‘Why doesn’t the army take the initiative? If the King is unable to lead us, he will at least follow us.’
‘Alas, my dear friend, don’t fill your head with too many delusions. Nobody’s going to make a move. We have compromised ourselves too much already. The declaration of war is like a messenger who can no longer be stopped. We’ll fight that war, for better or worse! Then, one after the other, the king and his subjects, the army and the fascist dissidents will start to make their move. Or maybe it will happen the other way around, meaning everyone will show up late! By that time, we’ll probably be able to prove that we had never wanted the war in the first place.’
‘But why are we just accepting all of this? Why?’ The Captain’s irritation was sharply in relief, and the Colonel observed him indulgently. He was a man at his peak who was hesitant to squander his energies in a time of mediocrity. This contradiction held the key to his destiny.
Captain Sorrentino stopped in the middle of the hall. ‘Our only hope then is for Mussolini to come back to his senses and stop before he falls over the precipice and just sends us home.’
The Colonel smiled. ‘Opinions!’ he said cheerfully. ‘Because it might turn out to be the worst solution, prolonging slavery for an indeterminate amount of time. Our lives grow ever more inward and empty. If he pulls back from this abyss, the Duce might assume greater powers for himself. We’ll owe him for that too, for defending us from Fascism’s fatal outcome.’
‘So we don’t have a choice!’ the Captain exclaimed in an excessively cheerful manner.
‘You’re wrong there,’ the Colonel retorted, ‘if we manage to save our skins, then we’ll have saved everything. There are always plausible reasons for coming to terms with one’s past. If in the end we don’t come to war, we’ll keep living as we are now forever: the king, his subjects, the army and the fascist dissidents. There’s an empty void inside me and I don’t know how I’ll ever fill it. I don’t expect anything out of war. But if I have to survive it, I don’t want the price to be an apology! If they are willing to forgive my sins, then I won’t bother them with my explanations and justifications. Maybe I just don’t love life enough – trials and explanations strike me as utterly ridiculous.’
‘This Christmas mass has been going on for ages,’ Captain Sorrentino said, returning to his seat. He didn’t feel like singing hymns anymore.
‘The Christmas mass and the military review to mark the anniversary of the Charter, the ball in the Governor’s palace and the great maneuvers: without these spectacles, life here would become unbearable. Mussolini keeps us entertained as though we were courtesans.’
‘Go on, I said, I don’t need anything.’
The voice hailed from beyond the tomb. Colonel Verri and Captain Sorrentino jumped to their feet. They were barely able to nod their heads to the General of the Army Corps Desiderius Occhipinti, who was on his way out. His wife lay seated in a corner of the sitting room. The dinner at the Prefect’s house had been a challenging trial. The tension caused by the people around her was consuming her.
Colonel Verri crossed the sitting room. He bowed. Captain Sorrentino stood next to him, lingering impassively like a guard. The General’s wife observed them without moving. She then extended her arm so that the Colonel could hold it devotedly in his to plant a kiss on it.
The General’s wife hadn’t left the hospital in order to be pitied, as some of the Prefect’s wife’s guests suspected, but merely to be able to watch and listen, so that life could start flowing freely before her eyes once again, instead of going around in circles at the hospital.
The Colonel took a seat next to the General’s wife. Here they were: Counsel and Strength, the two last loyal men. The General’s wife eyed one, then the other, as though probing them.
The sitting room’s emptiness was as heavy as sleep. The General’s wife felt like giving in to it. The compassionate attention the Prefect’s guests paid her had nevertheless irritated her and thus reawakened her strength. The chatter at the Officers’ Club was a spider-web, and it wasn’t strong enough to keep her for long.
She suddenly dropped her neck, like a swaying drunk. The Colonel smiled kindly at her, and interpreting that nod as a sign, he turned to his friend and said:
‘To tell the truth, my dear Captain, we are unable to overcome the petty religious root of our problem. From a social point of view, it’s a mistake. Few among us are in fact citizens. The army is a mystical body. Hierarchy aside, the exceptional importance we give to form and following the rules imply faith as well as a common faith, which we nonetheless lack.’
The General’s wife’s eyes grew wide. She had grasped the last sentence, like an image caught immediately after waking up, and she had mulled on it without managing to penetrate its meaning. She felt such an intense and unbearable solitude that a cry almost escaped her lips. She pressed a handkerchief against her mouth. Silence! Silence!
The Captain looked at her admiringly.
‘Among the most passionate of us, opposites become interchangeable,’ the Colonel said, ‘dread and restlessness for war, execration and indifference towards fascism, the anxiety for a renaissance and the certainty of not being up to its task. Even if good manages to triumph, meaning that the righteous win (or at least the ones closest to righteousness), can such an outcome change destiny and allow me to reconcile myself to life? I am dutiful when it comes to my work, just like others are. But it’s nothing but pride – or just an easy solution. In this confused war, many of us will serve with great dignity, and perhaps even with heroism when the occasion calls for it. But what will all this praiseworthy behaviour really mean? Selfishness is foreign to a religious soul. I shall calmly trust what my superior officers tell me. What others will go looking for when we begin to move towards the enemy, I don’t know. But look they will.’
The sitting room was deserted. The stuccoes on the ceiling and walls had a sepulchral magnificence to them. All in all, the room’s decoration was of a funereal character, and exaggeratedly consoling.
‘What will humanity’s fate be, then?’ The Captain asked. He nevertheless lacked the earlier spring in his step. The appearance of the General’s wife had left him distracted. Was all that agony – the General’s wife clung to her willpower as though it were a sword – noble or sacrilegious? What sense was there to all that effort?
‘War is a game to change the way the world is ordered,’ the Colonel insisted, ‘but neither camp is capable of reconquering my faith in life. The impulse to commit suicide springs from an inability to hold a dialogue with the events of the world around us. Self-awareness is a prison into which we threw ourselves while waiting (or looking) for a purpose. This is as far as our education allows us to go.’
‘What fruitless effort!’ Captain Sorrentino angrily exclaimed, coming to a stop smack in the middle of the room. The General’s wife was motionless. The Captain looked at that silvery face: he watched it float against the wall like the moon in a limpid sky. ‘We should instead seek to reach a positive solution, one azure enough to spread around the entire world.’
The General’s wife smiled with joy. That word – azure – had stirred her.
The Captain crossed the room with only a few steps. ‘I’m going to tell you a story,’ he announced.
‘This,’ he said, laying the palm of his hand on the table in front of him, ‘is the Fortress.’
He showed her. ‘It’s an orderly and isolated complex,’ he explained.
The General’s wife listened attentively. His words seemed clear enough to her. That clarity already heralded the aforementioned azure. The Captain didn’t bandy on about what that Order might be, it wasn’t necessary. The story would have the brevity of dreams, and share their burning immediacy.
‘Opposing the Fortress, is our Hero.’ The Captain took two paces to his right, and looking inexplicably youthful, he bowed before his public. Then, standing erect, he headed towards the little table.
‘A conflict is born when a
hero can no longer endure his isolation, and the repugnance he feels for the intangibility of Order. Owing to its isolation and immobility, the Fortress stands outside of time and experience.’
The Captain walked around the table three times while keeping his eyes fixed on it. With each turn, he bent his knees a little further. Then suddenly, he stood up to his full height and turned on his heels.
‘The young man escapes!’ he took a couple of steps away, approaching his spectators and thus subtracting himself from their gaze. The table had been left behind in the middle of the room.
‘The people of the Fortress refuse to take note of this flight and feign ignorance, but time and experience seep through and infiltrate the gaps left by the Hero’s escape.’
‘That departure was a wound,’ the Colonel burst out.
The General’s wife was following the story very attentively.
‘But the young man,’ the Captain resumed, stepping back on the scene as though having just returned from a trip around the world and had wound up at the starting point again, ‘comes back and stays. The opening created by his departure is plugged up by his return. The Fortress welcomes the young man as though it had just emerged from an illness, or freed itself from the germs of an infection, and recovers its initial harmony. Life in the Fortress carries on, in a repetitive circular motion, including: the addition of another young man.’
The image of the circle pleased the General’s wife. The present was only the darkest hour of the night. But azure was a path. She smiled cheerfully once again. Growing calmer, she nodded: the Captain was free to continue.
Sorrentino launched into it again, yet this time in a threatening tone, and laying his palm on the table again, he said: ‘The Fortress has been besieged.’ At which point he accosted the spectators to explain. ‘This time it has nothing to do with germs of an infection, or an illness of the organism, or rather one of its cells (the Hero): it’s an external force.’
With soldier-like, booming steps, the Captain advanced towards the Fortress. Once he’d arrived in front of the table, he suddenly turned around. His features were tense. ‘The young man defends the Fortress with incredible doggedness.’
The tension in his features left no doubt as to the young man’s determination.
Then, loosening his arms, which had previously lain still, he added: ‘All one needs to notice in this edifying turn is the young man’s exaggerated effort, which is vaguely ambiguous, and his careful violence when faced with the enemy; it is so different from the cold, calculating and impersonal determination of the others.’
The Captain repeated the same movement many times over: he would spin around halfway and then stop and show only his face. Another half turn and another stop. Both spins were so similar that in the end, partly owing to the speed of his movements, they came to resemble one another.
‘The external force, the only external force, appears to coincide with death: and as it happens the young man is killed. His heroic behaviour shares the same enthusiasm as the moment of escape. When that journey has failed, especially as an experience meant to renew the Order of things, death appears as the only force, or reality – and place – that is foreign to the Fortress. From the enthusiasm of the journey, and optimism, to the pessimistic heroism of the final battle, polluted by romantic leaps and moody suicides.’
‘Very good,’ the Colonel said, smiling indulgently, ‘that’s exactly what I meant to say: you never know what the Hero is looking for when he moves towards the enemy.’
The General’s wife looked at the Captain with her icy eyes, she could barely even move them anymore, like a puppet whose strings have all snapped. She nevertheless kept her head straight and her eyelids open.
Once they had left the Cathedral, the officers poured into the club. The ballroom was still empty, and people milled around in the large entrance hall.
The young lieutenant Mazzei crossed the ballroom. For a moment more, he lingered like a lost messenger in a crowd. Behaving as one who reaches the end of a road, he went to stand before the General’s wife and there came to a stop.
After a dramatic silence, he directed his eyes towards hers, which looked away.
The eye staring straight ahead allowed her to see what she was about to lose forever – youth, beauty and life – the other eye remained enigmatic. She had used up all her strength on the eye looking straight ahead without bringing the other eye in line with it. She made a supreme effort to keep them firmly fixed in the direction of Lieutenant Mazzei’s eyes – maybe this was the solution to all enigmas.
The public flowed towards the ballroom, where a banquet had been laid out.
Now that he had been left alone in the oblong hall adjacent to the main ballroom, Captain Sorrentino crossed it in a pacey manner. Surly and incredibly highly-strung, he had finally found an outlet in the parody of that tragedy.
‘I am convinced that Fascism is unequal to tragedy! And it is frightening, frightening! Not only is nobody making a move here, but even the Great Powers aren’t moving.’
‘We do not have a destiny,’ he added, disdainfully.
‘What a great bargain, eh?’ the Colonel muttered.
‘Without Nazism, Fascism wouldn’t be able to bring us closer to tragedy. It’s nothing but a minor, mediocre scandal. Without the Nazis, we’ll be forced to side with the powers of democracy against the Soviets. And if the Nazis are defeated, the Fascist remnants will be incorporated by the democratic powers in their struggle against communism. Nazism is the barrier holding back the tide of that disgrace. We the oppressed will never rebel against the regime, neither will the latter ever exceed the colonial confines of its misdeeds and boldness, nor will our friends make war upon us, since it would be seen as unforgivably impatient to waste any soldiers’ lives in our national comedy, which is so provincial – Hitler will declare war and it will be fought against him. That is a scandal, but Fascism isn’t. At least it isn’t considered a scandal by our collective conscience, which is so accommodating, nor is it deemed so by those well-disposed towards the compromise made by the democratic powers. Hitler has overstepped, and the fire has been lit. Our neighbour’s house is about to go up in flames, and we’ll wind up burned alongside him. Deceived by the nature of that fire, we drew close to it in order to conveniently warm ourselves up, but by the time we’ll want to leave it’ll be too late. In other words, we’ll suffer the same fate as that of a stupid servant who is in thrall to a diabolical master. Only when our entire house has gone up in flames will we be able to rediscover ourselves. Even the king, who binds us all together via that solemn oath of loyalty, will manage to do this.’
General Occhipinti appeared on the scene. ‘Darling, do you want to come into the next room? A service is being held by the Christmas tree.’
He offered her his arm. The General’s wife concentrated all her energies on that spot. Her hands stirred on the armrests, and blood slowly flowed through her whole body again. She looked like a snake exerting itself. Yet she stood up, and took her husband’s arm. She crossed the sitting room and entered the ballroom.
A few chairs had been positioned right in front of the orchestra. In the middle lay a gigantic Christmas tree. Slivers of silver foil hung from its branches. The General’s wife sat down. She was alert and felt that she was being watched, just like at the Prefect’s house. The presence of people gave her strength – and gnawed at her. She composed her features into a smile.
In order to make the Christmas tree stand out even further, the ballroom’s lighting had been arranged in an unusual manner. Almost all of the available light shone on the tree and the few guests of honour. The other guests were nothing more than an iridescent dust cloud of jewels and decorations. The stuccoes appeared to be hanging like festoons off the azure strip running alongside all the walls. The orchestra, which was only composed of string instruments, played a slow, melancholic melody, yet did so discreetly in order not to disturb the mysterious, nocturnal harmony. There was a strong visual
character to the service, while the music was instead merely secondary, complementary. Yet the General’s wife nevertheless listened to it attentively.
A male voice rang out clear, filling the room and dominating the sweet sounds of the string instruments. The General’s wife felt she was hanging by that thread. There was no doubt that this service aimed to bring her in the direction of that divergent eye, to the blue spot that the latter was pointing to. Her composed smile dissolved into cheerfulness. ‘Aren’t you feeling well, darling?’ The General asked, bending down towards her.
‘.......................sparget sonum
.............................................
.........................ante thronum
...............................et natura’xi
The General’s wife was hanging by the thread of that hymn.
To the right, the young officers were lined up like priests. The General’s wife’s gaze examined them one after the other. It seemed to her as though she was moving, carried along on a stretcher towards the destination which her sight had denied her, but which her ears had already found. The General, who was now sat beside her, waited for an answer. The General’s wife replied with a nod. She feared being distracted, and the service required all her powers of concentration. She kept her arms along the chair’s armrests, and followed the slow, musical rhythm of the priests’ footsteps. She looked to the left, at the officers and the ladies. The dress uniforms and all that impeccable grooming charged the scene with tension. The General’s wife straightened her bust. She dominated the scene with her head.
The General’s wife was hanging by the thread of the singer’s voice. She barely caught a few words. Maybe she distorted them or misinterpreted them, since she alone heard other words being sung. All of a sudden, making a convulsive gesture, she recognised that hymn, which they were trying to pass off as a sweet, innocent Christmas song.
‘Judex ergo cum sedebit
The Fourth Shore Page 8