The Colonial Conquest: The Confines of the Shadow Volume I

by Alessandro Spina

  The old bachelor had grown impatient. His bony hand now seemed to be scratching away, as though gripped by the same spasm that makes a man’s limbs twitch when close to death. He interrupted him, curtly. He said he knew how painful such a decision must be, but he wanted justice, not excuses, and the sooner the better. If someone else acted in his place before he could, the Hajji’s name would henceforth be smeared by the indelible stain of suspicion that he’d either hesitated or had refused outright. As for the rest, namely the feelings of the people involved, these were negligible and he had no desire to meddle. They had to find a compromise between the demands dictated by justice and the feelings, and surprising hesitations, of the injured party. Whatever collateral damage justice caused was of secondary concern. If weighing scales are a symbol of justice, this means the accused also has a right to weigh in, as he might have had his reasons and also been the victim of an injustice. But nothing else mattered apart from discovering which way the scales ultimately leaned.

  The uncle was trying to spare Semereth the pain of additional confessions. This was why he had interrupted him, so as to expedite a conclusion.

  Hajji Semereth listened closely, told his uncle he was right, but picked up the thread of his discourse exactly where he’d left off. However, noticing that his uncle was growing irritable, he tried to be concise. He said that the offence (the Hajji being the offender) shouldn’t be overlooked, but instead punished. He was prepared to forgive both parties, so long as his own mistakes could be forgiven, which could only come about through generosity and mercy.

  The uncle, by now choleric, interrupted him, arguing that he couldn’t possibly expect that servant to be forgiven in any way whatsoever.

  ‘Zulfa isn’t my wife,’ the Hajji retorted. ‘We were divorced that very night when the marriage couldn’t be consummated.’ That this wasn’t ratified through legal formalities was an error that fell squarely on him alone. Once Zulfa was divorced, she could choose whichever man she liked, so why not Ferdinando?

  The uncle could only muster the strength to object that Ferdinando wasn’t a Muslim.

  ‘This is why,’ Hajji Semereth concluded as he rose to his feet, ‘my renunciation and forgiveness will translate into a good act: I’ll ask Ferdinando to embrace our faith. Once this condition is met, I will repudiate Zulfa and recognise her as his lawful wife.’

  Chapter 5

  Saverio Delle Stelle

  I

  CAPTAIN MARTELLO: There you have it General, that’s the end of Semereth’s story. After paying his venerable uncle that visit, he returned home and called for Ferdinando. You can imagine what low spirits that boy must’ve been in: he knew he’d been condemned to die. However, he must have feared Semereth’s wrath more than death, since he didn’t disobey the summons and went into the reception room instead. The master – the injured party, the judge and the executioner all in one, namely Semereth – was seated at the back of the room, as though on a throne. ‘I forgive you,’ Semereth said, ‘I’m going to repudiate Zulfa and recognise her as your lawful wife. But on one condition: that you forsake your faith and become a Muslim.’ Who was he talking to? The master’s presence had paralysed the boy, who couldn’t even conceive of a future. That wretched merchant can never get a conversation going: despotic or kind, guilty or innocent, he always winds up talking into a void. He sacrificed it all for all those tender little creatures of his, but what did he get out of it? Either they’re too far away, or if he manages to reach them his presence crushes them. It seems he had an equally pathetic conversation with that old man, Abubaker. He was the only one who was still in the dark, and Semereth decided to let him linger there: he merely told him he’d decided to repudiate his latest wife and give her away to his servant Ferdinando, who would forswear his faith in return. The old man replied that if this was the master’s decision, then it must be a good one, and that Allah would reward him for initiating an unbeliever into the true faith.

  GENERAL DELLE STELLE: And so the conspiracy ultimately led to an annulment! It certainly won’t make a good impression that this Christian slave abjured his faith just as we were flinging open the prison gates. But hey! Young men always make mistakes when a pretty girl is involved, like incurring a debt with a family friend, or in this case, with God.

  MARTELLO: I followed the whole affair from its very beginning, intrigued by the haughty answer that Venetian woman had given Colonel Romanino when he asked her if she’d come and work for us: ‘I’m not looking for a master.’ I was present at the time, and I wanted to interrogate her. Her idea of us is rather offensive – she considers us barbarians. The idea of leaving Semereth’s big house to serve a soldier seemed risible to her. I retorted that Romanino is an officer in the army of His Majesty Victor Emmanuel III, but she sarcastically replied that very little of that majesty filtered down to Romanino, that these fairy-tale origins vouched for by official seals and stamps were just a bunch of papers that had no weight in the world of human relations. I feel like I’m going berserk every time I speak to someone who lives here. That Venetian humiliated a fellow soldier, and a high ranking one, at that. Nevertheless, it proved quite difficult to disentangle my wrath from my concern. The ties that bind people in that house are indiscernible, they’re often contradictory, and they have indecipherable roots: like Semereth’s link to the Venetian woman, who I believe was either the wife or daughter of one of his victims, or better yet, of one of the Turks’ victims. When the questioning was over, I ordered her to send Ferdinando to me as I wanted to interrogate him too. When he showed up, I explained that I wanted him to come and work for us. The boy really is very handsome: the Venetian woman’s praises don’t do him justice, in fact quite the opposite. Ferdinando was dumbstruck and tried to run away. Once apprehended and forced to talk, he finally confessed that he’d worried we wanted to enslave him, and he only calmed down once we’d reassured him of our integrity and sworn an oath to that effect. Although we had a different impression, Ferdinando doesn’t consider himself a servant in that house: he obeys Hajji Semereth, in fact since he’s an orphan he belongs to him, but that doesn’t mean – at least as far as he’s concerned – that he’s a servant. In other words, my proposal turned into a total blunder. The boy didn’t have the Venetian woman’s vivaciousness, or her flair for blarney. Thus, once the misunderstanding was cleared up, I let him go. But some time later, I used a pretext to head over to Semereth’s house before his trip to Egypt. I was courteously received, spoke of my conversation with the Venetian and Ferdinando to avoid being found out and make him suspicious, but I could only see the master’s unappealing face, and not Zulfa’s, the one I’d so ardently longed to see. After drinking a cup of fragrant tea, I got up, and before taking my leave mentioned that I was curious to see the rest of the house, since theirs are laid out so differently to ours. As the rituals of receiving a guest dictate strictly formulaic answers, Semereth immediately replied ‘My home is your home,’ meaning I was free to see it. I already knew that the women’s quarters – where each wife has a room with two windows and a door facing onto the inner courtyard – were off limits. But as I was walking through a corridor, I thought I saw such a little face glued to one of the windows that it could only have belonged to that beautiful wife of his. Using some pretext or other, I backtracked a few steps. It was dusk, and when I finally managed to get a glimpse through that window, I saw the face I’d spotted a moment earlier. But it wasn’t Zulfa. It was Ferdinando, who scampered off the minute he recognised me. Perhaps he’d feared I’d come to see his master to buy him! I had been one of the first to hear of Zulfa and Ferdinando’s tryst, having learned of it from the Maltese man who works as an interpreter for us, and who knows all the stories that make the rounds of the citadel. The story had piqued my desire to lay eyes on that beautiful face. But how to go about it? I’d chanced upon Ferdinando in the shop of a Maronite while he was speaking to a boy who’d once been in Semereth’s service and who now works for the Maronite merchant. I entered th
e shop without being seen by Ferdinando and once I’d asked Chébas a few questions about his business, and to show me his merchandise, I stopped to greet Ferdinando, who’d seen me by then, but was too terrified to run away. The young Maronite offered me a cup of tea with mint leaves and peanuts at the bottom. Their tea ceremony is really quite intriguing, it’s just like the bathing ritual at the pagan temples two thousand years ago: the refreshments are really besides the point, it’s all about getting to know one another. It’s as though my interlocutor were a high priest, and merely talking to him allowed me to consult the local gods.

  DELLE STELLE: Your devotion is unassailable, my dear Captain. Which is why I’m rather perplexed by what you’ve been saying. What are you looking for? We’ve come to Africa to carve out a colony for the motherland and to lay down rules and regulations, not to put these people to the test. An officer is a man who identifies with an Order and who devotes his life to guarantee its longevity. I often wonder what our African campaign truly means to you. Did you see it as a means to realise a personal need to escape the society in which you were raised and educated? The cruel irony of course being that you were instead asked to impose those very laws and customs on a reluctant country? Or is this some miraculous change that occurred the moment you set foot here? In other words, did you leave Italy convinced you’d be a paladin of truth and justice and yet your certainties were shaken when you saw how the locals were so unwilling to accept you? Or maybe this has nothing to do with these recalcitrant locals and you’re genuinely enthusiastic about African society and its laws and customs? Or should one come up with a different hypothesis, and posit that on seeing such primitivity and poverty, you were moved to side with those humiliated, downtrodden natives in an outburst of passion – a secret that bourgeois Western Europe has forgotten? I don’t want to pester you with questions about the life you led before you came here. Regardless of whether it was mediocre or fulfilling, that doesn’t change the meaning of the experience. Were you ever this interested in anything that happened back home? It seems to me that your feverishness is on the rise, and it’s my duty to try to restrain you before eventually having to punish you. Naturally, this has nothing to do with the story itself, which I found interesting, but rather with your conduct. For instance, why did you go to the market? Frankly, I can’t quite understand why an officer would go there. Semereth as the baritone, Ferdinando as the tenor, Zulfa as the soprano, the maternal uncle as the bass and the Venetian woman as the contralto … Louis Philippe had a passion for Turquerie, and it was all the rage in the eighteenth century. Giuseppe Verdi might have made one hell of an opera out of it, replete with choruses and ballets. Semereth is exactly like Verdi’s unlucky heroes: one of those beasts whose tenderness – like Philip II coming between Carlos and Elisabeth in Don Carlos, or like the Count di Luna in The Troubadour – tends to have deadly outcomes.

  II

  MARTELLO: We chatted for a long time while those two boys sat on the bench and stared speechlessly at us. I wonder why they were so curious? Ferdinando was very bashful. As for the other one, who I learned is called Abdelkarim, he’s an average sort of chap. Which is exactly why Ferdinando stood out so prominently, even though they were dressed more or less alike, but obviously incognito. Claiming I didn’t know where the goldsmiths’ market was situated, even though it’s a stone’s throw from here, I asked my gracious host if I could take Ferdinando with me. And so it was I went for a stroll with the boy, who was enormously embarrassed. I steered the conversation to this exact topic and tried to question him on his origins, of which he knows nothing. Then I asked him why he didn’t go back to his country, whether it was Italy or Portugal; after all, we’d offered to give him the freedom that he surely must have longed for. I told him he’d have the chance to grow up safely and serenely – and perhaps one day, if he happened to show the disposition for it and he were His Majesty’s subject, he could embrace a military career. This conversation had a result diametrically opposed to the one we’d had a couple of months earlier when I’d offered him a position as a servant at our headquarters. He kept screwing up his face to look at me, and asked me questions of his own, as though afraid I was trying to trick him. He took my hand in his and begged me not to deceive him, to swear that what I’d said was true. Was it true? I told him that I didn’t know, but that it certainly wasn’t impossible. My young friend seemed even more distressed. I already knew about his tryst with Zulfa. The dilemma that was plaguing his soul was the following: abandoning his master’s wife, whom he had a boundless love for, and escaping to become an officer in the Italian army – or remaining in his master’s employ so as to share a life of beatitude and martyrdom with the latter’s wife.

  DELLE STELLE: Melodramas have been preoccupied with exactly these sorts of dilemmas for as long as anyone can remember. Do you remember those lines from Dido Abandoned?

  Se resto sul lido

  If I linger ashore

  Se sciolgo le vele

  If I loosen my sails

  Infido, crudele

  I hear someone call

  Mi sento chiamare.

  Me cruel and false.

  E intanto confuso

  Meanwhile I’m dazed

  Nel dubbio funesto

  Amidst sorrowful doubt

  Non parto, non resto

  I won’t leave, I won’t stay

  Ma provo il martire

  But suffer just as much

  Che avrei nel partire

  As I would if I left

  Che avrei nel restar.

  As I would if I stayed.

  Lyric opera is the only art form I ever had any aptitude for: the only discipline that escaped becoming an academic discipline and eschewed the miserable righteousness of our times. The routine of reality kills art. I don’t know if my taste for melodrama led me to a military career, or if army life led me to melodrama as an equivalent substitute. Eighteenth-century operas excelled at resolving private conflicts with military violence. (HIS NARRATIVE CUTS OFF HERE, OBVIOUSLY TO MAKE WAY FOR FERNANDO’S ARIA).

  MARTELLO: I was expecting him to ask if I could arrange for his escape; in other words, if it would really be possible to present this retrieved subject to His Majesty the King, along with his incredibly young and beautiful lover, of course.

  DELLE STELLE: But of course! It’s like in The Magic Flute when the King turns into Sarastro.

  MARTELLO: Would he ask me to swear another oath? This time, Ferdinando didn’t grab my hand, but instead walked silently beside me as he let his hopes slowly evaporate. When we’d neared Semereth’s house, he stopped: his eyes were bright and alert. Without sharing his enthusiasm, I understood he’d opted for martyrdom and beatitude. I held out my hand to say goodbye. He seized it, and in the blink of an eye brought it to his lips and planted a kiss on it as local custom dictated. By adhering to the local traditions, he showed me he’d renounced my offer of protection, released me from my oath to remain beside his beloved. Thus, someone from that house had refused my offer a second time. Perhaps you were right all along, General: our baritone is cursed and doomed to be rejected. I only hope I didn’t cause that boy any more bad luck, or rather, using your words, that I was nothing more than an innocuous beast. Verdi always infused his baritones’ arias with an oppressive melancholy. Think of Il balen del suo sorriso. General, as our librettist, if you would kindly write me an aria, please place it at that moment, when I was alone in the middle of street, standing amidst curious and ignorant passers-by, just a moment after Ferdinando kissed my hand and disappeared, refusing to make his escape to go back to Semereth’s house, where his lover lived with her husband, the master, the monster.

  DELLE STELLE: I would prefer a concertato: you out on the street and the other characters situated in various parts of the house. I would even give the Venetian a line – after all, we did say she was the contralto. Curtains! Curtains!

  MARTELLO: The curtains certainly fell. How could I possibly re-establish a connection with Semere
th’s house after being turned down twice? Once, during one of Semereth’s absences, I’d sent for Abubaker, the old custodian. But the old man’s world is so alien from ours that I failed to get anything out of him. My attempts to poke a little fun at Semereth were met with such obvious disdain that I got confused and immediately stopped talking. To cut a long story short, I let him go without having drawn anything useful out of him. One day, while I was strolling through the market, I found myself face to face with the young Maronite, who invited me into his shop and dispatched his servant to fetch a second cup of tea. I gladly accepted. If Ferdinando had been in his shop, this meant the young Maronite knew Semereth Effendi, or had at least heard of him. The Maronite is young, intelligent and industrious, he runs around Benghazi – where he showed up a couple of months ago – with enviable self-confidence. I can’t tell what thoughts he might conceal, but he seems utterly indifferent to the political situation and avoids speaking out either for or against either side. Every time I tried to steer the conversation to make him compromise himself, he would deflect my questions by saying that he’d wound up in Benghazi purely by chance, and was only interested in commerce. But despite having subtly tried to force him to do so, he refused to disapprove of what the rebels were doing. He seemed courteous, obliging and well disposed towards a compromise, but only within the confines of dignity. I believe he thinks taking a stance against the rebels would be dishonourable. But what do we care whether he approves or not? Is that what I was looking for? I was far more interested in another detail: that the young Maronite had met Semereth Effendi on the ship from Alexandria. I asked him a number of questions about Semereth: the man has a keen eye, is never indiscreet, but is definitely sagacious. I understood that he knew the whole story, and that I’d found the key to unravelling this puzzle.