The Chief arrived to play, wearing wrap-around mirrorshades and a brown, hooded beach-robe. It was a Mediterranean August, hot, blue, and breezy. The murmuring surf was chased by a skittering horde of little shore-birds.
Irma poured the Chief a tall iced glass of his favorite vitamin sludge while Tullio shuffled and dealt.
The Chief disrobed and smeared his seamy, portly carcass with medicated suntan unguent. He gripped his waterproofed plastic cards.
“Anaconda,” he commanded, and belched.
The empty fourth chair at their card table was meant to attract the public. The Chief was safe from surveillance inside his sumptuous Shadow House—that was the purpose of the house, its design motif, its reason for being. However, safety had never satisfied the Chief. He was an Italian politician, so it was his nature to flirt with disaster.
Whenever left to themselves, Tullio and Irma passed their pleasant days inside the Shadow House, discreet, unseen, unbothered, and unbothering. But the two of them were still their Chief’s loyal retainers. The Chief was a man of scandal and turbulence—half-forgotten, half-ignored by a happier era. But the Chief still had his burning need to control the gaze of the little people.
The Chief’s raw hunger for glory, which had often shaken the roots of Europe, had never granted him a moment’s peace. During his long, rampaging life, he’d possessed wealth, fame, power, and the love of small armies of women. Serenity, though, still eluded him. Privacy was his obsession: fame was his compulsion.
Tullio played his cards badly, for it seemed to him that a violent host of invisible furies still circled the Chief’s troubled, sweating head. The notorious secrecy. The covert scandals. The blatant vulgarity, which was also a subtle opacity—for the Chief was an outsized statesman, a heroic figure of many perverse contradictions. His achievements and his crimes were like a herd of elephants: they could never stand still within a silent room.
Irma offered Tullio a glance over their dwindling poker hands. They both pitied their Chief, because they understood him. Tullio had once been an Italian political party operative, and Irma, a deft Italian tax-avoidance expert. Nowadays they were reduced to the status of the house-repairman and the hostess, the butler and the cook. There was no more Italy. The Chief had outlived his nation.
Becoming ex-Italian meant a calmer life for Tullio and Irma, because the world was gentler without an Italy. It was their duty to keep this lonely, ill-starred old man out of any more trouble. The Chief would never behave decently—that was simply not in his character—but their discreet beach mansion could hush up his remaining excesses.
The first wandering stranger approached their open table. This fringe figure was one tiny fragment of the world’s public, a remote demographic outlier, a man among the lowest of the low. He was poor, black, and a beach peddler. Many such emigres haunted the edges of the huge Mediterranean summer beach crowds. These near-vagrants sold various forms of pretty rubbish.
The Chief was delighted to welcome this anonymous personage. He politely relieved the peddler of his miserable tray of fried fish, candy bars, and kid’s plastic pinwheels, and insisted on seating him at the green poker table.
“Hey, I can’t stay here, boss,” complained the peddler, in bad Italian. “I have to work.”
“We’ll look after you,” the Chief coaxed, surveilling the peddler, from head to foot, with covert glee. “My friend Tullio here will buy your fish. Tullio has a hungry cat over there, isn’t that right, Tullio?”
The Chief waved his thick arm at the Shadow House, but the peddler simply couldn’t see the place. The mansion’s structure was visually broken up by active dazzle lines. Its silhouette faded like a cryptic mist into the island’s calm palette of palms and citruses.
Tullio obediently played along. “Oh yes, that’s true, we do have a big tomcat, he’s always hungry.” He offered the peddler some plastic coinage from the poker table.
Irma gathered up the reeking roasted sardines. When Irma rounded a corner of the Shadow House, she vanished as if swallowed.
“It has been my experience,” the Chief said sagely, scooping up and squaring the poker cards, “that the migrants of the world—men like yourself—are risk-takers. So, my friend: how’d you like to double your money in a quick hand of Hi-Lo with us?”
“I’m not a player, boss,” said the peddler, though he was clearly tempted.
“So, saving up your capital, is that it? Do you want to live here in Italy—is that your plan?”
The peddler shrugged. “There is no Italy! In Europe, the people love elephants. So, I came here with the elephants. The people don’t see me. The machines don’t care.”
Irma reappeared as if by magic. Seeing the tense look on their faces, she said brightly, “So, do you tend those elephants, young man? People in town say they brought whales this year, too!”
“Oh no, no, signora!” cried the peddler. “See the elephants, but never look at the whales! You have to ride a boat out there, you get seasick, that’s no good!”
“Tell us more about these elephants, they interest me,” the Chief urged, scratching his oiled belly, “have a prosecco, have a brandy.” But the peddler was too street-wise: he had sensed that something was up. He gathered his tray and escaped them, hastening down the beach, toward the day’s gathering crowds.
Tullio, Irma, and the Chief ran through more hands of Anaconda poker. The Chief, an expert player, was too restless to lose, so he was absentmindedly piling up all their coinage.
“My God, if only I, too, had no name!” he burst out. “No identity, like that African boy—what I could do in this world now! Elephants, here in Sardinia! When I was young, did I have any elephants? Not one! I had less than nothing, I suffered from huge debts! These days are such happy times, and the young people now, they just have no idea!”
Tullio and Irma knew every aspect of their Chief’s hard-luck origin story, so they merely pretended attention.
The summer beach crowd was clustering down the coastline, a joyful human mass of tanned and salty arms and legs, ornamented with balloons and scraps of pop music.
A beach-combing group of Japanese tourists swanned by. Although they wore little, the Japanese were fantastically well-dressed. The Japanese had found their metier as the world’s most elegant people. Even the jealous Milanese were content to admire their style.
Lacking any new victim to interrogate at his card table, the Chief began to reminisce. The Chief would loudly bluster about any topic, except for his true sorrows, which he never confessed aloud.
The Swiss had lavished many dark attentions on the Chief’s crumbling brain. The Swiss had invaded his bony skull, that last refuge of humane privacy, like a horde of Swiss pikemen invading Renaissance Italy. They occupied it, but they couldn’t govern it.
The Chief’s upgraded brain, so closely surveilled by Swiss medical imaging, could no longer fully conceal his private chains of thought. The Chief had once been a political genius, but now his scorched neurons were like some huge database racked by a spy agency’s analytics.
Deftly shuffling a fresh card-deck, the Chief suddenly lost his composure. He commenced to leak and babble. His unsought theme was “elephants.” Any memory, any anecdote that struck his mind, about elephants.
Hannibal had invaded Italy with elephants. The elephant had once been the symbol of an American political party. A houseplant named the “Elephant Ear.” The Chief recalled a pretty Swedish pop-star with the unlikely name of “Elliphant.”
The Chief was still afraid of the surgically warped and sickening “Elephant Man,” a dark horror-movie figure from his remote childhood.