‘And so, you’d like me to believe,’ the journalist said in a mocking tone, slipping a finger through two buttons of his shirt, ‘that there’s a stylish sort of society here in the colony which celebrates the ritual of endlessly complex and varied conversation, that life for Europeans here in Africa is like being in a theatre, and that it has the same intensity, levity, rhythm and liberty…’
‘I don’t want to convince you of anything. I’m not a government spokesperson – I’m often my own worst spokesperson anyway: I pretend so as to conceal what would be useless to say, what others haven’t understood, or in order to throw my interlocutor off his tracks and thus free myself from the situation. Occasionally, however, in order to honour my interlocutor, I engage in a conversation that isn’t futile, where reality is condensed so as to make its true face perceptible.’
‘Judging by the people I have spoken to, I’ve heard nothing but obvious truths, good sense seems to be firmly at the helm here; rather, it seems to me that you, as the narrator, are placing complex, difficult words directly in the mouths of whichever characters come to mind – which does not mean that it’s not good.’ the journalist added, bending his torso to one side.
‘Shakespeare already tried that…’ said the officer who was sat with his guest in the little garden of the villa on the leafy De Martino Avenue, which led one straight to the bridge before the Giuliana beach and its shandy shore: it hadn’t rained in months, and even the plants had acquired the yellowish colour of sand. ‘Why do you complain about all the banalities they utter, or about the fact that I try to avoid them; about all those who slyly simplify life while I try to search for truths, even if, it’s true, I do so staking some claim to elegance, which really simply means modesty and reserve when you get down to it, so as to use it when – just to make an example – horror stumbled onto the scene?’
Paunchy but quick – like the servants in ancient comedies who were ubiquitous and yet incapable of perceiving the drama at hand, let alone respecting it – the journalist furtively snuck a glance at the officer, whose features were angular, his uniform spotless, his gestures thrifty and his voice cold and emotionless.
‘Do you really think I could print such things in a newspaper? They’d laugh at me,’ the journalist said, and in his crumpled white linen suit, he became the first to laugh.
‘And I would laugh at them,’ the officer replied.
A bricklayer, who was busily repairing a roof on the other side of the street, was singing. In actual fact, rather than singing, it seemed as though he was trying to recall some tune: he would ardently launch into a note only for it to flatten out a few moments later, as if the music had slipped away and had blended in with the stillness of everything under that implacable sun.
‘What sets the colony apart is that it seems to have been subtracted from the passage of time itself,’ the officer said as he watched the bricklayer balancing himself atop the roof while humming that song’s fleeting notes. ‘It’s as if the entire colony was a waiting room, but waiting for what? For history’s train to pass through? It’s easy to answer such questions like that: but is it really true? Looking at the people here who are waiting: they spend all their time talking about nothing, and being so punctilious about it – look at them, they let themselves be led alternatively by banalities and ideas, and are always swinging back and forth on their mental seesaws.’
Given that the officer was speaking while looking directly at him, the bricklayer fell silent and stopped to return his gaze. He couldn’t hear anything, but he was intrigued by that man who talked so much under such a brutal sun.
‘At times… it was truly marvelous to lead a regiment into battle and plant the tricolour in the mysterious heart of Africa, even further than the ancient Romans had ever dreamed was possible, while the French and English empires waited to crumble. At times instead I wished that I would be chased out of this wretched colony so that the English and French could take our places here, as if those perishing empires weren’t big enough as it is. I surprised myself thinking about running off in a miserable fashion, with the rolled-up tricolour under my arm. Regardless of the war’s outcome, the Lombard peasant knows if he is going to survive the storm, like a plant he’ll still be there, in the green, familiar plains of his fathers. But what about the colonist?’
‘So, to put it briefly, you think of the colony as a game of roulette: it’s certainly exciting,’ at which the journalist emitted a sound, which seemed like a whistle, as though he were at a stadium.
‘What do you mean, exciting?’ the officer asked, disinterested in striking a familiar tone. ‘Here in the colony, the government’s speeches are even fierier than in Rome, as though we were in the front row. There’s a collective passion at play here, among the people who came here from all parts of Italy. Yet conversations also carve their own paths, which can be arduous and solitary – we live in a situation of privilege and latent doom, so we sit and question ourselves, find the humour in everything, ironise, running away and chasing ourselves: it always seems like everyone’s in a hurry and at the same time that nothing ever changes, because metamorphosis isn’t accounted for in the rules of the game, whose only outcome is either complete control or utter ruin. This is what I was trying to explain to you last night.’
Alone in that deserted café, as midnight drew near, the officer had told the journalist a number of war stories, taking meticulous care with his details while the end lay always just out of sight. The hotel gave out on the public gardens, and tables and chairs had been arranged along the street separating the two, creating oases that were reclaimed from the light. Aided by his accomplice, wine, under the sway of the African night – which levels everything in its path – the journalist had listened to him attentively. Now what he had been told struck him as vacuous: how could any of these stories be of possible use to me or my readers? His good sense had taken its leave thanks to the fairy-tale-teller’s efforts, just like in the plays of old. The morning’s blinding light had made everything appear both improbable and ridiculous.
‘Don’t you like the metaphor of the waiting room?’ the officer asked, after having poured himself a glass of orange soda; he was in his forties and tall, with a hint of authoritarianism to him. ‘Think of all the preparation that goes on inside a dressing room, before stepping out onto the stage and giving shape to the invisible, the unacceptable. There are places where reality seems delirious, ironic, dramatic, and utterly spurious… choose whichever adjective you like. But it is within these nooks and crannies that reality, true reality, really lies. It’s abundantly clear that this colony… is one of these places. Its very premises are unreal: we are treading a land that doesn’t belong to us. Everything else necessarily flows from this flawed premise: the boorish colonist, who is disdainful and violent; the functionary, who has confused his control over such a vast space as license to build a new world; the philanthropist who wants to reshape Africa… I, on the other hand, feel entirely crushed by thought of all that space, by a history that monotonously dragged on through the millennia, by the absolute absence of any trace of the past over the entirety of certain regions… – Africa is a metaphor for the Temple, for a God who either takes everything away or destroys it.’
‘But no!’ the journalist exclaimed, rising to his feet and pacing back and forth; he was wearing brown shoes, which were caked in dust. His face had a reddish glow to it, the African sun left an imprint on all things. ‘If I felt any pride here it was precisely because of the optimism espoused by the people here, which burns far brighter than in the homeland, no city on the peninsula can claim to be as ardently Fascist as this African town.’
‘Which is an optimism I share,’ his guest said, appeased. ‘Reason tells me that we will triumph. But the heart follows its own path, telling me base, sorrowful stories.’
‘Are you worried that I might be a spy, sent to report on your defeatism by the higher authorities? This is why you talk so prudently and vaguely, privileging metaphor
s over statements?’ the journalist, whose name was Gigli, asked him irritatedly, laying his whitish hands on the cement table.
‘If you want to fool yourself into thinking I’m afraid of you, then soit! I’m at your disposal. Everyone invents their own mythology, with their own angels and demons: life grinds to a halt without fictions. Perhaps you too have begun to succumb to the colonial aversion to reality. For those who love the arts, reality doesn’t matter outside of how the imagination is able to recreate it: meaning that the arts are a science of the possible. The colony represents a possibility of an art of living: given certain artificial premises, we drive inevitable consequences in our favour, and all together we run to the end of the road, or rather to the end of many roads. Last night, when we were sat in that deserted café, I was trying to inform your vision of reality: rather I was trying to warp it under the pretext of trying to redeem you from it. Are you after information?’
The officer hesitated. But then he picked up his thread again:
‘You’ve chosen the wrong interlocutor for this, I’m keen on… deformation. Do remember that the Greek theatre, which lies at the root of our civilization’s wordsmithing arts made ample use of masks, which are a metaphor for deformation: only in such conditions can one lift the veil of reality, or of the possible, the world granted to us mortals. Up on the plateaus lie the sublime ruins of the ancient theatres, you should make sure you visit them. When you sit on the bleachers of Cyrene’s amphitheatre your gaze descends towards the valley below and a little further along lies the vague glimmer of the sea. All that awareness takes is a simple gaze across that valley: but you don’t want to shed light on any real bonds and connections that would be too much, a lawyer could do that…’
‘Yes, or a journalist,’ the other ironically remarked, who after experiencing a moment of mimesis with his interlocutor, appeared to have regained possession of his former self, and had planted his feet firmly in reality again – and he had resumed his seat, crossing his large legs. Once he’d returned to the homeland, his friends would doubtlessly enviously ask him about his African adventure. He had experienced any adventure, he might as well have written his articles while comfortably ensconced in his house in Milan, situated on one of the side streets off the historic Corso Magenta. Yet he had met his doppelgänger in Africa: who wasn’t his spitting image per se, but rather his speculative double, with whom he would inevitably fight a duel – not over control of the world, but instead over his imagination, meaning a different kind of narrative.
‘What will you do when war is declared?’ the journalist asked him, leaning his torso forward and aiming his large, sly, banal eyes towards the other: he appeared to be fighting against himself.
‘At that moment, inside the psychological theatre which we all feed inside our heads, the uniform I wear will become the character that leads to the turning point in the drama: and the uniform will urge me to do my duty, a soldier true and brave,xcvi as the poet once said.’
‘So when it comes to the decisive moment you’ll be on the side of the colonial optimists then.’
‘That’s exactly right: except that the colonist is out for victory, whereas I… in Russian novels, conflicts serve to expand our self-awareness. War has now become the immemorial archetype of those novels, and… it crushes everything in its path, just like dreams do. It too hurriedly and violently forces someone to know themselves; in this optic, the external events of a character’s life, amidst the sinisterly all-encompassing fray, is nothing but the shadow of a process of growing self-awareness which nevertheless never leaves any traces on the scene. After all, in ancient times, heroism – at a time when individual physical prowess could prove decisive – was nothing more than a metaphor for this kind of inner journey.’
‘Meaning that war has been downgraded to the category of passions!’
‘Don’t you think that’s enough?’
There was a pause, as if the conversation, which was awkward and arduous, had momentarily faltered.
The journalist was the first to resume.
‘Is there anything you would like me to say in my article?’
‘I don’t understand the question.’
‘Look, at this point… it seems clear to me that you’re not the dreamer, I am: maybe it’s because I’ve drunk too much – or maybe I got a sunstroke, or I’m tired, or I’m under a spell… who knows – but maybe I fell asleep and in the middle of my dream, an officer from our present appeared to translate time for me in his own fashion. I don’t know if this image is leading me towards temptation or salvation, or if that encounter means that I too have given myself over to defeatism, or whether his presence actually makes me flee from such a thought with horror: as if I’d conjured it all up simply to avoid it, as if my journey to Africa had planted some doubts even in my head, and all I did was give those doubts a face – meaning yours – in order to be able to chase him – or them – away definitely.’
‘The uniform decides things for us in the way destiny does for others. We swore an oath.’
‘There you go talking about destiny: I don’t know whether you think of it as an anchor or a curse.’
‘Why couldn’t it be both?’
A pause.
‘The mind is like the natural world: it retains everything, grinds everything up, and welcomes everything in. It is only our behaviours, our way of appearing before others in the world that seems to reveal the presence of choices, of characters, or of a unique way of being in the world.’
‘You seem to be condemning form and conduct, whereas last night, when you described our dinner companions once they left after talking about such trite things, you seemed to be magnifying their importance.’
‘When one’s personality falls apart, form is a levee that holds back the floods: if a fire breaks out in the bleachers, you seek shelter on the stage.’
‘Here we go again, back to the theatre: you’re obsessed with theatres.’
‘The stage is the traditional setting where irony flowers, sometimes into sublime shapes. Careful, though: I’m not talking about ironic conversations, which we celebrate with such pomp on the stage. It’s that the mere, simple act of making theatre belongs to the world of irony: what could you possibly make up that could ever be more ironic than an opera theatre? Stories involving puppets and madmen: that said, how many wonderful things have been said thanks to those ridiculous premises, to all those fixed conventions that were both unacceptable and yet solid and well-defined. Well, by that logic, the colony, an unreal place, a land stolen from other people, where nothing at all justified our presence, where we’ve hatched sublime schemes that are possibly destined to vanish along with the rest of us tomorrow, is a stage, par excellence. Treading these boundless, deserted boards are the drama’s lead protagonists, the soldiers: the colony’s guardians, who are here to defend it, to increase its greatness, although tomorrow we will be the ones who will be pointed out as the ones responsible for out defeat – that is if the war is nothing but a trap. What about us, do you think we should sitting around talking with a Milanese shopkeeper’s specious sense of calm? Who’s been there forever? He was a shopkeeper yesterday and he’ll be a shopkeeper tomorrow, right in the same square patch of earth, even if the homeland relinquishes all of its colonies in Africa, even if they end up cursing the day they ever set foot in Africa? The colonists here – and especially the officers, who are the supreme figures of authority – cannot afford to be frivolous with their banality because banality in Africa was not expendable.’
‘That’s what you say: I’ve spoken to colonists who were very pleased with themselves, in fact they were quite arrogant.’
‘The imagination of the African colonist farmer has nothing of the avarice of their counterparts back in the homeland. The mere fact of living in the colony has allowed them to reinvent and rediscover themselves: there’s something alluring about an illiterate colonist who says he’s come here to bring civilisation to the natives. He’s clearly a saint.’
‘Or a buffoon!’
‘Is there a difference? We abandoned all sense of measure back in the homeland, here a doppelgänger takes over for you: he’s more active, aware, inventive – in short, he’s freer – no, rid of all inhibitions – and his conversation is unpredictable and layered. Tell me: do you think an illiterate farmer in Lecco would really talk about civilising missions? Where? We are one step away from triumph – where all of Africa will be ours – or utter defeat – at which point we’ll be denied even this patch of desert: we’re hanging in the balance. This is the source of the unusual eloquence you’ve witnessed in the missionary colonists and in me, a captain in His Majesty’s army. The colony is an artificial environment where people do not gain any new and better faculties in this rarified, half-fantastic milieu. But the faculties they do have acquire much greater definition.xcvii
‘Is that a quote? I can see how artificial its diction is.’
‘Of course… but don’t ask me which book I got it from… I don’t read all that much… a friend showed me the passage… and it is about a completely different place… – but a place, just like this colony, which is at an odd angle to everyday life. Perhaps our truly devilish dream was to try to convert such a fantastic place to a quiet normality. All of what the authorities have haughtily claimed – that this land used to be Roman, that it faces the mare nostrum, etc. – are the same, mad aspirations shared by both the military and the colonists: we want to convert the authorities’ speeches into a practical reality, into knowledge, into laws. Whereas Africa (and please forgive the humiliating banality here) is like a lover who one day loves you passionately, only to send you on your way tomorrow.’
‘You’re placing yourself on the same level as the illiterate colonist, given that you’re both characters in a unique situation.’ and the journalist illustrated his words with his fingers, ‘but there comes a point where the differences between the two of you are as deep as the abyss itself: it is certainly true that we’re treading a land that didn’t belong to our ancestors, and it’s equally true that Africa or the English might be waiting to play a nasty trick on us, the abyss – a lost war – but maybe… tomorrow everything will go the way it should. In the meanwhile, however, the colonist lives in horror of the abyss, you demonstrate an attraction to death, which is irresponsible. You seem to have given your blessing to our coming defeat, and I for one as a patriot hope that this attitude isn’t shared by your fellow officers.’
The Fourth Shore Page 38