Moriana

Note

One side of Moriana shows alabaster gates transparent in the sun, coral colonnades, glass villas where the shadows of dancing girls with silver scales swim beneath medusa-shaped chandeliers. But anyone who has travelled before knows such cities have an obverse, reached simply by walking a semicircle: rusting sheet metal, sackcloth, pipes black with soot, piles of tins, ropes fit only for hanging oneself from a rotten beam. Calvino closes the image in a single line: the city has no thickness at all: it is a sheet of paper with a figure on either side, which can neither be separated nor look at each other.

The scene takes that line literally. Moriana here really is one sheet: a curved wall, thin as a blade, bent into an arc a little wider than a semicircle. On its concave face, turned toward whoever arrives, the alabaster and coral stand in the shallowest of relief, barely lifted off the wall; on its convex back, visible only by walking all the way around, the same silhouette returns rebuilt from rust, sacking and soot. The two skins never touch: seen edge-on, at either end of the arc, the whole city thins to a line and all but disappears.

In the glass villas light runs as if through water, jellyfish chandeliers breathe, and silver scales turn slowly on themselves: the shadows of the dancers. Tap a villa and its chandelier lights, its scales begin to dance; and in the same instant, at the exact opposite point, on the face you cannot see, a sheet of metal shudders and dust rises. The two sides stay bound, and never meet: walk around the sheet to find out what the back of what you admire is made of.