The Fourth Shore

by Alessandro Spina

  ‘My husband is getting pain and evil a little mixed up,’ Andreina confided in a low voice to a friend who was sat next to her. ‘He’s either trying to justify his wickedness or his ignorance, I really can’t tell.’

  ‘Does he cheat on you?’ the other whispered.

  ‘It’s difficult to know when a man is cheating on you if he always wears a mask on his face, as if he confused life with a carnival. One would have to know whether the betrayal occurred in the first or in the second instance. This confusion is the source of his wickedness. Doubt is the péché abominablelix of any intimate relationship. I’ll say my piece on the Day of Judgement – but not now,’ she added with a smile.

  ‘Is it the source of his péché abominable or his inexhaustible grace?’ her friend asked, laying her arm down on the divan: she looked like she was waiting up in bed, alone.

  ‘You chase away those you hate, but you kill those you love,’ the handsome officer said to the lady next to him the following morning, the same woman whom Andreina had confided in the previous night, while the army band marched along the Corso.

  The woman wasn’t even listening to the officer, instead she was looking into his eyes, which were clear and introuvables,lx as she put it – or perhaps she’d meant that they were peerless, or that like Andreina she was now accusing them of lying, being the accomplices of a soul that wore its secrets like a uniform. She stared intently into those eyes, as if aiming to shoot. Lambertini noticed this and smiled, as though bestowing his blessing. To be killed or to be loved? That’s up to you, he thought to himself, distracted by all that sound which seemed to be erupting out of everywhere, like when a theatre is drowned by the sonorous deluge rising from the orchestra pit.

  The military parade had bewitched him, like a kind of travelling theatre, it excited him, as if he was a simple conscript marching for the first time alongside two thousand comrades-in-arms, all wearing the same uniform, which was either a magical cape or a funerary shroud. He said that that musical discourse, which was so aggressive and well-known, so brilliant and so seductive, and which spoke of virile solidarity, mimicked both movement and time, just like when one is attending a ball or drinking in a dive, sipping champagne or guzzling cheap wine, people at a parade equally find themselves swept along by sounds, all at the same time, as if everyone were holding hands. ‘Military parades inspire a multitude of paths, not all of them are smooth, of course, but it’s the magic city. Do you know what the savages say? Death is a beautiful woman, who lacks for nothing except a heart!’

  The woman next to him was happy that the warm word – heart – had been finally dropped into the conversation, if only in a serious context. Even she was now excited by the parade. She would have liked that strapping man to step onto the street with the band, so she could look at him as a prince – my lord and master – who was headed her way.

  The music had made her forget all about her friend, Mrs Lambertini, who was standing next to her, wearing a large black straw hat which brought her tiny face into sharp relief. The latter elbowed her slightly. Was she jealous?

  Can one really be jealous of an image? Because that’s all there really was lying between her and her husband: the image of that Captain which dwelled in his mind. They fornicated via music, and didn’t do so in a bed. The lady’s excitement grew.

  ‘Are you personally acquainted with any savages?’ she asked the Captain in a malicious tone.

  ‘Are you kidding? The anecdote is quoted by Chateaubriand.’lxi

  ‘I never know where I am with you: I thought we were deep in the savannah, but now I see we’re just in a Restoration salon.’

  The music was hot on their heels.

  That evening, at the Officers’ Club, the army doctor played Chopin in a ‘pseudo-military manner,’ as Lambertini had mockingly put it.

  The doctor’s foreign wife was standing next to the piano, like Cassandra speechlessly stalking the scene in Agamemnon, Lambertini thought, but this time his ironic tone was absent: he was looking at that mute woman and feeling the weight of Agamemnon’s furious destiny on his shoulders: will I too be killed in a bath? he asked himself, suddenly regaining his strength.

  ‘First of all, it is right to salute Argos and the gods of the country, joint authors of my return, and the redress which I exacted from the city of Priam; for the gods hearing suits…’lxii Lambertini declaimed.

  However, nobody paid him any heed, because the declaration had taken place in his mind.

  Only the army doctor seemed to keep up with him, or rather foreshadow his every move on the piano, just as two embraced figures chase one another endlessly in a dance.

  The mute wife diligently turned the pages, like a clock keeping time.

  The Club was very animated, people were chatting, laughing, people were observing and admiring, there were those who looked for someone, and those who avoided encountering others.

  From the window one could admire the tall, slender palms, which looked like additional characters wandering through the transparent night, occupying a third plane beyond that of the colonial society and the music’s shrill, desperate notes.

  Standing amidst a group of friends, the woman who’d received Lambertini’s confidences in regards to the savages and Chateaubriand was praising the Captain’s erudition. ‘He can quote Chateaubriand by heart,’ she affirmed, ecstatically.

  The story reached Andreina’s ears, who went over to her, intensely annoyed.

  ‘You should know that Professor Rovetta was the one who quoted that line during one of the lunches in the beach chalets. My husband never wastes his time reading books, he’s basically relapsed into illiteracy.’

  Someone – there were no secrets in that small colonial society, which was just like a royal court, where words travelled and performed actions like characters – referred his wife’s comment to Lambertini, who bowed obsequiously, as though standing before a judge:

  ‘I’m busy reading the book of my life, the book of my destiny: as such, I lack the time for any other books. If anything, just like an author, one can read me and learn my lines by heart. But my wife only knows how to read writing: she lacks all intuition. In such a situation, blindness fatally appears out of nowhere. Illiteracy, as if!’

  The last sentence sounded like a hiss.

  An old lady crossed herself. ‘I can smell sulphur…’ she confided to a woman next to her, who didn’t understand what they were supposedly talking about. ‘That man’s already got one foot in hell…’

  ‘What about the other foot?’ the young lady asked her, frightened.

  The two captains separated by thirty kilograms of weight – meaning, in other words, a radically different destiny – seldom saw one another now – one of them had only recently been discharged from the sanatorium – and nobody seemed to know why he had consented to be dispatched to the furnace of Africa – while the other recounted the exhilarating anecdote of having been visited by an illustrious physician, a stern man of few words, it had been a painstaking and long-winded visit…

  ‘And by the time he was finished, I was lying naked on the examination table, he drew aside and turned his back on me, looking as though he was trying to find the right words, by which point I already felt like a goner, when finally, and very sternly – as though he wanted to banish an infernal image from his eyes, or was pleased by the work of nature – he gravely uttered the following words: You are a perfect exemplar of a man… Well, thanks, Professor, I exclaimed, with bestial hilarity, jumping to my feet: this is definitely a piece of good news! I was so happy that I could have run naked up and down all the streets.’

  Lambertini’s arms were animated, he was sitting down to a meal with friends under an arbor: he looked like a wandering merchant trying to attract his potential customers’ attentions.

  Andreina’s gaze was elsewhere.

  The two couples had decided to go to the river Lethe, a few miles away from the city, where at the bottom of a horrendously steep ravine laid a majestic
ally large subterranean cavern where a pool formed the beginnings of a subterranean river. From where the water came, nobody knew. The colonial government was responsible for re-baptizing that river with that August name from antiquity, having diligently set itself to the task of extending a veil of familiarity over that obliterated, monotonous land which belonged to others. The name was like a tomb that testified to their control in a bygone era, thus legitimizing their return. No investiture is more sacred than a myth.

  Starting from the first grotto, which was ample as a theatre hall, one could progress to the second, and from thence to a third. In order to pass from one to the other, one had to lie flat at the bottom of the boat, since the wet rock was almost level with the water.

  Attentive to ensure the gaiety of its colonists and officers, the government had built a lodge right at the top of the ravine, a place where one could take pleasure in innocent delights before slipping down the river of oblivion.

  It was crowded on a Sunday. There were those who went there in a carriage, while others drove there, as if the present had one foot in one era and one in another.

  The ravine was silent and rocky, the few scattered clumps of brushwood seemed to depict the damned – those to whom oblivion had not been granted, and who now desperately called out for it, perhaps had been doing so for centuries, that place had been included in the old Greek Pentapolis. In fact, it was said that the vegetable gardens not far away – situated in sudden depressions of the ground, were the famous gardens of Hesperides, which exist outside of the verses of famous poets, unlike what some incredulous people believe.

  Having reached the bottom, one entered a black cave. A little farther lay an immense grotto, where the water stretched like an immobile mirror. There was a minuscule jetty, which looked almost unreal in its context, to which a boat had been moored. Strange whitish crustaceans, spectral-looking, and not much bigger than a finger, walked along the bottom. From that jetty, one could progress to the other grottoes, which the colonial government had illuminated in various different colours.

  The day-trippers were squashed into a Fiat that was green and black. The men were seated up front, while the ladies were in the back, the dust on the road, the immaculate sky of the plain above them.

  The women, who didn’t like one another much, put their faith in punctual courtesies. It’s as if we both thought the other was laying eyes on our husbands, Andreina thought benevolently, go figure that the war should break out elsewhere…

  As for the men, they actually liked one another a great deal. For this precise reason, instead of courtesy, there was a cold distance between them, punctuated by embarrassed silences. Only music seemed to bring them closer together, but music is dumb, or rather it can’t carry on a conversation. ‘My husband is trying to wrap up all his loose ends in a hurry by saying he doesn’t like simplifications, that masks are a substitute for music,’ Andreina explained.

  Once they had reached the lodge – a white dot lost in the boundless barren expanse of the moors – they left the car with a sigh of relief. The drive had excited both couples (even the doctor’s foreign wife was smiling now), and they stepped inside the lodge’s entrance making as much commotion as though they’d burst in dancing.

  At that moment, however, the army doctor said:

  ‘I can’t for the life of me understand why you always choose to talk to me with such banal phrases…’

  ‘That’s right, because I, unlike you, do not know how to play the piano!’ Lambertini exclaimed, aggressively. ‘It’s far too easy, my dear doctor, far too easy to just lay one’s hands on the keyboard and communicate. In fact it’s vile – did I say that right, dear?’ he added, turning to his wife, having recalled her observation.

  ‘But my husband is utterly banal,’ the latter exclaimed, ‘only his shell has some theatrical relief to it. Don’t smile and look so pleased with yourself,’ she added, disdainfully, ‘if I were the director, I’d give you a role…’

  But she interrupted herself.

  ‘There are those who simply radiate grace and those who seek it,’ the Captain retorted, ‘whoever seeks grace often brings the weight of a fatal destiny upon himself and those around him.’

  ‘Watch out, that’s just his take on the character of Don Juan,’ Andreina said irritatedly to Marinelli.

  ‘So what?’ Lambertini snapped back, provocatively.

  But at that moment, the army doctor nodded his head slightly, and maybe because he wasn’t paying him any attention anymore, Lambertini perceived it as a condemnation. He laughed, naturally at times there are horrifying shadows. But they are only shadows.

  ‘Allow me to invite you to lunch, Captain,’ he boomed, smugly.

  The statue that was the army doctor replied once again with a nod of his head, mute.

  The subterranean jaunt inside the grottoes of the river Lethe instead unfolded in the greatest gaiety and serenity, as if the ménage à quatre had taken a step back, having rewound to the opening scenes of a distant first act, where life flowed smoothly without any bumps and where one still had all of one’s cards to play.

  ‘My dear friends, I give you oblivion!’ Lambertini said in his irremediably theatrical tone. ‘We have now been offered what will happen: we have been freed from all forebodings. What do you say to that, Captain?’ he asked his comrade-in-arms, who was as wan-faced as the crustaceans who were trailing their boat.

  Marinelli smiled. He had no trouble admitting that he liked Lambertini. That paper hero was nevertheless a pentameter hero: one with its own musical reality to it, even if his enormous hands lingered inert and hampered on the keyboard.

  ‘Whoever told you have any forebodings, that I have some kind of message?’ he exclaimed, raising his voice, ‘Music teaches us to read everything, even when it comes to our everyday lives, with mathematical precision – and at the same time with extreme indeterminacy: for instance, could you tell me what this or that prelude by Chopin really mean?’

  ‘That depends on who is playing…’ Lambertini gloomily half-retorted.

  ‘We’re still here, you know,’ Andreina said, pointing to her friend; the gesture was ambiguous and allusive.

  Water dripped down from the grotto’s walls, in the way it had for thousands of years before the colonization of Africa had begun, meaning the colonization carried out by the Greeks – sublime vestiges of which they had witnessed on the high plains – as well as by the Kingdom of Italy. History, the apogee of grand opéra, doesn’t compare well with nature.

  So Lambertini went ahead in his explanation as he lit a cigarette and appeared to be daydreaming on his own on his couch at home. When they returned to the light, they joined some friends who were taking their coffee out on the lodge’s verandah and they mingled effortlessly. Conversation flowed quickly along, there were no obstacles or seductive stops. Yet above all there was no pretentiousness whatsoever, as if on leaving the grotto the actors had left behind their costumes and forgotten all their lines, and were now losing themselves in the crowd amongst the spectators.

  The black and green Fiat brought them back to the city, sputtering along, as though taking part in the new-found serenity and the easy-going conversation, which flowed so freely since the river of oblivion had freed both couples from their forebodings, or from the future, as Lambertini had said.

  The only moment of panic occurred at the gates of the city, when a camel nearly barred their path, having run out from behind a crumbling wall as though it had been leaving its own front door. Lambertini managed to retain control of the vehicle, which finally earned him some praise from his wife.

  ‘Darling,’ he said, ‘we saved ourselves.’

  They looked as though they’d forgotten all about the other couple, who were sat in the back, speechless, a little squashed together, despite the army doctor being an exceedingly thin man – thus a load that was pretty much imaginary.

  ‘A dream is solitude, a jealous woman who wants you all to herself,’ Captain Lambertini said, u
ndressing.

  He was in the army doctor’s bathroom, he had been having some trouble with his leg over the past few days, with sharp pangs of pain and a nasty bruise.

  He couldn’t keep his mouth shut for a single moment for the entire visit.

  In fact, he interrogated Marinelli, and amused himself by provoking him, casting filthy aspersions on the purity of Chopin’s character, making up malicious interpretations for all his sweetness, grace and digressiveness, that perpetual flight. It was as if he was jealous of the amateur pianist’s love for the Polish exile and was trying to persuade him to study other composers.

  ‘And I do,’ Marinelli said, ‘I go through all the scales, all the Gradus ad Parnassum,lxiii as well as other transcendental exercises. In traditional societies, the climax of the initiation rite gave way to sacred dances: but I play Chopin.’ And he let his fingers run in the void, but the gesture wasn’t playful or reassuring, it was like an exorcism that wanted to draw demons in instead of banishing them. ‘Do you see how easily I can imitate your kind of conversation, Captain?’

  ‘You can see how naked I stand before you. I can’t understand how you’ve failed to grasp que j’ai mon coeur mis à nus,lxiv just like Chopin in his Preludes, to borrow a phrase from god knows who.’

  ‘For that matter, the quote belongs to Baudelaire.’

  ‘What does it matter?’ Lambertini bitterly asked. ‘The philological roots of that statement don’t interest me. Look at my body: I want you to analyze my body, and not my soul, or my language or my choice of vocabulary.’

  ‘You can’t really think that your body is a keyboard, do you?’ the army doctor replied, who suddenly seemed to gain confidence, parodying the Captain, who now felt ill at ease.