THIN CITIES 5
If you choose to believe me, good. Now I will tell how Octavia, the spiderweb
city, is made. There is a precipice between two steep mountains: the city is over
the void, bound to the two crests with ropes and chains and catwalks. You walk on
the little wooden ties, careful not to set your foot in the open spaces, or you
cling to the hempen strands. Below there is nothing for hundreds and hundreds of
feet: a few clouds glide past; farther down you can glimpse the chasm's bed.
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: rope-ladders,
hammocks, houses made like sacks, clothes-hangers, terraces like gondolas, skins
of water, gas jets, spits, baskets on strings, dumb-waiters, showers, trapezes and
rings for children's games, cable-cars, chandeliers, pots with trailing plants.
Suspended 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.CITIES & MEMORY 3
Zaira
In vain, great-hearted Kublai, shall I attempt to describe Zaira, city of high
bastions. I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like
stairways, and the degree of the arcades' curves, and what kind of zinc scales
cover the roofs; but I already know this would be the same as telling you nothing.
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; the line strung from the
lamppost to the railing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the
queen's nuptial procession; the height of that railing and the leap of the
adulterer who climbed over it at dawn; the tilt of a guttering and a cat's
progress along it as he slips into the same window; the firing range of a gunboat
which has suddenly appeared beyond the cape and the bomb that destroys the
guttering; the rips in the fish net and the three old men seated on the dock
mending nets and telling each other for the hundredth time the story of the
gunboat of the usurper, who some say was the queen's illegitimate son, abandoned
in his swaddling clothes there on the dock.
As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks up like a sponge and
expands. A 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.
CITIES & DESIRE 2
Anastasia
At the end of three days, moving southward, you come upon Anastasia, a city with
concentric canals watering it and kites flying over it. I should now list the
wares that can profitably be bought here : agate, onyx, chrysoprase, and other
varieties of chalcedony: I should praise the flesh of the golden pheasant cooked
here over fires of seasoned cherry wood and sprinkled with much sweet marjoram;
and tell of the women I have seen bathing in the pool of a garden and who
sometimes--it is said--invite the stranger to disrobe with them and chase them in
the water. But with all this, I would not be telling you the city's true essence;
for while the description of Anastasia awakens desires one at a time only to force
you to stifle them, when you are in the heart of Anastasia one morning your
desires waken all at once and surround you. The city appears to you as a whole
where no desire is lost and of which you are a part, and since it enjoys
everything you do not enjoy, you can do nothing but inhabit this desire and be
content. Such is the power, sometimes called malignant, sometimes benign, that
Anastasia, the treacherous city, possesses; if for eight hours a day you work as a
cutter of agate, onyx, chrysoprase, your labour which gives form to desire takes
from desire its form, and you believe you are enjoying Anastasia wholly when you
are only its slave.
