Lake Inverarity

Lake Inverarity is an artificial lake at Fangoso Lagoons, set within an engineered landscape of earth-moving machines and sand roads. It first appears as a place of leisure, but its waters also hold bones connected to a wartime battlefield and stand beside a marker recounting an unsolved massacre. The lake’s polished recreational surface thus gathers several layers of violence, commerce, and uncertain history.

Setting and Appearance

The approach to the lake passes earth-moving machinery and an entire absence of trees; the road then winds down in a helix toward the sculpted water. On a round island of fill sits a social hall, a chunky, ogived, verdigrised Art Nouveau reconstruction of a European pleasure casino. Its constructed island and imported architectural style make the scene feel designed rather than untouched: even the water’s apparent openness belongs to a planned environment.

The visit is organized around ordinary recreation. The Paranoids unload musical instruments and look for places to plug them in beneath the trucked-in white sand. Oedipa takes cold eggplant-parmigiana sandwiches from the Impala’s trunk, while Metzger brings an enormous Thermos of tequila sours. The group wanders along the beach toward a small marina serving boat owners without lots directly on the water. One of the musicians proposes taking a boat, and the girls enthusiastically agree; the casual excursion establishes the lake as a setting for youthful play and social disorder.

Bones Beneath the Leisure Landscape

The lake’s recreational use is inseparable from the dispute over human remains. Manny Di Presso explains that some bones from Italy have been sold and placed in the lake to decorate its bottom for scuba divers. He says he has been examining the goods in dispute, while the rest of the bones were used in the research-and-development phase of a filter program in the early 1950s. The account makes the lakebed a literal repository for remains repurposed as decoration, while the other bones have been absorbed into industrial research.

The competing account of their origin leads to Lago di Pietà. Di Presso says Tony Jaguar claimed to have harvested the bones from that lake; he also places the remains within a straight sale, not a freeway-related bone trade. Metzger’s question about whether the dead were American soldiers prompts Di Presso to describe a 1943 battle near the Tyrrhenian coast, where a small company of American troops was cut off during the advance on Rome. The men were trapped on the narrow shore of a clear lake beneath German fire from the cliffs. The cold water, lack of trees, and absence of useful aircraft made escape or rescue difficult. Against that history, the bones displayed in Lake Inverarity’s depths are not simply scenery: their provenance remains contested, and their decorative purpose sits uneasily beside the deadly circumstances attributed to the dead.

Historical Marker and Unresolved Signs

A bronze historical marker on the other side of the lake records a separate episode: in 1853, twelve Wells, Fargo men fought a band of masked marauders in black uniforms. The account depends on a single post rider, the massacre’s only witness, who died shortly afterward. Its sole other clue is a mark traced in dust by one of the victims, and the attackers’ identities remain unknown.

Oedipa wonders whether the mark was a cross or the initial T, connecting the marker’s uncertain trace to the stuttered T associated with Niccolò in The Courier’s Tragedy. This resemblance does not settle the attackers’ identity, but it turns the lake’s historical inscription into another possible sign within the pattern Oedipa is pursuing. She calls Randolph Driblette to ask whether he knew of the Wells, Fargo incident and whether it had influenced his decision to dress the play’s bravos in black. The unanswered call sends her onward to Zapf’s Used Books, where the skull on the cover of the sought-after Jacobean revenge-play collection watches from the dim light. The lake therefore serves not only as a setting for disputed remains but as a point from which one ambiguous historical clue opens onto further questions.