CITIES & THE DEAD 3
No city is more inclined than Eusapia to enjoy life and flee care. And
to make the leap from life to death less abrupt, the inhabitants have
constructed an identical copy of their city, underground. All corpses, dried in
such a way that the skeleton remains sheathed in yellow skin, are carried down
there, to continue their former activities. And, of these activities, it is
their carefree moments that take first place: most of the corpses are seated
around laden tables, or placed in dancing positions, or made to play little
trumpets. But all the trades and professions of the living Eusapia are also at
work below ground, or at least those that the living performed with more
contentment than irritation: the clockmaker, amid all the stopped clocks of his
shop, places his parchment ear against an out-of-tune grandfather clock; a
barber, with dry brush, lathers the cheekbones of an actor learning his role,
studying the script with hollow sockets; a girl with a laughing skull milks the
carcass of a heifer. To be sure, many of the living want a fate after death
different from their lot in life: the necropolis is crowded with big-game
hunters, mezzo-sopranos, bankers, violinists, duchesses, courtesans,
generals--more than the living city ever contained.
The job of accompanying the dead down below and arranging them in the desired
place is assigned to a confraternity of hooded brothers. No one else has access
to the Eusapia of the dead and everything known about it has been learned from
them. They say that the same confraternity exists among the dead and that it
never fails to lend a hand; the hooded brothers, after death, will perform the
same job in the other Eusapia; rumour has it that some of them are already dead
but continue going up and down. In any case, this confraternity's authority in
the Eusapia of the living is vast.
They say that every time they go below they find
something changed in the lower Eusapia; the dead make innovations in their
city; not many, but surely the fruit of sober reflection, nor passing whims.
From one year to the next, they say, the Eusapia of the dead becomes
unrecognizable. And the living, to keep up with them, also want to do
everything that the hooded brothers tell them about the novelties of the dead.
So the Eusapia of the living has taken to copying its underground copy. They
say that this has not just now begun to happen: actually it was the dead who
built the upper Eusapia, in the image of their city. They say that in the twin
cities there is no longer any way of knowing who is alive and who is dead.
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