He spread the drawings over Victor’s desk. His partners had had the sense to keep them small and simple, at one-five-hundredth scale, so that the spirit of the group’s proposals was more evident than their complexity. For Signor Busi, the outdoors which they planned to bring indoors was more than just a scheme to shield the market stalls from wind and rain and temperature. The ‘outside’ meant the countryside as well, the world beyond the margins of the town.
‘What is a market anyway, but country brought to town?’ he asked. ‘Let’s give the people a country walk right at the city’s heart.’
He pointed to the ‘conceptualizations’ which had been sketched in ink and artist’s wash.
‘Please, pick them up and take a look,’ he said. ‘What do these elevations recall for you?’ He smiled, but furtively, while Victor shook his head. The design was called the Melting Glass Meringues by colleagues in Milan. Four spectacular glass ovals which seemed both like cakes and the domes of viscous mosques filled the Soap Market. Nine tapering barrel-vaulted aisles — spaceframed in wood and steel, spaceglazed — radiated from the centre without geometric logic but in the pleasing, balanced way that surface roots spread out from trees.
‘Here is a landscape at the city centre,’ Busi said. ‘There are no straight lines in our design, no matching planes or pitches. Instead we have the horizontal disunities of the natural landscape. We give you hills and plains and ridges made from curving sheets of glass. We look for coherence. We look for harmony. We let the natural city light, which is absorbed by brick and stone, pass through our glass and flood the building in the way that light can flood and warm and make fertile a country greenhouse. The inner walls are mirrored, and all the framing is constructed out of reflecting steel or polished wood, so that the journey of the natural light is not truncated. We have a greenhouse, then. We have the temperature and air control to maintain the perfect environment for plants and shrubs and trees. The walls are breathing walls. Outside, the city; countryside within. We have glass-bottomed elevators rising on a scenic ride through the foliage. We have nine trading corridors in human scale. And then the scale is more divine — four domes, the largest fifty metres high and visible from far away. It is a sculpture made from glass and greenery. It is a living carapace frozen in metal. It is …’ (and with a flourish Signor Busi revealed the project’s title) ‘… Arcadia. But modernized. Climate-controlled. Efficient. Accessible. Contemporary. Defended.’
With this last word, Signor Busi spread his hands, the saddened pragmatist: ‘Arcadia must be defended. Of course! We must admit the truth. If it is your wish to lure into Arcadia those better citizens who have good taste and incomes to dispose, then we must promise them security from …’ Again he spread his saddened hands. ‘… from the city itself. You see we have provided surveillance cameras, anti-theft shutters, suicide netting, commissionaires. The building is a fortress. A hand grenade would only shake its glass. It can survive the full impact of an intercontinental airliner. But this is not enough. We owe it to your customers to keep out drunks and tramps and demonstrators and people who do not come to spend, but simply wish to shelter from the rain, or sleep, or cause unpleasantness. Arcadia — as you will see — is far too good for them.’
He took Victor on a tour, beginning with the two-storey basement, cushioned in poured concrete and served by a delivery ramp concealed by lines of trees. He showed where refrigerated storage pods kept produce fresh, where ripening units brought on bananas, apples, mangoes to the colours judged best and most tempting for shoppers. Here were the offices, the basement studios, the service workshops, the market courtyards, recapturing — intensifying — a medieval market atmosphere, with coloured awnings, painted signs, terrazzo flooring, augmented natural light. And beds of shrubs, and greenhouse trees, and displays of bedding plants, with ivy, vines, and bamboo stands.
The four meringues were joined inside Arcadia by a central hub much as the four seed-carpels of nasturtiums cling fatly to their stems. The hub supported terraces and balconies, with views through foliage of the heads and hats of shoppers, and the ‘authentic’ coloured awnings on the fixed-site stalls. On the lower terraces there were bars, a restaurant, an open concert arena. The upper balconies were almost out of sight. Below them stretched netting. It hung across the higher chambers of the domes like the billows of a Tuareg tent. Above and beyond the white and green patterns of the netting, there would be the largest aviary yet built in which the Busi Partnership envisaged cockatoos and cockatiels and minah birds, who finally, would learn to call like traders. ‘All fresh today. All fresh today. No loot, no fruit.’
The centrepiece!’ Signor Busi produced a final sketch. ‘You see, we are not charlatans. We have respect for history. We have not torn the medieval washplace down. We have given it new life.’ The sketches showed what careful restoration could achieve, how medieval gargoyles could be rescued by the heroic dentistry of modern masons, how old and pitted stones could have the plaque removed, the cavities disguised, the broken tops replaced. There’d be new fountains, waterfalls, where previously the flow had been fitful and controlled by taps.
Signor Busi showed photographs of the bludgeoned washing basins where soap and stone and cloth had for so long made slapping music with the water. Then his new designs: the renewed basins were transformed by lights and plants. They were kept full and busy with piped, pumped, filtered, and circulating water, which tumbled from hidden faucets into sculpted pools and then ran into channels to troughs of plants. At night, the air-conditioning, the concourse lights, the water would be turned off and floodlights would shine onto the four meringues. They’d make the innards of Arcadia warm and fathomless with the haywire shadows of pot-bound trees.
‘I am a Milanese,’ said Signor Busi, ‘but even so I must admit that here we have a building which will be as beautiful and functional, more functional perhaps, than the Galerie Victor Emmanuel II in Milan. You share a name. You are Victor III, perhaps. You share a place in history as well, if you allow the Busi Partnership to make these drawings come alive.’
Signor Busi spread his arms and laughed. ‘No more to say.’ He left the plans and drawings where they were and put out both hands to Victor. ‘I am at your disposal until Sunday, naturally. Tante grazie, Signor Victor.’
Victor summoned Anna. She took Signor Busi to the boss’s private lift and travelled with him to the atrium and to the exit on the mall. He was ebullient and playful like an actor who has triumphed on the stage. He liked the woman at his side. Her perfume and her plumpness and the crowded intimacy of Victor’s lift loosened him. His wife was far away. He laid two fingers on her wrist. He said, ‘I think that your employer will give to me the contract for the Soap Market. Perhaps I ought to celebrate tonight, and you should be my guest at my hotel.’
Anna shook her head. ‘It’s very kind,’ she said, ‘but far too early for a celebration yet, don’t you think? Victor has another three to see.’
‘My dear,’ said Signor Busi, letting go her arm, ‘I feel it in my blood that we shall win. Our plans will be preferred.’
‘Perhaps Victor will decide to preserve the market as it is.’
Busi laughed. ‘There’s nothing to preserve. There’s nothing there. There is nothing to demolish. Of course there are the cobblestones to lift and lay again more cunningly. And there are those unkempt small bars and restaurants which cluster round the Soap Garden. Those we have to level off. And then we start from scratch! So we will speak again, I think. And many times.’