HIDDEN CITIES 1
In Olinda, if you go out with a magnifying glass and hunt carefully, you may find
somewhere a point no bigger than the head of a pin which, if you look at it
slightly enlarged, reveals within itself the roofs, the antennae, the skylight,
the gardens, the pools, the streamers across the streets, the kiosks in the
squares, the horse-racing track. That point does not remain there: a year later
you will find it the size of half a lemon, then as large as a mushroom, then a
soup plate. And then it becomes a full-size city, enclosed within the earlier
city: a new city that forces its way ahead in the earlier city and presses it
towards the outside.
Olinda is certainly not the only city that grows in concentric circles, like
tree-trunks which each year add one more ring. But in other cities there remains
in the centre, the old narrow girdle of the walls from which the withered spires
rise, the towers, the tiled roofs, the domes, while the new quarters sprawl around
them like a loosened belt. Not Olinda: the old walls expand bearing the old
quarters with them, enlarged, but maintaining their proportions on a broader
horizon at the edges of the city; they surround the slightly newer quarters, which
also grew up on the margins and became thinner to make room for still more recent
ones pressing from inside; and so, on and on, to the heart of the city, a totally
new Olinda which, in its reduced dimensions retains the features and the flow of
lymph of the first Olinda and all the Olindas that have blossomed one from the
other; and within this innermost circle there are already blossoming--through it
is hard to discern them--the next Olinda and those that will grow after it.
