The Sound of Silence

New York has tiptoed around a minefield of rhetoric and chauvinism: America ten years after. It resisted the temptations of politics, the sirens’ tears in search of the blues; [instead] there was benign and tacit agreement between the two political leaders to leave this day to those it belonged to, without kicking each other. The three thousand men, women, children and babies pulverized in the most obscene attack against humanity that the world has ever witnessed — and that it will never be able to “unsee” again, as Mayor Bloomberg said.

New York, the city of excitement and insomnia, cynicism and rat races, had become, from the empty Saturday night to the retreat of the fleet of SUVs and limousines used by Obama and Bush later the following morning, an island of silence. For those who have known the background noise, the urban cacophony that forms the Manhattan rhapsody, this night and then this day of quiet, scratched only by the rare complaints of the patrol cars racing to imaginary threats and by the echoes, voices and music on West Street (the eastern boundary of the crater turned building site), were both reassuring and disquieting in their unnaturalness. Even the Vietnam veteran, a former B-52 bomber wearing the emblems of Operation Rolling Thunder, dragging a rolling cart with a speaker, amplifier and car battery back and forth on Church Street (the western boundary of ground zero) and blathering Marine and Navy hymns in the silence, was frowned on by New Yorkers. On any other day, they wouldn’t have dignified him with a look. Today, the soundtrack was Simon and Garfunkel’s classic, “The Sound of Silence.”

At 9 a.m., together with the first ladies, George Bush and Barack Obama arrived in silence too, slipping in with the official procession in the service walkway dug between the building site and huge cranes — an enormity that no article or lens can convey. Maybe three thousand people, four to be generous, gathered on West Street to listen to them, fewer than the armies of TV crews roosted on the skyscrapers of the World Financial Center, in the trenches with their spotlights, cliches, chewing over comments and video clips that have been presented ad nauseam for weeks — enough to control the remote control.

In their presidential service uniform, the dark blue suit with white shirt, blue tie and now the mandatory, absurd, little U.S. flag in the buttonhole — as if someone could mistake them for the presidents of Dagestan — Bush and Obama admirably acted the part of the cohesive and homologated nation facing an offense too absolute and cross-cutting to be exploited politically.

The rare, equally spread out grumblings of protest or the patrol of demonstrators who believe the conspiracy theories (kept two blocks away with their big red banner saying “Bush did it” — insignificant conspiracy garbage) didn’t matter. Even they, who on other occasions would have risked a fight, were ignored in the bubble of silence.

Bush quoted the founder of the Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln, who “understood the cost of sacrifice.” He cited Lincoln’s letter to a mother of five children who died from the war to save the nation from secession, which said, “I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine” but also the need to express the gratitude of the republic. Obama, on the other hand, was more mercifully concise and surprisingly mystical. He didn’t refer to the sacrifice of war, fair or unfair; this was not a day for rehashing the ideologies of hawks, doves, liberals and neocons. [Instead he talked of] the mercy of the terrible God of Jacob: while “the nations raged, the kingdoms were moved. He uttered his voice, the earth melted” but in the end “[h]e makes wars cease to the ends of the Earth. He breaks the bough and cuts the spear in two … the God of Jacob is our refuge.” Laura and Michelle, after grazing their fingers over the names of the dead carved in the bronze balustrades above the cascade to nowhere, dutifully dried a little tear. The grown-up Bush twins were with them. The Obama girls, maybe too young, stayed home.

There was fear at 7 a.m. when the TV stations turned the spotlights that had been on the stage with the officials, started to frame the first tower, the “Freedom Tower,” and arrived on what will be the 85th floor of the 105 that will fill the ground of the building site, which surely forever blends in the mud the bones of the victims and perpetrators, no longer identifiable. Not fear of attacks — that likely didn’t upset anybody but the authorities who filled Manhattan with checkpoints like East Berlin — but fear that the sentimental and emotional setup from the long goodbye after 10 years might have produced a cheap 3-D blockbuster, a grotesque Disney World of memory and pain.

It wasn’t so, God bless America. If anything, a tender boredom sweetly settled on the 64,000 square meters of the crater. And if Vice President Biden, incurably long-winded, talked for too long in front of the Pentagon, the place of the third massacre, Obama, Bush, Mayor Bloomberg and former Mayor Giuliani (who himself clung to a Biblical quote from Ecclesiastes: “there is … a time to weep and a time to laugh … a time for war and a time for peace”) lightly slid on the surface of a day greyer and greyer, cloudier and cloudier, but quiet and vastly different from the dazzling and cruel luminosity of September 2001. Even the moment of silence imposed by the ceremony seemed incongruous, unnecessary in the silence of the city and the few tourists — in the sincere pain or the directed macabre. Those visitors illuminated the night, trying to record with the pathetic flashes of their cell phones and pocket mini-video cameras the enormity of the skyscrapers under construction and the building site, as if you could contain a lake in a pan.

The truth of this day, which will be the last celebration of the massive TV overdose of commemorations in the inexorable blurring of time, was not to be looked for in the mandatory pilgrimage of Obama, who flew from Manhattan to Washington for the memorial at the Pentagon where infants and young children died on the flight that fell apart. Neither could the truth be found in Shanksville, his last station of the calvary, in the coal-mining hills of Pennsylvania, where the desperate heroes of United flight 93, the story told by the flight attendants on the “Airphone,” propelled the jumbo jet to crash on the ground with the engines at full throttle.

The truth — capable of shaking even the toughest, most professional cynic, even the nausea from the excess of rhetoric and retrospective political analysis — was in front of the “Wall of Remembrance,” the one erected by the victims’ relatives on the fences of the building site, where the holy images of the dead have gradually replaced the Polaroids and photos of missing relatives (still nearly 700 without a name) since the first weeks of impossible hope. The truth is the Colombian family that came from Bogota to take a picture together (I counted eight), with the head of household pointing at a small picture of the dark-haired brother with a moustache under the pot-hat of the fire department (where he had enrolled to expedite his naturalization) in the long, bronze bas-relief dedicated to them. It’s the child’s hand next to his father’s picture (photographed for eternity while playing with him wearing a baseball glove three sizes too big) writing, rudely and passionately, occupying the whole space around: “I miss you sooooooo, sooooo, soooo much, daddy.”

Early in the afternoon, everything was finished. The football championship, waited for like the Messiah, should have started at 1, and the remote controls would have left the tears for the screams of cheering. The tourists, tired of spinning around the pool of emptiness to look down at the cascade of vertigo, dragged their feet to the subway, finally reopened at 11, to the shops and the “souviner” stands, as written on the sign of a seller more enterprising than grammatically correct, for T-shirts commemorating the 343 firemen crushed while climbing to the 85th floor, carrying over 60 pounds of equipment and oxygen cylinders. And the bubble of silence broke to let New York get out, be born again, make a mess, elbow each other — be that city that is impossible not to love or hate.