We were a wall before we were a house, and a height before we were a wall. The first ones carried us up stone by stone and put their backs against us at evening, and we learned backs before we learned prayers. The mortar changed hands a hundred times; every fashion of mending there has ever been is somewhere in us, and the mending has always been softer than the stone, so that what fails is the mending, and we have outlived every one of the menders in the same position: standing, facing the water.
For the first thousand years we understood. We were consulted, in the way weather is consulted: after.
They gave us their chastity the way others gave us their nights, and we banked both, and paid interest on neither. The recesses were cut for lamps. Two fit in them once the lamps stopped being lit. In the recesses, twice a century by our count, two would forget the century; the vowed above them kept the hours and the stone kept the temperature, and we have never once been asked to choose. Skin warms stone differently through cloth; we have banked both warmths, and nobody asks a wall. On the south wall they cut letters, and over the letters letters, until the wall reads as weather. Two words have outlasted the rest, being cut deeper than the fashion allowed: still here. We have never known who was asking, or of whom, or whether it was a question.
Men between their wars sat at our windows and wrote the channel’s traffic in juice that browned over candles, and both sides slept under us in different decades and confessed to the same wall, which kept the confessions the way it keeps rain. Along the water, in one season of one century, there was a town where the mornings arrived in volleys; the water carried the count up to us and we kept that too, having room. The goat’s track closed. We let it.
Then we tired.
The town along the water sent us four men in one season, and we hid them well, and two of them we hid from each other, and both told us the same thing about the mornings in the same words, and we understood that the words had been issued.
Not of them — of the repetitions. The same wars with the coats recut. The same two in the recesses, sincerely certain they were the first. The same questions at the box, the same three answers, a priest a century wearing thin against them like the rope on the steps. The book by the door filled and filled and stayed one book, the ink aging to one age.
Then we let go.
We stopped counting the steps ourselves. We let the benches decide where the resting is. We let the candle spring feed on its own wax and the bell teach its cord the smoothness cords learn from people who do not ring. We let the city happen.
One autumn a woman came up alone four times in a month, sat in the third recess, did not pray, and on the last visit left a spoon on the sill. We kept the spoon. It is the only thing on this hill that nobody has ever asked about.
Now we clench.
They come up in the evenings and stand where the vowed stood and take the same view, and the view is worth what it always was, which is why we are still here and the goat’s track is not.
Below us at dusk the windows light in an order we could recite, and the two cars of the funicular rise and fall and meet — twelve seconds of lit glass — and part. Small lit screens climb the steps in the evening and go dark at the treeline, and their people look up as if surfacing. The city keeps a book that corrects itself, and we hold the only page that no one edits, and we grip it now: the gate open, the wax warm, the letters weathered past reading, the count from the far town still in us, having room. One signs at dusk, most evenings, and nothing is charged for it, and the ink is the age of all the rest before they reach the candles. They come up out of breath, every one of them, and they stand in the gate until it goes, and none of them has ever asked us for water, and we have it.
We have been a wall, a house, a hiding place, a bed, an office of sorts, and now a view; and each time the city arrived we were told what we were, and each time it was accurate, and each time it was less. There is a form for us. We have not seen it. It is held somewhere down there, correct in every particular, in a hand that will thin, in ink that will reach one age, and it will outlast the wall, and the wall does not mind, and that is the clench: we mind.
We watched the city arrive. We are prepared.