The Fourth Shore

by Alessandro Spina

  That’s true… Matilde said, all that happened didn’t matter in the end.

  What do you mean, Doctor? the mother asked, as if she’d just woken up or was mocking the whole scene. And without waiting for an answer, she headed off to the kitchen, her hands suspended in the air.

  The weather outside looked like it was starting to clear up. Here and there, the fog appeared to be dissolving into a swirling whirlpool that revealed a brighter blue up above. Riccardo moaned in his sleep. I met her gaze. I tried to smile, Matilde looked away. As if his name had been called out, Riccardo woke up.

  And then?

  Riccardo took her hand: but it was a mechanical gesture.

  I said: And then?

  Matilde was sat on a stool. She placed her hand upon his brow. The mother was watching those banal quotidian gestures with great astonishment, and they must have seemed inconvenient or useless to her. Her left hand was making a strange and repetitive gesture, it was as if her fingers were playing with invisible strings.

  How are you? Riccardo asked.

  Fine. I’ll be better when you’ve recovered, Matilde said, pointing one of her fingers at him.

  Do you love me? I can’t see very far ahead. It means I’m not doing well, isn’t it?

  The mother went to sit by the foot of the bed and in a clear voice she said:

  No.

  Instead, Riccardo nodded yes several times with his head.

  We stayed sitting next to him, his mother and me.

  One day, she approached me in the corridor and said: ‘It’s strange, I was always afraid of making a mistake, of hurting anyone. But who? In the meanwhile, the only person I’ve hurt is me and even here next to him I feel like a stranger. She interrupted herself. She seemed bothered by the fact she had allowed herself to confide in someone like that.

  Do you want some cognac?

  I smiled. I told her: Riccardo likes cognac too.

  We resemble one another, he and I. Even if it bothers us to see it. We live out our feelings furiously on the inside, and this is why we hide them. And then he was so happy, he…

  Suddenly, she added: Isn’t it true?

  At which I replied: Yes, of course.

  The last thing on my mind was to heap reproaches on that woman after she had come blindfolded to be put to this latest test.

  He was happy, whenever he came to see me…

  She made a few incomprehensible gestures. Riccardo didn’t need me. Or maybe he pretended not to. And I had to pretend to believe him. Do you understand?

  I nodded that I did.

  Even now he pretends to be calm. As if dying didn’t matter to him. Maybe he does so out of pity for me: I’ve already seen two of them die.

  But who knew if Riccardo was pretending. He had reached the end, where the line between wakefulness and sleep grew blurry. Maybe he had even forgotten about Ettore, given that he didn’t ask after him. There was no longer any hope of saving him. Seven days had gone by since the last time he had managed to leave the house.

  It was already evening by then. I heard a knock at the door. I went to open it: it was Ettore.

  The mother looked at him and then she looked at me. But she didn’t seem to know how to ask who it was. Maybe she was afraid that I already knew. She had started to move around her son’s room confidently.

  Riccardo was unconscious.

  The mother was sat on the armchair. Her hands often communicated something, but to whom?

  My eyes met Ettore’s. Riccardo’s breaths were almost unperceivable.

  Ettore put his hand to his face. He was making no effort to play a part. He looked at the mother, who looked like she wasn’t really there. It was a beautiful evening and there was a sweet warmth to the air.

  It was late in the evening at that point. The last evening. No sounds could be heard. The window was shut. It was as if it was suspended outside of time and space.

  How is he? Ettore asked.

  The mother looked at him, the light in her eyes intact. Ettore noticed that she wasn’t paying him any attention. Some time passed. Ettore took Riccardo’s hand gently in his and having brought it to his lips, he kissed it: he too now had finally forgotten about us.

  But neither one nor the other expressed any grief or pain. I felt as ill at ease there as if I’d intruded on the scene. I stood, noisily scraping the chair along the floor despite myself. I looked at Riccardo, but he could no longer hear anything. I looked at the mother, I looked at Ettore.

  As though at a parade, Ettore jumped to his feet. He didn’t look awkward at all, in fact he was smiling. There was that sphinx’s smile, which Riccardo had so dearly loved. He looked at Riccardo. Then he left, without a word. That silence was as difficult to bear as tears, it was his way of crying.

  I went to stand by the window and I saw him walking down the illuminated street. His pace was normal. He headed down a little alley which was always deserted at that hour. He hugged the walls as he walked, occasionally letting his fingers scrape along the stone. An infantile gesture reserved for moments when he felt loose. He never turned around, not a single time. I followed him with my eyes for a long stretch. His pace remained steady and normal throughout.

  Outside, it was just like any other evening, since the plants and the stones had already seen everything there was to see: which was why they stopped being sensitive to sadness.

  The following day, at two o’clock, Riccardo died.

  His wasn’t a face, but rather the effigy of a face, like in those funerary monuments. His eyes were open, even though the light which he’d inherited from his mother’s eyes had now flitted away.

  lxxiv Monument to the Fallen: monument built by the Italian colonial government to commemorate the dead soldiers who fell during the war of 1911.

  lxxv Marcus Aurelius, George Long (tr.), The Meditations, Book Six.

  lxxvi Berca: now called Sidi Daoud. Southern suburb of Benghazi.

  18

  WORDS

  He was writing to a reserved, austere person, whom he hadn’t met, but whom he’d heard a great deal about, chiefly owing to his inviolable enigmatic nature. He had occasionally spotted him at the cathedral, looking tall and sturdy and strangely respectable at that eleven o’clock mass, where even the colony’s Governor sometimes made an appearance alongside his officers, all of whom lined up in a row and positioned themselves on the right side of the aisle. One of the stranger’s gestures had always struck him, since it reminded him of his father, whose job it was to take him to church (after he’d been endimanché’lxxvii by his mother, who instead attended the gloomy early morning service); his father would hold him by the hand, but he wouldn’t utter a single word on the entire journey there. He hadn’t felt close to his father, who had frightened him instead of making him feel safe.

  Well, the stranger, just like his father, had stepped inside the church, stopped, and without even dipping his hand in the stoup, he had crossed himself while bowing his head in humility. While entering the church with his father, he had raised his gaze, and that gesture turned the world upside down, light and darkness, just like how music reshapes it in its own manner. The father hadn’t taken any notice of the boy that was spying on him, just like when the saints, up on their colourful altars, appeared to ignore the human shadows at their feet. In that moment, while he bowed his head, a chain seemed to be emerging out of the shadows, linking God to his father and his father to him through the hand that was clenched in his.

  The stranger recalled his father’s image: it was for this reason, even though he had never spoken to him, that he was now writing to him. He was asking him if one’s faith in God could ever be substituted by the desire for God, to see Him in all His glory, and at the same time to be judged by Him so that one could know, having reached the end of one’s path, what direction it had taken. If life was chaos, he wrote, at least one could find the catalogue (he chose this word specifically in an upsurge of modesty) of order intact in that supreme Judge.

  He
had wanted to add that maybe the catalogue was a fixed point concealed in the vast unknown of the universe, but suddenly feeling startled he had stopped: rhetorical figures were deceptive, and his father’s stern shadow fell across his writing desk, enveloping it entirely.

  It was the first Monday of May, and it was muggy, the lands of Africa were inhospitable. There was constant, blinding waste of light, which instead of making the place look festive, instead seemed to menacingly reveal its true poverty. In the courtyard of the nearby barracks, the military band was playing a march, defying silence in a collective dream, a silence which was as old as the stones themselves, the magical embodiment of time. It was rehearsing its repertory for the annual march to mark the anniversary of the Charter.

  The writing desk was pushed up against the window.

  Lieutenant Valenzi signed the letter, slipped the sheet into the envelope, licked it shut, left his house – he lived on the narrow and lively Via Zuara – made a pit stop at the tobacconist’s, then headed for the mail slot where he slipped the envelope into a red iron box bearing the shield of arms of the Savoy dynasty, turned and lingered for a moment, rapt, as if more words had come to him.

  He shook his head and quickly retraced his steps.

  He felt as though he himself was an envelope, without a recipient, he added, disappointed. The stranger would never answer his letter. Or maybe, he hazarded, the following Sunday the man might bow his head in a slightly different way, in order to signify God knows what, perhaps to please on his behalf or take him by the hand. He intended to keep his eyes on him as he mingled with the other officers, confusing himself amidst that throng of soldiers who had been made almost indistinguishable by the elegant, repetitive game of the uniforms. In the same way that the white marble – which had been lavishly heaped onto the walls, and which had such dark and subtle veins – functioned like a fleeting kind of decoration when repeated across several successive slabs. Maybe he could even remain close to him, since they weren’t acquainted. Perhaps, in that holy place, a voice would whisper a warning to the stranger that he would watch out for the man beside him, who wanted to make him his interpreter.

  It was one of the thousand and one days of limpid skies in Africa, and there wasn’t a cloud in sight. Lieutenant Valenzi looked at the sea, which was as restless as life itself, and had a dark hue to it, all the more so in contrast with the spotlessly still blue above. At that moment, in the midst of this pause – from what? – he felt as though he’d been abandoned in Africa. However, there was still the stranger, wherever he was. Maybe he would cross paths with him along the seashore, which he was staring at now as though it were a page; or at the harbour where two columns held the bronze statues of Rome’s she-wolf and St. Mark’s winged lion (the symbols of colonial power) aloft. Yet he wasn’t concerned with history on that day; he felt as though the sea’s restlessness was far more eloquent than the city’s, which was anonymous and ill-defined. He walked along the white stones that marked the extreme limits of the earth, a path typically favoured by children, who preferred it to the slick asphalt and the cobbled pavements – as though he wanted to make himself invisible by not running into anyone.

  Beyond the well squared-off stones lay irregular masses half-submerged in the water, they had been put there to shield the coast from foam-crested breakers. On stormy days, the spectacle would assume epic proportions, leaving onlookers unsure as to whether the sight was terrifying or liberating.

  Whenever coastal storms were in sight, the lifeguards on the Giuliana beach would raise their red flags to warn others of danger, as if the town had been besieged by masked forces. The custom of warning bathers had been imported from the motherland, and he knew that, but he nevertheless thought that they gave off a sinister effect, as if those flags weren’t regulation signals but rather the flags of other armies and other conquerors, who had come to partition Africa and dislodge His Majesty’s army from that boundless continent. Nature had allied itself with the forces of the invisible, and those forces didn’t seem to be benign at all. The sight of the bathers fleeing the beach to avoid the storm assumed a comical and sinister aspect of parody, almost as if a carnival were about to begin, yet one from which they – or joy itself – had been excluded.

  He was occasionally overcome by a headache, especially if the winds rose from the south, as if the sea were intent on pushing back the earth, and thus detaching the colony from the motherland forever. As a little boy, he’d been unable to sleep when the wind seemed to want to burst through the windows to carry everything away. But he always remained silent and never called out for anyone. Besides, his father never put up with his son’s fears, as though the mere act of being afraid meant that he’d been disobeyed: fear had been banished from his robustly ordered world. Perhaps he had tried to please his father by opting for a life in the military – but everything carries a shadow with it, and it is useless to try and detach oneself from it. This was why the secret ceremony in the church, when his father bowed his head, had left such an impression on him: at that moment, even his father would admit that nobody was in control of anything, that we were ruled by a higher power, and that man can never know the real direction of the path he has taken. The game was up for grabs and the game was being determined by other hands, perhaps the Higher Hand itself. Not that these were the precise thoughts that had run through that boy’s mind, but life flows like an interminable voiceover on the enigmatic experiences of youth. Albeit consecrated to action, the military life allowed one far more hours of idleness than any other profession, just like how hunters can remain crouched down in a forest for long stretches at a time, lurking in wait for the moment to act, which is then lightning-quick.

  For the past few months, the winds of war had been blowing, announcing the time when the enemy would drop his mask and materialise before you. Who knew who would send them? That it was pointless – grotesque even – to try and impose extravagant meanings on facts determined by the endless competition among nations was obvious to him, but merely knowing this was useless to him. Life unfolded on multiple planes, and what is obvious on one plane can be confusing – or even meaningless – on another. He would keep fighting forever in that endless splitting of personality that he felt was occurring within him as he walked along the seashore, which was almost deserted during those dog days of summer, before growing lively in the evening, when the colonists and the soldiers went out for their ritual strolls. Was he afraid of war? Or was he lusting after it? Fear is a confusing force, you never know whether you’re scared or what you’re running away from in the present, or whether you’re afraid of the future that you’re running towards, which looms dramatically into sight.

  He was growing impatient with his ‘cosmic ignorance’ (as he put it, cautiously indulging himself in mystification). He wasn’t acquainted with the cosmography of the stars, which could always be seen in Africa and were thus easy to recognise. A sky with fixed stars was as enigmatic as the sea, which unlike the former is shaky and restless, ceaselessly advancing and retreating, as though it was unable to bring the conversation – or its letter – to an end. Maybe the sea had been questioning the stars in the sky for thousands of years and hadn’t managed to get a single word out of them: this was why he had witnessed sudden outbursts of anger, in the same way that he was tormented by images and powerful forces in his sleep. He occasionally looked at the sea as if it was his mother’s lap. Why was that? Perhaps because it separates me from the motherland, he thought, and what keeps us apart obviously also brings us closer together. Re-immersing oneself in the sea in order to rediscover the motherland, in the sense of rediscovering my ancestral home and not some so-called Great Power, which are words that are bandied around all too easily in these troubled times. Yet doesn’t plunging into my mother’s lap not also mean abandoning life itself: in other words, suicide? Maybe dying, or going into the great beyond, means no longer casting a shadow, thus allowing everything – thoughts, actions and feelings – to recover an unequivocal
meaning.

  From the shore, one could spot the cathedral’s imposing bulk and its two cupolas: the pride and joy of the colonial government. It was a lousy example of contemporary architecture, he thought, exemplifying an era unable to find happiness in art. Yet the familiar sound of bells, a kind of pleasant wave, appeared to blot out all criticism of the building’s quality, which (as that sombre, celestial sound implied) didn’t serve an aesthetic purpose.

  Sometimes he went out late at night and roamed without a destination in mind. It was his way of giving way to dreams. Occasionally, if he crossed paths with someone, he was asked whether he was on his way back from some secret, amorous meeting. Lieutenant Valenzi would always reply in the affirmative, without the slightest trace of shame, even though he never had a clue as to where he might have supposedly been, just like when dreams vanish into nothingness upon waking up.

  His predictions turned out to be incorrect, perhaps he’d made a mistake in never asking his father any questions, feeling crushed by his silence, which it was up to him to uncork. The stranger’s reply arrived only a short while later. It was a Thursday, and the day had gone by just like any other, with him giving and receiving orders, the barracks he lived in being almost like a gargantuan projection of a chessboard where a boring game was being played.

  On a little piece of paper, the stranger had written out the following verses, which embodied the happy song of one’s soul:

  Upon a darkened night

  on fire with all love’s longing

  – O joyful flight! –

  I left, none noticing,

  my house, in silence, resting.

  Secure, devoid of light,

  by secret stairway, stealing

  – O joyful flight! –

  in darkness self-concealing,