xxxiii Italian translation of the adventure comic-strip Tim Tyler’s Luck, which ran from 1928 to 1997. Many of the stories were set in Africa.
3
THE SEDUCER
Being the fourth offspring of one of the more notable bourgeois families in that colonial city, the boy was feeling restless: well, his two older sisters were practicing a role and would soon tread the scene. It was as if a bare wall had grown a window onto a boundless landscape – as if the ceiling had collapsed and unknown constellations had appeared in the celestial sphere. This was uttered by the boy’s mother, who was playfully illustrating her son’s restlessness – or rather, metamorphosis – to her friend. There were no important roles to play and the modest stage was provided by the convent of the Sisters of Charity of the Immaculate Conception of Ivrea, which was situated on the Corso. In order to celebrate the carnival, the school had put on a play. ‘What amuses me is that they all have different roles on the social ladder. Go figure, at my table is the Countess – for whom I modified one of my evening dresses, taking it in, and even the prison warden – I had her maid’s apron dyed black. Yes indeed, I’ve got quite a lot to do. I complained about it to the Mother Superior: my name isn’t even on the playbill. It seems the Prefect’s wife will be in attendance – as well as other esteemed names.’
They were sipping their tea in the sitting room’s penumbra.
‘But the men have been confined to the orchestra,’ she told her friend, ‘I didn’t read the play because they only gave the girls the pages with their lines. I nevertheless managed to piece it together. The story is très larmoyante and it’s about a fallen woman who’s led back to the right path. However, the entire plot takes place in the absence of men: fathers, husbands, brothers, even the priest, and it’s even missing the kind of character who matters most in these dramas, the seducer, the men who have gone out, they’re on a journey, or sleeping: but they never set foot on the scene, not even the postman or coachman. As if! Imagine putting together men and woman on the same compromising, pandering boards of the theatre: who knows what authentic dramas would ensue, it would be like leaving young people alone on the Giuliana beach by the light of the moon. The theatre is a full moon and the nuns won’t let themselves be duped. So, they threw out all the men!’
The boy hadn’t even noticed the spell that had been cast by the nuns, who watched over the order of things. He attended the local secondary school. He too was acquainted with La Traviata, the daughter of Manzi the jeweller, who was good friends with his sisters, and who had been entrusted with the title role, even though he’d been unable to read many of her lines, since he could only read the brief scenes in which his sisters appeared. He hadn’t even understood that she was to play a fallen woman.
‘He’s the only one who sees things as they really are,’ the boy’s mother explained, ‘that poor girl has fallen in love with a man she cannot marry, and who is promised to another. The fatal word – fallen – is never mentioned in the text, it’s implied, just like the presence of men. I haven’t really understood what is going to happen on the stage, because the nuns want to put on some theatre, to reflect life, cutting out real characters and dangerous words. There’s a real risk that the public will rise up and rebel: come on, they’ll shout, how about performing a real drama with the right characters and the right words? Picture the Mother Superior’s embarrassment! Maybe she’ll call the police or sink to her knees to pray. Maybe she’ll start to think the theatre is the devil’s playground and she’ll have it demolished.
‘My wife is talking nonsense,’ her husband said, having entered the room without either of the ladies noticing him.
‘Go on now, go on,’ Mrs Gilberti replied, laughing, ‘I don’t want to see any men in this sitting room – which is our stage – just like the nuns with their play. Plays can only occur thanks to those who are absent, since whoever generates drama is condemned to absence!’
On the day of the performance, the boy was sat in the orchestra. While it was true that opening night had been reserved for the adults, the entire city had turned up, but since his sisters had roles in the play, it was decided to make an exception for young Giovanni. One of the sisters, the Countess, had been responsible for persuading the Mother Superior to consent. She loved that dreamer and said that she wanted him present in the theatre.
From the moment that the lights came on and the curtain rose, the boy seemed to hold his breath. He was struck by the presence of his sisters on the stage, they seemed enchanted and more in the moment than he’d ever seen at the house – in fact, it was as though they had hitherto lived incognito, lodging at that hotel, their house, but without ever revealing their true identities. Thus the performance desired by the Mother Superior had been a kind of favour, as if the good Mother had called him over to a dark corner of the house to tell him exactly who he had been living with. There are no adventures without revelations.
However, the boy made another discovery. The Mother Superior’s revelations were reticent: there was evil, but there were no servants of evil. For instance, the seducer – why were they keeping him hidden, or worse, maybe he was hiding of his own accord? It was as though the boy wanted to challenge him to a duel, despite the fact neither of his sisters had been seduced, instead it had been a friend of theirs.
The play was a cheat, just like when one plays poker with an extra card, or rather missing a card.
He too began to applaud, although he didn’t know whether he was applauding the play, his sisters, the Mother Superior’s reticent revelations or himself, now that he’d discovered the trick – or maybe for a different reason entirely.
All appeared to have drawn to a close when, on his way out, Giovanni caught a quick glimpse of his mother standing slightly to the side next to an officer who looked roughly her age, around forty; the pair were talking. His sisters’ triumph on the stage appeared to be fading. The real actress was his mother, as she stood on the boards of her stage, her dream – she looked elegant and smiled, but something stirred in her in a manner that he’d never previously seen.
That realization quickly led him to understand that the seducer was standing right in front of him, and it left him stunned.
Everyday life was not an ordered world, with steely rules, and the theatre wasn’t a world of boundless excess: the latter was nothing but the spy-hole one used to peer into the hidden dramas of everyday life – then he went out onto the street and resolved not to spare anyone or anything, including his house.
He wanted to call the Mother Superior over so she could chase that man away. Instead he started crying and ran away.
4
THE STOLEN MANUSCRIPT
Once he had finished reading the manuscript, the little professor – as they called him in the city, because he was blond, thin, almost childlike, with a lock of loose hair always hanging over his eyes – placed it on the table. It was bizarre that that woman hadn’t seen anything but old age and death in that industrious Italian colony. She hadn’t written about his city, but rather about the colony’s capital – which lay roughly a thousand miles away; roughly because precise measurements were careless in Africa, and those spaces – the ruthless southern winds that seemed to want to obliterate everything in their path to restore the landscape’s primeval innocence – made any notion of precision nothing but wishful thinking, if not in fact ridiculous. Whenever he looked at the windbreak hedges outside, which had been planted to shield the areas of cultivated land and vegetable patches, his mind turned to the Justinian walls which had failed to protect the cities of the ancient Pentapolisxxxiv from the blind impulses of the tribes from the interior. Scorched by the sun, one could still tour their ruins along the coast: Ptolemais and Teuchira. All this appeared to justify the utter absence of joy in the author of the manuscript, now that, as she put it, war had been consigned to the winds and the barbarians: the Italian colony was on the verge of slipping away, of being hurled back into the sea.
The author had ind
ulged herself, for example lingering on the almost ethereal receptionist at a hotel, a parody of the confident army officers, in his uniform and his incredibly pallid skin, as though he’d just emerged from a dream. Or the incredible story of a baroness who was on death’s threshold in some room, even though nobody was allowed to know which: people said one day a guest would place his hand on the wrong door handle and on entering would come face to face with death.
Her death.
Truth be told, the entire manuscript was riddled with sepulchral indulgences, which is rather natural when all is said and done, the young man thought, because it’s a kind of last will and testament: it doesn’t deal with any material possessions, but rather with the past, a past which that woman didn’t know who to entrust with.
She had been a friend of his mother’s, while in the other city, Tripoli. A city whose incredibly long history – the Phoenicians, the Romans, the Arabs, Charles V, the Hospitaller Knights of St John of Jerusalem, the Sultan, the Barbary corsairs, Count Volpi,xxxv all stood on that scene like in a kind of eighteenth century Singspielxxxvi – appeared to guarantee both its reality and its continuity, thereby devaluing the city he lived in, which was as intimate as one’s home, having been nearly conjured out of thin air by the industrious colonial government two or three decades earlier. However, surprises abounded whenever one tried to circumscribe a complex reality: the narrator knows that well, it resembles the confusion and embarrassment that a tourist guide experiences in a historical city where monuments crowd the proscenium like characters, all wanting to tell their own stories, which are often heartbreaking because they’re in ruins – and all the more seductive for that reason. It is difficult inside a theatre to obtain the silence of a librarian, where every book is like a cell where the prisoner inside is a mute.
Carlino sighed and smoothed back his hair, without touching it, simply by tossing his head back, as though turning the page.
He was a bastard, and thus a secret.
Whenever she went to see him, his mother would introduce him as one of her sisters’ sons, and nobody ever got suspicious. Especially in the colony, which filled with people from all parts of Italy, thus allowing them to reinvent their pasts: there was no such thing as a constrictive, collective, communal memory, just like in America, of which the North African colony was a mere parody, albeit only a stone’s throw from Italy’s doorstep, on the other side of the Mediterranean, or Mare Nostrum. The mother owned a dressmaker’s. Needless to say, there were three characters in this drama, naturally the secret familial nucleus, there was a father; a married man who’d had a long relationship with Teresa. He belonged to higher circles and was well-to-do. ‘Rather well-to-do,’ the malicious gossipers stressed. Carlino had no love for him: he was a despot, with a beast’s dangerous narcissism, as he would say. Teresa did nothing to adjust the father’s image in the boy’s mind – given that Carlino had after all barely seen him, and ever since he’d lived in the colony, for the past five years, he hadn’t seen him once.
Carlino was twenty-nine years old.
He was esteemed and respected by all at the secondary school on Via Fiume: he was steadfastly diligent in carrying out that ancient and noble profession. The students occasionally took advantage of him, they weren’t afraid of him. He hated to experience or inspire such a sentiment – fear – in anyone.
He had lain the manuscript down on the small iron table, which stood atop three curvy legs, and had lingered there motionless. At which point a German man with a grey beard, who had landed in the Italian colony to venture with a colleague towards the heart of Africa, where they intended to carry out geological surveys.
Geology is concerned with the origins of the Earth and its composition and structure as well as its history as it changes over time. Carlino, who taught mathematics and had never even heard of geology, the notion struck him as very curious and he told the German as much, which made the latter shudder – who nevertheless being courteous, smiled. It was funny. As Carlino knew German, he had offered to serve as their interpreter during the few days they would be in that coastal town to prepare their expedition along the old caravan routes of the desert. They were punctilious, they wanted to prepare everything, even though Africa tends to scoff at anyone who makes plans, just as it did with all those efforts to catalogue and ‘circumscribe’ everything, the mathematician ironically explained.
They were sat on Carlino’s modest veranda – which he’d erected at the back of his little villa, in the shade, under a sloping glass ceiling, a corner of Oriental taste: the divans were strewn with cushions, bleached mats on the floor, painted peacock feather protruding out of cloisonné vases, yellowish ostrich eggs decorated with leather trappings, as well as a whole assortment of Oriental knick-knacks on the walls. He had never managed to come up with a plausible explanation to himself – the others never asked him anything about it, since that kind of taste was particularly in vogue at the time – as to why he kept indulging himself in reconstructions which strived towards being museum-like but wound up being dreamlike instead.
The geologist, for his part, had been very taken with that corner, it was the complete opposite of the gargantuan natural structures that were the object of his studies. He had wanted to show it to his colleague and he had taken advantage of the situation to quote some noble verses from the West–östlicher Divan.xxxvii It was as though his soul had stumbled, just like our ears can sometimes hear strange, mysterious, elusive sounds: an unperceivable shadow had danced through his knowledge-cluttered mind.
Doctor Batisti, a friend of the little professor, appeared at the garden gate. He too wore a grey beard, which had been trimmed in the same style, leaving the two – the physician and the geologist – to look at one another somewhat embarrassedly, as though one was mocking the other. Yet neither truly knew who among them was the fake, and thus they both kept quiet.
The fact the Doctor didn’t know a single word of German brought some lightness to the situation. Carlino, who spoke to one first, then the other, felt like he was walking on two different roads.
‘Did you read it in the end?’ the physician asked, having noticed the manuscript on the table as he took a seat.
‘I finished it just a moment ago.’
‘Was I indiscreet in giving it to you?’
‘No,’ Carlino replied. ‘The manuscript was addressed to a person. Well, I am that person. I am Antonio’s friend…’
‘Let’s go back a few steps…’ he began, as though standing in his classroom, whenever they had to summarise a certain notion, the students’ memories suddenly became wobbly. ‘I first made the acquaintance of Mrs Manzi in Paris, several years ago. Having always been close to her, my mother finally convinced her to come in winter to the colony. The old woman appeared to be close to the end of the line, or was at least unable to avoid it. Nevertheless, Africa saves only whoever she wants to save, and is as inscrutable as Providence itself: it can seduce one, destroy another and bore a third… it hardly ever repeats itself and it laughs at all our plans, even the flamboyant ones our Generals cook up.’
The woman had lodged at the hotel, the Mehari, which was situated by the shore: a low, well-structured edifice, which looked as if it wanted to playfully and elegantly recreate the bazaar’s winding labyrinth. So long as she’d been able to walk, the old woman had dined at her friend’s house; later she did so at her hotel, a ship she could no longer abandon at will: amidst Africa’s blinding light it was slowly carrying her to her final port of call.
‘I’m disappointed that the manuscript was left unfinished: she had promised in her incipit that she would explain why she had felt the need to talk to me of all people, but she wasn’t able to do so. Time laughs at me while I wait for clarity on my own life,’ at which he stood up, as if he’d struck at the heart of the matter, or had wanted to impatiently emphasise, either jokingly or painfully, his appearance on the manuscript’s stage. The physician followed the words, while the scholarly German observed his mo
vements, the former looked like he was in a library, the latter as though he were at a cinema – and they were both engrossed: ‘She wrote the manuscript for me because we both nourish unlimited ambitions for the people we love: a kind of violence that demands a theatrical intensity in life, which is the only plausible release one can experience, however ephemeral. The beloved is unable to be satisfied by any old plan, our love suffers because of it, as though it was devoid of justifications, derided, and even if it doesn’t perish, it never knows peace. All of this gave us a language, a system of values, reactions in the face of others’ victories or defeats. That woman was deluded by the four men in that drama, the husband and the sons – even handsome Antonio, whom she told me one time she hadn’t even been able to profit from his ruinous fall in order to grow. But let us leave that ghost alone, it’s an insatiable spectator and it is offended by the lives of others, indifferent to its torments, yearnings, just like nature, which has its own dramas, which are always independent from ours: didn’t you promise me that you would tell me how you managed to get your hands on that manuscript?’
The physician was astonished by the little professor’s revelation, that he himself had been the intended recipient – every event results in a revelation – and thus that he would ultimately in his own way be a character in the manuscript’s narrative. ‘Easily done,’ he confided.
He instinctively stood up, while Carlino sat back down. The scholarly German stood there watching them without understanding anything, although he was far from embarrassed. The different languages had created scenarios that overlapped, just like the real and the unreal, sounds and sights, or the present moment and one’s memories. Perhaps he understood geology as a metaphorical science. Regardless, all he had to do was think that he was standing in front of animals that belonged to some odd, unclassified species, which was devoted to idle meanderings.
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