Centrale Montemartini

Lo how the mighty. There’s ex-mightiness all around here, the might of the grand machinery now “fallen silent” – “fallen” – the might of the empire now “fallen” but now so long ago that it’s settled like dust. In fact it IS dust, and I think every day as I sweep (well, I think every day when I sweep) that just as sweepings in Iowa have bits of pig fur in them, prairieflower pollen and lots of pesticides, and the water has the antibiotics they give the animals, and maybe yet a few molecules of dinosaurs’ wings that survived from the swamp that was drained only in the nineteenth century by the European settlers (dirty work of Empire always done by the poor), so here, but much more distantly but still, I’m collecting from under the bed part of the right half of the face of that broken-hearted and broken-faced maiden, the fingers of that muscle-bound minor god, the garment of that little satyr. There’s talk of archival dust but has there ever been a scientific-anthropological investigation into actual dust?

Here the past interferes and intervenes in everyday life as carbonato di calcio. I’m speaking metaphorically, but also not. The water is so hard that mineral collects and clogs everywhere. I didn’t know how to properly clean my showerhead and it had to be replaced with a clever one with a tiny rubber nipple for each hole that I brush with my fingers to clear and sometimes out comes a tiny white crumb, the calcium that had accumulated there. I still don’t know how to clean my kettle and when I empty it completely big white chunks come out looking like marble, but crumbling and porous. At the bottom of the toilet is a dark brown accumulus which I can’t wash away. It is actually adhered to the ceramic. “They’re gonna make you pay for a new toilet when you leave,” Isabella says. — “It can’t be cleaned?”” —  “Past a certain point, no.”

Rome is a plumber’s paradise. They are in high demand everywhere with their snakes, everywhere shrugging, Sorry signora, gotta replace the pipe. PVC changes all this, of course. Gotta wonder if whatever giant union that enfolds plumbers has fought it.

Well, these statues are made of the same stuff. Obviously as they broke and became dust they got into soil, into air, into our plumbing, our kettles, our black jeans streaked white after the wash. We’re drinking them in tea and coffee, thought I buy spring water to preserve the life of my espresso machine with its tiny apertures and tubes.

The Amazons of Centrale Montemartini, half-gone to the ground, the air, getting scrubbed off our dishes, we swallow them every day. And so on.

The giant machinery of Centrale Montemartini, which ran on coal, product of time and sedimentation, of the Amazons, of dinosaur bones and trees, feathers, fur, etcetera, under tremendous pressure, over time became coal, which also lined our linings and we swept it from under the bed.

In the midst of all this a girl statue looks directly at me with the slightest smile. She’s got a sense of humor one can barely detect except it’s something in the way a shadow falls on her cheek, the musculature of her cheek, humor, openness; she feels like she’s at the beginning of an adventure.