‘But what are you saying?’ Mrs Brignole asked, a tiny, peppery lady, as people used to say. ‘Are we privileged – or are we condemned given that we don’t know the end is near?’
She seemed amused by the riddle.
The Major shook his head.
‘Actors don’t judge the roles they play,’ he replied.
In another corner of the beautiful hall, where the stuccoes appeared less decorative and more artfully arranged – to put everything in doubt, even the static, colours, shapes, the entire order of the world, taking advantage of the interval between one play and the other – the Club’s other guests were talking as if they were strolling along an imaginary foyer.
‘In a permissive era,’ Captain Lonardi, the tall figure leaning against the French door that opened out onto a limpid sky, was saying, ‘every deception is a game, and not an insult. Opposites don’t meet and neither do they guarantee one another: in fact they are interchangeable.’
‘Oh yes?’ asked one of the ladies next to him, who wasn’t paying much attention to what he was saying, but who wanted him to keep speaking, since she felt as though she was being caressed by the sound of his voice. Her husband was on a mission deep in the desert, far, so far away… whereas there they were cradled, suspended even, in the seashore’s seductive freshness.
‘There’s no longer a single endless path that one must necessarily read: one can now take various paths – which are brief, ephemeral, which lead you nowhere specific, or even take you back to the very place you had left.’
‘We never know where we stand when you speak,’ the lady said, craning her chin into her neck, as if contracting in a sudden twitch. ‘The ephemeral road…’ she mouthed, the only words which had remained impressed in her mind.
‘Do you mean to say that wisdom is impossible because that place no longer exists?’ Colonel Gambarotta asked.
Yet one couldn’t be sure whether he was playing the role of Filippo II or whether he was speaking as himself. After all, hadn’t he written the play?
‘Just like the opposite place doesn’t exist,’ the Captain replied, ‘Hypocrisy is the theatrical restoration of values, distances, fictive itineraries, it makes life eventful. It serves the same function as perspective does in the art of painting: trompe-l’oeil.’
‘Should I therefore abandon myself to hypocrisy? Mrs Cecchetto asked, alarmed. ‘And who with?’ she added, insinuatingly. The figures of her husband and her lover appeared to be vying with one another over something, between the desert and the sea.
‘I also wanted to write a play using the character of Don Juan…’
‘They’ve already done that,’ the lady said, finally feeling self-assured, ‘it’s already been written.’
‘Well, let’s try to live it out then, not on the stage, but in our mental theatres, the real source of all our wickedness,’ Captain Lonardi said.
Mrs Cecchetto was surprised to learn that that’s exactly where she wanted to go, the mental theatre.
‘That Don Juan story is so out of date, it’s a story that belongs to a time when one tried to stimulate one’s appetites and not repress them. Society doesn’t abhor Don Juan, they praise him. He was a demonic and aristocratic figure: even mediocre people who are nothing but afraid now fool themselves into thinking they are rebels and free spirits thanks to the great power of cinema, which shows everything and thus legitimises it.’
At that moment, the Prefect passed by the table and Captain Lonardi promptly shut his mouth. He even gave him a nod of the head.
‘In that famous play, Don Juan doesn’t premeditate his acts to illustrate his blasphemous intentions, but instead he simply chases his appetites, which others still interpret as demonic.’
‘What about you? What kind of appetites do you have?’ the lady whose husband was in the desert cheerfully asked.
‘Those who got offended slandered Don Juan. Frustration arises when one’s appetites are repressed: it satisfies a weak-willed person’s quest for personal identity.’
Gambarotta looked at him. ‘Get to the point.’
‘Never!’ the Captain exclaimed in a fit of passion, ‘Irony is the last paradise, a postscript to history rather than an introduction to it – it’s the only escape out of mediocrity. Irony marks the triumph of the mental theatre on everything: if the path itself is mediocre, the mind provides its own stage. This is why the idea of writing plays for soldiers appeals to me.’
‘So why haven’t you written one yet?’
‘But it’s the one I’m reciting right now: according to my genius – selon mon génie – I am both on the stage and on the street… Theatre life is like religious life, which never takes place in a specific place bur rather unfolds in the wider world and the mind. After all, secrets are the final refuge of those who want to bend the will of others to their destiny.’
‘Such eloquence!’ Mrs Cecchetto exclaimed.
‘Deception is escapism,’ Gambarotta disdainfully remarked.
‘Escapism is the preferential order of our times.’
‘We are fleeing from something, towards something else,’ said an officer who had been silent up until that point.
‘Even war?’ Mrs Cecchetto asked, stunned.
‘Actions, feelings, thoughts… these are nothing but stories of detachment,’ Captain Lonardi said, ‘If only one could flee towards something… Escapism doesn’t leave a blueprint behind. It leaves a thousand: the doodles of a complete maniac.’
‘In conclusion,’ Mrs Cecchetto said, leaving the entire circle around her stunned, ‘you, Captain Lonardi, have proclaimed yourself to be Don Juan. Why, the nerve!’ she added, conspiratorially.
‘Who doesn’t think of themselves as Don Juan these days?’ said the officer who’d previously been silent.
‘Well, me,’ Captain Lonardi said.
‘Really?’ the lady asked.
As far as she was concerned, Captain Lonardi was playing along.
‘Those who rid themselves of laws march towards the inevitable finishing line placed before them: solitude.’
‘No woman will ever come and ask me about the master, no knight will ever want to avenge his promised bride, Donna Elvira won’t follow him over mountains and the Commendatore won’t come to dinner?’ the officer agitatedly asked, as if fishing for a role, perhaps that of Siganarello.lxix
‘I am the invincible seducer of women.’
Mrs Cecchetto’s heart skipped a beat.
‘The character of Don Giovanni legitimises himself as the metaphor of one’s will to make the whole of reality as real as possible. A demonic amplification in which the others, who are made ignorant by the poverty of the lawful, are bound to lose themselves in: the proliferation of the real frightens them. The law demarcates the confines between the real and the possible, and separates them. It’s the government of the possible which has been reduced to a handful of clear paths: it claims that this is reality and claims it as lawful. In the face of such a disappointing equivalence, Don Giovanni comes into subvert that equivalency between what is real and what is possible.’
‘What about the role itself?’
‘The equivalency of what is real and possible as a mental fact. Not as an example or a scandal.’
‘It’s a little complicated,’ the lady hazarded, feeling the ground slip beneath her feet.
‘Is it no longer worthwhile to defy the law?’
‘A perspicacious observer could find the mental character of the operation scandalous.’
‘But what an entertaining play!’ Mrs Cecchetto exclaimed, unhappily, unable to find any further points de repère.lxx
‘And what if Don Giovanni went too far by remaining a prisoner of his own career? What if instead of scandalously converting the possible into reality, he was in actual fact a prisoner of the possible, which prevented him from forging a true connection with reality?’
‘Why don’t you ask him?’ Captain Lonardi said, shrugging his shoulders, ‘I don’t know how the story
proceeds. After all, I didn’t write the play and maybe it’s acephalous.’
The woman looked at him without knowing whether she should feel reassured or disappointed. Was it up to her to come up with a sequel to that story?
‘What irredeemable distance did it consume?’ Gambarotta asked.
‘Those who desire my salvation don’t know how to give up claiming my guilt: you are characters who have been feeding off my sins now for over four centuries.’ Captain Lonardi stressed, ‘Running away from one’s mistakes isn’t enough, you want others to make that mistake: the devil is a martyr.’
‘Would you hear that!’ Mrs Cecchetto exclaimed, highly interested.
‘Someone once said that humanity can be divided into fallen angels and evolving monkeys. As far as I’m concerned…’ Captain Lonardi paused, ‘the place where they’re running to doesn’t coincide with the place that we lost.’
‘That’s enough now, Captain,’ Gambarotta sternly remarked.
Mrs Cecchetto hurriedly adopted a detached – in fact distinguished – attitude.
Yet the second play was already underway by then, and the performance had been entirely written and performed by Captain Valentini, a reserved man, who had shocked everyone when he’d announced that he would be taking part in the matinée in the Club’s salon.
There was a person on the stage who played the role of the director as well as four young men who worked as stagehands: they carried on shifting around a few objects, stepping on and off the stage, causing confusion. Nobody knew if the play was about to start or if it had already begun: but if that was the case why weren’t they talking? ‘Could the play already be over?’ one of the ladies asked, frightened.
Valentini was on the stage, but he was waiting for the others to finish their work. Nobody knew what that work involved because their gestures all mirrored one another as objects were moved only to be put back in their original place.
Finally, everything came to a halt.
Valentini sat down at the table. The director and the stagehands stepped aside.
Silence.
Valentini’s head was leaning against the back of his hand.
He exclaimed:
‘God! God! God! If only I could see him! If only I could hear him! Where is this God?’
The director and the stagehands who were lingering on the side of the stage began to clap, as they were the only ones who’d understood that the play was already over.
And they immediately resumed moving around the objects on the stage in a circular motion.
lxviii From the opening lines of Vittorio Alfieri’s play, Philip: ‘Desio, timor, dubbia ed iniqua speme,/Fuor del mio petto ormai’ or ‘Love, apprehension and each wicked hope,/Leave ye my breast.’ Source: Edgar Alfred Bowring (ed.), The Tragedies of Vittorio Alfieri: Philip. Polynices. Antigone. Virginia. Agamemnon. Orestes. Rosmunda. Octavia. Timoleon. Merope. Mary Stuart (London: Greenwood Press, 1876), p.5.
lxix References to characters in Don Giovanni.
lxx French: ‘points of reference’.
14
THE LIBRARY
‘Culture? But it’s nothing but blackmail! Do you know how we usually spend our Sundays? Reading. My husband sits in front of me with a book in his hand, distant, absent. To tell you the truth: I wish he’d run off with some woman instead, at least I’d know where to go find him. But in books!’ she concluded, dismayed, making a wide gesture with her right hand.
She was wearing a white cotton dress, trimmed at the bottom by a volant of fan-shaped pleats.
‘Why don’t you burn them all?’ her friend, Major Mari’s wife, asked.
‘A vast undertaking! Only the barbarians managed to do that and that was a thousand years ago. And then: what about his memory? Those dull notebooks in which he confides? I never quite figured out where he hides them.’
‘You have to figure out where they are and then… we’ll burn them all! I’ll help you do it.’
‘Then his mind would get all blistered, or castrated even: what use would I have for such a deformed, impotent being?’
She continued to scrape the fingers of her right hand against the palm of her left, as if wanting to scrub some sand or dust off them, regardless of whether it was real or metaphorical.
‘What kind of books does he read?’
‘Des bêtises.’
‘But I’ve never heard him recall a book or refer to it.’
‘The Captain,’ the General, who was sat on the chaise-longue beside the two ladies on the interminably long deserted seashore, remarked in an annoyed tone, ‘never mentions any books out of respect for superstition, in the same manner as the priest of an esoteric cult doesn’t reveal the content of the sacred books, whose secrets are known only to a select few. Folly is subject to far steelier rules than reason. However…’
‘However?’ Mrs Mari asked in a malicious tone.
‘The way he talks is so complex, or if you like, so simple and clear, that culture appears to have been its obvious – nay, inescapable and fatal – foundations: one realises this after chatting to him just a little. The coordination of his conversation is regulated by a system of references that is difficult to circumscribe, where every door leads to another. He’s the only one who’s been able to understand that only in a library may one find the kind of space to balance against one’s presence in Africa – and thus he’s the only one who manages to live here effortlessly, in a legitimate fashion.’
‘It’s easy to relish all that chatter,’ the Captain’s wife replied, bitterly, ‘but do you know what it feels like to talk to a library? At times I feel as though I were stuck in a carnival, chasing countless masks around because my husband lies beneath one of them.’
‘You’re wrong there: your husband lies behind each and every one of them. This is the reader’s imagination. The individual – meaning a specific identity and a single face – dies in the midst of reading. You talk disdainfully of feeling like you’re in a carnival. As for me, your husband’s discussions are like a labyrinth. Don’t forget we are here in the colony to bring civilization. What image has civilization produced that is as genuine as a labyrinth?’ the General asked, who appeared to have overcome his proverbial coldness. ‘Truth be told, your husband is the only credible colonist around here: he has picked up a sword but inside his head lies a library, which is a divine attribute. It’s beautiful to watch a mind summarise the history of the world: the seductiveness of a mind is an all-conquering force.’
‘Arthur insists on seeing everything through a magnifying glass, reading distorts everything: it’s the sign of a sick mind.’
‘It doesn’t distort reality, it lays it bare.’
‘You seem fond of your Captain, mon Générale.’
‘Obeying the rules is enough for me, and the Captain is highly unyielding in this respect. In a world that grows ever more empty, rules have replaced destiny, which has orphaned us. Obeying rules makes life as fatal as destiny: all the rest is a dream, and reason is the restless shadow of that dream.’
‘Maybe you’re the one who’s looking at my husband through a magnifying glass.’
‘You must understand that without any lenses everything becomes insignificant and there’s no rhyme nor reason to it, as well as any of its artistic derivatives: feelings, fear, desire, ambition – or shadows: disloyalty, betrayal, dreams. Time is setting and reading colours everything in so wonderfully well… Besides… believe me… none of us express ourselves better than when we talk either to ourselves or silently to others.’ At which point, as if giving an order, he added: ‘Obviously, the only other means, par excellence, is via a book.’
‘Maybe Arturo the coloniser has confused me and his wife with the natives,’ the Captain’s wife bitterly commented.
‘I must disappoint you there: in order to be a true native, at least according to the colonizer’s conventional stereotype, you’d have to have a quality that you do not possess – and which would balance out the Captain’s eruditio
n – naivety. That’s why all your conversations are dry and stiff.’
It appeared to signify that the audience had been brought to an end.
15
THE COMEDIANS
‘… all right, I’ll tell you a funny story, about a doctor who’s just left, the hospital’s head physician, Doctor Emo, told me: he’s a man who knows this city’s secrets better than its priests and in any case (relying on the strength of his good heart, which appears to absolve him from any of prejudice’s malice) he never has secrets of his own. He devotes his attention to the human body and doesn’t give a fig for sentimental matters. He occasionally uses human bodies to carry out investigations, just like he did with the case of those three people whom he cured of syphilis without any of the three knowing he was treating the others. He kept their names quiet, thus ensuring the invention of a new game or eccentric pastime in town: hunting after the identities of the people in that love triangle.
‘But the story I wish to tell you is a publicly known triangle, and the tight-lipped doctor who just left is the opaque tip of that triangle. Just think that he was always in a good mood, tolerant, easy-going: some said he wasn’t too bright, while others smiled and said he was kindly. He had a beautiful wife and his open character appeared to be a reflection of that possession… which was excessive.
‘As is typical of the colonies, the imbalance between men and women is remarkable, and so we’re left to fight over the same muses, so you can well imagine what envy that meek man with the beautiful wife inspired among the others! People rushed to see her as if they were lining up at the museum to see Venus lying naked on the grass in the shade. But this Venus was chaste: she merely smiled at the collective homage to her as though it had been directed to her portrait. As for her husband, well… he turned a blind eye to the whole thing, pleased by the festiveness of it, as if each new trembling suitor added to the precious wealth of his marital chest. I’m sure that during the golden hours of that nocturnal possession he kept all those faces in mind – who formulated his desire into a howling orchestra which he alone could satisfy. He was like a boss trying to make a speech to a delirious crowd: but instead of words there was the body of a woman.
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