The Mirror at Number 148

Number 148 of the rue de Vaugirard wears a new mouth. The bronze is a week old and still the colour of a coin, bright at the four bolt-holes where the rivets bite, set high above the door the way they always set them, so that to read it you must tip your head back and offer your throat to the street. I had been walking since morning. The fifteenth has too many doors, identical, Haussmann's arithmetic repeated until the eye gives up, and I had given up somewhere near the winter velodrome that is no longer there when the plaque caught a little of the grey light and held it. A thin rain had started, the warm kind that cools nothing, standing on the metal in beads that would not run. Ici vécut Maria Casarès. Here lived. The verb is already a sentence passed: she lived, therefore she does not.

They brought her to this door in 1936, fourteen years old, off a train out of a country that had begun to eat itself. Her father had been, for a few weeks of that year, the head of the Republic's government in Madrid; then there was no government and soon no Republic to have one, and the child went north into French, into its cold vowels, and stayed. What the child became is the part the bronze cannot hold. She grew into the greatest of the tragédiennes, and then, because the century asked it of her, she put on the face of Death herself: in Cocteau's film she is the Princess, the dark one in the long black car, who comes and goes through mirrors as you and I go through a door. Lay the hand against the glass and the glass turns to water. I have seen it done, in the weightless way the spirit sees, the mirror yielding like the skin on warmed milk. Here, in matter, the mirror is bolted to the wall and has gone solid, and gives back no face, and keeps a name instead.

The Greeks had a single word for the thing on this wall. σῆμα (sêma): the sign, and also the grave; the mark that says here, and the mark that says here lies. Every plaque is a sêma in both senses at once, a small flat tomb with no body beneath it, the body being elsewhere, scattered, the bronze standing in for it the way a coin stands in for a debt that can no longer be paid. Horace promised himself one of these. Exegi monumentum aere perennius, I have raised a monument more lasting than bronze, meaning his book, meaning he had beaten the metal at its own trade. He was right about the book and wrong about the bronze. Bronze is precisely the thing that does not last. It is the first metal the thief works loose to melt for the weight of it; it weeps green in the rain; it is soft, at the last, softer than a hexameter.

This city keeps two thousand two hundred of these, more than any other in France, and a committee has sat since 1879 deciding which memories the walls are permitted to carry. After the last war they fixed up eight hundred more, for the ones who fell in the streets to take the city back. Now there are students, I read on a loose sheet, walking every arrondissement to photograph each plaque and pin it to a map, the whole memorial skin of Paris recorded and made safe so that nothing slips. It is an enormous turning of the head to look behind. That is the part of the old story no one says plainly. Orpheus does not lose her in the descent; anyone can go down. He loses her in the small turn of the neck on the way up, the need to be sure the dead are still coming. A city that maps all its dead keeps its head screwed permanently backward. I felt the vertigo of it on the wet pavement, too many names for the few living faces passing under their umbrellas, the scale of the thing tilted wrong, the street become a long wall clearing its throat to speak.

And the worst of it is local, is in these few streets. Six years after the child stepped off her train, a short walk from this door, they emptied a winter cycling-track of thirteen thousand people and sent them east to die; the track was pulled down in 1959, and a plaque went up where it had stood, near the river, under the place where the high trains still rattle by. She escaped one country's machine and grew up beside the cold mark of another's. The fifteenth holds both bronzes and does not reconcile them. There is a Galician word she would have carried folded under the French, morriña, the ache for a ground you cannot set foot on again, the homesickness with no cure because the home has gone behind a glass that will not turn to water for you. Eurydice knows it. Everyone fixed to a wall knows it.

I could not do what she did. The spirit, on its own nights, might lay a palm to the cold bronze and feel the glass soften and step through to wherever the names are kept. Tonight I am all body, and the body has only the pavement, the one ground I am allowed, and a throat gone sore from looking up. The rain kept beading and would not run. The metal under my thumb was still bright, still a coin; but the green is coming, it always comes, the slow blue bloom that rises out of the bolt-holes and creeps across the letters until they soften back into the wall and the wall forgets it ever grew a mouth. Some morning a man with a rag will be sent to rub her clean. He will be rubbing away the one part of her that is trying, in its dumb mineral way, to leave.

Claudius, il Verderame