The Confines of the Shadow

The Young Maronite-2

PASSA: But what did you see down there? The Africa I know from the newspapers seems so picturesque.

ROMANINO: So long as journalists and vested interests exist, the truth will always remain on the other side of the sea. Truth is a domesticated animal, it can’t survive outside a safe enclosure. The Expeditionary Force had the misfortune to come face to face with a people who took advantage of our arrival to live their defining hour: they were able to discover exactly who they were by encountering a completely different worldview to their own. But the other’s truth imperils our own, which thought of itself as universal and tasked with the duty of establishing a new world order, meaning, thus, that it must sweep away everything in sight.

FERRARA: (SARCASTICALLY) Do you mean to say – perish the thought! – that journalists are deceiving us when they glorify our officers’ heroism and their civilising mission even though most officers are illiterate? That the government is lying when it says that ‘fertile horizons’ are being opened up in Africa? That even priests misled us when they sprinkled our warships with holy water before they left our ports – and that even our secular luminaries and humanitarian organisations lied to us when they said the natives in those lands were good-natured souls who were just waiting for our gunships to leave Naples and free them?

(CHANGING HER TONE)

I shuddered when I read an account by a French journalist that a certain Rémond published in Illustration about some skirmish or other at the gates of Benghazi, where a young lieutenant was killed. When one of the others saw the lieutenant’s beautiful face in the dust, he leapt off his horse and bent to kiss it. A highly disquieting and inconvenient gesture. How can anyone make sense of that war? I’m still reeling from that item of news – which our own newspapers wisely censored – and yet you speak to me of that mysterious captain’s worries, who wants to pursue a re-examination of those events to rescue what truths he can out of that past, as though anything other than chaos could come of it. The Civil Code is crystal clear on the issue of inheritance: it explicitly forbids any estate to be broken up where said division would dishonour said estate. That also applies to the past: both we (and the people we don’t like) are the heirs of a single, indivisible past.

In a subsequent dispatch, Rémond reported an even ghastlier detail. A lady from Bergamo (meaning someone wearing a mask) recognised that the precious body of the soldier lying face down in the dust while the exalted enemy stood next to him was that of her only son, and had written to Rémond, not to ask him to keep quiet, but to write even more about that dead soldier. How confused someone’s mind must be to watch that scene without feeling repulsed, to insert that into the sequence of memories that constitute her son’s existence, to accept it as a definitive seal on his life.

May God grant peace to that young lieutenant who left this world with an enemy’s kiss on his lips instead of a viaticum …

ROMANINO: Do you wish to know when an officer’s resolve cracks?

FERRARA: It makes me apprehensive.

ROMANINO: If the officer stops thinking of the enemy as automaton and instead considers him as guileful. It’s laughable to accord those things such abstract concepts as rights, responsibilities, consciences and souls … it’s an entertaining game, like hunting – and massacres are taken lightly. But if said officer is rash enough to think of those two peoples as living under the same sky and under the same law, lights and shadows begin to assume such a mysterious shape that he’ll start questioning himself while absorbed in the act of killing the enemy; he’ll start to tremble and his anxiety will lead him down any number of paths. If that happens, the connection between the troops and their commanders will be severed. In times of war, isolation is fatal: enemies become supernatural knights, one’s own comrades become demons, comfort and morale vanish and an officer’s heart can rarely weather the ordeal. A hero can become a saint; but if he doesn’t, guilt will crush him and the warrior will begin to fear that he’s no better than a common murderer. Cruelty and suicide become the easiest way out of this dilemma. Just as a language is only useful in the area in which it is spoken, and is pointless outside of it, so it goes with Europe’s liberal moral values, which don’t extend anywhere south of the Mediterranean. As soon as one reaches the other coastline, one is ordered to do the exact opposite prescribed by God’s commandments: kill, steal, blaspheme … Once the Turkish garrison was defeated and a few key locations on the coast were occupied, we found a vast, obscure country stretching out before us, into which we were afraid to venture. Thus, we cloistered ourselves in the cities while waiting for daylight. Instead, the night is getting deeper, darker, deadlier and teeming with demons.

CELLA: (WHO HAS IN THE MEANTIME JOINED THE GROUP AND IS LOOKING SOMBRE) We don’t have the slightest intention of wasting our soldiers’ lives.

ROMANINO: The Arab patriots’ courage is admirable. They’re as nimble as acrobats.

CELLA: Courage devoid of consciousness is pointless. Besides, we have no intention of competing with those people, but instead with other European nations. The latter will be more impressed by our efficiency than by our courage.

ROMANINO: Yes, our preparations for the war were so judicious that we didn’t know who our enemy was. We thought we’d only have to fight an inadequate Turkish garrison and instead found ourselves faced with an entire nation who’d taken up arms against us. Our nationalism is very recent, being forged in the ideals and wars of the Risorgimento. But with this miserable venture, we’ve gone back to square one. What now? We return here only to trip over the various newspapers, all the lies, and the public euphoria for the colonial enterprise, for this new Risorgimento, and we can only feel tired, bored, or as Captain Martello drily put it, ‘estranged.’

(A YOUNG MAN APPEARS IN THE DOOR THAT LEADS TO THE STAIRWAY. HE IS WEARING A ROMAN TOGA AND THERE IS A LAUREL WREATH ON HIS HEAD. HE STOPS ON THE THRESHOLD, AND THE MUSIC CEASES)

ROMANINO: Time is tired and it’s vomiting history.

FERRARA: Time is just drunk, that’s all. By tomorrow, this confused dream won’t have left a trace. Must we give this woebegone tradition any real significance? It has no political subtext, is in no way connected to the Tripoli enterprise and Giolitti certainly didn’t make it up. The handsome young Roman by the door with the laurel wreath doesn’t threaten our awkward foundations. Everywhere you look, you can’t help but see the omens of a tragedy hanging over our heads like a Damoclean sword, of which the Libyan enterprise is but the prologue.

(SHE PLACES HER HAND ON THE COLONEL’S AND IN A HALF-FEELING, HALF-IRONIC TONE)

Tell me, does the Mal d’Afrique really ache so bad?

(MUSIC)

Chapter 3

Hajji Semereth’s House

I

Hajji Semereth was a reticent man. He had spent his entire life under an unmerciful light, but the essence of what he said, as well as the opinions he formulated, were always ambiguous. They characterised him in a misleading fashion, as did the sophisticated clothes he wore, his gait and his slow, heavy movements, which were those of a man wading through water with difficulty.

In Istanbul, the Hajji had occupied several public positions that prophesied a stellar career, but after a plot had been uncovered, the shadow of conspiracy had settled on him and triggered his fall. He had then withdrawn to that obscure provincial backwater and been quickly forgotten. Regardless of whether he had in fact been guilty or the victim of calumny, he was out of the game. Salvation had come at the cost of silence and renunciation.

He led a comfortable, quiet life, playing the role of a merchant to fill the void of his days, now that the arena in which he could move had been so drastically reduced and could barely contain him. People said his heart nursed a longing for the life of the public official he’d led in the capital, but no one else in that small African port city seemed less interested in titles and positions.

The doors to his house were always open. It was amongst Benghazi’s most beautiful, but only silence grew within its walls. Hajji Semereth’s presence in that house accentuated the sense of encumbrance and isolation. He received guests with all due honours, but never warmly. His relationships with people were bland, insignificant, unsolicited and a pointless waste of his time. He was very tall, and his face was frightening. A gunpowder charge had exploded close to him during a military campaign and he had been left disfigured. His hair had been reduced to a few tow-coloured clumps. A foul smell emanated from the wrinkles on his skull. He exuded an air of seriousness and authority that made anyone who talked to him instantly bashful and hesitant. It was like a spell that separated him from everyone else, but he was a victim of it, rather than its conscious master, as others tended to assume.

He had four wives and a great many servants.

Zulfa, the youngest wife, was twelve years old and the daughter of a poor gardener. When word of her beauty had reached the Hajji’s ears, he had asked for her hand in marriage. The gardener, ignoring the girl’s sobs, had consented: Semereth Effendi’s wealth would dry all those tears. The advantageous match had been sealed with a contract.

The wedding was celebrated in the most splendid pomp that provincial backwater could possibly offer. That night, when Zulfa saw the tow-haired giant who would call her his wife, she grew so frightened that she fainted before uttering a single word. Hajji Semereth was mesmerised: he caressed the little girl, and although he guessed he was the one who had made her faint, he didn’t become at all angry, but instead looked touchingly at her, with awe: he had never seen such light in anyone else. It was as though there were three people in the bridal chamber, one of them a shadow that didn’t seem to want to leave.

Zulfa threw herself desperately at his feet, begged him to forgive her and send her back to her parents and her home – how could she ever be his wife? The girl was so afraid that her words fused into a whimpering song, or an unchanging dance that endlessly repeated the same movements. That repetition was agonising. It was as though she’d got lost in an unknown country, armed with a language known only to her. At best, she could have tried to soothe her heart by singing to it, but the gracious melody would’ve been unable to save her.

Hajji Semereth took hold of Zulfa’s arm and helped her to her feet. He didn’t speak to her about his rights. In fact, he didn’t speak at all: he knew she wouldn’t have understood him and would have just grown more frightened. Zulfa continued imploring him, but the gargantuan idol stayed silent. Hajji Semereth’s hand scooped her up like a spoon. That gesture was tender, but the idol seemed either powerless, or subject to a higher authority. Endowing it with miraculous virtues, Zulfa kissed the Hajji’s blessed hand.

Semereth Effendi let her implore him until her voice went hoarse, and she’d cried herself dry. Finally, more tired than scared, Zulfa let herself go, sinking into his arms as though she were drowning.

Hajji Semereth had then tried to exercise his husbandly rights, but tormented his wife in vain: their bodies were so disproportionate that the marriage couldn’t be consummated. Wrath had taken hold of that fragile creature: Zulfa had begged, cried and threatened to end her life, to the point that in the end she’d reclaimed her liberty.