#29: Silent Lights

There is no sound in photographs.

Breaking glass. I learned to love the times when Rome awakened and shook us into consciousness with the dawn. Her transparent dead were everywhere, empty and prostrate but their spirits still watched over the Campo, haunting in the grey light, framing the littered expanse. Wounded soldiers joined them, grudgingly, still weary from a long night at their posts. These armies of stalwarts, garrisoned in alleys, under cars and bridges, seemed to explode from sheer boredom. Anything to punctuate a cloying silence, or a crowd’s monotonous hum. Sometimes a Roman would assist them and they flew through the air in shining arcs piercing the air with their sound. With time enough for just one cry, and then they were silent, sprawled against walls and cobblestones.

Rarer were the tall sentinels trained not to break with such ease. Vino, acqua naturale. Or frizzante, but birra was better for quenching that kind of thirst, thirst for cold acid and air. Towers of plastic cells all around us imprisoned their healthy kin, safe but not free to feel the stones we touched. Our feet knew Rome. They conversed with the little warriors, the conforming, the branded, the all, spent on that road - within their caste, some heavier, but outwardly each the same as the next. Until they spoke. As they fell by height or hand, unique voices rang out with surprise and shock. Different tones in different lengths. In their sound they were as varied as the shapes and sizes of their bones, which were scattered far and wide in the night but collected in the crevices between cobblestones, lying reposed in lingering channels of black water until they appeared as shards of flint bound to the stones inlaid, more rock than glass.

Some cries ended abruptly, as if plunged into water. Others rattled in sustained chords. Shattering in ones, sometimes twos, rarely threes. Triads of pitches and harmonies reverberated across the piazza and snuck up through the windows and under the covers; I learned to welcome the perfect, the fourths and fifths beautiful in violent crashing elegance. The meshing of others did not fall so well on the ears, if not in tone then in volume. Rome emptied her dishwasher each morning, one piazza at a time.

Pictures without sound. Sound without visuals. Video would provide both, yet damper each by leaving less to the imagination. Even if photographs could capture the morning’s welcome fanfare, would it be of the trucks and containers circling the square, sweeping and cleaning? Or would it be of the drunken revelers stumbling home, glazed and cracked like broken glass kicked to broken walls?