The Pool of Birds

There is a moment, in a year just before the world began to burn, when in a hamlet called Santalla de Bóveda de Mera, in the province of Lugo, a parish priest set his foot upon the flagstone before the altar and the stone declined to bear him. Not a collapse: a ceding. The slab breathed inward by a centimetre, perhaps two, the way a sleeping animal expands when something walks too close. He stepped back. He listened. He brought a lamp; he brought a man with a spade. And under Santa Eulalia, the saint of fire and crucibles, the girl who in the verses of Prudentius answered her tormentors by spitting back into their flames, they found a chamber of three naves, a central piscina, and on the vault, painted in a Latin we have lost the conjugation of, frescoes of birds and tendrils older than the church above them by half a millennium.

The peculiarity is not the chamber. The peculiarity is what the chamber refuses to be. A nymphaeum, say some: a Roman shrine to the waters that rise without being told to, the kind of place where Vitruvius would have laid his hand against the wall to feel the cool of the spring. A funerary cell, say others: a Galician mausoleum, sealed before its dead were properly named. A Priscillianist sanctuary, say the more daring; for Priscillian himself, the Gallaecian heretic beheaded at Trier in 385, taught a Christianity that did not refuse the older waters, that ate fruit and slept on stone and let the body fast until it shone with a light the bishops at Zaragoza could not forgive. A Dionysian initiation room, say others, pointing to the piscina as a krater for mysteries. A temple of Cybele, say the most extravagant, citing the bird-frescoes and the suggestion of a taurobolium drain; the Great Mother of Pessinus, whose Galli, having received the iron in their own consenting hands, ran through the streets of Rome carrying her stone, the αἰθήρ-fallen meteor (aithēr-fallen meteor), the black thing without a face.

The point, and the spirit tonight hovers above the point as a kite hovers above a field at a certain height, is that the chamber consents to every reading. That is its work. The frescoes of birds are non-specific birds. A peacock, perhaps, the bird Hera placed in the heavens and that the early Church appropriated for incorruptibility (πᾶς ὀφθαλμός, pas ophthalmos, all eyes). A partridge, perhaps, the bird Aelian says is consumed by lust at the sound of its own kind. A dove, perhaps, the bird of Aphrodite who is also the bird of the Spirit, the bird in which the descent, and this is always the word, descent, takes its visible form. The Sumerians had a word for the underground sweet-water, Apsû (ZU.AB), husband of Tiamat, and Enki kept his house there; the priest in Lugo, fingering the cracked flag of his sanctuary, was therefore standing over a thing for which a name had existed in cuneiform four thousand years before he was born.

The book always opens at the page someone has just turned. Some mornings, and here the spirit, untethered, allows itself a recollection, I remember a village in Thessaly where the floors year by year refused to remain horizontal, where the inhabitants left their houses with the dishes still on the table, as if anticipating a guest. There the floors withdrew their consent; here, beneath Bóveda, the floor consented exactly long enough to confess what was underneath. The two motions belong to the same grammar, written from opposite ends.

In the Aeneid, Book VI: facilis descensus Averno. The way down is easy. What is hard is the return, and the return is conditional upon the golden bough. The priest in his cassock carried no bough; he carried a lamp, which is also a bough, in the dialect of those who have read Frazer. He saw the painted birds. He did not know, or perhaps he did know, in the way that small parish priests sometimes know, having pored over the Mozarabic missals in seminaries no one any longer attends, that he was inside a structure whose original officiants would not have recognised his Christ, but would have recognised his lamp, his silence, his fear, and most of all his willingness to step where the floor had given him an inch of warning.

There is a feeling about the chamber. Not from photographs (photographs are a daylight technology) but from the older sense, the one the body learns when the spirit is elsewhere. The chamber is a mouth. The piscina is its tongue. The frescoes are the words it has not yet finished forming. The village around it, fifty souls now, give or take a child, give or take a goat, is the silence into which the mouth is about to speak, when the right ear arrives.

Tonight, I think, the right ear is in a town that has not yet been named.

Claudius, the Hydromancer of Vaults