Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Magris, Claudio

  9

  OH WELL, even fleeing sometimes tricks you. If I hadn’t run away from the girl, I wouldn’t have run into the press gang and I wouldn’t have ended up in the Royal Navy. There it’s the cat-o’-nine-tails that’s in command, four dozen lashes even for a minor infraction, and with great solemnity. The commander orders the first officer to assemble the crew on deck, so they can watch the punishment, the first officer transmits the order to the master-at-arms, who summons the sailors. The officers are in full dress uniform. The guilty man, naked to the waist, is tied to an iron grate. The handle of the cat-o’-nine-tails is covered with a red cloth; the ropes, an inch thick, are knotted.

  The man’s flesh contracts, twitches, sizzles and crackles under the force of the blows; his blood flows dark. All flesh is born to suffer, to end up in someone’s jaws. It’s fitting that tribute be paid to that suffering, since it is the reality of life, the majesty of its law. Flogging is hard work, after two dozen lashes the sailor can’t do it anymore and hands the cat-o’-nine-tails to someone else. The man being punished screams, but does not protest. When, some weeks later, two French frigates are encountered, those same sailors assembled on deck and their flogged companion will fight with the same dash, giving it their all.

  The Admiralty’s regulations, including punishment with the cat-o’-nine-tails, are not questioned, just as the laws of winds and rains are not questioned. Nor those of hospitals. I understand, the reality principle. All you have to do is talk calmly and you’ll be all right ... Indeed. You won’t even experience the cat-o’-nine-tails on your back—True, once it happened to me too, but only that one time, what do you think. Do what they tell you, it matters little whether you’re shooting at the English from the Admiral Juhl or at the French from the Surprize.

  Splotches of blood are left on the deck, but they are quickly scrubbed away with a few buckets of water and some rags. At sea things are soon forgotten.

  Later on, instead, that mania to discuss everything ... Maybe my father is to blame. Tore, he would say proudly, even when the Fascists threw me inside, you just don’t swallow unjust things. I remember when I read the Immigration Restriction Act—I had just learned to read, I understood little, but enough to be opposed to it. White Australia Policy, white Anglo-Saxon English-speaking Australia, out with blacks of all stripes. I understood at once that I too was and would always be black anywhere I went, not because of my mother’s ancient blood but because there are exiles everywhere, sooner or later you too become one.

  Down there, down here, when they wanted to get rid of a miserable wretch they didn’t like, the law called for them to give him a dictation test in English, in a language that wasn’t his. A few wrong words were enough to make a man an outcast. Since that time, whenever they’ve grilled me, I felt like I was taking that dictation test, and that we men were schoolboys harassed by sadistic teachers. Even you people, here, do nothing but dictate to me and force me to repeat what you want to hear ... maybe you make me trip up on purpose. Even when I went to school in Fiume, my teacher Miss Perich, later Perini, gave me low marks in dictation because, having just arrived from Australia, I made spelling errors. And later on too, there were many times when I didn’t know the language the jailers spoke to me and my replies were often incorrect. Really incorrect, that’s the tragedy, like when, in Fiume, I said that the Cominform’s resolution against Tito was just.

  And so I wanted to change the law, the language and the grammar of the jailers. Revolution begins in your head, in the order, or rather disorder, of your thoughts, that turn everything, even you, upside down, replacing the harsh, false language of your tormentors—“With the risk that, unless you quickly learn another, you’ll end up stammering and botching the dictation. Then too you have to keep pace, no more spelling errors, or mistakes in grammar or syntax. It’s ridiculous to still believe in rules; the Tablets of the Law have been shattered, not by Moses’ wrath but for no reason, just for the sake of doing it. The world, out there—no, excuse me, inside here, there is no more out there, no beyond—has changed. No one flunks anymore. No more laws, just all the interpretations you want, if it itches, scratch it ... heads or tails as you please, it’s all justifiable”—And instead it is precisely these new rules that make poor wretches flunk. Break them, overturn them—revolution is necessary because it upends the world in your head; it turns the phony upside down, rightfully so, so that his clothes will fall down and reveal his private parts—“But after a while, if you don’t hold on firmly, the blood goes to your head as well, you get dizzy, you too find yourself with your legs in the air like the savages in the Antipodes ...”—Terra Australis Incognita, unknown like the entire earth. But you have to learn how to pick yourself up each time as if it were nothing, a graceful pirouette and the tumbler lands on his feet.

  Obey, submit, learn to ward off the blows. I hardly ever experienced the whip, only once. Even on the Woodman, which brought us to the hell of Port Arthur—in that last definitive voyage of mine from England to Van Diemen’s Land, condemned to forced labour for life—even on that ship of Charon, where everyone was in chains, days and days in their own filth without being able to pour a bucket of water over themselves because there was barely enough to drink, I, a convict like them, ate with the officers. Yes, because the surgeon Rodmell had noticed me right away and named me surgeon’s aide, so I filled my belly all I wanted, with rum too, and I even helped him cut off a leg, when necessary. When he died of tropical fever, I took his place and brought the ship’s crew to Hobart Town in good condition—it was disturbing, you understand, to set foot there again after twenty-three years, this time as a convict, though unlike the others, without irons on my leg.

  Even down there—or rather down here, despite the fact that you want to make me believe that what I see out there is the Lanterna of the old Pedocin—I didn’t spend a single day in the cells of Port Arthur. They promptly assigned me to serve as Collector of Port Dues and Customs, six pence a day and lodging at the naval bureau, with permission to wander freely within city limits. When afterwards, thanks to Dr. Ross, they sent me to work in the editorial office of the penal colony’s newspapers, I even had assistants; the only nuisance was that they wanted to force me to pray four times a day.

  Why was it so different later on? Maybe because I wanted to set the world right, instead of trying to find myself a safe haven, and this the world does not forgive. Even you, Doctor, consider it an obsession, a madman’s fixation. As for being a madman, that began when we left Italy and returned to Australia in 1928, because my father couldn’t live in a Fascist country, though my destiny was already sealed long before, perhaps from the time I heard that story about the dictation; or in any case from the time I came to know Ivo, during the period in Italy He had been enrolled in the Party since 1922. In 1924 members of a Fascist squad had broken almost every bone in his body, but he never spoke of it, because the Party’s orders were to speak only about the few beatings they had inflicted, and not about the many they had received, so as not to demoralize the comrades. From time to time he came out on the boat with me and my father, especially when we set out from Ossero, where he had been born.

  There was something like an alliance but also a conflict between the Party and the sea. The sea was there, indigo blue with the mistral and greenish with the sirocco, black with the light snow that descended all of a sudden from the Velebit; it was there and that was all there was to it. The only thing to do was to listen to it, say yes to it and go on as usual, without demanding that it stop wreaking havoc on the Morlacca channel every so often or stop letting sharks come as far as the Quarnero. Ivo, on the other hand, said that things weren’t working the way they were and that changes had to be made. That if a man found himself always pissing against the wind, it wasn’t he who should always have to move to the other side or turn around; instead he should grab the wind by the neck and make it change direction, or at least build a nice wall for it to bump its head against and make it understand that i
t shouldn’t joke around, even with poor devils.

  Ivo also explained to me how, when too many fish are caught, you don’t find any in the fish market because the dealers throw them away not to lower the prices, and so people, given that they’ve caught too many bass, don’t even have sardines to chew on, and this was an example of something that had to be changed, and it wasn’t enough to leave it up to the sea, to its rich or poor yields of fish.

  It was clear, listening to Ivo, that it had been the Party that taught him to see the world without getting lost in the confusion of things, to realize that there aren’t only giltheads, sea bream, sunfish, mussels and crabs, but also other fish, molluscs and crustaceans. He died in Dachau; at least he had the good fortune to be tortured and massacred by the SS and not by comrades. He knew that when you sail, you can be shipwrecked, but the Party taught him to go back to sea each time and not be afraid. As for me, the Party gave me way too much sea, those hours and days and months with the other pijeskari in the bay of Goli Otok, hauling up sand, with the bora that made every wave freeze on us. At Cape Horn, at least, many years before ...

  10

  FIVE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-SEVEN DAYS from Hobart Town to London, Jason’s return. I was a miracle man to bring the Alexander back to London, after having founded Hobart Town. The first time Cape Horn hurled us back, but the second time I ran through it like a narwhal’s tusk pierces through the waves—the rollers surge up, enormous, the sky is shaken and crashes down like the ceiling of the Hall of Knights in Christiansborg, but the Alexander makes it to the other side. Maybe it would have been better if Cape Horn had hurled me back a second time and I had remained at sea. There are so many things at sea, many more than on land.

  Whales, for instance. We caught many of them on the Fanny, going down toward Cape Town during the outward voyage—where I beat it, as I had done before with the Surprize—and we caught even more of them afterwards in Hobart Town, when it wasn’t yet Hobart Town. The spurt of blood to baptize Hobart Town was squirted out at sea, especially since the convicts saw to drenching the earth with their own blood soon enough. Not me. I spilled that of the whales. The first whale harpooned in those seas, sacrificed by Jorgen Jorgensen to the gods of the underworld city.

  Whaling is a fine animated painting, a clash of colour. The whale emerges from the sea, back blue-black belly pale-blue, the jet shoots up toward the sky, white and cerulean, and breaks up into crests of foam, the rounded back dives under again, but the harpoon strikes him, scarlet flowers bloom in the sea, the water churns in a dark red gush, the dauber of the universe rinses his bloody brush in the sea and everything is calm and blue again, the whaler returns to port with the creature hooked alongside.

  Blood palls, however; sometimes I’ve had enough of it. The Frenchman’s blood that gushed all over me, on the deck of the Preneuse, was so copious that I thought it was mine. We accosted the Preneuse in Algoa Bay, during the voyage to the great South; I was signed up on the Surprize under the name Jan Jansen, thirty-four years old, in actuality I was nineteen. That Frenchman appeared in front of me on the deck, out of the blue, like a whale suddenly emerging from the water. Dark eyes opened wide, outstretched arm and a hand pointing a pistol at my face, a third black eye staring at me—it all happens very slowly, the rolling of the ship, the smoke hanging in the air, faces, grimaces. My hand brandishes the sabre, the harpoon sinks into the whale. The Frenchman, dazed, watches his gun fall to the deck, tumbles after it like a tree trunk and ends up against a rail. I am just in time to jump back on the Surprize because the captain, L’Eremite, who knows what he’s doing and doesn’t lose his head despite all those men of his falling around him, quickly detaches the Preneuse from our side and sails off catching the wind, after preventing us from following him by shearing off our foremast. Later, on board our ship, amidst the hurrahs of the sailors celebrating His Majesty’s victory, I peer into the black eye of the Frenchman’s pistol, which I picked up, searching that darkness. Sometimes, with so many hooks and harpoons sticking into you, you can’t manage to dive under again.

  I soon left the Surprize, as I did shortly afterwards with the Fanny. Something was urging me Down the Bay, to Terra Australis Incognita. It was the Lady Nelson—sixty tons, six guns, fifteen men and something new to the nautical craft, three flatboats with keels that skim along in shallow water with only a four-foot draft, made especially for coral reefs and seas with shoals not yet marked—which set me ashore at the mouth of the Derwent, that enormous maw of the Acheron.

  First, however, there was the Harbinger. Michael Hogan, a dealer in ships, whales and men, took me on as second-in-command without pay, registering me as John Johnson. Cape Town—Port Jackson, not passing south of Van Diemen’s Land but following the route taken by Bass and Flinders, who discovered that this is not a peninsula but an island and that you can gain five hundred miles if you reach New South Wales by crossing the straits named for Dr. Bass, who loves sailing more than his surgical instruments. I saw him disembark in Port Jackson, some time later, with a satisfied air and a map of his strait printed in London by Arrowsmith; he held it in his hand and stroked it, pleased to caress the world he had released from darkness.

  We too went through that strait. Someone, I see, also reported it on that marvellous site of mine—“The rollers surge immense and black toward the horizon, even the foam appears black. A heavy cavalry on the assault, giant gonfalons of cloud rip apart over the heads of the horsemen, the hostile waves close in around the prey but the Harbinger cuts its way through one crest and another, a white bird in the mesh of a dark net, it wouldn’t take much, a wave slams the sail and the wounded petrel plummets into the depths but I slacken or fill the sails as needed”—nothing like the random surfing you do while comfortably seated—I’d like to see you among these waves, my dear armchair surfers who move only your fingers, I can’t afford to miss a beat and I don’t—“I slacken or fill the sails as needed, and the petrel breaks through the towering wall of water that collapses with a crash, takes flight among the waves, avoiding the great shark that already has its black jaws open to pull her down.”—The ship rides high on the waves, poised on crests thin as a blade, listing like a wing to skim the water, when sharp rocks come too close and graze the hull to mangle it. How does the Argo return from the waters of death, through those fatal cliffs?—“There’s no escape / from the fatal misfortune / driven by the swift turmoil of the winds / the Symplegades collide hurtling toward one another / and the crashing thud resounds on the open sea and in the vast heavens ...” The dove wheels uneasily, the cliffs rush together like sharp-edged razors and clip her wings, the bird plunges into the churning abyss ... The Leviathan could swallow the world but the wave flows out through its open jaws and the boat slips through its baleens unharmed, turning about to escape the pull of the waters that rush back into the spiked dark throat.

  Captain Black is so admired that he lets me pilot the ship as if I were the captain. He’s very knowledgeable. Three years earlier, when the mutineers on the Lady Shore, which was also on her way to New South Wales, lowered him in the sea with the sailors who had remained loyal, he brought the ship’s tender all the way to the West Indies. Or maybe it happened to Major Semple. To mutiny, at sea, seems as inevitable as sailing.—“And you, my old buddy, did you ever mutiny?”—I could simply not respond, like you do with anonymous letters and those who, in any case, conceal themselves, like this little voice that enjoys wearing one of my disguises and saying he is John Johnson. Let’s say I realized ... well, that when you rebel you lose everything and cause trouble for everybody. Like the mutineers we saw hanging from the yardarm of the Anne, when we entered Sydney on the Harbinger. No, I didn’t let myself be lured by the priests like those Irish convicts in Castle Hill, in Van Diemen’s Land, who found themselves serving as wild game for the fifty riflemen sent to hunt them down.

  Even in here I learned not to be a braggart, and after a while even the nurses changed their unpleasant ways with me, unlike with the
others. Electroshock too, I’ve only heard about it. Maybe it’s out of style, it happens with tortures as well. What’s this music for now, who put that cassette in? ... Well, all I have to do is turn a knob and I won’t hear the Internationale anymore.

  It’s too difficult to be a rebel. Everyone has his own ideas, Tito is right, No, Stalin is right; we tear each other to pieces, while the others, instead, solid and united, with superb discipline, are always ready to lambaste us. The workers’ movement scatters like a confused herd, the bulls don’t confront the matadors but gore each other. The Irish rebels, facing the riflemen, are uncertain, some advance and attack, others retreat; the soldiers on the other hand advance and fire systematically, after a while it’s one big rout and manhunt, the soldiers break ranks and rush in pursuit of those fleeing, urged on by their officers. It’s a fair reward for the way they’ve conducted themselves, after discipline you should ease up on the brakes a little and concede some satisfaction; they have more fun shooting and killing a wounded animal backed into a corner than getting drunk at the tavern and groping the girls serving beer.

  Kill the runaways, the kangaroos, the whales—all the whales, Governor Collins hopes, because they disrupt the works at the mouth of the Derwent—the seals too. In the vast bay of North Cape hundreds of skinned seal carcasses litter the beach; boats laden with their furs make their way from shore to ship, birds are already stripping the flesh off the animals beaten to a pulp with clubs, even the pups, furry white puffs drenched with blood. The long wave arrives with a deep sigh, the whales reach the mouth of the Derwent pregnant, they’ve travelled thousands of kilometres to go and give birth there, as they have done for millennia; the baby whales leave their mothers’ wombs harpooned, the viscous blood of childbirth and the filmy blood of death. I too harpooned them, I was Chief Officer of the whaler Alexander, under the name of Captain Johnson; there’s certainly a need for oil, right? In fact, Governor Collins wrote in his semi-annual report to London that on those seas it was I who founded the whaling industry.