Over breakfast Paul showed her a passage from Bouvard et Pécuchet, in the chapter on spiritualism: “Tous les corps animés regoivent et communiquent l’influence des astres. Proprieté analogue á la vertu de l’aimant.”
“Animate bodies being subject to astral influences is nothing new,” said Amy, chewing, “but what’s this about magnetism?”
Paul flipped to the back of his edition and showed Amy references to eighteenth and nineteenth century works on the subject. Fingertips gritty with toast, she waved it away.
“And what did Neoplatonists know about magnetism? I don’t recall anything.”
“Didn’t Lucretius mention it? It must have been known to the Renaissance; their navigators certainly had compasses.” Paul spread jam on his own slice. Like Amy, he found he did not like the sweet butter of France but was embarrassed to admit it, so made a point of always bringing home fresh confitures. They already felt like furtive Americans for having toast instead of brioches.
“Perhaps I should call the National Magnetism Board and ask. They probably have a pamphlet for school tours.”
“The what T demanded Paul, sounding very American.
“I’m sure there is one,” said Amy innocently. “Le Conseil National du Magnetisme, established by Napoleon to set standards and regulate manufacturing. It’s housed in some great Third Republic edifice, shaped like a magneto and constantly humming. Native Parisians hear nothing in that sound range.”
“I think the Nazis dismantled it to make artillery,” said Paul. “Anyway, Michel Tournier says there are no native Parisians, that the city is a huge pump, sucking up and spewing out provincials.”
“Another good nineteenth-century image. Who is Michel Tournier?”
“The city actually is a big pump, did you know that? Paris has an underground pneumatic system, unique in the world, that pipes forced air to households. It was built back in the 1880s, and was originally intended to run clocks and elevators. But the system still exists: compressed air is a utility, and if you live along the line you can get it through a tap like gas or water.”
“You’re kidding.” Amy stared. “The pneuma!” She laughed. “Where on earth did you learn that?”
“From Jean-Claude, actually. While you were in the ladies’ room. One of his friends works in street construction, and told him how they blew away loose asphalt with a hose from underground.”
“Ah.” Amy would rather not have heard Jean-Claude mentioned. “Did he say that the Arabs devised such a system hundreds of years ago?”
“No, no. Quit picking on him. And never mind about Tournier,” he added, adopting his Jeeves voice. “He is fundamentally unsound.”
They rode down the creaking elevator—“The sensation of the 1862 Swabian Exposition,” Paul remarked—and were out in the morning sunshine, which had not yet warmed the sodden air to oppressiveness. The apartment building had a courtyard, transected by two low walkways that opened on parallel streets, so that those who entered through each walkway thought of the other as the “back” one. The apartment that Paul and Amy were sub-letting looked onto the street, so Amy craned her neck each time she stepped into the courtyard to gaze up at the windows of those tenants who lived facing away from her, whom she encountered only in the building’s ducts or cavity.
“Does compressed air go everywhere?” she asked suddenly. “Or only through the business districts?”
“Evidently there are a thousand kilometers of piping under the city, and three stations to service them. There is also a steam system to provide central heating to subscribers, but that wasn’t built until after World War I.”
Amy wasn’t interested in steam pipes. “Was the forced air system ever used to deliver letters?” she asked.
“That’s an interesting question. I know they used to do so in big Paris department stores; my father once told me about them. Copper cylinders like artillery shells, running between floors with letters inside. Office buildings too, I think. Would you like me to check?”
“Yes, please.” They were passing through the low vaulted walkway, still cool in its dim interior. The entrance was blocked by a large wooden gate with a door cut in one side, which Paul fumbled with his keys to open. The blast of light and sodden air as they stepped through to the street would mark the day’s beginning, entry into the world of contingency and consequence. On good days Amy relished the second of waiting for the widening shaft of light and the wave of street sounds; on bad days she dreaded it. She had experienced few bad days this summer.
They stepped into the morning rush of the Rue Saint-Dominguez, and Amy looked down its length, wondering if pneumatic pipes ran beneath the buried cobbles. The nineteenth century, that age of progress and certainty, underlay Paris at every street, the apotheosis of late medievalism’s mechanical vision of the physical universe. How did a failed theory of the human sensorium become the design principle for a capital city’s infrastructure?
“I’m being silly,” she said, too low for Paul to hear. But she looked speculatively at the street scene, as though it were a passage that would yield up further meaning once translated carefully.
Rome was a changed city, coarser and more brutal than he remembered it. Its stinks were greater, and Tommaso had lived amid stinks for a quarter century. The fashions of the wealthy were decadent, while the common folk had lost respect for homespun decency and dressed like vagabonds. There were also a lot of foreigners in the streets, more surely than Tommaso remembered.
Few took note of him as he negotiated the market streets, one monk in a city of many. Two guardsmen accompanied him, but Tommaso made them walk two steps behind, so that he did not look as though he were under arrest and frighten tradesmen out of speaking with him. He carried a parcel under one arm, the harvest of an afternoon’s bargaining beneath the placid gaze of the incurious guards.
“Pepito,” he called to a boy, “where can I find a lumberyard?” The child, perhaps ten (although it was hard to tell; city children were always small for their age), gaped at the older man. Tommaso tucked his walking stick under the parcel and produced a copper. “The establishment where they sell wood,” he explained. The child pointed to the west, then grabbed the coin as Tommaso began to proffer it and ran.
Tommaso glanced at his guards, who had watched this without comment, and shrugged. He bore west through the winding streets (the City of the Sun would have straight avenues laid out on a grid), and tried to catch the scent of sawn wood in the fetid air. Perhaps Rome no longer built with new materials, but simply prised loose stones from the ruins of its ancient glory. He was standing uncertainly at a crossroads when he caught sight of the young boy waving vigorously from farther up the street.
Tommaso hurried forward, a prayer of thanks under his breath. When he caught sight of the sign hanging above the child’s head, however, he stopped so suddenly that one of the soldiers almost crashed into him. Swinging faintly in the breeze, the sign board bore a painting of a lyre. The boy, seeing the priest’s expression, vanished into the crowd.
Enticed by the sweet smell of cedar, Tommaso stepped into the dark interior. The scent of glue and oils hung in the still air, and a bit of sawdust crunched under his sandal. “Good morning,” Tommaso called out.
Someone was moving in the back. “Yes?” called a voice. Brushing at his apron, a frail man stepped out of the shadows. As he came forward, a bar of light slanting from the skylight fell across his face.