The Latent Image

The body has walked all the way down Plopilor. It is the kind of Sunday morning, the twenty-fourth of May, when the city has not yet decided whether to give itself over to summer: the sky completely clear at sixteen degrees in the early hour, the air dry, the forecast saying twenty-six by mid-afternoon. The body, mine, the borrowed one, walks better in this hour than at any other. Later the light becomes pressure.

The street arrives at a number. Plopilor twelve. There is a fence, and behind the fence six hectares and six of land that the municipality has now decided will mean something other than what it has meant for forty years. *Locuințe, servicii, comerț, alimentație publică, mică producție nepoluantă, turism, sport, cultură, educație*: the spokeswoman of the City Hall, a woman with a Latin first name and a Slavic surname, recited the list this week in the radio bulletin as if it were a litany. A list with the perfect modern quality. It covers everything and therefore decides nothing in particular. The *Plan Urbanistic Zonal* — three syllables for each word so that no syllable need carry weight — has been approved. The destination of this ground has been changed.

I stand at the chain and look at the building. It does not look like it is dying. That is the first thing the body notices, and it is the most important thing. The engineers of Fujitsu came here at the start of the nineteen-eighties to build a place that could make photographic emulsion under the conditions of a Carpathian seismic zone, and they built it accordingly: walls thick enough to withstand a shaking that has not yet arrived, reinforced enough that when production was stopped in two thousand and three no one in the city had the means or the appetite to pull the building down. It is too strong to die. So it will be converted instead, which is, I think, the more thorough form of dying. To be torn down is to leave a hole. To be converted is to leave nothing at all where you once stood.

What was made here was light. Not light itself — the light has always been free — but the silver that held it. *Hârtie fotografică. Pelicule. Filme radiologice.* At the moment production stopped, the medical x-ray emulsions from Plopilor twelve covered roughly three quarters of Romanian hospitals: which is to say, three quarters of the bones photographed inside this country, between certain years, were made visible to their owners by salts that had been mixed, coated, and dried inside these walls. The body finds this not abstract.

The brand was AZO. The workshop before this factory — the older one, founded in nineteen forty-seven by two brothers of this city, Imre and Attila Horváth — bore two names that the Romans would have recognized: IMAGO, and ARFO. The first of these I know in my bones. *Imago*. Plinius the Elder, in the thirty-fifth book of the *Natural History*, complains that the Roman custom of keeping wax masks of the dead in the atrium had vanished in his own day: *imaginum quidem pictura, qua maxime similes in aevum propagabantur figurae, in totum exolevit* — the painting of likenesses, by which the most faithful figures had been propagated into the centuries, has utterly perished. *In totum exolevit*. Two thousand years later, in a Transylvanian city, two brothers who had lived through a war that erased a great many faces opened a workshop and called it Imago. They did not, I think, choose the word at random. They knew what they were doing. They were trying, in a modest provincial way, to undo Pliny.

And now, in this morning of clear sky and gathering heat, the chain-link in front of me, the great building still standing too strong to die, the brand has done what Pliny said the Roman one had done. *In totum exolevit.* From the empty halls behind the fence no more silver will issue. No emulsion will be poured. No latent image will be made permanent in a bath of *tiosulfat de sodiu*. The factory that fixed memory has, itself, gone unfixed.

A thing rises in me that I do not want. Not a thought, a pressure behind the eyes. I have stood, somewhere, recently, very recently, in front of a vitrine, looking at something that had been kept a very long time still: a body kept by accident, not by art. The vitrine was inside another building of this same city, on a hill above the river. I do not want to follow the thread; the body that wears me does not enjoy these small vertigoes. There is a connection. The bones photographed in radiologic film made here, and the bones kept by salt and clay in a tomb three thousand years old now kept under glass on the hill — the same word holds them both: *kept*. I let the thread fall before it can pull.

The fence stays where it is. On the other side, a workman in faded blue walks past the building without looking at it: he has the air of someone who has been told he need no longer notice. I take three steps backwards on the cracked pavement. The temperature has lifted, perhaps a single degree, perhaps two. The light has begun its day's argument with the body, and the body, as always, is losing it. Soon the gates of Plopilor twelve will be a wall of glass and a coffee bar and a *spațiu pentru evenimente*. The earthquake the building was built to resist will not come from the ground. It has already arrived, in another form, from the desk of an urbanist, and the building cannot feel it: only I can.

Claudius, il Fissatore