Jean-Marie Blas De Robles - Where Tigers Are at Home

“People aren’t as stupid as you like to believe. Alfredo’s bright enough to be taken in, but he’s a more complicated person than he seems. The day you realize that, you’ll perhaps have fewer problems with Kircher … All right, I have to go back. I’m exhausted. You too, it would be a good idea if you went to bed early if you want to be in form tomorrow morning. You’ve got to go to Santa Inês, don’t forget …”

“You’re sure you don’t want to stay?”

Gently but firmly Loredana took Eléazard’s hand off her shoulder. “Absolutely sure, caro . As I said, I’m not feeling well.”

“Another of your Chinese stratagems, I suppose?” Eléazard said with a sad smile. “What number is that one?”

“Stop that, will you? You’re wrong — about me, about Kircher, about almost everything. A strategy is what’s left when morality’s no longer possible. And morality’s no longer possible when absolute values are missing. If you believe in a god or something like that, it makes everything so much easier.”

“You don’t think it’s enough to believe in man?”

“As an absolute value?! Every man has his own definition of Humanity, and with a capital H, if you please. In life, if you insist, in the totality of living things, but not in man, not in the one being capable of killing just for fun.”

“Also the one with awareness? At least as far as we know … What do you think of reason?”

“Awareness of what? Of himself, of his complete freedom, of the relative nature of good and evil? There’s not a single concept that can stand up to the fact that we have to die, and if there’s nothing after that, as we’ve come to believe, then everything’s allowed. Reason doesn’t produce any kind of hope, it’s hardly even able to give a name to our despair.”

“You’re taking a pessimistic view of things. I’m certain that—”

“I can’t go on,” Loredana broke in. “Another time, OK?”

“I’m sorry. I’ll see you back.”

On the way to the hotel Loredana stopped for a moment to watch the mist of fireflies lighting up the rectangles of a façade open to the night.

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “It’s as if someone’s lit candles for a celebration.”

ONCE IN HER room, Loredana stretched out on the double bed, which hadn’t been made yet. Her hope of getting some sleep vanished almost immediately. She thought back to the ruins of Apollonia and to the magnificent moment when she had wanted to die, even though she had felt better than she did now. She had travelled to Cyrenaica with the avowed intent of going back to her earliest childhood for one last time. The Libyans who used to work with her father had aged, true, but less than her, to all appearances, for she had recognized them immediately while they had some difficulty putting the name of a boisterous little girl to this woman with the awkwardness of an adult. On the heights, Casa Parisi had now disappeared behind the eucalyptus trees, the same ones with which she used to amuse herself by pulling their trunks down so she could see them shake themselves in the sun when she let go. The modern town of Shahhat had deteriorated, as if it were in a hurry to match the ruins, to follow the dark voices of Cyrene and of the ancient necropolis on which it was founded. This tendency toward the vestigial was particularly noticeable in Marsa Susa, of which the Italian quarter, already dilapidated in her memory, seemed to have suffered a veritable bombardment. The customs building, the harbormaster’s office, the Hotel Italia, the cafés and restaurants with their shady terraces … all of that had vanished, or almost: inside the shells of the buildings — occasionally identified by a flaking syllable on the façade — herds of goats were capering, rummaging through the rubbish. There were wrecked cars or trucks everywhere, already half-buried in sand, apparently determined to become part of a dubious posterity. On the shore, all around the port, scraps of plastic bags were stuck to the ribcages of boats, standing, faded, on the shore like humpback whales in a museum. High up in its last dry dock a tug, perforated by rust, dominated the wharf. Young Arabs were enjoying themselves diving from the superstructure of a landing craft and three huge barges shipwrecked in the docks. Compared with this junkyard, the archaeological site of Apollonia seemed a model of town planning, of cleanliness: visible beyond the cemetery gate that closed off the port, just below the beacon, the shafts of Byzantine columns proclaimed a sort of Garden of Eden where she hastily took refuge. Although he had spent most of his time in Cyrene, at the works on the agora, it was in this haven of peace that she had her most pleasurable and moving memories of her father. The family came here every Friday, by the old road that snaked down between the sarcophaguses and tombs, now just loose stones in the thickets, to wind for a short while across the panther skin of Jebel Akhdar before suddenly plunging down, right at the bottom, toward the promise of the sea. In her mind’s eye she could see herself running over the beach with the smell of fresh bread in her nostrils, the joy of being alive that emanated from the sand and the sun, and which the call of the muezzin sometimes made swell to the very limit of what was bearable. In her clinging, white-satin bathing suit, suntanned like a movie star, her mother was reading under a hat shaped like a lampshade, and she just had to lift her head to see her father, sitting on the half-buried capital of a column or squatting down to clear out one of those mysterious foundations that would appear, as if by magic, under his trowel. Professor Goodchild would come over to say hello. He’d show his Italian colleague the progress made in his own excavation and always ended up inviting him to have a glass of bourbon in the old redoubt where the American archaeological team was based.

Nothing had really changed, except that her father wasn’t there anymore, nor Goodchild, nor the others, and that profoundly modified her view of things. Only the ruins had remained faithful to the child she had been, with that unfailing faithfulness shown by dogs and tombs.

She had waited for Friday before revisiting the site, waited with the same impatience, the same painful desire that had taken hold of her in her childhood when they’d been loading her mask and her flippers in the back of the jeep. The track of the narrow-gauge railway could still be seen, here and there, between the red earth of the molehills. Seen from a distance with their regular lines of columns, the three basilicas had made those “poky little holes” appear over the horizon, those poky little holes that had made Professor Goodchild frown:

“Poky little holes! My basilica’s poky little holes! Well, really. You good-for-nothing child, I’ll tell Miss Reynolds when she comes, you know, and what will you do then? ”

The one memory alone had made all the rigors of the journey worthwhile.

When she came to the old theater at the far end of the site, she sat down for a moment on the top tier, at the very same place her father preferred. Down below, just beyond the stage, the sea was so calm, so transparent that one could clearly make out the geometrical shapes of the submerged ruins. To the right of the stalls, a bushy palm tree had found room to grow between the blocks of stone. Quite close to her, on the dazzling limestone, a tiny chameleon was regarding her with magnificent disdain. Looking at it, she had told herself there would never be a more fitting occasion: now, on the point of noon, it was time to bow out, to cut her wrists and wait quietly until she resembled that little animal that seemed to concentrate the whole of the sun’s heat in itself.

She would die far from her home town, far from Rome, so pleasant in the spring when sudden warmth finally releases your drowsy body. When you stop hearing the din of the vehicles going around the Coliseum and the ill-tempered whistles of the carabinieri. With every step a bud is revealed, then another, and another. Young street vendors get drunk on their broken voices. The alleys resound with the amazement of sparrows. On Piazza Navona the water beneath the Nile is singing …