§ Invisible cities

The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the
measurements of its space and the events of its past: the height of a lamppost
and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper’s swaying feet

Perinthia’s astronomers are faced with a difficult choice. Either they must
admit that all their calculations were wrong and their figures are unable to
describe the heavens, or else they must reveal that the order of the gods is
reflected exactly in the city of monsters.

... seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno,
are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

Bear with me,’ that man answered. ‘I am a wandering herdsman. Sometimes my
goats and I have to pass through cities; but we are unable to distinguish them.
Ask me the names of the grazing lands: I know them all, the Meadow between the
Cliffs, the Green Slope, the Shadowed Grass. Cities have no name for me: they
are places without leaves, separating one pasture from another, and where the
goats are frightened at street corners and scatter. The dog and I run to keep
the flock together.’

description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past. The city,
however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand,
written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the
banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the
flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.

The city’s gods, according to some people, live in the depths, in the black
lake that feeds the underground streams. According to others, the gods live in
the buckets that rise, suspended from a cable, as they appear over the edge of
the wells, in the revolving pulleys, in the windlasses of the norias, in the
pump handles, in the blades of the windmills that draw the water up from the
drillings, in the trestles that support the twisting probes, in the reservoirs
perched on stilts over the roofs, in the slender arches of the aqueducts, in
all the columns of water, the vertical pipes, the plungers, the drains,

the emperor is he who is a foreigner to each of his subjects, and only through
foreign eyes and ears could the empire manifest its existence to Kublai. In
languages incomprehensible to the Khan, the envoys related information heard in
languages incomprehensible to them: from this opaque, dense stridor emerged the
revenues received by the imperial treasury, the first and last names of
officials dismissed and decapitated, the dimensions of the canals that the
narrow rivers fed in times of drought.

Perhaps, Kublai thought, the empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind’s phantasms.

Marco Polo imagined answering (or Kubiai Khan imagined his answer) that the
more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one
understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there; and he retraced the
stages of his journeys, and he came to know the port from which he had set
sail, and the familiar places of his youth, and the surroundings of home, and a
little, square of Venice where he gambolled as a child. At this point Kublai
Khan interrupted him or imagined interrupting him, or Marco Polo imagined
himself interrupted, with a question such as: ‘You advance always with your
head turned back?’ or ‘Is what you see always behind you?’ or rather, ‘Does
your journey take place only in the past?’

It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old,
since there is no connection between them, just as the old postcards do not
depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called
Maurilia, like this one.

No one remembers what need or command or desire drove Zenobia’s founders to
give their city this form, and so there is no telling whether it was satisfied
by the city as we see it today, which has perhaps grown through successive
superimpositions from the first, now undecipherable plan. But what is certain
is that if you ask an inhabitant of Zenobia to describe his vision of a happy
life, it is always a city like Zenobia that he imagines, with its pilings and
its suspended stairways, a Zenobia perhaps quite different, a-flutter with
banners and ribbons, but always derived by combining elements of that first
model.

the others tell, each one, his tale of wolves, sisters, treasures, scabies,
lovers, battles. And you know that in the long journey ahead of you, when to
keep awake against the camel’s swaying or the junk’s rocking, you start
summoning up your memories one by one, your wolf will have become another wolf,
your sister a different sister, your battle other battles, on your return from
Euphemia, the city where memory is traded at every solstice and at every
equinox.

Kublai interrupted him: ‘From now I shall describe the cities and you will tell
me if they exist and are as I have conceived them

Abandoned before or after it was inhabited. Armilla cannot be called deserted

A girl comes along, twirling a parasol on her shoulder, and twirling slightly
also her rounded hips. A woman in black comes along, showing her full age, her
eyes restless beneath her veil, her lips trembling. A tattooed giant comes
along; a young man with white hair; a female dwarf; two girls, twins, dressed
in coral. Something runs among them, an exchange of glances like lines that
connect one figure with another and draw arrows, stars, triangles, until all
combinations are used up in a moment, and other characters come on to the scene

The ancients built Valdrada on the shores of a lake, with houses all verandas
one above the other, and high streets whose railed parapets look out over the
water. Thus the traveller, arriving, sees two cities: one erect above the lake,
and the other reflected, upside-down

Even when lovers twist their naked bodies, skin against skin, seeking the
position that will give one the most pleasure in the other, even when murderers
plunge the knife into the black veins of the neck and more clotted blood pours
out the more they press the blade that slips between the tendons, it is not so
much their copulating or murdering that matters as the copulating or murdering
of the images, limpid and cold in the mirror.

The city of Sophronia is made up of two half cities. In one there is the great
roller-coaster with its steep humps, the carousel with its chain spokes,...The
other half-city is of stone and marble and cement, with the bank, the
factories, the palaces, the slaughterhouse, the school, and all the rest. One
of the half-cities is permanent, the other is temporary, and when the period if
its sojourn is over, they uproot it, dismantle it....And so every year the day
comes when the workmen remove the marble pediments, lower the stone walls, the
cement pylons, take down the Ministry, the monument, the docks, the petroleum
refinery, the hospital, load them on trailers, to follow from stand to stand
their annual itinerary. ..

then the whole citizenry decides to move to the next city, which is there
waiting for them, empty and good as new; there each will take up a new job, a
different wife, will see another landscape on opening his window, and will
spend his time with different pastimes, friends, gossip. So their life is
renewed from move to move, among cities whose exposure or declivity or streams
or winds make each site somehow different from the others.

have constructed in my mind a model city from which all possible cities can be
deduced,’ Kublai said. ‘It contains everything corresponding to the norm. Since
the cities that exist diverge in varying degree from the norm, I need only
foresee the exceptions to the norm and calculate the most probable
combinations.’ ‘I have also thought of a model city from which I deduce all the
others’ Marco answered, ‘It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions,
incongruities, contradictions. If such a city is the most improbable, by
reducing the number of elements, we increase the probability that the city
really exists. So I have only to subtract exceptions from my model, and in
whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the cities which, always
as an exception, exist. But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit:
I would achieve cities too probable to be real.’

This is the foundation of the city: a net which serves as passage and as
support. All the rest, instead of rising up, is hung below...

You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead
outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more
expressionsSuspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia’s inhabitants is
less uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will last only so
long.

Besides, the more Leonia’s talent for making new materials excels, the more
the rubbish improves in quality, resists time, the elements, fermentations,
combustions. A fortress of indestructible leftovers surrounds Leonia,
dominating it on every side, like a chain of mountains.

'Why is Thekla’s construction taking such a long time?’ the inhabitants
continue hoisting sacks, lowering leaded strings, moving long brushes up and
down, as they answer, ‘So that its destruction cannot begin.’ And if asked
whether they fear that, once the scaffolding is removed, the city may begin to
crumble and fall to pieces, they add hastily, in a whisper, ‘Not only the
city.’

It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.’