Giovanni Muro (q2) April 1984

“Here or elsewhere…we’re all somewhere by mistake.” Il deserto dei tartari; 1976; screenplay by Andre G. Brunelin , after Dino Buzzati “As they plodded along the sand became even softer until at last the camels were sinking in up to their knees...On inquiring where they were, Vambery was told by his companions that they had come to Adam Kurulgan- The place where men perish” From A person from England and other travellers in Turkistan by Fitzroy Maclean One damp morning in early Spring, some six months after the death of his father, Giovanni made one of his regular visits to his mother’s apartment ,only to find two suitcases blocking his way as he entered the hallway. His mother came out to greet him. While the suitcases looked like they had been identical at manufacture , each now showed different marks that bore witness to both their considerable age and also their separate histories. Lifting the cases by their leather handles so as to place them out of his way, it was apparent to Giovanni that the one that had a faded cardboard Alitalia tag attached to it by a piece of tan twine , had significantly heavier contents than the other , which seemed to weigh barely more than the case itself. Placing the suitcases against the wall Giovanni made a show of straightening his back and rotating the shoulder of his left arm, that had carried the heavier case, looking at his mother with a quizzical expression. “Some of your father’s old things” she said, turning away and making her way back to the stove where she started to make coffee. Giovanni stood in the doorway to the narrow kitchen. “Would you like me to see if I can dispose of them for you?” “Yes, but not the cases; I want them back”. “What’s in them?” “Stefano’s old books and his uniform”. Giovanni’s mind raced ahead ,seemingly outpacing time itself, before jogging back to the here and now. “Sure. I’ll see what I can do for you.” Doubt. They had been simple enough words but now sounded to Giovanni as if he was acting out the transparently mannered and dissembling tropes of a minor character in a Moravia story. Doubt. Had he sounded relaxed, compliant and slightly off-hand enough or had he come across as being just a bit too abrupt and eager in his response? Doubt. Giovanni scrutinised his mother’s back , but if she had noticed his tell-tale, slightly hurried, intonation and had maybe even guessed that Giovanni’s curiosity would not permit him to dispose of the cases’ contents until he had been through them thoroughly, she did not seem to care. For once there was not to be the characteristic, tetchy manner that since his tendency to practical awkwardness had emerged as a character trait in his early teens, Giovanni's mother had so often adopted with him ; that curt pronouncement that he didn’t need to bother with whatever task was then under discussion as his sister or his father would sort it out for her, invariably accompanied by the wiping of her hands on her housecoat and a change of the subject. But then his sister now had tasks of her own while Stefano, well, he was no longer there to help, at least in that way. Giovanni moved away from the hall door leading into the kitchen and sat down on the low settee in the living room, behind which he’d first placed the cases, his knees rearing up in front of his chest, and waited for his mother to bring in the coffee and some biscuits and no doubt point out that his shoes were unpolished . Sometime later Giovanni was making his way home , cases in hand, with Campo Santo Stefano and the Academia Bridge lying ahead of him. Although the contents of the heavier case, containing the books, might have ordinarily been more than enough to have piqued Giovanni’s curiosity, in fact it was the lighter one, containing his father’s uniform that rattled around most his mind as he made his way through the crowds, head down and round of shoulder. If his knowledge of his parents’ lives together prior to his birth was at best sketchy and sentimental, that of Stefano’s time in the Italian army (that he had joined as a volunteer in the late 1930’s, immediately after leaving school), and his participation in the latter stages of the second Abyssinian war, was truly minimal as it had remained a subject forever off limits, as the campaign itself had become for pretty much the whole of the nation. What Giovanni’s father had seen, what he had done, why he had volunteered, what he had believed in at the time and what he had subsequently thought about this sordid, imperial adventure , all remained unknown to Giovanni. There had certainly never been to Giovanni's knowledge any expressed denouncement or attempted distancing of this episode in his life by his father; nor had any excuses based on his youth , peer or parental pressure or state propaganda, ever been offered up. Indeed, once, when Giovanni had been no more than an infant and the idea of war and the army still seemed glamorous and exciting to his childish imagination, Giovanni had watched in awe as his father had packed his things prior to leaving one weekend to attend some sort of reunion, his medals ,ribbons, cap and oiled belt all carefully stowed in one of the cases that Giovanni was now carrying. In later years it had been tempting to account for Stefano’s subsequent bouts of sullenness and anger, the alcohol and the door slamming, to his experiences during this opaque period, but in truth there was no identifiable or acknowledged connection between these things, and when he had raised the suggestion one Summer when he’d returned from college and his father had been in a particularly deep and protracted depression, his mother had angrily cut him off. So far Giovanni had progressed along Calle delle Ostreghe , his Mac collar pulled up to fend off the steadily falling rain , his hat pressed down onto the tops of his ears, and now he had paused in front of Chiesa Santa Maria del Giglio in order to switch the suitcases between his arms. The label of the suitcase that contained the books and that was now resting on the increasingly puddled stone-slabs, was already suffering in the wet. The church offered some shelter from the rain and Giovanni lingered to glance up at the ornate secular facade that , like so many buildings in Venice, he readily recognised when he was in front of it but could not recall in detail or accurately describe when out of its presence, before turning his attention to the six panels set at eye-level that memorialised the career of the donor, Admiral Barbaro. Despite his reported insubordination and waywardness ,the Admiral had been clearly far more confident in trumpeting the worthiness of his military exploits than Giovanni’s father had ever been in his. Certainly the profligacy of the church that Barbaro had commissioned was a fulsome memorial to the extraordinary wealth that the Admiral had personally accumulated while serving “la Serenissima”. “La Serenissima”.... if there was one expression guaranteed to put Giovanni’s teeth on edge it was that. Giovanni idly let his finger trace the outline of the ramparts of “Candia” that were the subject of the nearest of the six panels. As depicted in low relief ,rain drops adding a moist sheen to the white and mottled marble, the carved battlements looked delicate , angular and stylised , as if something akin to a geometric urban fantasy that Calvino’s Marco Polo might have sought to describe to the Khan in his “Invisible Cities”. But Giovanni had been to modern-day Heraklion in Crete ( the “Candia” of old) in the high heat of Summer and had walked the massive ramparts of what for a time had been Venice’s principal outpost in the Eastern Mediterranean. How many prisoners and conquered locals had died in the making of that citadel? How much hatred, to last for centuries , had this enterprise generated? How many slaves had passed through “Candia” , loaded off and onto Venice’s round-hulled “Cog” ships, many succumbing to cholera and the like before they were able to be sold into servitude? How much exploitation and expropriation had taken place in the names of trade and Venice? “La Serenissima”...built on oxygen-starved mud, brackish, malarial shallows, rotting timber and trading relationships with Ottoman and Malmuk City-state elites, all sides supported by their most violent ,determined ,opportunist and adept citizens , who, between intense periods of conflict, had competed , fairly and unfairly, with each other but , even more, had tacitly united to exploit those more vulnerable than they were and whose histories were now largely lost. The rain beat down harder. Some hours later Giovanni was back in his apartment , on the floor of which was now spread the contents of the cases, with Stefano's uniform crumpled in a small heap (the pockets turned out where Giovanni had already searched through them), and the array of books looking like they were mimicking a late installation by Raymond Hains (and indeed both Hain’s installation and Stefano’s books included a copy of the politically compromised and to Giovanni’s mind toxic, Paul Morand’s self- congratulatory “Venises” in the original Gallimard edition of 1974, that seemed to have been the newest work in the case). But it was not the work by the “Immortal” Morand that had caught Giovanni’s attention , nor a copy of Stefano's fellow army-volunteer, Indro Montanelli’s “Qui non Riposano”, nor an early edition of Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” (that appeared to have been borrowed from a public library some five years previously and never returned), but rather a battered and early edition of the most famous novel by yet another participant in the second Abyssinian war, Dino Buzzati’s “Il deserto dei tartari”. This was one of Giovanni’s all-time favourite novels, that seemed to him to conjure an imaginary world that was far more profound and troubling than any of Calvino’s rather twee "Invisible Cities" of the mind , one that was not to be pin-pointed on any map but existed somewhere between the arid, sun bleached world of Camus’ North Africa and the long-imagined world of Tartary ,that stretched from the early cartographers and globe makers of the 17th century (especially as depicted in the three globes , known to Giovanni as being still in Venice, by William Blaeu and his successor, Vincenzo Coronelli, with their depiction of eastward-bound traders and travellers and their North African, single humped camels, close to defeat in the emptiness of the arid wastes of “Karakithay”, listening in the cold nights to hostile sounds away from the meagre camp fire and to stories of cities such as Dandan Oilik, long lost in the dunes and not to be uncovered for a further three hundred years or so), through to the writings emanating out of episodes from the so called “Great Game”, such as by Vambery and Arthur Conolly, and ,in particular, the self-promoting and romanticised works dating from its immediate aftermath by explorers, expropriators and adventurers such as Steiler , Hedin, Robert Bryon, Aurel Stein ,Teichman and Fitzroy Maclean. Apart from being in Giovanni’s view an extraordinary novel, he also felt that , along with Lampedusa’s The Leopard, it was one of the few works of modern Italian literature that had, in turn, formed the basis for an exceptional version in film, in the case of Il deserto dei tartari a film directed by Zurlini and released in 1976, that had been shot in the remote South East of Iran , south of the Caspian, at an ancient fortress complex called Arg-e Bam and had been graced with a musical score by Ennio Morricone. Leafing through it Giovanni saw that Stefano’s copy of Buzzati’s novel had various notes and marginalia in his father’s familiar hand-writing, along with various old photographs and postcards that had been tucked in between a few of the pages, possibly once used as markers. One of the photographs was a newspaper cutting that included a young Stefano in uniform , seemingly participating in some sort of military parade that involved a bust of Mussolini, while two of the latter were photos of ancient, remote, fortified buildings in Abyssinia , one at a place called Gondar and the other labelled as being Guzara near Emfraz. Many of Stefano’s notes in the margins of the novel were hard to decipher but on the back of the latter postcard Stefano had written in bold , expressive script “Welcome to Fort Bastiani! “, being the name that Buzzati had given to the place on the “Steppes” that his central character, Giovanni Diogo, is sent to serve out his days. The idea that Buzzati’s novel could have been in part influenced by the Abyssinian castles and deserts that Buzzati had witnessed as a journalist covering Mussolini’s colonial adventure, rather than , say, either Kafka's "Castle" or Western culture’s long-held anxieties of an Eastern threat coming out of the vast emptiness beyond the Caspian, a fear possibly dating back as far as the narratives that fed Homer’s Iliad, was a new and disorientating idea to Giovanni. Indeed, the more he thought about it the more it seemed unlikely that occupied, colonial Abyssinia could have been an influence on Buzzati's work, although it may have proved to have been an eerie exemplar of the physical and psychological world that Buzzati had evoked . Nevertheless ,Stefano’s wry and scornful comment gave Giovanni a rare and precious glimpse into his father’s feelings for and experiences in Abyssinia . In his mind’s eye Giovanni tried to imagine his father serving out his days , doing his duty in a hostile and alien environment , waiting to leave. There could be little doubt that for most serving soldiers it must have been an ignominious, desultory and protracted period in their lives ,with long periods of confinement in a largely male, cloistered barracks , dominated by routines, hierarchies, subtle social codes and unrequited wants and ambitions , only temporarily "relieved" by phases of more active service, when they were called upon to oversee various unloved civil engineering projects of uncertain value in a hostile land far from home, and all the time subject to the risk of inglorious episodes of violent confrontation. Giovanni picked up the Calvino and put it to one side so that he could in due course return it to the library that it had been borrowed from, and idly leafed through the familiar and playful text of bloodless myths, feeling tired and empty and very much alone. Night was falling. Looking across the room Giovanni wondered whether his father’s uniform would fit him if he tried it on.