‘Without the musical staff in sight you seem at a loss,’ Lambertini said, with some bother. With every step he took he felt he was losing ground, their relationship had been turned on its head, and while the army doctor had earlier seemed excessively taken with his sentences, he now appeared intent on breaking them down… into what? Lambertini ironically asked himself with a start, albeit the fact he was also troubled.
The light, in the doctor’s examination room, was blinding.
‘Are you done?’ Lambertini asked impatiently.
‘I’ll tell you when I’m done,’ the latter sternly replied.
Lambertini felt as though he had taken another step back. But he wasn’t seized by panic, in fact he was immobile. Just like Don Juan… he thought, in an attempt to recover some of his earlier bravado. The army doctor wasn’t the Commendatore, after all! It was true: by laughing he had evoked that fatal figure during the trip to the boundless plain where a ravine opened up to lead one down to the river of oblivion – and I even invited him to dinner! Is this the dinner? Why is this usually courteous man now making me restless? What does he want?
‘I’ve often asked myself why you came to Africa,’ he said, as if dreaming.
He laughed.
‘Now I’m ranting and raving,’ he observed, as if talking to himself.
The other paid him no heed. When he noticed this was the case, Lambertini tried to pull himself up on the examination table, but Marinelli’s hand pressed against his chest. ‘Stay still,’ he ordered him.
That usually ceremonious man was giving him orders! Who was he then?
Lambertini would have wanted to jump off the table, now I’ll grab my sword and defend myself, he thought, he formulated his inner dialogue with the same deceitful care with which he formulated his actual words.
‘Give me your hand,’ the other said.
Lambertini felt a brief upsurge of excitement, but an imperious statue of a man stood before him and so he tendered his hand.
The other waited for a moment, which Lambertini felt lasted for an eternity.
‘You’re not doing too well,’ he said.
The following evening, at the club, the army doctor danced and Lambertini observed his movements. Truth be told, he wasn’t moving much. He hinted at steps instead of actually taking them, it was as if he was talking about them. He wore a short beard. It was the rocking flow of a dreamlike image more than a soldier dancing.
‘Has his dancing hypnotised you?’ Andreina asked.
‘C’est la danse macabre…’lxv Lambertini retorted.
The officer towards whom he felt an unjustifiable attraction, and with whom – the realm of music aside, where the conversation taking place between them was concealed to both – he exchanged a few ironic banalities, even though he never failed to imitate an actor, who carries a sacred script in his mind, well… the other was his double, his death in other words, as the latter had in fact revealed to him by saying you’re not doing too well. The thirty kilograms between them were a playful and mocking metaphor that death employed to better mask itself and deceive him, by talking, which was exactly what he enjoyed the most. Beneath that uniform lay a skeleton – how could I have failed to spot it right away?
He had been shocked when Marinelli had revealed that he hadn’t been discharged from the sanitarium for that long, and he had reproached himself over his gaffe, because he’d poked fun at his friend’s weight loss. He had listened to the music of Chopin, a kind of celebration of the ephemeral, behind which lies the gaunt face of death, he had explained to the female friend who’d stood beside him at the parade. Now that the other had finally removed his mask and he had made it clear death will come for me, and not him! Lambertini thought, as he jumped to his feet with such a dramatic surge that the people around him eyed both reproachfully and interrogatively. Nobody ever knew who that man was really talking to, or whom he was replying to.
Indeed, the only immeasurable secret each one of us conceals is our own death! he thought, referring to his own secret, which he was already using as a source for vain confabulations.
Yet he quickly recovered himself and, while still standing, muttered some nonsense to the people sitting at the neighbouring table who never even noticed that he was fooling around with them, despite being annoyed.
This was not the case for Mary, who was looking elsewhere, staring at a fixed point, known only to her alone: whether unscrupulous or tormented, Cassandra was aware of the deception, but silence had been imposed on her, and she was a prisoner of her own foreignness. Only that while Agamemnon had kidnapped that woman from Troy as it went up in flames, Marinelli’s wife had made her first appearance in colonial society before a single shot had been fired at the British army, which ruled over Egypt. It felt like the director mockingly confusing the order of events in order to give them a fresh spin.
Death roams outside of time, which it shapes and manipulates as it likes, and the chronological sequence becomes the embodiment of everything – the totality – and is the mocking mirror of the Last Judgement, Lambertini thought, rien que ça!lxvi
In the middle of the hall – which was now empty, where the light was more intense, as though a great chasm had opened up before it – was nothing but death, which was swinging instead of dancing.
The female friend from the parade placed her hand in his, brought him back to his seat, and looked as though she was pulling him up into her bed, telling him in a hushed voice, now that they were on a first-name basis: tu es beau et tu le sais,lxvii as though that secret language had finally legitimised their desire.
lix French: ‘abominable sin’.
lx French: ‘unobtainable’.
lxi François-René de Chateaubriand, (1768–1848): a French writer, politician, diplomat and historian.
lxii Anonymous. The Agamemnon of Aeschylus (Oxford: James Thornton, 1880), p.24.
lxiii Latin: ‘Steps to Parnassus’.
lxiv French: ‘I’ve laid my heart bare.’ Name of a journal written by the poet Charles Baudelaire.
lxv A line from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal.
lxvi French: ‘that’s all’.
lxvii French: ‘you are handsome and you know it’.
BOOK TWO
13
LOVE, DOUBT AND
EACH WICKED HOPElxviii
A thick curtain, similar to a theatre’s drop curtain, in front of which two people are sat.
The wind is blowing furiously, but it remains off-stage. Gambarotta, the Colonel from the Civil Engineering Department, is in dress uniform.
A couple is on its way back from a military parade to mark the anniversary of the Charter.
Isabella’s black hat lies atop a chair.
A grey cat warily moseys around while the Colonel speaks in a hushed monotone.
Isabella is motionless, as though posing for a portrait: in fact, as though she was a portrait, her destiny having already been fulfilled.
The cat sniffs at her purse.
‘Has my behaviour really been so nasty and shameful? Why? Coupled with the certainty of my guilt, I wanted there to be witnesses. A cautious course of action: now I have all the papers in order and I’m pressing ahead. You wanted to betray me… with my son. Does passion legitimise deceit? Not in the slightest as far as I’m concerned, and not simply because I was the victim: Deceit sullies everything, without requiring any additional legitimization. Did you hope you could betray me in secret? You were wrong, I saw you when you met for the first time: there were four of you because there were two witnesses at the far end of the garden… with my own eyes.’
The cat left Isabella’s purse behind and in a leap he went to stroke itself against the officer’s legs, who petted it without looking at it.
‘I allowed your passion to grow because I wanted to ensure your guilt as you stood before me… I handpicked the witnesses with great care, they are solemn and obedient. They will speak if I ask them to speak and they will refuse to talk if I do… If you
think that the crime has been made all the more irrevocable due to their presence, you’re wrong: the real scandal now lies in the poison stored in that phial, to be used at my discretion…’
The Colonel stood up: he paced back and forth.
Having wound up underneath the table, the cat eyed him suspiciously.
‘My ploy, which I had planned for some time, was to find proof of your guilt while still preventing you from making that mistake: my honour hasn’t been offended anywhere outside of the tiny theatre in your mind, which nobody cares about. It’s up to me to decide how the affair unfolds from hereon in, and it’ll be to my advantage, not yours. Pessimism, clairvoyance… all they’re good for is staying one step ahead of the others: it’s an important quality for a soldier, which is a difficult profession.’
‘Running away with Carlo… But he’s a weakling, who would never have the courage to kidnap me from you: my figure, which he keeps close to his heart, keeps him away. You don’t love him, but rather the distance which separates us. He’s sentimental… delicate… – he’s like a shadow which instead of repeating your movements, does the opposite.’
The Colonel stopped pacing.
‘You feel oppressed, here in my house. But if you had ran away, you would have had a weak flame by your side which would neither have warmed you nor brought you any light: that son of mine disappointed me before he did anyone else. You would therefore send him back to me after a brief… – that is provided he learns how to overcome his pride and so long as he wishes to break that wicked oath of loyalty in the way that you broke the one you swore at the altar. It isn’t true that fate has been cruel towards me, assigning me my own son as my rival: instead it favoured me by selecting an individual of little worth, even though my blood runs through his veins. Fate hasn’t steered me towards a duel: it plagues me with a filthy dream.
‘It must cause you great bitterness to know that that boy is still your heir, one day I won’t be there anymore and someone dull will take my place, not in your heart, but in the great theatre of the world: time has set an inescapable trap for the Gambarotta family.’
The cat stopped looking at the Colonel and directed its bright, questioning eyes towards Isabella: why was she silent?
‘I listened to all your delirious monologues. I know that the black role was set aside for me: there you were, in front of me, dressed in white. All of a sudden there were two people. Carlo wore himself out with too much self-love… he intuited his stepmother’s escape… and even on the stage of my mind one figure becomes two, but I’m there too and I’m the one who should be in the director’s seat – I alone am destiny.’
The Colonel stood up again and looked outside the window.
‘I watched you exhaust yourselves in the midst of your agitation… – and in the end you gave in. From your very first meeting, you knew I was hot on your trail. The surprise… when you found there were four of you at the agreed meeting place, it wasn’t the way it was supposed to be: by splitting up the scene like that, with a black side and a white couple, you were demanding my presence there. But you wanted it to be implicit, your intent was to defile our double bond… Hello, Hello.’
The telephone had started to ring impatiently and the Colonel picked up the receiver.
He lingered while listening.
‘But no,’ he said, ‘I already explained to you that this stretch of road needs a bed and gravel layer approximately five miles long. As it stands, the Public Works Department has completed the section leading to the eastern gate. As for the wells, they were dug by the Civil Engineering Department, who left a carriage-boiler that can be moved from well to well, and which, thanks to some pumps and a cloth tube, can shift the water around from well to well – do you understand? Pipes that are 145 mm in diameter channel the water from the reservoir to the city, storing it in the two tanks that were built at the top of Giuliana beach, which rise thirty-six feet from the ground. A few additional side-pipelines here and there will convey water to the various barracks and military hospitals. So, bluntly put, I don’t understand your question. Go to the place and check on the situation yourself.’
Relaxed, the cat stretched out – this was its everyday life. It was useless to pay any attention. It closed its eyes.
It didn’t notice that the Colonel had already replaced the receiver and with his back turned to the window, he resumed his monologue:
‘Anyone who seeks to play the role of the victim can’t deny the executioner anything – it’s always the same old story! The executioner was right there, in the shape of the two men. If I let you get all the way to a rendezvous it was to lay your dreams bare. Carlo is far away by now… it’s unlikely that he would dare to come back. He’ll try to write… I’ll intercept the letters. I keep as tight a rein on the colony as if it were a piece of paper, there’s a reason why I work in the Civil Engineering Department.’
The cat was dreaming, as though it too was in the midst of a secret monologue. It tried to chase something away with its paw, without opening its eyes.
‘Only passion could give you an escape path and yet you chose to exalt yourselves with the desire born of sacrifice: I’ll limit myself to preventing you from carrying that out, I no longer require the love of my wife and child. Carlo is afraid: I shouldn’t add to that fear, given that it seems that I gave him enough of it simply by creating him. He wore himself out in the attempt to bring some order to his emotions and to forge a real connection with the world: he wanted to exclude me from that world and now he sees that I am the world.’
The world woke the cat, as if it had understood the idea. It stretches again, it wishes to recover its strength and control over itself. The duel begins and one must show oneself to be astute: his whiskers are stiff and white.
‘Regardless of where he runs or flees, he will find me there. His fear is a sure-fire guarantee. I only gave you a rival to humiliate you.’
The cat began to run, but all the doors were shut. It didn’t lose its verve. It remained sat down, waiting, as if it was a sacred simulacrum.
‘I only gave you a rival to humiliate you,’ Colonel Gambarotta repeated. Then he stayed quiet.
Yet he promptly picked up his monologue again:
‘The desire to compromise yourself seemed to you like a way out, something that could resolve the situation, if in a ruinous manner. But I won’t let anyone dictate the chronology of events, it’s the first rule of the military arts, which is based on being able to divine the future at any given moment: I stopped the act in its tracks, you were put on hold halfway through. The desire to break with me made you choose a rival who was in my own house, but you didn’t notice that he was someone who was already predisposed to being a rival: you are running away with a man who is worth about as much as one of my fingers! When you see that he won’t dare to take you away with him, and that even if you do run away, not even the whole desert will give you enough space to hide in, and I will get a hold on him again, and all desires will be extinguished. I can choose to humiliate him before his beloved – who is also my wife and his stepmother – whenever I wish. The memory of your crime, which was sought but not carried out, is my loyal and most punctual servant.’
The first witness entered, out of breath. His modest attire stands in stark contrast against the officer’s high dress uniform.
‘Carlo has come back!’
He leaves in a hurry, followed by Gambarotta. Carlo enters and takes Isabella away. The cat doesn’t budge, but observes everything.
The second witness enters, but doesn’t find anybody, and sorrowfully spreads his arms. He’s also badly dressed, he looks as though he’s forgotten he’s an actor and he’s just wandered onto the stage by accident.
He yells:
‘Isabella has killed herself, Carlo has killed himself.’
The first witness enters again.
The witnesses stare straight ahead and say:
‘We can attest to that.’
Lights.
�
�The cat just stayed there, he obviously didn’t understand what happened in the big finale,’ Mrs Brignole said.
‘Gambarotta didn’t give the cat any lines, that cat just wandered over from the Club and wrote his own part: nobody will ever know the dramas he’s lived through!’
‘Honestly, so the cat didn’t really get what the whole drama between Filippo, Carlo and Isabella was really about, and we didn’t understand him?’
‘That’s right,’ Lieutenant Giovannini said.
‘Lieutenant Rossi didn’t have a hard role to play, as the young pretender he barely stepped on the scene.’
‘But he’s always there, that is in Mrs Leoni’s mind – meaning Isabella. She dreamt him up, didn’t you notice that?’
‘All in all the play was a little gloomy. I wouldn’t like a husband like that.’
‘So if you did you would betray him?’
‘That would depend,’ Mrs Brignole said, ‘that would depend,’ she repeated.
The Club was packed and the audience was complimenting Gambarotta on the play he’d written and performed in. Mrs Leoni, who had performed the rather difficult role of Isabella, was also being praised.
‘It sure looked difficult,’ Major Tanzi drily exclaimed, ‘can you imagine, she didn’t even say a single word!’
The Officers’ Club on the Corso had been bitten by the theatre bug, it was the ultimate game they could play to counteract the reality of the place they were in – ‘without even realizing’ Major Galì said in a disenchanted manner, ‘that the artificiality of the colony’s situation makes theatre as effortless as everyday life, and allows the two to get mixed up. We think we’re avoiding reality on the stage but it is actually the stage itself which shapes our day to day lives: there’s nothing necessary about this society, just the mere fact that we the military – unproductive actors – are in charge here instead of society’s actually productive members is a testament to that. The stage isn’t an alternative to reality, it’s a distillation of that reality, which gathers all its essential rare liquids. The theatre is the temple where facts of everyday life are celebrated as a vision of the world: even we in the audience are actors are woe onto us should we ever forget that.’
The Fourth Shore Page 28
