Piazza delle Cinque Scole, 2017

The tiny restaurant Sora Margherita issues orders secretly to the piazza. She is to the piazza what Sam’s dog was to David Berkowitz. ­­­Now, she pretends indifference to the hail, as if she had nothing to do with it. She sits quietly, changing colors as she now does (last year she was only red, but now she changes), only occasionally revealing her powers when cars in the piazza, or the sampietrini before here in the rain, reflect her colors: the piazza glints blue. It began with the colors, then expanded to the weather, and the traffic too …

Sora Margherita, by day, especially in sunlight, looks utterly innocent, nonchalant, as if she didn’t have any special powers, as if she had no impact on what happens in the piazza, (or elsewhere), as if she had nothing to do with putting the fountain in shadow or in turning the water on and off. The fountain is dry now, but soon it will be turned on again, making its unbelievable music in which one hears fires and floods, bells, birds, babies crying, the wind, orchestras tuning up

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Now see the piazza at night. My little bedroom is an antechamber to the piazza, is pressed up against the piazza, especially when its tall windows are open wide. Lying in bed is like lying on in a hammock on the porch of the piazza, with the water reflection moving on the ceiling. I am breathlessly thrilled to be among a relatively small number of people in the history of the universe who have been able to look down on the fountain, thus looking into its upper chamber, and as such incurring the special responsibility of having to learn how to climb up onto the lower fountain with a long stick to fish out the corpses of the birds who have died in the upper fountain and float there, where the municipal workers who come (magari, if only) to fish the dead birds out of the lower fountain that no one can see. It is my civic duty and my great privilege. In dreams begin responsibilities …