Omar crossed the neighbourhood again, running through one alley after the other, until he reached the street where the shop was situated. It was late at night by then, and the street was quiet: neither tambourines nor flutes could be heard.
When the Countess played the piano, Khadija’s face lost its hearty glow, and she would appear barefoot at the threshold and look compassionately at the beautiful Countess. The morning creature for whom she braved the Count’s severity, Rosina’s favourite nephew, Antonino – whom Saber had been astonished to chance upon while the officer dozed on a bench in the garden, and who was still so youthful despite his military uniform – would never change, Khadija had confided in Omar: maturity and old age would not be a part of Antonino’s destiny.
Omar pushed the door to the shop open and stepped inside. In the semi-darkness, the loom that took up almost the entire room looked like an infernal machine enshrouded by impenetrable shadows. He pushed the little door that led into the back room. The assistants had vanished, but Sharafeddin had his back against the wall, his head bent slightly, his eyes half open. Antonino was sprawled face down on the floor.
Omar knelt down and rolled him over. He was drunk. Omar argued bitterly with his cousin. He was afraid to leave the shop with the officer in that state. The only people out at night on the streets of Benghazi were patrols of suspicious soldiers.
Once he’d chased Sharafeddin away, he repositioned his friend more comfortably, covered him with a blanket, and fell asleep by his side.
Omar woke Antonino at dawn and tried to make him look respectable, but Antonino pushed him away and left. Omar ran after him, but kept at a distance. The streets were deserted.
Facing out onto the little streets of the old city were modest-looking secret houses, their only distinctive feature an ample door with engraved door knockers. They were whitewashed, with a grey band at the base of the walls where the humidity had rotted the plaster.
The pink two-storey houses, on the other hand, displayed an array of doors and windows on the ground floor and little balconies on the first floor, one right next to the other. They were inhabited by members of the city’s ethnic minorities, who lived according to different customs. All their windows were kept shut.
The city was very inhospitable in the freezing dawn. The young officer crossed it, shivering: it was like walking on the mysterious, iridescent floor of the sea.
At ten in the morning the Count returned home looking very pale, his hands all tense, as if he’d been crumpling up endless sheets of paper: Antonino had fallen from his horse and cracked his skull on a rock, his curly haired head seemingly drawn to it like a magnet. His regiment had been on manoeuvres at Ayn Zayana, to the east of the city, where the lone spring on that boundless plain had formed a lake almost parallel to the sea. The lake was surrounded by dunes, with tufts of green palm tree foliage sticking out of the snow-white sand.
Next to the spring, the dunes gave way to large slabs of rock. Spooked by the booming sound of a trumpet breaking the silence in that desolate place, Antonino’s horse had tripped on one of the slabs, throwing the young officer from his saddle into the hard ground’s embrace.
When the Count announced the news, the loyal Omar shielded himself and retreated a few steps. He saw a horse rider hurtling towards Antonino and unseating him: it was Sharafeddin. Omar’s cousin was the closed door past which Antonino couldn’t go. Wherever else he went, Antonino would easily find his way in, but Sharafeddin was the human embodiment of his limits. That silent, desolate lake was one of Sharafeddin’s favourite places: the guardian of the lake had risen up out of the water to kill the intruder while he was surrounded by his fellow soldiers.
What was his loyalty worth? Omar remembered that he’d been the one to take Antonino to see Sharafeddin in that shop in the old city, dominated by that deafening hand-loom. Sharafeddin had given them a hostile reception. The shop was narrow, and there had barely been enough room for them. The duel had taken place on the boundless plain, on the lake’s untouched shores.
Omar went to hide in the room at the far end of the courtyard. Who would believe that such a banal fall could have caused a mortal wound? Only he had seen who else was present at the scene: the trumpet had merely been Sharafeddin’s ruse to escape being detected by Antonino’s fellow soldiers. Right from the beginning, Khadija had kept an eye out for characters who manifested themselves only in the form of sound. The tragedy had reached its conclusion on a barren plain devoid of words and sights.
XIV
Ten days later, once all hope was lost, Antonino was transferred from the hospital to the deputy governor’s house on a stretcher. His head was bandaged, a kind of white disguise that framed his small face in a military pose. Now that the great door of death barred his path, the peculiar discrepancy between his childlike face and the role of a warrior and lover that life that thrust upon him seemed to be the culmination of his pathetic destiny.
Sitting on the edge of the brass bed inside the brightly lit guest room in his house, while the sea breeze filled the ample muslin curtains with air, swelling them like sails, the Count felt as though he were the accused appearing before the court.
What sins had Antonino committed? Perhaps that of believing he could pass through every door, that he could disregard all the rules? Or was that agony nothing but a journey, the visible form of a metamorphosis whose outcome was always unpredictable?
But perhaps instead of a court with incomprehensible laws no amount of pity would have placated, there was the personal and secret envy of a god from whom Antonino had cajoled the secret of how to walk anywhere without leaving any tracks. The Count asked himself whether he hadn’t also envied his nephew and whether he hadn’t actually put that weapon in the hand of that god. Perhaps it had been due to the difficulties his plan presented, as well as the uncertainty of where his own path was headed, but it was a vain torment, which added to his already considerable discomfort.
Antonino slipped in and out of consciousness for hours at a time. Whenever he came to, if his beloved aunt was in the room she would hysterically suffer through his agony, either defying the irrevocable, or trying to make it insignificant. She wasn’t preparing his soul for the unknown, but was defending herself from it – embodying the laughable, ironic refusal of moderation when faced with the blackmail of the immeasurable.
That frivolous, vain attempt was a pantomime played out before the solemn gate of death, not with a view directed at the afterlife, but instead with a gaze fixed on what was about to be left behind – a tender, heartrending goodbye.
When Antonino was alone with the Count he no longer concealed the horror of that inexorable path, and the discrepancy between his childlike face and the solemn majesty of those pearly gates could no longer be reconciled. Shock and fear hadn’t aged that boy’s face by a single day.
‘I’m so scared of dying in such a distant place!’ he said, clasping the Count’s hand.
XV
On hearing Khadija mercilessly pounding their bedroom door with the palm of her hand, Count Alonzo and Countess Rosina understood that death had solemnly entered their home. The Count switched the lights on, but hesitated. Then he laid his hand on Rosina’s shoulder and drew her close to him. He got out of bed, and slid his feet into his slippers. He had to open the door for Khadija, but he would never allow her to enter the room where they shared a bed.
When he opened the door, Khadija stepped inside. She took the Count’s hand in hers and kissed it. ‘What is good lives inside you,’ she said. She crossed the room. She was barefoot. Rosina was sitting up, her hands folded in her lap. Khadija put her hand on the Countess’s head, tilted it, and kissed her white forehead. ‘Praise to He who remains alone.’
The Count was confused by a few incomprehensible gestures, as though his body had lost its centre of gravity. He drew near to his wife, and murmured a phrase into her ear that nobody heard. ‘Let her cry to her heart’s content,’ Khadija said, putting a stop to his useless efforts
.
She slid her mistress’s feet into her slippers.
When Rosina stood up, Khadija headed for the door, leading the procession out of the room. The Count and Countess followed her along the corridor and down the stairs. The Count was hypnotised by Khadija’s feet: she moved in the shadows of the door that so terrified the young officer without either hurrying or being afraid, as though she’d known all along when and how that precious life would end. The Count thought back to Antonino’s first days in the colony and the cook’s indulgence towards that boy in his military uniform – but the expert soothsayer had refused to divine the boy’s fate by examining the black sludge at the bottom of his coffee cup. The wrathful shadow that crossed her swarthy face wasn’t moodiness, it was experience.
As soon as they entered Antonino’s room, Omar rushed towards them. He had stretched his friend’s arms out along his sides, in the way believers should be prepared for meeting God. ‘He wished you well with what strength he had left in him,’ he said, clasping the Count’s hand firmly. Then he clasped Rosina’s hand. ‘We will grieve together,’ he said.
The Count took a few steps towards Antonino’s slender white body lying on its deathbed. He grazed his fingers against Antonino’s cold hand. Rosina seemed both drawn and repelled. Eventually she went to the Count’s side, knelt before the bed, and buried her face in her hands.
Old Saber appeared on the threshold. He’d heard footsteps and strange noises. His skin had become very pale, as always happened when he was troubled. He could barely stand on his feet, and his knees were tired. He made a gesture as though trying to catch everyone’s attention. Rosina still had her face buried in her hands. But she found the silence behind her unsettling, and she stood up. Saber walked a couple of steps closer to the bed. How fragile that old man was, and how faraway he seemed. ‘Praise be to God,’ he said, ‘since nobody survives after Him.’
Rosina saw before her the little gold theatre on whose boards they had so pompously played their roles up until that moment, and the illusory candles of ‘civilisation’ that had shined a light on their every move. In that hour’s solemn darkness, the only candles they could use to guide their way were the traditional phrases of the indigenous people, the sound of their voices the only light.
Alonzo wasn’t the one who was in danger in that distant land, as in fact she had been saying ever since he had left Italy for Cyrenaica, always seeing him far away from her, and from himself, as though he’d lost himself in that passionate journey. Or perhaps death had missed its intended target and struck an innocent instead? Destiny first plays with words, then throws the designated victim onto the scene; and destiny alone chooses the victim, out of whimsy. An angered god had hidden a rock in his hand, which Antonino’s head had smashed against after he was unseated from his horse. That land could only belong to a single people.
But the time for analysis and conjecture had come to an end: they were nothing but vain and useless wreaths lain against the ashen faces of the dead …
The top part of Antonino’s head was wrapped in bandages, but the lower part was white and transparent, like the asphodel flowers that jutted out of the fields of the acropolis in Tolmeta. Once, when he’d been on his way back from the ancient city, Antonino had left an asphodel on top of the shiny black piano. Rosina thought she could hear the notes of Chopin’s posthumous waltzes. Antonino’s face looked like those waltzes: it was tender, and tragic.
Omar asked if he could wash his friend’s body. He didn’t know anything about these foreigners’ customs, but a guest had to be buried with the same considerations that applied to one’s brothers. And since prayer – an act of appearing before God – cannot be performed without the necessary ritual ablutions, no body could be buried without being washed, so it could properly present itself before God.
The Count remained silent, lost in his thoughts. He didn’t trouble Rosina with any questions or affectionate caresses. Coolness of manners is a virtue. There would be no such discretion the following day when their fellow Italians learned the news. Rosina thought with horror about those empty phrases she would be forced to hear a thousand times:
‘Please accept my condolences.’
‘He was so young.’
‘To be killed by falling off one’s horse!’
‘What grief it caused me.’
‘You can count on me.’
… and so on and so forth.
She felt so tired that she wanted to go back to bed. The Count followed her. Once she’d reached the door, she was startled. Something had got stuck yet again, and could move neither forwards nor backwards. Her robe was loose, revealing her well-shaped breasts. The prominence of her bosom made her look like a soprano. Old Saber walked ahead of her, leading the way with little dragging steps.
Rosina leaned her hand against the Count’s arm. For the first time since she had arrived in Benghazi she was grateful to have those servants in her house. Thus reconciled, they followed the old man up the stairs and down the corridor, until they reached their bedroom door.
Epilogue
BENITO MUSSOLINI, PRIME MINISTER
I have the honour of announcing to Parliament that His Majesty the King, in his decree dated October 31st, has accepted the resignations of the Right Honourable Luigi Facta from the office of President of the Council of Ministers, and of his colleagues, the Ministers and Under Secretaries of State, and has asked me to form a new government.
Gentlemen!
For many years, in fact for too many years, Parliament saw fit to create and resolve crises in Government through more or less tortuous and underhand tactics, so much so that a crisis came to be regarded as a regular scramble for portfolios and the ministry, as caricatured in the comic papers. Now, for the second time in the brief space of seven years, the Italian people, or rather the best part of it, have overthrown the government and formed an entirely new one, which lies wholly outside the current system and refuses any appointments offered to it. The seven years of which I speak lie between May 1915 and October 1922. I shall leave to the gloomy partisans of super-Constitutionalism the task of discoursing, more or less plaintively, about all this. I maintain that revolution has its rights; and, I may add, so that everyone may know, that I am here to defend and give the greatest value to the revolution of the ‘black shirts.’
I could have carried our victory much further, and I refused to do so. I imposed limits on my actions and told myself that the truest wisdom is one which survives even after victory. With three hundred thousand fully armed young men who are ready for anything and zealously prompt to obey any command I give them, I could have punished everyone who slandered the Fascists and threw mud at them. I could have made a bivouac of this grey hall; I could have shut up Parliament and formed a government composed exclusively of Fascists …
‘Bivouac Speech’, November 16th 19227
The Count, who was the managing director of a textile company where his father-in-law was the major shareholder, was walking along the Via Santa Margherita in Milan on a clear evening in September 1931. He had attended a dinner at the house of some friends, a discreet pretext under which fellow anti-Fascist liberals could meet and discuss politics. Implacable dogs were defending economic interests: the cult of liberty was blooming in those elegant catacombs. The Count had listened closely to noblemen, scholars, and passionate discussions.
Two days earlier, after a celebrated trial had taken place in the rooms that once housed the dissolved Cyrenaican assembly, the legendary leader of the twenty-year Libyan resistance to the Italian occupation Sidi Omar al-Mukhtar had been hanged at the age of seventy-four. The execution had been carried out in Solluk, a wretched little village to the south of Benghazi. The man had the same name as the young man who’d lived in the Count’s house when he was in Africa.
The Count was astonished that his anti-Fascist friends hadn’t mentioned that murder during their noble, scholarly, and passionate discussions.
7 Translation by André Naffis-
Sahely.
1927
THE NOCTURNAL VISITOR
The night is an intermission. Standing upright on the threshold, Sheikh Hassan scanned the empty room. The candle was making the shadows dance and flicker across the walls. In the right-hand corner was a wooden chest filled with books. To read is to travel. He mulled over the secret his wife had maliciously decided to confide in him. The night had subjugated him: the reptile that had entered his house now lingered there, spellbound. Sheikh Hassan held the candle aloft, then lowered it. It made him happy to distance himself from others. He moved the candle to and fro as though performing an exorcism. To leave the world behind, then enter it again through the portal opened by books. Those mountains and that splendid valley were dearer to him than any other place on earth. After nightfall, they fitted into the hollow of the hand. His eyes embraced the tiny valley illuminated by the blinding sun; the candle’s wan glow revealed a world without borders, which had been magically preserved in a few books.
From the little window in his room Sheikh Hassan was able to keep contemplating that deserted place by the light of the moon, which gave the valley the calm clarity of a sheet of paper. Sheikh Hassan took to his days with a lord’s calm condescension: a tension that was at times fiery, and at others intolerable, but always exaggerated, fleeting, useless. Nothing left except books.
He would have to choose sides in the predicament his wife had revealed. History tells us of dazzling individuals who inspire in readers a confused admiration and a gratitude that is occasionally intertwined with fear and horror. But that particular incident was devoid of merriment: a judge, which was the role he’d been allotted, was merely a conduit for the application of the law.
The Colonial Conquest: The Confines of the Shadow Volume I Page 26