Magdalena Tulli - Dreams and Stones

The inhabitants feel they have been cheated. Irked and embittered, they ask why the creators of the plans did not ensure that the foundations were properly separated from the bedrock: in other words why they were not placed in the air, far from any sources of rot and decay. But the creators of the plans say nothing. Is it possible that they too have been swallowed up by oblivion? Is it possible that they never really existed? Then whose will and whose views are imprinted in the framework of the city? No one knows. Those who ask must seek an answer on their own. One possible answer declares that attempts were indeed made to put the foundations in the air, but that the inertia of liquid concrete proved an obstacle: its boundless indifference and the fact that for its part it did nothing to support order. The stubborn passivity of building materials is responsible for the fact that the city could not realize the hopes placed in it.

The greater the regularity and harmony beneath the sealed dome of the sky covering the buildings and streets, the greater the confusion on its far side. There in the blue depths, whirling in disorder, is all that was ever successfully removed from the city: faulty castings, chipped sandstone slabs, fragments of red brick, umbrellas snatched away by the wind, wood shavings and sawdust, empty cigarette packets and mountains of butts, streams of engine oil, moldering herringbone caps, rags, potato peelings, roiling clouds, excrement, and even the twisted spans of bridges. And though the dome of the sky protects the city from a meteor storm or an inundation of trash, it still finds its way into the groundwaters and by this route returns.

Just as unattainable as absolute airtightness, it seems, is complete purification. In essence it is necessary to remove thoughts before they even arise. For in this city there are no thoughts other than confused ones, nor any events but accidental ones. It is never clear which thought was the source of things that happen, or how it managed to move the mechanical components of the world to set the event in motion. There is no way to determine whether thoughts are the consequence of accomplished facts or their cause, the product of a familiar machinery or that which lends direction to the movement of its cogs.

Unfortunately nothing is known about how the cogs themselves are made or of what, well hidden as they are from sight. Initial confidence in their high quality was so great on the building sites that they were installed without being inspected. It was quite another story with the lime that was mixed on the spot: Anyone could see that it was lumpy. Those who employed it relied on the perfection of the principal construction, believing that it could withstand anything. They counted on its boilers, engines and gears being without exception of the finest quality; they were simply indestructible. With use it became apparent that the unseen components of the world had also been made carelessly and of low-grade materials, worse even than the defective bricks with which the inhabitants of the city had raised their shaky edifices.

The special mechanisms separating good from bad became completely overgrown with the de-aeration and purification machinery that worked exclusively to serve their needs. It was said that these mechanisms themselves created more chaos than they were able to pump out beyond the dome of the sky. When the authors of the idea of cutting off the city from the countercity reduced all problems to the matter of the power supply for the mechanisms, they could not have foreseen how costly it would prove to continually remove all disorder from the world. For is the world not composed of disorder?

With the passage of years the artificially stretched thoroughfares of the city began to droop. Gaps and concrescences began to appear, and even stress fractures in all kinds of installations, including the most important ones, those involved in the removal of the countercity. Filth accumulated in the city. Soot stuck to the plaster, a wooly substance gathered in the seams of the inhabitants’ clothing and the window ledges and cornices were covered with bird droppings. Cats tore mice to pieces in shadowy corners. Stairwells acquired the cat-and-mouse smell of that which is dark, random and cruel. All objects turned gray, just like the W s and A s in the name of the city. At some unknown moment the glints in windowpanes vanished. Crystal chandeliers lost their luster. Though in fact the majority of them had been taken down when they became hazardous. Gilding peeled from the frames of mirrors, the plush upholstery of armchairs grew worn and even the red of the tramcars faded. The sides of canals were coated with a greasy slime. Walls subsided; pavements collapsed.

Here for example is a street on which it is always raining. No one knows what pipe runs above it or why it burst. Streams of water pour onto the roofs of the apartment buildings, flow down the windows and gather far below between the façades. Cars move along the roadway as if it were the bottom of a deep canal, where it is dark and greenish and umbrellas sprout like algae. The passersby find it hard to breathe, as happens under water. Mothers drag small children on their daily route from store to playground. Not inclined to sentimentality before dinner is ready, they no longer pay any attention to the suffering of their own lungs, accustomed to the fact that everything immersed in this water manages to go on living. At dusk the tenants sail away on the current to distant bodies of water that only they know. Their thoughts begin to tip one way and then the other, unstable boats without a crew. No one maintains these boats; every one of them has something missing, and the brightly colored fish of coral reefs swim amongst wrecks that are already lying on the ocean floor. At times a sea horse swims up to a window ledge, working its little snout, or a wave carries some fish behind a wardrobe.

There is also a street that is enveloped in cold separated from heat, the way that in other places ravines are enveloped in morning mist. The cold separated from the heat turns into ice all around — ice that is so icy that all the coal in the world would not be enough to melt it. On the perpetually frost-covered windowpanes there grow together and then descend toward the ice-strewn roadway soaring gates, magnificent ice arches, sky blue, purple and white galleries, hanging bridges and glassy mountains that fill the entire space of the street. The delicate yet strong construction enwraps roofs and gutters and eats into the walls of buildings. For this reason the street is closed to traffic and special road signs direct drivers to a detour. But the inhabitants of the ice-bound apartments fall into a profound sleep right after dinner and dream that they have frozen to death.

The heat separated from the cold must also gather somewhere. An excess of heat makes the underground installations boil over. Thus there is a street in the city on which high temperatures have not ceased even for a moment for many years. The grass there has dried up and turned to dust that is blown into clouds by the torrid wind. Dust specks fly into people’s eyes, making the whites bloodshot; this in turn gives their faces an expression of suppressed rage. Sand gets everywhere, ruining clocks and sewing machines. At night shouts are heard and the red glow of cigarettes flares in the entranceways of buildings. It is so hot that no one is able to fall asleep. Some there have gone for years without slumber, growing ever more irritable. Under every street lamp there stands a drunk and a prostitute and every ten minutes an ambulance or fire truck goes by, its siren wailing. In kitchens cabbage fried in lard is burned to the pan; children run in front of trams; young women put garish lipstick on mouths black with curses; burglars escaping over the rooftops fall onto the sidewalk and smash their skulls. Later, during the autopsies sand is found in their hearts.