Colonial Tales

THE PRINCE OF CLEVE-1

THE PRINCE OF CLEVEI

On seeing Lieutenant Nemiri standing before him, the President of the Shopkeepers Association seethed with rage. The young man’s presence was simply intolerable to him: it was an outright provocation.

It had proved impossible not to invite at least a few young officers to the annual ball, alongside higher-ranking civilian and military officials. Yet why Nemiri? The President replied to Nemiri’s greeting with extreme coldness.

The lieutenant however behaved obsequiously, he kissed the president’s wife’s hand and complimented the reception hall’s splendour. His submissiveness betrayed a cruel and sarcastic attitude. Being of noble birth, it was as though he’d wanted to express how honoured he was to join that colonial club.

The lieutenant had entered alongside the young Berto. The President asked him to keep an eye on Nemiri. ‘I’m sorry your father’s no longer with us, Berto. If he’d lived to see this sort of man step foot inside the club, he would have instructed the waiters to kick him out.’

‘But no,’ Berto said. He was a young man completely devoid of any spontaneity and was furthermore pensive and reserved, almost like a priest. His father had once been the President of the local Chamber of Commerce.

‘He’s a dangerous man,’ the guest insisted, keeping his eyes fixed on Nemiri. ‘You’re a good lad, Berto, and there are some things you just do not understand; but when it comes to business I’ve developed an infallible eye for these things.’

‘People have surely exaggerated…’ Berto’s answers were always defeatist, and served only to cushion against the impact with reality.

‘He who is offended never exaggerates. Please spare me the unpleasant task of having to recount his adventures.’

Berto kept quiet.

‘If I see him strike up a conversation with a girl,’ the President added, his vexation growing with each moment, ‘I’ll challenge him to a duel.’

He kept his arm hanging by his waist, ready to unsheathe his sword. There was something impetuous to his behaviour, as well as solemn and serious. He hadn’t seemed to account for the fact that his hand laid nowhere near a sword’s hilt, but rather a large golden watch with its visibly sumptuous chain. Standing next to him, Berto felt as though he was merely adding a little decorative value to the scene. He was a witness to events he was not fated to take part in; just as was the case in crowded frescoes, where people are depicted despite the fact nobody knows their respective dramatic functions. ‘Come on,’ he sullenly added, ‘he won’t get that lucky.’

At that moment, the Governor entered the hall. Although his presence had been assiduously requested, his arrival had remained a maybe. The President instantaneously cheered up, as though a divine blessing had been bestowed on him.

‘He’s as handsome as the Duke of Mantua,’ one of the ladies admitted.

The excitement among the shopkeepers prompted by the Governor’s presence was intense. The whites of their starched shirts shone on their chests like medals.

The Governor smiled, decreasing the tightness with which he shook those men’s hands as he went along and cast an indulgent glance around the hall. Then, just like Lieutenant Nemiri, he paid the place a few compliments. The President felt oppressed by all that courtesy.

A group of officers standing in a corner surveyed the scene.

‘He isn’t a good governor at all,’ Captain Sorrentino said irritably, turning his back to the illustrious guest, ‘but he got lucky. The hard part of the job, in this colony, fell on others’ shoulders. He reigns on the foundations of the sad peace that they forged. Cruelty has been exiled because it is no longer useful. The indigenous resistance has given way to resignation. Considering the situation, the police itself would do; the army is only here for the sake of appearances. It serves no purpose.’

‘This is the original sin of our presence here. But surely, Captain, you don’t intend our lives here to be spent meditating on that original sin…’

In contrast to the Captain, Colonel Verri made an ostentatious show of his indifference. ‘A governor’s worth lies in compensating resignation with humanity, or to borrow from our propagandists, progress and civilization.’

‘As for me,’ Major Borghi’s wife said, ‘I don’t give a fig for progress, it’s nothing but a bit of theatre, propaganda. I admire this governor because he amuses us.’

‘This is where we exorcise the political meaning of our presence here,’ Captain Sorrentino retorted, sarcastically, ‘with a bit of music and elegant dancing.’

‘When there’s no injury there’s no tragedy,’ said the lady who had compared the Governor to the Duke of Mantua, ‘everything is both easy and insignificant. The curse is missing.’

‘A curse?’ Captain Sorrentino exclaimed. ‘The injury occurred when we first occupied this land – that is the original sin. Anyone who can’t see the curse looming over us cannot see the path we’re walking on.’

Calm and indulgent, the Governor was seated at the top of the room. The members of the club had especially welcomed one thing: the simulation of power. The Governor flaunted his presence there as though he was an actor. Meanwhile, the orchestra played courtly arrangements that were both depressingly slow and sublime. It contented itself with merely ensuring its presence for the moment. It would only begin to play in full swing later in the evening – mediocre melodies to be sure, and yet they were also magical. If only the Governor himself had been able to hear the music, instead of being dragged hither and tither like a page boy.

The Governor raised his gaze. The shopkeepers were entranced by that gaze, and followed it like a magic wand. The violinist who led the orchestra pulled his bow away from the string, which groaned. The pianist punched the final three chords of the tune they had been playing. Sound emptied out of the hall.

The full orchestra, comprising the violin, the double bass, saxophone, piano, drums and chimes, launched into it. It was a feast of colours: a joyous, sensual rush, an echo of the sea and its nocturnal abandon. The Governor looked at the beautiful Princess of Cleve sat in a corner next to her husband, a second lieutenant of the third artillery regiment. Yet the dancing couples, like a colourful festoon, took center stage and the Princess vanished behind them.

‘Berto,’ the Princess’s mother said, taking the young man’s hand as he passed by, ‘why don’t you come and sit here next to me? There’s simply too much excess in reality and I find it overwhelming.’

She raised her eyes, two slits. Two tiny sparkles of light shone out. Were they tears?

‘These old tear dams have grown weak these days, but what can I do about that?’

Like an astronomer high in her observatory, the old woman studied the room. Her eyes were fixed on the princess, while also keeping track of Nemiri’s movements. She couldn’t deny the overwhelming evidence: they were like stars that belonged to the same constellation. The lieutenant was dancing with a woman not much younger than him who walked around him in circles as though trying to tie him up. The confusion, the randomness of movements, was obvious. The mother could read people, and could spot the obvious – and fatal – relationships that linked them together. It left her feeling distressed.

Once the tango was over, the Governor’s eyes snuck around the couples still standing in the middle of the hall and finally reached the Princess. She was so fragile and tiny that her stillness appeared like a gracious and vain attempt to lend herself a heavier, more important presence. She looked like a little girl at a carnival, wearing a costume meant for someone older. The violinist observed the Governor. He couldn’t follow his gaze and discover the object of his attention. He was boldly prolonging the duration of that silent interlude to please his master, to conceal his stare and allow it to slip past the couples and find its desired target.

Lieutenant Nemiri accompanied the young lady back to her seat. Stopping, he shook the strings she’d tried to tie him up with off his shoulders. When he bowed towards her, she squirmed in a prudish, bashful way. ‘The angel who bowed before her seems to have filled her with fright!’ Princess Cleve’s mother exclaimed. Her awareness proved to be an inadequate bulwark. ‘Berto,’ she said, showing her the tortured slits of her eyes, ‘that Nemiri…’ but she didn’t finish her sentence.

The movement in the hall was like a battlefield, and the waltz’s notes flew like flags above that tangled mass.

The Governor stood up. The orchestra slowed the waltz’s rhythm. It was an invitation.

The Governor authoritatively left the dais, but then stood still, as though lost. Between him and the Princess, whom he’d been able to spy from only a few feet away, lay a kind of labyrinth, from which he was unable to extricate himself. The waltz’s notes were like magic circles.

Instead he invited the Podestà’s wife to dance. A woman who nursed a constant fear in her eyes. The Governor was circumspect. He tried to keep up with the music, zig-zagging instead of going in circles. He suddenly began to spin too, and the Podestà’s wife shuddered, as though the strings had snapped and she were falling into the Governor’s arms, or who knows where…

The Prince of Cleve was standing anxiously next to his wife. He kept bending over to her in order to talk to her. The Princess’s stillness (her face was split in two by her perfect stillness) was a vain attempt on her part to resist. The Prince’s words assailed her like flames: ‘All you can offer me is a kind of goodness which cannot satisfy me: you know neither impatience, nor restlessness, nor pain. And you’re not unsettled by my passion…’

Having emerged unscathed from the waltz’s waves, the Governor had come to a stop right in front of the Princess. He gazed at her admiringly, now that she had begun to move – barely at first, as though neither her heart nor brain were responsible for putting her in motion, but as though she were being articulated by an intricate alien mechanism that allowed two or three movements at a time. He looked joyfully amazed. He had once seen two similar-looking figurines perform a couple of little movements each time the clock struck the hour, although he couldn’t remember where. The Princess was performing her mechanical dance in front of the stupefied guests.

The Governor was easily moved by the Princess’s fragile grace, and her pointed little face, like a swallow’s beak.

When the wicked Lieutenant Nemiri appeared in the group’s midst, the Governor immediately realised he was the second figurine. He experienced a curious feeling: the years that had passed stood between him and the luminous shore of youth, and age blocked his path like an interdict. At the same time, he felt a slight pleasure that was precisely linked to his age. Lieutenant Nemiri’s presence had stolen the Princess away from him, but it had given him something equally precious in return: a couple. The gracefulness of youth is a mystery, he thought. It was at this point that he felt that he could only overcome being excluded in a single manner: by wanting what was fatally bound to happen anyway.

‘The young people aren’t dancing?’ he asked, with slight irritation in his voice.

A prodigious dissolution ensued. As though he were the mechanism guiding their movement, Lieutenant Nemiri bowed and invited the Princess to dance. The Governor’s command had marked the stroke of that hour.

The Princess of Cleve and Lieutenant Nemiri took over the room as if it was their own private garden. The Princess’s mother felt that they were running away; it didn’t much matter that they occasionally brushed past her as they danced, that was just a ruse, a trick. She would have wanted to hold her arms out and stop them. What antidote could possibly make them stop, what could possibly break the magic spell that the Governor’s order had cast?

The civilians in the crowd could already detect the incipient affair: they believed intrigues and scandals were embedded in the regulations that governed military society – their mirror opposite.