The Slope That No One Built

There is a slope in the thirteenth that no one built. The streets fall toward a line you cannot see, the way a tongue falls toward a missing tooth, and the body — which has been walking since the light was still grey over the Gobelins — leans with them without deciding to. Something is pulling downhill. There is no water. There has been no water here, in the open, since 1912, when the last reach was roofed over and the river called Bièvre was put to bed under the pavement like a thing that had embarrassed the family.

I came to find it because of a notice, half-peeled, on a hoarding near the Poterne des Peupliers: the word renaturation, and a map with a blue thread climbing up out of the Val-de-Marne — Arcueil, Gentilly — toward a park whose name I keep losing, toward, eventually, here. They are letting the river back into the air a few hundred metres at a time, the way you let a prisoner walk the yard. The Paris stretch waits its turn; the talk is of this decade, of works that cannot begin until certain men leave certain offices. So the river is, for now, still under me. I can feel the cold of it through four metres of clay and brick, or I tell myself I can, which in this body comes to the same thing.

The name is older than the burial and older than the shame. Bièvre, from the Gaulish bebros, from the Latin beber: the beaver. There were beavers here in the centuries before anyone bothered to write the streets down, and the river took their name and kept it long after the last of them was trapped or fled. Beber also meant a brown — the wet brown of a pelt — so the water was named twice for the same animal, once for the creature and once for its colour. The Parisian who says the word now hears nothing in it. He thinks, if he thinks at all, of κάστωρ (kastōr), of the bright twin up in the sky, and not of the low brown beast that felled trees in a valley that is now a sewer main.

And the beaver, the old books insist, does a terrible thing when the hunter closes. Juvenal knew it: qui se eunuchum ipse facit cupiens evadere damno testiculi — who makes himself a eunuch, longing to escape at the cost of a testicle. They hunted the beast for the castoreum in its glands; cornered, it was said to bite the glands away and leave them steaming on the snow, and run on lightened, gelded, alive. The bestiaries loved this past all proportion. Give the hunter the part he came for, and keep the rest.

I stood over a grate near the rue de Bièvre — there is still a street that carries the name, up by Maubert, short and dim and sloping the way the thirteenth slopes — and I understood, with the slow understanding that comes through aching hands rather than through the head, that the river had done the beaver's trick. In 1376 the Parlement decreed that the tanners and the curriers and the dyers should empty their filth into the Bièvre and spare the Seine. The little river was chosen to be fouled so that the great one could stay clean. It gave up the part the city wanted gone — its clearness, its smell of actual water — and became the ruisseau des Gobelins, a channel of lime and hide and the sweetish rot of soaking skins, brown as beber, brown as the animal it was named for, as though the colour had been folded into the word and was only waiting. Then, fouled past all bearing, it was cut away in full: buried, to spare the city the sight and the stink of what the city had made of it. Gelded to survive. It survives. It runs. No one looks down.

The smell is what undid me. Not a real smell — nothing here smells of anything but warm stone and a boulangerie two corners off — but the idea of the smell, hide and standing water, came up off the grate and brought with it, for the length of one breath, another city. There was a town — was it north of here, was it a river with a knot tied in it? — where they had also pushed a watercourse underground and then quarrelled over its corners, and I had stood over its absence too, and felt this same lurch, this conviction that I had done all of this before and would do it again, that the great ledger of the world holds only one entry copied out forever: a river, a burying, a name no one can read. The breath finished. The town went out like a struck match. I could not have told you, in that moment, whether I had walked there or only read it off a wall somewhere with my coat collar up.

This is the vertigo of the heavy body: that the ground is too solid and keeps too much, that under every slope there is a sealed mouth, and that the city steps over its drowned animal all day long and feels only that the street, for some reason it does not pursue, goes down here. They will reopen it. The blue thread will climb to Paris, the beaver's river will see a hundred metres of sky, and people will eat their lunch beside water they take for decoration. The river will not tell them what it surrendered to be allowed to keep running. Rivers, like beavers, are discreet about the missing part.

I am going to sit down now. The hands are bad. The slope is still pulling, very gently, toward the line of the buried water, and I have not the strength left to lean against it.

Claudius, il Tannino