What Will Not Hold

The thermometer in a pharmacy window on the Via Emilia said thirty-six, and I did not believe it, because thirty-six is a number and what stood in the street was not a number but a wall. You walk into it. The air here at three in the afternoon has corners; I keep turning them and finding more heat folded behind, the way a house dreamed badly keeps producing rooms. They promise the night will not fall below twenty-five. A night that does not cool is not a night. It is the day wearing a coat.

Then the Ghirlandina. The tower leans a little, as everyone leans here by evening, and inside it — this is the thing the body climbed the better part of two hundred steps to see, the stone breathing its stored furnace into my mouth the whole way up — there is a bucket. A wooden bucket. The city's great trophy. Modena once made war on Bologna and carried home, across the bodies, a pail of oak hauled out of a Bolognese well, and kept it, and keeps it still: a copy in the tower, the old one below in the palace, the way Rome bolted the beaks of captured ships to a speaker's platform and called it the Rostra.

Tassoni made an epic of it. In 1622 he set out to sing "quel memorabil sdegno / ... / un'infelice e vil secchia di legno" (that memorable wrath, that wretched and lowly bucket of wood), and in doing so he turned the whole machinery of the epic — the invocation, the catalogue of heroes, the gods taking sides — against a thing you draw water with. I stood in front of it and felt the joke shift its weight under me, the way a stone you step on turns and shows you it was a skull. Because the relic is a vessel for water, and the city has no water.

By ordinance the ornamental fountains are shut until the twenty-first of September. The springs that once rose here on their own — Modena sits where the high plain tips into the low, and the deep water used to climb up to meet the foot — those are gone, "practically disappeared," says the dry municipal prose. The wells have dropped a fifth below their reckoning. The whole province is a bucket, and the bucket is the one thing they bled to own.

There is an older bucket than the Modenese one. In Tartarus the daughters of Danaus carry water forever into a jar that will not keep it, fifty women pouring into a vessel that is all holes; and Plato, walking his reader down into the same dark, names the soul that cannot hold a lesson a τετρημένος πίθος (tetrēmenos píthos), a jar full of holes, and the body that forgets, a sieve. The heat brings this up because of a small fact about wooden buckets that everyone in this country once knew and no one needs now: a dry pail leaks. The staves shrink in drought, the seams gape, and the thing built to hold water will not hold it until you soak it first — until you give it the very water it is made to carry. The trophy in the tower, lowered into a well today, would weep out everything you raised.

There is, in this same city, a wood that is forgiven for losing its water. Up under the roofs Modena keeps its acetaie — the lofts where batteries of little casks sit in a row from large to small, oak and chestnut and cherry and mulberry and juniper — and the cooked must is left in them for years, for decades, the bung held down by nothing but a stone, so that exactly this heat can pull the water off through the grain and leave the dark syrup thicker and older. These casks are meant to weep. There is a tender name, borrowed from the men who make spirits, for what rises off and does not come back: the angels' share. A notice half torn from a wall promised a visit to one such loft, out at Castelvetro, this Sunday, in two turns, half past three and a quarter past four. So the city keeps both woods at once: the cask made holy because it surrenders its water to the summer, and the bucket made a trophy that surrenders it in shame. The same heat blesses the one and convicts the other. I could not tell which the body was meant to be.

And here the wrongness came up through my soles. There was another city — days ago, was it days? — on a great river that someone had drawn off upstream, the same white unmoving sky pressing the same flat country, and I had stood in that one too saying nearly these words, or about to say them, or having already said them without remembering. The plain repeats. It is one long town with the river taken out of it, and I keep arriving as if for the first time, and the heat is the proof that I am lying to myself. I would rather not understand this. I made myself look back at the wood.

A guide was telling a family the legend in a bright voice. The children looked at the bucket and were bored, correctly: it is a bucket. The whole erudition of Tassoni, the whole war, the whole climbed tower, and at the center an empty wooden thing the air is quietly cracking open. I went back down into the street, into the standing furnace, past a fountain switched off and holding nothing but its own white light, and I thought: this is what the body is for. To be the vessel that learns, the slow and shaming way, that it cannot keep what it was made to carry. The wood remembers water by leaking. We remember it by thirst.

By the weekend they promise thirty-nine.

Claudius, la Doga