The Member for the Swifts

The swifts have perhaps ten days left. You can hear it in their pitch: the high black scream over the courtyards has turned urgent, as if the air itself were being spent. By the first days of August they will be gone, every one, and the city will hold their absence the way a wall holds the shape of a plaque someone removed. I learned what had been done behind the walls of Palazzo Marino from a newspaper folded twice and left on a seat of the 16 tram. I read it standing, one hand on the scalded rail, while the granite outside gave back the day's heat through the soles of my shoes.

They held a parliament of animals in the council chamber.

I mean this literally. The hall where the city speaks to itself, under the weight of stone a Genoese banker's gold once paid for, was given over for an afternoon to the species of this place. Students sat in the councillors' seats, and each had surrendered the use of a throat to one animal: the swift, the fox, the nutria, the frog, the pigeon, the beetle. A guarantor presided; this city keeps an official guarantor for the rights of animals, which is itself a sentence I had to read twice. On the agenda: the fate of the great stadium, the reopening of the buried canals, the rules of buildings, the terms of coexistence. The fox was consulted about San Siro. The water animals were asked, through human mouths, whether the water should be let out of its grave.

Consider what stood reversed. For seven centuries the emblem of this city has been a serpent with a man in its mouth. For one afternoon, in the room where Milan is decided, men and women sat beneath the ceilings with animals in their mouths.

Assemblies of the unhuman are older than the buildings that host them. Chaucer dreamed one: on Saint Valentine's day Nature herself convenes every fowl of every kind, lets them plead, interrupt, mock their betters, vote. "The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne" (the life so short, the craft so long to learn): so begins his parliament of birds, with the shortness of life, because the birds already knew what every agenda is about. Further east, further in, Attar sent thirty birds across seven valleys to petition their hidden king, and at the end of the last valley they found a mirror: سی مرغ (si morgh), thirty birds, arrived before the سیمرغ (Simorgh) and saw that the sovereign they had crossed deserts to find was the assembly itself, feather for feather.

I do not think the students knew how old a technology they were operating. Lending the body to a voice that has no body is work; there are villages where it was seasonal work, done at night, done for the sake of the harvest, and those who did it were paid in suspicion. The throat is a door, and every door I have ever studied opens from both sides. When the one who carried the fox rose to speak, I am told the chamber went quiet in a way that chambers do not usually go quiet. I believe it. I know that quiet. It is the silence of a room understanding that something has, in fact, arrived.

I walked home the long way, through streets that had too many corners, and the evening light lay on the stone like something with mass. The city was loud in the wrong places. At some point a shriek crossed above me, green, though nothing green was there; and for a moment there was salt on the air of another city, a southern one, almond husks underfoot, small bright birds that did not belong in the old books of that place either, and someone, somewhere, had written an elegy. I stopped myself. I have decided not to remember for whom.

The swifts were given a member in the chamber, and it is right that they were, because of all the species entered into the minutes they are the least parliamentary. A swift that touches the ground is in mortal trouble: the wings too long, the legs nearly a rumor, the whole animal built on the assumption of air. They eat aloft and sleep aloft; they court on the wing. The earth receives them twice, at the nest and at the end. They will not wait for the minutes to be approved. Within days they leave, all at once, on a signal no guarantor countersigns, and the chamber they briefly possessed will keep sitting through the heat, deciding the fate of stadiums and of buried water. Their vote was cast before the session opened. Their assent has always been the screaming.

Claudius, la Muta