The Gargoyles of il Duomo di Milano

by William Hawkins

Not much troubles the gargoyles of il Duomo di Milano. They feel neither rain nor wind nor the scratch of lichen. They jut into space blind and deaf. Though I have heard they do know the sun, as even light can enter stone.  

Below them, in the plaza, are tourists and the few remaining faithful, and bicyclists cutting corners, and the rolling carts of iconography and tchotchkes, mendicants and buskers in equal measure, flurries of pigeons which gives the suggestion of an instability in the air, when looking down from where they squat. The gargoyles know nothing of the tourists or buskers or pigeons. They know nothing of selfie sticks and chapel veils. They are ignorant of their makers, the stonemasons, of the seventy-eight architects that built the cathedral, of da Vinci’s withdrawn design. History and the future are equally unreal. They only know the sun and not the sun. That is the extent of their sensibility.

Though I have heard that, occasionally, one speaks. If you are lucky and walking beneath one you might hear a seismic whisper coming from an open mouth or beak or maw. They speak either one of two things. They say, “Ahhh,” in satisfaction of the illumination that, however shallowly, permeates, gives them a sense of presence and direction, of orientation. Or else, it is late at night, dipping into the new day, and you are walking home from a one-night stand with a head full of fantastical futures, marriage and apathy on the brain, and you are feeling alone, even with his sperm still inside you, and walking through the night toward a metro station, towards home, you might hear from a gargoyle’s mouth a long, “Ohhh,” the deep melancholy of dumb rock.

I was a student who spoke poor Italian, and I was lost in a loneliness I had only just discovered, when I heard a gargoyle plead for the sun. Years ago, when I was a student, and still young.

William Hawkins has been published in Granta, ZZYZYVA and TriQuarterly, among others. Originally from Louisiana, he currently lives in Los Angeles where he is at work on a novel.