VIII
The Count laid his book down on the floor. The month of fasting had begun, and the streets emptied around sunset – even most Italians hardly left their houses. Occasionally, the Count liked to go out for a stroll precisely at that time, enchanted by the silence of the city. He toured Benghazi like a museum: the stillness made every object precious and rare.
The books he’d read on Africa, even the ones that had seemed promising, had disappointed him: they were full of impressions only fit for those who lived far away. The uniformity of the images they offered was caused by omissions intolerable to anyone like Count Alonzo, who compared these books to the reality before his eyes. They proved poor guides to the conflict he’d committed himself to waging: by crossing the sea, those books had been exposed to a light that altered them, and had rotted away. They’re like spoilt fruit, he thought, and anyone who eats them will also expire.
He stood up. He wouldn’t find the sought-after keys to that country in those books, and it was pointless to read or even leaf through so many. They were more like sounds than words, or maybe more like objects.
He approached the window. The courtyard was deserted: the servants had left the house an hour before the breaking of the fast. Moderation doesn’t mean imposing limits on oneself – one must walk lightly and gracefully down the path of experience and knowledge. The motto of Renaissance humanism was ‘Festina Lente’. Its splendour intact, it had crossed the seas. While reading so many dishonest books was humiliating, his contact with Libya’s indigenous people was growing more cheerful, even if it caused his outlook to grow more sombre than he’d previously imagined: the conversations led to deeper depths, the sacred place to which all rivers led. The strength to endure all that’s obscure, to not maim reality simply in order to console ourselves – that’s what makes destiny into a journey! The more time passes here – and the more we follow this liberal course with the Basic Charter, which we treat as though it were some magic talisman – the more we complicate the situation, rejecting all our efforts. We have granted the natives this Basic Charter because of our inability to pacify the country by means of arms; nevertheless, we’ve painted it as a grand gesture, as though granting these inferior people the right to open the book of civilisation. When I try to gain the natives’ acceptance, I should employ the same efforts as when I try to impose these ‘Basic Charters’ on them. In fact, the Basic Charter was a passport designed to make them accept us. What nourishes the desire for acceptance? Am I repudiating the society I come from? Or perhaps I’m worried that my beloved civilisation is reaching the hour of its inexorable decline, and by bonding with the ‘barbarians’, I’m trying to guarantee my survival? This monologue was the direct result of solitude, an irrepressible weed which grew in that savage, forsaken place. My political zeal conceals a secret desire: my high-ranking position is only a refuge, a mask. I offered these people a Basic Charter, and identified with that mission in order to hide my eagerness for them to share my heart and my bed.
The landscape outside the window was static, like the backdrop to a non-existent play. The sky was blue, just like it always was. The province of Cyrenaica lacked adequate aquifers, even if the few rain showers that occurred were extremely violent, like an outburst of heavenly wrath: the city had been conquered and it had submitted, and it thus returned to its former swamp-like state.
Anyone who’s angered by their desires is afraid, and won’t go far in their journey; having reached a crossroads, and instead of proceeding cautiously, they’ll shut their eyes or run away, torn between hope and desperation, between ardour and dread. Desire has conjured a vision before my eyes, and I shoo it away, slowly but earnestly. Renunciation is not tantamount to weakness: I’m the deputy governor, the city’s eyes are on me, and secrets aren’t allowed. I’m not angry with myself, nor do I deny the force of the vision. But I won’t grant that desire the freedom to run roughshod over my duties.
Is Omar loyal to me? And yet this precious servant is a ‘native’, meaning therefore a potential enemy. On the other hand, I represent a more generous political power; we granted them the Basic Charter. My own job is that of a humble servant; but if the efforts of the Basic Charter’s supporters and those aiming for reconciliation fail, the country will be split in two, and Omar will become my enemy. He will be a native who defends his land, his sacred homeland, grieved by the violence of strangers.
We all follow our own paths. Likewise, the wooden boats we set out in to come here will go in directions determined by elements that for the most part elude us: like in a dream, the beach we landed on isn’t the one we embarked for. All of us, including kind, loyal Omar, will see our feelings change according to how the negotiations between the two warring parties progress. Our bond grows in the narrow patch of shadow created by the Basic Charter. If this should disappear, we’ll be forced to part ways.
An antithesis always implies an attachment. In this house, Omar and I represent the two warring parties: what binds us together? If Rosina dislikes the servants so much, it’s because she senses this attachment. At least part of this attachment is patently obvious: the servants are natives, who belong to an oppressed group, whereas I belong – albeit with reservations – to the oppressors. Oppression is an injustice, and injustice is the fatal link that binds us.
They interpreted the civilisation we gave them as a ‘gift’ as oppression. The Libyans will refuse the Basic Charter we granted them – all in order to show these barbarians how they would be better off as citizens, even if only second-class citizens – and they’ll tear it up along with the Italian flag. To be a foreigner is a magical condition: this land will never belong to me, no matter how many cannons and rifles I bring here; weapons will only protect me, and I don’t know how long that will last. Alas, you can’t put down roots with cannons. Regardless of what that witch Muna says, Omar isn’t my son: he’s my rival. Not my heir, but he who will triumph from my defeat. If I were his father, I’d belong to his past: but how can you change someone’s ancestors? That is the only miracle that’s never happened, and whatever binds us pales in comparison to that conflict! Omar is my prisoner, and no real bond can exist between us, except through oppression. He doesn’t want to be adopted by me, since he thinks this would mean forsaking all his ancestors, the most abominable murder conceivable.
The Count picked up the book he’d laid on the floor. Deemed an expert on African affairs by the ministry, the author had long hoped for the conquest of Libya to happen – an innocent, even generous act of bravado – as well as its colonisation. Having entered the stage as an actor in the third or fourth act of this tragedy, the deputy governor of Cyrenaica envied that writer who’d appeared in the serene atmosphere of the prologue, oblivious to how events would unfold.
His passion, like all deep sentiments, was devoid of pedantry. Even though he despised these books, which had been used for ends that differed greatly from the reasons they’d been written, he collected them because they distracted him. Plagued by exhaustion, he wound up identifying with the innocent traveller: he just needed to picture the ‘savages’ as peaceful apparitions. The stern mantle of the King’s representative fell from his shoulders. The barbarian conqueror, the aggressor, took on the garb of the honoured guest. Once reality’s implacable sun faded away, the little theatres of lies became playful and plausible, in fact legitimate.
At that moment, his responsibilities and burdens as deputy governor seemed very easy to bear. The tragic stage of life had been reduced to the size of a little theatre. Sleep surprised him during the performance.
IX
Rosina was standing next to the piano, which looked like an enormous black book. The window in front of her was wide open.
These were the last days of the year, and night fell quickly, a tidal wave that submerged everything. Rosina loved that cheerful hour: a secret and constant flux of thoughts guided her through the shadows.
Alonzo’s reality is the web of conflicts in the society we live in:
he’s not interested by the power struggle in Rome, but rather in a formula that might resolve the colony’s contradictions.
Nevertheless, these legitimate efforts were linked to something obscure and indefinable. The resolution of conflict in the colony seemed like the finishing line at the end of a different life. Her life companion appeared to be absent because he was treading an altogether different path.
Alonzo annoys the collaborators. What annoys them most about him is the infinite patience with which he observes indigenous society, and how he constantly demystifies all the conventions of colonial ideology. His thoughts are like clear water that surges out of a distant spring and does not mix with the stagnant swamp. The native is a living shadow, while our fellow Italians are like a scrubby field they no longer wish to harvest.
The anxiety prompted by his quest is not caused by the conflicts he’s trying to unravel: its origins lie elsewhere, or at most have a tangential link to those conflicts. Alonzo is fond of saying he’s not aiming to psychologically analyse anyone’s soul, or to resolve an inner conflict. He has lost his fundamental bond, the vision of the world within which he’s been educated, and alienated from the world he comes from, he’s looking for a new connection, a new spiritual wholeness: the natives’ gestures, even their most insignificant, hypnotise him as fragments of a totality, a circle where all the points are joined by a single line. Is this what we call the Mal d’Afrique?
Alonzo’s refusal to change course and turn around shows that he’s hiding behind his public persona’s deceptive appearance. The Mal d’Afrique is the pain caused by alienation, the fatal wound of a spiritual organ.
‘You use music as a form of escapism!’ he thundered. Music offers a glimpse into a different reality and acts as a bridge to it: if Alonzo speaks with such wrath it’s because he’s trying to avert suspicions from himself.
If I lose myself on these ivory keys, the sound of the native flutes has led Alonzo’s soul down secret paths, far away from all that’s familiar. He’s not only grown distant from me, he’s grown distant from himself; his destiny is in the hands of a cryptic doppelgänger. It’s as if the conqueror and the native had become bewitched by each other’s presence: the native threatens the stability of the conqueror’s world, and this threat causes murders, regrets and deliriums. As for the conqueror, the native transforms from an object of optimism to the source and living embodiment of the conqueror’s anguish.
Does death mask itself as a native? A bloodcurdling discovery that isn’t limited to the field of battle, when the wounded officer sees the enemy on horseback hurtling towards him, it can even occur in a tidy office in a well-defended barracks, or in the palaces of government, during the midst of a sumptuous public ceremony or luncheon.
Music lies in the opposite direction to Alonzo’s destination. But even these opposites are linked. Alonzo in his office and me at the piano are either travelling or praying. They’re both transitory ways of being.
He accuses me of escaping into music, but flight is the opposite of a quest, although they too are interconnected.
Even for me, leaving Italy was like crossing a border that divides two very different experiences. Why this rift? Alonzo doesn’t love me like he once used to. I’m no longer the Rosina who once made his heart ache. Je suis la pauvre Comtesse Almaviva, a sad woman he no longer loves. Je l’ai trop aimé! Je l’ai lassé de mes tendresses et fatigué de mon amour.6 Both his wife and the concept of marriage itself belong to, or indeed symbolise, the very society he is rejecting. The interest he takes in his public life is only an alternative to bourgeois life. What he sees in me, as his wife, and in this consecrated union that binds us, is a diabolical pact whereby he has traded his soul for a dull sense of peace. But if Alonzo is fleeing from the law, he is also looking for it. The law is the reconstructed circle. Any other shape is inharmonious. This is the root of the deputy governor’s haste: he needs to reach an accord before the two parties resume fighting.
The essence of any religious phenomenon is the division of the universe into two orders that mutually exclude one another. The encounter with a completely alien civilisation works similarly: knowledge always leads to discord.
At the sound of the first rifle shots, Alonzo’s journey will come to an end, and he’ll be the first victim: he won’t be found dead on a battlefield, but will be forced back into the very museum that going to Africa allowed him to escape.
What will I be able to offer him? The sound of my music will torment him – it’s like offering a man petrified by a spell a thousand roads to walk down.
What was the Countess doing alone in that hall, already submerged in darkness? Khadija soundlessly climbed the stairs and saw the door was ajar. She observed Rosina standing still in the middle of the room, next to the piano’s curving recess. Who was with that woman?
In Alonzo’s case the fear of the other civilisation, which poisons the conqueror’s mind, became the end goal of his quest. The two civilisations – the one we represent, which left a splendid mark on history, and that of the barbarians, which history ignores – can if not integrate, then at least come together, like a married couple. Nevertheless, the terror of the intersection inevitably leads one down the fatal steps to that intersection anyway. The fear of breaking the law makes one break the law. This breach is designed to lead to the restoration of a pre-existing unity, but every diabolical dream has the rhythmic ebb of a return.
What is chaos? A horrible past, a monster controlled by the social order in which we were educated – or the last barren, uncultivated land where order hasn’t yet installed itself? The longed-for God … At times, something breaks and turns upside down in the conqueror, who is the deadly embodiment of order. Like in Alonzo’s case … Whoever considers their civilisation a dogma becomes a traveller; whoever destroys, becomes he who seeks. The new opportunities chaos creates turns he who sows into he who reaps.
Lifting the fall board, Rosina sat in front of the keys. She leafed through the books whose wide pages had made the cook so suspicious. Under Rosina’s small, frail hands, the demons imprisoned in those occult books transformed into sounds – their natural state, the way in which they manifested themselves and accomplished their deeds.
Khadija slammed the door. ‘What shall I make for dinner?’
Sound versus sound: the innocuous demons lingered on the large book’s thick, black lines.
If one wanted to divine the Countess’s nature, one had to approach her circumspectly. The invisible, whether auspicious or not, never reveals itself except reluctantly.
Khadija grabbed hold of the Countess’s hand and examined it: there was nothing extraordinary about that little perfectly proportioned hand. It contained an invisible sound. Khadija brought it up to her ear.
‘All right, tonight I’ll cook a traditional Libyan soup,’ she said.
6 Lines from Beaumarchais’ Le mariage de Figaro, Act II, Scene I.
X
A perfume was altering the equilibrium of the house, and Rosina searched in vain for its source. It had entered all the rooms, descended to the courtyard, and spied on the people who lived in the house: now it had grown more intense, and wandered around autonomously, alternatively running away from her and heading towards her.
One Sunday afternoon the house had been prepared to welcome guests. They had not been selected according to the Count’s sympathies, but by the necessity of bringing all the spokes of society’s wheel together. The attention Rosina had put into the preparation of the canapés and the sweets unburdened her of the need to tend to the guests; she welcomed them indifferently.
The perfume was the unexpected guest, and it was the first to arrive.
Their paths crossed in rooms that were still devoid of people. But it would suddenly slip out of her grasp, and if Rosina tried to chase it, she soon lost its tracks. The invisible guest was hot on the heels of someone else, and it was impossible to tell whether this second character was visible.
Khadija looked serene
but inscrutable. One could observe her features until one’s eyes grew exhausted, but never find a thing: she buried her secrets in her face as though it were a patch of earth.
The afternoon was consecrated to Italian opera. To attentive ears, melodrama offers a reading of reality – linking together elements previously believed to be irrevocably divided, unscrupulously utilising polarity as a plot device – and could, if properly understood, be a constant repudiation of hackneyed patterns.
Rosina crossed the hall and sat down in front of the piano. She was alone. The épouse délaissé’s imprudent hand opened the fall board. The invisible guest revealed itself.
The cook had sprinkled the keyboard with a burnt incense, as a ceremony against the evil eye, the lord of all evil spirits. Magic is the means whereby one can travel in the reality where these spirits operate. It was customary to draw seven circles with the incense on the head of people who’d been possessed by these malign spirits, before eventually burning it. Either Khadija had done this to the Countess in secret, or she had sprinkled it on the keyboard because that’s where she thought those spirits manifested themselves.
The perfume was the spirit under Khadija’s control. Whom did sound obey? Was it the sixth guest in the house, or was it the doppelgänger of one of the other five characters? It was a plane of reality that ran parallel to the visible world, thus doubling reality, a path superimposed on the path one walked in public. Sound is a bridge. Travelling through sound waves, the impossible – the armour of the unpredictable – would become possible, and fear led back to its positive roots: love. Fleeing is the opposite of falling, but he who falls has already reached his destination, and the precipice is nothing but an illusory distance, vanishing before he who braves his trial.
Khadija was on the tracks of the spirit of sound, challenging it for the right to bind and unbind souls. The row of black-and-white keys was the pillow on which the Countess laid her head, where the spirit weaved lofty and frightening intrigues. The burnt perfume had to wake her up. Transformed into a perfume, the heavyset Khadija kept watch over the house.
The Colonial Conquest: The Confines of the Shadow Volume I Page 24