The Fourth Shore

by Alessandro Spina

  The Governor looked at them and the perfect harmony of their movements – as though they were being coordinated by a single device, as well as the proportions of their bodies, as if they had been cast by the same mould – left him feeling excluded, brutally so.

  On the other side of the hall, the Prince of Cleve, who was still standing, kept his eyes fixed on his wife’s agile feet as they ran around to who knew where. The suspicion of adultery was far from his mind. He was looking at the tiny golden shoes, which barely touched the ground as they moved, and he felt the distance between them grow wider, a nocturnal separation, immeasurable. It didn’t matter much that they were kept contained by the frame provided by the club’s dancehall, which was richly decorated with fanciful stuccos.

  The dance came to an end, and the Prince’s wife was returned to him, her chest barely moving. She leaned on the Prince’s arm, first lightly, then slowly with her entire weight. She sat down, and something about her movements had retained the lightness of that dance, as though it had never come to an end. The Prince looked at his wife’s shoes, which were now immobile.

  He suddenly rose and bowed before her. The Princess stood up, barely smiling, laid her hand on her husband’s shoulder and followed him into the next dance. The Prince pressed her tightly against himself, as though frightened that she were about to flee – in fact he held her so tightly that she could barely breathe. Nevertheless, she said nothing, and kept following his lead, despite being nearly deprived of air. It was a complete reversal of the earlier dance between Nemiri and the Princess, unravelling the tangled mass created by the Princess and her knight.

  A few minutes later, once the party’s luminous energy had exhausted itself. The Governor – paying some hurried compliment to the club’s president, who had accompanied him out onto the street – took his leave and left.

  II

  Inside the immense amphitheatre, the group of people following the Governor around resembled a flock of birds that had perched for a moment to recover their strength. Nothing remained of the skēnē – the edifice which encloses the proskenion – aside from a little door. The landscape beyond was unscathed: it replicated the theatre’s structure at ample intervals along the coast, a staircase leading down to a nonetheless invisible boundary, the sea.

  The morning was clear and the sky limpid.

  ‘Professor,’ the Governor called out from atop the steps, addressing the archaeologist who had accompanied them to tour the excavation sites at Cyrene, on the high plateaus, and who had remained standing in the orchestra pit because he couldn’t make it all the way up the steps, and go to and fro like the rest of them. ‘Why don’t you recite something for us?’

  It was an order. The archaeologist looked around.

  ‘Ερως ἀνίκατε μάχαν, ’Ερως, ὃς ἐν κτήμασι πίπτεις,

  ὃς ἐν μαλακαις παρειαις νεάνιδος ἐννυχεύεις,

  φοιτᾳς δ’ ὑπερπόντιος ἔν τ’ ἀγρονόμοις αὐλαις:

  καί σ’ οὔτ’ ἀθανάτων φύξιμος1 οὐδεὶς

  οὔθ’ ἁμερίων σέ γ’ ἀνθρώπων. ὁ δ’ ἔχων μέμηνεν.’iii

  The amphitheatre was a port, and those sailors had come from distant countries. The goods that the merchant-archaeologist was offering them were alien and incomprehensible to their ears, as well as faintly ridiculous. The old man himself looked ridiculous, weak and overly serious, so that the assembled visitors could barely contain their laughter.

  ‘O Eros, invincible in strife,’ Lieutenant Nemiri thundered, throwing everyone’s thoughts into disarray:

  ‘Eros, thou who hurlest disasters,

  Who in the soft cheeks

  Of the maiden liest in ambush,

  Who rosiest beyond the sea and rustic cottages

  Neither any among the Immortals can escape thee,

  Nor any of the short-lived mortals;

  and whoever has thee is mad!’

  ‘That’s absolutely wonderful, wonderful!’ a lady who was sat next to the Governor exclaimed.

  Were the words fashioned by the era’s great charismatic poet, Gabriele the Prophet, sufficient to explain their perplexed amazement? The presence the young lieutenant commanded had played a determining role. Unfamiliarity, and the blind fumbling around in the dark which had characterised the previous hours, had now given way, vanquished by the swell of emotions.

  ‘Behold me, O citizens of my native country’

  (Lieutenant Nemiri was reciting the poem only a couple of steps further down from the main group. He was so close that they could almost touch him; his capacity to play any role given to him was now defying verisimilitude. Like a ghost resurrecting old customs, the young man played the part of the young maiden.)

  ‘Entering upon the last journey,

  Looking at the splendor

  Of the sun for the last time,

  And hence forward never again!

  Hades, who stills everything, conducts me

  To the shore of Acheron alive

  And deprived of marriage…’iv

  Behind the archaeologist lay the hills and the immense necropolis which housed the area’s only inhabitants. The graves were square black boxes, cavernous holes that looked like windows carved into the hillside.

  They climbed their way up to Apollo’s fountain. Water was dripping down from the rocks. The Princess of Cleve was immobile: she filled the hollow of her hand with water.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Colonel Ajello asked her.

  ‘I want to see if it’s fresh,’ the Princess hurriedly answered.

  Truth be told, she was petitioning the local gods. Apollo, the city’s founder, had chanced upon this place when pursuing a nymph. Kyrene, the mistress of the land, as Pindar contents himself to say.

  At the evening banquet, the Princess was sat with the Prefect to her right, who was trying to ensnare her in the web of his conversation, like a spider. She couldn’t even keep up with him: all that administrative jargon, those snippets of gossip burrowing their way into reality like worms, all of that oppressed her. Instead she tried to listen to what the archaeologist was saying, but she could only grasp whatever he said in Greek. In order to help the Governor understand what he was saying, the old man would raise his voice whenever he uttered a word of Greek. Those words lingered in the air, like breadcrumbs marking out a magical road.

  The Prefect’s tactless speech was laying reality to waste. On the other hand, the guardian of that ancient city used reality to help one pay attention, as though one were a neophyte searching for a hidden, invisible realm.

  Lieutenant Nemiri’s recitation in the amphitheatre had had the burning immediacy of a religious revelation. That celebration of Eros had been an externalization of his own feelings. The Princess was certain that nobody had understood the meaning of that ceremony. Nemiri was the object of desire, he was desire itself. A single person, and the intensity of their presence, can be a key to reality. The Prefect’s words were ashes that reality was scattering around as it ran by, while Nemiri’s presence sent reality up in flames.

  ‘You have for some time now developed a taste for solitude, which both shocks and worries me, because it comes between us.’

  The Prince’s reproach had made her shudder. He was sat far away from her, but he was keeping his eyes on her. His words lay in the dark oblivion of her memory, until they suddenly resurfaced to assail her once more. She lingered immobile, as though attempting to hide, or conceal her tracks.

  Yet the Prince never took his eyes off her.

  The Princess left the hall. She hated that pretentious hotel, the wasteful marble, the columns, the arches, the dome, the giant staircase. Just like the previous day, time had flitted away on pointless chatter: it all felt like a game of cards that would never end.

  A few pines, planted far from one another, just a few feet
from the hotel. To the left, the incomparable ruins atop the mountain. Up ahead in the distance lay the terraces facing the sea.

  The Princess descended the steps. She walked slowly, even though it seemed to her that each step was taking her very far away, as though she weren’t wearing sandals, but seven-league boots.

  Solitude already constituted a kind of distance.

  She crossed the deserted square. She descended the steps that led to the woods. She sat in the shade. They couldn’t see her from the hotel. That, too, was a kind of distance.

  The ruins of the ancient Greek city were simply marvelous. The presence of the others had bothered and exhausted her. All emotions, when truly present, have to find an outlet in order to be expressed, or concealed. As was often the case, when beheld by our immediate consciousness, emotions tended to be laid to waste.

  Lieutenant Nemiri’s vitality earned him diffidence and libel just as in the same way it simultaneously earned him favour with others. It was said that a woman would compromise herself simply to speak to him; in truth, nobody eluded his grasp and the Governor had kept him on as his ordnance officer. Being everywhere at all times seemed to amount to a constant flight from anywhere specific.

  The Princess was playing with a branch when she suddenly felt something pulling at its other end, as though a bird had grasped it in its beak. She raised her gaze, frightened. It was the Prince, the same sad restless bird he always was.

  They entered the pine grove, walking alongside one another. A road that led to the port of Apollonia once passed through there. Half of the small commercial outpost had sunk into the sea centuries earlier due to an earthquake. One could admire the seaweed-covered ruins from atop a boat.

  The port lay almost twenty miles from Cyrene, and the road that led there was on a steady decline and was pleasant to walk.

  The tombs had been carved into the rock, on the hillsides facing the sea. They had eaten through those hills like termites through furniture. The square black entrances were windows into an invisible world.

  The Prince sat beneath the portico of a tomb which mimicked the architecture of classical temples with moving humility. There was nothing except two columns, each slightly taller than a couple of feet. At the top, above the tympanum – a bunch of purple flowers. Its simplicity, even more than its venerable age – the tombs had been built in the 5th century AD – made that place a wellspring of time. The Princess sat in front of her husband; inside the tiny portico, they looked as though they were inside a carriage.

  The impression she’d had after leaving the hotel – of having worn seven-league boots instead of sandals – came flooding back to her.

  The dead were spying on them. Now that the sky had turned lilac, they had all come out into the open. They were an invisible public, and they formed a crowd around them.

  The Princess recalled a popular fairy tale: It was said that the dead would throw themselves under the path of the living at night in order to be trampled on. Obviously, they don’t suffer any pain. Yet they still want to feel the weight of something. Weight is one of the markers of living things they are most sensible to, and the one they have irremediably lost the most. Weight excited them more than colours, which really excited them, and even more than words and music.

  The Princess experienced the admiration of those spectators as though she were an actress. There was an obvious connection between that necropolis, which took up more space than the city itself, and the city’s four theatres. She knew they were grateful to her for having worn that dress with its cheerful patterns, and they were looking at her sandals and her little string of pearls. Their steps, the sound of their steps, must have been like a triumph.

  The necropolis was the city’s fifth, and most important, theatre.

  The scene was silent, the Prince gazed into the distance, while those terraces were engulfed by the dark, one after the other. The Princess straightened her tiny bust, as though wanting to take a proper breath of air.

  Acting, she thought, means putting on those seven-league boots.

  They weren’t more than a couple of hundred feet away from the hotel; it had been a specific, initiation-like journey, and now they stood on the slope of death itself. This was a place where one could come and look at life and gain perspective; it is for this precise reason that it is called the slope of death. A city which had honoured its dead in such a manner was necessarily loyal to the arts of the theatre.

  The Prince and Princess had been embroidered against the backdrop of a temple that could have fit in the palm of their hands. The Princess decided that she would confess. It appeared as though she was being driven by a fatal strength, as she recited a text she’d nursed in her mind since the start.

  ‘I ask for your forgiveness a thousand times over,’ she said, ‘if my feelings have upset you in any way. But I’ll never offend you with actions.’

  The Prince (so the wife loves someone else – and who was that? Who?) leaned his back against the rock face. Having endured two thousand years, it was damp to the touch.

  The play was growing ever more tiresome. He too wanted a tomb like that, by the sea. The only true interactions would be with the sea, the limpid sky, and the terraces on which lights and shadows undulated. Neither did he want to see any of the living – apart from the old archaeologist, with his loving hands and beautiful, mysterious verses, as well as the stories of ancient kings whose moves were governed by the sovereign mechanism of Fate.

  The Princess nursed an acute sadness within her; yet she also exhibited the same determination as the Greek maiden whom Nemiri had evoked in the amphitheatre. The itinerary through the pine grove and then through the paths of the necropolis had made what had previously appeared impossible or unthinkable seem simple and easy. Amidst those clear, pure eyes lay in fact this certainty (and she would have wanted to confess this to her friend, the archaeologist, and entrust this certainty to the care of his delicate hands). Standing on the slope of death, (and here again the connection between the four theatres and the necropolis appeared obvious to her), the only true mistake one could make would be to lie.

  ‘Once upon a time I used to be very curious about the future,’ the Governor said, pushing back his chair and standing up, ‘but I’ve been told so many lies and so many unlikely things… I convinced myself that one can never acquire any authentic knowledge.’

  The dinner guests stood up in a hurry. The Prefect’s gaffe was irremediable; being a stranger to that court, he had no understanding of its secrets.

  The Governor was omnipotent, and unlike the ones who had preceded him, he trusted and had sympathy for the country and land he had been sent to govern. His approach to reality was natural and immediate. Instead of being oppressed by his powerful role, he played into it with a beguiling and cocky display of bravado.

  He had been foretold that he would die by accident. The most unlikely of circumstances given it would have been very difficult to kill him voluntarily. He had rejected the prophecy with a smug laugh, as though a horse had just neighed.

  The Prefect never managed to strike a natural pose in the Governor’s presence; instead, he looked like an embarrassed lover poiselessly offering up his devotion and, to capture his attention, the sinister products of his imagination. He had taken his cup of coffee and placed it before his wife’s eyes so she could divine the contents of its slimy grinds. The Governor had immediately stood up and pushed back both his chair and the offer. He was horrified by prophecies – as if someone had just told him that the lord of this land was unpopular with the gods.

  The assembled crowd dispersed.

  Whenever he was reminded of that prophecy, the Governor felt pestered by the court and the guards. He dismissed everyone and went out onto the street by himself, as though he wanted to expose himself and defy fate; but fate was hiding in a mysterious place and would only come out at an unexpected moment. You won’t sleep where you like on the day that you die, went an old snide, gloomy proverb he’d once overheard. W
as his careless behaviour actually a case of him showing off his virile courage, or did it instead simply betray his desperation?

  The solitary walk unfolded in the most tranquil of manners. He crossed paths with only a few people who greeted him respectfully: his subjects would protect him. He went back to the villa he’d had built for him in an unspoilt bay east of Cyrene, and shut himself in his room. Yet he didn’t love solitude – it was a waste.

  The Prince of Cleve was headed in the villa’s direction. He turned around before reaching it. He always kept his head low whenever he walked. Not by chance, the pavement rocks had been laid haphazardly and he appeared to be adjusting his walk to tread exclusively on them, as though it were a test. The Governor despised the Prefect’s servility, that bottomless desire of his to delight and entertain him; yet he also felt a kind of dissatisfaction if he felt excluded from someone’s thoughts, his existential anxiety would gnaw away at him. Why did the Prince not look up at the window from which he watched him?

  He recalled having seen the Prince and Princess an hour or so earlier as they headed in the same direction that the officer now took in the opposite direction, on his own. He descended the stairs and went out onto the street. Leaving, he dismissed all who offered to accompany him.

  He furtively took the path that the Prince and Princess had taken earlier. The valley was so narrow that nobody could see him, and the path remained hidden. At the bottom of the valley, a clear stream flowed past the smooth white stones only to eventually spill into the Halfmoon, the deserted gulf he could admire from his white villa. It was the only stream around for thousands of miles. Long ago, the region was crisscrossed by mighty rivers, but now only the terrifying magnificence of their dry beds remained. Devoid of water they were now barren, as mysterious and incomprehensible as the archaeologist’s verses.

  The villa had been built on a ledge atop the mountain, where the valley opened into the gulf’s pincers. It was the only building in the area, the only rocks which had been picked up and purposefully arranged. The ruins of the Greek city lay forty miles in the distance. Its presence made the Governor uneasy: he ruled over a colony where the natives had been exterminated, and he could not bear the physical reminder of other rulers and predecessors, and the tombs left behind to mark the vanity of power. Those dead were the priests of a cult which contradicted the reality he presided over.