The Fourth Shore

by Alessandro Spina

  ‘O, hand of God, How heavily

  have you descended on my ancient head!

  In what condition do you return my son to me!

  My son, my only glory, I am overcome,

  And tremble to see you.’

  The small handful of copies of Manzoni’s Adelchi found in the city were passed around. The readers searched for the General’s confession, where the last scene was stretched out. Their efforts bore no fruits: every single verse appeared to contain the key to the whole text, but all the possible interpretations cancelled one another out. They were now waiting for the actor to settle the matter.

  Desiderius Occhipinti’s transformation into a vanquished king, who wept over the loss of his kingdom as well as his son, fired up their imaginations. The examples of Ernesto Rossi and Tommaso Salvinivi were brought to mind. Dragging the impassive General into a delirious, Verdian conflict was the only means to compromise him and thus understand him, or better yet, it was the only means by which to defeat and kill him. That secretive man was planning an attack on the entire colony’s happiness and its self-satisfied serenity: one couldn’t help but want to overcome his silence, as though it were an evil spell.

  Occhipinti’s reading was cool and collected. The desperation he voiced couldn’t have been less immediate, his phrases were nothing but mere academic posturing, like a neo-classical frieze.

  ‘And now you will die,

  not as a king, but deserted, in the hands of your enemy,

  without lamentations, except from your Father, and thrown

  before a man who exults to hear them.’

  Captain Landucci proffered his reply, in a completely unembarrassed manner. It appeared as though he had seen through the General’s intentions on the spot: ‘Old man, your sorrow deceives you. Pensive / And not exulting, I contemplate the fate of a valiant / Man and a king…’

  Made nervous by the long wait, the audience could barely conceal its bad mood. The way these officers were interpreting Manzoni’s play, which had been transposed to the years of the Cisalpine Republic, seemed of little consequence. Yet having been assembled to hear a confession, they had instead been shown an inscrutable mask. This chaste and reserved recitation and the way words were spoken without explaining their meaning ultimately emptied them of any communicative value – as though they’d been speaking another language, even though it was still sprinkled with familiar sounds. The effect was labyrinthine: like starting upon a path to nowhere.

  The authorities were perplexed. The General breathed in the air of conspiracy and often scanned his surroundings suspiciously. It was as though the actors were squandering the meaning of their lines. The Prefect, the supreme guarantor of law and order, could not comprehend any reality unless it was endlessly repeated to him. He abhorred anything that was new and mysterious as though they were fatal flaws.

  ‘So, this is theatre then?’ the Prefect asked Colonel Verri, who was sat to his left.

  ‘I tend to find dialogue difficult to follow. Or rather tiresome,’ the Colonel replied. The way the room itself had been decorated, with pictures and festoons, appeared to exclude the possibility of all dialogue. ‘A grown man hardly ever puts up with listening to the sliminess behind most confessions.’

  Nevertheless, their appeals fell on deaf ears, and the Prefect was used to the clear paradigms presented by order.

  The public could no longer follow the recitation. Just like at the opera, they caught a few stray words here and there: woeful…pity…never…hope…arm…place…the kind of words made popular by nineteenth century librettists.

  ‘O father, I see you again! Come close.

  Touch the hand of your son!’

  Instead of expressing love and resignation, Lieutenant Rossi’s words unleashed a sort of violence. The General had pronounced King Desiderius’s desperate words with a stiff upper lip. Rossi’s vehemence was commensurate to the role. Instead of ending with a confession, the reading of the text was about to conclude in forgery.

  ‘It is dreadful / To see you like this, ’vii General Occhipinti said, in a detached manner.

  Colonel Verri observed the Prefect out of the corner of his eye.

  ‘It’s all wrong,’ the other snapped, albeit taking care to protect himself from Mrs Spada’s careful ear, who was sat to his right. ‘Rossi just doesn’t get it,’ he added.

  Mrs Spada gave a nod in agreement.

  Professor Favagalli was extremely agitated. This performance contradicted all his instructions. Yet this was not the chief cause behind his feverish state: rather it was the gall with which those actors were turning everything to a lie – both Manzoni’s intentions and the words they were voicing. He wouldn’t have much minded if the pillars supporting the great hall they were in suddenly began to show cracks. Everything had fallen apart.

  Rossi voiced Adelchi’s lines, expressing anger and desperation.

  ‘Lament no more, / Father, no more, for God’s sake / Was this not my time to die?’ The young man died, cursing: ‘Rejoice at not being king, rejoice that every path…’

  ‘Do you hear that?’ the Prefect exclaimed, horrified, ‘this is a man who is cursing life!’

  ‘He’s certainly not going to Heaven,’ Mrs Spada calmly replied, passing sentence. ‘I see neither peace nor resignation in this man’s soul. It’s a gloomy death.’

  ‘If I lose you, / My son, who will console me for it?’ General Occhipinti asked. The young man was dying surrounded by three priests, who were as cold as statues, and who were furthermore confusing – or purporting to confuse – the youth’s death rattle with a prayer.

  ‘We no longer have any real aims except to fulfill our promise.’ General Occhipinti said.

  Captain Sorrentino raised his head in a jerk and called out: ‘Call it not patience, Gaunt; it is despair’viii

  Once the performance was over, the club’s assembled guests dispersed into its other rooms and gardens.

  ‘Captain, do you think,’ Desiderius Occhipinti asked Valentini, ‘that we truly have a purpose in today’s world, meaning do we have a real political-military role to play?’

  ‘I think there isn’t even much style left to it as it is,’ Colonel Verri grumbled, ‘The Napoleonic eagles felled by the soldiers of the Seventh Coalition were picked up by antiquarian dealers and lovingly restored. As the Empire becomes fashionable once again, the prices go up. Professor Favagalli, do you think we’ll one day see the Fascist eagle lovingly stuffed in some lady’s sitting room?’

  Favagalli smiled awkwardly – banter was not his forte.

  The vapid notes of a military march broke into the great hall. At the Berenice Cinema, five German girls had shattered the calm that reigned over the colonial city. The curtain-raiser’s finale, which had involved those girls sitting in a papier-mâché train, wearing sexy military uniforms, had been an overwhelming success. Now one could hear that little tune everywhere, whether played on a piano or whistled by a soldier as he passed by. ‘What a brothel rat,’ a lady hissed, as though addressing the insult to a rival.

  ‘An officer,’ General Occhipinti said, ‘is a courteous man. Our ethos no longer serves any political or practical function: it has become an absolute.’

  ‘I, Captain Luigi Sorrentino,’ the impetuous Captain proclaimed, ‘find myself here in Africa to brave the adventures that Fascism strews across my path in order to test me, in order to allow me to know myself and realise my potential.’

  It was as though he were suggesting a toast.

  Turning his brightly-lit face to scan his surroundings, Favagalli ran into Captain Valentini’s silence and was left dumbfounded by it. The man had a penchant for subtracting himself. ‘When he doesn’t know what to do,’ Lieutenant Colonel Fontana said in a good-humoured fashion, ‘he just takes himself out of the picture.’ Yet Favagalli detected different intentions in that man. All that chatter, even if voiced far away from the Fascist authorities, could nonetheless (if maliciously referring to someone higher up) cause some
one huge problems.

  ‘Fascism is a world of wonders,’ Verri pressed on, as if having divined Favagalli’s suspicions, wanted to provoke him: ‘in which the knight is presented with fabulous perils and encounters, which are artificially created and very large indeed. The trials which Fascism places in our path won’t manage to bring down a giant like Albion, nor will it make our diet more curious – it is a path of gradual self-affirmation, and by walking it, we will fulfill our destiny. Fascism is the face of the present, whereas we try to resist with virtues from our remote past: honour, loyalty, mutual respect and gentle manners. In fact,’ Verri concluded, whispering in Favagalli’s ears, ‘all you need to do to fight Fascism and overcome it is to be courteous.’

  ‘If our social class doesn’t wish to identify with Fascism, it will have to reject the entire narrative of our history and settle for the rigidity of the mask,’ Fontana held forth.

  Sorrentino broke into the restless circle.

  ‘One day we’ll recite Europe in the same way one recites lines from The Trickster of Sevilleix or A Month in the Country.x The declarations of war will drop down like a curtain and there won’t be anything left of our world. Our life here is regulated by the distant echo of mannerisms and traditions that went out of fashion decades ago in Europe.’

  Verri looked at him. The Captain’s fiery temperament amused him. ‘Theatre,’ he said, ‘is an ironic form of communication. It is the only kind of confession befitting a grown man.’

  ‘…Whom Fate has already torn from its book,’ Captain Sorrentino cheerfully asserted, stamping the seal of that evening shut.

  v French: ‘cart of the condemned,’ a cart used to transport condemned prisoners to the place of their execution.

  vi 19th century Italian actors.

  vii Michael J. Curley (tr.), Alessandro Manzoni, Two Plays (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2002), pp.216, 217.

  viii From Shakespeare’s Richard II, Act 1, Scene 2.

  ix A play by Tirso de Molina.

  x A play by Ivan Turgenev.

  THE FORT AT RÉGIMA

  Captain Valentini received the order to join the regiment stationed at the Fort of Régima, to the south of the city. ‘Everything’s missing in that fort,’ his predecessor had warned him, ‘not just danger or action, but there isn’t even a reason for keeping a garrison there. Orders never reach you. You must look on the High Command the way one beholds a higher power. It’s useless to ask for a sign or an explanation. The High Command won’t remember you until it needs you to go somewhere, or want you to come back, that is if it remembers you’re still out there.’

  The Captain was nevertheless glad to go. His departure for that fort essentially presented itself as an opportunity to subtract himself from everything: General Occhipinti and the military parades, the Officers’ Club, the speeches by the Secretary of the local Fascist party, the five German girls and their papier-mâché train at the Berenice Cinema and the evening walks alongside the main avenue…all would be swept away. Solitude, he reflected, is the epitome of subtracting oneself from life and for this very reason it is blessed.

  The fort was situated on a hill. The brief walk one had to take to reach it was pleasant. The path was slightly uneven. Not a single tree in sight for over thirty miles. The fort, one part of which lay in complete abandon, had a medieval feel to it – a feature the original builders had probably wanted (first the Turks then the colonial government) and had decided to enhance it with pointless battlements. Yet time had worked its magic on those imitation battlements, and the inclemency of the elements had endowed the fort with a hard-edged, aristocratic sheen. More than Western medieval structures, it recalled the castles the knights had built in Greece during the Fourth Crusade. The landscape was identical. The Captain’s armoured car tottered along a path strewn with stones. Sometimes it ventured into the open fields, where the ground was often more level than the path itself. Had I come on horseback, the journey might have been more comfortable. As with the celebrated Knight of La Mancha, he had many famous examples in mind: Anseau de Cayeux, Thierry de Tenremonde, Orry de Lisle, Guido di Conflans, Macario de Sainte Menehould, Bègue de Fransures, Conon de Béthume, Milon le Brèbant, Païen d’Orléans, Peter of Bracieux, Baldovino di Beauvoir, Hugues de Beaumetz, Gautier d’Escornai, Dreux de Beaurain…the Captain proved unable to stop thinking about the legacy of those knights. They had occupied Constantinople, made and unmade Emperors, and had divided the vast empire into feuds; they had scrambled hither and tither throughout the lengths of the Empire in the vain attempt of keeping alive a system, which, lacking any roots in that country, was ultimately fated to die.

  All that remained was their fortresses, like the gigantic carcasses of vanquished animals. Nothing had linked those knights to anything that had come before them, and nothing survived their slaughter. The Empire had simply swatted them away, like flies.

  As the Captain bounced around in his armoured car, it struck him that repeating the same sequence of events so many centuries later was both cruel and unbearable.

  A SOLITARY DUEL

  ‘Literature is reality’s dress uniform,’ Major Morelli’s wife said, slipping her foot into a purple velvet shoe.

  Reserved and aloof, as though on display in the shop windows, the ladies were selecting their footwear for the New Year’s Eve Ball in Treni’s, the cobbler. Mrs Occhipinti had a golden sandal in her hand.

  The cobbler, a ridiculous and repugnant-looking little beast, was sat at Mrs Borletti’s feet. He always struck a gracious pose, light as a pixie. These movements were his exaggerated way of recognizing how ridiculous he looked. There was something pathetic and heartrending in all that ostentatiousness. The ladies were nevertheless drawn to it, as they slipped their feet into the shoe held in his hands, cupped with sensual repugnance.

  Mrs Borletti laughed. ‘There’s something death-like and funereal about literature…’ she said, somewhat embarrassedly. ‘Truth be told,’ she added, lifting her index finger, ‘the spirit freezes life in time. My dear,’ she exclaimed, leaning her upper body forward, ‘aren’t you feeling well?’

  ‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ Mrs Occhipinti calmly replied, raising her hand. She hated compassion. She had spent two months in the hospital; she had been released against her doctors’ wishes so she could celebrate Christmas and New Year’s Eve with her husband, the General of the Army Corps, Desiderius Occhipinti.

  The hospital’s head physician had stammered when he’d told the General: ‘I refuse any and all responsibility…’ Occhipinti had shot him a cold stare. Then he had given his arm to his wife, and as though he could barely notice the pitiful effort it took her to walk, he had left alongside her. The General’s orderly, standing to attention out on the street while holding the car door open, was filled with terror at the sight of that woman as she walked along in tiny, mechanical jerks.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t need anything, darling? Maybe you’re tired?’ The General asked.

  Mrs Occhipinti thrust her leg forward, as though kicking away her friend’s pitiful voice, or wanting to prove her strength. The sandal flew off her foot and landed in a corner.

  Lieutenant Mazzei appeared in the shop window’s frame, looking as though he wanted to smash it and step inside.

  A couple of days later, during the Christmas dinner held at the Prefect’s house, the guests paid particular attention to her. Mrs Occhipinti remained impassive and her sentences were cold and curt.

  The Prefect’s wife had welcomed Mrs Occhipinti with the most unrestrained and intense pity imaginable – as though in a romantic novel, it was to be the highlight of the day. Yet she had been rudely refused. Mrs Occhipinti was a dark guest: aggressive and hard-edged, she had not come to put her agony on display, but rather her strength. The Prefect’s wife was convinced that Mrs Occhipinti’s illness was merely her just punishment for her sins. Thus, her strength – a blatant display of pride and presumptuousness – struck the Prefect’s wife as completely sacrilegious. Our house has bee
n profaned, she thought to herself, alarmed.

  General Occhipinti hadn’t kept track of his wife’s mistakes. He refused to connect her mistakes to her illness, or to think of her condition as a form of punishment, like the Prefect’s wife did. In the same manner, he also allowed her to suffer while he sat next to her, silent. Only his behaviour had been normal when he’d accompanied his wife out of the hospital, or taken her to the Prefect’s house for dinner, free of all bother and orotundity. It appeared as though he knew nothing of the devils looking to waylay his wife on her path.

  The Prefect, who perceived the General as enigmatic, had once asked him why he’d opted for a career in the military. ‘Because it’s the only way of life that is scientifically precise.’

  He abhorred confiding in people, as though doing so would violate a rule.

  The halls of the Officers’ Club were brightly lit and empty. They would remain open until four in the morning.

  The Cathedral was crowded with people. The Bishop had already made his entrance, having been preceded by his priests. Having descended from his palace and crossed the square, the Bishop had entered through the large gates. All in black, and lined up in serried ranks, the nuns sang choir.

  The officers were wearing their dress uniforms.

  ‘His Majesty doesn’t speak,’ Captain Sorrentino said. ‘We would just need a nod of his head to sweep Fascism away like dust.’ He took in the club’s hall, crossing it in great strides. He was irritated and restless. ‘Well, what’s stopping him?’

  ‘He would certainly prefer a more cautious kind of Fascism,’ Colonel Verri said, having a penchant for indulging the Captain’s temperament, ‘and an even falser and more hypocritical one too while we’re at it. In other words,’ he added with a smile, ‘one that is both more civic and cynical. But maybe he’s worried that any attempt to perfect it will ultimately weaken it, and make it incapable of withstanding an opponent’s blows.’