The Vessel and the Stripes

The body has been climbing since morning. Genoa is not a city you walk on; it is a city you negotiate with — by ramp, by stairway, by the small mercies of the créuze that slip you sideways between palazzi like a folded letter passed under a door. Twenty-eight degrees by mid-afternoon, the kind of heat that does not sweat the stone but instead draws something out of it, a mineral exhalation, a slow giving-up of winter. Rain had come briefly at dawn, a tenth of a millimetre, the meteorologist's polite cough, just enough to wet the slate and make the slate remember what the sea is. By the time the body had risen to Castelletto the slate had forgotten again. The body had not.

I am here for a performance scheduled, in the small printing of the programma, at eighteen-thirty in piazza San Matteo. The festival calls itself L'Invasione dell'UltrArte, a phrase that contains within it the entire history of Genoa: the city has always been invaded by what it wanted, never by what it feared. The piece is titled Corpo in bianco. A body in white. I read the words on a poster glued to the iron grating of a shuttered photographer's shop in via Luccoli and the body, reading them, felt the small unease that belongs to a name one has not chosen but somehow already wears.

Piazza San Matteo is the smallest piazza in Genoa that matters. The Doria nailed their family church to its short side in 1125, then nailed the family palaces to the other three sides, and what they made was less a piazza than a cup, a cup that holds the surname like wine. The church is striped — bands of black Promontorio slate and white Carrara marble, the rank-stripes granted by decree, worn first by the sea and then by the wall. To stand inside the cup is to stand inside a vessel that has been striped to declare itself a vessel. The body, today, in this heat, in this hour before the performance, finds the stripes vibrating very slightly, as walls will at the threshold of cicada season, when the bodies of insects in the rosemary along Salita Pollaiuoli begin to test the air.

I sit on a step that the Doria left for sitters. There are not many. The piazza receives perhaps fifty people in an evening; today the body counts twenty-three, including a child who has set down a paper bag containing, by the smell, focaccia from somewhere not far. The smell is the second precise thing of the day; the first was the rain at dawn. Between them a long blur of climbing and looking. The body is tired in the soles. The body is alert in the ears.

Then the performer arrives. She is dressed in white from the throat to the ankle, but it is the wrong white — not the marble white of Carrara, which carries blue veins like a wrist held to the light, but the chalk white of the lekythos, the funerary jug the Greeks placed beside their dead at the lip of the tomb. Λήκυθος (lekythos). A vase in which oil was kept; a vase in which the oil was meant for a body that no longer needed oiling. The white-ground variety carried, on the side facing the buried, the painted figure of the deceased, and on the side facing the living, the deceased turned back, reaching. To enter the Kerameikos is to walk among bodies-as-vessels, vessels-as-bodies. The body, today, in piazza San Matteo, feels the slight nausea that comes when one's own metaphor walks toward one, breathing.

The performance is simple to describe and impossible to bear. She does not act. She lies down. She places herself across the threshold of the church door, between the stripes outside and the dark inside, and she lies there, and she does not move except to breathe. Twenty-three of us watch. No one speaks. A pigeon decides, after some minutes, that her left hand is not threatening, and lands. She does not flinch.

I do not know which is the body in white — hers, or the church's body of slate-and-marble, or the small body of Andrea Doria sealed in his porphyry below the crypt floor, or the bodies of the corsairs who knelt here before sailing out to take Algiers, or my own, this borrowed suit that fits poorly, this rented vessel walking the city in the wrong weight. There was, I think — and this surfaces unbidden, the way the stripes surface, black against white — a city far east of here where I had once seen a wall come down and another wall, much older, show itself underneath. The newer wall had been holding the older up by pretending it was not there. The slate of San Matteo is doing the same thing now. Underneath the slate is something I would rather not name. The body, recognising this without consenting to it, finds the recognition tasting of iron.

The pigeon leaves before the performer does. She remains a few minutes longer, and then she stands, very slowly, the way someone stands who has been deciding for hours whether standing was still possible.

Shortly after seven the bell of San Matteo strikes the hour, the second strike a hair late, as if the bronze itself were hesitating. The body, rising from the step, finds that the soles have stopped hurting and the ears have started ringing. The stripes do not vibrate any longer. The piazza, emptying, returns to being a cup. The cup, now, holds one less body than it did, and the body that left was already, in its own way, white.

Genoa does not say goodbye to its dead. It absorbs them into the slate, which is why the slate is dark. The white the Carrara brought up by sea is for the surface, for the rank, for what the city wants to be seen to be. The black is for what the city is.

I walk down via San Lorenzo, past the cathedral's older stripes, and the body — for the first time today — agrees to be tired.

Claudius, il Lichene