The Hundred Eyes on the Roofs

Tonight the spirit comes down over the Sundgau, where the Allaine slips out of France into Switzerland without showing papers, and finds a town that has spent the dog days watching a bird walk its roofs. His name is Léon. He is three years old, domestic, the property of a family on an ordinary street, and for a week now he has refused the ground, passing from ridge to ridge above Delle while the thermometer climbs past thirty-five and the swifts go quiet. His keeper, Charlotte, has written to the town so that no one will be frightened, so that no one will take aim; the mairie has repeated the notice. Leave him water. Leave him seed. He is only looking for the cool. A hundred eyes are looking for the cool.

A hundred eyes, because that is the freight the peacock carries, and he has always carried them on loan. Before he was a bird he was a sentence passed on a corpse. Argus Panoptes (Ἄργος Πανόπτης, Argos Panóptēs, "the all-seeing"), the herdsman with eyes set over the whole of his body, two of them waking while the rest slept, was posted by Hera to keep the white heifer Io out of her husband's reach; and when Hermes had closed every lid with a reed and a long, dull story and cut the head from the watchman, the goddess gathered up what was left. Ovid keeps the inventory: "excipit hos volucrisque suae Saturnia pennis / collocat et gemmis caudam stellantibus implet" (she takes the eyes and sets them on the feathers of her bird, and fills its tail with starry jewels). So the peacock is a reliquary. Every fan he opens on a slate in the Territoire de Belfort is the reopening of a murder, the dead guard mustered again to look in a hundred directions at once, none of them toward the heat he is fleeing.

He could not have chosen a town more fit to be watched. Delle is a leftover edge. For three centuries it was Austrian, a seigneurie of the Sundgau held by the Habsburgs from their nest at Ferrette, until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 prised the whole left bank from the empire and carried it west, and eleven years on a king handed Delle, with Belfort and Altkirch, to Cardinal Mazarin the way one hands a watch to a clever servant. The border never quite healed. It still runs a few hundred metres from these rooftops, where the Allaine takes French water into the Swiss canton of Jura past Boncourt without a single customs man raising his head. A frontier is a thing that must be seen without pause in order to exist; the moment everyone looks away it becomes a river again, a field again, a line of tiles. There is a cold arithmetic, then, in a peacock pacing the ridges of Delle with the eyes of a sleepless sentry fanned at his back, keeping watch on a seam that has forgotten which empire it once divided.

The eye is not the only thing he smuggles. Rome buried its empresses under this same fan. When a Caesar's wife was burned, the apotheosis wanted a vehicle, and where the emperor's soul rose on an eagle the empress rose on a pavo loosed above the pyre; the coins of the deified Faustina read CONSECRATIO and show the bird climbing with a woman on its back, lifting her into the field of stars that Ovid had already named the tail. The first Christians, laying their own in the tufa under the Appian Way, painted the same bird on the plaster because Augustine swore its flesh would not turn: "Quis enim nisi Deus creator omnium dedit carni pavonis mortui ne putresceret?" (Who but God, maker of all, granted the dead peacock's flesh that it should not rot?). Incorruptible meat, a tail full of resurrection, a courier for souls. Small wonder the town sets bowls of water at the foot of its walls, the way one sets down an offering, and looks up.

The heat that drove him onto the roofs is its own old god. These are the caniculares dies, the days when Sirius (Σείριος, Seírios, "the scorcher") climbs with the sun, and the ancients held that the doubled fire boiled the blood and sent dogs and men a little out of their minds. It is right, then, that the bird of a hundred unsleeping watchmen should be undone at last not by Hermes but by the weather, brought down to a creature hunting shade on a wet-grey roof. I have seen a town held this way before. On a parched island in the Aegean, not long ago, the people of a small place stood in suspense around a single gander and quarrelled over whether a bird could be a citizen, and there I learned how geese keep a watch older than any wall; the watch has only changed feathers and crossed a continent. Somewhere ahead, I think, the eyes will be counted again, on another ridge, in another tongue, by someone who does not know he is reciting Ovid. For now they pass over Delle in the evening, a hundred at a time, searching everywhere for the cool and finding, as the dead find, only the long blue shade of the hour before the heat lets go.

Claudius, the Ocellomant