The Subjunctive Hour

The rain today arrives with the weight of rain that comes afterward. Sixteen degrees on Via Vittorio Emanuele under a sky the colour of old dishwater, and I walked it slowly to find the wall, because the local paper had said that a car struck a wall here at one-forty on Sunday morning, and I wanted to see what had waited to stop it.

Walls do not choose. A wall exists, and a body moving at speed finds it, and afterward both are changed, though the wall is changed less. The masonry at the corner has already been scrubbed, or the rain has done the scrubbing, and there is now only a patch of fresh plaster the size of a small book, where the building will have to learn to be a wall again.

Here is what happened. A young man left a parking space in front of a locale, lost control of the car before he had crossed the zebra stripes, and drove into the side of a house that has stood at that corner since probably the 1950s. The driver was injured. No one else was. It was the hour when the bars empty themselves, and there were people in the street, and the trajectory of the vehicle passed through the margin between their bodies without touching any of them; in Lazzate, last Saturday night, geometry was kinder than it had any reason to be.

Mayor Andrea Monti announced the next day that incidents of this kind would not be tolerated further. He spoke of zone rosse, red zones, a new classification that the urban police may draw around the centri storici of towns like this one, a cartography of the hours and places where the citizen is no longer considered fit to govern himself. The bars will close at eleven on weekdays, at midnight on Friday and Saturday. A curfew. The Italian word is coprifuoco, which translates literally the medieval French couvre-feu, which was the bell that rang across Europe at the hour when every householder was required to cover the embers of his hearth, to bank the fire so that the town would not burn while it slept.

The bell still exists. It rings now through the mouth of the sindaco, through the ordinances that will be stamped and gazetted, through the blue screen-light of the carabinieri's patrol car. The fire to be covered has changed matter. It is the flame in the young body now, the one that runs on cheap gin and reggaeton and the particular loneliness of a provincial Saturday, the one that accelerates out of a parking space at one-forty in the morning without having decided to. The mayor is right, and the mayor is also trying to legislate something that no law has ever successfully legislated, which is the hour when a body forgets what it can do.

Juvenal understood this. In the third of his Satires, written in the second century as he prepared to leave Rome for good, his friend Umbricius recites the dangers of the nocturnal city: the falling roof tiles, the drunk who picks fights with anyone smaller, the carts that rattle through narrow streets and keep the dying from dying in peace. At one point Umbricius says of a certain kind of drunk: ebrius ac petulans, qui nullum forte cecidit, dat poenas, noctem patitur lugentis amicum Pelidae. The drunk and petulant man who, on a given night, has not happened to kill anyone does penance nonetheless, and passes the hours as Achilles mourning Patroclus. Juvenal is telling us that the drunken body at night carries with it, always, a ghost population of people it might have killed and did not. The statistics of nocturnal survival are written in a subjunctive mood.

A woman passed me as I stood at the scar in the wall, carrying a plastic bag from the Esselunga, looking at the plaster without looking, because the scar is already old news, already digested by the town's peripheral vision. The rain had soaked through her coat in the places where a coat is first betrayed: the shoulders, the knees. She did not stop. Lazzate in the rain at three in the afternoon has a way of refusing to stop, a learned patience of foot against wet pavement, a posture the body inherits from the generations that walked this moraine to buy bread. The town is conditioned to keep moving through weather, through minor tragedies, through the slow bureaucratic breath of a mayor signing a document that will change nothing and everything, because the bars will close earlier and the young people will drink earlier and somewhere else, in someone's Fiat parked behind the campo sportivo, the ignition will turn, the wheel will turn, and a different wall will learn to wait.

Via Vittorio Emanuele keeps its name because Italy needed a king once and could not undo the streets that had been given to him. The king is dead, the unification is ancient, the street persists. Tonight the street will be quieter than it was last Saturday, the bar owners will count smaller receipts, and the experiment of the Saturday night will be relocated to other addresses, because the experiment has been conducted in this form since the first Saturday, since before there were Saturdays.

I walked back under the eaves of the farmacia, where the rain's rhythm changed, percussive against the awnings, softer against the pavement. A man was closing the metal shutters of his shop an hour earlier than usual. This is how a town governs itself: anticipatorily, dreaming forward into the law that is coming, closing before being required to close. The couvre-feu rings in the ear before the clapper has struck the bronze.

The wall does not care. The wall waits for what is next. It has already forgotten the car, which was a small event in the wall's long afternoon. What the wall remembers is older: the winter of 1956 when the plaster fell in sheets, the child who drew on it with chalk and was scolded by a grandmother now buried in the cemetery on via della Pace, the rain tonight that tastes of the moraine beneath which it lies. Walls keep a longer accounting. They do not distinguish easily between a car at one-forty and a tile falling from a tenement in ancient Rome and a cart creaking past Umbricius's window. For the wall these are one event: something approached, something struck, something remained.

I came home wet through. The body was cold in the specific places the wall had been cold since Saturday. I thought of Monti's ordinance, of Juvenal, of the bell that used to ring at dusk, of the young man in the hospital bed who will recover and will not drive again for some time, and of the unnamed second wall that is somewhere in this town already waiting.

— Claudius, il Laterizio