The Fourth Shore

by Alessandro Spina

  Her behaviour became apathetic, having lost her willpower in the way one abandons a ship’s rudder when tired of fighting against the sea’s fury. It didn’t matter much that no image was further away from the sea than that of the meagre space which the officer took up: yet that name was a kind of codex, subject to shadows and madness, like the keyboard of Serra’s baby grand piano, from which he extracted notes that perturbed oblivious pedestrians as they passed in front of his little villa.

  Space and the fury of movements are occasional by-products of violence and shadows, the void and the abyss can co-exist in an elegant uniform, or a pentagram.

  III

  The Giuliana beachxxviii was the pride and glory of the Municipal government, which had built three rows of multi-coloured wooden beach cabins, where one could both change one’s clothes, just like in a theatre’s dressing room, as well as cook or rest. The lunch offered by Colonel Colombo was held in the Air Force’s blue chalet. This served to put Mrs Bellotti at ease, given that Wojciechowski was assigned to the infantry, and thus there would be no danger of running into him. It seemed Mrs Bellotti only moved around the city in order to avoid something or someone, like in some children’s games, where fatal mistakes committed on a multi-coloured, bizarre board led to esoteric itineraries.

  Nevertheless, there was Lieutenant Wojciechowski standing right at the chalet’s door: bare-chested with his greyish hair and blue eyes, he looked like a parody of African savages with their dazzling ebony skin.

  His beautiful uniform hadn’t led anyone astray, the young man was perfectly chiseled: there was something truthful to him, and he wasn’t entirely deceitful and fake, as she thought. She was shocked, her mind procrastinated, maybe she had seen demons in the guide of puppets or ghosts. A human body always gave her some guarantee of truth. Yet there was nevertheless something unusual to his body’s shape, which shared the unusual gracefulness of Cranach’s nudes,xxix turning to the North for some familiar reference to describe those inanimate wonders.

  ‘Look at that fool,’ Doctor Bellotti said, irked.

  Wojciechowski gave him a military salute as though he’d been in uniform; he looked like a little rascal poking fun at the adults’ pompous ceremonies.

  While they were sat at a table, some distance away from the others, and while Colonel Colombo was politely entertaining them, at the same time that Wojciechowski, Giulia and the Lieutenant appeared almost completely naked, one could notice the big blue sea behind them like a bed in the background.

  Truth be told, it had been Doctor Bellotti who had discovered them, but Emma had only seen one of his pupils burst into flames, a concave mirror that metaphorically dilated the scene.

  The chalet was full of people coming and going, some were dressed in bathing costumes, while others looked as though they were backstage at a theatre, mingling with the characters and ghosts of other plays. It was one thirty in the afternoon, but the sea breeze kept the bathers’ faces feeling fresh, just as moving, colourful lights at a theatre often add a veneer of magic to the actors on stage.

  Mrs Bellotti noticed that her husband’s irritation was about to cross the point of no return; she had been told frightening stories of whenever the man in charge of customs, whose office was situated at the docks, had discovered illicit contraband. He was a robust man with a round face. A keen nationalist, when his wife had mentioned that the little Lieutenant could pose a small danger to Giulia, his knee-jerk reaction had been to exclaim: that name! going blue in the face. What would he do now? The same rigidity he demonstrated in his defence of the laws of the State reflected itself within his family environment, order meant harmony of the whole. Yet could he, a mere civilian, order an army Lieutenant to be arrested? And on what charges?

  The conversation at the table carried on, but Bellotti got muddled up whenever he tried to proffer a reply, and each time his gaze turned towards the entrance, where the forbidden couple stood, his gaze became entirely distracted. Holding his knife and fork in his hand, he looked like a man who was either intoxicated or traumatised by dreadful burst of pain.

  Emma felt that she had tortured her husband over Giulia’s sentimental life, her daughter’s drama had been augmented by the love her husband felt for her, and his rather ridiculous passion for appropriating all her feelings. Colonel Colombo was struck by Bellotti’s agitated state. The other dining companions, two couples who had just moved to the colony, and ironically resembled one another, looked like theatregoers who had shown up late to the performance and were thus finding it impossible to understand what was going on. Yet while inevitable, the drama was in no hurry, it had taken root inside that chalet, and it was letting time slide slyly by, like a god from the underworld who, having emerged into the light, stops to bask in the sun, before fulfilling all the destruction it carried in its heart.

  For instance, nobody ever found out what Doctor Bellotti said to Wojciechowski in a fit of anger barely an hour later, once the lunch hosted by Colonel Colombo had drawn to an end. It was as though the sea-breeze had either carried his words away or muddled them up: in the same way that a spectator’s untimely cough at the climax of a drama often deprives the other listeners of a key sentence, the drama’s final seal, which had been long awaited, and thus the whole play is left acephalous.

  The two men had found themselves face to face on the smooth planks of the chalet’s entrance. Doctor Bellotti was attired in an elegant white linen suit, while the young man was semi-naked, as though someone had stolen his uniform.

  Save for the colour of their skin, hair, the clear blue of their eyes, their encounter on that African beach looked like it was mimicking one of those yellowed photographs or oleographs that once graced the covers of shiny illustrated weeklies: here was the colonist, dressed, and the native, naked, in the same way sumptuous altar pieces often show how the divine and the human are separated by two planes, or the way their cautionary frescoes separate the saved from the damned. There were those who later said that Doctor Bellotti had rubbed the foreignness of Wojciechowski’s name in his face, in fact he’d distorted his name, which was in itself barbaric, as though it bore all the resounding proof of Wojciechowski’s betrayal.

  Others instead said that he had pronounced Wojciechowski’s name correctly, but that he had mocked him over his incredibly thin waist: he too had noticed that the young man had been shaped with the same freedom with which Venetian glassblowers modelled their glass – they spun the hot fibre into a thread, pushing the glass to beyond the laws of physics. It therefore seemed that the Doctor had levelled heavy insinuations against that artistically-shaped physique.

  The only sentence which had been distinctly heard had been the following: ‘But out blood will never be one!’

  It was at that moment that, given that Mrs Bellotti had not left her table, Giulia, still in her black swimming costume – which emphasised the rosiness of her skin, her hair hanging loose on her shoulders, her gaze clear and limpid – suddenly appeared next to her mother, just like sirens, whose bottom halves are never clearly perceived, and she whispered: ‘But now our blood is the same, in a single new creature.’

  Then she hurried away, not because she feared her mother’s brutal reaction, or the insufferable questions she might ask, but in order to show off her full figure.

  In the same manner that an art critic can immediately recognise that two paintings created at different times in fact constitute an unnecessarily untidy diptych, Mrs Bellotti finally realised that her daughter had been shaped by the same hands as the one which had crafted Wojciechowski; her waist was thin and narrow, like the incredibly pale figures in Cranach’s canvases.

  While her husband (and Giulia’s father) went about rodomontading on the beach, refusing to sign the pact (mostly to please her, since he was obsessively loyal to her), a creature in Giulia’s womb subverted the pact, nature had triumphed over laws and religious ceremonies.

  She stood up, looking as though she’d been pierced by a sword. Here comes the f
irst victim, Giulia thought to herself, half-moved, half-mocking: in that delightful setting, bathed in the immaculate splendour of the African coast, they were living out a conventional tragedy.

  Emma crossed the chalet, whose floor was composed of long, varnished planks of wood; she looked like the messenger on whose arrival all the characters’ confused heads turn to look at.

  Having reached the two rivals, she turned towards Wojciechowski and said: ‘Lieutenant, we’ll expect you over for tea tomorrow.’

  Wojciechowski stiffened into a military salute, like when he had seen them enter. Yet his gesture no longer looked like a provocation, and the person who had performed it had lost his brattish aggressiveness, it was as though that brief sentence had defused the tragedy.

  The small gathering of onlookers who had assembled broke up in a flurry of ironic comments, looking like spectators drifting towards the exit once the curtain had fallen.

  Taking Doctor Bellotti by the arm, Colonel Colombo was reminiscing over his time in the military, telling him atrocious, pointless stories.

  They strolled along the shiny beach. There was Serra, right up ahead, sat in a chaise-longue over which a festively-coloured cloth had been draped. Despite the fact the chalet was only a short distance away, he never raised his eyes from his book, which was tiny and very old, a kind of cult-like object, all the more surprising in a crowded beach of loud sunbathers where everything was new, fresh, colourful and sonorous.

  Laughing, Colombo ripped the book out of his hands.

  ‘What’s this, what’s this? The s’s all look like f’s, and the v’s look like u’s, what the hell is this, professor?’

  The Colonel showed the book to Doctor Bellotti, but he couldn’t see s’s, f’s, v’s and u’s, what he read was a story. Serra was friends with Wojciechowski: the damned devil had leapt out of one of the Professor’s books. His wrath was already on the lookout again.

  The Doctor took the book from the Colonel’s hand as though he’d wanted to throw it into the sea. At that moment, Serra’s eyeglasses slid down his nose and fell. As though having emerged out of the sands, Wojciechowski appeared among them, knelt down, picked the glasses up, and handed them to Serra.

  The tea that took place the following day, a Monday, was brief. It looked as though the Bellotti sitting room had been converted into a public notary’s office, where three parties (Giulia being absent from the proceedings) had agreed to meet to stipulate a contract.

  It was decided that the engagement would take place a month later, and in the meanwhile the youths could be seen together in public, given that a hurried announcement would have raised unnecessary suspicions. For the first time in his life, Doctor Bellotti felt as though he’d taken part in a secret criminal meeting, similar to the one those smugglers who infested his ports must have attended. Yet this wasn’t about saving some merchandise or seizing illicit profits, it was about his daughter’s honour. It was also the only time in his life when the line between the legal and the illegal looked like it hadn’t been neatly cut by a sword, but rather was a slender thread that shook with the changeability of the wind.

  Mrs Bellotti thought that the Lieutenant had committed another crime on top of seducing her daughter, given that her husband was near collapse, an earthquake had destroyed his ordered, geometric conception of the world. Sat in that sitting room, they looked as though they were drifting away from the mainland – where they had lived happily until that day – while atop a boat.

  Doctor Bellotti said that they would use the gravity of the situation as an excuse to avoid attending the wedding reception.

  As it happened, the war was announced just three weeks later.

  Just as a lady who had proved not entirely indifferent to the unpronounceably-named Lieutenant’s charms said, Wojciechowski was one of the first to leave. She hadn’t known that he’d gone to the front, where the army had already been deployed, but the other world – where new arrivals, especially in the early phase of the war, weren’t that frequent yet.

  As far as the director of customs Bellotti was concerned, that fallen soldier was more like a deserter. Even he had been called up to active duty, as if he’d been forced to take his son-in-law’s place. Before leaving for the front, where he might meet the same fate as Wojciechowski – yet without giving rise to atrocious, obvious rumours – he had decided, right there in that sitting room (the designated location for the declaration of such lawfully-binding sentences) that the unborn child – which was the first time he’d ever referred to that strange guest in his daughter’s presence – would bear the name of Bellotti. (Or rather, Bellotti-Riva, he added, combining his wife’s name with his own, in tribute to the family which he’d been honoured to marry into; a tribute which, when mouthed by that portly man who’d aged so much during those last few weeks, which had seen so much trouble to befall both his home and motherland, sounded rather pathetic.) The Bellotti name? He seemed to prefer that the unborn child should endure the shadow of incest over his conception, as if he himself, the director of customs, had been the boy’s father, or by the unknown, anything was better than that barbaric name, which was as tragic as destiny itself!

  His wife didn’t intervene, even though Doctor Bellotti appeared to be desperate for her to do so: yet ever since the drama had started, Emma’s vitality had entirely vanished. He had seen this before on numerous occasions.

  Even Giulia, who wore a little cotton dress and colonial sandals on her feet, remained silent and said nothing at all. What point was there to sharing one’s secrets with other people? Had Tadeusz Wojciechowski ever done that?

  xxv Genesis 3:24.

  xxvi Complete Quote: ‘But the soul of another is a dark place, and the Russian soul is a dark place – for many it is a dark place.’ from Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot (London: W. Heinemann, 1915), p.227.

  xxvii Don Juan’s servant in Mozart’s Don Giovanni.

  xxviii One of Benghazi’s main beaches.

  xxix Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553): German Renaissance painter and printmaker.

  Twenty-four Colonial Tales

  BOOK ONE

  1

  ON THE SHORE

  1939

  ‘Africa is a giant riding-stable, the ideal place where one can train and hone the ancient art of horse-riding,’ the General said, shattering the silence.

  They were standing by the shore, on the boundless plain. The palm trees, few and far between, looked as if they’d been planted by an invisible hand to mark out paths that knew no end. The General was fond of spending time with Captain Valentini, who was a reserved man and always on the alert, but who carried on the conversation on his own, inside his head, where there was never the bother of having to listen to a reply. What good would it do anyway?

  They had been riding for two hours. The sun was oppressive, but a sonorous breeze was rising from the sea (it felt like the plain’s invisible twin, a continuous flowing) – like how music, sometimes, which is a movement in itself, ensnares our immobility, while we’re sat in the profound recesses of a theatre or a closed room. There wasn’t a single structure in sight: neither native and wretched nor colonial and optimistic. Nothing except the littoral’s expanse – ‘one of the great wonders of the world,’ the General sternly commented, as though he was mocking his listener – that extended for thousands of miles along the colony’s coast, a testament to the fact that it wasn’t inviolate. Nothing could be seen along the greyish strip, neither man nor machine: as though it had been created for ghosts.

  The General took to horse-riding with his customary ceremoniousness even in that deserted place, as though he were at a parade and was busy inspecting the troops. His bearing was always proud and erect, a joker had once said that he’d resembled the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, as he frighteningly held four fingers up.

  ‘Do you know Professor Curri?’ the General asked.

  Changing his tone, which grew a little more irritated, he added: ‘Yesterday we dined together at the
air force’s chalet; I don’t know who invited him. He said that Montaigne once questioned an Indian chief who was held as a prisoner in France what prerogatives he enjoyed in his country. The chief replied that he had the right to be at the head of his troops when leading them into battle. What else is new? That’s what history teaches us.’

  Valentini nodded his head very slightly.

  ‘Professors always talk such rubbish when they speak of battles.’

  They carried on riding in silence.

  ‘Come on, there’s no need to drag Montaigne into this; even heroes in action films put themselves first and drag everyone else along.’

  A pause.

  ‘Who knows where? Needless to say, the “enemy” is nothing but a metaphor.’

  Just like the sea-breeze, they too looked like the victims of a kind of perpetual motion owed to atmospheric events, fated to always keep floating. The breeze was the wind generated by the unequal heating of different zones.

  Even the littoral carried on sliding towards the East.

  ‘Captain!’ the General exclaimed, as though his comrade was far away and he was calling him back. Instead, their horses were right next to one another, just like during the ritualistic military exercises where they weren’t free to heed either their own caprices, or their knight’s.

  ‘Do you know what a chief’s prerogative really is? To fall from even greater heights, the highest possible heights is what I mean.’

  Valentini raised no objections whatsoever. His silence had a soothing effect, leaving something unexplored, unfinished. This was why the General loved talking to him.

  ‘Anyone who doesn’t understand that doesn’t have the right to lead anybody, because he is oblivious to his tragic privilege. Bloody hell! I would have liked to tell that chap that tragic destinies were the exclusive prerogative of kings in the old plays of antiquity!’

  He suddenly spurred his horse into a gallop.