CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR

Lift Machinery, 2

SOMETIMES HE IMAGINED the building as an iceberg whose visible tip included the main floors and eaves and whose submerged mass began below the first level of cellars: stairs with resounding steps going down in spirals; long tiled corridors, their luminous globes encased in wire netting, their iron doors stencilled with warnings and skulls; goods lifts with riveted walls; air vents equipped with huge, motionless fans; metal-lined canvas fire hoses as thick as tree trunks, connected to yellow stopcocks a yard in diameter; cylindrical wells drilled into solid rock; concrete tunnels capped with regularly spaced skylights of frosted glass; recesses; storerooms; bunkers; strongrooms with armourplated doors.

Lower down there would come a gasping of machinery, in depths momentarily glimmering with red light. Narrow conduits would debouch on vast enclosed spaces, on subterranean halls high as cathedrals, their vaults clustered with chains, pulleys, cables, pipes, conduits, joists, with movable platforms attached to jacks bright with grease, with frames of tubing and steel sections that formed gigantic scaffoldings, at whose summits men clad in asbestos, their faces shielded by trapezial visors, filled the air with the vivid flashes of arc lamps.

Lower still would come silos and sheds; cold-storage rooms; ripening rooms; mail-sorting offices; shunting stations with their switching posts; steam locomotives pulling railway trucks, flat wagons, sealed cars, container cars, tank cars; platforms stacked high with goods – cords of tropical wood, bales of tea, bags of rice, pyramids of brick and through-stone, rolls of barbed wire, extruded steel wire, angle irons, ingots, bags of cement, drums, hogsheads, cordage, jerry cans, tanks of butane.

And still further down: mountains of sand, gravel, coke, slag, and track ballast; concrete mixers; ash heaps; mine shafts glowing with orange light; reservoirs; gasworks; steam generators; derricks; pumps; high-tension pylons; transformers; vats; boilers bristling with nozzles, levers, and dials;

dockyards crowded with gangways, gantries, and cranes, with winches winding ropes taut as tendons, displacing stacks of veneer, aeroplane engines, concert grands, bags of fertiliser, bushels of feed, billiard tables, combine harvesters, ball bearings, cases of soap, tubs of asphalt, office furniture, typewriters, bicycles;

still lower: systems of lock and docking basins; canals lined with strings of barges loaded with wheat and cotton; highway terminals crisscrossed by trailer trucks; corrals full of black horses pawing the ground; pens of bleating sheep and fattened cattle; hills of crates overflowing with fruits and vegetables; columns of cheese wheels, hard and soft; perspectives of glassy-eyed animals split in two and slung from butcher hooks; piles of vases, pots, and wicker-covered flasks; cargoes of watermelons; cans of olive oil; tubs of fish in brine; giant bakeries where bare-chested baker boys in white trousers withdraw from their ovens burning-hot trays lined with thousands of raisin buns; interminable kitchens where out of cauldrons as big as steam turbines hundreds of portions of greasy stew are ladled into giant rectangular pans;

and lower still, mine galleries with blind ageing horses drawing carts filled with ore and slow processions of helmeted miners; and oozing passageways, reinforced with waterlogged timbers, that lead down glistening steps to slapping blackish water; flint-bottomed boats, punts weighted with empty barrels sailing across a lightless lake, bestridden by phosphorescent creatures shuffling indefatigably from shore to shore with hampers of dirty laundry, complete sets of dishware, knapsacks, cardboard boxes fastened with bits of string; wherries filled with sickly indoor plants, alabaster bas-reliefs, plaster casts of Beethoven, Neo-Gothic armchairs, Chinese vases, tapestry cartoons depicting Henri III and his minions playing cup-and-ball, counterpoise lamps still trailing lengths of flypaper, garden furniture, baskets of oranges, empty birdcages, bedspreads, thermos flasks;

further down, another maze of ducts, pipes, and flues; drains winding among main and lateral sewers; narrow canals edged with black stone parapets; unrailinged stairs above precipitous voids; a whole inextricable geography of stalls, backyards, porches, pavements, blind alleys, and arcades, a whole subterranean city organised vertically into neighbourhoods, districts, and zones: the tanners’ quarter with its unbearable stench, its faltering machines fitted with sagging drive belts, its stacks of pelts and leathers, its vats brimming with brownish substances; the scrapyards littered with mantelpieces of marble and stucco, with bidets, bathtubs, rusty radiators, statues of startled nymphs, standing lamps, and park benches; the quarter of those who deal in waste metal, the quarter of ragpickers and flea merchants, with its jumbles of old clothes, its stripped-down baby carriages, its bales of surplus fatigues, worn shirts, army belts and Ranger boots, its dentist’s chairs, its provisions of old newspapers, lensless glasses, key rings, braces, musical table mats, light bulbs, laryngoscopes, retorts, flasks with lateral nozzles, and various types of glassware; the wine market and its mountains of demijohns and broken bottles, its staved-in tuns, its cisterns, vats, and racks; the streetcleaners’ quarter full of overturned dustbins spilling out cheese rinds, wax paper, fish bones, dishwater, leftover spaghetti, used bandages, its heaps of refuse endlessly shoved from one place to the next by slimy bulldozers, its unhinged dishwashers, its hydraulic pumps, cathode-ray tubes, old radios, its sofas losing their stuffing; and the quarter of government offices, whose staff headquarters swarms with military personnel in impeccably ironed shirts moving little flags across maps of the world, its tiled morgues peopled with nostalgic hoods and the open-eyed bodies of the doomed, its record offices filled with bureaucrats in grey smocks who day after day look up birth, marriage, and death certificates, its telephone exchanges and their mile-long rows of polyglot operators, its machine room full of crackling telexes and computers that spew forth by the second reams of statistics, payrolls, inventories, balance sheets, receipts, and no-information statements, its paper-shredders and incinerators endlessly devouring quantities of out-of-date forms, brown folders stuffed with press clippings, account books bound in black linen with pages covered in delicate violet handwriting;

and at the very bottom, a world of caverns whose walls are black with soot, a world of cesspools and sloughs, a world of grubs and beasts, of eyeless beings who drag animal carcasses behind them, of demoniacal monsters with bodies of birds, swine, and fish, of dried-out corpses and yellow-skinned skeletons arrayed in attitudes of the living, of forges manned by dazed Cyclopses in black leather aprons, their single eyes shielded by metal-rimmed blue glass, hammering their brazen masses into dazzling shields.