The journalist’s tone had grown stern and harsh.
The house where the bricklayer was repairing the roof had been rented by a single lady, who had just arrived in Africa. The Captain had candidly and obsequiously introduced himself to her as his neighbour, and that if he could ever be of any service to her, that he would not hesitate to do so.
They had lingered in conversation on the entrance steps, where there were vases of geraniums scatted around – reddish blots on a canvas where everything seemed bleached by the sun.
She hailed from the lands of lower Emilia, south of the Po River. She said she had sold everything she owned in order to relocate to the colony, where a friend of hers, who owned the Albergo Vienna, lived. She hoped to open a knitwear shop and had already spotted a few suitable locations in the city, but wanted one on the Corso – but there were no available spaces on that street, nothing except some ill-suited locales in various shady side-streets, which scared her a little.
It was the first time that she had taken up a profession.
She was in her forties, and still looked very attractive. Perhaps her voyage to Africa had brought out the ingénue in her, making her look like a debutante.
Even more pathetic was the unavoidable and predictable confession that followed: she had come there to remake her life.
‘Yes, I was betrayed,’ she added, with a touch of ironic sadness, ‘by myself, naturally: because I’m still in love with him.’
‘Do you think being in Africa will be of any help to you? Distance doesn’t count for much in affairs of the heart.’
‘Do you mean to say that I’ll still love him from afar?’ she replied, in the same questioning, melancholy tone as before. ‘I’ve locked myself away in prison!’
‘And who is that?’ the journalist asked, his curiosity piqued, pointing out a woman who was leaning on her windowsill, right under the bricklayer’s feet, and was looking down at the street.
‘A woman willing to kill herself for love.’ the officer said. ‘She’s here to bury the past.’
‘What do you mean, ‘bury the past’?’
‘There’s a haunting old belief that goes something like this: the souls of dead bodies that have been left unburied roam the earth looking for another body to inhabit, and this is why they’re dangerous. Even passion is an unburied body. And that woman has fallen victim to passion.’
‘This is all nonsense.’
‘And yet it’s also true.’
‘Let’s go back to the army’s conduct, or rather its morale: is it riding high?’
‘I’m not a spokesperson. Who gave you that idea?’ the officer asked him, resentfully.
‘I get it: you want to steer our conversation!’ the wily journalist exclaimed, making a gesture with his hand, as though swatting away a fly or a bothersome shadow.
‘Reflecting on our situation, which is certainly out of the ordinary – since the fourth shore is nothing but a metaphor – is what sets each and every one of us here in Africa apart from one another, and do please forgive me here for borrowing one of your earlier phrasings, creating a gulf as deep as the abyss itself: the ordinary erases all character from the archetype, while what is out of the ordinary redeems the archetype by turning him into a character, in other words a unicum.’
‘Is this what the mal d’Afrique is?’ the journalist asked, growing ever more curious, having finally found a point de repère.xcviii
‘The expression can be more appropriately used to describe those who have returned to the motherland. But perhaps you’re right: the unreal situation here in the colony brings characters to life, who can then no longer bear the constraints of the changeless continuum of life here. Everyone who lives here seems to be chased by a curse – as if those characters had suddenly swapped all their ancestors for different ones.’
‘The colonists are here because of their ancestors’ triumphs,’ the journalist exclaimed, in a fit of passion. ‘All the way back to our most distant ones: I haven’t heard a single speech here in Africa that didn’t reference the universal Empire of Rome in some manner or other.’ his crossed leg slipped off and his foot hit the ground.
‘All restorations are bound to end in failure, history teaches us that,’ the officer observed, ‘its an impervious impulse, that seeks to climb, whereas life loves the easy downward path – and yet the metamorphosis continues unabated – just as evidenced by nature, which is an inescapable example. The Romans, unearthed from their tombs where they slept silently and solemnly, are unpredictable ancestors – and having already been told of the future, they’re probably laughing at us too along with the English and the rest of Africa.’
‘You don’t appear to have grasped that it is only through collective action that a man can both realise himself and cause his own destruction.’
‘The situation for those who have ripped away from their homeland, their ancestors and their customs and are brought face to face with other ancestors and customs brings them to reflect on their own destiny, and it leads them to isolate themselves.’
‘But answer me this: do you wish to escape that or do you instead yearn for it?’
‘One oscillates between both answers. One performs one’s duties because that is the easy oath to take, and so you eventually reach the end of that path, whichever end that may be, as is customary. A very learned friend of mine, who happens to be a businessman – whose quotes always have a veneer of irony to them whenever he cites them – once read out an essay that more or less said the following: The new Faust is a Faust of the study. Nor does he seriously desire to leave it, that is, to translate his aims into deeds. Into this study crowds the whole complex of Faust problems, for the link that binds a quest for truth and life with social practice has been severed from the outset…xcix It seems worthwhile to emphasise that the officer is a man ready for action, who safeguards society, stands for order, against the barbarians converging on his borders.’
From the little garden one could see the only palm tree in the street, which was an odd, alienating sight, given that North Africa was a land chock-full of palm trees, as the old adage went. It was as though that single tree had been stranded in that city of colonists, or perhaps, like the lone palm tree on the stage of Aida, it was making a courageous show of itself with its evocative power: it belonged to the realm of the significant but unreal, which of course differed from the obviously insignificant, if only because of its natural aspect. The journalist was observing the officer, who was nodding his head, as though answering someone’s question. That someone was actually himself, given that for the necessity of sustaining that fictional dialogue, he was also playing the part of the other.
‘Everything you’ve told me would be lost in translation in my newspaper column: meaning – and I don’t need to excuse myself here since you are well aware of the situation – I am wasting my time talking to you.’
‘And I am grateful to you for that. Not that I’ve wasted your time, but that you’ve understood that what I’ve told you won’t be of any use to you at all.’
‘Could you explain to me what attracted you to a life in the military, I still haven’t quite understood whether you’re proud of your service…’ the journalist said, as though he were a judge trying to discern the facts in a roundabout manner.
‘The authority decided it for me, and I swore an oath of allegiance: if the leader – the Duce, His Majesty… – makes a mistake, we follow them anyway: this is how we take measure of the hero in tragedies, where Fate is nothing but an authority. In other words, everything has already been predetermined. I can only express my own suffering: through harmonious verses, if they come to me. Being aware of the irrationality of everything and the need to do one’s duty, has replaced the role of Fate in the old Greek plays, where destiny is no longer negotiable – a tragic situation which in some ways appeals to man in its own strange fashion…’
The bricklayer had stopped working and was now watching the two men, who sat in the garden scorched
by the sun, talking around a cement table with a bottle on top of it. They looked like insects through a magnifying glass, intent on their mysterious rites. The bricklayer had a trowel in his hand. He looked as though he’d forgotten how to use it, perhaps even forgotten about himself. Only the occasional note still left his lips. To the journalist, who was looking at him from below, the bricklayer looked like one of the figures depicted in the pediments of the old Venetian villas. Yet the figure wasn’t graceful, it was twisted in pain, like the images of saints in dark churches…
‘You seem to nourish a cult of sterility within you.’
‘Do you really think so? I hadn’t thought about it. But woe onto anyone ready to take any way out of this: the dignity of a solitary man lies in his refusal to contemplate anything that might be deemed useful.’
In order to embarrass him, the journalist fell silent, depriving him of a pretext for further polemics. Nevertheless, the other carried on:
‘We have spoken about a study, where Faust questions himself. Now the study could also be a living room. The stories I told you last night are derived from this very source: we don’t want the artifice, it is actually an intrinsic part of colonial life, which is destined to disappear one day or the other: this is what history laughing guarantees us. Go visit the ruins of the Greek colonists on the highland plateaus: here are the arches and the columns and the statuesc – and nothing else. At the date fate has fixed, we shall instead leave behind the interminable roads that lead to uninhabited places and the jetties of docks that shield from the tempests and currents ships that nevertheless never sail into the harbour anymore: but the progenies of the colonists will also die out one day. Just as with the ancient Greeks today, future peoples will discover tombs with white bones in them, where individual stories are no longer legible, and blood has been stolen away by the devil.’
‘Captain!’ the woman leaning on her windowsill on the first floor shouted, ‘do come see me when your guest takes his leave, I have something to tell you.’
On the roof, the bricklayer tensed his arms, trying to suss out what she was saying. He looked as if he had just fallen out of the sky, an angel sent to that woman to help her remake her life; perhaps he’d even brought her a new life as a gift. He started singing again, in that enigmatic way of his, hinting at a tune, then falling silent, listening out, as if he’d just tossed a stone in a river and was waiting to hear its splash.
The woman was immobile, those notes had reached her and were working a spell on her.
Growing impatient, the journalist lit a cigarette. He felt as though he’d been dropped into a gigantic puppet theatre – like the Gerolamo theatre in Milan, a Sunday shrine for the city’s children.
‘The theatrical calculations of time here having nothing to do with subjective artifices,’ the officer resumed, after a long pause, ‘rather, they are an inescapable reality, because we don’t have the patience to spell out everything that happened in history and thus stare nothingness in the face, just like we stare into the mirror. Everything is only appearance, at least for those who look on from the bleachers of history, which, I hope you’ll allow the expression, I find a touch méloci. We soldiers don’t do much at all: we’re like animals in a zoo: we prepare for war, where death becomes part of our daily life. But the wait is long and thus we have more time on our hands than those devoted to industry, or teaching, or keeping the public order.’
‘But what does any of this mean?’
The journalist was rapidly losing his patience.
‘I meant to say that in Africa, which is the supreme elsewhere, reflections find fertile soil to prosper in: I don’t mean that it’s conducive to philosophical reflections given that most of us here are as ignorant as courtesans; I meant mundane reflections, exquisitely crafted outlooks on one’s own life, like in the courts of old, yet another setting that was detached from the daily routines of others and whose life was unmistakably theatrical. We have more time on our hands and are a step away from the supreme apex of life, where everything ends. Isolation and artifices are a selection process. This is what frightens you – you’re used to your newspaper, which instead endlessly multiplies reality every day.’
‘You don’t seem to think much of my profession.’
‘What about you? What do you think of mine? Last night you said you were surprised that officers were capable of any depth or insights.’
The officer’s thoughts had turned to what the woman in the house across the street had modestly told him earlier: that she’d been betrayed by a man, but that she had been equally betrayed by passion. The woman had explained that her lover wasn’t free – meaning that he was married, since metaphors, like lies, are nothing but modesty and reserve used to distract one from one’s suffering – and they hadn’t managed to see one another except during brief, furtive meetings, with agonizing gaps in between each visit. Yet the figure of that man was present in her mind and the dialogues playing out in her mind were as long as time itself. ‘What am I going to do now?’ she had asked him with tears in her eyes, ‘who am I going to talk to? With the African palm trees, which I’m seeing here for the first time? Who have I run away from? He was no longer there anyway…’
She had carried on in that manner for a while longer, in a kind of lullaby-esque way.
The man’s wife had discovered the affair, and she had given him the age-old ultimatum: either she goes or I will. The man had told her that there was nothing to decide, that he was staying in their house. ‘Only that there was a tiny bureaucratic detail to take care of,’ the woman commented with teary irony: ‘but out where?’
The man’s most obvious promises – I’ll never see her again, I’ll go tell her it’s all over, etc. – still didn’t seem like enough, despite the fact he was shouting, to steel himself. Suddenly, Africa had appeared on the scene, to take her away from everything. ‘Do you know what she told me? he had told his wife, that we could run away to the colony together. He didn’t need to finish his story. His wife gave him an express order: then send her over there. And that was the price she had exacted for their reconciliation. And I paid that price, because I was scared. Not for me, of course, after all, how would I matter? But what would have happened to him if I’d stayed? That man was dear to me, how could I let his reputation be soiled? You should have seen him, sir! – I mean, Captain! There he was, lying at my feet, in prey to his passions, for one last time, pleading with me to go: that only I could save him. Yes, he was a vile man, but he also nurtured a dream for a quiet normality within him, which isn’t shameful at all. That is why he chose to stay with his wife and opted for the conjugal bond: he betrayed me, Captain, right during the final act, during the play’s climax, but before all that he’d dreamed of running away with me to places even further than our colony, I’ll tell you that!’ – and as though overcome by emotion, she sighed.
‘Please forgive me, but why did you accept to make such a sacrifice?’
‘What would have happened otherwise? I knew Luigino well. It was the moment of truth and passion had given him wings. If instead I had refused to leave, he would have come back to his senses and would have only behaved in endlessly sordid ways. I simply had to take advantage of that magical moment, when the drama hadn’t quite resolved itself yet, in order to run away. There was no alternative: on the other hand, Luigino appeared to be falling apart. In fact, he was going up in smoke. He wanted me to be a prisoner of misery, but I preferred… to die a heroic death: and here I am.’
‘The solitude I bear – or rather carry within me, which this deserted Africa acts as a mirror for – is his legacy to me, do you understand? To love someone makes our souls noble, my friend, it restores that soul to movement and shelters it from all calculations. It’s… a flight. Then we eventually plunge into the deep well of solitude and crash.’
The Captain shook all over. Yes, he thought, she’s performing a funerary rite: inside the tomb isn’t the man she loved, but the demon of their love.
; ‘Didn’t you notice that this woman talked only in clichés?’ the journalist asked in an annoyed tone.
‘That’s what I told her too: we must shy away from clichés. ‘Why?’ she asked me in a fit of pride. ‘They are lifeboats in the great night of life: woe onto anyone who dares open his eyes!’ Once upon a time, people who fled their homes used to take cult objects with them that embodied the spirit of their dead ancestors who watched over their house. This woman keeps a photograph of Luigino in her sitting room, not to remind her of the vile man he was, but of the passion of which she’d been capable of. Even cults, like language, trade in what you so cheerfully called clichés.’
‘Why don’t you tell me your own story now? I mean the story of your life.’ the journalist said, as though ordering the officer, astonished by the fact that it had taken him this long to ask a question that might force the officer out into the open.
The woman leaning on her windowsill was making strange gestures with her hands now, as though she was trying to send signals overseas, to her distant lover.
‘My story is the summation (or an itinerary, or a landscape, whatever you like) of all the events that happened in other people’s lives, many of which I have just told you about. My confession ended a long time ago, Mr Gigli.’
xcvi Author’s Note: from Goethe’s Faust.
xcvii Author’s Note: György Lukács, Essays on Thomas Mann (H. Fertig, 1965), p.36.
The Fourth Shore Page 39
