The Cartographer of Small Towns
She had mapped thirty-seven towns no one had asked for. The thirty-eighth would be different, she told herself — though she had said the same thing before.
The problem with small towns, Elisa had concluded, was not that they were unmappable — it was that they resisted the conventions. The scale kept shifting. A road that took twenty minutes to walk felt short on paper. The churchyard, which everyone treated as the centre of things, was technically on the edge.
She had been doing this for eleven years, since her husband left and she had needed, as she told people when pressed, something to do with her hands.
The maps were not sold. She had tried selling them once, at a craft fair in Bergamo, and had sold precisely none. The man at the next table, who sold honey, had suggested she add more colour.
“Colour suggests opinion,” she told him.
“Yes,” he said. “That’s what people like.”
She had packed up at noon and driven home and that had been the end of selling maps.
Now she arrived in Monteverde at the beginning of October, when the tourist season had just ended and the bars were mostly empty by nine. She had booked a room above the tobacconist. The woman who ran it was called Signora Ferrante and she wore the same blue cardigan every day and seemed neither pleased nor displeased to have a guest.
Elisa began with the perimeter, as she always did. The town was bordered on two sides by agricultural land, on one side by a stream that ran sluggishly in October, on the fourth by the provincial road. None of these limits were especially interesting. The interesting things were always in the interior.
On her third day she found the alley.
It connected two streets she had already mapped, but from neither street was the entrance obvious. You had to know to look, or to follow a cat, as she had done. It was perhaps forty metres long and it had, at its midpoint, a door painted a green so faded it was almost grey, and above the door a name in iron letters: Archivio.
She knocked.
No one answered.
She came back the next morning, and the morning after that, and on the third morning a man of perhaps seventy opened the door and looked at her for a moment without speaking.
“I’m making a map,” she said.
He considered this.
“You’d better come in,” he said at last.
She stayed in Monteverde six weeks. Her map of the town was the most detailed she had ever made. It included, in fine pencil in the lower left margin, a legend that read: Some doors require patience.
She had not written a legend before. She was not sure it was strictly cartographic.
She left it in.