Mrs Vanzi made a horrified gesture, as if an incandescent fireball were heading straight towards her: she felt she was dreaming.
Dull as a dish rag, and unable to move without affectations, the hairdresser smiled triumphantly as he observed himself in the mirror, while he kept those beautiful ladies prisoner with his curling irons.
‘In the evenings, we take a stroll along the Corso. My husband thinks it’s foolish to stay at home to entertain the children. The servants are there to keep an eye on them and the rest doesn’t matter, in fact he can’t even see what that ‘rest’ might be. Picture me involving him in the troubles between Gioacchino and the Brothers, do you think he ever asks about how his son is doing at school? Forget about him taking the time to go see the boy’s teachers himself, that’s out of the question! He should stay on top of his duties – that’s all he says. I have been avoiding the explosion of this drama between Gioacchino, his father and the Brothers by staying silent: they are only allowed to communicate, fight or act through me. And I keep my mouth shut. The boy hasn’t been put back a year and he occasionally gets good grades, which seems to indicate the presence of some intelligence somewhere in that head of his. If he wants to talk at school instead of at home, then he’s probably got reasons of his own for doing so. It would be a lot worse if he was bald, or a cripple, don’t you think?’
She appeared to have been bitten by the same conversation bug that had affected Gioacchino, maybe she was mocking him or was instead piously justifying him through imitation.
‘During that evening promenade, we cross paths with everyone who lives in the city, but my husband, he’s not interested in anyone, at most he’ll cast a quick, bewildered glance at some good-looking woman, looking as if his eyes were busy chatting, but his mind is almost always somewhere else. If he’s present during the promenade, he wonders whether the crowd is impressed by his presence, like the last Emperors of Rome. I, on the other hand, wish to make no impression on anybody, but I still want to seduce everyone, that’s my way of talking, I’m loyal to my husband but I’m as greedy for tributes as a tyrant, a sweet tyrant, I like to make a guest appearance in other’s dreams – just for fun!’
The hairdresser looked at her ecstatically but silently, yet his hands playfully carried on of their own accord.
By the time they had reached the end of the school year, nothing had seemingly changed, Gioacchino was still a chatterbox, his teachers always unhappy, and the boy usually read in class instead of listening to them as they rattled off useless notions – occasionally, he would keep a book on his lap during the Brothers’ lessons, books like The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Laterlv, which the teacher himself had imprudently recommended – his parents went out on their evening walks, the lights on the Corso remained many and bright, as though the city was a perpetual party, and thus drama had been avoided…
Yet it nevertheless finally arrived.
Truth be told, there had been nothing unusual about that Saturday. At the end of the lesson, one of the teachers, who appeared to exhibit a particular dislike for Gioacchino, suddenly became affable with the others – and, in an astonishing turn – was even kind to Gioacchino. He read out some names: yes, they had to stay behind after class. Gioacchino wondered what could have possibly happened, he felt that the teacher, who was also the deputy headmaster, was showing the kind of goodwill he’d never seen before – on either side – as he naïvely observed. So what was going on?
Once the others had left, there were five children left behind. Why them?
At that moment, the drama erupted in all its might. The school needed a games-room, which they would all benefit from, especially them, since despite the fact they would be leaving for middle school in a couple of years, their extra-curricular activities would still take place at the Brothers’ institute, meaning that the games-room would stay open for them, etc., etc. – it seemed as if the teacher himself had been bitten by the chatting bug that day.
Yet the entire drama was encapsulated by a single sentence, in fact by a single word:
‘I’m speaking to all of you because you’re the sons of this city’s sharks: talk the matter over with your parents, and let them finance the project,’ leaving Gioacchino, whose father was presumed to be the biggest shark in town, to feel the sting of that affectionate slap.
It was as if money had burst into his happy, innocent life for the first time in his life. He had also understood that he was the main character in that great theatre of the world!
Gioacchino remained silent, in fact from that day on he never talked in class again.
‘Oh yes,’ Gioacchino’s mother said to her friend, while sitting under the hairdryer, who had now set up shop at the Officers’ Club, the temple of the god of Strength, who was caught in a timeless struggle with Pluto, the god of Money, whose temple lay elsewhere, and perhaps even with the Church, whose vast cathedral rose out of the shore – they could see its cupolas which from that distance appeared to be floating upon the water, ‘I finally heard his confession.’
She preferred to spend her time at the Officers’ Club rather than the Merchants’ Club. She looked upon military life as belonging to the world of infancy, where games are played according to strict rules that were both senseless and unchangeable, and it seemed like a happy extension of the uncontaminated bliss of childhood. Bourgeois life, however, lay in the realm of mediation and compromises, if not, everything is confused with its opposite, which swallows it up. ‘I would have liked to marry the commander we met in the square,’ she had confessed a week earlier, out of the blue.
‘A marionette!’
The President of the Chamber of Commerce, who was a friend of her husband’s, and who had been present at that confession, was parodying a soldier’s pride without getting up from his rocking chair.
‘An actor,’ Gioacchino’s mother corrected him, ‘besides, children always dream of military uniforms, I never heard a boy say that he wanted to be a lawyer when he grew up. Soldierhood sublimates childhood and transports it to a world of heroism, idleness, elegance and incredibly dangerous games.’
However, this conversation took place before the most recent dramatic turn of events.
The two friends were sat on the shaded veranda. They had bowls of ice cream in front of them, whose colours were simply dazzling. Her friend smoked, with provocative delight.
‘That word – shark – really upset him. Not because it was so indelicate – what can you expect a boy to know about that? It’s because he has finally understood the power of money: the war between him and the Brothers – who were so different from the nuns – had come to an end and the enemy had given up: he had been entranced by the sight of all that gold. Anyway, as I was saying, the boy’s rite of passage from the world of women to that of men, which failed to occur when he switched schools, thanks to the nuns’ fears that the boys would soon be subject to woeful passions, has now become a reality: having learned the value of gold, the boy has finally entered the world of men. Now we’ll see.’
lii XXVIII: 28th October 1922, the date of Mussolini’s march on Rome.
liii A kind of fennel once used as a seasoning as well as for its medicinal purposes. It was one of Cyrene’s most prized exports and particularly sought-after in Rome.
liv Also known as the De La Salle Brothers: Catholic religious teaching congregation.
lv A sequel to Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers.
10
THE DICTIONARY SAYS
‘Faithfulness? It’s something that’s incredibly noble, strange and incomprehensible, even a little ridiculous too: despite what we generally assume, it lies outside our willpower’s control – just like mysticism, you understand? Let’s open the dictionary.’
The man pulled out a little dictionary from his greatcoat’s pocket, which was partly unbound, its type was minuscule and nearly illegible; the dictionary never left his side. He used to say that the dictionary was an esoteric book, where all of creation wa
s featured in the shape of words, meaning all that bears testament to the supreme mystification and supreme knowledge. His large fingers had something bestial to them as they ran alongside those minuscule words, which had almost been worn away by time.
‘Here is the definition: mysticism, noun, from the original Greek myeomai, “to be initiated”, belief that union with or absorption into the Deity or the absolute (I’m already confused here, where do you draw the line between them?) or the spiritual apprehension of knowledge inaccessible to the intellect (the parallel here is perfect: faithfulness is personal, in fact collective) may be attained through contemplation and self-surrender. (I’ve gotten confused again here, how can you attain something that lies beyond our world? Isn’t it hypocritical not to assume that one would never exaggerate things at that point?)’
His face had a certain universality to it.
‘Dear me! Dear me! Putting one’s reason to use means bouncing from one mirror to the next and always winding up at the starting point, stuck…
‘A means to achieve direct experience of the divine (I never thought it would be indirect, maybe this means without any intermediaries or rules – which I like) and with the supernatural (here I feel right at home: what’s more natural than the supernatural, forgive the pun, what a breath of fresh air it blows into life, which is otherwise so cruel and stupid) through irrational means (I should think so!) related to spiritual contact and one’s own feelings (but feelings are a subspecies of the soul).’
The sophism of his words contrasted against his fresh, healthy appearance, which concealed a repressed and chilling aggressiveness.
‘Let’s keep reading – we’re still on mysticism here – any philosophical doctrine which aims to achieve first-hand awareness of the divine, or various divinities: well, of course I would hardly a philosophical doctrine to not be first-hand and instead meander around like poetry!
‘But let’s return to the subject of faithfulness, and let’s put those other comparisons to the side, since they’re so misleading.’
It was as though he had wanted to carefully dissuade anyone who might have been eavesdropping on them, lurking in the shadows. Yet it was a fake: within that shadow, which was a mirror, lay only yet another part of him.
‘My stance before the idol of faithfulness is uncertain, as it is a most demanding idol. I am intellectually drawn to the idea because it is a definitive action: let’s say that I’m in love with a woman, and all other variations don’t interest me at all; it nevertheless feels like a kind of castration, contrary to nature and what is natural – faithfulness breaks the rules of metamorphosis, which is terrible.’
He would occasionally rise from his seat to respectfully greet a lady who was passing by, or make a slight gesture with his hand if he saw a fellow officer – as though he thought he had to explain himself to as many people as possible.
‘Have I been loyal to my wife? Never. Not because I don’t love her, god forbid! Even less because I’m more loyally in love with another woman, it would be ridiculous to break my faithfulness towards one woman only to give it to another and find myself again at the same impasse. Let’s just say that these are events shaped by uncontrollable forces. Let me give you an example: you love sunny skies, don’t you? But sometimes it rains, in fact a storm breaks out, as furious as a torrid love affair (one can always turn comparisons on their heads). Well, can you do anything about that? At most you can open an umbrella and shelter yourself from the rain. Whereas in our case: we lie – we keep the affair concealed from our wives not because we’re afraid of them, but because it would be senseless – in fact, contemptible – to cause them any suffering. When it comes to sentimental relationships, lying is nothing but finesse.
‘Or an umbrella, if you like – which doesn’t really strike me as one of mankind’s greatest discoveries. So, as we were saying – one always runs the risk of losing one’s thread – faithfulness eludes our control just like the sky (I’m not making any allusions to our previous conversation about mysticism here; if you don’t like the sky we can just as easily use the sea, which like the human heart, is also capable of being rocked by frightening storms).
‘Can one redeem one’s unfaithfulness through emotions? Not at all! Feelings nevertheless marvelously embellish our unfaithfulness. Let us make a learned comparison: unfaithfulness is the synopsis red on the palette of feelings (or masked feelings, since it’s always carnival in one’s heart and you never know the identity of the characters who reside in it).
‘People want to separate the heart away from nature and enslave it to reason. Nature is metamorphosis, and unfaithfulness is an imitation of that metamorphosis. Shutting it up within faithfulness? Anything that is brought to a stop, nature allows to perish.
‘Faithfulness means trying to stop time – which is also against nature: time takes its revenge by letting everything dry out (time and nature are in a perfect symbiosis). I have seen couples who are loyal to one another and resemble funereal status. Does unfaithfulness keep us fresh and young? I have no idea, but it gives us the illusion that it does, which is blissful. I don’t understand the pleasures autumn brings? But nothing makes me think of autumn more than unfaithfulness: everything acquires the most unusual and varied colours – and all is already wrapped in the embrace of death, the hard winter.’
They were sat at the Zizzo pastry shop on Piazza Cagni.
‘Would you ever dare to have this kind of conversation with your wife?’ Gallini the surveyor asked him, being his interlocutor.
‘There’s no need,’ the officer said irritatedly, putting the dictionary back into his pocket, ‘to talk about anything with my wife. I’m not a dictionary and I therefore don’t need to furnish any explanations for words, or in my case, to constantly provide explanations for my entire range of actions: life keeps going and runs over everything in its path. Besides, things never get better for dictionaries: languages evolve and change, as you know.’
The pastries – among which were sugary, almost lascivious Sicilian sweets – were excellent, if not the freshest. The officer was a glutton. He inhaled each bite so as to be able to speak.
‘Everything that is alive also changes: and you would want a heart to stay loyal? Loyal to whom?’
He gulped down his soda – which looked like fog in the stuffy African climate.
‘Our sovereign divinity, Time, is responsible for all unfaithfulness, since it forces everything to undergo a metamorphosis – and by so doing laughs in the face of Faithfulness, who is my accomplice and a model I aspire to.
‘When dealing with occult forces, I employ the same kind of caution that my comrades reserve for everyday life and social events,’ he added in a hushed tone, getting up.
He left, picking up his pace as though he was late for something.
‘That bastard!’ a roly-poly woman who was sat at the next table exclaimed. She hadn’t touched a single pastry.
The surveyor also stood up in a hurry, and as if afraid of the woman at the next table, he sped into a nearby alley, even though he had no idea where it abutted.
As though it was Carnival time, the surveyor asked himself whoever could have been hiding behind that mask of fat – which wasn’t funny at all, he observed with a shudder. He felt like Sganarello, when the Commendatore says yes to the grave and accepts Don Juan’s challenge to a duel.
11
PURIFICATION
They were childhood friends. Each knew the other’s story, but instead of simplifying things between them, it complicated them. Whenever they talked, they seemed unable to hold back, because both would respond to the various characters that the other had assumed over the years. ‘It’s a real headache,’ Captain Cafiero facetiously remarked, being a man who concealed his true thoughts with humour, which occasionally produced a discordant effect.
Nevertheless, Pacella – a bank employee, as well as a poet who wrote in dialect – had already laid claim to the real discordance in that situation. Thanks to his lively
exchange of ideas with his friend, he had been able to confess his abnormality to him: he was an anti-fascist. Captain Cafiero wasn’t afraid to be seen in his company: Pacella, who hailed from a distinguished Milanese family, knew how to move about circumspectly, despite his free-spirited nature, being both prudent and slippery. In fact, given that he suspected the clique currently in power – the Fascists – of suspecting him, he had become the most careful of all when it came to trying to avoid getting caught in a trap, and he concealed his anti-fascism as though he belonged to some secret revolutionary cell – not that Captain Cafiero thought there wasn’t much to that cause.
Nevertheless, it existed on paper.
He wrote poetry in the crepuscular mould, which his dialect brought colourful vivacity to, and so long as his political tirades didn’t spoil everything, his verses scanned as banal but nonetheless fresh. Captain Cafiero had them read out to him, having had some difficulty reproducing the exact sounds despite the poet’s excellent orthography. Born in Milan, his dialect was like the Navigli, absent from everyday life.lvi The poems were all unpublished since Pacella would never have consented to seeing them in official Fascist publications. On a few occasions, Captain Cafiero had suggested that he send off a few fragments – the ones where his political sympathies were completely absent – for publication, and each time Pacella had proudly replied that he would in fact go ahead and publish the most political of his poems.
And the conversation would end there.
However, the movement whose existence Captain Cafiero had doubted, burst upon the scene and in the most theatrical of manners. Pacella had founded a revolutionary cell, and was preparing some anarchist coup de main – perhaps the assassination of the colony’s Governor, given that the Duce was on the other side of the sea? Was he therefore aiming to strike the Governor’s Palace since Palazzo Venezialvii wasn’t close to hand? It was none of the above. An idealist, and as a direct consequence badly informed, Pacella had widened his topographical knowledge of the city, and having become a habitual frequenter of the cafés along the Corso, the Giuliana beach, and the only decent bookshop, which was also on the Corso, he had finally discovered that there was a Via Marina a little further along, past the old Turkish city, along the littoral. A lady belonging to the supercilious local bourgeoisie would never be caught dead walking along that ill-reputed street: it was where the city’s two brothels were situated.
The Fourth Shore Page 25
