Whoever had led Pacella to that street, history does not say. Maybe he had stumbled onto it by chance, and at night, under those strange lights, he had a revelation. Stepping inside that brothel’s entrance had unleashed a powerful feeling in him, as though he’d just infiltrated the crypt of power armed with explosives.
Naturally, a man always keeps explosives in his reserves. He had struck up with a woman on the first floor, who had big black eyes and was both a skeptic as well as a sentimentalist. Business was transacted.
From that day on, Captain Cafiero could barely recognise Pacella. Not that he was jealous of the prostitute for having stolen his friend away from him, nor did he envy her having supplanted his long-standing place as his confidant, yet because he could not understand on what scene Pacella was operating. He had lost all his earlier reserve, and the verses flowed out of him in a flood; they looked like the footprints left behind by a race, and they were all bad now, erratic and superficial.
Nevertheless, Pacella had finally discovered the cause.
In his solidarity with the fallen woman, which was a complete negation of Fascism’s values of social respectability, he had found the ultimate expression of his anti-fascism, if only temporarily. Hand in hand, the poet banker and the prostitute with the big black eyes walked into the depths of the night, where the sun of the future lay hidden in wait.
Captain Cafiero listened to him, without either approving or disagreeing with him. Quite the contrary, the scene intrigued him. He couldn’t understand how Pacella could have confused the nervous, trembling way one steps inside the brothel with finding himself in a public square, shooting, killing and turning the world upside down the way revolutionaries do. Pacella was taking it too far, he claimed that the Duce had subjugated the spirits of all Italians: in any case, who knew if everyone indeed had a soul, and the dictatorship was functioning efficiently without turning bloodthirsty. It was nevertheless strange that he found the symbol of Fascism’s offenses in that prostitute, and her redemption would eventually trigger to Italy’s own, which he had long yearned for. In the meanwhile, he negotiated that body, and paid for it: briefly put, in bed he was the Duce.
Maybe even worse than the other – who at least took some interest in the soul, if only to ensure its subjugation. Who knew if the prostitute truly loved Pacella, or laughed behind his back, or exploited him for her own ends, or if she had even noticed anything at all given that he was a customer like all the rest, and the fact that he was talkative wasn’t unusual in those kinds of places?
How would it all turn out in the end? Captain Cafiero listened to his friend’s foucadeslviii with growing embarrassment. While his offended dignity as a citizen had earlier endowed him with a great deal of humanity – now his triumph as a man, which he’d been forced to pay for, made him seem increasingly mediocre, just like his poetry, filled with stifling verbiage and tired forms.
Their friendship slowly came undone.
lvi The Navigli are a system of interconnected canals in Milan, Italy. They fell out of use in the late 19th century and are currently being revitalised.
lvii Palazzo Venezia: Palace in Rome where Benito Mussolini kept his offices.
lviii French: ‘caprices’ or ‘whims’.
12
OBLIVION
‘One only removes a mask in order to replace it with another,’ Captain Lambertini cockily said, as though he was replying to someone, either challenging him or accepting a challenge.
The assembled guests looked at one another with embarrassment, a sudden chill held them all back, as if everyone present wanted to shirk the suspicion that the phrase had been directed at them.
Lambertini looked as though he hadn’t noticed anything and he carried on picking his chicken clean with great rigour.
His wife followed him with her eyes: she had spent eons trying to discover her husband’s real expression, which was always ready to flee from sight into an endless escape.
A handful of harsh jokes had been swapped the previous night.
‘You’re always running away…’ he had said, as though he’d meant to say: you’re a liar, you’re guilty.
‘Am I running away from the past or the future?’ Lambertini had mockingly replied.
He looked like a tempter who was operating on two different scenes: had the time come to shed light on the past, or was it about stipulating a contract for the future? The squabble ended there, in lieu of understanding the story of his life, as the opening sentence had led one to believe. They were in their bedroom, when time seemed to stretch into infinity until it was ready to dissolve. That night, Andreina’s dreams were rather strange, but they had nothing to do with that squabble. Something bothered her that morning, in fact she was suspicious: that her husband was manipulating them to ensure that nobody would be able to follow his tracks. It was all a joke, he was making fun of her. That large, solidly-built man, who was devoid of any elegance and more than happy not to have any (either due to mysterious theatrical necessities or out of sheer arrogance), believed himself one of the world’s finest gentlemen (or so his maliciously-tongued friends said of him), but that he had a secret, and that he wasn’t afraid of anyone, not even his wife.
‘My secret?’ Lambertini icily asked when the rumours reached him. ‘But it’s simply about always keeping a mask on, and taking care of them, changing them as and when needed, just like actors can take on roles that have nothing to do with them, but which only they can play convincingly. It would be misleading to think that I want to hide something. Masks prevent direct communication because it’s simply impossible. You should read Immanuel Kant: every kind of communication is… subject to conditions, or at least that’s the impression I got when I studied this in secondary school, who knows… I’m about as interested in him as he is in me. Other people go ahead and mislead others, I won’t be one of them: by showing their open faces they… it’s all useless. The deception lies in the way the weak pretend to be sincere and direct. One can either bring the theatre into their life, or else live and sleep in prison.’
‘This is my husband’s poetics, do you see?’ Andreina, who was present but bored, said. ‘He writes his own orations, right here on the spot.’
The day went calmly by, despite the fact it was a Sunday and that they therefore had to spend the whole day together. Now they were sat having dinner with their friends in the breezy African night. The chalet had been painted blue. Ahead of them lay the boundless sea, and the lights only stretched as far as the water’s sandy edge. The conversation didn’t manage to stray beyond conventional subjects, but it flowed so quickly and effortlessly that the phrases being spoken coalesced into a kind of collective dance, where phrases replaced moves and steps, and everything expressed both joy and harmony. Nobody seemed to want for anything more, or look at anything – a secret music kept everything in concert. Why had Lambertini therefore introduced the misleading detail of the masks? It seemed as though the others – and not him – had tripped on some invisible thing and were now keeping quiet.
At that moment, the army doctor arrived, a certain Marinelli, accompanied by his wife, who was a foreigner. He was a very thin man, yet one whose thinness had nothing dry or stiff to it: he looked like a shadow, a strangely elegant one. He hadn’t been in the colony for long. Discreet and reserved, he had made no effort to create a circle of acquaintances. It was as if he still lived elsewhere, and that only his shadow had arrived in Africa, having been somehow secretly projected down there by a secret light. Lambertini had been the one to suggest that image, which hadn’t been admired, although it was ironic and suited to his mocking brilliance. He was nevertheless the only one to exhibit any interest in that newcomer and that female double of his who followed him everywhere. It was as if her different mother tongue was a disqualification which disbarred her from talking. Actually she did speak, but only in little bursts, and in a low voice, as if she wanted to speak and let the trail of her words dissolve in her interlocutors’ minds.
‘You appear to be stuck in the formulaic phrases strangers use after being introduced to one another: all you do is swap stock phrases.’
‘You’re mistaken,’ Lambertini replied, ‘our ideas couldn’t be any more different when it comes to Chopin’s powers of interpretation.’
Marinelli, who played the piano with his bony, almost transparent hands, was in favour of a Polish interpretation – or so his friend would put it, with a flourishing gesture of his hand – as if to say both passionate and romantic, while Lambertini, who was incurably tone-deaf and whose large brutish hand could barely play a few notes on the piano, was instead in favour of an orthodox interpretation that was both perfectionist and white, a view that seemed on the ascendancy in Europe’s distant concert halls. They had shown themselves capable of fighting over the issue, duelling over it ‘according to how the winds were blowing,’ as Lambertini said, ‘or the whim of the moment.’
Yet Marinelli was the only one to play the baby grand piano in the ballroom of the Officers’ Club – a bizarrely shaped, single-floor building – since Lambertini would have never dared to place his ugly paws on the piano in the former’s presence.
The duel symbolically unfolded over the course of infinite diatribes, and its outcome always remained a mystery to others.
Even though, as Andreina put it, all they did was exchange hackneyed phrases.
It was said that even Marinelli had complained of this in his allusive, evasive way.
Now that the medical officer’s arrival had revealed the identity of the person whom the joke had been addressed to, if Lambertini had said that he only removed one mask in order to replace it with another, it was to let his friend know that he had chosen banality as a mask, but that it would be unwise to stop there. Whether it was a warning or an excuse, he had finally opened up.
Andreina noticed that the medical officer’s arrival had suddenly warmed the room: once the letter’s secret addressee, the phrase which appeared to necessitate the assistance of a mask, every other person seated at that table overcame their awkwardness and resumed their conversations. Some of them had even started to laugh, as though they’d just looked over their shoulders and were surprised by the silence into which they had fallen, as though it had been some sort of trap.
The newly arrived couple sat at the table, far from the Lambertinis, whom they greeted with a wave of the hand.
The tear in their relationship appeared to have been repaired, nothing had happened.
Only Lambertini was looking at the starry sky, and he was asking himself, just like Andreina had done, why he should nurse such an intense curiosity for the army physician who’d only just arrived in the colony, but who had already earned himself some public esteem for the probity with which he exercised his profession, but whom nobody seemed to care about, that is apart from him.
Now that he had asked himself that question, he no longer wore the ironic smile with which he’d greeted Andreina’s own question. In fact that smile had been replaced by a painful expression. Andreina was looking at him. She knew that her husband – who was always vague, theatrical, blustering and standoffish with others – was only serious whenever he answered his own questions. What kind of question was he trying to answer?
She stretched her arm out towards her husband’s plate, which was right in front of him, and she stole a carrot which Lambertini had left to the side – he was very fond of carrots and had been saving that special morsel for last. Lambertini immediately came back to his senses, as if someone else had travelled into the realm of shadows.
Andreina hurled the carrot into the sea, which lay behind her, and her gesture unfolded so rapidly that it seemed mechanical. Everybody laughed, even though they didn’t know why.
However, Andreina noticed that the army physician was looking at her with jealousy in his eyes. He was a very courteous man: it seemed as though all his words and gestures had already been written down on a piece of paper and he were merely playing his part by reading them out loud.
Was he jealous due to some rude or silly gesture?
Andreina and the army physician lingered observing one another, each lost in their own dream. Which were both about the same man: Lambertini – whom had already made some witty remark about the carrot to a lady who was sat beside him.
The latter put one of her own carrots on his plate. She had a soft spot for that strapping, authoritarian man who was devoid of all grace and elegance. It was as though she’d slipped into his bed.
They laughed, as though embracing.
Time flowed either quickly or lazily, yet its artificial subdivisions, as organised by clocks and calendars, was nothing – to parrot the Captain’s words – was nothing but a mask. Thus it manages to fool the simple, or manages to console those scared of change, ‘or acts in concert with its accomplices, meaning those who understand that the game is determined by other rules,’ Lambertini explained, ‘maybe time deceives itself in exactly the way it deceives all men, and so, exhausted and worn out, it searches for peace within rules.’
In the mouth of such a self-assured, haughty man, the word peace sounded like a wink.
Nevertheless – and without ignoring his question, as to why that man seemed so reserved and insignificant to others outside of his professional capacity actually felt like somebody to him – time was doing nothing to come to their aid. It felt like time was in no hurry to unroll the papyrus where their story – or rather that ‘of the two-faced Captain,’ as Lambertini put it – had been written.
There was a reproduction of one of Bellucci’s canvases hanging in front of his bed, which depicted a very ancient man, who was in fact Time himself, as he discovers a Sibyl, a curvy, bare-breasted woman. Well, the epiphany still hadn’t materialised, as is often the case, the Captain commended, both amused and disappointed.
It arrived nonetheless, when they least expected it.
One day, they were sat at the Café Italia on the Corso (gentle music meandered through the trees of the garden where one could see a four-piece orchestra on the stage, and all the seats at the tables filled, all covered by the patina of elegance ‘and the absurd,’ as Lambertini said, of colonial society, which lagged behind all the advances made on the European mainland, which was in fact a remnant of the extreme indulgences favoured in the eighteenth century, when conversation flowed effortlessly along without going off the deep end) and Marinelli suddenly made a vague allusion to one of his stays at a sanatorium just a year earlier.
Lambertini jumped up with a start, horrified.
Naturally, he was horrified with himself. He had made an atrocious gaffe the previous evening, when he’d discovered that that skinny man, who was almost the shadow of a man, but who was as tall as he was and around the same age, weighed sixty kilograms, while he – who had ‘bones made out of solid steel,’ as though mocking Fascism’s vocabulary – weighed an extra thirty kilograms. ‘How is that even possible?’ he had incredulously exclaimed, being full of envy, before bursting in a laugh. It was as though he had discovered that he was a monster, or that the other was a ghost.
Simply put, he had made fun of his friend’s illness.
Yet at the same time, the truth – or better yet, the Sibyl – had been discovered. If he had any curiosity for that man, it was directed towards one of his secret traits, his illness, which the others had been unable to see. Illness as a metaphor: of what exactly? He asked himself while sitting back down, not embarrassed at all by the shock stamped on the faces of his friends who were sat at the same table. He started talking again, as if he hadn’t heard anything in the first place and as if time always held his cards in its hands.
However, those thirty kilograms between them, despite seeming like an unbridgeable distance (that man was sick, voilà tout), were actually bringing them dangerously close together: because only he was the only man in Africa, he commented sarcastically, who had immediately
detected that bottomless pit and had remained somewhat subjugated by it. Yet those sensual, nocturnal notes of Chopin’s, to borrow a trite cliché, had pointed to a path: there was nothing left to do but listen. ‘And I listened!’ he loudly exclaimed.
‘Who did you listen to?’ Andreina asked.
Lambertini pointed his index finger to the garden where the orchestra’s music meandered.
Lies are in keeping with his character, Andreina thought. And she finally turned her attention to the elegant chatter of a young Lieutenant who was trying to ensnare her: women were rare in colonial society, and every single one of them had a litany of tireless admirers, who were often young and interchangeable, as the uniform indicated.
At that exact moment, the pianist, a red-headed woman, whose décolletage was as ample as the Sybil’s, and who was wearing a lilac dress, and had shiny arms, launched into a solo and attacked the brilliant arrangement of one of Chopin’s melodies. It wasn’t until much later that it was learned that the army physician had put in a request for that specific melody, given that the pianist was one of his patients.
On one occasion, Lambertini made a reference to the man’s intuition – yes, there was something special about that man – in the presence of Major Carloni, who was ill-disposed towards the doctor.
‘Why should illness indicate anything special?’ the Major asked, irritatedly, ‘please explain.’
‘But nature only becomes interesting where it makes a mistake, since rules are commonplace and don’t therefore fuel any curiosity, just like mass-produced goods in a marketplace,’ Lambertini replied. ‘Where nature makes a mistake, however, it’s as if the divine has pierced through the cracks – or maybe the infernal, who knows, but the hand that governs it is alien, it comes from an otherworldly place. Pain is sacred; even religion teaches us that.’
The Fourth Shore Page 26
