Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Magris, Claudio

  So then, my name is Salvatore—like Jason, Comrade Blasich said mockingly, a healer, one who saves, a physician familiar with the drugs of life and death. History is an intensive care unit and it’s easy to get the dose wrong and send patients you hoped to save to the other world. Salvatore; Tore, in dialect, to my friends. Salvatore ipiko, then Cippico, in the twenties, after we had returned to Europe, and Trieste, Fiume, Istria and the Quarnero islands had become Italian, the Vattovaz had become Vattovani and the Ivancic Di Giovanni or at least Ivancich, all Slavic names rinsed clean as they should be, the Isonzo and Jadransko More filtered and purified in the Arno.

  I had other names as well, which was customary in underground combat.—“Yes, Nevèra, Strijèla and ...”—Enough. You all know everything about me, so many spies against one single man ... This PC controls the world even better than that other one, of course, the old PC has been seized up since who knows when. History presses a key and the Party disappears; I disappeared with it but now I press a key and delete those curious strangers who want to know my names. Jorgen’s name was given to me not by a Party cell but by another one, still a cell, but a different kind—but all in due course. Port Arthur, a century and a half ago, Dachau and Goli Otok, yesterday, today. Be careful with those keys; otherwise you end up deleting some passage and then you’re lost, you don’t know who it is who’s speaking, whom that voice belongs to—when it changes on its own, and comes out differently, from your throat and from who knows where, even you don’t recognize it—

  However, that’s your problem. We’re willing to talk in any case. We wanted to talk even before, only no one wanted to hear us. Even you must have known little or nothing about it, Dr. Ulcigrai, if, as I saw in that file of mine, you had to borrow some studies about that forgotten old atrocity to understand it. That’s the real Nosological History, not mine—it’s History that’s sick, that’s taken leave of its senses, not me. Or maybe I’m crazy because I was under the illusion that I could heal it, crazy like all healers, like you, like Jason, who for a sheepskin provokes destruction and horrendous crimes and madness ...

  Take notes, Doctor, fill out the chart, explain kroz stroj to your assistants, that ingenious, atrocious system that puts prisoners at the mercy of their companions of misfortune, to torment one another as cruelly as they can in order to ingratiate themselves with their superiors ... Maybe even try it among yourselves, that way you’ll understand better. Write it down, if you want I’ll dictate, but write it. Maybe if you had done it then, when they were slaughtering and torturing us, with everyone deaf and dumb; the screams didn’t carry across the expanse of sea, they didn’t even reach Arbe, the island closest to Goli Otok, that infernal Naked Island. Bald too, they call it. Well, Arbe too had had its hell, when the Italians chose it to slaughter the Slavs ...

  I hope you understood that story well. How we went to Yugoslavia, in 1947, to help that country, which had been liberated from the Nazis, construct communism, how we left our homes, in Monfalcone, for that reason and sacrificed everything, we who already bore the brand of Fascist torturers of half the world on our flesh, and how soon afterwards, when Stalin and Tito began to go at one another, the Yugoslavians accused us of being Stalin’s spies, traitors of Yugoslavia, enemies of the people, and they deported, tortured, massacred us on that island, without anyone knowing, or wanting to know anything about it ... You see, I was in Dachau, I risked my life to eliminate all the Dachaus from the face of the earth. Dachau is the culmination, the unparalleled apogee of evil, but at least everyone knew immediately what Dachau was, who the murderers were and who the victims, while at Goli Otok it was our comrades who massacred us and called us traitors, while still other comrades didn’t want to know anything about it, gagging our mouths and plugging other people’s ears. And if nobody’s listening, it makes no difference whether you keep quiet or speak out; even raving to yourself in the street, gesturing and grimacing, doesn’t mean much.

  It took another sudden reversal for anyone to remember that story and that disaster, an even bigger reversal, which rocked the world and the future and dealt me a final blow, relegating our red flags to the attic and throwing a bucket of water on our blood that had been shed for everyone. It’s clear that when things blow up, tongues are loosened and ears unplugged. Talking is nonetheless a consolation when the revolution, for which you’ve lived through the centuries and years of your life, is a wrinkle of a burst balloon twisted on the ground and those shrivelled rubbers are what’s left of your life. Now I’m the one who’s talking, it’s up to me, a worn-out rag used since time immemorial to wipe the bottom of the hold and scrape the dirt from under History’s fingernails. This old rag, hung on the rigging, flaps and flutters in the wind; if it’s drenched in blood it looks even better, a red flag, nicer looking than that blue one with the three white stockfish that we hoisted in Reykjavík, We Jorgensen, His Excellency the protector of Iceland, Commander-in-Chief by Sea and Land, for three weeks, then back in irons again, like so many other times.

  It’s good to talk. You yourself know it, Dr. Ulcigrai, that’s why you stimulate me with those questions of yours—discreet, barely suggested, just to stir up the waters. The words rise, get clogged up, mingled with saliva, they smell like breath. Talking, coughing, gasping—you could easily ruin your lungs in Port Arthur or Goli Otok, in those cold, fetid cells, subjected to torture. The words spill out. The water surges against the manhole cover and overflows, rusty-brown, in the street, like that day in Trieste in the rain, as I was going up Via Madonnina to Party headquarters and the abyss of my life.

  When you talk, and everything repeats on you, the memories the horrors the fear the prison stench the stomach acid, you delude yourself that those words are something more than the scars you feel on your face, than the obscure throbbing of your body being consumed and whose consumption they describe, than the silent catastrophes that occur in the cells and in the blood cells, daily hecatombs of neurons, appalling like those in the Lagers and Gulags recounted by those who survived the Leviathans who pulverized them, broken vessels that turn into small bluish splotches under the skin, much smaller and shorter lived than those inflicted by the torturers in the Lager from which we did or did not return, ready to sacrifice ourselves for the future, for a life that doesn’t exist, and throw our present into the ovens of all the infernos, the only life we had and would have in the billions of years between the big bang and the final collapse, not only of the revolution but of everything.

  Immersed in shadows that begin imperceptibly and make the body, that shell that is given a first and last name or a concentration camp serial number, into a dark underground cell, like those in which so many of us ended up, when the world became the prison’s isolation cell, the murk of the shithole down which the jailer stuck our head—In these shadows, viscous as the prison walls, we deceive ourselves that words are of another world, free messengers pronouncing a judgment on the executioner which is higher than that of his puppet court and which are capable of passing through the prison walls like angels, off to tell the truth about what has been and proclaim good tidings of what is to come.

  Perhaps, at some point, the survivor who is happy to talk remembers when, undergoing torture, the no he meant to say, the suppressed groan and the reflux of blood running down his chin were all one thing, and he’s afraid that words too are merely a regurgitation of flesh that can no longer stand it, a death rattle, a burp and nothing more. But then he thinks that the dizziness is a deception, one of the Lager’s tricks to bend you and throw that which most sustains you into confusion, and that he must therefore resist as he did then, say no and sing the Internationale, which is not a scream but the song of a world in which there will be less screaming from pain. And so he resumes talking, recounting—to anyone, to you, to those maniacs on the Net, to me—because a man cannot live without words and without faith in words; to lose that faith is to surrender, to give up. But I ...—“To abdicate though, like in Iceland ...”—Another slander, another
story, all in due time. That is, never, it’s never the right time. Anyway, I never gave up and, in spite of everything, this much I feel I owe to the Party. The Party wrung us out like rags used to wipe up clotted bloodstains, and in its passion to scrub the world’s floors our blood got mingled with that which we had to swab, but it taught us to be gentlemanly, yes indeed, to behave, even with our jailers, like a grand gentleman ill treated by the rabble. Those who fight for the revolution never sink very low, even if the revolution, in the end, comes to nothing. And even the realization of having failed is part of the ability to see the objectivity of History, of what the Party called dialectic but which I have long preferred to call refinement, and that perhaps comes only from a lengthy familiarity with defeat.

  Talking, even just between us, is perhaps the only way left for me to be faithful to the revolution. The reaction is less loquacious, it fires ruthlessly but acts as if nothing has happened; it keeps quiet and makes sure no one talks about what takes place. It’s not surprising that it has kept silent for so long about Goli Otok as well, about that dishonour that rained down on everything and everyone, on the Party, the anti-party and those who kept their mouths shut on the other side and were overjoyed to see how the Communists ended up.—“Actually that’s all they talk about now, the jackass kicking and also braying at the lion breathing its last.”

  —You think I don’t see it? When the revolution is over, there’s a lot of talking, because that’s all that’s left: everyone blathering, like people who’ve witnessed a horrifying car accident and stop on the sidewalk, in the crossroads, to comment on what happened.

  3

  MY DEAR COGOI, I said to myself that morning in Trieste, leaving the Party headquarters on Via Madonnina, semo cagai, we’re in deep shit. Unlike my father, who used it even for trivial mishaps—a bad hand you’re dealt during a game of trump or the house key you can’t seem to find, at night, outside the locked door—I try to reserve this amiable expression of my dialect, or what I can almost consider my dialect (and yours, Dr. Ulcigrai, although I understand that here, at the Antipodes, you may have forgotten it, even though you pretend to be still up there, perhaps to make sure you’re not standing on your head), I try to reserve it for real blows of fate. In a word, I treat it with respect. It seems to me an affable and dignified way to acknowledge disasters and also a mark of a good upbringing—of Kinderstube, my father would say. When you meet an acquaintance, even a disagreeable one, it’s only right to greet him and tip your hat, and if that lout is death or misfortune, of course you try to avoid him and turn the corner before he can bore you with his story, but that doesn’t mean you should forget good manners and sink to his level.

  That Mr. Cogoi must be an ideal companion in stricken situations; gentle, composed, perhaps he’s already seen the hand tracing the fiery letters on the wall and realizes that there’s nothing more to be done, but he isn’t troubled by it, indeed he doesn’t even talk, he merely listens and nods assent. Is he here, by any chance? Have you seen him? If only someone like that were nearby, amid the turmoil of things, someone who does everything he can not to upset you. I remember quite well addressing him in the usual way, as I left Party headquarters that day when they told me that I too had to go along with those two thousand Monfalconesi, give or take, who had decided to leave everything behind, their home their work their country, to go to Yugoslavia to construct socialism.

  It was late morning, but the rain and the air were dark, a steely grey. Torrents of filthy water streamed down Via Madonnina, grimy streaks lined the sooty walls; the rain fell hard and straight, shutting off the world behind the bars of a prison. As I walked along trying to take cover close to the buildings, I ran into an old woman huddled near the wall, dressed in black; she had pulled a kind of shawl over her head, and its fringes, soaked from the rain, coiled on her head like snakes. At that point the rain had caused a sewer to overflow; in the middle of the street the brownish liquid, swollen by the rushing streams, widened like a river. The woman grabbed my arm; her dark eyes searched my face, so close to hers and to her open mouth, as she asked me to help her across the flooded street, encumbered as she was by a bundle she held under her arm, a rolled-up carpet or blanket or something. The thick fur, clumsily wrapped in paper, was wet and shiny from the rain; for a moment the headlights of a passing car, which splashed mud on both of us, lit it with a golden glow.

  She clung to me, I held her up but kept my face turned away so as not to smell her old woman’s odour, despite the rain and gusts of wind.

  In the middle of the street the woman stumbled, right over the deepest muddy rivulet; I lifted her up and jumped over that seeming vortex but I slipped, and trying not to let her fall, forcing all my weight on my ankle, I wrenched it violently—a stabbing pain, the foot twists and slides out of the shoe, which the little stream carries off to a drain a little farther down. I found myself on the sidewalk, on the other side of the street, with an aching foot, wearing only a drenched sock. The old woman deftly released her hold, wiped my face with her hand and quickly went off, turning into the first cross street. Before rounding the corner she turned. Her eyes blazed, a dark, sweet, vulgar fire; she murmured a blessing and disappeared, again the headlights of a car made the fur she held in the tattered bundle under her arm shine like gold in the darkness of the street and of the air.

  Comrade Blasich, shortly afterwards, made fun of me seeing me come in with only one shoe, but then he broke off, looking at that foot of mine almost uneasily. The Party headquarters was large and sprawling; small rooms, corridors, stockrooms, a large hall for conferences, an internal staircase that wound upwards, spiralling like a chute, to the areas of the upper floors that overlooked Via della Cattedrale, high on the hill of San Giusto. Now it seems to me that that staircase was a shortcut between two universes, you enter at the point where they are planning the revolution and you come out in another world; the city is at our feet, indifferent, beyond the sea, jagged pale blue mountains can be seen, a broken wall, the peaks are splinters of glass scraping the sky. Revolution is a word as senseless as the ones children make up and repeat over and over until even things around you become as nonsensical as that word. I for example used to recite salmoiraghirhodiatoce rhodiatocesalmoiraghi, I must have seen them in some ad. I think they were two different ads but it doesn’t matter, salmoiraghirhodiatoce rhodiatocesalmoiraghi, after a while the whole world became a meaningless babble, things melted, heaving and surging, a thick, amorphous chocolate. And now revolutionrevolutionrevolution.—“Great, my friend, we’re on the right track. Revolutionrevolutionsalmoiraghirhodiatoce, if we understand this, recovery is not far off. Matrix revolutions, simulated turmoil that doesn’t happen to anyone, those slaves in irons whom you broke your back to liberate don’t exist, avatars of avatars of nobody in a video game. No more proletarians, a keyboard replaces the working class, workers of the world unite in a chip and leap out on command only when a key is struck. Learn to keep pace with the times. It’s easy, because they don’t have a pace; all you have to do is not insist on the march of progress. Schluss with delusions of grandeur, redeem the world, engage in revolution, get sunstroke beneath the rising sun. Why go out and look for trouble? That weeping and gnashing of teeth, out there, is a program like any other, it’s not worth the trouble to ...”

  Why ask me questions, if you’re only going to interrupt me? As I was saying, Blasich was sitting in the administrative office, behind him a portrait of the Leader with his small cruel eyes and kindly moustache. “Eeta son of the sun that grants light to mortals, with his terrible gaze.” Indeed, those classical citations were a mania of his, a vain affectation. He watched the steam rising from his coffee cup and wiped the left lens of his eyeglasses—only that one, as usual—with his handkerchief. On his neck, his pale, reddish hair, almost albinic, was sweaty, his even paler eyebrows aged the smooth-skinned, childlike face. “I think the best place for you is the Fiume shipyards,” he said in a calm and persuasive professorial voice; on his
table were notebooks, class assignments that he had brought from school to correct, and the Argonautics of Apollonius Rhodius, open perhaps to the passage assigned for translation. He was known for the rigour of what he demanded of his students: without Greek, he said, we cannot comprehend the humanity that we must liberate and create. “That’s where the best men go, the most qualified, and also the most politically experienced; excellent comrades, these Monfalconesi, they’ve been through it all, many spent time in Fascist prisons and in the German Lagers, like you for that matter, without giving up ... some were even in Spain, in the Fifth Regiment. Yes, I know, in this case too like you. Men of sterling character, true revolutionaries ... but it’s not child’s play, nor is it a noble fight. The Party isn’t for hotheads, there’s no place here for people like Oberdank, and the childish extremism of certain revolutionaries has done more harm than all the police forces of the oppressors ... in Spain too, if it was up to the Trotskyists and anarchists ...”—Every so often he unintentionally glanced at my shoeless foot, under the table.