Arcadia (24 page)

Signor Busi ended up exhausted by the place, his suit dishevelled, his shoes discoloured. He rested in the Soap Garden but was not happy with the coffee and the pastry that he bought, or with
the waiter who was too hurried and lacking in finesse. He tried but could not find his way back to a traffic street. The market was not logical. It had no signs, no thoroughfares. A man in
cellophane had sent him deeper in. He had to pay a boy to guide him to a taxi rank. He was elated that the Busi Partnership of New York, Paris, and Milan might be the ones to introduce some Order
and some Uniformity. A modern, regulated city should be governed not by the impulses of crowds but by the dictates of its tramlines, pavements, traffic lights, timetables, laws. A modern, regulated
city would not allow such squalid topsyturvydom.

When at last they met, Signor Busi complimented Victor on Big Vic and on the mall which was its artery.

‘It is gracious and it is legible,’ he said. ‘I applaud you that you wish to extend such geometric harmony into the ancient centre of the town where, evidently, legibility and
graciousness are out of fashion.’ He waited for an instant to allow Victor an opportunity to respond to these pleasantries. But he saw at once that Victor was no conversationalist and would
be silent but attentive, too. He unzipped the black portfolios of draft proposals which he had brought from Milan, shook his body in his suit, and fixed his merchant client with his finest 3H
smile.

‘We have nostalgia and we have experiments,’ he said. ‘But you are not the man to like such things. You are a man of
now
. So let’s not waste our time with these
survivals from the past.’ His hand dismissed his rivals’ plans. He lifted the corners of a design by the Ultra Studios and raised his eyebrows: ‘And let’s not bother either
with science fiction. It is dated just as soon as it is built. You see my Ultra colleague – should I talk behind his back? – has designed another Centre Lyons-Symphonique for us, all
pipes and tubes and vents, but this one is for cabbages and not for culture. He thinks it’s witty to put a building’s guts on show, to put the inside on the outside. But this is what I
have to say to you: you are a man of eighty, this I know. Witty is not what you want. You want a little dignity. You want a marketplace which comprehends and celebrates your business intellect and
not the artful vision of an architect. I’m right, I think. So, we dispense with inside on the outside. For you, for this great marketplace, we put the outside on the inside, we bring the
outdoors indoors.’

He spread the drawings over Victor’s desk. His partners had had the sense to keep them small and simple, at one-five-hundredth scale, so that the spirit of the group’s proposals was
more evident than their complexity. For Signor Busi, the outdoors which they planned to bring indoors was more than just a scheme to shield the market stalls from wind and rain and temperature. The
‘outside’ meant the countryside as well, the world beyond the margins of the town.

‘What is a market anyway, but country brought to town?’ he asked. ‘Let’s give the people a country walk right at the city’s heart.’

He pointed to the ‘conceptualizations’ which had been sketched in ink and artist’s wash.

‘Please, pick them up and take a look,’ he said. ‘What do these elevations recall for you?’ He smiled, but furtively, while Victor shook his head. The design was called
the Melting Glass Meringues by colleagues in Milan. Four spectacular glass ovals which seemed both like cakes and the domes of viscous mosques filled the Soap Market. Nine tapering barrel-vaulted
aisles – spaceframed in wood and steel, spaceglazed – radiated from the centre without geometric logic but in the pleasing, balanced way that surface roots spread out from trees.

‘Here is a landscape at the city centre,’ Busi said. ‘There are no straight lines in our design, no matching planes or pitches. Instead we have the horizontal disunities of the
natural landscape. We give you hills and plains and ridges made from curving sheets of glass. We look for coherence. We look for harmony. We let the natural city light, which is absorbed by brick
and stone, pass through our glass and flood the building in the way that light can flood and warm and make fertile a country greenhouse. The inner walls are mirrored, and all the framing is
constructed out of reflecting steel or polished wood, so that the journey of the natural light is not truncated. We have a greenhouse, then. We have the temperature and air control to maintain the
perfect environment for plants and shrubs and trees. The walls are breathing walls. Outside, the city; countryside within. We have glass-bottomed elevators rising on a scenic ride through the
foliage. We have nine trading corridors in human scale. And then the scale is more divine – four domes, the largest fifty metres high and visible from far away. It is a sculpture made from
glass and greenery. It is a living carapace frozen in metal. It is …’ (and with a flourish Signor Busi revealed the project’s title) ‘… Arcadia. But modernized.
Climate-controlled. Efficient. Accessible. Contemporary. Defended.’

With this last word, Signor Busi spread his hands, the saddened pragmatist: ‘Arcadia must be defended. Of course! We must admit the truth. If it is your wish to lure into Arcadia those
better citizens who have good taste and incomes to dispose, then we must promise them security from …’ Again he spread his saddened hands. ‘… from the city itself. You see
we have provided surveillance cameras, anti-theft shutters, suicide netting, commissionaires. The building is a fortress. A hand grenade would only shake its glass. It can survive the full impact
of an intercontinental airliner. But this is not enough. We owe it to your customers to keep out drunks and tramps and demonstrators and people who do not come to spend, but simply wish to shelter
from the rain, or sleep, or cause unpleasantness. Arcadia – as you will see – is far too good for them.’

He took Victor on a tour, beginning with the two-storey basement, cushioned in poured concrete and served by a delivery ramp concealed by lines of trees. He showed where refrigerated storage
pods kept produce fresh, where ripening units brought on bananas, apples, mangoes to the colours judged best and most tempting for shoppers. Here were the offices, the basement studios, the service
workshops, the market courtyards, recapturing – intensifying – a medieval market atmosphere, with coloured awnings, painted signs, terrazzo flooring, augmented natural light. And beds
of shrubs, and greenhouse trees, and displays of bedding plants, with ivy, vines, and bamboo stands.

The four meringues were joined inside Arcadia by a central hub much as the four seed-carpels of nasturtiums cling fatly to their stems. The hub supported terraces and balconies, with views
through foliage of the heads and hats of shoppers, and the ‘authentic’ coloured awnings on the fixed-site stalls. On the lower terraces there were bars, a restaurant, an open concert
arena. The upper balconies were almost out of sight. Below them stretched netting. It hung across the higher chambers of the domes like the billows of a Tuareg tent. Above and beyond the white and
green patterns of the netting, there would be the largest aviary yet built in which the Busi Partnership envisaged cockatoos and cockatiels and minah birds, who finally, would learn to call like
traders. ‘All fresh today. All fresh today. No loot, no fruit.’

The centrepiece!’ Signor Busi produced a final sketch. ‘You see, we are not charlatans. We have respect for history. We have not torn the medieval washplace down. We have given it
new life.’ The sketches showed what careful restoration could achieve, how medieval gargoyles could be rescued by the heroic dentistry of modern masons, how old and pitted stones could have
the plaque removed, the cavities disguised, the broken tops replaced. There’d be new fountains, waterfalls, where previously the flow had been fitful and controlled by taps.

Signor Busi showed photographs of the bludgeoned washing basins where soap and stone and cloth had for so long made slapping music with the water. Then his new designs: the renewed basins were
transformed by lights and plants. They were kept full and busy with piped, pumped, filtered, and circulating water, which tumbled from hidden faucets into sculpted pools and then ran into channels
to troughs of plants. At night, the air-conditioning, the concourse lights, the water would be turned off and floodlights would shine onto the four meringues. They’d make the innards of
Arcadia warm and fathomless with the haywire shadows of pot-bound trees.

‘I am a Milanese,’ said Signor Busi, ‘but even so I must admit that here we have a building which will be as beautiful and functional, more functional perhaps, than the Galerie
Victor Emmanuel II in Milan. You share a name. You are Victor III, perhaps. You share a place in history as well, if you allow the Busi Partnership to make these drawings come alive.’

Signor Busi spread his arms and laughed. ‘No more to say.’ He left the plans and drawings where they were and put out both hands to Victor. ‘I am at your disposal until Sunday,
naturally.
Tante grazie, Signor Victor.
’

Victor summoned Anna. She took Signor Busi to the boss’s private lift and travelled with him to the atrium and to the exit on the mall. He was ebullient and playful like an actor who has
triumphed on the stage. He liked the woman at his side. Her perfume and her plumpness and the crowded intimacy of Victor’s lift loosened him. His wife was far away. He laid two fingers on her
wrist. He said, ‘I think that your employer will give to me the contract for the Soap Market. Perhaps I ought to celebrate tonight, and you should be my guest at my hotel.’

Anna shook her head. ‘It’s very kind,’ she said, ‘but far too early for a celebration yet, don’t you think? Victor has another three to see.’

‘My dear,’ said Signor Busi, letting go her arm, ‘I feel it in my blood that we shall win. Our plans will be preferred.’

‘Perhaps Victor will decide to preserve the market as it is.’

Busi laughed. ‘There’s nothing to preserve. There’s nothing there. There is nothing to demolish. Of course there are the cobblestones to lift and lay again more cunningly. And
there are those unkempt small bars and restaurants which cluster round the Soap Garden. Those we have to level off. And then we start from scratch! So we will speak again, I think. And many
times.’

His car drew up and Signor Busi left Big Vic a happy man. Above him, on the 27th floor, his plans were strewn across the desk and carpet. Victor stood amongst them, a reference dictionary in his
hand.
Arcadia
– a rustic paradise, he read.
Arcadian
– of pastoral simplicity.
Arcade
– a covered row of shops.

Signor Busi waited at the Excelsior for three more days, and on the fourth he received a call. Anna spoke for Victor. She was pleased, she said, to let him know that the Busi Partnership had
secured the Soap Market contract. A formal letter would be sent, and Victor would be grateful if Signor Busi would extend his stay for three more days so that a press conference could be arranged
and the timescale for construction plotted. He would, too, be sending Signor Busi sketches of a small statue which was a birthday gift to Victor from – how appropriate! – the leading
market traders. It was a mother and a child and should be incorporated into Arcadia.

‘A small statue? This we will give pride of place!’ Busi told Anna. And then, ‘So, please let me give you pride of place at my table at the Excelsior tonight. Now I think it is
not too soon to celebrate.’

A
NNA ATE VEGETABLES
like anybody else, but she was not an habitué of the Soap Market. She lived a little way from town – ten minutes on the
bus, a forty-minute walk. She did not count herself so poor or so energetic that she need queue at market stalls and then transport her purchases by bag and bus. Within a hundred metres of her home
there was a delicatessen with a fresh-products counter and an unhurried clientele, and this she used. Of course there were those times when she preferred to shop in city streets for clothes or
shoes or presents for her nieces. Once in a while, after work, she set off down the mall towards the boutiques and the studios, determined to spend money on herself.

On the evening that Signor Busi first met Victor and then ventured to hold Anna by the wrist, she had felt so glad to be herself, so glad to be admired and flirted with (if only by a creaky
clothes horse from Milan) that she went looking for a treat in town. She’d seen a brooch that she wanted, handmade, a galaxy of silver stars, a single moon of pearl. She’d need a darker
jacket, too, to suit the brooch. Some Belgian chocolates, perhaps, could keep her company that night. She’d take a taxi home.

The jeweller had her workshop-studio beneath the timber galleries in Saints Row. Anna walked there by the quickest route. She was a little anxious that the galleries might close before the
larger stores. But there the owner was, at work on a bracelet, a flight of copper geese. Anna could not see the brooch she wanted on display. She went inside. She asked. The jeweller did not lift
her head, or take the magnifier from her eye. She said, ‘I sold it. Weeks ago.’

‘Do you have something similar? Another galaxy?’

‘I don’t do stars and moons, not any more. What I do now is birds and butterflies.’ Anna waited for some helpful word, for some expression of regret, for some polite farewell.
Instead the jeweller, clearly not prepared to talk, instructed, ‘You could try elsewhere.’

Anna was too vexed to look elsewhere. What kind of businesswoman had such contempt for customers that she could not be bothered to raise her head or lift her eyes. Anna regretted that she had
not gone home by bus as soon as work was done. She did not need a darker jacket now. She would not treat herself – and just as well, perhaps – to Belgian chocolates. Or take the taxi
home. Instead she’d catch the bus back to her sewing and her television set, and spend the night, as many single women do, as silent and as self-possessed as quails. But first, she thought,
she’d take a look at the Soap Market. It was so near, and on the way to her bus stop. Her contacts with the architects and with their plans had made her curious to see exactly what Signor
Busi had meant that afternoon: ‘There’s nothing worth preserving there.’ She’d buy some salad for her sinless evening meal.