Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Magris, Claudio

  It’s all I had, that smile. Yes, in Christiansborg she was stern with me; she hardly ever took me in her arms, as she often did with Urban. But it was to teach me, to harden me and make me capable of facing the harshness of the world. Urban never left home; he didn’t need such a leathery skin, able to withstand Arctic cold and equatorial sun, storms, cannons and lashings. Me, however, imagine if I had been a mama’s boy when I embarked as a ship’s boy on the British collier Jane when I was only fourteen. It’s a good thing I left with no kissing.

  As you can see, one remembers many things. Every so often I prompt myself by reading those papers of mine from long ago, as many people do, especially if they are old and forget what they have experienced. A diary or a letter from earlier times helps draw the years up from the clogged well. So then I remember and you can benefit from it. It’s a discovery that you can take credit for and, having no ill will, I gladly grant you the right to turn it in to a fine, revolutionary scientific publication and to appropriate all merit. What matters to me is that revolutions be made, not who makes them.

  So it’s not true, what that professor said in that illustrated magazine that was in the room where we were waiting for them to do the MR scan—it’s not true that—wait, I copied it down exactly, here’s what he said when he wrote all that stuff about Dolly the sheep: in DNA memory, he said, there remains no trace of anything acquired and therefore a person who has been cloned, a clone, someone resurrected, or rather reawakened, can’t remember anything that happened to him. This may be true for Dolly maybe, what can a stupid sheep remember, but not for me, I remember everything. Evidently the Antarctic ice preserved my cells quite well, since they continue to stand up to all the horror and turmoil of events.

  So yes, I remember, and how! That boat returning to Miholašica full of conger eels, dentexes and scorpion fish, my father happy, looking toward Unie and telling me about my mother in Hobart Town, how she would carry me into the water in her arms—it’s cold but not for me and therefore not for him either, she would say laughing at my father, with that smile of hers as white as the waves’ foam. At Miholašica too the water is colder than on the rest of the island, my father added, except in Plava Grota below Lubenice; it must be the freshwater currents that filter under the rock from Lake Vrana, just imagine how she would have loved this sea. But all of these things are so vague, ebbing and flowing ...

  My childhood in Christiansborg, however, is well documented, even in writing. Those walls of the corridor hung with red, twice a week the servants cover them with black drapery. In the assembly room, at the end of the hall, Crown Prince Frederick, his father-in-law Carl von Hessen and Minister Bernstorff are seen entering—it’s my brother who whispers their names to me, as they pass in front of the half-open door of the workshop. When they enter the room, strange objects are momentarily glimpsed on a table, candelabra, some portraits. There are also two men, one tall, dressed in dark clothing, fumbling around with crosses and black veils. A muttering is heard, hissing, intoning, rapping. Something is going on in there. The tall man is talking to someone who did not enter the room with the others.

  Who are they trying to evoke, to summon to this palace from the hereafter? It must be Struensee, the great minister, as is whispered in the palace; they say his face is bloodied but still recognizable. It’s strange, twenty years after his execution, but it’s him, grim yet imploring. What face, what age do the dead have? There inside the others can see him. No one ever sees these things; only others do. One evening when the door opens for a moment and I, crouching in the shadows, am able to glance into the room, I don’t see anything, hardly anything; gesturing hands, a portrait and a fine powder floating in the air, a handful of dust that shines in the glow of a torch, flickers, outlines a form, dissolves, a dust that rises from the old furniture, a face, no, only a diffusion, a cloud, clouds have a shape, no, they don’t.

  Why disturb someone who has been dead for twenty years? They’re trying to evoke him to show him to the King. His Majesty Christian VII hardly ever leaves his room, in the opposite wing of the palace; he remains there for hours and hours staring at the painting by Hogarth, Madness, Thou Chaos of the Brain, his lower lip pendulous under his gaping mouth, his arms hanging at his sides. Dr. Osiander said that a big fright—such as seeing the all-powerful minister reappear from the dead, the man who had defiled his bed and whom he, despite this, had only reluctantly been persuaded to execute—might cure his dazed condition. I’d like to see Struensee, even bloodied; there’s no reason to fear the dead, only the living can do you any harm and in fact they do the most they can. Outside the door some knocking is heard, then the voice of the tall man telling Struensee to go to King George of England, at night, so that perhaps Christian VII’s madness might be passed on to him. In addition to the rapping and the words, an imprecation is heard from Count Bernstorff, he must have hurt his leg banging it against the table.

  Sounds, voices, a murmuring, something, nothing. Who’s speaking in there? Even now, Doctor, who is it who every so often speaks in that recorder, when you interrupt me and press a button? There, in the corridor of the Royal Palace, it’s me, okay; I left the workshop and hid behind a column near the door to the room, I listen but I don’t know who it is, this voice coming from inside—inside of me, inside the room, no one ever knows where a voice is coming from. I talk and talk, yet in my entire life, even now, I’ve done nothing but listen and repeat what was said to me. Pistorius read us those verses in which Odysseus invokes the shades of Hades. To listen to the dead, to make them talk and repeat what they say, there must be blood—Struensee’s was shed twenty years ago, it still flows, blood flows forever.

  There, the ghost re-emerges, summoned by that blood, raps on the table, whispers in the ear of the tall, dark man who repeats his words; I too repeat them, huddled behind the door, my eye glued to the keyhole. The dark corridor expands, a great shadowy void, an increasingly loud murmuring, I repeat those words before they disappear. The darkness is rent like a thick velvet curtain ripped by a sabre and light bursts in. Struensee, it must be him, imposing, blinded by that light, like during that dance when everything ended suddenly, the lights were lit, scores of lamps and torches burned—“Silence!” he shouted, but what can you know about that evening, the flaming crystal globes in the salon trembled shook and swung, Caroline Matilda, the queen, was a fiery gaze behind a mask, pearls of dark fire ablaze like the torches, the wine caught fire in the goblets—I shook hands released them shook others, everyone wanted to shake my hand, let me tell it, Doctor—the chandelier above me was a globe, the world that I made turn in my hands, I, the all-powerful minister, master of the King, his State and his bed ... Caroline Matilda’s eyes sparkled flashed and darted away, shooting stars, they engulfed me, I almost didn’t realize it when the guards grabbed me and carried me off, I thought they were gentlemen in costume like the others, I shouted: “How dare you, you’ll pay with your head! You’re all crazy, I’ll have you put in chains, in a straitjacket,” but they paid no attention to what I was shouting, I felt like I was still dancing as I struggled in the arms of those scoundrels, a vortex was sucking me under, gusts of wind on every side tore Caroline Matilda away from me, away forever, I thought, transfixed by that word as by the dazzling light of a crystal piercing my head, I felt it inside, an extremely sharp pain, my hands reached out to her, the circles of light were the edge of her dress, I had lost all restraint, I would have torn that dress off of her, I would have kissed her on the mouth and thrown her to the floor before the entire court, like so many times in that silent room beneath the tower, so many evenings, a single drawn-out evening—I don’t remember how I ended up on the executioner’s platform, in twenty years you forget a lot of things ...

  A whirlwind of words, inside, outside of me, others that fade away, a wisp of fog dissolves, the sky is empty. In the room someone blows his nose, a scurrilous trumpet of judgment, you can hear a chair fall; when they come out—luckily I had already fled to the clock wor
kshop—Count von Hessen’s face is all red, like that of his guards when they’ve been drinking, Count Bernstorff looks bored, half asleep, an odour of mildew, of stale rooms, seeps into the corridor with them. Caroline Matilda, exiled in Hanover, has also been dead for many years. But she, they said, would not let them evoke her, or maybe they didn’t even try, an aged adulteress no longer interests anyone.

  Ah, the ending. You want the ending too, doctors are interested in the end of things more than anything else. Even that of childhood, of adolescence, in short, of that time after which death begins. A subdued ending, low-key, an irremediable but silent grief, that day when I returned home, to the house adjacent to my father’s store, it wasn’t clear whether still on the grand river or already on the immense sea, and found my mother gone. They didn’t say anything to me, well yes, something vague and syrupy like you say to children, but I understood that that departure, that face that suddenly is no longer there, is the entire reality, there is nothing but that emptiness. However, I’m losing myself again with those other things that happened later on, I must be tired, maybe even a little agitated, give me something, Serenase lithium Belivon Risperdal, that way I’ll calm down and go back to telling the story in an orderly manner.

  The ending. Glorious: a pyre, like a barbarian king. Christiansborg burns for three days and three nights, they say it started in the large wood stores under the roof, which immediately became a red-hot chimney. The flames rip through the air like arrows, piercing the faded blue ivory of the day and the ebony of the night like incendiary flares launched against the battlements, opening breaches in which the red rises and spreads, a river of lava flows over the merlons, covering and staining everything. The day the night the sky are the colour of fire, a single red dot under your eyelids; even the burning air that stifles your breath and slashes your face like a scythe is red. Flowers of flame bloom, enormous, in the dark waters of the canals.

  The great tower is still there, a black giant in the midst of the fire, then it collapses with three frightful rumbles staving in all floors of the building, which crumble in a fine sanguinolent dust; isolated tongues of flame flicker in the smoke-filled rooms, the chandeliers glitter like at the grand parties, globes of shuddering, scarlet light, suns that grow red-hot before plunging down and exploding. The clockmaker’s workshop is also in flames, crystal spheres burst with sharp booms, incandescent pendulums lie on the floor among shattered fragments, time is reduced to ashes. Shadows flare and peter out, someone rolls on the ground screaming, ensnared by a flaming drape that fell on him.

  That red is in no hurry, confident of its eventual victory. I remember how fascinated I was by that composure, by that slow regal pace.—“The flames that issued from the immense pile, awful as they were, filled my youthful mind with the most lively emotions of delight. I never contemplated for a moment the destruction of property in the striking magnificence of the scene.”—Thanks, I don’t know who you are, on the other side of the screen, you like to call yourself Apollonius, but—However, that wasn’t necessary, I remember very well what I wrote in my autobiography. A huge mahogany table holds out tenaciously; the flames lick it hesitantly, then they assail it encircling it furiously, but the wood is strong, the charred outer layer keeps the ardent tongues from penetrating and they retreat, flickering and more tenuous, suffocated by their smoke, then a flaming tapestry breaks away from the walls and plummets down on the wood from above, enfolding it in a fiery dress, in the shirt of Nessus that not even Heracles survives in the end, Pistorius was proficient at telling us the ancient story.

  At times the destructive fire seems in difficulty, and shrinks back; so I pick up a big firebrand and hold it to the jamb of a robust door from which the flames have retreated. The firebrand gives them new life; they come back, hurl themselves against the shield that protects a small room, they don’t slacken. Vases, paintings, ornamental friezes are destroyed, burned. The Dutch residents who for generations have lived in the small colony of Amagen—wearing the ancient wool cassocks that they have worn since the time of their ancestors, black and scarlet silhouettes like the shadows projected on the walls to amuse people at parties—rush to the scene and pour buckets of water. King Christian VII is incredulous, he screams that the palace is safe and cannot be destroyed, and has to be carried away by force. The magnificence of destruction, majesty that is resplendent in reducing everything to ashes.

  The ceiling of the Hall of Knights falls in, tongues of fire envelop the portraits of Danish kings and noblemen, serpents of flame coil around the breastplates and ermine cloaks, ripping the canvases from the wall, the ancient faces are distorted in the flames, the eyes flicker and die like sparks, the figures shrivel and curl up, fetuses returning to nonentity. The great clock is a white blotch in the gusts of burning wind. When, soon afterwards, I embarked as a ship’s boy on the British collier Jane—I was fourteen years old—I remember how glad I was not to leave anything behind, that there was no childhood place I could return to.

  7

  YOU’VE GOT MAIL. Cooperate, go on, open it. There’s a message.—“Del mio fato no me lagno, go trovà un altro bagno.” About my lot, I complain not, another place to bathe I’ve got.—Riddle-me-ree. Nobody knows? Go on, it’s that little poem by Cesare Colussi. He came down here to the Antipodes on the San Giorgio, in 1952, a year after me, I mean one hundred and forty-nine years after me. Of course, it’s not great poetry, you don’t have to tell me that, in all modesty I know something about these things. It’s no accident that I wrote two novels, a tragedy and a comedy, not to mention various essays, which only envy on the part of London’s literary clique has prevented me from publishing. Like the one about the journey to Iceland, moreover, which would have been a sensation. However, I find Colussi engaging, with his passion for ocean bathing. So content to have found a nicely sheltered beach near Melbourne, where he could sail along the coast with his little boat, and thus ease his nostalgia for the Lanterna in Trieste, the Pedocin they called it, that lice-infested old bathing establishment where I too went as a boy, well known for the fact that men and women are kept strictly separated—even today, according to what I read in Il Piccolo that you let me peruse to make me think I’m up there. Absolutely right, men over here, women over there, that way you avoid painful complications, fuss and bother, messy scenes.

  But it’s not enough to keep men and women separated. The men too should be separated from one another. No, I take it back, in fact being alone is too much, you begin to enjoy hurting yourself. It’s like being isolated in bojkot. If only I were alone, without this screen, this tape, without myself, what a relief. Incognito, private. A bit like being at the Lanterna, without those female legs too close at hand. Colussi went there up until the end, to the Lanterna. Me, no, of course, I too went to a bathing resort but a different kind, the penal spa at Goli Otok—“Magnificent ocean bathing for tourists, hotel reservations at ...”—If you think it’s funny showing me this illustrated brochure distributed last month by the Croatian Visitors and Tourism Agency ...

  Colussi came down here because, not being able to find work, his pants were falling off him, so he emigrated, like so many others. I don’t know why I came down here. Down the Bay, they used to say in King George’s time to refer to the Austral penitentiary. But what else could I have done, when the beast that held me in its jaws spit me out, after it had already thoroughly chewed me up? Things still went well for me, not even a year. Others, Adriano Dal Pont, for example, remained there until 1956: they had to wait for Comrade Longo to come and persuade Tito to permanently close that slaughterhouse and feed his dogs canned meat instead of living flesh. And when I left the island of the dead, how could I have stayed there, in Trieste? Run into Comrade Professor Blasich in the street, as if nothing had happened, or go to the Lanterna and gaze at the sea where everything disappears, where my life had disappeared? I had had enough of ocean bathing.

  How do you get Down the Bay? That Apollonius should know, the one who claims to tell
the story, to be Orpheus among the Argonauts. The Woodman set sail from Sheerness at the mouth of the Medway, the Nelly from Bremerhaven, and the train to Bremerhaven, where they put us on board the Nelly, set off from Rome and, before that, from Trieste. And the sealed boxcar to Dachau—no, that we can’t even talk about.

  The ships, trains, convoys, aircraft depart from many places, but the destination is the same and they arrive at night. The anchor is lowered to the bottom; from the portholes it’s dark outside; maybe on the other side of the earth it’s daytime, the long perpetual day of the Nordic summer, and here, where we are, it’s polar night, six long endless months. In Port Arthur the harshest punishment was being shut up for weeks in an utterly dark cell. I said weeks, but I don’t know whether they are months, days, years, because in there, in that darkness, you don’t know when time passes, whether you’ve been there for an hour or forever, maybe time has stopped. At least so they’ve told me, because I haven’t been in those cells. In others, yes, later on.

  Here it’s dark, Doctor, it must be the bottom where the anchor sank. The sleeping quarters in the refugee camp are dark too, the lower floors are plunged in shadow; entering the Silos, the old grain deposit in Trieste, built at the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where they put us up with all the other emigrants before our departure for Australia, was like entering a dark and a smoky purgatory—it was Maria who said this, years later, when she too passed through that purgatory to atone for my sins. Her voice, at the edge of the shadows, lights up every corner of that maze. The dismal granary opens like a corolla; there is only the vast blue sky, full of wind.

  Maria had opened the cage, but the bird with its wings bound did not take flight and so she too was lost for nothing ... I don’t even really remember how I ended up here with you, Doctor, on what ship I arrived, or rather returned down here.