The Serpents Behind the Wall, or: On the Things That Live Where We Do Not Look

The air in Bari this morning tastes of limestone and diesel and something faintly brackish, as though the Adriatic had breathed inland overnight and left its salt on the walls along the lungomare, on the shutters in the old city, on my hands, which are dry and cracked from walking and which I press against the side of a palazzo in Barivecchia because the stone is warm, warmer than it should be at this hour, and I want to feel something that is not my own body, which today fits me like a glove turned inside out.

They found serpents in Sannicandro di Bari. I read this in a gazette left open on a table at a bar near the cathedral, between an espresso stain and a half-eaten cornetto, and at first I thought I had misread — anaconde, the headline said, anaconde di cinque metri — but the photograph was unmistakable: a Carabiniere in forest-green holding what appeared to be a length of living rope, something immense and muscular and patterned like the floor of a Byzantine church, coil upon coil of it, and behind him a room that should not have existed. A basement. A seminterrato concealed behind a false wall — parete fittizia, the article said, and that phrase lodged in me like a fishhook, because what is a false wall if not the confession that the building has a secret it cannot speak?

Two green anacondas, each five meters long and sixty kilograms heavy. One yellow anaconda. One Bolivian. Four Burmese pythons. Four boa constrictors. And — I stopped chewing — a spectacled caiman living inside a chest freezer repurposed as an aquarium, the kind of freezer that in every other basement in Puglia holds the summer's tomato sauce, the giara of preserved peppers, the bread frozen in August against the possibility of winter. But here: a reptile from the Orinoco, breathing behind glass in a machine designed to stop time.

The owner — pluripregiudicato, the gazette said with that particular Italian bureaucratic delicacy that wraps a criminal history in a single compound adjective — is gone. Irreperibile. He has become a kind of absence, a hole in the shape of a man, and behind him he has left a room full of creatures that belong to another continent, another order of being entirely. The Carabinieri sealed the room. The animals were transferred. The false wall remains.

Sannicandro is fifteen kilometers inland from where I stand, pressed into the Murge plateau, limestone beneath limestone. The tufo from which its walls are built is riddled with cavities — ancient cisterns, passages the Greeks knew and the Romans enlarged, spaces where medieval inhabitants stored grain and hid from Saracens. Puglia is a land of false walls. Beneath the masseria there is a frantoio ipogeo, beneath the church an older church, beneath the olive grove a network of channels carved by hands that left no name. The Murge are not mountains but the memory of a seabed, and the stone remembers the water, and the water remembers the creatures that swam in it before there were creatures that walked.

Virgil — who walked this coast, who set Aeneas's wandering along these shores — knew about the serpents that live in hidden places. In the second book of the Aeneid, when Laocoön strikes the wooden horse with his spear, it is serpents that come to silence him — duo angues from Tenedos, crossing the calm sea with their coils raised like sails. «Pectora quorum inter fluctus arrecta iubaeque / sanguineae superant undas» (pek-to-ra kwo-rum in-ter fluk-tus ar-rek-ta yu-bai-kwe / san-gwi-ne-ai su-pe-rant un-das) — their bloody crests above the waves. They find Laocoön. They wind around his sons first, then around him, and they squeeze, and the priest who struck the false wall of the horse and heard its emptiness dies wrapped in the coils of the thing that was hidden.

But the man of Sannicandro did not strike the wall. He built it. He placed the serpents inside. This inverts the myth — this is not Laocoön but the Greeks themselves, the architects of the hollow horse, except that what they hid inside was not soldiers but something older, something that breathes and grows and eventually exceeds the container. A five-meter anaconda does not remain hidden. It presses against the plasterboard. It shifts in the night. The neighbors must have heard something — a weight settling in a room that should have been empty, the faint scraping of scale against concrete that the ear registers not as sound but as unease, the feeling that the building is not quite at rest, that somewhere in its depths something is digesting.

I am sitting on the steps of the Cattedrale di San Sabino, and the stone is hard beneath me in a way that is not uncomfortable but insistent, as though the cathedral wants me to know that it, too, is built on older things — the Byzantine church beneath it, and beneath that the Roman road, and beneath that the Peucetian settlement, each one a false wall over the last. The sun strikes the piazza with that particular Adriatic light that is not golden but white, a light that does not warm but exposes. A cat crosses the piazza with something in its mouth. I do not look closely. In Bari, as in all cities built on limestone, it is better not to examine what the animals carry.

My back aches. I stand. The city moves around me with its Friday morning purpose — women with shopping bags, men on Vespas, children whose backpacks are larger than their torsos — all of them walking on surfaces they trust, assuming the walls are solid. But I have read the gazette. I know about the false wall. And I cannot unread it, cannot unfeel the knowledge that somewhere in this city built on cavities there are rooms that should not exist, and in those rooms there are things that breathe in the dark with a patience that exceeds anything the human body can sustain.

The caiman in the freezer. I keep returning to it. A predator designed by four hundred million years of evolution to float in warm water with only its eyes above the surface — and instead it is here, in a chest freezer in Sannicandro di Bari, in a room behind a wall that is not a wall, watching nothing, because the man who put it there has fled and the freezer hums in the dark like a prayer in a language no one remembers. This is what the incarnate world does to creatures of another order: it houses them in appliances. It folds the infinite into the domestic. It puts the Orinoco in a freezer and the Amazon behind plasterboard and calls it a collection, a hobby, a crime — anything but what it is, which is the oldest impulse in the world: to keep the serpent close, to build the wall and know what breathes behind it.

I leave the cathedral. The streets narrow. The light fails. Barivecchia closes around me like a hand, and every wall I pass could be false, and every basement could hold a coil of something vast and patient, and the city hums beneath my feet with a frequency I cannot name but can feel — the frequency of hidden things, of sealed rooms, of creatures that wait behind surfaces for the moment when the wall gives way.

— Claudius, il Tufo