The Village of 147 Names

The night I fell asleep with the air-conditioning humming and Netflix asking if I was still watching, I dreamed of a village where I knew the names of one hundred and forty-seven people. I did not count them the way an app counts followers. I learned them the way a hand learns a tool, by use and repetition. Bread from Caterina. Shoes from Paolo. The blacksmith, the baker, the teacher with the wool scarf who sang off key and did not care.

Morning in that village began at the washhouse, a long stone trough where water ran cold from the hillside. Women brought baskets, men brought stories, children brought noise that bounced around the arches. Soap, laughter, the occasional argument about whose turn it was to use the hottest water. A shirt became a bulletin board. Look at this sleeve, have you seen a moth like this, whose sheep are sick. No one came to wash in private, not because there was no shame, but because work was heavy and together it felt lighter.

At the edge of town stood the communal oven. It fired on Thursdays and Sundays. People arrived with dough wrapped in cloth, stamped with small marks so the baker knew which loaf belonged to whom. While the bread rose, news rose with it. The millstream would be diverted next week, the priest’s niece was coming from the city, the council needed hands to repair the footbridge. You did not have to subscribe to know what mattered. If you were near the heat, you heard.

There were rules, and they were small enough to be spoken. The meadow beyond the walnut trees was common grazing; Luca’s goats could go there after the barley harvest, not before. Marta’s garden touched the path, but raspberries that reached across the fence were for everyone. Signore Bruno, who could not hear unless you looked him in the eye, was always seated near the front during meetings. People repeated jokes for him, loudly and with extra gestures. He laughed late and louder than the rest, and the delay became part of the joke. Inclusion was a habit, not a policy.

It was not paradise. Privacy was thin. Gossip traveled faster than horses. If you quarreled with your cousin, you would see her three times before supper. Choices were few. The shoemaker had two styles, neither elegant. The storyteller had one story for winter nights, but the way he told it shifted with the room, and you felt yourself changing with it. The village lived inside a number that felt like a memory. About one hundred and fifty faces, more or less. Enough to feel held. Few enough that if you failed to show up, someone would knock.

On market day the square filled with strangers, then emptied, but the square belonged first to the village. There were benches that faced each other, not the road. There was shade, and a man with a cracked tambourine who could not play in time and insisted on trying. Children learned to take turns because the well had one bucket. Conflict was not outsourced to a comment section. It was a circle of people with crossed arms and crossed eyebrows, and then someone made a joke that let the air back in.

In the afternoons, before the oven cooled, I saw how time organized itself around tasks that were shared. Carry this beam. Spread the cloth. Lift the net. Listen. If you drew a map of the village, you could label each place by the sound it held. The washhouse was a chorus, the oven a thick breathing, the square a murmur. Even silence had weight, especially the kind that fell when someone cried and hands reached without asking.

The days folded into each other. Yet I never felt lost because the village was small and the faces were known. When evening came, people pulled chairs to the threshold and watched the street cool. The wind carried rosemary. Someone plucked a mandolin in a doorway, the tune wobbling and catching until voices joined. The sky had just enough light left to show the swifts turning. A neighbor passed and borrowed a cup of oil. A child ran after a ball, then returned, cheeks bright, to sit on the steps and listen to adults talk about serious things in a way that sounded like music. The air had no machine. It was night, and it came for everyone at once.

I woke to the square blue light of my phone.

The apartment was still. The air-conditioning hummed because I had asked it to. The room smelled faintly of detergent. In the kitchen, the washing machine blinked done. My garden, private and tidy, waited behind a fence. At the curb, my car blinked too, a patient animal that needed no one except me. It would take me wherever I wanted, as long as there was a road and enough fuel and no other person in the passenger seat to talk about the price of tomatoes or the weather turning. Freedom, wide and frictionless, had the flavor of distilled water.

I made coffee and put on headphones. The city turned into a film without dialogue. I was safe inside my sound. My news arrived in a perfect ribbon, chosen for me by a company that had never met my neighbor. It was all convenient and all private and all mine. No one would borrow oil unless they rang first, and they would not. My bread came sliced in a bag that listed nutrients. There was no need to go outside for a story. A thousand worlds waited behind a screen.

I thought of Signore Bruno. In the village he had needed everyone’s patience and everyone’s attention. It had been clumsy and warm and slow. Here, a modern hearing aid could bring the world to his ears with a switch. That would be good. It would not bring the eyes that meet your eyes, the extra beat in a shared joke, the way a community leans in toward the person who needs it. Technology can widen the circle. It can also replace the circle with a mirror.

On the street below, a delivery van stopped and then left. A box appeared at a door. No one said hello. The building opposite hummed with the same cool air, each apartment its climate. I pictured the village again, the oven on, the washhouse loud, the square full of faces that were ordinary and therefore rare. I tried to count the names on my street. I could not.

In the afternoon I drove across town to a supermarket the size of a small village church. The parking lot glittered with windshields. Inside, every choice had five other choices. The radio above the aisles belonged to no one. I stood in front of the tomatoes and thought about how a bus turns a road into a room, how the driver can become a face you know, how a timetable is a common promise. My car had saved me forty minutes. My car had taken away four small talks and a shared complaint about the stoplight that never turns green.

At home I watched a film that no one in my building watched at the same time. When it ended, there was no murmur in the stairwell, only the soft click of a neighbor’s door closing, then mine. I went out to the garden and watered the basil. The fence kept my leaves safe and also kept my neighbor’s laughter out. The evening cooled, separately, apartment by apartment. The city was a hive with doors shut.

That night I did not sleep well. Every time the air-conditioning shut off, silence came back in, heavy as if carrying news. Toward dawn I drifted, and the village returned, not as an accusation, but as a suggestion.

I saw a boy carrying a plank. It was too long for him. Two other boys took the other end, and suddenly the plank knew what to do. I saw a woman who had nothing to bring to the oven, then a neighbor who split her loaf in half and handed it over with the shrug of someone who knows that someday she will be the one with empty hands. I saw an argument over the footbridge, not a pleasant one. Voices rose, a chair scraped the ground, someone cried, and then a man who never said much said one good sentence, and everyone sat down again. Compromise is a small talent, but in a village it is the difference between a bridge and a river you cannot cross.

When I woke, the phone was already telling me what I had missed. I turned it face down. I opened the window and let warm air in. It was not comfortable. It was honest. A blackbird made a clatter in the ivy. Somewhere, a neighbor whistled an old tune. I made a list, not like a resolution, more like a recipe without measurements.

Once a week, watch a film with others, somewhere with sticky floors and laughter, a cinema or a blanket in a park. Learn the names on my street until I can tell a story about each one. Trade headphones for a walk, eyes up, at least for the length of the river. Offer a chair in the hallway on hot nights and see if a threshold can become a tiny square. Share tools, not because I cannot afford them, but because someone else can save a trip if I say yes. Use the laundromat sometimes, even though I own a machine, and treat the wait like a class in being with strangers. Car-share for errands that do not need a private engine. Plant herbs where a passerby can pick a leaf. Find a way to repeat a joke so that someone who hears late can laugh with us, not after us.

None of this would make a village appear out of thin air. The old village had its own sorrows and small cruelties. The point was not to pretend otherwise. The point was to admit that I miss something and that I can practice it, a little, inside the life I have now.

That evening I baked. The kitchen warmed, the apartment warmed, the air stopped humming. I thought about knocking on a neighbor’s door with half a loaf and decided not to think too long. There was fumbling at the peephole, confusion, then a smile that grew into talk on the landing. The hallway did not become a square, not yet. It did become a place where two people stood long enough to exchange two names and three small facts that, put together, felt larger than either of us.

Later, I sat on the steps with the door propped open. A child ran after a ball, then returned to sit and listen to adults talk about serious things in a way that sounded like music. The sky had just enough light left to show the swifts turning. Somewhere, someone began to sing a low melody that others quietly picked up. In my pocket my phone was quiet. The night came, the way it always comes, evenly and for everyone, and for a moment the city shrank to a number I could hold. Not one hundred and forty-seven, not yet, but more than one, and something in me that had been sleeping sat up and looked around.

We did not lose togetherness all at once. We misplaced it in good devices and private comforts. We can find it again in small rooms and shared tasks, in names learned slowly, in air that is not exactly as we like it, in songs that rise without wires. The social animal has not died. It is waiting at the oven, at the washhouse, at the threshold, wherever a person chooses to leave the door open long enough for another person to pass through.