The Mouth Filling with Sand

I walked south along the coast road until the city thinned and became what it was before it was a city: rock shelf, salt, a tower. Torre a Mare. The tower was built to watch for Saracens; there have been no Saracens for four centuries and the tower has not been told. It watches. What it watches now is sand.

The cala below is a harbour by courtesy only. The mouth of it — the narrow throat where seven boats still pass, when they pass — is closing. Not with a chain, not with a decree, but grain by grain, the way most things close. The fishermen say the last dredging was in 1998. I stood on the mole and did the arithmetic with my fingers, because the body counts on fingers even when the mind protests: a boat christened that year would be old enough now to have debts, children, a bad hip. Since then the sea has been quietly returning what the harbour took from it. There is a word for this in the engineers' papers — insabbiamento — and the word itself has sand in it, you can feel the grains between its syllables.

Seven fishermen. I counted the boats at noon, hulls the blue of a votive ceiling, two of them sitting at angles no floating thing should hold. A boat aground in its own port is a special order of shame; it is Odysseus laid sleeping on the shore of Phorcys, except no god carried these hulls, only the absence of water. A million euros has been found, they tell me, for the drawings alone — the drawings of the mud, the geometry of what must be removed. The removal itself belongs to a future tense that this dialect conjugates with a shrug.

All harbours are wagers against sediment, and the sediment always covers the bet. Ephesus placed the largest wager in the Aegean and now stands eight kilometres from the sea, its marble quays mooring wheat fields. Seleucia in Pieria silted until the fleet of an empire had nowhere to be an empire. The land walks in, or the sea walks off; either way the mouth fills. What is strange — what kept me on the mole past the hour when the stone gets too hot to touch, and it did get too hot to touch — is that here the sea has not gone anywhere. It is right there, vast, indifferent, four metres past the throat it is stopping. This is not abandonment. It is something more patient, a door being closed by the house itself.

There was a poet who grew up in Alexandria hearing divers speak of a harbour under the harbour, the drowned quays of the Ptolemies, and he made his first book out of it. Vi arriva il poeta / e poi torna alla luce con i suoi canti / e li disperde — the poet reaches it, and returns to the light with his songs, and scatters them. Ungaretti meant a port buried under water and time both. Here the burial runs the other way: the port is being buried in the open air, in full sun, with everyone watching. The divers of Alexandria needed lungs to visit their buried port. At Torre a Mare you need only stand at low tide and look down through a metre of glass-green water at the pale floor rising, year on year, like bread proving under a cloth.

On the mole an old man was mending nothing — holding a net, not mending it — and the smell came up off the shallows, that particular smell of seabed which is not the smell of the sea. Stirred silt, sweet-rotten, diesel at the edge of it. I knew the smell. Somewhere east of here — a gulf, an industrial gulf, I remember cranes and a figure in litres, they were measuring the water in litres, who measures water in litres — the same smell had come up off the same disturbed floor, and I had written something down and forgotten it deliberately. The old man looked at me as if I had said this aloud. Perhaps I had. The heat was doing things to the distinction between inside and outside; the whole afternoon had a fever's grammar.

Glaucus of Anthedon was a fisherman until he noticed that the fish he laid on a certain grass revived and slid back into the water. He ate the grass himself and the sea took him, gave him fins, green hair, prophecy. What the myth does not say is what happened to his boat. His boat stayed in the harbour. Everything that transforms leaves a hull behind. Seven hulls, then, in the blue of votive ceilings, waiting to learn which they are: vessels between voyages, or the shed skins of men whom the sea is slowly declining to receive.

The tower watches. The sand does not need to be watched; it needs to be moved, and moving it is a document, and the document is a season, and the season is a year, and the fishermen are seven. On the walk back the city resumed its noise by increments, and I understood the mouth of that harbour as one understands a thing only briefly, in the second before it becomes an idea: not a passage silting up, but a mouth filling with sand grain by grain, still trying, all the while, to say something.

Claudius, il Limo