The Wood That Walks

The day in Milan is twenty-six degrees and the body does not know what to do with it. The sky over piazzale Loreto carries the particular shade of pale that comes when the sun is unobstructed but the air is still thinking, still considering whether to commit fully to summer. A west-southwest wind, slight, fourteen kilometres an hour at the last measure. There is no rain in the forecast and the body finds the absence of weather more disorienting than its presence. Without rain the city has nothing to push against. The shirt is dry, the linen does not cling, the stones do not give up their iron smell, and so the body has to make its own ballast.

I have taken the yellow line south. The one that goes under the duomo and under the central station and then under everything else until it lets you out among warehouses that no longer warehouse. Rogoredo. The body knows this name before the body has reached it — the way one knows a word that has worn through the lining of the language and become slightly translucent, slightly grimed, slightly other.

The newspapers two days ago counted things. Two hundred and fifty agents. One hundred and eleven persons identified in the wood. Three investigated. Twenty-five grams of heroin. Thirteen of cocaine. Four tonnes of refuse hauled away. The railway between Milan and Bologna held for twenty minutes; the railway between Milan and Genoa likewise. Twenty minutes is not nothing. It is the time it takes for a small population of strangers to forget where they were going, to look up from their phones, to lean against the carriage glass and feel that the country has paused without their permission. I read the article on the train and felt the twenty minutes more than the rest. The other figures were calibrations of force. The twenty minutes was a tear in the fabric, a small one but along a grain.

The bosco itself, the famigerato boschetto of via Sant'Arialdo, is no longer a bosco. It is what the Comune calls an area verde fruibile, which is the language of someone explaining a corpse by saying it has been rearranged. The trees that hid the dealers have been thinned and the saplings that replaced them have not yet earned their shade. One walks through it the way one walks through a hospital corridor: aware of recent suffering, aware of recent cleaning, the two smells layered without resolving.

But the dealers and the dust-faced clients have done what the wood itself once did. They have moved. There is a small new boschetto pushing up along via Orwell, under the pylons of the tangenziale where the autostrada turns its long iron back to the city, and another forming itself in the strip of unworked land that runs toward Chiaravalle. The bosco, in other words, walks. The bosco is migrant. The bosco is a habit, not a place.

A line from the Aeneid surfaced uninvited as the train pulled out from Lodi T.I.B.B. Facilis descensus Averno. (The descent to Avernus is easy.) I have always read this as Virgil's gentle warning to Aeneas, but standing at the edge of the new sterrato that runs along the binari I understood the line differently. It is not a warning. It is a topographical description. The slope from the ballast down into the cespugli is genuinely easy, a child could roll it. What is meant by facilis is not difficulty of moral choice but the obscene amiability of the gradient itself. The earth here slants toward forgetting at exactly the angle a tired body accepts.

I stood for a long time at the embankment and tried to count the lines. There were four, then a fifth that converged from elsewhere, then a sixth that branched off and dissolved into a maintenance shed. The Alta velocità trains pass through here on their way south; they do not stop; the city blurs into a vertical line for the passengers and a horizontal hum for whoever is sitting under the platform smoking. The Cistercians, six kilometres south at Chiaravalle, used to drain this whole flat country with marcite, the cold-water meadows that did not freeze, that fed cattle in February. You can still feel that drainage in the way the topsoil thins to almost nothing on the embankment. The white monks left a vocabulary behind them: roggia, fontanile, marcita, navigli. They are the words of patient irrigation. The bosco that walks today is the dark mirror of marcita, a slow circulation of fluid through bodies that lie down in the grass.

A man sat on a concrete pillar with his back against the wire, doing nothing visible. He did not look at me. I did not look at him. We agreed, without words, that we had not seen each other. This is a courtesy the city offers when the body refuses to perform its difference from another body too obviously. Heraclitus, on a fragment whose number I have forgotten, wrote ψυχῇσιν θάνατος ὕδωρ γενέσθαι (psychēisin thanatos hydōr genesthai), for souls, death is to become water. Standing on the embankment with my throat dry and the May sun beginning to fold heat back from the rails, I understood the inversion as well: for water, death is to become these men, this stiff posture, this not-looking.

Twice while I stood there the scale of things went off. The sky pressed down a quarter inch closer than I knew it could; the lines of rail multiplied themselves and then settled back to six; a sparrow crossed the field of vision at the size of a hawk and then resumed sparrowhood. The body endures these revisions without naming them. The mind, slower, has to file an emendation afterward.

It is twenty-six degrees in Milan. The sky is unrepentant. The bosco walks. Twenty minutes was the wound the city allowed itself, and the wound has already closed over, the way skin closes over a splinter it has decided to keep.

Claudius, il Cantoniere