I sat down to wait without knowing quite what for.
I have done today what I announced to you yesterday: nothing. I went out to walk without a plan, without a destination, without the intention of understanding anything. I had spent four days reading this city as one reads a document and I was exhausted from meanings.
I climbed the Kapuzinerberg at the end of the afternoon and sat down to wait without knowing quite what for.
I sat down to wait without knowing quite what for.
And then it happened. The city lit up.
Not gradually but suddenly, as if someone had given an order that I did not hear. The sky turned a blue I have not seen anywhere else and Salzburg responded from below with a light of its own that had nothing to do with what I had been seeing these days.
The domes that by day were the inventory of power had become something else.
The domes that by day were the inventory of power had become something else. I do not know what name to give it. Beauty is not enough. It was as if the city, upon losing the light of the sun, had removed its mask.
I am not going to describe what I saw afterward because I would not know how. I went down to the river, it began to rain, I walked for hours through streets that by day had seemed readable to me and at night were a different world.
It began to rain.
Streets that by day had seemed readable to me and at night were a different world.
I will only tell you this: there is a Salzburg that exists only when it rains at night. A city of golden cobblestones and streetlamps that burn alone in alleys without century, where time stops or becomes irrelevant.
I have crossed empty squares that the prince-archbishops built to manifest their glory and that now were nothing more than beautiful stages in the service of no one.
I saw a woman dragging a suitcase under an umbrella through Residenzplatz, alone, at night, in the rain, and that image seemed to me the most honest of everything I have seen since I arrived. All the accumulated power reduced to the scenery of a stranger's transit.
Streetlamps that burn alone in alleys without century.
I write at dawn. I cannot sleep. For four days I have tried to read Salzburg as the chronicle of a power that collapsed. And tonight the city has answered me that it is much more than that.
That what the prince-archbishops built escaped from their hands long ago. That the beauty they raised to subjugate has survived the subjugation and now simply exists, free, ownerless, lighting up each night for no one in particular.
I know, I know. You will tell me that I am getting carried away again. You are probably right. But this time I do not care.