The Fourth Shore

by Alessandro Spina

  ‘All this was related to me by Doctor Emo, but it was the city which either tormented itself over the enigma or laughed about it: the Little Doctor’s Beauty. The Doctor used to be a chatterbox and not the silent man who now seems to want to avoid the rest of the world, and has turned a deaf ear to everything, as if he was the patient in this clinic – and not me, with my broken leg.

  ‘Venus may have been chaste, but devoid of a classical education, the Doctor had ignored the fact that Mars conquered her heart by secretly undermining Vulcan. It was true that there were already some soldiers among the Procilxxi and that some were insistent, but only one of them won the game: let’s call him Captain Mars.

  ‘Don’t ask me to pass judgment on him. I’ll merely say that he wasn’t loyal to any of the lovers whom were rightly or wrongly attributed to him, and that he was a reserved man, although he talked a great deal, and often disappeared only to reappear, as if he had a great gift for ubiquitousness in conversations just as much as he did in bed – occasionally you would ask yourself: just what is he talking about? One often saw him around, a triangle with a golden tip. If the Doctor had previously bragged about having one of the most beautiful women in town as his wife, he subsequently began to brag about having a hero of love as one of his rivals. In the colonial city, which was as tightly-knit as a royal court, the constant chatter and gossip encircled the passage of the trio with a halo of sound. But then the image began to embed itself in everyday life without any talk attached to it: after all, as someone put it, so long as they’re happy… In fact, he had added, I don’t envy the little doctor: by cuckolding him it’s as if that officer avenged us all!

  ‘But the cuckold was blessedly happy. Perhaps I’m exaggerating and you’re growing suspicious: regardless, the presence of that third wheel didn’t seem to put the Doctor out at all, and that’s a fact.’

  ‘As nature teaches us, everything is in a constant state of metamorphosis, and nothing remains as it once was – our eyes deceive us. However, it was later learned that: the Captain, not content with having cuckolded the Doctor, was now cheating on his new lover, barely after that beauty had managed to tame his ubiquitousness. Of a far less easy going character than her husband, when the lady found out, she caused a scene, and there are those who swear that she grabbed the Captain’s pistol. However, Doctor Emo, who knows the story better than anyone, claims that it was a hunting rifle she had stolen from her husband. But when Emo wants to tell you a story, he doesn’t just want to laugh at the actors involved, he also wants to laugh at the listener, meaning you: sometimes revelations are pulled out of thin air merely to phagocytise some reality that you’re comfortable with into an unreal situation.

  ‘The relationship was ended. There were even those who said they had detected a trace of melancholy in the husband. Yet there were those who explained with the way that beautiful lady had grown embittered: betrayed by her lover, she wanted her husband. So the world goes, as it cruelly tramples upon the weak. Whenever they went out onto the street for their evening stroll, everyone would look at them, as though asking themselves, where’s the third one gone?

  ‘Finally, the Captain was transferred to an outpost at the border, where he could only pay court to numerous, slender palm trees that poked out of the dunes. There were those who said that the General envied his good fortune; there were those who instead said that the conspiracy had involved everybody. Given that the pretty lady had surrendered herself, there had been a need to remove the chosen one and try to take his copulative functions away. Perhaps, now that the officer had been sent far away, the husband had also lost all his rights, and this explained the origins of the black humour impressed upon his face. It was as if his bed had been kidnapped and dumped out in the desert: the beautiful lady was under the power of a spell which nobody – not even her lawful husband – could break.

  ‘Then the entire affair faded into the background, it was as if the woman had just disappeared, and one could only see her image out on the Corso. There were some newcomers who, believing they’d just discovered America, as a friend put it, tried – as they say, rudely – to chat her up, but there was no chatter to be had.’

  ‘One day, however, it was learned that the beautiful lady had been taken ill – gravely ill. There were those who suspected her husband of having poisoned her. He had become serious in that way, that’s for sure, in some sinister way – and, I don’t know why, he’d even grown uglier.

  ‘You’re already picturing how the story ends: the lady died not long thereafter.

  ‘But at this point Doctor Emo jumped out with his revelations.

  ‘He says he’s only confided these revelations to me, because we’re from the same village, on the Brenta. As for me, I haven’t shared the story with anyone else; I’m making an exception for you because you’re just passing through – despite your forced stay in this hospital, where we have been plunged once again into the idleness of childhood, where stories have replaced… the games of our youths. Your intestinal troubles are certainly strange my dear accountant, nobody else here is affected by them. We don’t get the kind of infectious diseases here that you do in other viler parts of Africa. Everyone here dies of love, just like at the theatre.

  ‘And I’ll show you how.’

  ‘The beautiful lady was therefore stretched out on the bed, which had reappeared from the desert only to host death, and not love. Our Doctor – not Emo, but the husband – you follow? – sat there stunned, as if he’d just gone bankrupt, as my merciless friend put it, after having visited him. His luck had all been used up. Her agony was both quick and slow, we’re at her final days here, but for many days the lady never poked her head out in the street.

  ‘Finally, one morning, when Emo was there – this is what he said, I have my doubts, maybe he got all his details from the cheerful, roly-poly servant in their employ – Captain Mars was seen heading towards the house and then he came to knock on its door. Who warned the husband, who was in the bedroom, nobody knows. But he leaped up as if he was twice as tall as he actually was, perhaps he’d recognised the specific kind of ring, conjugal and unique, perhaps he’d seen his wife’s eyes brighten up since she would have recognised the sound even better than him, and he dashed to the door, quick as lightning.

  ‘He seemed like a different person: his eyes were aflame with rage.

  ‘The Captain didn’t flinch. He gave him a military salute, either mockingly or obsequiously, who knows.

  ‘Not a word.

  ‘Even the husband was reining in his anger, but he really did seem like somebody else. There are those who say – yet again! – that he was holding a gun at the time. Emo said that his anger had transfigured him and that he did not need a gun.

  ‘Now I hope you’ll remember that a gun had already been mentioned when the pretty lady had discovered that Captain Mars was cheating on her. And now it reappeared. The bed was a part of the scene, as was Mother Death, in addition to Doctor Emo and the maid. As a rule, the final scene in a play is usually crowded. The allotted time was very brief and they had to resolve the matter quickly, but it wasn’t easy, Emo remarked. What would you have done, my dear accountant? Would you have run away? It’s like I said: it seems the husband had morphed into something terrible, he too had finally become a god, just like Mars and Venus, gun or no gun. Would you have sought shelter behind Doctor Emo, who’s so big and tall that he could hide two people behind him? Would you have asked the maid in her long frock to help you?

  ‘The handsome Captain didn’t budge from his spot. His face was serene, but closed. He wasn’t menacing – as if! – but neither was he scared. There was no room for him there, the husband’s rage told him. Which was right. But if there wasn’t room for a person there, would there also not be any room for mere words?

  ‘I only came here to tell Lina that she was the only woman I ever loved.

  ‘Doctor Emo said he’d seen them all, but that this was certainly new!

  ‘That proud man bowed
deeply and added:

  ‘If you would be so kind as to tell her yourself? I owe it to her and I would never forgive myself if I kept my mouth shut out of cowardice.

  ‘Can you believe it? Elmo told me, I’ve been around the block, but…

  ‘Why be so formal among friends?

  ‘But now the Captain was on his knees, begging him – this represented the metaphorical transformation from informality to formality.

  ‘Her husband wasn’t an insensitive man: he had always loved Lina.

  ‘He would have done anything in his powers to save her from death, despite the fact she had betrayed him: but death was already there. The only thing he could do now was to not prevent the latter from playing his last card.

  ‘He threw open the bedroom door.

  ‘Captain Mars stepped in.

  ‘He said what he had come to say.

  At that exact moment, the beautiful lady shut her eyes forever.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said the man who was lying on one of the beds next to that of the functionary of the colonial government, and turning on his side, he asked: ‘What’s so funny about that story?’

  ‘But, my dear accountant, we’re the comedians!’ the functionary exclaimed, ‘we chased away the melodramas of everyday life, the symbols and rituals, the excess of the theatre where life remains warm at heart. If everyone had known in advance how the final scene would unfold, they would laugh at the story as it was a bad libretto, but they don’t hear the music that redeems it! The entire city turned out for her funeral. Here is what that friend who sullies everything with jokes said: there you have it, he said, while the archaeologists are busy unearthing the ruins of those ancient temples devoted to the immortal Venus, here we are burying a lusted after image of that Venus, who will be ash by tomorrow evening at eight. Ever since the art of opera was invented, the history of the West (meaning an esoteric history, the rest is noise, vanity, and daily brutalities) has unfolded there. History as a mythological system, you understand? The creation of gods as gigantic shadows of everyday life. Look: the heroes of melodramas, the only people one could compare to the gods of Homer and Olympus, can only be seen at the Scala – and nowhere else. These are our substitutes for the Greek gods of old. They dwell in the invisible, which is sound.

  ‘Dear me, how I love those who know how to bring a spark of light to this sombre world and chase the darkness from the path of everyday life.

  ‘If I asked to be reassigned to the colony, a provisional, burlesque world, even though it abounds in metaphorical riches, it’s because it’s a parody of opera of all its excesses: it is triumphant and upsetting, and always an inch away from the ridiculous. It’s the same impulse which had led me to passively accept the coming war, the last melodrama that is still performed out on the streets, an atrocious drama filled with sounds, ruins, blood and victories. War is a fact of life that we shall have to endure, and yet it unravels destinies enough to put any libretto to shame.’

  A pause. Silence.

  ‘Do you understand why I said that we were the comedians? What isn’t comical about our potential and inadequacy, which debases everything? What isn’t comic about our smiles, which accompany all our actions and sully all in sight? Comedians no longer stand on the stage, they sit right in the audience, they are a choir, which was once a custodian of our highest values, in short, we are the comedians my dear accountant.’

  ‘Just keep your leg still!’ the clinic’s orthopedic surgeon exclaimed irately as he entered the room and saw Colla the functionary in such an animated state. ‘What’s come over you?’

  The functionary turned over on his other side and immediately fell asleep.

  lxxi Penelope’s suitors in The Odyssey.

  16

  ANABASIS ARTICULATA

  ‘The anabasis articulata is a leafless plant with fleshy stems that comes in two varieties: one whose branches bear flowers and one whose branches don’t,’ the colonial functionary said as he displayed the images he’d printed on a milky background in the dark room. ‘This instead is the neurada procumbens, and a tiny thread of tissue always survives in the rootstock. Please magnify this, go ahead and look, here we have: lotus creticus, a copiously-branched perennial with whitish leaves and golden-yellow flowers.’

  Captain Valentini showed no emotion. Yet his patience appeared inexhaustible, as though he were carrying out an important duty. Like what? the functionary circumspectly asked himself.

  Owing to the crystal-clear photography, those examples of flora had acquired the appearance of Japanese calligraphy and its thin, elegant brushstrokes. They looked less like pictures of African flora and more like the enigmatic, imaginative doodling of a pen.

  ‘This one on the other hand is vicia pseudocracca.’

  The Captain picked up the shiny sheet. Everything was growing ever more immaterial, as if the artist had melancholically internalised his visions.

  ‘Pituranthos tortuosus, an endemic and aromatic plant with whitish flowers. Erodium hirtum, haplophyllum vermiculare, statice thouini…’

  The functionary sighed.

  ‘Perhaps I’m boring you, Captain?’

  The officer nodded slightly, like a tree top signalling the direction of the wind. He seemed to be aphasic. They had spent the past four hours together and he had merely uttered a dozen words, save for the customary phrases one employed when they shared a drink or to ask a question about which path to take. They had driven their jeep in the boundless brush in search of flora, and now, sitting in the functionary’s office, they were reading the photographs the latter had taken in his patient and diabolical quest to catalogue everything. The distinguished officer’s aphasia didn’t bother the scholar, as far as he was concerned he had the kind of nature that meant he only spoke in the heat of the fire, and he was pleased with this turn of phrase.

  Commissioned by the government, this scientific enterprise didn’t interest anyone in the slightest, but having planned for a book on the colony to be published before the end of the year – which would include all aspects of life there: landscapes, industries, the artistic and the political – the colonial administration had deemed it worthwhile to include painstakingly detailed information and illustrations on the local flora. They wanted to show that the boundless African lands which had been conquered were even more precious than previously thought – and alive, not buried under piles of sand.

  The scholar occasionally felt that rather than studying the flora of the area, he was actually examining its past, that he was travelling on a path parallel to that of an archaeologist’s: thus not along nature’s eternal and vital cycle, which constantly goes round in a circle, but on the linear road of history which is destined to end in nothingness – as proven by the superb ruins of the old Greek colonies on the high plains, with its deserted temples and abandoned theatres.

  If he ever spoke about his research to his colleagues in the government, they would sooner or later interrupt him with the same question: ‘Oh yes?’ which expressed both their tedium and distractedness.

  He therefore remained speechless, as if locked away in a prison cell. He was like a madman, the umpteenth adventurer in his timeless attempt to achieve the fabrication of gold.

  ‘But nature is the real gold.’

  He hadn’t been able to find anyone who, like Valentini with his silence, expressed any respect at all for his research. There wasn’t a single corner of the exterminated province which they hadn’t covered. It was as if Lieutenant Rossi had mockingly said that he’d ‘gotten smaller thanks to all that running around.’ He was pale, wore spectacles, and had a face which looked like nature had doodled it off in a hurry in a moment of uninspired apathy, ‘leaving the job half-done,’ as Rossi had concluded. The functionary, for his part, did nothing except redouble his zeal: not to capture the attention of the colonists, but instead to run away from them.

  One day, however, under the heat of that implacable sun, amidst the desolate silence of everything, while he was trying to
rip a sapling from its cradle between two black-grey rocks in Tocra, at the foot of the plateau, he had found Valentini’s eyes pinned on him. He had felt his heart jump, it was as if he belonged to some animal species, maybe even a dangerous one, but he had quickly recovered: ‘I’m stealing…’ he said, pleased by the attention of others.

  Not that this had led to them striking up a friendship, but those cold eyes appeared to be alert. He suggested a run for the following Sunday, out onto the boundless plain whose scattered flora he was better acquainted with than anyone else: the sheer scale of space seemed to overwhelm everything and thus it made any vegetation seem even tinier than it was.

  The functionary was sweating in his well-ordered office, while Valentini was fresh as a rose, in fact, as fresh as a statue, absent and immobile. The functionary experienced a moment of unease. How would it all turn out in the end?

  ‘Tamaris articulata, moricandia suffricotosa, acacia tortilis…’

  An interminable litany as the photographs were passed from one person’s hands to the other’s, in a quasi-mechanical fashion, as if their hands functioned like automatic springs.

  All of a sudden, the zealous functionary put his cards on the table. ‘My dear Captain,’ he said, ‘nature is a book that knows no end: it’s sorcery,’ at which point he shut his briefcase with a stern gesture, leaving his palm resting upon it.

  ‘Very interesting,’ the Captain said.

  The light in the room was scarce, except for around the table, where there was a lamp with a screen of crumpled yellow silk.