Dreams and Stones

by Magdalena Tulli

  The inhabitants of the city preferred not to broach openly the sensitive matter of the machines. They knew they had been built in a nostalgic adoration of perfection with a wish to amaze the world and that the substances out of which they had been made had always proved more unwieldy and intractable than that from which thoughts arise. The inquisitive and insolent operators of the machines encountered technical solutions introduced from elsewhere and compared their quality with that of the mythical original. In this city imitations never attained the level of their prototypes, whose brands were mentioned in a whisper with shining eyes, bringing the discussion to a close. The more magnificent they sounded the more contempt was felt for the local mechanisms of production that actually existed – the only ones that could be hooked up to the network and set in motion. While the mechanisms were still new people waited for them to be run in. This took place at some unknown point amongst successive breakdowns. Their gears jammed, their screws snapped and nuts fell into their cog-wheels. The machinery of the city worked sluggishly amid earsplitting signs of damage, amid rattling and grinding. Here every object had its defects which were a part of its nature, perhaps the most important part, which needed only time to be revealed. That was why pipes had to become clogged and tanks had to leak. The more complex their construction the sooner they started to jam, fall apart and corrode.

  AT A CERTAIN TIME A LARGE NUMBER OF DARK STARS APPEARED in the sky of permanent stars which was suspended above the sky of clouds and below the sky of suns and moons. These were said to be merely ordinary stars that differed from others only in that for some reason they had died. And since they no longer shone they had become invisible. They were smashed to pieces by the helicopters of the municipal transit system which were roaming aimlessly beneath the vault of the sky without fuel, which they could not refill since there was nowhere to land: The landing pads on the rooftops had never been built and now they were overgrown with dense jungles of antennas.

  The fragile lustrous substance that the stars were made of lost its transparent quality after the collisions and rained down on the city as a black dust. From it the plaster darkened. With time the buildings took on the same shade of gray as the cloudy sky and in this manner disappeared. As the problem of the power supply worsened successive stars were extinguished and ever greater quantities of black dust accumulated, falling like a shadow on sky and earth and obscuring every source of light, including the sun. The eyes of passersby skimmed over the tops of façades lost in the clouds. No one enjoyed any of the wonders of the city. The stone bricklayers in their stone clothing stood alone on heavy stone legs in the recesses of walls, needlessly wielding their pickaxes. With pigeons puffed up from the cold perched on their heads they endured, unnoticed, in the darkness of the street. The buildings, clouds and earth were all cloaked in the same hue and even the birds melted into the background. It was easier to see them in stamp albums, where at least they were not freezing.

  No one knows where sorrow comes from in a city. It has no foundations; it is not built of bricks or screwed together from threaded pipes; it does not flow through electric cables nor is it brought by cargo trains. Sorrow drifts amongst the apartment buildings like a fine mist that the wind blows unevenly across the streets, squares and courtyards. There are long streets and short ones, there are broad ones and narrow ones. The gray of some bears a trace of ochre while others are bluish from the sidewalks to the roof tiles. Each of them has its own peculiar shade of sorrow. Those it has liberally coated and those it has marked with only a barely perceptible shadow run together, intersect and separate. Their length, breadth and angles of intersection influence the circulation of sorrow. Its volume and kind change every day in the city just like the weather. Here and there a small point of joy appears and a zone of joy begins to expand in wedges down streets enveloped in sorrow; its advance parts pass over the roofs of buildings like an atmospheric front. There are streets on which the flags of the sidewalk are loose and there is always a smell of cabbage and bacon while on Saturdays noise and music can be heard on every corner. Each Monday the place is filled with a dreary silence interrupted at infrequent moments by the slamming of doors and the sound of hoarse voices.

  From a certain point of view sorrow might be regarded as an alternative form of enthusiasm which from the beginning was included in the plans for the city but – like everything in the world – proved not sufficiently durable and sooner or later had to turn into its opposite. Sorrow is what enthusiasm becomes when its explosion passes its highest point, after which implosion inevitably follows.

  These were the discoveries of the inhabitants as they sought new rules in feverish desperation. For without rules life is lived in an intolerable uncertainty. Rules too are of little help. They do not enable one to touch either enthusiasm or sorrow, much less the causes of their appearance and disappearance. Little can be encompassed with the gaze – no more than a street corner or one side of a square, sometimes a sign over a store or a lace curtain in a window. Thoughts and imaginings, unlike walls, can be seen without opening one’s eyes. This entire city standing here below on earth and covered with the dome of heaven is suspended in another vaster space where the names of all things and states arise and circulate and out of which thoughts emerge. Even the blind tapping the sidewalks with their white canes, their gaze fixed on the inside of their heads, never cease to be aware of the fact that something is rising or subsiding in that abyss.

  Beneath the vaults of skulls there extend boundless expanses where no human has set foot and which contain things that are in plain view yet cannot be touched. Whereas that which is tangible endures in places trodden by feet yet closed to thoughts. The stone bricklayers will not see anything beyond what is seen by any brick or roof tile, though they stare untiringly without blinking day and night. Everything around them has its place yet nothing has a name. The city trodden by feet and the city in which thoughts swirl adjoin each other at the lens of the eye, by which they are scrupulously separated. Even the blind see what is most important: limitless darkness like the night sky, in which the constellations of the names of all things are scattered, shining and dying like stars.

  This vast expanse is curved in such a curious way that everything that can be thought is always situated inside it. It can be crossed without the slightest effort; there is no need even to open one’s eyes, for everyone knows what a telephone booth looks like, a bus or an opera house. It is woven from that which one knows without looking. And even if it never existed the telephone booth will always be found on the right corner exactly at the moment the bus pulls up at the stop in front of the opera house. It is enough to utter the appropriate word in order to summon up in an instant all the corners of that incorporeal city, all the signs above the stores and also all the bus stops – including those that exist only in someone’s mistaken memory – and all the telephone booths, at every hour of the day and night, in rain, frost and swelter. All the buildings and all their windows on every floor, every newspaper kiosk seen from the first floor and from the attic, from the front and from an angle. It should be added here that in the rows of windows, on some floor a window will always be found through which instead of a kiosk one can see for instance a large building with a clock tower, since it too belongs to the city, just like fading recollections, unrealized plans, and dreams. Everything that can be thought has its name and – along with the trams, safety pins and rosin – belongs to the city.

  Objects and buildings circulate randomly and mingle with one another. Memory must constantly untangle them since permanent order is not possible there. The city can neither be described nor drawn; the reality of the city blocks is resistant to orthogonal projection. Cut off from the sky, deprived of clouds reflected in the window panes, they will rather recall that which remains of streets after they are demolished: an outline of foundations. By manipulating the scale it is possible to create roadways on which the make of a car will squeeze by without difficulty, maybe the color of the bodywork too,
but the wheels cannot pass. Every attempt to render a permanent image of the city multiplies similarly defective nooks and crannies which from that instant on assume a life of their own. Thus it is not possible to depict the city in two dimensions regardless of whether they are situated on paper, on a screen or in the memory.

  Despite this in any kiosk one can buy a street map of the city, folded into sixteen or thirty-two and marked on the surface by a special configuration that is like a gateway bristling with the black shafts of the letters W and A, like a great entrance guarding the teeming street names within. These names, printed in the tiniest lettering beneath closed eyes, evoke images of Sunday mornings, autumnal clouds racing across the rooftops, people in overcoats, cracked flagstones in the sidewalk, a music store with cellos in the window, an Alsatian dog with a newspaper in its mouth and a hundred thousand other things. All this breaks off suddenly at the thin line beyond which the white margin begins.

  The map also contains train stations, thanks to which it is possible to cross the border of the thin line and conquer the edge of the paper. Trains pass to the outside through dark tunnels concealed beneath the paper. The sides of the wagons carry plywood panels with black inscriptions that cannot be seen in the gloom of the tunnels. The same inscriptions appear on the departure boards. Amongst them are uncommon, beautiful words that make the eyes water slightly. They are written in large letters. The banal ones are written in small letters, for otherwise there would be no room for them – there are a great many of them. Both kinds, however, are but pale reflections of the names toward which the train is headed. It is they that determine the direction of the locomotives on the tangle of tracks invisible under the paper. The true names, those whose force of attraction sets the locomotives in motion, whether beautiful or banal, always lie somewhere beyond the border of the map. It is not known to what degree the cities they refer to really exist.

  For nothing in the world is merely invention. Somewhere beyond the margin of the paper lies yrardów, which is now a sewing shop, now a spinning mill, now a tannery. Somewhere out there Oarów, Otwock and Nowy Dwór Mazowiecki, attached to the railroad tracks, by some miracle manage to avoid drifting into space, only because like rosary beads they are threaded with other beads onto strings called the Otwock line, the Skierniewice line, the Nasielsk line. The trains pass through drab neighborhoods where the rumbling of their wheels makes china rattle in the dressers while the tin gutters echo. All the street corners there have been peed on by mongrels and all the mongrels have their tails between their legs. Carts bounce over cobblestones. Patient men stand in line in front of a closed store whose sign has faded in the sun and turned gray from the rain. The streets are filled to the brim with random incidents as if even the mind that gave the city its proper shape broke off at the edge of the map.

  Each of these places has its own central point that brings order to its space: It is a lottery office always for the same number game which in essence does not anticipate any winners. It is marked by a sign on which are painted symbols of good luck: a small skinny elephant above a frail four-leaf clover. Yet it is clear the elephant found the cloverleaf too late and is so weakened it cannot eat it. One feels sorry for the elephant because it missed its chance. Apparently somewhere at the furthermost branches of the tracks there live herds of large well-fed elephants that chew on clover – exclusively the four-leaf kind – every day of the week from morning to night till it makes them burp and they get hiccups in the shade of the palm trees. It is warm in both summer and winter where they are, whereas here there is rain and drizzle and dusk falls in the early afternoon. There in that mild climate it is said life is less arduous and death too is easier. An influence of those far-off regions that is hard to explain causes the space around the lottery offices to be distorted and disturbs the arrangement of thoughts as if they were iron filings obedient to the poles of a magnetic field. The contemplation of distant countries leads to serious illness (a trembling of the head and disturbances of vision brought on by a dull pain). Over the magnificent ebb and flow of a storm-whipped sea the color of bottle glass there rise warehouses of corrugated metal, cold landscapes set in window frames. The corrugated metal rises amid weeds; a fly lies upside down in the foreground.

  Empty bottles hit passing trains, shatter and remain forever on the embankment, like a testimonial to the mysterious hatred felt by those regions toward anything that moves on tracks: The hatred felt by that which must always stay where it is toward that which – not fastened to the earth – escapes and disappears beyond the horizon.

  And yet the tracks, wherever they lead, never forsake the expansive territories of the name even when they pass station buildings bearing innumerable foreign-sounding names such as Radom, Kielce or Kutno painted in black against a white background. Even when they pass through stations with the same names shining in bright colors over gray platforms. The lines of the tracks with their metallic gleam cut straight as arrows across a background black and white like a photograph: Even the wall of red brick has no trace of red in it. They do not attach themselves to any background or to any hue. They glint equally coldly amid fabulously colorful advertising posters, thrown-away illustrated magazines and empty soda cans. It is said that whoever does not know Kutno does not know life. In reality no one knows Kutno and no one ever can know it. The spaces of the name are filled with endless tracks next to which cities form briefly and only when needed and then vanish again immediately afterward like the red lights of semaphores in the gloom of dusk.

  The last station turns imperceptibly into a seaport. There without even opening their eyes the passengers can transfer from trains to ships on which they will sail the seven seas. They will see massive whales and fearful icebergs and they will hear the song of sirens. The word Gdask shining over the platforms can be read as an allusion to a figure wielding a trident against a background of white clouds to the accompaniment of an audible signal. But it may prove only a fragment of a larger whole broken off from the words Free City Of. And it may equally well originate from newspaper headlines screaming in the tallest print that no one is willing to die for that name. It is only when its full content is revealed – in the platform sign it has been stintingly replaced with an ambiguous abbreviation – that the gravity of the reference can be comprehended. Yet amongst all the names that can be seen on station platforms there is not one for which the passengers would be prepared to die. The more so because no one knows whether it is possible to die in the same way that one sails the seven seas – without opening one’s eyes.

  It is for this reason that the places whose names sound from station loudspeakers are incapable of independent existence, even though in many of these names varicolored lights are constantly being turned on and off and there are gigantic perfumed fountains and little silver bells that ring. Is it possible that Paris really exists – a place with a name so pretentious it makes one laugh? Or London, which was essentially conceived as fog? Manchester and Liverpool are two soccer fields with coal tips instead of stands. Bordeaux is a mountain in the shape of a bottle; Rotterdam, Antwerp and the Hague are the names of flea-ridden sailing ships rocking against the quay, their holds filled with spices and silk. Venice is in reality a mother-of-pearl gondola in which is concealed a music box. Chicago is a place filled with suitcases of money where gangsters in felt hats live, shoot guns and die. New York crammed the tallest skyscrapers in the world into an area six inches long and four and a half wide; on the other side there is a box for a postage stamp. Rome is a point to which all roads lead: a dusty moth-eaten inn in the middle of nowhere. The word Casablanca, white as paper and black as the night, is the name of a late-night bar for undecided suicides. All these are part of the city and if the truth be told, in it they occupy less room than a bookmark in a book. The passersby who gaze daily at the dim quadrilateral of Constitution Square understand that Paris is where one buys Parisian rolls and that no other Paris exists.

  Apparently in Montevideo there is another Constit
ution Square with palm trees and a fountain in the middle, bathed in the blinding glare of the sun and ringed by colonial mansions. If something like this does exist it is only a supplement to the regular square that everyone knows, an additional hidden aspect of it that escapes everyday attention and does not belong in everyday consciousness. Apparently Milan also has a Central Station in the form of an immense sarcophagus from whose walls stone gargoyles stare down with bulging eyes and bared fangs. This means that for some reason the glass-walled Central Station in the middle of the city needs a more distinct shadow than that cast by its transparent sides. Apparently a Prague of gilded palaces hovers somewhere over the Praga neighborhood of shabby apartment buildings and courtyards deep as wells, cut off from the rest of the city by a river that tastes of rust and engine oil and from the sky of stars by a mantle of clouds and smoke. The buildings, streets and districts are suffocating from opportunities unrealized, transformations uncompleted, promises withdrawn and desires in abeyance for which the city searches in vain for an outlet. In the densely built-up space the city landscapes crowd together; the crush of them oversteps all bounds. It is precisely because of the pressure of missed possibilities that the city begins to generate mirages: the gold of Prague, the mystery of Milan, the colonial architecture of Montevideo.

  The Central Station here – the only one that really exists – is one of the principal stops on the routes of the trams as they calmly transport their numbers from one terminus to the other. Hurrying to catch a tram one passes the platforms indifferently since the station is merely an underground passage and a transfer point for the municipal transit system. There are those who are reminded by the sight of the glass walls of when they once bought tickets for a train in the great light-filled hall. But they are well aware that at that time they were dreaming. This magnificent aquarium has no need for platforms or trains; it can exist equally well without them. Nor does it need tram stops or underground walkways. In essence it needs nothing. It is the city’s salvation.