The Confines of the Shadow

The Young Maronite-1

1912

THE YOUNG MARONITE

BOOK I

CHAPTER 1

November 1912

I

The young Maronite had lied. Only a quarter of the cargo belonged to him, and the rest was owned by Rabagian the Armenian, his business partner. He was only entitled to half the profits, once the shipping costs from Alexandria to the Cyrenaican coast had been deducted. Hajji Semereth eyed the young man closely: he suspected he was lying, but instead of decreasing, his benevolence towards him grew. That Christian owned very little, perhaps even nothing, yet he was so sure of himself that he wasn’t afraid of lying. Lies were promissory notes he would eventually settle on time. He pretended to take the young man’s words at face value. Cowardly obeisance to reality is the rot that eats away at the mediocre. That young man was ambitious, and lying was simply a form of risk-taking. Hajji Semereth decided to take him under his wing.

He asked to be shown the merchandise, and despite noticing its inferior quality he praised it, because he knew he would be able to sell it. The war had paralysed commerce and depleted all stockpiles. Hajji Semereth said he was prepared to purchase part of the cargo, but he wanted a discount. Trade at the market was slow that day and that first deal might expedite the sale of the rest. Hajji Semereth paid in cash.

The young Maronite accepted Hajji Semereth’s offer, thinking that Hajji Semereth might prove useful to him in that city where he’d only just landed: the young Maronite was looking for a patron, and Hajji Semereth seemed kindly disposed to him.

‘We have ourselves a deal,’ the merchant said, ‘I’ll take a quarter of the stock.’

The young Maronite looked at him. He trustingly put his hand into Hajji Semereth’s enormous palm and said, ‘Deal.’

Hajji Semereth invited the young man up to the stern deck to have some tea. The young man didn’t seem impatient; it looked as though he trusted that giant faith had been put in his path.

‘I’ve brought so much stuff with me!’ Hajji Semereth exclaimed, as he climbed the rope ladder to the deck ahead of the boy, ‘Cloths, copper, medicine, sugar, oil, tea.’

Then the giant who towered above Émile leaned his hand on the latter’s shoulder and cheerfully added: ‘And a new friend!’

II

Hajji Semereth told Émile where he could find a warehouse for his goods not far from the market, and sent a boy to accompany him. They had come ashore that morning. The young man thanked his new friend and promised to meet him later that afternoon. Hajji Semereth told him he could keep the servant with him until that evening.

Émile looked for an inn, but the small town didn’t seem to offer anything suitable. He regretted not having taken up the merchant’s offer to lodge with him, but he didn’t want to be in the man’s debt. There was something larger than life about that man, not only his height but his corpulence. His intentions were generous, but Émile’s desires didn’t correspond with those intentions. Hajji Semereth’s heavy cloak, which hung down to his feet, made him look even more imposing.

The young man decided to sleep in the warehouse he had rented. It was spacious enough, and dry. A window on the roof lined with thick, strong bars allowed a little air to waft in.

The servant that Hajji Semereth had given him proved most useful. He procured Émile a bed and some pitchers of water. He also helped him open two cases, whose contents he checked: perhaps his first customers might show up as soon as tomorrow. He was itching to be put to the test.

The boy was well acquainted with the market. The Maronite listened to his chatter and translated his words into prices: that servant was as valuable as a spy. They worked solidly for the next four hours.

While he was arranging the merchandise, Abdelkarim learned about the goods and seemed to be etching everything the foreign merchant was saying into his memory, as though he were his employee. This was an effort that bore no correlation to the humble assignment Hajji Semereth had entrusted him with, which was to help his young friend for the day. The Maronite was surprised by this, and grew wary. First, on the deck of the ship that had brought him to that African port, the giant in the dark cloak had bestowed his patronage on him, and now the giant’s tiny servant seemed utterly devoted to him. Too many favours can be deliberately misleading.

Exhausted, Émile stretched out on the bed. Abdelkarim immediately stopped working and cosied up by the latter’s feet, as though that was exactly what he’d been waiting for. Without being asked, he told the young Maronite all about Hajji Semereth’s sombre past.

CHAPTER 2

I

Colonel Romanino walked down the corridor. Once he’d reached the far end, he stopped and turned around. The corridor was more than four metres wide and extremely long: it looked like a road. All the doors that looked onto it were black. Standing behind the only window, the Colonel’s face was enshrouded in darkness.

‘Who were the owners of this villa? It’s difficult to think of heirs, it already belongs to the creditors. It’s a wreck, even though there’s hardly a brick out of place.’

Signora Ferrara left the group and headed over to the Colonel.

‘My dear Colonel, you’re so unworldly. Heirs are far more persevering than creditors and blindly tear everything apart – they’re driven by a sort of passion. Creditors, on the other hand, are only interested in turning a profit.’

‘You’re wrong: the villa had clearly fallen into ruin before that. Did you notice how the halls down there were decorated? They’re in keeping with styles that only went out of fashion a few years ago. The villa has all the hallmarks of wealth’s violent vulgarity. The same hand that erected this edifice also caused its destruction. The owners left their creditors nothing but a carcass. Death has delicate hands, and handles objects reverently.’

‘What a clever reply! My dear Colonel … While the motherland enjoys her gilded age as though it had robbed Africa of its light, here you are making up dangerous stories. You remind me of those suicidal men who stake their lives … on a game of roulette. Might the ingenuity with which you weave spiders’ webs of intrigue and craft arabesques out of logic be a way to conceal your criticisms of the times we live in, of our patriotic and aesthetic excitement? After all, isn’t criticism the mask that betrayal usually wears?’

‘But I still haven’t understood who wants to buy the villa,’ Signora Passa said.

‘A captain, a friend of Romanino’s. He went missing in Africa, who knows where. Maybe nostalgia has led him here and made him want a villa in our beloved Lombardo-Veneto. At the same time our government is opening up new horizons for us in Africa, and Italy is taking its first steps as a ‘great power,’ the captain wants to buy a villa here: he risks his life in our colonies, but my place – he says – is here, and this is where I must return if I wish to survive. Gross insubordination! If our own officers forsake the colony they’ve given their lives for, this presages a rift that won’t lead to anything good.’

‘The Colonel is right,’ Miss Cella said. While Signora Ferrara continued talking to the Colonel, Miss Cella detached herself from the group, and having walked down the corridor attentively, as though following someone’s tracks, was now standing at its far end.

‘There’s only one card left to play in this game. The present owners are merely custodians who wish to rid themselves of it as soon as possible. The villa’s a hot potato.’

‘Come in.’

Standing still in front of a door, the Colonel was inviting his friends to enter.

A gargantuan wardrobe took up the entirety of the scene. They had evidently tried to drag it out of the house, but the plan had failed. How had they got it inside in the first place? Miss Cella gave the wardrobe a conceited knock. Strictly utilitarian, Signora Passa opened its doors and then shut them; Engineer Restivo palpated the back of the wardrobe, unbothered by the layer of dust that glued itself to his palm. Nevertheless, nobody seemed capable of discerning the secret of how to dismantle it. The wardrobe had grown in that house as though it had sprouted out of the earth like a tree.

‘The villa’s frontispiece is in the Louis Philippe style. It reminds me of how Franz Liszt once described a ball: only down there can one truly understand how that dance can contain such pride, tenderness and allure …’

‘It’s this new addition that doesn’t quite fit,’ Colonel Romanino said, ‘as though they’d been bitten by the frenzy of bloating everything out of proportion, for the lack of anything better to do. The bourgeoisie made it to the end of the Risorgimento panting and heaving. Now it has no benevolent objectives, and so it has made one up. We don’t need the colony: it’s yet another symptom of that same frenzy for bloating everything out of proportion for the lack of anything better to do. We’ve lost all sense of scale, just like the builders who worked on the villa after the Louis Philippe frontispiece, which you praised all too rightly.

‘Are you done? Romanino, your confession is quite touching. These vulgar, hollow walls have a hypnotic power to them. I too made a connection between our motherland’s destiny and the parable of this villa, and I also thought it was a sinister omen. When you said that the same hands which built this house were responsible for tearing it down, I too thought about who governs us and how patriotism seems to have taken a wrong turn. The obsession with ‘making it big’ that infected the bankrupted owners of this house seems identical to the one ruling this country. But is it right to let ourselves get frightened by omens such as these, which are only illusions, the relics of our superstitions? The younger generations have their needs, and we have granted them this colonial war in the same way that one might overlook an amorous escapade, so as to avoid anything worse. After all, don’t we tolerate those infamous bordellos right here in our country to keep society – which is set on being so morally demanding – in equilibrium? Well then, going to war in Africa is like turning an entire continent into a bordello and offering her up to our young men, so they may vent the entire spectrum of their human, heroic, sadistic and aesthetic emotions.’

II

(AT THE THEATRE CLUB. SOME MEMBERS ARE IN FANCY DRESS; OTHERS ARE IN CONVENTIONAL EVENING ATTIRE, A PECULIAR CHOICE CONSIDERING IT’S MARDI GRAS)

FERRARA: I’m keen to meet that captain who went missing in Africa and entrusted us with finding him a villa here, and to carry out God knows what sort of inspection.

It makes me think of the day when I’ll have to hand over the keys to his house: to a man whose past is so similar to ours, but who has been to mysterious places where he’s made new acquaintances or been dramatically deprived of certainties so familiar to us.

PASSA: I can’t understand how prattling on like this can give you any pleasure.

FERRARA: Not prattling, but formalities – so as to send Romanino back to Africa with a lighter heart. The memory of the day we set foot on the Libyan coasts fills him with dread, but he feels like a stranger here, as though in that long descent to that Underworld he too, like Captain Martello, had been subjected to unbearable apparitions that now make his sweet Lombardy as incoherent and random as a nightmare. In other words, he sees things that neither you nor I can see, he dreams of a reality that torments him.

ROMANINO: You’re afraid – or you’re pretending to be afraid – of individual logic and experience. But our last hopes rest precisely on the individual. This is the moment to love Salvation more than the Motherland, to think of ourselves as Christians before Romans, as we once did.