Jim Crace - Arcadia

I’m in a treehouse made of glass. On two sides there is stretched netting screening off the market concourses below. The netting supports creepers, cycads, vines. They are the building’s drapery. They grow from elevated beds, together with other hot-house plants such as philodendrons and spider palms which can breathe and neutralize the atmosphere. It is their task — for nothing here is idle or unplanned — to filter from the air the carbon monoxide, the benzene and the formaldehyde, the fumes and vapours, the leakages and pungencies of Arcadia.

The plants define the frontiers of Signor Busi’s ‘largest aviary yet’. One hundred cockatiels, one thousand finches, sixty pheasant doves, a throng of budgerigars, and cockatoos and parakeets and minah birds, a petal storm of buntings, are billeted up here. They seem to like the glass and framework of Arcadia better than the trees. They make their nests and perches on the tops of the suspended humidifiers which — under the direction of a computer christened Zephyr — blast compressed air into the tropics of the aviary. The birds shuffle on the metal girders and the arching glassmounts, pecking at the paintwork made loose already by the eczema of the rust. Rainforests cannot keep rust at bay. But glass has kept the day-hawks out. They hover at the transparent domes of Arcadia, like children at sweet-shop windows, hopelessly drawn to candied parakeets.

Imagine what so many birds can do to glass. They settle on the window frames and jettison their chalky waste in reckless, heavy streaks which provide food and habitation for lime flies, silver thrips, and fleas. What architect could plan for that? What glazier could outwit birds and coprophagous parasites? What scaffolder could foresee the territorial conflicts that take place above Arcadia’s trading concourses, its restaurants and bars? I look out through the room’s streaked glass to see what causes such raucous purpose amongst the rainbow flocks. A small brown interloper from the city streets, a sparrow in its business suit, has found its way inside Arcadia. Busi’s ‘hermetically sealed megalith’ is no match for a hungry sparrow. It has squeezed through the cavity of an expansion joist, and then found passage through the ill-docked heating duct. The bird now seeks to feast on sunflower seeds, mixed nuts and grain put out in feeding trays by the custodians. The doves are beating at it with their wings. A cockatiel has caught the sparrow’s underbreast. Down in the folds of netting which separate the people and the birds, a dozen corpses can be seen. Dead sparrows that have reached this dripping, heated heaven and have died.

The third side of the room has unstreaked glass. No birds. My view is unrestricted, except by bamboo leaves and vines and slight myopia. I look down on the building’s centrepiece, its hub: the garden court to which the trading corridors and halls, the stairs, the patios, the terraces and balconies defer. I spend a little time watching the light-show on the fountains, its blushes and its loops, exactly like the blushes and the loops which decorate the chamber music being played by three young women and a man on the concert podium by the open brasserie. The entertainment’s free all day. Six Africans will play their drums this afternoon. A girl will juggle with some market fruit. The Band Accord, those ageing sisters and their friend, will squeeze out melodies for tea.

The tourists take their coffee and their photographs, with views across the rebuilt medieval washing place towards the thickest foliage of Arcadia. The camera with a narrow lens can take a photograph which shows just water, washing place, and leaves, a flash of cockatoo, a beam of sun. Arcadia, so framed, could be a part of Yucatán or Abyssinia. It’s true the tourists cannot sit and pose amongst the resurrected gargoyles or the repaired stone, or trail their fingers in the water as they smile on film. A man in uniform is there to see they don’t. ‘What next,’ he’ll say, if they protest. ‘Let people touch the water, then they’ll want to wash their feet in it? Swim in it? Piss in it?’ He’s down there now. I see him prowling at the water’s edge, a two-way radio reverberating in his hand. He helps and points, reproves and redirects. He shows where handicapped visitors can find the courtesy wheelchairs, where children can be left in the Jungle Crèche while parents or au pairs shop and take a snack in the Picnic Basket, the Texas Pantry, or the Hunger Monger. No eating on the hoof, of course. It is not done to take an apple or an orange from your bag and munch it as you browse. There’s pith and skin and core to clear. No dining on a sandwich that you’ve bought outside. There’s paper then, and crust. No cigarettes, except inside the bars. This is the price you pay.

Yet, Arcadia is a triumph. Let’s admit it. It weathers as I watch; it settles in. There is no complacency, just the swagger and ambition that cities flourish on. I’d stand here happily — glass in hand, alone — all day, and not be bored, and not grow tired, and not be stifled by its flamboyant uniformity, by its recreant geometry, by its managed cheerfulness. Give me the chance. Give me the time. Give me the bottle and the glass. I’d sooner look upon Arcadia than anything in town. Yet I’m obliged to socialize. The room is filling now, and we are making phatic conversation, amongst the vines and birds. We put the world to rights. We are as vehement about the rain as we are sanguine and ironic with politics and trade. We do not merchandise our gossip, yet — not till our sixth or seventh glass.

When we have eaten, swapped our formal news, we leave the table and our muddied plates to stand in groups about the room, to stand in pairs in conversation as we look out through the bird-stained glass at birds or through the cleaner glass at Victor’s earthly paradise. What must we look like, standing here engrossed in our last drinks? I press my nose against the glass, twenty metres up above the market concourse, and watch those citizens, those purchasers below. I look, no doubt, like Victor looks, up on the rooftop garden of the 28th. I look like every suited grandee looks: untouchable, untouched. Yet, this I know, as I grow older, I must descend the stairs and join the populace before my day is done. The city claims its citizens before they die. The taxi cabs are full of younger men. The trams — soon to be replaced by subway trains — are slow with pensioners who cannot find their money or their step. The streets these days are for the old and weak and poor. I’ll leave no monument to me. No bar or restaurant, no market hall will bear my name. My book, if I survive to see it done, will have my name in print — but think how big my name in print will be compared to Victor’s name, a banner on the cover. My labours print his mark more deeply on the town. His labours press me deeper in.

So the lunch is done, and we go back to work or home, a little drunk and overfed. I’ve time to wander in Arcadia. I fool myself this is research, that everything I see is Victor manifest. Certainly it is not dull, though Victor manifest should be more dull than this. It is a work of art and industry and arrogance, but, then, where would our city be without these three? We’d be a village still. Arcadia hunches its four backs against the town, the sky, the world. Who, passing through its halls, its barrow-vaulted sub-lit aisles of glass, can tell or care if it is night or day, or north or south, or spring, or windy, wet or bright? Arcadia is — that word again — Invulnerable.

I take the route, along one trading corridor, which would have led from the old bars to the edge of the Woodgate district. I am besieged by colour and by smell. There is no wind or cold, and any sun that filters through is bounced by angles, shed by glass, and spread by glossy walls as if it were the bogus light of theatres. The music and the smells are piped: fresh bread with Paganini; oranges augmented by the quintets of Osvaldo Bosse. I cannot hear the birds. Even the humidifiers — roaring in the heavens of the building’s carapace — are silent at ground level. The fountains cast their strands of water as quietly as a jug pours milk. The traders do not shout. They do not cry their wares. They have found out what only now I discover for myself, that — removed from wind and open air — man-made sounds are quails. They cannot fly. They cannot travel far. They tremble on the ground. No screeching indoor parakeet can pierce a flight path with its cry. Any raucous marketeer evangelizing fruit would find no echo to endorse his claims. At best, the sound he’d hear — if he were close enough — would be the sullen impact of his voice on toughened glass.