Ready to follow him, Valentini leapt after him.
However, the littoral looked like an infinite thread, and it too ran alongside them, with all its unrivalled reserve, overwhelming them.
2
BLOOD MUST FLOW
AND YOU MUST DIExxx
Her name was Elena Petrović, and just like Her Majesty, she was born in Montenegro, the ancient Illyria, and she had married an Italian man who wore a uniform, but the similarities ended there. The Captain was a man of average height, portly, optimistic, and his character was entirely different from Victor Emmanuel, who sat on the throne so diffidently, as if he didn’t actually wield supreme authority, but rather feared it. Captain Andolfato on the other hand liked the world he lived in, and everything seemed beautiful and well-disposed towards him: nature, the State, the Fascist party, the colony, the Army. If one put a problem before him, he would try to minimise its importance, to dismiss it, and this appeared to free him from the need to try and resolve it. He wasn’t held in especially high regard by either his superiors or his underlings, but neither did he have any enemies, since everyone recognised the goodness of his soul and his inexhaustible human sympathy.
In the midst of that pleasant life – the Captain also enjoyed perfect health, despite being quite the drinker, and the alcohol accentuated his good cheer – only a single eccentric detail stood out: his wife’s extraordinary beauty. That such an exquisitely sculpted woman had married a man who was the epitome of banality itself had stirred much disbelief in that small colonial town. ‘Mentally and physically banal,’ the skeletal Professor of Natural Sciences sarcastically commented, lusting after the man’s wife.
The woman had composed an elegant and devoted letter to the Queen, in which she had bowed before Her Majesty to proudly inform her that they shared the same name, and that she had also come from Montenegro to Italy, in fact to the colony, a land which had been restored to Rome under the reign of Victor Emmanuel III, the Victorious King.xxxi The letter sent by one of the ladies in waiting at court had been accompanied by an official portrait of the Queen, which Her Majesty herself had so graciously signed; having been slipped into a silver frame, the letter could be admired in the sitting room. The Captain made a point of bragging about it: as if he and Victor Emmanuel were in-laws now.
Nobody understood what sense it made, once the incommensurable difference in rank was accounted for, for him to call himself the King’s brother-in-law. Had he married his sister, or was the King perhaps his wife’s brother? Someone put the question to him and he had replied with a laugh; at times it seemed as though he didn’t understand the way the word should be used, in the way one doesn’t know the various names of animal species, and he therefore formulated his answer with a gesture of laugh.
‘He’s the only animal who laughs,’ a shopkeeper angrily commented, passing sentence on the man, Mrs Andolfato – who had never laid eyes on him a single time – being one of his customers. It was as if the Captain and Victor Emmanuel had married the same woman, who had somehow – as if magically – been split into two identical copies. The dictionary, while being vast, did not account for the relationship between two men who had married different models of the same woman, Elena Petrović. ‘It’s a neologism that idiotic Captain came up with,’ Strino, the Professor of Literature mockingly explained. ‘But doesn’t neologism mean a word borrowed from another language?’ the Professor of Gymnastics asked, proud of his strapping physique, but devoted to the arts of the spirit, to culture, which his education had forced him to abstain from (as Pirovano Maria, the Professor of French, put it).
‘A neologism can also indicate a new meaning for a word already in use, my dear colleague,’ the Professor of Literature replied, placated.
If the professor nursed an opinion on this, it was because the beautiful damsel lived in a building at the bottom of Via Fiume, on the second floor. In order to reach the Corso, she therefore had to walk along the pavement beside the secondary school. Thus, while a professor would be explaining one of Horace’s odes, or complicated equations, they would see this image on the street pass by like a vision, in a white, straight-cut princess dress. Elena wore no jewellery, neither real stones, nor fakes, ‘in the same way nobody looks at an old canvas painted by the hand of an artistic god and thinks of adding some trinket to the picture,’ the Professor of Philosophy explained in his baritone, comblé.xxxii He too – all the while never losing the thread of his lesson on Kant’s philosophy, unlike his thirty-odd students, who understood none of it – would follow that lady’s steps with his eyes, as she strode hurriedly along, as if fleeing from something. It felt as though she wasn’t a material presence, but rather a collective dream conjured by the male teachers who were crushed by the boredom of their lessons. Even the headmaster, a furtive man, often cast a quick glance across the street, and if he happened to cross paths with her on the street, he would rapidly remove his hat, enraptured, his reason flitted into smoke.
It was as if a tragic fact from historical memory had slipped through the fingers of the magician illustrating his point in the classroom, as if it had leapt out of the book and jumped onto the street, sorrowful, inscrutable, excited and lonely; it was right there, in that secondary school, that the details of the epilogue of that story were first learned.
‘Of turning point in that story,’ the scowling Professor of Mathematics corrected, still jealous of her looks, despite the fact they had faded.
The beautiful lady had killed herself.
She had done so right there in that apartment on the second floor of the building at the bottom of that sun-drenched road. Her eldest son, barely twelve years old, had found the door shut on his return home. He had jumped from the stairs up onto the building’s ledge and had climbed into the bedroom through the open window: in front of him lay his mother, in a pool of blood.
The Professors all talked at the same time, one was still sitting down, and another was on his feet. The council had been adjourned, and the day’s agenda lay inert beneath the headmaster’s glassy eyes: what was to be done?
Truth be told, nobody expected those eggheads to do much about anything.
However, the man who stood stridently up from behind his desk, like a Captain who leaps upon his saddle when the decisive hour has come, or so his loyal accountant said, was a businessman, who was bound by ties of friendship to the Andolfato family (the beautiful suicide had been his youngest son’s godmother). He was a man in his forties, robust, authoritarian and generous. He had burst into the Andolfato home, being among the first to arrive – having been warned by a mysterious phone-call, it was later said – and had ordered the bereaved husband and his two sons to follow him back to his own house. In fact, he had basically kidnapped them.
As it happens, events had unfolded in a far calmer manner: yet following the customary formalities, the Andolfato family had actually spent various weeks living in the houses of close friends.
The city was very small and everyone knew that the woman had committed suicide. The official version of events was that she had suffered a sudden stroke. ‘She suffered a blow, a blow!’ people constantly said.
‘Yes, she suffered a blow to the heart,’ the Professor of Mathematics and Physics creepily added; she was skinny as a rake, and had no heart.
The unhappy woman’s son, the one who had found her in a pool of blood, would go suddenly pale whenever he heard those words – a blow, a blow! The lie was meant to protect the boys from their classmates.
They played together in a group of four – the Andolfato boys and the Mariani boys – now that tragedy had united them into a single house. Yet it was always as though a dark cloud hung over them. In the way that music is sometimes like an invisible plain, an alternate reality to the slower passing of time, where nothing happens.
The youngest of the Mariano boys, Albertino, who was ten, always seemed to run along a secret track. He was the only one in that group who had noticed his friend’s binary pain: he wasn’t merely
suffering because his mother was dead, but because her blood had also been concealed, and while he hadn’t been obliged to lie – and to say that she had suffered a stroke – he was required to keep quiet whenever anyone voiced that lie. The authority of his elders had therefore been compromised: it was as if they were the ones who were children, incapable of living without the help of consoling lies.
Albertino was proud of his father’s gesture. The latter had wanted to host them all in his house and he had therefore spared the Captain the need to ask. What should he have asked for, after all? That man also looked like a little boy, and was now both taciturn and dazed. Mrs Mariani, who had always been friends with the deceased, gave him some comfort; she was a woman who possessed a soothing lightness, even in the midst of tragedy. It was as though the Captain had become her third child, her big boy, as the Captain himself bitterly commented.
A blow!
If Elena’s final gesture had been rescinded and re-written, the adults had nevertheless failed to take sufficient precautions. After a carelessly mislaid sentence here, and an allusion there, either from relatives, strangers or classmates, in the end even the boys – the two Andolfatos and the Marianis – found out the truth: the beautiful woman had had a secret affair with one of her husband’s colleagues.
Adults and children alike were certain that Captain Andolfato was innocent, and the road to her suicide had taken other paths, which had had nothing to do with his thoughts, actions or words. Had he known about the affair? Nobody had had the regrettable idea to ask him, given that even baseness has its limits. There had certainly been no outbursts or threats.
On the husband’s part.
If anything, the more sophisticated ones tended to say, it was worth looking into whether any threats had been launched by the invisible man on the scene, the woman’s lover.
Whom nobody ever questioned.
Mariani protected the Andolfato family, his friends. Everyone was aware that Mariani was a Don Juan, but nobody had ever insinuated that he had had that woman in his sights. He would never have dishonoured that friendship – just as he always kept his word when it came to business. It appeared as though he felt it was his duty to take charge of the situation and keep his friend and his sons on the painful path of continuity. At the table, he would talk of trite and even bizarre subjects, as though wanting to use the quotidian as an antidote. The widower was very grateful to him: he had never thought such a tragedy would befall him. He would facetiously say that ‘there’s no need to prepare oneself.’ He looked like a man who walked along carefree singing his way through life while death had already left to hunt for its victim.
Mariani’s youngest son, Albertino, Elena Petrović’s godson, wouldn’t let himself be. He wanted to help his friend, Peppino. He certainly understood that it was necessary to banish that unbearable memory – that is, the suicide – but he found it naïve and rude to merely say that it had been: a blow, a blow! He had also understood that his friend was suffering because of it, as though the adults had wanted to make him – the first person who had witnessed the event – out to be a liar.
It took him a few days to wrap his little head around all his thoughts.
Apparently, the day had been proceeding without a hitch in that house, which was now shared by two families: if Mariani had decided to impose normality on the tragedy’s victims, his wife was offering them levity in the form of playful, affectionate conversation. As for Albertino, he had not only understood that Elena would live through a passionate affair, but that his friend had known all along. Maybe his father didn’t know, but he did. Thus, he had seen the lover’s secret face in the pool of his mother’s blood.
They often read adventure comics together.
Slowly, Albertino was able to see the wood for the trees. To start with, he had managed to get his friend to admit that there had been another man in his mother’s life. It seemed that confiding in someone did him much good, as though he had been freed from the weight of being the only one to know something, or being unable to talk about it with anybody – children shouldn’t get mixed up in affairs such as these, this was his mother they were talking about, a sacred image who was now dead… As if being forbidden to talk about her could change any of the details of the facts already known to him.
Albertino had some talent when it came to sketching, and his teachers praised him for it. He decided to avail himself of it. That evening, when they were alone in their room, he pulled a sketchbook out from under his bed and began to draw, beneath his friend’s attentive gaze. He even drew a speech bubble, just like in their comics, but he only mouthed the words, without writing them down. Perhaps because the words were superfluous, or because he feared someone would find the sketchbook.
The ceremony had been going on for several evenings, without anyone ever noticing that the light would stay switched on for a long time, because the room gave out on the terrace.
Drawing took up a great deal of time, and thus the narrative progressed slowly. This helped the young novelist to unravel its thread.
The plot twist happened all of a sudden. It wasn’t a piece of fiction, but rather a memory. He had read a sentence in one of their comics, ‘Cino and Franco’,xxxiii the adventures of two friends, a hand covered by a piece of cloth… Just like in the comic book, the murderer had faked his beloved’s suicide, secretly gripping the gun that had killed her. This was what was being revealed to him. It hadn’t been a suicide, it had been a murder. His mother had betrayed her husband, but she would have never abandoned him by killing herself.
Peppino listened while holding the comic book in his hand, which Albertino had even taken the trouble to fill with colour. Peppino didn’t seem to want to substitute one lie with another (a murder instead of the blow), or to want to be cheered up; but Albertino seemed to be the only one who had understood the question that had been nagging him all that time: why did she leave me?
Albertino’s answer was wrong, but he had in some way at least heard his question: this was what truly cheered him up.
‘Can I have it?’ he asked his friend, holding the comic book in his hand. ‘So, do you think I should avenge her now, is that it, should I kill him?’ he added, pointing to the handsome lover in the book, whom Albertino didn’t know: he had sketched a tall, blonde man with an Olympian physique. Whereas he was actually (given that Peppino knew him) a Lieutenant of average height with elegant features who had something restless or musical about him, as if his mind was always somewhere else. This had endowed the Lieutenant with a childish immediacy, which had struck Peppino, as though he’d found himself before a playmate his own age. Whereas he was in fact a man in the midst of a baleful tragedy. Everyone knew that his mother was plagued by nerves and mental afflictions, even though her beauty always distracted them from his and left them ensnared.
Ever since the day Elena had killed herself, her lover had also apparently vanished, as if they’d eloped.
Peppino loved his father, but he also knew that his mother had hailed from a different world. Not because she’d shared the Queen’s name, which was a meaningless coincidence. Besides, she didn’t look anything like her: if there was something statuesque or matronly to the Queen, it was an effect that existed only in the ambit of her public appearances, while his mother instead had been shaped so simply and yet so gracefully that she appeared ethereal. At times, his father had seemed genuinely embarrassed to have such a beautiful woman by his side.
If anything… the title of happy couple suited her only when in the company of that Lieutenant with his theatrical – nay, musical – elegance.
That man had killed his mother because it was the only way, the only way to run away together to that elsewhere where they both hailed from. There was a kind of consistency to the affair, even if the others had turned out to be inadequate spectators. Peppino felt complicit.
At that moment he understood that he was forgiving his mother – not for having betrayed his father, or for her relationship with his
fellow officer – but him, because she had abandoned him to the world where he could still embrace her venerated shadow.
Peppino appeared relieved and glad when, the following day, beneath the heavy African sun, the azure sky which was a little whitish in parts, but entirely cloudless, he rode in the shiny, black rented carriage as it brought him back to his own home. Not the one where the tragedy had occurred. Mariani, an energetic man, and lightning-quick when it came to making decisions, had seen to all the arrangements: they now lived on the other side of the city, on Via Roma, on the third floor of a building owned by Mariani, where all the furniture had already been moved from the house that had been abandoned. Mariani had been the one to convince the Andolfato’s previous landlord to terminate their contract. After all, that tragedy had been absolutely dreadful, and men needed to stick together in such times, it was their duty to do so.
Next to the Queen’s official portrait, bearing its kind inscription, there was now a smaller portrait of Elena, also in a silver frame, in the new house on Via Roma, a picture that showed Elena in profile, showcasing all her unblemished beauty, it looked like a painting. Anyone who stopped by the Queen’s portrait noticed that her expression was rather conventional, whereas Elena was staring at some invisible point, out of sight for anyone looking at her portrait.
Just like Peppino, who often stood in front of the portraits whenever he found himself alone in that silent house. Something troubled him: he had for some time suspected that he resembled the vanished Lieutenant.
As though this metamorphosis was the secret thread of willpower.
xxx Lines spoken by Anckarström, a character in Giuseppe Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera/A Masked Ball.
xxxi Popular nickname granted to Victor Emmanuel once Italy emerged on the winning side after World War I.
xxxii French: ‘satisfied’.
The Fourth Shore Page 20
