Finally, the Captain recovered his speech. He employed courteous, frugal phrases to express his gratitude, adding that he was sorry that he’d wasted his time – ‘a whole afternoon,’ to be precise.
The functionary was ready to make his rebuttal…
But the Captain had already left.
‘As though he’d just left a shop,’ the functionary muttered, once on his own.
‘Rhus oxycantha, Erodium hirtum…’ as though he was reading the name out at roll call.
But the window gave out on the vast, empty sea.
‘Well, that was interesting,’ he concluded.
The doorbell began to ring.
It was the officer, who loquaciously excused himself right away for having forgotten one of the functionary’s pencil sharpeners in his pocket, after having borrowed it during the long ride out of the city.
Once he’d taken a left and walked to the end of a little alley strewn with the kind of oleanders that grew in Africa and which were so fragrant, Valentini reached the white seafront promenade. He hadn’t noticed that the functionary was at the window watching his every move like a shadow.
So it’s over then, he thought.
For a few months, he had been the talk of the town: a reserved officer who loved solitude, who always walked along the seashore or the Corso on his own, had fallen in love with a girl much younger than him, who loved him in return. Now one would see them on the Corso together, but never, as Lieutenant Rossi pointed out, in the same direction: he would go up and she would go down, he would go left and she would go right, these are the workings of a mechanism whose function is unknown to us. ‘Eros… is younger than me, a boy really, and his vile, celestial science can come up with an endless series of games, many of which are often incomprehensible.’
Valentini came to a halt at the quay.
It was winter: the brief, inhospitable, wet, windy winter typical to that distant shore, when Africa appeared anguished and menacing.
Tall as she was, and with a lively gait, the girl loved reveries and daydreams, it was as if reality’s role was merely to provide inspiration for the romantic novel in her mind, where space was infinite and time enigmatic. This was why one always had to struggle with her: not because her heart couldn’t make room for anyone, but because it couldn’t accommodate reality. But why hold it against her? Reveries were nothing but the flip side of solitude, which was dear to him, and thus they were cut from the same cloth: ‘nous sommes faits du même bois’lxxii as she would say.
It was all over, and the speed with which it had happened had left him feeling offended: who did I fall in love with? he kept asking himself without ever finding an answer. Had he really been dumped? Had nothing touched that heart except his shadow? Where had they spent their time together? In the real world or the imaginary one? Francesca, whom he occasionally saw at the Club, or on the street, the beach, at church during mass, or chatting cheerfully to people her own age, seemed to have forgotten all about him, and whenever they crossed paths, her eyes always had a jeering expression in them.
‘Listen, when you talk by Via Generale Briccola don’t bother to look up, I don’t live there anymore,’ she’d mockingly told him.
How far removed she seemed from the first image he’d had of that fleeting, elusive soul. The image was now crying because it had discovered that it did not have a life of its own: it wasn’t that Francesca had disappointed him, but that reality had disappointed his image, repudiating it: the entire drama had never even left the realm of his imagination.
The sea now seemed like a mirror where that man contemplated either his own reflection of that of his demonic double. A chilling breeze was on the rise, as though it wasn’t brushing against Africa, but the Night itself.
He coughed.
He appeared to be confiding in someone, in the shadows. In fact, it looked as if he was being confided in: it was his self from yesterday who needed to justify his actions. The two men were two black figures, and one could barely tell them apart at that late hour.
Marionettiste amoreux, je me promène avec ton image…lxxiii
It’s not that I’m disappointed by reality, the other said, but the image is, that golden shadow, look at the body that deludedly casts it aside: as if it had been profaned. It’s she who suffers, the image! And where? In my heart: the only place it exists.
He looked around himself as though afraid someone were eavesdropping.
He was a reserved officer: ‘a lights out kind of guy,’ as Lieutenant Rossi said.
Ever since Francesca had left him, he felt as though everyone around him could perceive the void that accompanied his each step.
The botanist had left the house, where he had felt ill at ease after his guest fled, and he headed towards the seashore, as though looking for him. He found him standing still and absent-minded on the quay. What was he doing? Or better yet, he playfully corrected himself, what was he thinking?
He stopped at a reasonable distance, after all I’m only a little guy, he bitterly conceded, and searching for refuge in irony, he added, I can blend in easily.
One could hear the beating of the waves on the cement shore, a solitary, obstinate beat which sounded like a clock’s ticking. Not the solemn tick-tock of nature, but that of a tormented heart, unable to find any peace. Yet he was wrong: Valentini was a surface that didn’t retain anything, just like how bronze statues are hollow on the inside. It was all the more striking now that the sun was setting and Valentini’s immobility appeared to be definitive.
‘He looks like a monument,’ the colonial functionary muttered in a single breath. He was no longer thinking about African flora, but was instead ensnared by an indecipherable image that was both human and inhuman.
Yes, Valentini’s black silhouette looked like the monument to an Italian officer who had been forgotten by history on the quay – just like how up on the high plains, in the places considered sacred by the Greek colonisers in Cyrene, or in the ancient ports along the sandy seashores in Teuchira, Apollonia and Ptolemais, one only needed to dig a little, and until very recently, one could still unearth statues, most of which were mutilated, but whose faces had not been impressed with the wounds and the expressions of pain and horror that characterised their end. This is why statues are superior to people, he thought, their soul is disconnected from the miserable vicissitudes of matter.
He knew nothing of Captain Valentini’s love affairs, given that he’d only known him for a week. Yet amidst the darkness of that heart he could not recognise Francesca’s silhouette. It felt to him like a darkness unto itself, inviolable. And this was the Captain’s great mystery. He appeared to be out of step with time – indeed, just like statues, the functionary cheerfully thought to himself, pleased with his razor-sharp wit.
Major Carloni was headed in their direction.
‘Where are you going looking so pensive?’ he asked, despite the fact Captain Valentini had remained perfectly still. ‘I saw you with our most learned, pedantic botanist. Has he fallen in love with a flower yet?’
‘No,’ Captain Valentini said in a distracted tone, ‘nature wouldn’t know what to make of our feelings: one must be careful of that.’
And all of a sudden, without saluting his comrade-in-arms, he went on his way.
The zealous functionary had kept his ears pricked, but had been unable to pick up any of that conversation. The clock-like splash of the waves on the whitish cement had grown louder, it was the sound of a thousand year old shadow that was advancing to obliterate everything in its path.
lxxii French: ‘we are made of the same wood’ , metaphor, similar to ‘cut from the same cloth’.
lxxiii French: ‘Loving puppeteer, I walk alongside your image…’
17
THE MOTHER
Under a scalding sun that reached into every nook and cranny – like a stream captures all objects in its wake – the funerary procession wound its way through the city until it reached the cemetery, situated along t
he arc of the lagoon where the tracks for the train that brought people to the Giuliana’s golden beaches were situated.
The blessing of the body was carried out quickly: nobody would have expected more, the heat was stultifying.
The pleasantries and formulas exchanged between the bystanders were also brief: having been an invalid for so long, the boy had chosen a terrible moment to leave this world. The plants in the cemetery, parched and yellow, looked to be crying out for help.
It was with great relief that everybody reached the beach. Almost naked, they jumped into the sea as though performing a collective purification ritual. Bright and fresh, the water was in constant flux. It was the middle of the summer, when all life resided in the sea, and not on the flat, arid land, or in the colonial city’s dusty labyrinth.
Two people had carried on along the road, until they reached the Monument to the Fallen,lxxiv which springs out of the extreme tip of the Giuliana beach, where many years earlier General Caneva, the obscure chief who had mimicked Napoleon’s Egyptian proclamations, had landed his expeditionary corps. Atop a short series of steps was a kind of obelisk, at the top of which lay a statue depicting Italy, with a sword in her hand. Inside the obelisk lay the ossuary.
On the rocky promontory, by the monument’s shade, the sea breeze blew and slowly rocked all in sight: everything in the vicinity was dry and strewn with porous stones but breathing was easy, as if one’s head ‘was elsewhere’ as Bedendo the pharmacist cheerfully said.
‘Death is a cessation of the impressions through the senses, and of the pulling of the strings which move the appetites, and of the discursive movements of the thoughts, and of the service to the flesh.’lxxv Doctor Risi declaimed, resting his back against one of the steps leading up to the monument, and then he lingered quietly. It seemed like he was using Marcus Aurelius’s words like a sexton or choirboy rang bells to announce to the faithful that the religious ceremony had begun, a re-evocation of a sacred agony: he wanted to narrate the last days of the young man whose body had been buried in a distant land.
One could see the ships in the port, and a little activity on the distant quays, as well as the peaceful white city in the distance. Yet like some paintings which employ a particular perspective, almost the entire line of sight was dominated by the sky, which was clear and devoid of movement.
When I got to the little square it was an intensely foggy morning where one stumbled around blind, and Riccardo was stretched out on his bed, with his head tilting down and his eyes closed. The light in the room was still on and the stillness of everything induced a great silence.
He had been found unconscious at the foot of his bed.
Two hours later, I was about forty miles south of the city, on the outskirts of Al-Abiar, where the mother’s farm was situated. She lived with a man I did not know.
What happened?
He tidied up his hair, which was fine and red, and seemed to be hiding his emotions. We were under the villa’s portico, which had been built unusually well. The windows had double panes of glass, the only ones of the kind I’d ever seen in Africa; but they did nothing to shield one from the cold, although they did keep out the heat and maybe even the sand, which the winds hurled with such fury against the flat land.
I once visited a funerary monument not far from the villa in a deserted landscape; although its traces couldn’t be detected at the surface, one is able to go descend down an invisible staircase for a few feet. On the walls of one of these two subterranean rooms is a fresco depicting the death of Polyxena, King Priam’s youngest daughter, whom a triumphant, implacable Pyrrhus sacrificed to the flames. Considered against the poverty of its surrounding landscape, it was like a sad dream.
I told her that I had come to fetch her. She moved strangely, as if dancing, but she didn’t reply. Then she spoke again: give me a moment and I’ll come with you.
We climbed into the car. The road from Al-Abiar is tight and dusty, and it felt like I was driving blind.
We entered the city through Berca.lxxvi We took the straight road that takes you to Piazza Cagni. That was where Ettore’s house was, but his window shutters were closed. Tragedy never knocks on everyone’s door at the same time. Then we went along the Corso and up the narrow Via Torino. Finally we entered Riccardo’s house, next to the new fish market.
On stepping inside the bedroom, his mother hesitated, and once again she started swaying in that dance-like way which seemed like a substitute for words or tears. Riccardo’s eyes were closed. The light barely filtered through the windows. I touched her elbow, but she appeared to be unresponsive. She swayed her arms here and there. But she said nothing. Her bright red hair was the only spark of liveliness in the midst of that gloomy morning.
Did that woman have something immature about her? Maybe her husband’s early death, as well as that of her first son had left her feeling youthful: ever since then, she had decided not to see anything, an absence that blessed her with youth. It seems she had wound up at the farm in the way others wind up in primary school. She didn’t exercise any control over her son. She never reproached him over anything, maybe out of indifference or desperation, and she knew that he would soon take the descending staircase that others had taken before him. Maybe she noticed that I was observing her. She placed a hand before her eyes, which were a little dilated, just like Riccardo’s used to when he was melancholy. Did she fear being reproached? But what did the others know! She looked at her son and tried to stroke his black hair, which she even planted a light kiss on, either out of tenderness or fear.
Riccardo was twenty-three years old. He worked as an accountant in a business firm. The hot-tempered entrepreneur who owned the firm trusted him, but often told him that he took to his work dispassionately. Sure, sure, I know, he would say, he’s a little sickly: but that’s not enough. Not that he ever explained what wasn’t enough, nor did anyone ask him, not even when he mistreated the pale young man. It was as if he was trying to find where the boy’s willpower could have hidden itself inside that weak, frail body.
The fog blurred the contours of things: the windows, the palm trees, the white terraces, and the sky. The mother stood up and went to the window. The same tremor that had affected Riccardo’s hands was visible on her hands.
At that exact moment, Riccardo woke up. He curled his fingers into a fist.
How are you?
The tone was very exacting, neither worried nor cold, it didn’t seem natural at all. His mother’s face was close to him.
Don’t cry.
I hadn’t seen any tears. But they appeared to understand one another in their own way, and could see things in the other that were invisible to the rest of us. The mother made a gesture, as if she was wiping away a tear. And she asked him again: How are you?
Riccardo looked outside the window for a moment. It had just stopped raining. Yet the morning felt heavy. He shut his eyes.
The mother stood and left the room, gesturing me to follow, and so I did.
It’s like he’s lost all will to live, isn’t it? She looked outside the window, as if she was alone. Maybe the likelihood of her son’s death felt impossible to her, or perhaps she’d always envisioned it. What runs through other people’s minds is also hidden underground, just like that painting of Polyxène égorgée.
Riccardo had always been sick, that’s true, but he was happy and that’s why it’s strange that now… This is why I never looked after him much.
She said that she felt estranged from Riccardo, that she didn’t know anything about him. Or perhaps she was worried that she would be told everything about him all at once on the spot. This was how she behaved over the course of the following days: she would be on the alert, as if wanting to be told something, and she would always be distracted, as if she never really heard what she was told. It was a drama that had gone on forever. Her husband, an officer in the navy, had died when he was still in his prime, and her first son had died in his infancy. The little vegetable patch of life h
ad been tended to in the valley of death! They were delicate flowers, with tender colours, who had fled into cemeteries.
Then Matilde, the hot-tempered entrepreneur’s daughter, came to visit. Four days had already gone by. Riccardo looked like he was sleeping. The mother was next to the bed and her eyes were pinned on him. Yet the light within them was still seductive. She’d been there like that for an hour, or maybe for all eternity, as if Riccardo had always lain in that bed and she had always been there to watch over him.
Matilde entered the room without making a sound. The mother stood up. Matilde said something confusedly in a hurry and then looked at Riccardo. She sat down next to him, carefully. She was behaving as though she wanted to impress every detail in her memory. Maybe it was a distraction, so as to overcome her emotions. Nobody spoke because nobody had anything to say. Matilde took Riccardo’s hand in hers. Her lips trembled as she hesitated for a long while before loosening her hand out of his. A pitiful silence delicately settled over everything.
She went out into the corridor, where I followed her.
Four days ago he came home really late. In the morning…
She interrupted me: Where had he been?
The mother was standing there on the threshold. She raised her head, upset by the sound of that question, and went back inside the bedroom. I thought I saw her smiling at Riccardo, as if they shared secrets that nobody else would ever shed light on.
Did you ask anybody?
No.
The mother reappeared on the threshold, I don’t know whether she was being serious or ironic. We were standing in silence.
Besides, it wouldn’t do any good to find out where he was: it wouldn’t change anything.
The mother smiled and made a gesture with her hand. Didn’t I tell you? It was as if the conventicle in the corridor had been a tribunal that had just dismissed all charges against her. You reached this conclusion a long time ago: there was nothing to look for and nothing to find. It was all right there in front of us: it’s easy to see that now. It was as if she’d said, finally!
The Fourth Shore Page 31
