storm was raging, wind blew against the shutterless bay window, what were we doing in the same bed, she was probably complying with modernity, she saw in this sharing a pallet an innocence laced with danger whereas I, steeped in desire, saw only a magnificent opportunity, the rosé wine called Ruby of Egypt I had filled her with was still, along with the Ricardo, my Alexandrian madeleine: at a table with the soldiers or police officers who sipped Johnny Walker at lunch without removing their sunglasses I downed Ruby of Egypt and Omar Khayyam in big swigs happy at the memory of Marianne in front of their horrified gazes, as if the Prophet had authorized only British whisky, and I even knew someone close to the president of the Republic who stuffed himself with fried red mullet and washed it down with single malt, a symbol of status, of power, all the while telling me in detail the fate of such-and-such a person, dead under torture or in who knows what torments—why did I so rarely go to Cairo I don’t remember anymore, we were given assignments to meet in Alexandria or in Agami at the entry to the Libyan Desert, maybe because it was summer, in winter everything was different, the winter of 1998 something important was being negotiated in the capital, right against the Nile at the edge of Garden City with businessmen who looked like the Communist activists in novels by Tsirkas, boastful talkative men the kind who can put you to sleep as surely as this train at night, cautious but also pleasant, Salomé made into a snake, far from the seedy simplicity of the soldiers and cops, people who took off their tinted pince-nez so as the better to look you in the eyes, assess you, sound you out as the train rocks me, puts me to sleep as in Alexandria where I fell asleep shivering and counting Marianne’s unattainable breaths, now despite myself I count the vibrations of the train as it goes over the crossties, one by one, I become aware of my body on the seat, Egyptian, Lebanese, and Saudi businessmen all educated in the best British and American prep schools, discreetly elegant, far from the clichés of colorful, rowdy Levantines, they were neither fat nor dressed up as Bedouins, they spoke calmly of the security of their future investments, as they said, they spoke of our dealings, of the region they called “the area,” the Zone, and of their safety, without ever saying the word “weapon” or the word “oil” or any other word for that matter aside from investment and safety, I wondered, as now the exhausted landscape is hypnotizing me, just as the French say dusk is “the hour between dog and wolf,” who were the dogs and who were the wolves, these people who were so courteous, I watched, I listened to my boss, that’s what I called him, I listened to my boss convince these pleasant predators, some had sold weapons to the Croats in Bosnia, others to Muslims, still others in Africa before changing over to smuggling with Iraq—the lords of the Zone in that sumptuous hotel in Cairo were present at an informal meeting during which we tried to convince them to go along with us, we informed them of the situation, of the help we could offer them in selling Iraqi oil at the best price, they owned whole tankers full of it, black gold is voluminous and it floats, the Syrians charged them fortunes to send it as if it came straight from their dried-up wells on the Euphrates whereas it had been loaded in Latakia, strange route, everyone had tons and tons of crude oil to sell, so much that a few years later French diplomats coming from Baghdad strolled about Paris in broad daylight with thousands of barrels to sell as if they were pots of jam, they reminded me of the trafficking of the Blue Berets in Bosnia, who sold their rations, their gasoline, and rented out their armored vehicles like taxis for Split or Zagreb, as naturally as anything, happy, with a good conscience and the pocket money these services got them, but still complaining about the danger, just as our businessmen from the Zone didn’t see the threat behind the outstretched hand, the deadly games that would play out in the course of the years to come, and of course I was unaware that all that would end up propelling me like a cannonball towards Rome at 150 kilometers an hour over the frozen plain streaked with trees from the landscape, this landscape eroded by the Lombard twilight illumined suddenly by the Lodi train station: the Lodi bridge over the Adda must not be far away, during the first Italian campaign, not long before going to Egypt, Bonaparte too fought there—Bonaparte maybe the greatest Mediterranean soldier along with Hannibal and Caesar, the somber Corsican beloved of Zeus faced my Croatian ancestors serving under the Austrians lined up neatly in front of the bridge on the other shore of the Adda, 12,000 soldiers, 4,000 horsemen with their cannons, their heavy muskets with the endless bayonets and their military music, Napoleon lent a hand, he helped aim the weapons, he was an artilleryman, right beside his men, he breathed courage and determination into them as Athena did for the Greeks, they will cross, against all expectation they will attack a wooden bridge on which bullets and grapeshot are raining down, a column of 6,000 grenadiers charges on the carpet of their own corpses fallen to the rhythm of the Austrian salvos, in the middle of the bridge they hesitate Lannes the little dyer from Gers advances shouts and with sword drawn at the head of his men emerges onto the opposite shore facing the enemy gunners seized with panic the French forge a path for themselves through the lines with their swords as the cavalry having forded the river upstream massacres the panicking Croats, 2,000 killed and wounded, 2,000 Hapsburgians fallen in a few hours lie strewn across the river’s shore, 2,000 bodies that the Lombard peasants will strip of their valuables, baptismal medals, silver or enamel snuffboxes, in the midst of the death rattles of the dying and the wounded on that night of 21 Floreal 1796 Year IV of the Revolution 2,000 ghosts 2,000 shades like so many shapes behind my window, the poplar trees, the factory chimneys, we’re heading for the Po the countryside is becoming darker, the Grande Armée which is not called that yet enters Milan the day after the battle of the Lodi bridge, the Little Corporal is born, the myth is underway, Bonaparte will pursue his adventure into Russia, passing through Egypt—he will land in Alexandria two years later with the idea of carving out an empire for France like that of British India, and the dead will be strewn not along the shores of the Adda but around the slopes of the pyramids: 15,000 human corpses and a few thousand Mameluk horses will rot at the entrance to the desert, the ripples of worms will give way to swarms of shifting black flies, on the channels of blood absorbed by the sand, there where, today, it’s tourists that succumb to the blows of vendors of postcards and all sorts of souvenirs, in Egypt the flies are innumerable, not far from the Fertile Valley, on the slaughtered cows hanging in the covered markets, irrigated by putrid ditches where the blood of sacrificed animals calmly flows, the smell of dead flesh must have been the same after battle, the flies always win, I rest my head gently against the window, pressed by the speed in the half-light, sleepy from the memory of the dense heat of Cairo, of the dusty mango trees, the shapeless banyan trees, the dilapidated buildings, the pale turbans of the porters and the boiling fava beans that made the dawn stink as much as the livestock hanging in the sun, a stone’s throw away from the British embassy where in the 1940s spies swarmed the way stoolpigeons do today, in a nameless boarding house on the top floor of a building whose elevator shaft served as a garbage chute where there piled up, as far as the second-floor landing, ripped-open mattresses and rusty bikes, my room had by some miracle a little balcony and at night, in the entirely relative calm of the city that never sleeps, I looked out on the dark strip of the Nile with the smell of catfish, streaked by the plunging lights of the new opera house on the island of Gezira, magnificent silurid with long luminous mustaches, I read Tsirkas’s Drifting Cities, without really understanding it, without recognizing in the schemes of the shadowy figures in his pages my own steps as an international informer, just as today, sitting below my suitcase, motionless at over a hundred kilometers an hour, I let myself be carried through the twilight without perhaps really being aware of the game I’m taking part in, of the strings that are pulling me as surely as this train is carrying me towards Rome, and in that gentle fatalism that weariness and insomnia push you into my eyes get lost in the middle of the December evening among the frost fireflies the train illumines at intervals on leafless trees, life can seem like a bad travel agency brochure, Paris Zagreb Venice Alexandria Trieste Cairo Beirut Barcelona Algiers Rome, or like a textbook of military history, conflicts, wars, my own, the Duce’s, Millán-Astray’s the one-eyed legionnaire or else before that the one in 1914 and so on ever since the Stone Age war for fire, a good soldier I arrived at the Gare de Lyon this morning right on time, what a funny idea I hear myself saying on the phone, what a funny idea to come by train, I guess you have your reasons, I don’t have any, I think, I simply missed the plane and in the train that brought me to Milan, half asleep, I dreamed—how long has it been since I took a train—about the Spanish War and the Polish ghettos, probably influenced by the documents in my briefcase, whose computer ink must have flowed onto my seat and penetrated my sleep, unless it was Marianne’s diaphanous fingers with the bluish veins, in
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