Invisible Cities

Very well written nonsense.

"A vegetable vendor was weighing a cabbage on a scales and put it in a basket dangling on a string a girl lowered from a balcony. The girl was identical with one in my village who had gone mad for love and killed herself. The vegetable vendor raised her face: she was my grandmother. I thought: "You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living.
And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask."

The stevedores climbed the steps in a line, bent beneath demijohns and barrels; their faces were hidden by sackcloth hoods; "Now they will straighten up and I will recognize them," I thought, with impatience and fear. But I could not take my eyes off them; if I turned my gaze just a little toward the
crowd that crammed those narrow streets, I was assailed by unexpected faces, reappearing from far away, staring at me as if demanding recognition, as if to recognize me, as if they had already recognized me. Perhaps, for each of them, I also resembled someone who was dead. I had barely arrived at Adelma and I was already one of them, I had gone over to their side, absorbed in
that kaleidoscope of eyes, wrinkles, grimaces. 95 I thought: "Perhaps Adelma is the city where you arrive dying and where each finds again the people he has known. This means I, too, am dead."
And I also thought: "This means the beyond is not happy."

---

But first, for many long years, it was uncertain whether or not the final victory would not go to the
last species left to fight man's possession of the city: the rats. From each generation of rodents that the people managed to exterminate, the few surviviors gave birth to a tougher progeny, invulnerable to traps and resistant to all poison. In the space of a few weeks, the sewers of Theodora were repopulated with hordes of spreading rats. At last, with an extreme massacre, the murderous, versatile ingenuity of mankind defeated the overweening life-force of the enemy. The city, great cemetery of the animal kingdom, was closed, aseptic, over the final buried corpses with 159 their last Beas and their last germs. Man had finally reestablished the order of the world which he had
himself upset: no other living species existed to cast any doubts. To recall what had been fauna, Theodora's library would preserve on its shelves the volumes of Buffon and Linnaeus. At least that is what Theodora's inhabitants believed, far from imagining that a forgotten fauna was stirring from its lethargy. Relegated for long eras to remote hiding places, ever since it had been deposed by the system of nonextinct species, the other fauna was coming back to the light from the library's basements where the incunabula were kept; it was leaping from the capitals and drainpipes, perching at the sleepers' bedside. Sphinxes, griffons, chimeras, dragons, hircocervi, harpies, hydras, unicorns, basilisks were resuming possession of their city.

This very short novel is completely unique in that it is collection of stories about cities that are really ideas and feelings. The stories are tied together by an imagined conversation between Marco Polo, who is reporting on the cities, and Kublai Khan who is unable to venture out and explore himself.

It's about memory, so it's interesting to reread it and see what I do and don't remember about the cities. The first time I read it was in 2010 while my dad was dying, and the city that stuck out was the one where ships sailed out and none returned. But in my reread I discovered this wasn't one of Marco Polo's cities but the Kublai Khan's dream, to which Marco Polo replies, "Forgive me, my lord, there is no doubt that sooner or later I shall set sail from that dock," says Marco, "but I shall not come back to tell you about it. The city exists and it has a simple secret: it knows only departures, not returns."