To Zeus, who has set mortals
on the path to wisdom, who established as a binding law
“learning through suffering (pathei mathos).”
Even in sleep, an anguish distilled from past sorrows
settles before the heart:
wisdom comes even to those who resist it.
— Aeschylus, Agamemnon
This episode is about white guilt , or rather, white shame .
I wrote it during a bout of high fever, and I only realized it afterwards, when the temperature dropped and the text remained there, like litmus paper.
It speaks of the analytical and interpretive tools I learned during my travels in South Africa—ways of listening to trauma that were not originally mine. Tools learned from archives, from activists, and also from sangomas – Zulu-trained healers—who taught me forms of knowledge one cannot find in books.
Since then I keep asking myself:
is it legitimate to use what I learned?
Is it legitimate to make a living from it?
Or is it that theft we call cultural appropriation?
The only answer I can give myself—for now—is that I can use those tools only as long as I remember where they come from, and only as long as I use them to help pursue justice for the ongoing consequences of colonialism today. Easier said than done, of course, but intentions still matter.
In this story, the Tarot card of The Hanged Man represents those who remain suspended beneath us — often invisible, and yet inescapable.
The reference to Loreto Square in the title is an invitation to find and overturn the hidden colonizer within each of us — metaphorically, of course.
Previous episode: –> Episode 12: The Rigging of Justice
I think I’m dreaming.
In the dream, my narrow bunk is bathed in a light that doesn’t seem to come from anywhere in particular—an inner dawn, suspended between two worlds. The thermometer on the bedside table shows a red number, but my body no longer trembles: it hangs in balance.
Giacomo Casanova, impeccable even in dreams, sits beside my bed; one gloved hand resting on his heart, the other idly teasing the feather of a Venetian fan.
“Ah, my dear,” he says, in his theatre-ready Venetian drawl, “fever is the most honest of lovers. It strips away every pretense and leaves only what truly burns once the flesh has surrendered.”
“The flesh is just a tired monkey, Giacomo,” I mutter, too weak to truly smile. “Life is only a videogame the body plays without having chosen it; and God—if God exists—is the rhythm that sets the tempo. The rest is free will controlled by a faulty joystick. Whatever moves you make, the level ends the same for everyone: sooner or later, in peace or in torment, the monkey dies.”
He laughs, delighted, as if I had delivered a line written centuries ago for his personal amusement.
A moment later, the curtain around the bed stirs with a liquid rustle, and in the opening appears a figure made of amber and mist.
The light catches in her veil. When she speaks, her voice is low and steady:
“Do not mock those who search for rhythm, libertine. I lost it, and I danced out of time all my life.”
Casanova rises with a flawless bow. “And whom do we have the honor of welcoming into this chamber?”
The woman lifts the veil that hides her face.
She is Caterina de’ Medici Gonzaga, once betrothed to an English prince who died too soon, later the ill-fated Duchess of Mantua and Monferrato.
Her eyes have the exhaustion of someone who has walked too many palace corridors to still believe in the neutrality of destiny.
“I do not know whether I am alive or dead,” she says, “I only know I am still a prisoner of courtly expectations, and I carry stories on my skin that I never chose. I also know that fever is sometimes the only way to hear them speak.”
She presses a cool cloth to my forehead, like a gentle sister long accustomed to command.
“You do not have an ordinary fever,” she continues, fixing her gaze on me. “You have the fever of mystics—or of the guilty. The Zulu call it ukuthwasa. The fever that forces you to look at where your tools come from… and to whom they answer.”
Casanova pretends not to hear her.
“Philosophy and fever, what a delicious pairing! Nothing in this world is more erotic. But tell me: if the world is a videogame, who programmed it?”
“Perhaps no one, perhaps the world itself,” I manage between bouts of coughing. “Perhaps there is no programmer—only a symphony writing itself. I just try to stay in tempo. When I miss a note, the body falls ill.”
Caterina nods.
“The Hanged Man lives this way: suspended between one world and the next, upside down until he sees what others avoid. Reversal is his medicine. It is the uncomfortable waiting—head downward—that becomes knowledge. But remember: even those who dance with the rhythm of the world need rest. And remember too that visions should not be cultivated like a garden—they must be received like rain.”
Casanova, thoughtful for the first time, adjusts my pillow with an unexpectedly sober gesture.
“I still prefer wine and games to spiritual exercises. But I wonder now whether the burning of love I pursue is really so different from that of the mystic.”
Caterina smiles—a smile ancient, woven of mercy and fury.
“Fever is a rite. But only if you remember the genealogy it comes from. Otherwise, it is merely a wildfire.”
The room trembles softly, like the sway of a boat. Candles flicker; my breath vibrates in the air.
And in their exchanged glance—a libertine always in flight and an unlucky duchess—I see the same thing: a shared wound, and the vertigo of those who know that no vision is ever innocent.
The night air is warm and thick as honey. The candles burn slowly, their flames wavering with each breath, with each cough that shakes my chest.
On the bedside table lies a deck of cards Casanova brought from Venice, while Caterina holds in her lap a small pouch filled with bones and shells. Two worlds study each other from behind different veils—curious and cautious, like lovers who have not yet touched.
Casanova taps his fingers against his thigh, eyeing Caterina with playful mischief.
“They say fever is the fire that purifies,” he murmurs, “but to me it seems it only burns what one loves most.”
Caterina smiles faintly, without showing her teeth. She is beautiful—not the kind of beauty that displays itself, but the kind that reveals itself only to those who have sinned enough to deserve it.
“Fever is a rite,” she says. “A doorway. But only if you know its language.”
“A new language?” Casanova arches a brow.
“Oh, Giacomo…” she replies, laying her hand upon the shells. “It is older than all of us.”
The shells clatter softly between her fingers. I recognize them: they are like the ones a sangoma once let fall into my hands, one summer night in Cape Town.
She had told me: Do not ask questions of the spirits unless you are willing to hear the pain they come from.
The memory cuts through me like a warm blade.
Caterina inhales slowly. “Would you like to know the rules of Zulu necromancy, Giacomo?”
Her voice does not ask—it warns.
Casanova leans back in his chair, theatrical as ever.
“If they come from you, Duchess, they could come from Lucifer himself and I would still listen.”
She closes her eyes for a moment, then recites with a calm that belongs to no living world.
“First rule: blood is the thread that binds the living to the dead. Reincarnations exist—yes—but they matter only if you acknowledge your lineage.
Second: to break a curse you must return to the beginning and replay the tragedy as farce.
Third: every good deed pays tribute to evil, and every evil one to good.
Fourth: the cards of the white man lie, because they hide the bastards. And so finding the trauma takes more effort than ignoring it.”
Casanova looks at her like an actor who has just heard the crowning line of a new drama.
“It is a theology of merchants and comedians,” he says at last. “Far more honest than anything the priests offer.”
“Because merchants understand the price of debt,” she replies, “and comedians know how to laugh at the saints. I consider them both prophets.”
I turn slightly toward them. The fever distorts the edges of things, yet I see them clearly: two souls studying one another, teetering between irony and desire.
I swallow, my throat dry. “But these rules… they aren’t yours.”
She turns toward me slowly. Her gaze is gentle, and yet it allows no escape.
“No knowledge comes into the world without wounding someone,” she says. “But the most dangerous kind is the knowledge that pretends to be innocent. You, like me, learned these tools from hands that have suffered. You cannot use them without remembering the wounds they come from.”
“And if I make a mistake?” I ask.
“Then,” Caterina says, “the fever will remind you.”
She lifts a shell and lets it gleam in the candlelight.
“The Zulu do not fear the genealogy of pain, and they do not flee from it as we white people do—they question it until it answers. It is the only way not to turn the dead into ornaments or into terror.”
Casanova twirls a card between his fingers—the Fool. “And where does this one fit into your rules, Duchess?”
“The Fool is the bastard,” she replies. “The unwanted child of the white man’s deck. The trauma one refuses to name, the origin one pretends not to have.”
“So you believe in bastards, then.”
“In a way, I am one myself,” Caterina says, her voice softened by an unexpected tenderness. “Daughter of a courtly dream and of a body that tired too soon. But at least I have acknowledged my trauma. That is how it stopped ruling over me.”
Casanova smiles, tilting his head. “I, on the other hand, have spent my life trying to get rid of mine. Perhaps that is why the devil never takes me entirely seriously.”
“The devil does not take seriously those who do not respect him,” she counters. “And you, Giacomo, treat him like a card-table companion. Perhaps it is time you looked your ghosts in the face instead of ignoring them.”
He laughs, but does not answer. He takes Caterina’s hand, naturally and gently. The silence that follows is full, intimate, and I feel the sea in the distance as if it were breathing through my own body.
The candle dies with a final flicker, spent, and in the darkness that remains I hear them laugh softly.
A brief, gentle laughter—belonging no longer to the living nor to the dead.
Fever loosens its grip the way an animal does after biting—retreating into the shadows to watch what happens next.
I decide to go out: I don’t know if it will help, but I feel I have to move. And there is a documentary on the Moria refugee camp, showing at PARC (Florence’s Performing Arts Research Centre), which several people have urged me to see.
The bus to the cinema passes through the Cascine Park, and along the way the air grows heavy.
Under the trees stretches a line of makeshift tents, blankets, improvised braziers; bodies that seem to sleep and bodies that shift through the shadows. The bus fills with silence, with smells, with eyes that avoid each other.
When we stop at the traffic light, I see a man holding a child in his lap, singing softly, without melody—perhaps just to keep his mother’s language alive.
I pull my scarf tighter, as if to shield myself; but I know it isn’t the cold I’m defending myself from.
I reach the screening room just in time, as the lights go down and the documentary begins.
On the white wall appear the shacks of the Moria refugee camp: plastic, mud, misery.
The voices of the interviewees tremble, as if traveling across a dense geography of pain.
They speak of the 2020 fire, of flames racing between the tents like a starving animal. They speak of how hell can take an administrative form. In the new “humanitarian” camps, the fences gleam like blades: everything is so clean it looks like a waiting room for a deletion procedure.
One of the interviewees says, in an almost neutral tone:
“They turned the prison into a jail, and fear into procedure.”
I recognize in that phrase the perfection of horror: pain normalized, converted into administrative language. The banality of evil, signing the authorization for inhumanity.
I feel Caterina and Casanova seated beside me—I see them, though no one else does. She covers her mouth with her thin fingers, as if trying not to retch. He smokes nervously, a cigarette that produces no ash.
“This is the new Europe,” he whispers, “a Venice without water. Only walls.”
“No,” Caterina replies, “this is the old Europe remaking itself, disguised as democracy. The same chains as ever—just polished.”
The screen continues: rows of white containers, uniform, silent, as if humanity had entered them only by mistake.
My throat tightens, and I cannot tell if it is fever or shame.
What right do I have to speak of the dead, I think, when I can hardly bear the gaze of the living?
When the screening ends, no one applauds.
We step out into the suspended darkness of evening, while the Cascine smell of smoke and rotting leaves.
Then—from the far end of the square—a voice rises, swelling into a chorus.
A dozen men, perhaps more, are singing.
It is not a song for an audience.
It is a song for the absent.
Some clap in rhythm; someone is crying; someone else looks upward as if waiting for an answer from the sky. They are singing an old blues: Ten Million Slaves, by Otis Taylor.
Standing down here, fallout shelter…
Think about the slaves, long time ago…
The words lift into the cold air and become a bridge. And I understand—with the clarity only visions grant—that it is not only the living who are singing.
The dead—the drowned, the rejected, the burned—join the chorus. Their voices sound like the swallowing sea, like the land routes that grind people down, like burning camps and freezing deserts.
Caterina steps closer without touching me. “See? There is no need to summon them. They are already here. What we must do is remember them.”
And Casanova adds, his voice trembling: “We have played with the dead for far too long. Now it is their turn to throw the dice.”
I look toward the river Arno in the distance: dark, still, an enormous pupil reflecting without judgment.
For a moment, the whole of Florence seems upside down, like the card of the Hanged Man—the city of enlightened white people, hanging above an abyss of shame that holds up its foundations.
When the singing fades, a long, thin note remains in the air, like a string that keeps vibrating even when no one touches it.
And then I understand: the Hanged Man is not the martyr contemplating us from some heavenly vantage point, but the one held down below—the one who bears the weight of the world with their arms bound behind their back.
To integrate the Hanged Man is to integrate this genealogy of pain. And yet all of us, far too often, prefer to hide that pain behind a cloud of hypocrisies, terrified of what it would mean to face it.
The last to stop singing is the river.
I stand there, motionless, without the courage either to lift my eyes or to lower them, wondering if this is the price of seeing.
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