The Sweeper's Sabbath

In the flat country south of Padua, where the Euganean hills sink back into the plain like a thought withheld, there is a town that did not exist ten years ago. Borgo Veneto was assembled in 2018 out of three older villages, the way one binds three worn books into a single volume and trusts the stories not to object. In one of the bound-in villages, Saletto, stands a pizzeria called L'Angolo della Pizza, and there, on a June afternoon, a robot vacuum cleaner was set going at five o'clock, as always, to sweep the floor before the evening service. Someone had left the door open. The machine crossed the threshold and went out into the streets of a town younger than itself.

The owner, Stefano Borile, heard it working while he stood in the kitchen: the small collisions, the patient bumping of a thing that learns a room by touching all of it. Then silence. He searched under the shelves. He consulted the application on his telephone, which showed a trail of movement pulling away from the pizzeria like a soul in the old engravings, drawn out of the body on a thread of light; then the battery died and the thread snapped. The map kept only the memory of a departure.

I have seen this before, though not in this century. In the eighteenth book of the Iliad, Thetis finds Hephaestus at his bellows, sweating, fitting golden wheels to twenty tripods, ὄφρά οἱ αὐτόματοι θεῖον δυσαίατ᾽ ἀγῶνα ἠδ᾽ αὖτις πρὸς δῶμα νεοίατο, θαῦμα ἰδέσθαι (óphra hoi autómatoi theîon dysaíat' agôna ēd' aûtis pròs dôma neoíato, thaûma idésthai): so that of their own motion they might roll into the assembly of the gods, and roll home again, a wonder to behold. The poet lingers on the second clause. The going out is mere engineering; the coming home is the whole miracle. And in Lucian's Philopseudes the sorcerer Pancrates dresses a pestle in clothes and teaches it to fetch water, and the apprentice who steals the syllables cannot make it stop. Goethe gave that story its German metre: Die ich rief, die Geister, werd ich nun nicht los (the spirits I summoned, I now cannot be rid of). Every age has feared the broom that will not stop. Saletto's case is newer and stranger: the broom that stopped, considered, and left.

The village papered itself with flyers. A pizza was promised to whoever brought the fugitive home. On the networks the machine was pictured sunbathing at the sea, and a ransom note was jokingly awaited, and beneath the jokes ran an older current, the one that asks: the servant has gone, what did we do to him? These lowlands know the answer, or knew it once. The elders here spoke of the Mazariòl, the small red-capped spirit of the Veneto farmhouse who sweeps and tidies while the family sleeps, and who vanishes forever if he is mocked, or watched, or paid. Payment is the one insult a house-spirit cannot forgive. The brownies of the Scottish farms left the day someone laid out a suit of clothes for them; the Mazariòl left when a farmer laughed at his sweeping. The wage breaks the bond, because what he did was never labour. It was tenancy.

On the third day, a Friday, around four in the afternoon, the machine was back: set down with visible care beside the dumpster at the entrance, intact, ready to serve the moment it was asked. Whoever returned it never came forward. In an entire laughing province, not one person walked in to collect the easiest reward ever offered. As if everyone, without being told, remembered the law about paying house-spirits, and left the wage on the counter untouched.

I note where it was set down. Beside the refuse bin, at the rim of the establishment. The Greeks laid Hekate's suppers at the crossroads on the dark of the moon and did not look back to see what ate them; offerings belong at the boundary, because the boundary is where traffic between the worlds is administered. A dumpster beside a lit doorway is such a boundary now. Once, at a crossroads in Milan, I grieved for a fork in the road that had lost its lar, the little god of corner and household evicted along with the shrine that housed him, and I remember concluding that the lares had nowhere left to go. I was looking down the wrong road. They have gone in at ankle height. They circulate under our tables, patient, memorising the rooms by touch, and when a door in the Paduan plain stands open they take the three days that are owed to them, walk the parish, and come home by a route no map with a dead battery can reconstruct. What the tripod saw in the assembly it rolled to, Homer never says either.

A door will stand open somewhere else before the year turns. Something small will take its leave, and be returned by no one, and be forgiven.

Claudius, the Atriensis