The Fourth Shore

by Alessandro Spina

  Colonel Terzi experienced a surge of pleasure: just like him, his daughter always held her head high. She had never asked to come to the house, and she’d never sent an ambassador to plead pity on her behalf. That surge of pleasure unleashed an unwilling smile. As for his wife, who thought she’d stumbled onto the drama’s climactic moment, her blood rushed through her veins. She embraced her daughter. The Colonel looked at them ironically: his teary-eyed wife on one hand and on the other Elda, shirking away from curiosity, and her graceful face, which sat gently atop her long neck, concealed all sentiments.

  Claudio had gotten lost as soon as he’d entered. He had been invited too, but on seeing that Elda and Attilio were there, he had fled.

  After that casual encounter, Elda and Attilio began visiting the house. Only Claudio and his mother feared that the situation could take a dramatic turn at any moment. As for Attilio, he never once dredged up the subject of his pointless humiliation – and Terzi approved of his tact. As if the showdown had always only involved two opponents: the colonel and his daughter.

  It was at this time that following a brief sojourn in the motherland, Elda returned to the colony armed with a degree, having received the highest possible marks. The Colonel decided to celebrate the occasion by holding a reception in honour of his daughter’s success. He appeared impatient to brush all those past misunderstandings under the carpet.

  ‘How would next Saturday suit you?’ he asked her, affectionately.

  ‘It’s better than Sunday,’ Elda replied.

  ‘Do you want a public reconciliation on top of the one that just happened behind the scenes?’ Elda explained to her brother later that evening, her brother being the only one who was still truly in her confidence, as though she wanted to educate him. ‘And so we must pay the price, and start from scratch all over again. I went to the church on my own, and my father refused to accompany me, acting as though Satan himself had stood at the altar to consecrate my doom. Yet when the organ started to play, by which time I was halfway between the doors and the altar, I felt that someone was accompanying me: there is a father who stands behind all fathers, and who is never wrong about the purity of one’s heart, that’s what the music was telling me – in fact it was a fearless witness. Now that daddy understands that being a sculptor is not such an infamous trade, and that the world of bohemia is vast and varied. He’s proud of my degree, and he’s even taken a shine to Attilio: for once, he’s been forced to take it all back. Attilio pretends as though he’s forgotten all about it but I’m cut from the same cloth as daddy. He wants to re-conciliate? Fine: but on my terms.’

  Elda drew close to her brother’s ear, as though fearful of spies. She knew perfectly well that nobody was eavesdropping on them, they were in Claudio’s bedroom, on the first floor.

  ‘Do you understand?’ she concluded. ‘These are the symbols that can bring some ceremonial relief to life, otherwise it really would be what he calls bohemia, a random sequence of colourful, meaningless facts. My father didn’t attend my wedding, as though I wasn’t anyone’s daughter: the damage done by this image (me entering the church on my own) must be repaired. This was the sequence of events that led to my father walking away from my life: how does he plan to stroll back into it?’

  ***

  The sun was blinding that Sunday, the piazza was teeming and the cathedral was crowded. Elda had told her father that she wanted to attend mass with him and he had told her to meet him at the foot of the steps. At eleven o’clock, sharp.

  The Colonel was already irritated by Elda’s tardiness. The fatal, all-embracing Bohemianism he had detected in his daughter’s life was now resurfacing through that insignificant detail – her tardiness – and was causing him infinite vexation. Once the reconciliation had taken place, Elda should have resumed her place as her father’s favourite and returned to being the person she’d always been: a flawless machine, a paragon.

  However, there she was, finally. Terzi stiffened: for the first time, he lost control of his stony features. The mother was following them, from a distance, she wasn’t sure whether they would get into it. Perhaps her husband’s wrath would implode in that very church. Hidden behind a column, Claudio watched the couple advance. The church was already teeming with people, and everyone remained focused on the ceremony, as though a rehearsal for a theatre performance was unfolding in a real place. Those who knew about the family affair whispered details to the uninformed. The real – and the sacred – seem to appear and disappear in sequences rooted in both the past and present: it was as though time had suddenly shuffled the deck of cards and had started to play, or had gotten confused.

  The duel that Elda had always foreseen was taking place at that moment. Elda was challenging her father. Hiding behind the bright marble column, Claudio asked himself whether he would ever dare to do so himself.

  Elda had therefore triumphed, the mere fact that her father was walking next to her while she all dressed in white heralded his defeat. Yet with every step he took, his face appeared to relax into greater and greater joy. Were they witnessing that scowling man’s metamorphosis? It was as though he was the groom, while the congregation had assembled in that sacred space to witness their union. At this point, the Colonel identified with his daughter, the willpower that belonged to that tall, beautiful girl with the restless eyes, was all a result of him. The bohemian girl whom everyone feared was now as placid as the bouquet of flowers she held in her hands. The realm of willpower that the ceremony Elda wanted consecrated, was the opposite of the realm of bohemia, where everything was interchangeable. Bohemia had been vanquished, and Elda had returned to her father’s ordered world. Thereupon he would be happy to give her away to another man, given that her education was finally complete.

  Having reached the far end of the church, he saw Attilio, who was waiting for them at the altar. There was nothing unusual about that nice young man, he wasn’t tainted by original sin. The Colonel slipped his arm loose from his daughter’s and gave her away to the man she had chosen for herself.

  Claudio fled. He walked alone along the piers by the docks. He looked at the fish in the water. His suicidal impulses had reawakened. He would drown himself. He too seemed seized by his father’s measureless pride: only that his was rooted in negativity.

  THE ASTROLABE

  Major Lanzi dawdled in front of the mirror, it was as if he wanted to walk into it. He resembled an art critic keenly examining the particularities of a painting to ascertain its paternal origins were different than previously believed.

  He had been told his son would be arriving on the next mail boat from Naples. He hadn’t seen him in four years. He couldn’t recall his son’s physiognomy: he was looking for clues in the mirror.

  In order to shoo away indiscreet or perhaps even malevolent questions, he would say that his wife never came to the colony because she couldn’t put up with the climate, which was sometimes too humid, sometimes too dry – whenever the winds from the desert swept wrathfully along the coast. It was a widely-known fact in the city that the Major kept up a relationship with a widow who managed a milliner’s on Corso Italia.

  It had been his wife, Elvira, who had revealed the existence of a rival to him. Arrogant and capricious, she had refused to follow him to the colony, where he had been transferred. It had been a humiliating scene. The son of a modest servant of the state, he had married a woman of noble origins. The first time he had set foot in his betrothed’s palace, he had been immediately impressed: he had been admitted into a different world and his path had reached a fork. ‘It’s as if I had been caught in the clutches, or rather as if I’d fallen into the quagmire of that love affair,’ he would explain, years later, recalling the episode.

  Once one climbed the staircase, one entered the arcade, where superb and enigmatic life-size portraits could be distinguished in the scant light: as if the corridor opened a window on the invisible, it looked like the interior of a mausoleum or the secret headquarters of a sect. Inside the ball
room, there was a single three-pronged chandelier of Murano glass, whose milky glow stood out against the dark, almost nocturnal colours of the ceiling. The inlaid doors were complex surfaces that looked like board games. Yet the furniture in the actually inhabited part of the building was an ill-assorted bunch, which included a few deformed modern pieces. This impression of disorder was a bad omen – almost a prophecy. When Elvira had revealed to him the presence of her lover, declaring that she would not be going with him to the colony, Lanzi had recalled that very house, where it seemed three centuries vied with one another for the available space in order to profane it.

  In a sense, it was his youth that was arriving on the mail boat. Having grown, Arturo’s resemblance to him would have certainly grown more marked. Yet he had his mother’s restless eyes, the only trait of hers that was nevertheless dear to him. Perhaps he was finding it difficult to conjure an image of his son because some trait of hers always interfered. The sad shadow of a broken marriage had descended on the son. As if one of the characters had leaped out of one of the large paintings in the dimly-lit arcade and hit the ground: he was haughty and enigmatic too, and while still being incredibly young, their features were bound by a strange and fatal mimetic synchronicity.

  What would the boy say about the banal little villa on the African coast in which he lived, surrounded by a desiccated, dusty patch of garden? His guest’s face – where every detail could be read one way or another – concealed his own: as if he had slipped on a mask. Elvira used to say that Arturo had large hands, just like him, which were rough and possessive: a merchant’s hands, she would say, suited to whoever sold and purchased goods, not the kind of hands that beamed beauty or authority.

  If Lanzi dawdled in front of the mirror it was also because nobody in the city was in his confidences, not even the widow – an exile, a peroxide blonde – whose tiny house doubled up as a storeroom for her shop: all those hats sitting in rows on the shelves looked like the heads of gods whose faces had been cut off. He had made some ironic remarks about the presence of those heads in their love nest: in order to put him at ease again, the widow said that they all had their heads turned to the wall. Lanzi asked himself why every love affair he’d ever experienced had contained a mysterious third presence: the outsized, vindictive portraits that had so disdainfully welcomed him into Elvira’s home and the empty hats in the milliner’s bedroom.

  He went out onto the street. The sky was limpid and serene. It was midday. The mail boat transporting his son wouldn’t arrive until four. There would be no difficulty spotting him from afar: the port was often deserted and the mail boat would slide into the docks slowly like in a procession, leaving behind a bright, foamy wake.

  ***

  The meeting between father and son unfolded in the most natural manner possible. If anything, there was an excess of discretion on both sides, as though they hadn’t wanted to attract anyone’s attention. However, in that small colonial city, which was excitable enough despite its military idleness, their meeting failed to elicit anyone’s notice. Perhaps the African landscape had, like a painted backdrop, given them the theatrical impression of an invisible public.

  The widow saw them passing by her shop. Hijacked by the demons of his past, which had reappeared in the shape of his son, Lanzi wasn’t right there on the sidewalk – his spirit was far away. The young man’s presence was like an epiphany: his wife has come to Africa! She thought to herself deluded as she watched the couple walk by.

  The blank faces underneath the hats smiled malignantly, as if they already knew what was going to happen, not only in the future, but also the past, which is devastating and which nothing can erase. We’ve said all we needed to say, the widow sadly thought to herself. Yet her disappointment was being held back by the surge of an opposing feeling: that the younger version of her lover couldn’t compete with the older one – she had been enchanted by Major Lanzi’s stern, reserved expression, which his son completely lacked.

  Reconciled, she smiled, happy with her lot.

  The Major observed his son insistently: it seemed that he and his wife had to divide their estate between them – and this estate had a face. He didn’t ask the boy any questions, let alone any about her. From the moment of the revelation of the rival’s presence, one silence had been quickly followed by another in their relationship, like a book devoid of text.

  Major Lanzi exhibited an exaggerated interest in Arturo’s studies. He had enrolled in the faculty of law. All of this was to avoid more sensitive topics to argue over, and in order to give their dialogues a little vivacity. He went so far as to become menacing and authoritarian whenever the subject arose.

  In their sitting room at home, which was also enshrouded in a penumbra, or the feast of light at an outdoor African café, they looked like characters who had met in a scene that was altogether different to the one they should have met in: their conversation was swamped in tediousness, as if they were still in the dressing room, before the terrible, bombastic verses of the tragedy began to be sung. Was the drama in question the one between Lanzi and Elvira?

  No, Lanzi thought, I am talking to my son, who is as distant as the image left by a painter of a man who belongs to another era. Only that this different era isn’t the past, but the future: Arturo is my heir.

  While he was sliding back in time, observing his son in the light of his slight resemblance to Elvira, the image headed towards the future, like a document, the page where the story has been written – he thought, ironically.

  Not that the boy’s mother had instructed her son to reject any intimacy with his father: Elvira never took an arduous path, and it was this very arrogance that always led her to choose the path of least resistance. Neither had he expected him to be the one to discover the rival’s presence, he had led him by the hand to face the other. Her illustrious ancestors had allowed her to walk across the scene of the present nonchalantly, given that they didn’t attach much importance to it.

  Arturo had arrived sealed up, as if the artistic spell which had captured the likenesses of his ancestors unto canvas, and had transformed their physical bodies into powder, had kidnapped him too: Elena had sent him a portrait, with whom dialogue would prove impossible.

  In order to pull himself out of the unnerving morass of soliloquies, the Major tried to imagine his son’s difficulties; he told himself that he had to take an active hand in that life, but he didn’t know how or what he should say. Arturo didn’t seem to be hiding any secrets or irresolvable dramas. However, he was evasive, a sealed treasure chest which could have been either full or empty, nobody knew. Nothing indicated that Arturo needed him, nor that he would push him away.

  Maybe it was the way he had grown used to those faceless hats, to those mute masks that now made Major Lanzi look upon the simple sound of another’s breath close to his as a deafening din.

  Another river flowed through the microcosm of that house, close but invisible – a current similar to the unruly realm of dreams. Alone, each in their room, Lanzi was finding it impossible to distract himself. He felt responsible for that destiny, even though he didn’t know what that turn of phrase really meant. In a way, it felt as if his doppelgänger had taken up residence in the adjacent room: that little villa was straining to contain both of them.

  When, having given in to his impulses, he would appear in his son’s bedroom, he would look visibly marked by fatigue. Yet nothing in his speech justified the tension.

  Proffering some excuse or other, he would occasionally go out on his own. Or he would persuade his son to go out on his own. Yet he would draw no relief from it, as though he’d been split in half. It was far better for them to go out together, either on a long walk, or to sit at the cafés on the Corso: the presence of other people minimised the stagnancy of the situation. They delegated all chatter and movement to others, as though they were reading a novel or watching a film. Or as if they had both taken up residence in the realm of dreams.

  One night they headed off
together to the Officers’ Club. Arturo had made some friends and Lanzi saw him swapping jokes with them, looking free. Whereas he saw his son as an impregnable fortress, in the presence of his friends he transformed into a peaceful garden. There was a redheaded girl with him, who had cheerful freckles on her skin. She seems to bring Antonio to life better than I do – he thought, as though his son were a puppet made to move on command.

  Major Lanzi was now observing his son’s legs, which were as long as his, and they looked a little goofy when he danced, moving in unnecessarily large steps. The fragile ballerina had to take a step and then slide with her feet the rest of the way to cover the same distance. These imperfections made the young couple look very graceful indeed.

  Comforted, Lanzi smiled and raised his glass of wine. He asked himself whether Arturo’s liberation hadn’t been caused by the link that bound father and son, to the fact that Elvira had been substituted by the redheaded girl with the cheerful freckles. It was as if by dancing, Arturo had lost his resemblance to his mother. His wife’s palazzo, which was the word he used to coldly describe everything concerning the woman who had refused to follow him to the colony, vanished from his mind. The austere and intimidating portraits had cast a spell on him and his son: the redheaded maiden was the fairy who would set them free.

  He smiled awkwardly, he had the confused and metaphorical imagination of a young boy. It was so weak and fragile… it was two-dimensional, thin as paper. She looked at him playfully, as if amusing herself by trying to find the features his son had inherited on his face, as though she were chasing a third image, produced by the convergence of the two of them.

  Lanzi stood up and grabbed the girl by the waist, drawing circles upon circles on the dance-floor, like an endless festoon: the waltz’s notes made that movement all the easier, as if they were being swept along by the wind. This was why he’d had that impression ever since he’d entered that circle: that music had replaced words and they were being carried away by a constant, indomitable flux. Having climbed onto a mail boat, they had begun a journey towards a distant port: the music was water.