THIN CITIES 3
Whether Armilla is like this because it is unfinished or because it has been
demolished, whether the cause is some enchantment or only a whim, I do not know.
The fact remains that it has no walls, no ceilings, no floors: it has nothing that
makes it seem a city, except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses
should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be: a forest of
pipes that end in taps, showers, spouts, overflows. Against the sky a lavabo's
white stands out, or a bathtub, or some other porcelain, like late fruit still
hanging from the boughs. You would think the plumbers had finished their job and
gone away before the bricklayers arrived; or else their hydraulic systems,
indestructible, had survived a catastrophe, an earthquake, or the corrosion of
termites.
Abandoned before or after it was inhabited. Armilla cannot be called
deserted. At any hour, raising your eyes among the pipes, you are likely to
glimpse a young woman, or many young women, slender, not tall of stature,
luxuriating in the bathtubs or arching their backs under the showers suspended in
the void, washing or drying or perfuming themselves, or combing their long hair at
a mirror. In the sun, the threads of water fanning from the showers glisten, the
jets of the taps, the spurts, the splashes, the sponges' suds.
I have come to this explanation: the streams of water channelled in the
pipes of Armilla have remained in the possession of nymphs and naiads. Accustomed
to travelling along underground veins, they found it easy to enter into the new
aquatic realm, to burst from multiple fountains, to find new mirrors, new games,
new ways of enjoying the water. Their invasion may have been built by humans as a
votive offering to win the favour of the nymphs, offended at the misuse of the
waters. In any case, now they seem content, these maidens: in the morning you hear
them singing.
