There was a white lighthouse on the top of the little rocky promontory.
A soldier had died a month earlier while taking a dip with a friend west of the lighthouse, in a seemingly tranquil bay where the undercurrents often carried one far from shore. That stretch of water was treacherous even for the local fishermen’s ships.
The beach was deserted: the umbrella stood out like a sail.
It was said that there was an ancient theatre lost somewhere amidst those barren hills, but nobody knew its exact location, since the excavations hadn’t gotten underway yet. After pondering the matter, Professor Berioli said that the theatre “couldn’t be anywhere else”. He had offered to act as a guide for the party, but nobody had wanted to follow him: he was a boring man, read extensively and indefatigably, and ceaselessly quoted the authors he’d read.
“He has such a sepulchral mind,” Mrs Lozzi said. “Who brings books to the beach? Does anyone go swimming completely clothed?”
“You’ll see, you’ll see, he knows everything by heart.”
“I would love to test him.”
The Professor had disappeared, only to show up again two hours later. It was midday by then. Yes—the location of the theatre in those hills was just as he’d guessed from down below. His sandals were dusty, he looked like a wayfarer from the old fairy tales.
“So, you share the same rare and exalted tastes of the Greeks when it comes to locations, eh?” an officer attached to the party mockingly said in a loud voice. He had just graduated from the Military Academy of Modena.
“We will never again attain the heights reached by Greek knowledge,” the Professor modestly replied. “If anything, I can only brag about having been educated by them just a little.”
“As for me,” Major Lambertini said, both solemnly and menacingly, “I was educated by the Romans.”
It was an invocation of fascism, but it only served to generate a great deal of embarrassment. Nobody ever understood what that officer really meant when he spoke; the truth was always theatrical, as if it was a quality to be attributed to a specific character. Only that he had forgotten to let everyone know which character his mind had summoned at that moment.
Perhaps the Professor already knew that, since he nodded at the remark rather than being frightened by the major’s threatening tone.
“Anyone who wants to play at acting can go up there—so long as you leave us in peace down here,” Mrs Lozzi said. She had been the last to slip into her bathing costume, but not without first going through the very time-consuming poses and rigmaroles involved when revealing one’s nakedness—it looked like a ballet.
“What if my head isn’t at peace?” Major Lambertini asked, pained.
“Then throw it away,” Mrs Revelli said, “throw it right into the sea.”
Lambertini vanished into the sea.
“It would have been far better if he’d thrown that sandal-wearing Professor into the water.” Mrs Lozzi confided to her friend, in hushed whispers, “One never knows how to . . . handle these men, nor, by extension, how to chase after them. Sometimes I dream about stupid, mute, deaf, and handsome men—in other words, a man fit only for the darkness of one’s bedroom.”
The Professor, whom everyone had forgotten about, cut in.
“In Goethe’s Torquato Tasso, when the poet asks the Princess if she considers all men to be ‘unfeeling, wild and rude,’ she replies: ‘Not so! But ye with violence pursue / A multitude of objects far remote’.”
“What a bore!” Mrs Lozzi exclaimed, having lost her patience.
Lambertini called out from the sea, making it look as if the current was dragging him away. He faked everything, even being in danger.
“You’re such a comedian!” Mrs Lozzi yelled from the shore, while smilingly replying to the Major’s call, all the while baring her body, which was still seductive and alluring, under the sun (as if it had nothing better to do than illuminate her).
“You can go ahead and read out loud Professor, the ladies have gone in the water,” Major Lambertini said.
The first picnic, a light one, had come to an end.
He was sat on a deck chair, over which he’d draped a brightly coloured towel.
The Professor was wearing shorts, which looked faded, and a white shirt, which was all creased. He was the only one who wasn’t in a bathing costume. He scanned his surroundings, suspiciously.
He read in a low voice, as if looking to isolate himself:
The Khalif, likewise, during his residence in Egypt, the present year, erected a tower, or castle, on mount Al Mokattam, which he called Kobbat Al Hawa, the tower of desire; and permitted two of the gentlemen of his bed-chamber, who were Christians, to build a church, denominated first by them as the church of the two gentlemen of the bedchamber, and afterwards the church of the Romans, upon a spot of ground at a small distance from it. He also erected a Mikeas, or Mikias, or measuring pillar, in order to determine the gradual increase of the Nile, at Shurat, a place belonging to the village of Banbanudah, in the country of Al Sa’id, Thebais, or the upper Egypt; and repaired another of the pillars at Akhmin, in the same region, which was gone greatly to decay.
“What century are we in?” Lambertini asked.
“The twelfth.”
“Go ahead and read, Professor.”
Berioli had the habit of writing down phrases he collected here and there into notebooks that were considerably smaller than the kind used by scholarly types—he taught at the Regio Liceo Ginnasio Giosuè Carducci. It was as though he dreamt of reducing an entire library to microscopic proportions. It struck Lambertini as a funereal dream, like the ones the Pharaohs used to have, who wanted representations of the entire cycle of life painted on the walls of their tombs, or maybe even as a vainglorious dream, one shared by those who sought the formula to transform base metals into gold. His taste for the bizarre had been piqued.
I wanted to outrun my desire for you, but my desire carried the day.
“It’s such an absolutist dream, it’s unacceptable, it’s sheer blackmail,” Lambertini exclaimed, standing up. “Who said that?”
“Al-Mutanabbi, a poet of the tenth century.”
“Right. I had thought it was some librettist from the mid-eighteenth century. If it’s from the tenth then it’s fair enough . . . ” He sat back down.
“Keep reading, Professor!”
The dress of the bride, during this procession, entirely conceals her person. She is generally covered from head to foot with a red cashmere shawl; or with a white or yellow shawl, though rarely. Upon her head is placed a small pasteboard cap, or crown. The shawl is placed over this, and conceals from the view of the public the richer articles of her dress, her face and her jewels, etc., except one or two ‘kussahs’ (and sometimes other ornaments), generally of diamonds and emeralds, attached to that part of the shawl which covers her forehead. She is accompanied by two or three of her female relations within the canopy; and often, when in hot weather, a woman, walking backwards before her, is constantly employed in fanning her, with a large fan of black ostrich feathers, the lower of the front of which is usually ornamented with a piece of looking-glass. Sometimes one zeffeh, with a single canopy, serves for two brides, who walk side by side.
“And what’s a kussah?”
The Professor seemed reticent.
“But this is an eighteenth-century Englishman describing a bride’s bathing rituals!”
Lambertini didn’t press the issue.
The modern women were in the water, far away, growing smaller and smaller in the distance, until one could only see their heads.
“Keep reading, Professor!”
Often I sang this, and even out of the grave
will I cry it: ‘Drink, before you put on
this raiment of dust.
“This is Julianus Aegyptus. We’re in the Justinian era (527 to 565); he's the very same emperor who had the walls of Ptolemais rebuilt—can you see them down there? It seems the walls had been almost entirely destroyed by Khosrow I before the time of the Arab invasion. Have you seen the mausoleums strewn along the coast?”
“I don’t want to see anything; keep reading, Professor!”
The Prophet said: If anyone introduces an innovation, or gives shelter to a man who introduces an innovation, he is cursed by Allah, by His angels, and by all the people.Lambertini remained quiet.
The Prophet said: the innovators are the worst of all of God’s creation.
The Prophet said: the innovators are the dogs of the inmates of hell.
Al-Hasan said: The most detestable creatures are those who seek the most insidious answer to blind the servant of God.
Al-Hasan said: The more innovators redouble their zeal to save God, the further they leave Him behind.
Muad said: The hand of God lies upon the community, when a man separates from it, God abandons him.
Al-Fudayl said: Do not trust the innovator and do not seek his advice in your affairs, and do not sit with him since whoever sits with an innovator—Allah will cause him to become blind.
Al-Fudayl said: O Allah do not let any innovator give me anything so that my heart should love him.
Standing up in the sea, the two ladies were admiring two slender officers as they swam in butterfly stroke, their arms rhythmically leaving the water in unison while kicking their legs like frogs. Their performance struck Lambertini as a failed attempt at flight, and most ungraceful. The spitting image of this entire century, he thought to himself, vexed.
The sand on the beach was scorching.
“You won’t sleep where you like on the day that you die.”
“You made this one up, didn’t you?” Lambertini exclaimed, pointing his finger at the Professor.
“No, no . . . I just don’t know whether it’s a proverb or whether I lifted it from a book. I don’t even know if it’s a sacred saying . . . ”
“If you can’t give me the century it was written in, then don’t even mention it at all: anything that isn’t signed is a fake.”
They lingered in silence.
Someone from the group—there were five or six couples—shouted something at them from the shiny, wavy water.
“Yes!” Lambertini shouted, even though he hadn’t understood a word they’d said. He then made a sweeping gesture with his arm, as if he’d just caught something in the air.
“Keep reading, Professor!”
“A demon lurks inside solitary travelers.”
“What century? What century? The tenth?”
“No,” the Professor said, as though he were some antiquarian in his shop, frustrated by his customer’s inability to grasp the quality of an object from the Haute époque, “it’s from the ninth.” The waves washed ashore in a sweet and mellow way, almost like the conversation taking place.
They looked like a book cover to Lambertini, who felt that he was holding the precious, invisible book in his hand. The swimmers lay even further away; their voices could no longer be heard, and one could only see their gestures, as though they were a series of muted paintings. That moment already felt like the memory of a distant past, and the world assumed the slow rhythm of memory.
“Keep reading, Professor!”
The portion of the earth which is inhabited is reported to be estimated at a hundred years’ march, that is to say, eighty years for the countries inhabited by Gog and Magog, sons of Japheth, son of Noah, a region (Siberia) which, situated at the northern extremities of the earth, is bounded by the sea of darkness. Fourteen years are required for the countries occupied by the Blacks, which comprise all that is beyond Mogreb, (Western Barbary), and extend along the same ocean.
And finally, the six remaining years’ march are required for the countries of Northern Africa, Egypt, Syria, Arabia, Persia, the land of the Turks, that of the Khazars and of the Franks, China, India, Abyssinia, the country of the Selavonians, that of Rome, as far as the great city of Rome, and other countries; in one word, all the countries occupied by infidels.
“Africa has taught me that space is an immense proposition,’ Lambertini said, melancholically.
“Well, that’s exactly the same lesson reading imparts,” the Professor muttered in a low voice.
“Do you think you’ll discover something here?’ Lambertini asked, growing annoyed.
He had stood up and was waving strange signals to the bathers out at sea as they bobbed up and down.
“Why didn’t Khosrow’s armies reach these shores?”
“It appears that the entire Persian army vanished on one occasion while crossing the desert between Egypt and Cyrenaica.”
“Do you think we’ll share their fate?” Lambertini asked, his tone serious, as though subjecting himself to a difficult trial: world war was at their door. It was as though he were petitioning a saint inside an empty church.
“I don’t know anything about war,” the Professor answered, lowering his gaze.
“Caution is cowardly.”
“Yet arrogance is a sin.”
“There you go: drop it all into the hands of the army . . . Picture yourself as a Greek hiding inside his Justinian walls as he sees Khosrow’s armies on their way. A picture as strange as the surrounding plain, where five hundred people lived, at most, as if it was one of history’s theatres. But of course: the desire to miniaturise an entire library in your notebook is a similar game to the one they played in those times, which involved putting everything in a single place, just like they did here.”
“It seems that, during the Christian era, the citadel was home to an important movement of heretics.”
“The stones are characters themselves. I tried to explain that to Lozzi.”
“Is that the blonde?”
“Occasionally, I feel as though I were the sun,” Lambertini said, “who rises alone each morning, looks at the world, observes the ruins of times, and then vanishes, still alone. Do you think I’ve stretched that metaphor too far?”
“Anyone used to reading isn’t surprised by much.”
“I’ve never been able to find an answer to this question: what do you wish to see when you open your eyes? If you were to answer that question, I assume you would say a library as big as the world, everything is inside books.”
“What has already existed does anyway. Time resides within books—that’s not much of a discovery.”
“Nothing, that’s what I see.”
“What about the rest of you?” one of the ladies in the sea shouted. “Aren’t you coming in?”
“The landscape’s beauty, with the Greek temples’ white ruins, the Justinian walls, Khosrow’s shadow, the Christian heretics, the Arab invaders, the mausoleums carved out of porous stone on the shores, the theatre buried in the hills, etc., etc., the landscape’s beauty is a bookish beauty.” Lambertini leaned his head over. “Tell me, did you like that last thought at least?”
It seemed that the tall, self-assured man was agonizing over something. He moved his arms, as though he was talking to someone—but there was nobody in front of him.
He sat back down. He shut his eyes. Then once again, without opening his eyes, he raised his arms, like a clown or a bronze statue whose arms are always up in the air:
“Keep reading, Professor!”
It is night, so arise, because the night is when lovers talk, Crossing the threshold of Friendship’s door.
The night shuts all doors wherever it finds them,
All except for Friendship’s door, which stays open at night.
“Naturally, God is the friend in question,” the Professor added in a hushed tone.
Lambertini made an irritated gesture.
“Of course! I was just waiting for you to teach me that! Everything here speaks of God: the space, the emptiness, the sky, time, and all the history that burned to ashes . . . ”
Yet he then resumed his inquisitive stance.
“Where did we get to? Are we still in the eleventh century or have we gone further?”
He was holding some sand in his hand, which he slowly allowed to slip out of his fist, looking distracted. The Professor thought he was looking at an anthropomorphised hourglass.
“Who knows?” the latter said, somewhat embarrassedly. “It’s by Abu-Sa’id Abul-Khayr, but I don’t really know who he is.”
“So we’ve gotten lost then!” Lambertini concluded, mockingly. “We don’t know where we are anymore!” He raised his hands into the air again, like a blind man.
During that afternoon, after the ladies had flicked through all their magazines (“and scored a few points,” as Lieutenant Rossi said, being a young man who knew a thing or two, having been born with the mind of an adult, just like an elf), the semi-naked ladies—some of whom were wearing straw hats, while others wore brightly coloured veils—all allowed the Professor to speak. One needed to reshuffle the cards in order to keep their husbands entertained: there were fifteen people and the scene was composed of several juxtaposed planes, some of which were secret, while others were singular or dual, if not plural.
They were walking along the coast, heading west.
“After the death of Alexander the Great, when his empire crumbled, it was Ptolemy ɪɪ Philadelphus who gave the city the name of Ptolemais.”
“What century was that, Professor?” Lambertini interjected in an authoritative tone.
“The third century before Christ.”
“We’ve got a long way to go!” Mrs Lozzi exclaimed, shaking her sandal, which was covered in wet sand. “To get to the present day . . . ” she explained to her friend.
“It prospered during the Roman era . . . ”
“Why don’t you tell us a little about the monuments? Let us leave history to the side for now, it’s always the same,” Mrs Lozzi said, bursting out in a laugh.
Lambertini laughed too, but he appeared distracted.
The Professor picked up his pace, as Rossi put it, whispering into a comrade’s ear, and sped through the classical era as though driving a Fiat.
“Then the Vandals laid it to waste.”
“What was there to destroy?” Mrs Lozzi asked, looking at the bare landscape, where there was nothing beside the sky, sea, and hills save for a few scattered hovels, some palm trees, and finally the lighthouse, which stood behind them atop a rocky promontory, like some solitary romantic character.
“Then, well, Justinian came and raised some new walls,” Lambertini concluded, as though talking to someone he’d met just the previous day and to whom he was now re-explaining himself.
“Ptolemais was marked on all the ancient maps, even Muhammad al-Idrisi’s,” the Professor announced, seizing Lambertini’s attention.
“Are those the Justinian walls?” Mrs Lozzi asked.
“Don’t confuse those, signora, those are ours: we had them built in the early days of the occupation, when the revolt had broken out, almost twenty years ago.”
“Using old stones, though!” exclaimed Mrs Lozzi, who was keen to chat with the Major.
They had arrived in front of a mausoleum, which was quadrangular, and hailed from the Hellenic era. It was situated just a few steps from the sea.
“The frieze is Doric,” the Professor said.
“What about the base?” Mrs Lozzi asked, who was increasingly fond of that long walk along the coast and through the annals of history; perhaps she had a third itinerary in mind.
“The base,” the Professor replied, “is a square piece of calcareous stone.”
There were Greek tombs everywhere, that had been hollowed out of the rock, with the names of the deceased still faintly visible. There were also numerous shards of unlaboured—yet nevertheless stylized—rock that rose naked out of the sand.
Having retraced their steps and walked towards the interior, they reached the city’s ancient gate with its imposing square pillars; the gate stood between “nothing and nothing,” as Mrs Lozzi put it, sounding ever more knowledgeable. They even visited the ruins of two Christian basilicas and the ancient Roman forum.
At this point, the entire group’s cheer picked up—as if they’d suddenly reawakened and, having chased tiredness away, all the fatigue caused by the heat and all those thoughts, which were headed in god knows what direction—and they descended to a lower level. There was a vast cistern underneath the old Roman forum, which resembled an underground city. “It features twenty-one vaulted galleries,’ the Professor elaborated, “which are five metres tall, thirteen of which,” he added, “are eighteen metres long and are lined up from east to west; while the others are situated on their sides, four on one and four on another, all eight of which are lined up from north to south and are fifty-two metres long. Inside the vaults, spaced out at regular intervals, are cylindrical openings, which were used to air out the galleries as well as draw water . . . ”
“The light!” Lambertini yelled.
The group had scattered childishly around the galleries: some were running, others were hiding, others still were talking in whispers. Their excitement was at its peak, and all those lights and shadows seemed to lie at the very heart of the drama’s plot.
Suddenly, all heard Lambertini’s booming voice yell from one of the galleries’ cavernous interiors:
“Keep reading, Professor!”
The latter recited the following from memory:
When the time for the prayer arrives, I perform a copious ablution and go to the place where I wish to pray. There I sit until my limbs are rested, then I stand up, the Kaaba straight in front of me, the carpet under my feet, Paradise on my right, Hell on my left, and the Angel of Death behind me; and I think that this prayer is my last.
