Fabric on form, January 2020
AT THE FOOT OF THE ANGEL-STUDDED BRIDGE that crosses from the ancient hospital over the Tiber and out of the Borgo, a small and impractical courtyard sits wedged between two busy streets and an underpass. It is one of those leftover pieces of land sometimes called “refuge islands” that normally provide very little in the way of refuge beyond nominal safety from oncoming traffic. This one is about five hundred meters from San Pietro and is traversed all day by the people who have come from far and wide to see the basilica’s wonders and its works of art.
It must have been a headache, many years ago, for the city planner or whoever was charged with these bland municipal tasks to manage this incidental triangle of dirt. They could not plant grass there, because all grass turns back to hard-packed dirt in the heart of the Eternal City. Nothing soft and living lasts long underfoot. So the municipal workers put down paving stones to keep the dirt from becoming studded with broken glass or eroding into a pit of mud and trash. They installed a few slab benches and separated a terrace from the sidewalk with steps and low concrete walls. They planted three saplings, which was a kindness.
On any given day—even now, in January, when visitors are fewest—thousands of pedestrians pass on the island’s sidewalk, either down toward the crosswalk or up over the bridge, and almost none of them step up onto the little terrace. If it actually overlooked the Tiber, it might be a favorite place for tourists to sit and eat their fast-food lunches, to stop and get a head count before leaving the Borgo, to take a picture with the water and the Castel Sant’Angelo, refuge of popes and corpses, which sits like a massive cake at the bend of the river. As it is, from the accidental overlook one can mainly see the highway that runs along the river, not the river itself. The tourists never stop there to rest, and the locals have better places to be.
It is not so hidden as to be interesting to lovers, explorers, or dealers, but not so open as to attract attention. The courtyard seems to have no purpose aside from housing the three cork oaks that are no longer saplings.
Given this arrangement, it is not surprising that about a dozen men have taken up residence here. Their number and the durations of their stays fluctuate based on the day and the season: now, in the winter, they are fewer, but more permanently settled, nested in the many trappings of keeping warm. On the coldest nights, puffs of breath plume up over the concrete walls. The far end of the island is crowded by three tents, and the two longer walls are already lined with lean-tos made of tarps, so someone has been left with the spot just at the entrance, where the low walls open: the place most visible to the people on Via San Pio X and the sidewalk and the bridge. It is not necessarily the worst place to sleep—there is at least a bench—but there is no privacy and little shade.
There are many, many reasons not to be asleep at night, and few reasons not to sleep during the day. There is the sun, of course, but it is easier to keep out the sun in the day than to keep out danger in the night.
Look: the one sleeping in this most visible place appears to have covered himself and the bench entirely with an enormous tan sheet that drapes down to the ground and piles there. He has pulled two more blankets, orange and yellow, onto his torso and legs, and has leaned a small metal dolly cart onto his lap to pin them in place. His form is very tall, his shoulders broad and square. He has propped his covered head and legs up on his bags so that only his back rests on the bench. He curves upward, cradled by nothing. He must be very tired.
The pietà in San Pietro that the crowds have come to see, like every other pietà in the world, has the benefit of a mother. A work of art called Pietà might show a slab of rock, a hill, a city, the other dead, the other mourning, but always Mary holding her son’s ruined form. Though caresses are too late for such a body, a mother at least lends some structural integrity to a son’s limp figure, such that he does not have to find a place for his own head and feet.
The cloud-covered days are not beautiful, but they are warm enough to sleep. The coldest days are clear. This day is dim and gray and does not change in color or temperature as it goes on.
Come back, look again: the form on the bench does not move for hours. The others enter and leave their tents, smoke cigarettes, argue lightly, leave to find food, discuss the day’s news, wake up and return to sleep. Even the most exhausted roll over on their benches from time to time. It is the rare man who can sleep long and sound on a cold slab of concrete, even if he has been practicing for many years. But stillness comes easily for the man who is unconscious, or on his way out of the world.
Most pietàs have their own private chapel, or at least a niche or corner of a church. The least the world can give a body is someone to grieve it; the least the world can give a grieving person is a warm and safe place to grieve.
The man is not breathing. The others, when they sleep, waver, hushing up and down like the Tiber at its banks. This thrice-shrouded form does not breathe, and no one touches it.
The nearest pietà is Michelangelo’s, just inside the entrance of San Pietro, in its own chapel. There, Mary’s lap is wide, solid, and benchlike. Either she has grown in grief or her son has shrunk in death, though both are much larger than any who come to see them. Two young, uncovered faces, meticulously cleaned by cotton swab and airbrush.
Everywhere in the basilica, the dead are on display. Corpses of popes lie beneath altars in illuminated glass caskets, glowing prisms like Snow White’s coffin or the refrigerated display cases at the front counters of cafés. In one such fridge-coffin, under the altar of Saint Jerome, a short walk down the north aisle from the famous pietà, lies Pope John XXIII, who convened the Second Vatican Council and died before it changed the church dramatically. He was too short and squat for the papal garments on the day he was elected, but in death he has been swathed in beautiful and well-tailored robes that are half bridal lace, half fur-lined velvet. Soft and pink, he really looks as though he might just be sleeping, except that he is very still and wearing clothing in which no one could reasonably sleep, and except that he is in a box.
When, at the turn of the third millennium, embalming workers unsealed his original coffin, they found his body surprisingly incorrupt, and this might have been considered a miracle in an earlier time. To render his form even less corrupt, to prepare his death-sleep for public sight, they submerged it in months-long baths of camphor, nitrobenzene, turpentine, benzoic acid; they wrapped it with linen strips drenched in mercury bichloride. They molded skinlike wax over his face and hands. By the end, the inanimate remains looked remarkably animate, and all but one of the workers had died of cancer.
A man carrying a white plastic bag crosses the street to the island. He walks with a slight slant forward, as if his shoulders are impatient with his shuffling feet. He steps up into the courtyard, goes straight to the most visible place, and pulls back the tan blanket. The man underneath disappears, and there is only a pile of bags and packs as long and tall as a giant.
It is not necessarily the worst place on the island to sleep, but it is undoubtedly the worst place to leave your belongings, even for a moment, because anyone could see them, decide they want them, come and take them. And so it has occurred to the man in this position that there is one way to make sure no one will want to look closely. When he has to go about his business in the city—if it takes any longer than getting water from the hospital lobby—he first meticulously positions, rolls, and sculpts his belongings into this most effective shape.
The eye snaps toward anything resembling a human figure. We see people in the clouds, a man in the moon, someone standing in our closet among the overcoats. This is nothing whimsical; it is an electrical imperative of the brain to hyper-recognize things shaped like human forms, and especially faces, because of neurons specialized for facial recognition. When these are damaged, we cannot distinguish our mother’s face from that of a stranger on the street. When they are pathologically overactive, we see innumerable, inescapable faces swirling and taunting us in every object, crevice, wall, and landscape. Under normal circumstances, face-selective cells in the visual cortex recognize and signal, That’s a face! And a hundred milliseconds later, other cells in the medial temporal cortex determine whether it’s a face we know. Even when a face is not visible, the attention snaps toward anything that may be a human form. The song of a little chorus of neurons: one recognizes the bend of an elbow, another the curve of a thigh, another the knobby bit of an ankle. And when all of these, or many of them, are singing out their electrical signals at once, higher structures put the pieces together in milliseconds and cry, That is a body. Even when some characteristic of the body is missing—movement, the surface of the skin—the mind, already convinced of what it sees, fills in the gaps.
So the shape of a human body does not deflect the initial attention of the passerby on the refuge island; in fact it draws that first look. But one look does not cause theft or cleaning out, having to start over with no food or bedding. You cannot avoid the initial being-seen, anyway: there is nowhere here to be completely out of sight. It is the second look, the craning neck, the too-close inspection that must be prevented, and above all the touching.
Thieves and municipal cleaners both afflict the inhabitants of the island, but the cleaners are a little worse. The thief might take your blankets or your food, but he cannot take all of them, and you might, at an opportune time, steal them back. Cleaners are slow and inexorable, trashing everything indiscriminately, drawling and pointing and standing around with their hands on their hips as if they were carrying out some kind of responsibility. It’s not up to us, they say. Nothing is up to us. But they come from the government, and they get paid to do it, and this is enough to set them below the rank of thief.
Beyond the refuge island a great seagull violently displaces the pigeons that have perched on the wings of the bridge’s first angel, who herself knows nothing of good tidings or great joy. She is a Winged Victory, and her only message is the sword in her hand. The pigeons scatter in a panic of iridescent grime, shouting oo in protest, pooling defeated at Victory’s feet like an oil spill and launching their fat, exhausted bodies back into the air in fear every time a bridge-walker passes too close, unaware.
The form of a man sleeping is enough to deter all merely wandering visitors, because they do not want to be near difficulty or danger, and also because, despite their incessant photography, they do have some dim understanding of respect. A sleeping form wards off most thieves and cleaners, because they see plainly that he may awake and confront them. But if it looks as though he may never wake, all the better, for who wants to discover a dead or dying man? It is the best defense. All who notice it purposefully look away.
Beneath the feet of the hundreds of workers and thousands of visitors in San Pietro, beneath the marble feet of Mary, visible through the ornate brass grates in the floor, ninety-one dead popes are arrayed in great sarcophagi. In many cases the likeness of the dead pope has been carved into the massive slab that covers his remains. Each stone man resting in high relief is much longer and taller than he ever could have been in life, smoother-skinned and more serene. Their marble heads and feet are propped up on marble pillows with marble tassels and marble stitching; marble linens drape down to the base of the sarcophagi and pile there; marble cushions make the effigy of each man seem acceptably comfortable. As over the centuries they died one by one, each was adjusted and arranged to look as if he were only asleep, and this pretended sleep was imitated in stone. Inanimate matter, styled as dead matter, styled as someone alive and sleeping.
How did the bag sculptor come to learn his art? What has happened, over the many years of his life, to teach him that people are almost certain not to approach the form of a person unmoving in distress—that his best disguise is death?
We have never wanted to touch the dead. The human hand snapped away from whatever looked sick, dead, or dying long before we understood contagion or parasites. Even Mary’s marble hand does not touch her son’s skin: she holds her robe between herself and him. But because she so obviously holds and sees him, loves and mourns him, commentators interpret this not touching as an act of reverence. She is surrounded by the sustained and reverent attention of multitudes, and a bulletproof plexiglass shield keeps the multitudes from disturbing the dead and mourning. Before the shield they often tried to touch her finger, her son’s face, the wound between his bare ribs, her long and draping garment. Once a man attacked the grieving mother with a geologist’s hammer, shattering her arm and hand and cracking off parts of her face. He did not harm the dead one.
Michelangelo’s Pietà, like all the others, was created with the knowledge that the pain in those faces would soon pass. The crowds press in and look at the sorrowful mother and feel the pathos, but the sculptor knew and the viewers know that two days after this scene, her lifeless bare-ribbed son will be alive again, and this makes it bearable and approachable, so different from the sight of grief whose end escapes us. The sprawling form of Christ has people pressing in from all sides to see, to see, to commiserate, to think of their relation to this pain. How they feel it, what they have caused.
The sculptor’s hands move more quickly than his feet did, and he excavates his things with precision until he finds a gray and purple backpack and a black plastic bag, and after taking these things he reassembles his belongings as they were and drapes the three blankets again and there appears the man-shaped form, just missing breath. There is a brief word with a bearded head that has emerged halfway from a sky-blue tent, and the man of true flesh leaves the island the way he came, slanting himself toward the basilica and beneath it the dead, real and wrought, in their own quiet city.
Sharon Christner is from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. She enjoys making monks laugh.
Photo by Serhat Beyazkaya on Unsplash
