First installment of a vainglorious and arrogant appendix to "Invisible Cities" by Italo Calvino. Hypothetical accounts of Marco Polo Khan, returning from Shanghai tireless dawn of the twenty-first century.
prologue from "Invisible Cities"
"It is said that Kublai Khan believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his, but certainly not the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater curiosity and attention than any other messenger or explorer of his.
In the life of the emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the immense breadth of lands we conquered, the melancholy and relief in knowing that soon give them up to know and understand, a sense of emptiness that comes over us an evening with the smell of the elephants after the rain of ash and sandalwood that cooling in the brazier, a vertigo that shakes the storied rivers and mountains on the backs of tawny planispheres, rolled one over the dispatches that we announce the recent landslide defeat to defeat enemy armies, and scrape the wax seal of King never heard of begging advancing the protection of our military in exchange for annual tributes of precious metals, tanned hides and tortoise shells: it is the desperate moment when we discover that this had seemed to us that the sum of all wonders is an endless collapse nor form, that corruption is too ingrained for our scepter to offer protection, that the triumph over opposing rulers made us heirs of their long decay. It is only through Marco Polo, Kublai Khan was able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the watermark of a design so subtle as to escape the bite of termites. "
First
guide cities and the sky
Miranda
Arriving at
Miranda is on flat ground during the day a great chessboard of shadowy rectangles, fresh or dusty, secluded or transparencies, wrinkled or wheezing. These are nothing but the projection of the many roofs that make up the city, suspended in midair second inscrutable laws. Sharp and treacherous, soft and packed, histrionic and lumpy, smoky and laconic, the roofs form an archipelago of solid thick and indecipherable incunabula, called by its inhabitants Miranda. Every day, when the sun starts to drop, you start with a noisy team of long hooks to unroll the sheets that are squatting on the roofs. Each sheet has a different warp and weft, in some bright rivulets flowing from above, others take on the appearance of an incomplete puzzle, many nests are colonized by unstable rubber canvas. Only when the sheets are rolled out, and with insistent beeps forewarn their arrival on the ground, the soil is indifferent shared in streets and squares, courtyards and secret gardens. The night brings guidance and direction to the inhabitants, shelter and certainty, until, at sunrise, the relentless team rewinds towels, and shrinks in a sleepy endless shadowy rectangles of Miranda.
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