Cities and Eyes. 1.

The ancients built Valdrada on the shores of a lake with houses entirely made of verandas stacked one on top of the other and high streets that faced out over the water, their parapets lined with balustrades. Thus the traveler arriving there sees two cities: one rising up above the lake and one reflected upside-down within it. Nothing exists or occurs in one Valdrada that the other Valdrada does not repeat, for the city was built such that every point of it might be reflected in its mirror, and the Valdrada down in the water contains not only all the paterae and friezes of the facades overlooking the lake but also the interior rooms with their ceilings and floors, the view down corridors, the wardrobe mirrors. 

The inhabitants of Valdrada know that all of their actions are both a single act and its mirror image, which possesses the special dignity of images, and their awareness forbids them from abandoning themselves, even for an instant, to chance or oblivion. Even when lovers turn their naked bodies, skin against skin, searching how to position themselves to find the greatest pleasure in one another, and even when murderers drive a knife into the dark veins of a neck and the clotted blood flows freely as the blade plunges deeper, sliding through the tendons, it is not so much the coupling or slaying that matters as the coupling or slaying of their images, clear and cold in the mirror.

The mirror sometimes increases the value of things, and sometimes nullifies their value. Not everything that seems to hold value above the mirror endures in its reflection. The twin cities are not identical, for nothing that exists or happens in Valdrada is symmetrical: every face and gesture is answered from the mirror by a face or gesture inverted point-for-point. The two Valdradas live for one another, gazing continuously into one another's eyes—yet they do not love.