the rail trench into a quarter that announces, in its own name, a thing that is no longer there. Ponte Seveso. A bridge for a river. There is no river. The Seveso runs somewhere under the soles now, culverted, sent below decades ago, and the bridge it once justified has thinned into the noun that outlived it. So the body arrives already standing on one absence, and walks straight into a second.

Twenty-two degrees is the most the radio would allow today, the heat refusing to climb because the storm wants the heat for itself. A minimum of nineteen, a maximum that behaves like a lid and not a ceiling. The wind comes from the east-southeast, fifteen and then thirty, carrying the smell every Milanese knows and no Milanese names: wet asphalt before the rain, that mineral breath the tar gives up the instant the first heavy drops strike a surface that has been baking all afternoon under parked engines. They have promised hail. The sky over via Edolo has the colour of a coin forgotten in a pocket through a wash.

Here is the second absence. Where via Edolo meets via Raffaele Parravicini the roadway opens its mouth and forks. Two streets becoming three, or three collapsing into one, depending which way the body is failing to go. A "Y." The geometry leaves a slack triangle of asphalt in the middle, wide enough for nine or ten cars, and ten cars is what it holds, wedged nose to flank on a surface that was never a parking lot. The white paint says so. There are zebra stripes here, a pedestrian crossing drawn across a space that no longer permits crossing; there is the hatching that means do not stand, do not stop, keep moving. The cars stand precisely on the do-not-stand. The pedestrian, the rare upright animal who still means to walk it, threads between bumpers and folded mirrors as through a herd lying down in a field, and reaches the far kerb having performed the small civic humiliation the city now asks of anyone on foot.

The body stands at the apex of the Y and feels the old wrongness rise. This is a place that exists by accident. No one drew it; it is the remainder left over when two lines are laid across a third, the arithmetic of streets producing, as arithmetic will, a number nobody wanted. It has no name. And the body, which has spent too long now among things too solid and too loud, recognises in that namelessness something close to unbearable, because where I come from, and I will not say where that is, a place where three roads met was never nothing.

It was a trivium. In the old city every compitum, every joining of ways, kept a shrine no bigger than a cupboard, and inside it the Lares Compitales, the small gods of the crossing, who watched the seam where one quarter bled into the next. At the Compitalia they hung woollen dolls from the little roof, one figure for each free soul of the neighbourhood and a ball of wool for each slave, so that the passing year might count the threads, grow confused, and take a doll instead of a child. The crossroads was where you left the thing you were afraid to keep. Ἐνοδία (Enodía), the Greeks called the one who waited there, She of the Road, and her other name was Trivia, the three-faced, who looked down all three throats of the fork at once and ate the suppers set out for her in the dark of the moon. A named crossing had a face to meet its own. It had a guardian because it had a name, and a name because someone had once agreed it was a place.

This fork has agreed to nothing. It is unbaptised. No Lar comes to a corner the city has not consented to call a corner, and so the vacuum at the heart of the Y fills the way every unguarded threshold fills: with the trivial, which is only the Latin for whatever collects at a trivium, the loose talk and the loose matter that gather where three roads relieve themselves of their traffic. Here the trivial is sheet metal. Ten offerings nobody intended as offerings, left out for the goddess who is no longer permitted to receive them.

Then the rain begins exactly as the bulletin swore it would, all at once, vertical, loud on the bonnets, and the smell lifts off the asphalt so hard the body has to shut its eyes, and behind the eyes, for a single second, there is a yard somewhere, beside water, a wide flank of brick the colour of river-soaked clay, and a man, a bearer, who could not get to the other side, who stood at a margin holding something heavy and was not let across. Was it a canal? The memory will not keep its own shape. It arrives on the wet-stone smell and leaves when the smell thins, and the body is grateful to lose it, because the dread underneath it is the dread of having stood at a fork before, failing to cross, and being asked to do it once again.

The municipality, they say, now talks of depaving. Of lifting this useless skin of asphalt and bedding two squares of earth in its place, two trees, shade where there is now only the held heat of stopped motors. A flowerbed where the cars are. Tilt it to the light and it is the same gesture as the woollen dolls: an offering laid at the crossing to buy it back from neglect, to give the nameless place a green face so that something, at last, might consent to guard it. The body would like to believe it. But the body has heard this city promise other corners and forget them by the next rain.

The hail does not come. The rain falls hard and ordinary and runs in a brown sheet across the do-not-stand, around the tyres, downward toward the buried river that no longer has a bridge, and the cars sit in it like cattle that have learned to sleep on their feet, and the fork keeps no shrine, and Trivia, three-faced, looks down all three streets and finds no supper, and the body turns up its collar and goes, uncrossed, the way it came.

Claudius, il Cippo