The Fourth Shore

by Alessandro Spina

  The Major was stunned when, having come to a stop, he saw his son standing still and mute next to the doorpost: his face was marked by the painful concentration that characterised many caryatids. He wanted them to leave. More for him than for me! he admitted, as if quoting someone, we are divided because we are not the same person. A malignant smile: the phrase recalled the Lord of La Palisse,xxiv the only credible philosopher because he never deviates from tautologies.

  He was called away by a superior officer and disappeared with him into the garden, onto which the Club’s inner facade opened out. From there, one could see the silhouettes of all the assembled guests and one could hear the little orchestra’s overindulgent notes. The Colonel was talking irritatedly about the binding necessity – and he constantly used that legal term – of repairing the roof of the Moccagatta barracks in the one of the city’s suburbs. ‘The rain spills into my office!’ he exclaimed disdainfully. The Corps of Engineers were taking their time, claiming they were urgently engaged elsewhere. The Colonel wanted Lanzi to take charge of the situation: ‘I’m counting on you!’

  It struck Lanzi that he felt like a prisoner of a palace, just like Elvira, who had never torn herself away from those regulation portraits. Yet instead of life-sized portraits, there were now the silhouettes of dancers as they glided back and forth past the French windows, which gave out onto the African night. Amidst those shadows, he thought, while taking care to answer the Colonel’s questions, was his son. If Elvira had been imprisoned by her ancestors, he had been imprisoned by his son. The phrase meant nothing at all. Yet meaningless things often carried the greatest weight, since the knot could not be untied.

  The Colonel looked at Lanzi, astonished: the Major was smiling while talking about all the endless bureaucratic hurdles that would have to be overcome, which couldn’t possibly justify his good cheer.

  ***

  When his son left, given that the autumnal season of exams at the university required his presence, the Major once again became the lord and master of his little villa.

  His relationship with the widow resumed its usual flow – as well as its function, so to speak. The widow, Carlina, never set foot at the Club, which was a kind of military court, and where it was rare for civilians to be admitted, and the fact she was a simple milliner was an unbridgeable disadvantage.

  His life, which was monotone, in fact monochrome, as he put it – given that he had a penchant for precise and metaphorical expressions, seemed even emptier now. He had taken a step forward – or rather, a step back, just like when Elvira had announced the presence of a rival. Even his son had abandoned him: the curled-up ball that was his son had silently rolled past his house and was now far away.

  He would occasionally go for a stroll along the white seafront. The water was barely moving and it shone. It looked like a gigantic mirror, but it only ever reflected the constantly limpid sky.

  He had had the idea of buying an astrolabe, an instrument which could work out the position of the stars. However, would he be able to find one or had they become museum pieces? The stars don’t care about human affairs, he thought to himself, and hats and life-sized portraits are just as indifferent. Even though they’re the ones who plot the destinies of human beings with their enigmatic games. They are omnipotent, but nevertheless display no curiosity for human events.

  Lanzi, the father, the star, could very well be the architect of his son’s destiny, but contrary to the stars, his own curiosity was eating him alive. His son had fallen from the sky in a distant land, amidst a dark night, and he was now vainly trying to find a trace of him in the universe of his mind. There had always been an occult and determining presence in his life: hats, portraits and stars, just like the milky chandelier hanging from the ceiling of the palace’s great hall, constituted the trinity of his life. It is said that the stars influence the destinies of men, he thought, stopping, while his shadow on the ground looked at him, as though it wanted to talk to him, but it’s just a mechanical fact: oh how I envy you star, you’re never weighed down by the burden of destiny! He appeared to want to detach himself from his shadow. Yet this inescapable twin simply strolled alongside him.

  My head has been aching for a while, he thought. However, he felt an upsurge of annoyance: why was he trying to deceive himself?

  One evening, along the Corso, he had been walking past the milliner’s shop – where he never set foot in order not to set the rumour mill running again – and casting quick glance at the window display he noticed that a hat studded with shiny flakes which he’d already once noticed due to its veil, which was blue instead of the usual black, was now missing from the display and could be seen inside the shop itself, atop a woman’s head. Who could it be? That question was like a switch that set his mechanism in motion and he soon found himself inside the shop.

  Imagine his amazement when that head turned, revealing the deception: it was the girl with the freckles that were as festive as confetti, who was looking straight at him. She wasn’t smiling, like at the ball, quite the contrary: as soon as he appeared, an expression of painful concentration had settled on her face, which the hat’s veil couldn’t entirely conceal. It was as though he’d tripped, just like when she’d danced with Arturo, who took gigantic strides, leaving her to glide across the floor to bridge the same distance.

  Why am I so surprised by it? Didn’t they come in pairs? At the Club, he had detected the same painful expression on his son’s face. It was simply natural for the couple of caryatids to wear similar expressions. Why am I so surprised by it? He asked himself again. It was like facing the echo of a scream.

  Inside that shop, all the characters had arranged themselves in a triangle, and the apex at the top of that triangle wasn’t the milliner, who was smiling behind her counter, but Arturo’s shadow.

  ‘Why don’t you ask me to dance?’ the girl asked him. She had repeated what she’d told him at the Club, like a wind-up doll who could only mouth the same words while the music played. The Major bowed. Yes, he thought to himself, there’s that smiling girl, that look of painful concentration I thought I had detected and had assumed it was a message from my son – turned out to be all in my head. He reproached himself for always being hot on the heels of what wasn’t really there. Yet the feeling of being unable to be a part of his son’s destiny tormented him, as though he was standing right there, in front of him. Every mind is a labyrinth, he thought, and to love is to fall into someone else’s labyrinth… Yet irony gave him nothing but momentary, useless relief.

  ‘Do you know what Arturo told me?’ the girl asked him, immediately adding, as thought to dash the father’s hopes: ‘He told me that the light is really blinding here in Africa!’

  What silliness! What banality! Lanzi glared at her sternly. Yet a thought flashed across his mind like lightning: Had Arturo been using the metaphor of the blinding sun to refer to his father? Of course not! Now he was the one being silly and banal. The girl then lowered her veil, which she had lifted in order to let her words through. She then removed the hat from her head and returned it to the milliner, who was still behind her counter. She then fled from the shop, but turned around as soon as she was out on the street: as if she’d just decided to finally say what she knew – but it was late and she vanished as though she’d been spirited away.

  ‘The light is blinding in Africa,’ the Major repeated out loud, as though reading an epigraph. Yet he nevertheless made small talk with the milliner. Only his right shoe still pressed against the counter, like a desperate, loving wave crashing against a reef.

  ‘I’ll dine with you tonight,’ he said.

  The woman’s face lit up. Yet the officer was annoyed with himself: it was as though he’d given her an order.

  Out on the street, where the light seemed different to him, he started on his usual evening perambulation, a ritual of the military court. Lanzi nodded a greeting.

  His mind wandered off, as usual, and his thoughts turned back to the stroll along the seafr
ont. Idleness is the poison of military life, he concluded, as though putting a seal on the entire affair.

  ‘Precisely…’ the Major loudly confided that night as he addressed all those hats lined up in rows in the devout milliner’s little house, a theory that belonged to priests who held voluminous scrolls of knowledge in their heads, in fact it was all-embracing knowledge. As for the stars, high up above, they remained silent, distracted.

  xxiv Lord of La Palisse: Protagonist of a French chanson that has since become famous. It was inspired by a French nobleman killed in the Italian Wars in 1525. The lines from the song ‘s’il n’était pas mort,/il ferait encore envie.’ were successively misread as ‘if he wasn’t dead,/he would still be alive’ rather than the original meaning of ‘if he wasn’t dead,/he would still be envied.’ Thus, Spina’s meaning here is to use him as a symbol for tautologies.

  SILENCE

  ‘The army is the aristocratic form of emigration’

  Gottfried Benn

  The black cockroach on the stage threatened all of creation.

  ‘Mon cher ami,’ Colonel Verri said to Captain Valentini, who was standing next to him, ‘my ears are crying.’

  The Captain didn’t reply. He kept his gaze fixed on the stage, but he wasn’t listening.

  The piazza was crowded. Infantry units had been deployed in rows in the middle of the square; on the right, towards the lagoon, stood the youth organizations; on the left were all civilians, and there were a great many of them. The piazza’s architecture was funereal.

  The sky was blue and the sun was fixed in its middle. So much indifference didn’t bode anything good. The local party secretary’s threats hadn’t shaken up the ranks, it had instilled fear in them. Lost amidst the peacefulness of their natural surroundings, his threats had had a sinister effect.

  ‘One can only be a good fascist on condition that one feels an intense loathing for oneself,’ Colonel Verri said, closely observing the party secretary. ‘Captain Valentini,’ he cheerfully added, ‘I’m proud of how observant you’ve been. You haven’t missed a single word, not a single word…’

  The frenetic applause of the assembled civilians, as well that of the youth organizations’ initiates, drowned the party secretary’s words.

  The army stood immobile in serried ranks, like a funerary bas-relief. Colonel Verri turned his head: he looked at those soldiers and those officers.

  ‘What are we going to do? What are we going to do?’ he muttered, ‘It’s over, Captain Valentini, it-is-ov-er!’

  THE SOUL OF ANOTHER

  In that foreign surname, Mrs Bellotti recognised a sign that was even worse than a bad reputation and should have instantly put her on her guard. The announcement that Lieutenant Wojciechowski would come over for tea had thundered in her hostile ears: that scoundrel had set his sights on Giulia. Having been in the colony for a decade, she showed no indulgence towards the officers there: their foreignness to the place was all too obvious. Those barbarians turned life in the city upside down, and then lost sight of it amidst their luxurious idleness. The Officers’ Club functioned like a public square. Mrs Bellotti hardly ever set foot in it, and when she did so it was with the greatest reluctance. In that place, everything turned into theatre, and then dissolved into febrile obviousness. The presence of Gianbattista Serra, an esteemed professor from the Giosuè Carducci secondary school, whose visit had also been announced, was simply a mask which Wojciechowski used to trick people, given that he was friends with the professor. That Serra read a great deal, pedantic subjects that belonged to different times, a kind of invisible city as opposed to the real one. Yet he who reads too much, Mrs Bellotti thought, opening the French windows of the three tiny balconies that gave out on the Via Regina Elena, becomes a stranger to the environment where they live, and lives on their own terms. She had met Lieutenant Wojciechowski only once, at a café on the Corso after Sunday mass at the cathedral. Nevertheless, she occasionally saw him walking down the street, an aura of nothingness about him, just as though he were a spectre or a demon: he appeared to share the peculiar nature of the books Serra read.

  Mrs Bellotti was also a teacher, at the secondary school on Via Fiume, in the new neighbourhood that the colonial government had built on land it had reclaimed, to the south of the Ottoman-era citadel. The streets were wide and they intersected at right angles.

  A quick getaway which had taken place half a century earlier had brought the Wojciechowski family to Italy. It had taken Serra a great deal of reading to reach what Wojciechowski had simply inherited: foreignness. Having sacrificed the harmonious strictures in which he had pursued his education, he now knew a great deal without ever seeming to make much use of it. Despite the fact that the colonial city was rather small, nobody knew anything about Serra’s life. Whoever walked by his house often heard animated, heart-wrenching notes of music. Prior to meeting Wojciechowski, it seems his only friend had been his piano. He was a wiry man, as if he’d been carved out of wood, his height was slightly below average, and his nose was concave, allowing his little oval-shaped golden glasses to constantly slip further down.

  Serra taught French, while Mrs Bellotti taught natural sciences. She occasionally looked on Wojciechowski as a poisonous flower, which while being beautiful, its seductiveness ultimately meant death: the flower’s caducity was a sign of that. If the scoundrel got his hands on another victim, it wouldn’t have bothered Serra at all, and perhaps his intellect compelled him to respect Wojciechowski’s freedom. Nevertheless, it certainly mattered to her: Giulia is my daughter! Once Wojciechowski had appeared, the invisible city had become a real-life character, as if the baby grand piano had taken on a human form instead of just sitting there in the corner of Serra’s little villa – and had started going everywhere, on the streets, shops, sitting rooms, and at the Club – and as if that wasn’t enough it had even started wearing that woeful, elegant uniform, similar to the military marches that fascist militants sang in the streets about violence and heroic deaths.

  Despite Serra’s presence, a kind of Trojan horse which Wojciechowski had used to bring his wicked plans to fruition, she would have nevertheless greeted that guest with open hostility: after all, what did the army have to do with school, or soldiers with books? If she ever saw Giulia walking with Wojciechowski from her window, she would think that Giulia had read the other’s secret books in a single sitting. At which point she would begin to heed her colleague’s words: being highly intolerant, he had told her that Serra belonged to that perfidious race of intellectuals ‘who are completely unrelated to us as educators; educators,’ he explained, ‘are people who transmit knowledge, and they devote themselves to its destruction and reinvention every decade or so with the zealous treachery of sorcerers.’ It was a pity that his words sounded as though they’d been coined in a cheap inn: overweight and little loved by his students, her colleague’s breath always stank of alcohol, even in the mornings. Why did everyone seem to tarnish their not completely undignified positions with some aspect of their behaviour?

  Ever since Giulia had grown up, she’d felt constantly apprehensive, as if she were travelling on a remote and dramatic itinerary, where people had replaced places. As for Serra, whom she allowed to go out with Giulia, she thought he had started behaving hypocritically ever since Wojciechowski had arrived in the city: as if everything he taught his students or told his colleagues took him further away from what he knew.

  As for her, she preferred to look on all of them – the meagre ranks of intellectual citizens and the army’s officers, who were garrisoned in the colony but were as foreign to it as though they were mercenaries – from the safety of her windows, rather than inviting them into her house. The music in Serra’s cottage, whose interior always looked like it was night-time, in a neighbourhood on the outskirts of the city, had nothing to do with military bands: yet even these, vivid and shrill, wrapped in the sumptuous mantle of glory and the unknown, spoke of death. Ever since Wojciechowski had appeared, she felt as t
hough she could hear a funeral march take over that house, a spell that didn’t herald immobility, like in so many fables, but of endless flight.

  As though she’d wanted to erect a dam inside her four walls to act as a bulwark against those changes, she had meticulously reconstructed all the elements of her home in Lombardy in her apartment in Africa. Positioned next to exquisite objects were counterfeits or surviving relics of bygone fashions she held on to all of them with the zeal of a memoirist transcribing all of life, saving it from falling into certain oblivion. As for Doctor Bellotti, who was in charge of customs at the docks, he assisted his wife in her quest for a mechanism or ritual that would bring time to a stop, just as had happened in other eras when people had employed science, madness and fraud to turn base metal into gold. All their nice furniture belonged to his wife’s family, to whom he was rather devoted; being a keen nationalist, Doctor Bellotti looked upon the reconstruction of his Lombard home as the symbolic confirmation that the colony had enlarged the motherland’s hallowed ground.

  Mrs Bellotti was making a cake. The eggs hadn’t been whisked properly, her hands were nervous. Is Wojciechowski coming to tea? Good, she would even bake him a cake – so that he would witness the strength of habits and traditions: if he thought he could turn the house upside down with his presence he was dead wrong, but a murder would still get a slice of cake, just as a boyfriend would. She would have done anything in her power to keep that young man from crossing her threshold, his presence inspired the same disdain in her as the filthy, smutty book she’d found in the hands of one of the boys entrusted to her care (or, in her husband’s case, whenever he came across unsavory contraband at the port). But since Wojciechowski was bound to come in, she had decided to welcome him with great care and consideration, placing an emphasis on her every gesture, word, the very presence of things, like the cake’s exquisite taste, it was the only shelter she could seek: harmony repels deceit.