After cycling for an hour he had still seen no movement — no cars, no people. He crossed a bridge and cycled through a landscape of gentle hills and tree-shaped trees. A sign said CRESCENT CITY 25 MILES. He became aware of a breeze, a few clouds. A flock of birds, drifting smoke. A car came roaring towards him, passed in a swirl of grit and fumes. He saw a dog padding along the roadside, tail wagging. Minutes later he waved at a woman and a child who smiled and waved back. Their gestures — and especially the child’s red bobble hat — were surprisingly familiar and as he cycled towards Crescent City little details of the landscape also touched elusive chords in his memory.
In the city itself he was constantly assailed by a sense of déjà vu. Although he had never been here before every street corner and house was steeped in memories. Entering the bakery, asking for croissants, handing over coins, the way the assistant smiled and said, ‘Merci, au revoir’ — each gesture was like an echo of one that had already occurred. When the desk clerk showed him to his room at a boarding house he knew, fractionally before the door was opened, how it would be arranged: the bed tucked into an alcove, a porcelain jug and bowl on a chest of drawers, sunlight pouring into the dim room when the shutters were opened. In the days that followed a single detail often brought back a whole sequence of events: seeing two birds perched on a phone line recalled a previous time when he had walked down exactly this street, at precisely this time of the evening, with the elderly couple limping towards him.
And then there were the wind-chimes which hung from the balconies of houses. All over the city the air was full of the sound of fragile tinkling. It was a beautiful sound and Walker was startled by how deeply these chimes affected him. The breeze connected houses to each other like phone lines, brushing one set of chimes fractionally before another as it made its way through the streets.
More than anything else it was these chimes that filled him with déjà vu. Each chime was less like the actual noise of the metal tubes touching than the memory of that moment, of that sound, endlessly renewed. He made a recording of the chimes but the tape made them sound like wire hangers jangling in a wardrobe, preserving none of their resonance.
The chimes haunted Walker, convincing him that he had been here before, but however hard he tried — in fact the harder he tried the more elusive the sense became — he was unable to fathom the origin of this sensation. He wondered if Malory had experienced the same thing when he had passed through Crescent City. Perhaps it was experienced by everyone who came here and the sensation of déjà vu — there was something familiar even about this sequence of reasoning — was the city’s distinguishing feature, like the canals of Venice, the garbage dumps of Leonia or the spires of Christminster. Walker’s sense of following in his own footsteps grew steadily but no less subtly stronger.
Then, as he walked down Esplanade, each step adding to — without confirming — the feeling that he had done this before, he began to wonder if there were some way in which he could use this to his advantage. Until now he had been dragging memories in his wake; he had to try to allow these hinted memories to lead him onwards, to show him what to do next. Since it became more difficult to pin down the feeling the harder he concentrated, he had to make his mind blank, to cease being an active agent of his own intentions and allow the sensation to ebb and flow as he wandered. The problem was that a sense of déjà vu pervaded the entire city and as time passed the hinted memories he sought to follow became overlaid by the actual memories of the previous days. The strongest, deepest, most allusive sensations were the most elusive and least immediate.
He drifted through the city, tugged by shifting currents of memory, until he found himself outside an old wooden house, painted white. Windows, open shutters. Chimes hanging from the balcony, stroked by a breeze no longer there.
He unlatched the wrought-iron gate and walked round the side of the house. Strewn with leaves, a lawn extended from a conservatory to some flower-beds, bare except for clipped rose bushes. Beyond the flower-beds was a patch of rough ground and a grey-haired man scooping up armfuls of leaves and tossing them on to a bonfire. Walker stood in the middle of the lawn watching him. He appeared lost in thought, pausing in his work and watching the flames, tugging at his right ear-lobe with thumb and forefinger. Thin smoke smudged the sky. The man turned and looked at him, hesitated, and then resumed his work.
Repeating a sequence of events enacted before, Walker passed through the conservatory and into the house. From a ground-floor room he heard a crackly recording of a cello, a woman humming gently in tune with it, the rattle of teacups. He went upstairs and into a small study. Typed pages were scattered over the floor. He looked out of the window and saw an old woman carrying a tray of cups and plates over to a weather-worn table in the garden. The man looked up, saw her, smiled.
Beneath the window was an open roll-top desk. Propped on one side of the desk was an old postcard showing a silent piazza, empty except for a statue and striding shadows. On the back, in his own handwriting, was the name of the city in the picture: Imbria.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
He travelled there the next day. It was a city of empty piazzas, red towers and the endless perfect arches of arcades. Mustard-coloured walls, ochre streets. He noticed red towers and arcades but mainly he was aware of the space between things, as if there were more space here than was possible. There was no distance or direction, only perspective and white walls, mustard-coloured streets. The city looked the same in every direction — arcades, piazzas, towers, long shadows — but each new view was unfamiliar, strange. Whenever he turned a corner a new but identical vista of arcades and towers opened up before him. Only one sense mattered here. Everything was arranged for the eye.
The sky was turquoise, becoming lighter, greener, close to the pencil-line horizon. The light made the walls of the buildings glow amber. On the other side of the square was the city hall, a tower and clock face that told nothing. Time slid across the piazza in angular shadows. Always it was the shadows, dark as a girl’s hair, that he noticed first. Even a stone in the middle of the piazza cast a shadow the length of a man. Shadows peeked from the edge of a wall and when he turned the corner to see what cast them his attention was held by another shadow, projected from beyond the next corner. Something seemed always to be going on just beyond the edge of his vision, around the next corner. Everything happened in the distance. In this way the city lured him through itself.
Between the mustard walls of a building he caught a glimpse of the sea. He wandered in that direction but did not get any nearer. Space swallowed him up. Shadows slid into the cool arcades. Up ahead was a red tower with flags flying. He turned a corner and there was the sea. Flat, opalescent, lapping gently beyond the low wall. Near the horizon was a triangle of sail, brilliant white. A white cane had been left propped against the wall. A statue gazed out to sea. On the sea-wall was a book, pages flapping in the wind — except there was no wind. Everything was still but the pages were flapping as if in a spring breeze. He moved closer to the book, listened to the rustle of the pages: as if the book were alive, like a creature whose breath had only the strength to make this faint flutter.
Out of the corner of his eye he noticed a shadow emerge from an arcade. A figure stood in the piazza where Walker himself had been standing minutes earlier. They stared at each other, each mirroring the other’s reaction, neither displaying shock or alarm, and then moved on. The sky was an even deeper turquoise than before. Instead of becoming darker, the light had been squeezed, concentrated. Beyond the city was the low swell of Renaissance hills.