The following day, he didn’t manage to speak to Fathi, as that leg of the journey was too short, and the terrain hostile and hard to ride through. They reached Tolmeta, the ancient Ptolemais, in the early hours of the afternoon. On the way he’d had the time to reflect on the previous day’s conversation. His attention was focused on the secret symmetry between their experiences. He had once thought that his own voyage – from the motherland to the colony – would be irreversible, because the knowledge of a different social order was enough to show the inadequacy of the society he’d lived in, and now, as an officer of the Expeditionary Force, he believed the way it pretended to be more exemplary was sinful. In his turn, Fathi had thought of the Italian conquest and the escape of the Turks as irreversible, and had put much effort into carving out a niche for himself in this new world, learning the invaders’ language to find employment, of course, but also so he could better understand this newly discovered world. Four years ago, the captain had purchased an ancient villa in Lombardy which he’d had painstakingly restored, but it had felt as though he had been building himself a tomb: just as with the ancient Egyptians, mustering all those traditions only proved useful for the journey to the afterlife.
At sunset, the captain took Fathi on a tour of the ruins of Ptolemais. Although the sight might have been better seen in the light of day, they were still imposing. Positioned underneath a fairly wide square were the vast cellars where the city’s water was once stored in a series of labyrinthine tunnels that coalesced into an underground city. Fathi listened closely to his commanding officer’s explanations. Martello didn’t seem in a hurry, or keen to solicit the young man’s confidences. Thus, by showing him the ruins, he prevented him from speaking.
Captain Martello evoked the empires and diverse influences that had dominated the country, conquests that belonged to the ancient past – the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Vandals, the Byzantines – with the intent of forcing that young man to stay silent, in order to impress him so that, having overcome his diffidence, he could no longer speak freely. Martello told Fathi that they’d discovered an old fresco of Apollo surrounded by his muses and holding a zither in one of the main halls in his villa, concealed under a layer of whitewash. Apollo had founded Cyrene, which lay at the end of their journey. In another room a woman, most likely a metaphor for Venice, could be seen holding a crown aloft. He then told Fathi about Venice’s eastern, Byzantine heritage. He always seemed to be wandering off and then suddenly reappearing before his interlocutor; it was a regal and almost reticent kind of dance. Every initiation ceremony is highly metaphorical: the invisible bursts onto the scene only to vanish again after being moved by unintelligible actions, which the gods use to threaten and seduce.
When the captain finished his history lesson, Fathi noted bitterly that he’d spent much of his time in Sicily looking for that Italy the captain was telling him about, but he hadn’t seen the slightest trace of that splendour in the squalid little village where they’d been confined. The village hadn’t looked anything like Rome, or Venice, or Byzantium – it was simply a village lost in the middle of a deserted interior, which looked a lot like the places they’d seen on their way to those ruins. Fathi said he knew those magnificent cities existed, but that once they’d crossed the sea, the Italian authorities had only shown them places that looked exactly like the ones they’d left behind, as if the only difference wasn’t the distance between them, but this puzzling notion called progress. Their training course in Italy had had a single effect on them: disenchantment. They had simply been shown a facsimile of their old country, but populated by different people. As though his own country, which had been taken away from him, could never hope to change, and the future could only be a replica of the past. During their initial training the authorities had also tried to politically indoctrinate them. Then they’d forgotten all about them. Life in the camps had been lethargic, the days interminably long and purposeless. Only the shopkeepers took any interest in them: the soldiers’ pay had swelled the parched rivulet of the village’s commercial life. Many of Fathi’s comrades had fallen ill, a few had died and been buried in someone else’s country. Their only viaticum was the desperation of the renegades these new idols had refused to welcome.
Martello let him talk. He said he’d thought the whole project had been an arrogant fantasy from the start; that bureaucrats could only conjure sterile and reactionary dreams. He promised Fathi that a different Italy existed, and that he would take him there once the war in Europe was over. The prospect excited him. He forgot all the wrath and despondency Fathi’s story had aroused in him. He said he hadn’t meant to humiliate Fathi with stories of Italy’s greatness and her perennially celebrated beauty; instead, he wanted to offer her up to him. He also told him that he didn’t care about his military training or political indoctrination, that he didn’t give a fig whether he would ever become a loyal subject. Getting drawn further and further by the fugue of images that flooded his mind, he said he simply wanted to welcome a friend, not a subject.
Fathi eyed him attentively. Irked, the captain asked him if he didn’t believe him. The offence swept away the immense panorama he’d evoked, and at a stroke he once again felt like a colonial officer with a native recruit by his side.
But before he could say anything, Fathi began to cough, making an incredible racket. The idyllic scene of the voyage to Italy was juxtaposed with the inextricable gloominess of that chesty cough, whose rumbles shattered the silence of that isolated place. It was as though an abyss had opened up before them and a god were making a gesture or uttering a word. But it was a benevolent god.
That cavernous cough seemed even more horrible under that blue sky, which was unblemished by a single cloud, or the slightest tear.
It was nearly evening, and they walked back in silence.
In a tent a little removed from the military camp, a woman was busy weaving a carpet. An old man stood next to her, watching her work. Invited in by the old man, Martello and Fathi entered the tent. The woman didn’t lift her gaze, and continued weaving. The loom was rudimentary. The weaver’s slow hand would alternate between running the threads lengthwise, then crosswise, interlacing them through the loom. Fathi tossed a coin onto the carpet. Afterwards, once alone in his tent, the captain drafted a solemn letter to his fiancée by candlelight.
On the evening of the third day, they reached El-Hania, the little Eastern port where Émile Chébas’s business had opened a branch two years earlier.
The captain inspected the market, where the merchants recognised him and greeted him fawningly. He even paid a visit to Chébas’s shop, and was astonished to see Abdelkarim there, whom he hadn’t seen in a long time. Abdelkarim had grown a few inches and was now in charge of the branch. He came towards the captain, pleased to host him, but unable to conceal his awkwardness. Immediately amused, Captain Martello took in the entirety of the scene so as to spot any sign of benevolence, and Abdelkarim – who now looked so conventional thanks to the implacable passing of time – was cheered by his presence. Martello asked him if he remembered their first encounter in Benghazi, when he’d seen him with Ferdinando in Émile Chébas’s warehouse. He asked after the Maronite and Abdelkarim told him the master was quite busy due to Armand’s impending departure. Yes, Armand was going to Italy to fight the Austrians. From the way the conversation developed, the captain understood Émile was annoyed by his brother’s decision, which seemed so removed from their actual concerns: after all, what did that colossal brawl have to do with them? The captain asked what had happened to that gloomy uncle of theirs, and Abdelkarim answered that Mikhail had gone back to Syria since his three daughters were now of marriageable age. At that moment, the captain heard something move. Unnerved, he shot to his feet and only then realised that Fathi was standing at the back of the shop next to a pile of multicoloured cloths. The boy’s smile was impenetrable, reminding Martello of the expression on one of the statues the soldiers had unearthed after they’d stumbled
on a stone foot sticking out of the ground, and which was now housed at the local military base. Abdelkarim said Fathi was his cousin and appeared surprised the captain knew his name.
Martello asked Fathi what he was doing there and why he was eavesdropping. There was a metallic hint to his voice, which made it seem as though the words were being uttered by his uniform. Fathi modestly replied that he’d greeted him on entering the shop, but that the captain had pretended not to notice. Enraged, Martello abruptly took a step towards him, saying he didn’t need to pretend to do anything. The captain’s sudden wrath made a big impression on Abdelkarim, who’d hitherto always seen him looking so courteous and composed, drinking one cup of tea after the other with his master. But instead of receiving a reply, Fathi’s cough echoed through the shop, and the officer was struck by the sound, as if Jupiter had shaken the heavens with his thunderbolts to admonish his arrogance.
Abdelkarim invited Martello to have a cup of tea. His offer seemed a little reticent, as if he were playing a bigger role than he was used to. Martello accepted, but was surprised and disappointed when he saw Abdelkarim bring only a single cup. He knew it was a sign of deference, but still felt the bitter taste of estrangement in his mouth. There was an unbridgeable distance separating him even from Abdelkarim. Abdelkarim lingered a step away from the captain, while Fathi, having cheered up, stood like a pillar by the shop’s entrance. Fathi was slightly shorter than average, slender, well-proportioned, pale-skinned, and he effused an aura of suffering, as though he were a statue surrounded by fog, and therefore barely perceptible.
Martello was amused by the scene, as though he were on stage at a theatre. He thought about General Delle Stelle: what would the general have said if he’d seen him sitting serenely in that exotic shop? The general loved opera, and was in fact fond of saying that a military career was the most ‘melodramatic’ option available to one in that mundane century.
Martello enjoyed being among all those cloths, so smooth and light that they slipped through one’s fingers; he would stroke them with one hand, while holding his cup of mint tea with the other, which he sipped at. Jumbled memories of exquisite Viennese or Neapolitan Turquerie flashed through his mind, brittle figurines of shining porcelain which vanished and transformed into a mellifluous music that caressed his ears.
He would tell his fiancée about it all.
Who knew if that girl could even comprehend how reality sometimes becomes strangely complicated, that doors can open onto unknown places one ventures into without knowing anything about them, like in dreams, where different worlds are juxtaposed against one another? Or like in pentagrams, which the wise one has inscribed with mysterious hieroglyphs that an expert hand could decipher and transform into music in the ephemeral and seductive clarity that one can achieve when turning notes into sounds.
Martello stood up. He took his leave from his host with all due ceremony, thereby increasing Abdelkarim’s confusion, as well as, so it seemed, his happiness.
The next morning, while they were climbing a ridge to reach the high plateau from whence they would continue to Cyrene, their journey’s destination, their attention was drawn to a tomb. It looked like a tiny temple. The ruins of that distant, illustrious civilisation were the only language familiar to him in that impenetrable country. The ruins always emerged out of the sand alongside the coast, as if even the Greek colonists hadn’t dared to venture into that boundless interior.
Martello had once tasked his soldiers with excavating one of those ruins and had been rewarded with a prize: a nearly intact mosaic decorated with subtle black arabesques on a bed of white. Martello could recite Catullus’s verses from memory and as a practical joke General Delle Stelle had made him perform the most immodest ones in public. Both the front and back of the temple had been broken into. The officer stuck his head out of the opening, and as though he were peering through a telescope, he saw Fathi motionless on his horse. Martello was struck once more by how fragile he looked.
Having climbed back onto his saddle, he called Fathi over. They rode all the way to Massah without exchanging a word.
They stopped in the village for an hour, then continued to Beida. Along the way they saw Greek tombs dotted around the landscape like the footprints of a civilisation. They all bore a round hole made by thieves who had pierced the rock in order to stick their hands through it and into the tombs. Those acts of desecration made Martello feel uneasy. Feeling melancholy, he began to talk. He asked Fathi questions about the Sanussi Brotherhood, which had established its first zawiyah in Beida. He said he would gladly write a study on the Brotherhood, whose work he admired. Fathi had made the acquaintance of Sayyid Hilal al-Sanussi, the man who’d been put in charge of the Eastern regions and who’d abandoned the front the Sanussis had successfully held to set out on the road of betrayal. He said Sayyid Hilal was debauched, and incapable of leading the heroic life of the Brotherhood’s members. He aspired to become the invaders’ straw man, the sort of character other imperial powers were prone to protect. He’d sold out for nothing, and paid for it by shamefully tarnishing the Sanussi name. As for the invaders, they would exploit him for all he was worth and then, once he was useless, they would discard him and leave him to rot under house arrest.
Martello disagreed. This was the price every traitor paid: heaps of slander and conjecture that every onlooker claimed to have insights on. He asked Fathi more questions about the two Italian soldiers who’d been taken prisoner at the battle of Sidi al-Qarba and had recanted their faith and gone over to the other side.
Re-evoking betrayals on both sides, they entered Cyrene. The city had been looted by corsair archaeologists and its marvellous statues sold off to European museums, but they could nevertheless still gaze upon its impressive ruins. Much more could be seen poking out of the soft layer of grass. Captain Martello walked all the way to the amphitheatre’s basin, which looked out onto the sea, and was flanked on its right by the hills of the necropolis rising like ramparts and studded with deep black windows into the realm of the underworld.
On Thursday evening, Captain Martello went for another walk through the ruins, going along the ‘sacred way’ that led from the fountain of Apollo to the Agora. He fantasised about rediscoveries, excavations, restorations and deciphering inscriptions. Walking slowly along that path was like taking part in a procession alongside invisible companions, releasing him from the boredom of the interminable hours spent sitting in school listening to a literature professor who tried to bring Greek and Latin grammar to life in a vaguely threatening manner. It was as though a door had been thrown open and Martello now stood face to face with the world whose sepulchral remains the professor had tried to impart on him. These lessons in Classics had turned out to be metaphorical disquisitions on eschatology; but now that he was in Africa, and standing amidst the solemn, sublime remains of an ancient civilisation, the captain had finally been granted a window into the afterlife.
To his great annoyance, he realised he’d forgotten all his Greek – it had been erased from his memory, the original hidden city. On the other hand, he’d managed to hang on to his Latin, as though the intimate landscape of his mind had decided which monuments to keep and which to eliminate, according to its whims. He silently recited beautiful Latin verses or the commemorations of illustrious authors. An identical ideal of beauty acted like a beam of light that linked disparate ages in history together until they appeared like different sections of a single fresco. He made plans to return there with his fiancée, and visions of German poets wandering through Roman ruins flooded his mind. He decided he would read Goethe’s Italian Journey, then remembered Johann Joachim Winckelmann and the other great scholars of the Romantic rediscovery of the classical world.
Retracing his steps, he climbed up to the top of the amphitheatre, where one could enjoy an outstanding view: a kind of blue vortex that faded away in the distant mirage of the sea. The basin below filled with the tragic and alluring characters Martello’s lonely walk had caus
ed to leave the recesses of his memory, even though they spoke in unlikely and bombastic sentences that their enthusiastic translators had fed into their mouths, and which were widely available for sale in Italian markets. To his right, where the hills of the necropolis lay, a few ragged farmers, donkeys, goats and a few women in brightly coloured dresses – as well as the odd soldier – moved across the slopes. He recalled the little scenes of daily life that Renaissance painters would insert alongside the main subject, just like in Masaccio’s Crocifissione and Botticelli’s Pallas and the Centaur. One could put down roots in African lands through the classical culture that had blossomed in these places, this was the secret his walks had imparted to him. He had landed in Benghazi with the Expeditionary Force, and having followed Apollo’s tracks, who had arrived there chasing a nymph, the captain had finally arrived in Cyrene: Apollo’s presence turned history into a myth.
What did he care about Rome’s greatness, whose remains were being flaunted by fanatical journalists and rambling generals to justify the colonial invasion? What use could he possibly have for those nationalist strategies? Those incredibly mellow ruins were more delicate than anything Claude Lorrain had ever painted, and that landscape, bathed in an inimitable light, which re-evoked the dainty, intoxicating rediscovery of the classics, had nothing to do with the remote uproar of triumphs. It recalled the first Christian writers who’d hailed from those shores: Tertullian, Augustine of Hippo and Synesius …
When he returned to the camp at sunset, he ran into Fathi.
Fathi said he’d seen him sitting on the bleachers. Martello asked him where he’d been.
Prostitutes plied their trade inside the tombs, which had been carved out of the rock and were often decorated with little columns, recalling the façades of temples, and business had picked up considerably amidst the ruins of that ancient city since the Italian soldiers had set up camp there. Captain Martello remembered that when he’d been standing atop the heights of the amphitheatre, he’d spotted women in colourful dresses walking along the necropolis.
The Colonial Conquest: The Confines of the Shadow Volume I Page 17
