pygmy

MR. PALOMAR ON THE TERRACE

"Shoo! Shoo!" Mr. Palomar rushes onto the terrace to drive away the pigeons, who eat the leaves of the gazania, riddle the succulent plants with their beaks, cling with their claws to the cascade of morning-glories, peck at the blackberries, devour leaf by leaf the parsley planted in the box near the kitchen, dig and scratch in the flowerpots, spilling dirt and baring the roots, as if the sole purpose of their flights were devastation. The doves whose flying once cheered the city's squares have been followed by a degenerate progeny, filthy and infected, neither domestic nor wild, but integrated into the public institutions and, as such, inextinguishable. The sky of Rome has long since fallen under the dominion of the overpopulation of these lumpen-fowl, who make life difficult for every other species of bird in the area and oppress the once free and various kingdom of the air with their monotonous, molting, lead-gray livery.

Trapped between the subterranean hordes of rats and the grievous flight of the pigeons, the ancient city allows itself to be corroded from below and from above, offering no more resistance than it did in the past to the barbarian invasions as if it saw not the assault of external enemies but the darkest, most congenital impulses of its own inner essence.

The city has also another soul-- one of the many-- that lives on the harmony between old stones and ever-new vegetation, sharing the flavors of the sun. Fostering this good environmental attitude or genius loci, the Palomar family's terrace, a secret island above the rooftops, dreams of concentrating under its pergola the luxuriance of the gardens of Babylon.

The luxuriance of the terrace corresponds to the desire of each member of the family. For Mrs. Palomar it was natural to extend to the plants the attention she reserved for individual things, chosen and made her own through an inner identification and thus becoming part of a composition with multiple variations, and emblematic collection; but this spiritual dimension is lacking in the other members of the family. In the daughter because youth cannot and should not become fixed on the here but only on the further-on, the over-there; in the husband because he was too late in freeing himself from his youthful impatiences and in understanding (only in theory) that salvation lies solely in applying oneself to the things that are there.

The concerns of the cultivator, for whom what matters is that given plant, that piece of ground exposed to the sun from this hour to that hour, that given disease of the leaves which must be fought in time with that given treatment, are alien to the mind modeled on the processes of industry, led to make decisions along general lines, according to prototypes. When Mr. Palomar realized how approximate and doomed to error are the criteria of a world where he had thought to find precision and universal norm, he slowly reverted to the direct observation of visible forms; but by then he was the way he was: his connection with things has remained the intermittent and labile tie of one who seems always intent on thinking of something else, though this something else does not exist. His contribution to the burgeoning of the terrace is to run out every now and then to frighten the pigeons_Shoo! Shoo!-- waking in himself the atavistic sense of defending the territory.

If birds other than pigeons light on the terrace, instead of driving them away Mr. Palomar welcomes them, closes an eye to any possible damage done by their beaks, considers them the messengers of friendly deities. But these appearances are rare: a patrol of crows occasionally approaches, punctuating the sky with black patches, and spreading (even the language of the gods changes with the centuries) a sense of life and gaiety. Then an occasional blackbird, polite and clever; once a robin; and sparrows in their usual role of anonymous passers-by. Other feathered presences over the city allow themselves to be sighted at a greater distance: the squadrons of migratory birds in autumn, and the acrobatics, in summer, of swallows and house martins. From time to time, white gulls, rowing the air with their long wings, venture over the dry sea of tiles, lost perhaps in following the bends of the river from its mouth, or intent perhaps on a nuptial rite, and their marine cry shrieks among the city noises.

The terrace is on two levels: a loggia or belvedere dominates the hurly-burly of the roofs over which Mr. Palomar casts a birds-eye glance. He tries to conceive the world as it is seen by birds. Unlike him, birds have the void opening beneath them, but perhaps they never look down, they see only to the side, hovering obliquely on their wings, and their gaze, like his, wherever it turns, encounters nothing but roofs, higher or lower, constructions more or less elevated but so thick that he can move only so far down. That, down below, hemmed in, streets and squares exist, that the true ground is the one at ground level, he knows on the basis of other experiences; at this moment, from what he can see from up here, he would never suspect it.

The true form of the city is in this rise and fall of roofs, old tiles and new, curved and flat, slender or squat chimneys, arbors of reed matting and sheds of corrugated iron, railings, balustrades, little columns supporting pots, metal water tanks, dormers, glass skylights, and rising above all else, the rigging of TV antennas, straight or crooked, enameled or rusting, in models of successive generations, variously ramified and horned and shielded, but all of them thin as skeletons and disturbing as totems. Separated by irregular and jagged gulfs of emptiness, proletarian terraces with lines for drying laundry and with tomato plants growing in tin cans directly face residential terraces with espaliered plants growing against wooden trellises, garden furniture of white-painted cast iron, awnings; pealing campaniles; facades of public buildings, in profile and full-face; garrets and penthouses, illegal and unpunished constructions; pipe scaffoldings of constructions in progress or left half finished; large windows with curtains, and little WC windows; ocher walls and burnt-sienna walls, walls the color of mold from whose crevices clumps of weeds spill their pendulous foliage; elevator shafts; towers with double and triple mullioned windows; spires of churches with Madonnas; statues of horses and chariots; great mansions that have decayed into hovels, hovels restructured into smart bachelor apartments; and domes that make round outlines against the sky in every direction and at every distance, as if to confirm the female, Junoesque essence of the city: white domes or pink or violet, according to the hour and the light, veined with nervatures, crowned by lanterns surmounted by other, smaller domes.

Nothing of this can be seen by one who moves on his feet or his wheels over city pavements. And, inversely, from up here you have the impression that the true crust of the earth is this, uneven but compact, even if furrowed by gaps whose depth cannot be known, chasms or pits or craters whose edges seem in perspective to overlap like the scales of a pine cone, and it never even occurs to you to wonder what is hidden in their depth, because the panorama of the surface is already so vast and rich and various that it more than suffices to saturate the mind with information and meanings.

This is how birds think, or at least this is how Mr. Palomar thinks, imagining himself a bird. "It is only after you have come to know the surface of things," he concludes, "that you can venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface of things is inexhaustible."