There are no omens. The fate doesn't send heralds. It is too wise or too cruel for that. (Oscar Wilde)It's time you know this: the pride of the Royal Navy, the Titanic, was sabotaged. Happily, desperately, inexorably sabotaged. The Egyptians built their pyramids, the geometric design to unite the human and the divine, using simple and poor workers, elegant synonymous of slaves. In the same way the civilized English at the beginning of the last century had the bright idea to build the most impressive of their ships in Belfast. Belfast, Northern Ireland.
In the course of two years two thousand Irish workers completed the floating wonder. Among spitting, sips of fourth category beer, curses, half in English and half in Gaelic, and, everywhere, including dust, mud and sludge, above, below, inside, a thought. A little lively thought, slippery and elusive as a mouse. A rat named Manganese. A simple, almost domestic rat. Manganese is a poor metal. A fragile material. Without merit, readily available at low cost. Used in modest amounts it would have allowed owners to save money on the overall balance of the work. It could partially replace the use of the much more expensive steel. All this, it is essential to reaffirm, in small quantities.
But Irish workers have never liked small quantities. When it's time for dark beer mugs, or to shout and sing, nor, especially, when the opportunity presents itself to be generous. They were very generous with their masters in London: they decided to make them save a lot of money. They run around their beloved little rat left and right, sprinkling the whole ship with drips of Manganese. In the cast, in the pillars, in the cracks, everywhere. The poor metal eventually spread and proliferated everywhere.
A few months later, many miles away, the Titanic sank in just two hours, with a gloomy croaking of thousands of porcelain plates of good china crushed and swallowed up by the waters. The ultimate symbol of finance and technology of the triumphant Modern Age had been defeated by a bit of ice, a thin blade dispersed in the immensity. An inverted pyramid, a mocking island upside down. Place and space impossible to conquer, virgin land of the harsh fate. To say that the only true part of this kind of story is the final would serve little. It's evident. There has never been a rat named Manganese. Maybe. Or maybe yes. We should ask the glasses, the vases of spices, sugar and marmelade, hats, clothes and shoes that still rest on the ocean floor. They might have seen him go. Maybe he still reflected his dark shape on the silver and ivory statue of the blond captain who dreamed the solemn entrance into the port of arrival. The rat exists. In the minds of those who have assembled with their hands and muscles the metal and the timber of the ship. There he was and still is, the good Manganese. He has substance and reality in the thoughts of those who imagine a ship in which there is only one huge deck from which everyone can see his own piece of America, dreaming of it, looking at it or turning it their back. A ship without cargo and with endless lifeboats.Maybe it's the same dream of the objects laid since many decades on the sand of the ocean depths. Wood, iron and glass that still defend their truth from the narrow suffocating seaweed. Different from the reality of the glossy Hollywood films. The truth, Manganese is well aware, is always a bit dirtier and a little deeper. Down there, in the mud.
Ivano Mugnaini
(also published in “La dimora del tempo sospeso”
