The Fourth Shore

by Alessandro Spina

  Ursula allowed herself to fall into an armchair. War! Her calculations had panned out, she had lived her life all too lucidly aware of what was lying in store for them, and she had drawn the most extreme conclusions. Not being a religious soul, she had prepared herself for the deluge in her own manner: in other words, she’d accumulated such an excessive number of crazy incidents that thanks to all the scandals her husband had been threatened with repatriation. When it was announced that war would likely be declared in the coming hours, she had felt her knees buckle, as if she had hitherto borne a weight which had drained all her strength. The others were in the grips of regrets, fears, hopes and delusions: whereas she had squeezed all she could from peace-time, and she had enjoyed her life on the brink of scandal, and now felt spent. As though it had suddenly dawned on her that might prove calmer than peace-time, and its obsession with ‘living it to the full,’ because it was not fated to last.

  I’ll go to bed with him tonight, the surly Anna thought to herself, and if the war can wait until dawn to break, then I’ll be Pietro’s lover tonight.

  The messenger stood on the door’s threshold talking to various people. Having hurriedly accomplished his fatal task, he had resumed his usual role: that of a young officer, just like all the others. They had dispatched him to the colony in order to take part in the war and he had arrived there as though it was already the front. He was the son of anti-Fascists, and fully aware that he was being kept under observation, he behaved prudently. While he conversed with the other officers, or rather while he pretended to follow what they were saying, he mulled over this thought with nervous intensity: That’s it! This is the moment to obey our orders, now there’s nothing left to do but to heed our Duce. We must even show some enthusiasm, so that his ambition may grow, so that he’ll take even greater risks over time, so that he refuses any and all compromises, so not a single door will be left open. He has poisoned peace-time to the point that we’ve decided to throw ourselves headfirst into this war: because even if it proves atrocious, it’ll be our way out.

  All of a sudden, the Major drew near to the group the messenger was socializing with, carrying a glass in his hand. A toast? A war song? A pathetic farewell to peace-time? A joke? Pietro looked at the Major with painful curiosity, since he always expected that man to do something to him, he expected him to somehow express his state of mind – just like his earlier kick had revealed his desperation.

  The Major never spared a thought for what he was about to do. Thus, he had decided to kick Pietro at the same time that he actually kicked him. His state of mind for the time being was that he was blindly searching for a way to express what he felt on the inside. He wasn’t intoxicated, but he had drunk quite a lot. Standing right there in the middle of the room, he raised his glass. He still didn’t know what he would do at that point. So he started to sing; it was one of Schubert’s beautiful Liederxiii: ‘Im Abendrot’xiv. He sang as though he were proclaiming, mouthing those words that nobody understood, since no one there spoke German except Ursula, and the Major had chosen that mysterious way to bid goodbye to his youth, to his wife, who knew what he was saying. That scene was truly pathetic as the warrior, who was meant to be on his way, instead hesitated and was now stretching out his goodbye to unrealistic proportions – one can see such scenes in a number of operas. Using the reference her husband had provided her with, in the shape of a Lied he often sang in his youth, Ursula could thus relive the past twenty years of her life, when she had so feverishly experienced all that remained of her youth, in the manner that other people interpreted youth – and which in her, thanks to that instinct for exaggeration owed to her German roots, or maybe inspired by her husband’s example, she took a path which lay in between tragedy and farce (everyone apparently agreed that her adventures fell into either of those categories). Planting one of her feet in her past – in the Lied her husband was singing – while keeping the other firmly fixed in the present, in the concrete announcement of the coming war, Ursula looked at her guests from atop those twenty years of peace as though one were watching a river’s leisurely flow from atop a bridge. The river mirrored her reflection, and more than disgust, or horror, she felt happy to finally be outside of it. Seeing as she also knew a bit of Latin, a famous passage by Lucretius, it was the first that she’d used Latin to express herself, for the first time Latin became the ultimate expression of her soul: Suave mari magno, with all the verses that followxv. And while she talked to herself, simultaneously listening to that Lied which her husband had chosen from thirty years of memories, she had rediscovered her former virginal, prudish attitude. She looked like a girl who was going to be serenaded by her first love, the kind of girl that first love would express his feelings to, that song cleared the air, it restored something both indefinable and yet necessary. Everyone felt it, through what one of them – the biggest bully, and the one with the most overabundance of character – was expressing: the Major was the group’s poet, he had earlier given voice to their desperation with that kick and was now expressing the overflow of emotions affecting all present with that mysterious song. Once he had finished singing, the Major stiffened up once again and approached his wife, whom he kissed, then approached his daughter, whom he also kissed, then, having bowed to kiss each lady’s hand, he turned to his men and said: ‘Let’s go.’ He departed in sure-footed manner, as though heading off to a parade rather than to war. One by one, his officers followed him, planting kisses on the ladies’ hands, smiling to the girls – all the while losing none of the rigidity and form which the Major had inspired in his own final goodbye. Despite there being a great many of them in that room, the scene was nevertheless very poignant, and emotions were running high when the last officer left, just as they had been when the Major had led the way with his goodbye. The men were going to headquarters to receive their orders, while the women headed home to prepare everything before their arrival. After the great peace-time feast, the soldiers only had a few hours at their disposal, and they all had to leave on time, while the women stayed behind: ‘It’s like coming back from a really long party at the club.’ Mrs Boninsea said with a sob in her throat.

  Pietro had gone upstairs to his bedroom. He was readying himself to leave.

  Ursula and the Major never saw one another again. Sure enough, the war had started a few days later, and the Major experienced an adventure – whom men with little imagination thought was simply unbelievable, while those who appreciated the bizarreness of life deemed it completely unique; others, who read mysterious meanings into facts thought it tragic, while those who understood that facts meant nothing at all saw the comedy in it. The matter had been officially hushed up, given that the war was only a few days old and the requisite regulations for hypocrisy hadn’t yet been drawn up. The Major had been wounded while inspecting the southern front lines in his jeep. Such was the confusion along the infinitely long sandy front that the Major had quickly found himself behind enemy lines, inspecting troops he believed were his own. That he’d gotten out of there alive was in itself a miracle, given that two of the men who had been with him were killed and then immediately used as human shields by both the Major and his driver: the only one who could be said to have truly survived the incident, given that the Major (following two months in the hospital, and despite the intensive care devoted to him due to his having been the highest-ranking officer to be wounded on the front lines) died.

  ‘If he’d known that the area he was traveling in had fallen into enemy hands even though it was still technically supposed to be behind our lines, he would have gone there anyway, just to discredit the entire High Command.’ This was a comment made by the Major’s superior officer, the general, whom knew the Major well. It appeared that the Major insisted on leaving surprise and scandal in his wake even in death. He had even been ready to sacrifice his life in order to further discredit himself: even though he was a romantic, or rather, precisely because he was such an incurable romantic, he therefore behaved cynically, unmask
ing mediocrity and fraud wherever he found it.

  The Major’s death had left an even greater impression on Pietro than the war’s outbreak. He had always respected him greatly. He looked to him as a real master in that authoritarian world they lived in. He struck his fancy, and he felt, without really knowing why, that the Major belonged to a different breed: those who know how to act, taking a feeling, desire, or caprice and then imposing it on others, regardless of what those others thought. Thus, given that Pietro found it easier and more congenial to obey and follow, without the Major he would have felt the void around him. Instead, when the Major moved, he had made Pietro move in his own turn, since the mechanism that set the Major’s will in motion apparently regulated Pietro’s will too; in fact, Pietro needed the Major in order to function. They had long since joined into a single, symbiotic being.

  The war had broken out to save him from that tea party, during which time he’d felt as though he’d been drowning. It had broken out so he could finally step down off that pedestal where Ursula’s friends had placed him. Then the Major had died, freeing him from the hindrance of his will. Had he longed for the war’s outbreak? For the Major’s death?

  Pietro lingered while looking at the Major as he lay stretched out on the field hospital bed. He sat next to the Major in the same way he’d once sat next to the window. He stared out into the Major’s night, like he had once observed the starry sky. Amidst the dark depths of the night, Pietro had once dreamed many dreams, the very same ones that Cossa had so torturously spied on during that last night of peace-time. Maybe they weren’t even dreams, but rather states of mind, a kind of peace made possible by the dark. And ever since Cossa, no longer satisfied with observing him, had started strolling with him, Pietro had surprised himself thinking that he now wanted to die in the same way he once used to desire nightfall. Ever since that memorable night when they’d met, when he’d still been warm with sleep and Cossa had been troubled by his obstinate observation of the boy, Pietro had nursed the desire to definitively cross the threshold of the night, instead of being stuck on the exhausting see-saw that life forced him to ride. And if he had first ventured into the night on his own, he now thought he would share that adventure with Cossa forever. He peeked at the dead Major, buried in his desperation. He, on the other hand, no longer felt desperate, as if the only desperation were the one brought about by living, and that he would die in the same way others decide to save themselves.

  Death caught Cossa on the fly, as his aircraft burst in flames as festively as a firework. The officer shocked everyone with his courage. It was said that he had followed orders irrespective of danger, and according to Marchi, he had followed those orders obtusely. I don’t avoid danger when following orders, rather, I follow orders to find danger. Death appeared before him now – not as his salvation from desperation and solitude, but as a means to re-conciliate all the contradictions in which his soul had found itself once he’d moved beyond desperation and solitude.

  Cossa managed to pilot his craft a few moments longer before the plane wound up with its nose stuck in the sand between two enemy lines. ‘A mock landing,’ an officer soberly commented while he observed the scene.

  Cossa managed to emerge out of his cockpit. Yet after a few feet, his body laid on the ground:

  ‘It-is-over!’ Cossa mouthed in a different voice to the theatrical tone he used to employ when being ironic, the glove his consciousness needed to wear in order to handle a feeling or an emotion.

  His life amounted to a long, grey road along which he’d travelled in absolute solitude, and his surpassing of solitude coincided with that great, blue lake, that midnight blue in which he was drowning.

  From the grey of solitude and suicide to the blue of love and death! In order to accentuate the theatricality of that comment, he wanted to accompany the sentence with a gesture. He tried to raise his arm. Yet it appeared to have sprung roots, and refused to budge. It was the kind of feeling that wasn’t even unpleasant, since the connection between his willpower and hand had almost been severed, and his hand appeared to be reaching out to something else, something far away and still uncertain, but already very intense in its own way. Indeed, while all his life he had considered reality too clear and too miserable, everything now seemed simultaneously intense and uncertain.

  He had written to Ursula that the Major hadn’t donned his uniform when about to die. He had given the world one last great kick with his last letter. Cossa felt that he was also cut from the same cloth, and even though he was alone in the middle of the desert, he behaved as though he’d been sitting in the Major’s living room, when the Colonel’s wife had gazed at him lovingly.

  What is that boy doing now? Is he sleeping or did he see a plane fall out of the sky? Did he know it was mine? And what are they so worked up about, shooting in this way? What are they firing at, deep in the night?

  His vision misted over. Is this the end? he asked himself, employing his consciousness’s final effort. Pondering that question, he breathed his last.

  The fusillade was intense. The soldiers on either side of the lines didn’t move: and yet they kept firing as though they wanted to fill the night with their sounds. Yet the night was a sack full of holes, and it remained peaceful and serene.

  xii Reference to the River Styx, which the Greeks believed formed the boundary between world of the living and that of the dead.

  xiii German: ‘songs’.

  xiv German: ‘at sunset’.

  xv Latin: ‘Pleasant it is, when over a great sea,’ from Book II of De Rerum Natura by Lucretius.

  New Officers’ Tales

  A DARK THING

  ‘What we need here is a pleat,’ Antonio’s mother said.

  Having stood up, she fixed a pin to the side of the pseudo-Polish woman’s flower-patterned dress. She took a step back, took a better look, then, opening her hands in a gesture of valediction, she said: ‘Voilà qui est fait!’

  ‘You’re an artist, my dear lady,’ the dressmaker said, vexed. Just as Antonio’s mother had so happily intuited, all one needed was a pleat. ‘I can’t even see straight anymore!’

  She laid her fingers upon her eyes: the gestures were merely rhetorical, as though she were illustrating her words.

  ‘The hems appear to have been stitched hastily, watch out for the smaller one, it’s coming undone.’

  The pseudo-Polish woman looked beyond the mirror at Antonio, who, having sunk into an armchair, and having discarded his school-bag on the floor, looked like he was growing increasingly bored.

  ‘Why don’t you come tell her yourself? The girl tells me you’re one of our nicest customers – could you please also tell her that stitching hems requires enthusiasm?’

  ***

  ‘Only amateurs have any flair these days,’ the dressmaker said, having reappeared with Mrs Boncompagni. ‘Just like adulterers,’ she hissed. She kept fiddling with the thimble on her finger.

  ‘Darling, you never did tell me,’ Antonio’s mother said to her friend, ‘whether you’re happy.’ She picked up a scrap of cloth: ‘Drama, so much drama. You know,’ she said, turning to the dressmaker, ‘Elena hates surprises. She’s secretive!’

  Antonio suddenly stood, took the pseudo-Polish woman by the hand and dragged her outside.

  ‘Elena and Antonio… have run away! Yes, it’s a fantastic cloth, these large bloomed flowers… I don’t like the outline Elena picked for the dress: it tries to imprison this cloth and deprive it of all its fragrance. Yet she didn’t manage to, since these flowers simply cannot be repressed. ‘Look,’ she said, unrolling the cloth, her eyes were clear and held a marvellous light, ‘I would have done it like that. You need to let necklines hang. But what good does it do?’

  The dressmaker displayed great surprise.

  ‘Of course,’ Mrs Boncompagni said, letting the cloth sample fall on the chair, ‘Elena would never wear this.’

  Having stepped out onto the boulevard, she looked for her friend and Antonio. She f
ound them at the corner of the Officers’ Club, and Antonio was sat on the second step, which was a little larger. He held up a closed fist at the pseudo-Polish woman.

  ‘There’s nothing prettier than a North African autumn,’ she said, delighted, ‘in this light, the streets become as intimate as private gardens.’ She seemed to know everybody, and she greeted them all with a smile or a nod of her head, as though she was at a gala.