City of Pain
By: Teju Cole
Tags: Creative Writing, Short Story, Fiction, Literary Fiction, Writing

And after one of those journeys that involved the drawing of an imaginary line across the Earth, a flight that brought her to the gleaming nowhere of an airport in the early hours of the morning, the traveler caught another flight, around noon, and continued her journey. She spent six hours on this second plane, or it might have been 16 hours; the difference between the two was difficult to tell in that airborne suspension. The traveler’s wristwatch made one claim, her calendar made another, and her jet-lagged body made a third. Finally, around midday, the plane began its approach for landing, and the traveler could see from the air what resembled, in almost every respect, a familiar metropolis: the same twisting highways, the same elongated parks, the same repeating towers. It reminded her, as aerial views always did, of what her mother had once told her about the collapse of enormous stars, which could shrink to a width no greater than that of a city. Judging only by distance covered, the traveler might well have just circled the globe and returned to the place where she had started. But there was something about this view that convinced her otherwise: The immense city was circular, and the tangle of highways in its center resolved neatly into several major roads leading outward, like the spokes of a wheel. This cartographic regularity was how she knew that she had arrived, for the first time, in the city of Reggiana.

In the terminal, she saw a signboard featuring the crest of the city, illustrated with three dolphins. She’d arrived in late winter, and the weather was inconstant. There were snow flurries one moment and the softest sunshine the next, and yet, she was soon to discover, no matter what the weather looked like on a given day, the temperature was always higher than expected. She who knew how similar cities could be was now interested only in their differences. When she discovered that all the citizens of Reggiana were refugees, recent arrivals from elsewhere, she knew she had come to the right place. The city had been rapidly constructed, everyone coming in at almost the same time; the founding myth said that between the city’s establishment and its peak population, hardly a full season had passed. This collective newness meant that learning the culture of Reggiana was itself central to the culture of Reggiana. Like Qom or Touba, Reggiana was a holy city. As in Jerusalem, Lhasa, Mecca, and Ile-Ife, the experience of the numinous was pervasive in all its streets and on all its walls. To touch a railing or open a gate in Reggiana was to be reminded of human mortality. There was no interaction that was not imbued with a tremendous weight; each was like a sugar cube as heavy as Mount Everest. All this was true, but the atmosphere of the city was neither ascetic nor dramatic. The citizens had, instead, a sober sense of living in an ensorcelled world in which the conflict was with what they could not see. They knew that what was invisible was not thereby imaginary. They were under the scourge of a Visitation, and it was for this reason that all Reggiani carried a curfew in their heads and a knot in their hearts.

At the time of the traveler’s visit, the hand of Death was heavy on that careful city. As in all earthly places, people were born and people died, but Reggiana also daily endured numerous additional bereavements. So extensive was the scourge that, for many of the citizens, the day’s first activity was to check the obituaries. As one carter said to the traveler, taking her to collect her rations: “Each one of us checks the obituaries not only to see who has died during the night but also to confirm that it was not us.” On his cart was painted the city’s crest, which featured a doorknob. “Reggiana,” the carter added, “is one of the few true democracies in the world. Anyone at any moment might succumb to the Visitation: the rich, the poor, the educated or simple, the well-known or anonymous. The actual population of the city is unclear, for we stubbornly include the dead on our census rolls.” He told her that one of the first to die during the Visitation was a customer of his, who had been a leading architect of the city. That man was still referred to, the carter said, in the present tense.

Photo: Teju Cole

The Reggiani traded stories the same way merchants in other cities traded spices, leather goods, perfumes, rugs, and carvings. Each story told in Reggiana was different, and only in memory, only when the traveler attempted to recount to herself the story that she heard, did it become evident that the stories were all one story, variations on a single tale which, in one way or another, were connected to the Visitation. But she soon forgot this realization, and, the next day, encountering new stories, each was as fresh in her hearing as it was in the storyteller’s telling. One afternoon, writing down an account of one who had recovered from the Visitation, she heard the church bell ring, summoning no one, and the azaan sound from the next neighborhood over, unattended by the hurry of feet. No one gathered in the churches or synagogues, no one assembled in the temples or mosques, the schools were empty, the shops remained shuttered, the people stayed home. But the inhabitants of Reggiana were deeply interconnected, and all their civic and social life was conducted within domestic walls. In each house in the city was a means of communication. Families from all over the city reached each other from these humble enclosures; businesses large and small were operated from kitchen tables and bedrooms; lovers, ex-lovers, and future lovers engaged in all the stratagems by which desire could be cultivated in the absence of the beloved’s body.

There are particular forms of knowledge possessed by those who have had to rebuild their reality. The Reggiani were great gourmands, cooking with flagrant disregard for borders, with palm oil, fish sauce, garri, beets, yoghurt, harissa, anchovies, yuca; but what really marked out the cuisine of Reggiana was the love of concentration in all its forms: Given a choice, they would choose demi-glaces instead of stocks, spirits instead of beer, wine instead of water, paste instead of tomatoes, chiles instead of capsicum. Alongside this love of whatever was reduced, preserved, dehydrated, spicy, and pickled, was an inclination toward frugality and an abhorrence of needless waste, culinary or otherwise. No city of comparable size produced less garbage. These habits came naturally to whoever came to the city. The traveler had only been with them a few days when she noticed that she was writing her notes down with the same pencil, day after day, sharpening it each time it became blunt. She felt no inclination to go outside to buy a new one nor would she have been able to as the stationery stores were closed. Shorter and shorter the pencil became until it was the size of a golf pencil. The traveler, writing, marveled at this, not only because she had not persisted with a single pencil since childhood, but also because she was thrilled to share the modesty of the citizens of the city in this way, though she was, herself, only a temporary resident.