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InVisibility
Cities & Desire 5
From there, after six days and seven nights, you
arrive at Zobeide, the white city, well exposed to the moon, with
streets wound about themselves as in a skein. They tell this tale of
its foundation: men of various nations had an identical dream. They saw
a woman running at night through an unknown city; she was seen from
behind, with long hair, and she was naked. They dreamed of pursuing
her. As they twisted and turned, each of them lost her. After the
dream, they set out in search of that city; they never found it, but
they found one another; they decided to build a city like the one in the
dream. In laying out the streets, each followed the course of his
pursuit; at the spot where they had lost the fugitive's trail, they
arranged spaces and walls differently from the dream, so she would be unable to escape again.
This was the city of Zobeide, where they
settled, waiting for that scene to be repeated one night. None of them,
asleep or awake, ever saw the woman again. The city's streets were
streets where they went to work every day, with no link any more to the
dreamed chase. Which, for that matter, had long been forgotten.
New men arrived from other lands, having had a
dream like theirs, and in the city of Zobeide, they recognized something
from the streets of the dream, and they changed the positions of arcades
and stairways to resemble more closely the path of the pursued woman and
so, at the spot where she had vanished, there would remain no avenue of
escape.
The first to arrive could not understand what
drew these people to Zobeide, this ugly city, this trap.
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
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