The Podestà’s wife barely drank a few sips of her tea and contented herself with placing a single biscuit on her saucer, without bringing it to her lips.
Knowing that the pseudo-Polish woman was still in the sitting room, the Lieutenant Colonel went to join her. ‘My dear princess!’ he murmured, planting a kiss on her hand. He cast a glance over what remained of the earlier buffet: a few crumbs of cake and meringues, looking like the eviscerated remains of sacrificial animals soiling the high altar.
‘Quite a bit of commotion today. What’s new?’
Margherita had already told him everything.
He looked at his wife. The impression she’d left the Podestà’s wife, and worse still, the profanation of the ceremony in which her house was being celebrated had left her looking aged.
The Lieutenant Colonel approached the buffet. He was nibbling a few things, picking them up from plate to plate, even picking at the crumbs on the tablecloth. He kicked the crumbs on the floor under the table with his foot.
‘You know what I think?’ he asked, turning to his wife, ‘Antonio did this for Elena’s sake: a memorable gesture in honour of his beloved. You didn’t understand him at all. Antonio was right to feel aggrieved, you mistook him for a simple little thief! What an inadequate audience… Deep down, I find all this highly gallant, and most ingenious!’
Having left the table, the Lieutenant Colonel went to sit between the two friends. ‘What exquisite cakes! Antonio is being incredibly impertinent by screaming that they’re disgusting, you did well to give him a good hiding. Whose is this cup of tea?’ The Podestà’s wife had used it. The Lieutenant Colonel stirred its contents. ‘Cold tea is very refreshing.’
He was in the mood to talk.
‘You didn’t love Tommaso until he had played his last card, and you love Antonio who still has all of his. Quite a careless, foolish act. Antonio is what Plato – or whoever – once called a dark thing.xx My dear princess, you’ve taken on quite the risk.’
Tommaso Marinoni was a reserved sort of officer, around forty years old, still a bachelor, who had once carried on a long conversation with Elena one evening at the Officers’ Club, attracting the guests’ curiosity. He had been killed a few days later, after an accident on the mountains, when his vehicle ‘flipped over, executing him,’ as Boncompagni had put it, incapable of talking about a tragedy without enforcing an ironic distance as though it was something he’d read or thought. ‘Tommaso was able to bring Elena from the distant centuries of her ancestors’ times and back to the present: but lo and behold those very same ancestors steal that distinguished officer away from her to keep him imprisoned in the cold mansions where they dwell…’ he had then added.
‘At times I feel as though I am saving the tragic Tommaso and the restless Antonio, as far as our friend is concerned, we are interchangeable apparitions. All this is arrogant and offensive – what do you think, darling?’ he asked, turning to his wife who was sat on his right. He felt young and alive, pleased by the fact he didn’t have any powerful ancestors lurking in his past, his nature fled from the drama: ‘only he who lives in here and now manages to steer clear of them, ’ he said, facetiously. He distrusted Fascism’s tendency to invoke the past in the anxiety to bring it back to life. As in Tommaso’s case, he feared that the Roman Empire would bury fascism in its ruins, contrary to the former’s idea of resurrecting that old world.
‘I don’t understand, should I punish Antonio or not?’ the Lieutenant Colonel asked, impressed by the ladies’ silence.
III
On the walls of the city, posters had been put up announcing the forthcoming season of opera at the Berenice Cinema, an exceptional event in the colony, and one on which the administration counted to augment the golden aura of their prestige. It was a symbolic gesture, a kind of consecration for that distant land: what could be further removed from the boundless, deserted Africa, devoid of social artifices, than an opera? The playbill included Andrea Chénier, Rigoletto, Madama Butterfly, Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci. The piece which had been picked to open the season was Lucia di Lamermoor, starring Mercedes Capsir,xxi a soprano whose glory was fading, and whose portrait, where she appeared smiling and all powdered up, could be seen in all the shop displays along the Corso.
A week prior to the season’s inauguration, at a conference held in the great hall of the Municipality building, a teacher from the Giosuè Carduccixxii secondary school had employed seductive slides projected on an immense canvas to illustrate the majestic ruins of the Greek and Roman amphitheatres in the colony.
Quicumque mundo terminus obstitit
Hunc tangat armis, visere gestiens,
Qua parte debacchantur ignes,
Qua nebulae pluviique rores.xxiii
The over-attentive audience in the auditorium broke into frenetic applause, those Latin verses which nobody understood were a kind of patriotic mass, where they bore witness to the past rather than the great beyond, given that this past was the source of the legitimacy of the new colonization of the African mainland. The hall was full to bursting, and the heat was stultifying.
‘One of the colony’s health-stimulating effects,’ the Lieutenant Colonel jovially commented while he and his wife returned home in a rented carriage, which was as black as a gondola, two flames throbbed in the headlights atop the driver’s seat, ‘is to make one proud of its past civilization, even someone like me, whose gaps of knowledge extend to entire centuries. Here in the colony, we are all rewarded by our illustrious heritage: this is why the pseudo-Polish woman didn’t make much of an impression on me. She numbers a King among her descendants, while I – going by what the archaeologist said – can count Pindar, Plato, Callimachus and Emperor Hadrian among mine, all of whom also took part in public assemblies of colonists.’
He coughed. ‘Nobody had realised that our colonization is a sublime theatrical event. The Mal d’Afrique is a period, darling,’ the elegant officer added, taking his wife’s hands in his, ‘just like the baroque.’
Stimulated by emulation, the women of the city were in crisis. Mrs Boncompagni had managed to send for one of her mother’s evening dresses in Italy, given that her mother had once been an incredibly elegant woman in her time. It was made of black silk, with sparkling sequin paillettes. It clung to her sides a little too tightly. The dressmaker didn’t seem to be bothered at all over having to modify an old dress rather than creating a new one. Having been pulled out of a chest, the dress was worn, but thanks to the confluence of clout it exuded, it ennobled her profession. ‘I feel as though I’m preparing you for the stage!’ she said, enraptured.
During the final fitting, which had unusually taken place in Mrs Boncompagni’s sitting room rather than the shop on the Corso, Antonio lingered in mute, agitated contemplation: his mother was thus becoming a character. It was as if an alien, magic hand had lain on her. Thanks to that dress, she had transcended everydayness, it was a kind of elevation – perhaps a metamorphosis. The dressmaker was kneeling before her, mumbling about something or other, looking like a devout worshipper before a sacred image.
Maybe Antonio identifies with me as the suicidal Countess, his mother thought, experiencing a mixture of vanity and pain, and by pain – with all the wasteful, sentimental excess typical of suicides – she meant the Countess’s, her son’s, and her own.
Antonio was taken to the performance of Rigoletto by the pseudo-Polish woman (who was wearing a long dress, which was diaphanous, and looked like a larva that had come from another world, or had just simply landed on the scene, as Lieutenant Colonel Boncompagni put it) who paid her many compliments when accompanying her to the theatre along with his wife, but which he quickly turned inside out like a glove as soon as the aging miss disappeared with his son into the illuminated atrium as though they were the ones about to step on the stage.
However, Mrs Boncompagni’s attention was fixed on the little knight who was entering the theatre, beaming with pride at the damsel on his arm; there was some
thing false or unreal about it, which appeared to allude to something difficult and non-adaptable in Antonio’s soul and nature.
What is an officer, which characteristics define him?
The Corso was bustling with activity. The last latecomers who were arriving at the theatre, the multitude of curious onlookers, the people on their customary evening perambulations: it looked like an immense miniature, or a scene set in an Africa crowded with bit players.
The season of opera had reanimated the night, the windows on the Corso were brightly lit, and the colony performed that ritual with a kind of consecration, celebrating their ancestors, the sacred remains had been brought over and ritualistically exhibited on the new African land. Who would have imagined that one day, the abandoned coastline where the Expeditionary Corps under General Caneva had landed, would see a theatre built on it, where a play set at the court of Mantua would be performed!
Having retracted their steps, Mrs Boncompagni and the Lieutenant Colonel sat at the open-air café of the Hotel Italia, situated in the Piazza del Re, where the little orchestra, whose stage was situated among the trees of the Municipal gardens, played a pot-pourri of excerpts from famous operas, as though wanting to please the clamouring crowd of those who had been excluded from the entertainment inside the theatre.
Once midnight had passed, the couple, comprising the diaphanous princess and her tiny knight, reemerged from the Berenice’s dark, silent parterre and reappeared in the piazza. The Lieutenant Colonel and his wife were waiting for them on the sidewalk of the garden overlooking the theatre. Antonio gave his mother his hand, his fist tightly clenched, a ritual gesture introducing something difficult, and he talked and fell silent again in a feverish state of excitement. It was as though the pseudo-Polish woman, having spent a great deal of time preparing him, had brought him to the temple, where the setting of his mind and the past, a golden tail, had, thanks to the stage décor and music, been magically pushed out of the invisible world into the visible one. In the meanwhile, they had headed towards the crowded, festive Corso, and Mrs Boncompagni and Antonio walked slightly behind the pseudo-Polish woman and the Lieutenant Colonel.
Fragments of a cheeky, tight-lipped conversation, whose thread was entirely clear and indescribable, infantile and inscrutable, Antonio’s words projected themselves on the stage of the future, drawing out his silhouette as a man, his destiny. It was as if the knight had offered the palm of his hand to an expert fortune-teller. Antonio had been elected to suffer constant discord, this is what his mother had read in his palm. The violence of feelings as performed on the stage was devastating and had nothing to do with real, everyday life: the boy had seen figures flash before his eyes, egged by passions similar to his own, or with the same intensity of passion as his, perhaps even sharing the same excess that typified and moved the characters in his mind. The theatre’s magic circle as the metaphorical objectification of the mind and its unruliness, where life remains warm at the core.
Provided, therefore, that he could become a character from an opera – whose secret lies in the brevity of life, in fleeing the reckoning of the road for that of the stage – the brave knight Antonio had been finally allowed to undergo a rebirth, even though it occurred as he raced towards catastrophe. This was why the Polish King, the suicidal Countess, and the gentleman killed in a duel depicted in the little golden oval miniature (or bauble, as the Lieutenant Colonel put it) that Elena wore pinned on her tailleur’s label, as well as all the other characters from the pseudo-Polish woman’s past, were metaphorical configurations of Antonio’s destiny, illustrating all the possibilities lying before individuals which everyday life appeared to exclude. Thanks to the power of alienation, the fact that the actors sang instead of talked also alluded to their rejection of society’s rules and its deadly magnitude. Elena’s past had been a prelude to the opera, into which the boy had finally been admitted, having moved up a rung on the ladder of consciousness. Opera was the twin of history: a triumphal confirmation of the lessons the pseudo-Polish woman had taught him – in fact opera acted as a safeguard against history.
The Corso was teeming with people, and the party carried on: only on the occasion of His Majesty Victor Emmanuel III’s visit had the colony experienced such long nights. The seafront promenade, which ran parallel to the Corso, was as brightly lit as the latter: three-pronged cast iron lanterns were hanging from columns of Roman travertine, their light gently skimming the water’s trembling surface.
The Lieutenant Colonel and the pseudo-Polish woman in her crêpe georgette dress, now a little rumpled, were walking a few steps ahead of Antonio and Mrs Boncompagni. It looked as though the officer wanted to draw everyone’s attention to how they looked like a couple while he walked alongside the old miss, who resembled those tempestuous characters in those old operas which always ended with a sacrificial offering. He had thus been granted the pleasure of walking along the Corso, a real place, with a character that was both imaginary and musically seductive. For the first time, he found it ironic – irony being his sole means of even approaching the truth – that he finally understood Antonio’s fascination for that boring, penniless woman.
Mrs Boncompagni didn’t miss a single opportunity to nod her head at someone she knew with a smile on her lips. Her social conduct, even in the most extraordinary situations, followed a musical rhythm, just like that walk along the Corso. Once upon a time there were dances that resembled soft, lavish strolls. What did it matter if thanks to some incomprehensible spell, her knight had been reduced to a midget?
After all, her thoughts were not directed to the Corso, still heaving with people at this late hour owing to the opening night of the opera season. Amidst that festive, restless sea, all that interested her was the island constituted by her son, Antonio.
Only a small incident occurred. Having almost reached the end of the Corso, they had crossed paths with the dressmaker, who wasn’t far from her shop. The poor woman was left speechless after she greeted Mrs Boncompagni and failed to be greeted in return. She was one of her few clients who said hello without first being obsequiously prompted: and now she didn’t even answer anymore. She experienced a moment of spite and disappointment, which was immediately negated by the sudden fear that her most generous client had found herself in the middle of some drama. She had seen her gallant husband walking with the Polish woman a few steps ahead of Mrs Boncompagni and her boy: but it simply couldn’t be that the old Miss Guastalla could cause the beautiful Mrs Boncompagni any jealousy. Or perhaps, just like during the nights of the carnival, people’s faces had been replaced by masks?
The agreement struck at home had stipulated only a single outing to the theatre for Antonio, given that the cost of a season ticket was a tad exorbitant (as Lieutenant Colonel Boncompagni snidely remarked) simply to fill a little boy’s evenings.
However, when Antonio learned of the ban, he was seized by such an excess of frightening anger that his mother, knowing the performance would begin in not too long, offered to give up her own seat so that he (meaning Boncompagni) could accompany the boy. The morning had already been tense, and he had already heard the doors being violently shut on several occasions – one of Antonio’s bad habits, for which she always reproached him – but he had taken it too far that morning and it made the house seem haunted by ghosts. She had spent the rest of the morning in a pensive mood, but she hadn’t questioned Antonio. She had been so distracted that she’d forgotten her appointment with the dressmaker, and when she realised it, she took it as a bad omen. It was as though a placid, serene plane of her life had just flitted into nothingness.
All of this had taken place in the morning, when the Lieutenant Colonel had been away.
Now they were all at home, while the beginning of the performance drew nearer and nearer.
‘That boy’s an idiot!’ the Lieutenant Colonel thundered, one could have heard him all the way out on the street, or on the terrace. His voice, almost always eloquent and ironic, was completely suited to
his martial profession. ‘A nervous breakdown just to go to the opera! What are we going to do with a boy like that?’ he asked, beside himself with rage. ‘I’ll give him an opera!’ he screamed, wearing the most evil expression worn by baritones as they skulk off backstage.
That vain man also knew how to be incredibly ugly. It struck Mrs Boncompagni that her husband’s voice was a sound triggered by the same forces she’d seen earlier that morning in Antonio’s slamming of the doors – or a different force entirely, yet one which nevertheless existed on the same dramatic plane.
The orderly appeared, looking spooked, believing himself to be the object of the officer’s ire. The young man spoke the dialect of the rural valleys around Bergamo, a tongue suffused with guttural sounds and glottal stops, Mrs Boncompagni often guessed at what he said, rather than truly understand it. Yet on that day he sank even deeper into his accent, and she couldn’t make any sense of it.
The opera in the house: while the Lieutenant Colonel makes every room reverberate with his yells, one can still hear Antonio’s desperate, combative cries, sounding like a tenor in the final stretch of the performance. However, the drama wasn’t over, far from it.
Her motherly foreboding received its confirmation: that boy was destined for a difficult life. It had already been made obvious by Antonio’s zealous devotion to Elena’s past, a kind of swashbuckling drama where every adventure was always sealed by a death.
All palliative remedies would be useless, as would deferments: the tragedy of Antonio’s path to self-awareness simply had to play out.
She had gone to the hairdresser that morning, who was incredibly busy, as all the ladies wished to look seductive at the theatre, propelled by the desire to emulate one another. Amidst that domestic din, masterfully curled locks were entirely extraneous to the scene, just like wigs. Today marks the beginning of Antonio’s drama, she told herself, as though she was staring into a mirror.
The Fourth Shore Page 14