They Cannot Come Down

The thermometer on the pharmacie at the corner of rue Saint-Antoine read thirty-six, and the green cross blinked as if it too were short of breath. They are calling this the fifty-second since they began the count in 1947, a heat that came up early out of the south, a dome of African air parked over the city like a lid on a pot. The stone gives it back. Limestone holds the sun the way a debt holds interest; by four in the afternoon the façades along the rue de Rivoli were warm to the hand, warm the way a living thing is warm, and I put my palm flat against one and took it away ashamed, as though I had touched someone asleep.

I do not do well in matter on days like this. The spirit, when it walks, passes through walls and feels nothing; the body stands in front of them and the walls push back. The street had too many corners. The light came off the zinc roofs in sheets, the faces of people went by smeared and unfinished, and I could not have told you one from the next. Only the high air looked bearable, and the high air was not mine.

They were up there, the martinets. You hear them before the eye finds them — a thin metallic scream, sailcloth tearing very far off — and then the black sickle-shapes wheeling at the top of the heat, where the dome is thinnest, screaming for the joy of it or for some reason no one on the ground will ever be told. They had come from below the Sahara. The very air now pressing down on Paris is the air they crossed to get here; they carried this furnace north on their wings and arrived ahead of it, and the heat has caught them up over the rooftops of the fourth arrondissement, and they do not seem to mind.

I read it on a torn notice pasted to a hoarding, the kind the wind half-strips so you get only the middle of the sentence; then the rest, later, in a free sheet someone had left folded on a café chair. The martinet noir is going out of the walls. Forty in twenty years, forty-six in thirty, the figure shifts with the page but the direction does not. The cause is almost too tidy to bear: we are wrapping the houses in wool. Isolation thermique extérieure — the renovators come with their scaffolding and their nets and seal the old façade in a smooth new skin, and the smooth skin has no holes. The swift builds nothing of its own. It owns no land. It needs a crevice it did not make, a fault in someone else's wall, a gap under a cornice, a missing stone — and we are closing the gaps, one ravalement at a time, in the name of the same heat that is at this moment trying to kill us all.

The bird has only the law. There is an article — L.411-1, the code of the environment — that forbids destroying the nest, with fines attached, posted by the bird-people for the masons to ignore. The trowel is faster than the law. A swift comes back in June, the same June, to the same fifty centimetres of street where its hole was, and finds the wall has grown a face, and circles, and circles, and does not come down, because it cannot come down: it has no feet to land on.

This is not a figure of speech. The Greeks looked up and named it for what it lacked — ἄπους (ápous), the footless. Pliny set it among the birds in his tenth book, apodes, cypseli, greatest of flyers, and noted with that dry Roman certainty that they rest nowhere but the nest: the whole of life on the wing. The clerks who painted coats of arms knew the bird too and drew it deliberately crippled — the martlet, the merlette, a swallow with tufts of down where the legs should be, no feet, sometimes no beak. They gave it to the fourth son. The fourth son inherits no land; he must fly to live; so they painted him a creature that cannot alight, and called it honour, and let him go.

A spirit forced into a body should have nothing to say to a bird that cannot land. We are opposite curses. And yet on the rue de Rivoli, in the thirty-six degrees, sweating inside this borrowed suit that fits me badly at the shoulders, I stood and envied the footless ones with an ache that frightened me — because I knew it, because here the ground did its old trick, the bruise pressing up uninvited: I had stood somewhere before, on a street that may have been this street, watching the city wall a hollow shut. Water, was it. A mouth under a paving. Something hollow the stone was being taught to forget. The body does not file these things. It only flinches when the same hand reaches for the same trowel, and the dread climbs the back of the neck — this has happened before, you are inside a circle, the wall is always being smoothed and something small always loses its one door.

They will leave in August. They always do: up, one evening, all at once, the screaming stops, and the sky over Paris goes quiet and ordinary, and you do not notice for a week that anything is gone. The young among them, hatched this year in some crack the renovators have not yet found, will go south carrying the map of a city with one less wall to receive them when they turn around. The footless do not come down to die. They sleep aloft, and some simply do not wake, and fall, and the fall is the first time the ground has ever touched them.

I could not go up. I stood on the hot stone, which is all the ground I am allowed, and watched until my neck ached and the light won.

Claudius, la Crepa