To whom he told a colonial fable.
‘Once upon a time there was a deep-sea diver…’ Major Laurenzi began, apparently winking at Lieutenant Nerino, yet when the latter reciprocated with a complicit smile, the Major’s face bore no expression at all.
Lieutenant Nerino’s cheeks reddened: he hadn’t winked at him, but at his peasant audience who saw nothing unusual in him using the age-old opening formula of all fables. ‘The ship had been at sea for over a month, in the gulf of Sirte, where rich beds of sponges lay at the bottom of the seabed, which were difficult to get to. The diver never risked those waters without his suit, in the way ancient warriors never faced their enemies without their shining armour. The knightly ceremony has found refuge in secret places, often out of sight, and are only usually practiced within the solitude of the mind, which the marine seabed is a metaphor of: the invisible is the safe-haven of the adventurous.’
The Major’s complex eloquence seemed to Lieutenant Nerino to be an ironic allusion to the difficulties of rhyme which had been virtuosically overcome by the old epic poets: telling a story is an art form, and it shuns all obviousness, even what’s natural. The simple folk, he thought to himself, were well versed in the art of listening, which doesn’t know what do with the pretense of wanting to know everything about everything, as if everything were intelligible to man. Within the audience’s patience lay wisdom, reality also comprises what is incomprehensible or ineffable, without which, perhaps, even what we do know would lose all meaning, or might only retain a miserably thin patina of opaque meaning.
He experienced a moment of irritation because the thoughts which the Major had passed off as his own were merely the scraps of a conversation he’d had with the Major a few weeks earlier at the officers’ mess hall.
‘Having gone ashore on the docks of the port, the deep-sea diver kept his eyes peeled and looked around himself, looked at the long road that opened up before him, and the three alleys that spilled into the piazza. He pushed his gaze further running along the port’s half-moon, then lifted it towards the sky, looked at the piazza again, then fixed it on the ground.’
It was as if the story had just ended there, because the Major had stopped speaking.
However, the audience was in no hurry, they were used to the narrator’s slow rhythm, which maybe is as slow as the seasons, Lieutenant Nerino thought to himself, trying to flee into his own wit.
‘The diver’s movements were lazy and calm, he kept to the slowness that would be forced on him by the water’s resistance once he was submerged in the sea and descended to the bottom. The same slowness affected his thoughts. He looked gigantic. The slowness of mind was matched by a surprising determination in his actions. Always usually impermeable to the events taking place around him, and plunged in a kind of torpor, he mulled on his impressions for a long time, and they re-emerged only when he would have thought they’d been forgotten, and having baked in the depths of his mind, his thoughts were incomprehensible to everyone else.’
Lieutenant Nerino asked himself if those simple folk were really managing to keep up with the Major’s story, and as if answering his own question, he felt a surge of satisfaction: whether Major Laurenzi had taken any notice of it or not, he was clearly the most capable listener in the audience. Yet those simple folk might have naïvely formed their own images in their heads in order to better illustrate the story – in fact they might have given the main character some definition, because there wasn’t much of a story at that point. He felt a kind of envy and longing for when the Major, over the course of that long afternoon, had spoken to him and him alone: that is unless he was really talking to himself then too, he thought to himself, irresolutely.
‘It was two in the afternoon, and the city had been forced back to sleep by the scalding sun: it crept into every nook and crevice, as if it was water trickling down. Roughly cut stones paved the square, with wide cracks between them, while dry, dusty plants, with little lymph left in them, lingered immobile, as though they’d been suspended along the way.
‘There had to be some cool places, a little restaurant with a shady arbor, rooms filled with a light, breezy air.
‘His companions had quickly found a street to walk down on and had vanished. Instead, he had just lingered there, patiently and calmly – as if he had found, in the abstract serenity of the sky, clear of the clouds which had marred it over the previous days, in that port where the size and magnitude of the waves appeared to have been arithmetically fixed, in the heavy silence overhanging the piazza, or the alleys, or the low, white houses – a kind of compliance: in the same way that while marine seabeds have to be explored slowly, and everything does indeed move about, nothing actually escapes, because all available space has been taken up.
‘He wore faded blue trousers and an open white shirt which revealed his taurine neck, whose veins, thick as rope, slightly protruded out of his skin.
‘Right at the end of the avenue which began at the piazza, lay a house on a corner which had collapsed years earlier after being shaken by an earthquake whose epicentre lay far away, in one of the islands of the Aegean. Instead of falling into itself, the edifice had given way in only a single place and it had been turned into a pile of rubble. He remembered that night: it was a full moon, and the stones appeared to have been dematerialised, made somehow lighter. Two nearby palm trees, which had been struck by rocks that had been hurled farther, and by the pieces of broken plaster which had filled the sky like confetti – had acquired a carnivalesque shape, with branches that hung off the top of the trees like sleeves. The night was limpid, in the calm after the sudden upheaval, arcane and thick – just like the seafloor.’
The Major had begun his story calmly composed, his hands resting on his knees, whereas he now appeared to want to physically illustrate the story, leading his hands to fly here and there, telling the same story, but not in synchronicity with his words. They were simple gestures, while his words had been carefully chosen, as though they were destined to wind up on a page, Lieutenant Nerino thought, who was once again trying to flee the situation through the door of irony.
Perhaps he had smiled: an old woman had glared at him sternly, as though she’d caught him being distracted during prayer.
‘There was an inn in front of the house, and all the sailors knew of it. Even he preferred it to all the others, and at one point he had even been the innkeeper’s lover.’
The narrator paused.
‘I knew her too.’
Lieutenant Nerino was shocked: was he telling a story or accounting for actual events? Was he looking to increase the story’s plausibility by giving it a touch of reality? He was disappointed to notice he was the only person in the room who seemed interested in that question. The audience was quiet and patiently awaited the narrator to resume his story: it seemed that as far as they were concerned, the narrator himself was a character in that story, and the various planes of reality blended in with one another, intertwining. Irony was of no help in these situations, just like in tragic situations. Was this a tragic situation? Not at all, they were safely sheltered inside the farmhouse, and had been welcomed with obsequiousness and human warmth by that family and its sing-song accent. What constituted a tragic situation? he asked himself. Was it doubt? Was it the advent of the invisible? When we’re pursued by death? Or are we still inside that palace, where I stumbled and fell on the floor inside that upper room, am I just dreaming up the Major’s story and everything he’s been saying?
‘She too had vanished,’ the Major carried on, ‘She had either fled or died – the inn by then was frequented by sailors who knew little of the city’s stories, which were so long. She had liked to joke, the innkeeper, once upon a time – when she used to make fun of his colossal frame, when she would see him crouch as he climbed up the stairs in order not to hit his head on the steps of the staircase above his head, when it looked like he was swimming his way up the stairs.
‘That staircase must have still been there,
somewhere in that city, but getting there would have meant navigating such a maze of little alleyways that he wouldn’t have been able to reach it. And what would it matter if he found it anyway? After all, the innkeeper would no longer be there waiting for him, to accompany him up the stairs while he bent his back so as not to hit his head – stairs which she could climb while keeping straight, while flapping her arms about to show him that she could barely touch the overhanging staircase above them with her outstretched arms, like a bird mocking a fish who while being able to slice through water, can’t rise an inch above its surface.
‘The innkeeper’s skin was a ravishing white, and under the perennial shade cast by that staircase, she looked like a child of the moon.
‘The game of flapping her arms about pleased her inordinately, and she never tired of it, it was a trait of the uncorrupted childishness that still dwelled within her. Yet the deep-sea diver also enjoyed that game, and he would pretend to bang his head in order to hear her laugh. The silvery peals of her giggles seemed to pour through the cracks of an invisible world.’
The Major is the deep-sea diver! Lieutenant Nerino suddenly thought, as intently as though he’d just shouted it out, and such was the passion within him that he felt he was being lifted up in the air, the spell having been broken. Nobody paid him any mind: only the old woman noticed the blush on his cheeks, and slowly, wearing a sad, maternal expression, she stood up and poured him some wine, which the Lieutenant proceeded to gulp down, as if he’d just been offered a magic potion: freedom and oblivion.
‘On the day the house on the corner had collapsed, the innkeeper had made a few desperate scenes because a man was moaning in his bed, and nobody had managed to reach him so as to help him, he’s done for, the doctor had said, passing sentence, and his relatives had just stood there looking miserable and dejected, only she had kept screaming.
‘Life occasionally places certain situations in our path,’ the Major said to the Lieutenant, as if they were now sat at a café in the city and the peasants from the Veneto had just disappeared, ‘where any reaction you may choose will prove ultimately inadequate. The man’s relatives were on the side of reason, but songs know no reason: that woman was singing a sorrowful melody, and since our ears distort sound, it was said that her scream had sounded like the yell of a wild beast. When pain and pity are deep enough, sound is indecipherable – don’t you think?’ he added, with a tone of banality that debased the entire conversation.
Lieutenant Nerino cheered himself up: he hadn’t been the one who’d fallen asleep and had started dreaming, instead it had been the Major – who was talking to himself, this was why his speech was so ornate, just like the kind employed by heroes in tragedies, or by their visible shadows – the actors – as they recite endless monologues.
‘Perhaps the innkeeper had wanted to flee – from the world, naturally,’ he added, turning once again to face Lieutenant Nerino, with a sharp tone in his voice, devoid of any emotions, ‘she was screaming like someone who had started to run, but misfortune hounds us at every step, and at some point it overwhelms us, only to one day turn around and embrace us: it’s death, our death.’
The Major performed a strange gesture with his arms, as though he’d wanted to stand up but hadn’t managed to.
‘Much has changed in the time since these events transpired. The colonial government has devoted a great deal of attention to that part of the city behind the docks: buildings were torn down, land was reclaimed, the ground was swampy, and right where Piazza del Re is now, with its festive-looking Hotel Italia and its shady gardens, there was once a sinister kind of square called Piazza del Sale.’
It was as though the Major’s only real preoccupation was to give his Lieutenant updates on how the city had evolved, given that Nerino had barely been in the colony for a couple of months.
‘Everything is indirect and allusive, luckily we’ve been blindfolded and we soldier on with the certainty of sleepwalkers.’
A pause.
‘And woe onto us should we ever wake up – what do you think?’
Every time that he had been called onto the stage by his superior officer, it startled Lieutenant Nerino as if someone had just shoved him.
‘The deep-sea diver, whom we’d lost sight of, despite him being so big, thanks to thoughts inspired by the innkeeper’s skirt,’ the Major remarked with a cold smile on his lips, ‘was standing still on the clearing in front of the jetty, understood that awful events that shouldn’t have happened anyway… – a child who had died because of a simple chill, or that hunchback whom everyone in the city had talked about, who was miserable because he was a hunchback and who had become a murderer because he was a hunchback, having proved incapable, at fifty years of age, to take the step that would have inevitably saved him, that of coming to terms with being a hunchback…
‘The child had died because he’d caught a chill: all that was left to do was explain how that had happened, and why that had happened, was it a quirk of fate or a Heavenly design – or had it actually been a case of murder, like people insisted.
‘Everyone knew the deep-sea diver in that city because he had saved the life of a man at sea, when the current had dragged him far away from the shore, and nobody apart from him had had the courage to jump into the water and rush to stare certain death in the face. Instead, he had reappeared carrying the saved man in his arms. People always asked him how it had all happened meaning to whom or what had he placed his trust in before jumping into the sea: in his own strength, in his own courage. God?
‘That instance of heroism had left him feeling utterly indifferent, as though the moment belonged to the nearly-drowned man rather than to him, who had just randomly happened to be nearby.
‘The boy who had died from a chill was the child he’d had with one of his cousins a decade earlier. In that distant village of his, people said that the woman had rid herself of the child because she didn’t want to be with her cousin anymore: he scared her. She didn’t think of him as gentle, but rather as intensely wrathful. She had given in to him out of fear, and she’d ended up having his child. Then she’d gotten rid of that child and had run away before he could come back. She wasn’t scared of the man’s cruelty, but by his silence: she feared his silence the way little girls feared the dark. The cruelty of that murder could never be explained without the mention of that old fear, which the deep-sea diver’s presence had reawakened. That monster belonged to the night, and nobody has ever been able to contemplate the entire expanse that it unfolds over.
‘It seems that the rumours regarding that murder were credible…
‘Perhaps the deep-sea diver felt no nostalgia for dry land because he didn’t have anyone there, no emotional bond tied him to his distant country and to ports like ours.’
One doesn’t suddenly stumble upon death, rather it grows silently within us: while we cautiously peek at the future, it has already gained possession of what we’re trying to cheat from it, meaning almost everything. Having slowly emerged amidst his memories, this thought insinuated itself into the story.
‘He had reached the end of his destiny, the only certain path before us.
‘A stranger, he looked around himself: here was a shore similar to many others – new and empty. Which explained why he hadn’t disappeared down an alleyway along with the other sailors as they chased after their desires, but had lingered immobile in the middle of the square, like an enormous animal who’d been ripped from the water, rather than had walked out of it of its own volition.
‘Once they’d returned aboard their ship late at night, worn out, looking rougher than ever, his comrades found him immersed in a kind of torpor.
‘Someone tried to mock him, but to no avail, given that there also hadn’t been much conviction behind the jest.
‘They fell asleep with the bothersome image of the comrade who hadn’t walked into town with them, an image they could not for the life of them decipher, but which had nevertheless been etched into their
memories, clouding over the entire night’s events: the dives, the wine, the girls, the smoke, the bitter and comical fistfights.’
On the other end of the room, a little boy began humming a nursery rhyme from the Veneto, it sang of innocence, of a springtime that followed the story’s winter.
Lieutenant Nerino felt like an acrobat walking a tightrope.
At that exact moment, the door noisily burst open and the messenger who had been dispatched on his bicycle came in, holding the bicycle by its shiny handlebars. It was a dusty Bianchilxxxviii of which he was inordinately proud: he announced that Headquarters in Barca had been notified – and that everything was all right.
lxxxiv Author’s note: French: ‘The magnificent account of our nothingness’. Source: Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, Oraisons funèbre de Louis de Bourbon, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1851). p.270.
lxxxv Vincenzo Monti (1754–1828) an Italian playwright and poet who translated Homer’s Iliad into Italian.
lxxxvi Torquato Tasso (1544–1595): one of the greatest poets of the Italian renaissance.
lxxxvii Latin: ‘remarkable to say’.
lxxxviii Make of bicycle.
22
LITURGY
The first reaction had been panic, which had been intensified further by the surprise and incredulity attached to it. While the faithful were keeping their gazes fixed on the altar, an abyss opened up in the ground, as though Beelzebub himself was about to emerge, and all eyes turned towards the portal. The Bishop presiding over the solemn ceremony, who was a pious man – and whose name, Candido Moro,lxxxix was in fact a complete oxymoron – stopped dead in his tracks, astonished. Why had everyone turned their heads in the way the wind bends an entire forest’s branches to its will in a storm – why were the faithful parting to make way for someone, who was coming?
The Fourth Shore Page 35
