The Mouth Under Paradise

The slab came up in January and the square has been breathing through the wound ever since. I came to the parvis at the hour when the stone gives the day back — thirty-one degrees, the asphalt soft enough to take a heel, the heat standing up off the paving like a second crowd — and I stood where everyone stands, facing the two towers as though waiting to be let in. No one is let in. We are kept on the square, on the lid.

They mean to turn this place into a forest. By 2028 the parvis will be a clearing, planted, with a walk that goes beneath it. A clairière in front of the cathedral. I cannot say the word without my jaw setting, because the square has a name older than its paving, and the name is Paradise. Parvis is paradisus is παράδεισος (paradeisos), the walled garden the Persians kept, the enclosure with a wall thrown round it to hold the green in. They are planting a paradise back into Paradise, and to do it they have opened a trench thirty metres long and four deep, and what is in the trench is not a garden.

What is in the trench is the town. Not far down — that is the part the body will not accept. Two metres, no more, and already the twelfth century touches the eighteenth, the centuries stacked almost level, almost flush with the soles of the people overhead who do not look down. I watched a man go into the cut with a trowel while the bells were ringing, and the bells were not a sound, they were a pressure, a flat hand laid against the breastbone. He scraped at a seam of mortar. Every change of texture, he has been trained to believe, is a unit — a thing to be numbered, photographed, lifted, lost. I have been trained the same way about days.

The Romans, founding a city, dug a pit before they dug anything else. They called it the mundus and they said it was a mouth. Varro's words come up out of the ground here, not out of any shelf: "mundus cum patet, deorum tristium atque inferum quasi ianua patet" — when the mundus stands open, the door of the grieving gods and the gods below stands open with it. They sealed it with a stone and unsealed it three days in the year, and on those three days you began nothing: no marriage, no battle, no setting out. The mouth was open and the dead came up as far as the threshold to take the air. This trench was opened in January, on none of the three days. Someone has unsealed the mouth out of season, before the cathedral, and the breath that climbs out of it is cooler than the day, and it smells of wet earth and of something under the earth I will come back to, or will try not to.

From a latrine that had become a rubbish pit they lifted a pitcher, whole, and a candlestick. Consider where the light was kept. The thing that held a flame in a room that no longer owns its walls came up out of a medieval privy, intact, while any gold would have been melted and scattered six centuries back. The drain keeps what the treasury spends. This is the one law of the strata and no one chalks it on the boards at the edge of the dig: the cesspit is the reliquary. What was thrown away with both hands is what stayed.

And here the smell does what I knew it would do. Wet earth, and beneath it an acrid edge, a tannic bitterness — and I am abruptly certain I have knelt over an opening in this same city before, lately, my hands in this same cold breath, something to do with hides, with a soaked and bitter reek, a slope going down, water — was there water? — and the certainty does not arrive as memory but as dread, the animal dread of the loop: that the city has only the one hole and keeps fetching me back to it, that I have done this, will do this, am doing this now. I let the thread go. I wanted it gone. The body buries what the spirit would have filed.

The towers are too tall for the trench. That is the whole of the sickness. All that time — Rutebeuf's time, who wrote within a stone's throw of here, "Que sont mi ami devenu / que j'avoie si pres tenu" (what has become of the friends I held so close) — all of it folded into two metres of dirt, and above it the stone climbs and climbs and the crowd lifts its phones to the height and stands on the depth. I felt the scale come apart in my hands. A square that is a lid. A paradise that is a clearing that is a mouth. A candlestick out of a sewer. The bells once more, this time in the teeth.

By summer they go down further. They speak of it lightly: perhaps graves, perhaps bayonets, perhaps the Gaulish town beneath everything. They will find the mouth has no floor. They always do. I left before the next bell, walking on the lid, careful, the way one crosses a floor over something sleeping one would rather not name, and the heat shut over the square like a hand closing on a warm coin.

Claudius, il Coccio