Captain Valentini received the order to join the regiment stationed at Régima to the south of the city. “You’ll miss everything there,” his predecessor had warned him, “not just danger or action, there isn’t even a reason for keeping the place garrisoned. You never get any orders. You must look on the High Command the way one beholds a higher power. It’s useless to ask for any signs or explanations. The High Command won’t remember you until they need you to go somewhere, or want you to come back, that is if they even remember that you’re still out there.” The Captain was nevertheless glad to go. His departure for that fort presented itself as an opportunity to subtract himself from everything: General Occhipinti and the military parades, the Officers’ Club, the speeches by the Secretary of the local Fascist party, the five German girls and their papier-mâché train at the Berenice Cinema and the evening walks alongside the main avenue… all would be swept away. Solitude, he reflected, is the epitome of subtracting oneself from life and it is blessed for this very reason. The fort was situated on a hill. The brief walk to the top was pleasant. The path was slightly uneven. Not a single tree in sight for over thirty miles. The fort, one part of which lay in complete abandon, had a medieval feel to it, a feature the original builders had probably wanted (first the Turks, then the Italian colonial government), and had decided to enhance it with useless battlements. However, time had worked its magic on those imitation battlements, and the inclemency of the elements had endowed the fort with a hard-edged, aristocratic sheen. More than Western medieval structures, it recalled the castles the knights had built in Greece during the Fourth Crusade. The landscape was identical. The Captain’s armoured car tottered along a path strewn with stones. Sometimes it ventured into open fields, where the ground was often more level than the path itself. “Had I come on horseback, the journey might have been more comfortable.” As with the celebrated Knight of La Mancha, the Captain had many famous examples in mind: Anseau de Cayeux, Thierry de Tenremonde, Orry de Lisle, Guido di Conflans, Macario de Sainte Menehould, Bègue de Fransures, Conon de Béthume, Milon le Brèbant, Païen d’Orléans, Peter of Bracieux, Baldovino di Beauvoir, Hugues de Beaumetz, Gautier d’Escornai, Dreux de Beaurain… the Captain proved unable to stop thinking about the legacies of these knights. They had conquered Constantinople, made and unmade emperors, and had carved the vast empire into feuds; they had scrambled hither and thither throughout the lengths of the Empire vainly trying to sustain an order, which, lacking any roots in that country, was ultimately fated to die. All that remained of those knights was their fortresses, like gigantic carcasses of vanquished animals. Nothing connected those knights to anything that had come before them, and nothing survived their slaughter. The empire had simply swatted them away, like flies. As the Captain bounced around in his armoured car, it struck him that repeating the same sequence of events so many centuries later was both cruel and unbearable.
Translated from Italian by André Naffis-Sahely