13
“DEAR JORGEN, a previous letter of mine went unanswered and another has been returned to me, but I am hoping that this one will reach you. A secretary of Mr. Jermyn has been kind enough to see to it that it is delivered to you, should you have changed your address again in the meantime. But since ...”—Where on earth did this letter come from, was it you who gave her the address? How could you take the liberty, what are you trying to do, create a psychodrama? Aside from the fact that I don’t believe it’s from Marie, it’s not her style—It must be a forgery by one of my biographers, itching to add a little romantic pap. I had decided not to say a word about this affair, in fact I’m surprised to have mentioned it in the autobiography. Then too, is there ever a reason why people can’t manage to stay together, to go to sleep and awaken as one, to share the evening and the morning? Go ahead embellish it and sneer all you want; you, Doctor, not being a seaman, can’t understand. On ships, with no women and no love, you forget about happiness, about the impossibility of being happy, the shame of it. Jason, on the Argo, has only his companions, no woman. Sure, Atalanta, but she was making it with Meleager, she doesn’t exist for Jason, nor does he for her, it’s not an issue. Jason quickly walks out on women—Hypsipyle remains in Lemnos, pregnant in fact, while he clears out, and this almost always happens. It’s not by chance that the one time he takes a woman with him, Medea, it spells endless trouble, especially for her. I don’t want to ruin any woman, that’s why I fled, even before things really got started. Once you start, everything is already lost.
I liked to write to her, yes, and also to receive her letters, I found this one in the pocket of my frayed jacket—the uniform of Protector of Iceland, I wore it not to give myself airs but because I didn’t have any others, after they took me by force from Reykjavík to London, and I had to pawn even my clothes with a moneylender from Stepney to pay for that hole-in-the-wall at the Spread Eagle Inn, but I never gave away that uniform. Because, because ... Things happen and that’s that. Or they don’t happen.
Marie Philippina Frazer, eighteen years old. I met her in London, through Sir Joseph Banks. Yes, I asked her to marry me. Naturally I expected a refusal from that pure and pious angel, so much younger than me, and above all I expected that a gentleman and scientist like her father, a celebrated maker of mathematical instruments, would make me pay for such impudence. How can a man hand over a young girl, a chaste virgin, to a seaman accustomed to all the depravity of the hold and the dregs of society—it’s rape, infamy, disgraceful parents who get rid of a daughter, after keeping her shut up at home, pure and intact as a flower, only to have some swine deflower her with the blessing of the king and of God, pimps more vile than those who keep the list of hookers supplied in Covent Garden, delighting in violating and sullying what is immaculate.
Ah, the filth of life, the stink of armpits and heart—it’s fear that secretes that smelly sweat, that sour breath in the mouth, how shameful a morning kiss after a night away. I know, Maria, I mean Marie, knew neither fear nor disgust, she wasn’t afraid of the price to be paid in misery and filth—for her love was everything, to desire, grow old and decline together, even twisting and turning in bed without being able to sleep, after too many nights without kisses—and yet one flesh, glorious though sagging, consumed together—
Of course, if at the time—now ... but how does one choose between love and apprehension, the solitary vice of a sailor without a woman, the secret vice known to all—Filthiness borne alone is easier, it’s less risky than living and finding happiness as a couple. Marie is behind the door, but I don’t open it, I turn back without making a sound. So no one will hear those steps, that ignominious flight when faced with the only true adventure. Fleeing, deserting.
I left the following morning—how could I have met her gaze, after drawing my hand back from the handle of that door? I left her a letter. I imagine her, as she opens and reads it—her eyes wide, a figurehead who perceives the inescapable catastrophe, Eurydice who sees Orpheus turn and abandon her forever to the void ... what a nice reproduction of Eurydice this is, with those upturned eyes in which the shipwreck can be read ... It’s at the Portsmouth Naval Museum, it says here. Who knows who sent it to me here, and why, some malicious person who wants to make me remember, make me suffer ...
14
“STRANGER, why stay ye so long outside our towers?”—Easy for Comrade Professor Blasich to make fun of me, before sending me off to die or worse, when I spoke to him about Maria, about that encounter, there in Fiume, on that summer day. A sticky summer, the heat oozed from a hazy sky that melted like asphalt in the streets. I had just returned from Australia, I looked around under the opaque sun, the murky eye of a squinting sky. I saw ships docked in front of the crude, assorted structures along the shore, buildings caked with pannonic mud facing an oily sea that extended to the ends of the earth. I didn’t know which way to go and it was Maria, coming down the street and seeing me so uncertain, who asked me where I wanted to go and showed me the way to Angheben Street.
She smiled at me, a smile stronger than destiny. I had arrived. That smile dissolved the close air like a fresh wind, a white daisy opening in a meadow that up till now was brown. “Stranger, why stay ye so long outside our towers?”—Blasich repeated the line, reciting his beloved Argonautics. In poems, Tore, he told me, the stranger always meets good fortune; when the sea tosses him on an unknown, hostile shore, there is always a Nausicaa or a Hypsipyle or a Medea for the Ulysses or Jason of the day. In Lemnos, Jason, as usual, doesn’t know what to do, he remains uncertain at the entrance to the city and it is Hypsipyle who, blushing, addresses him and leads him to the palace, as Maria led you to ... what was the name of the street? oh yes, Angheben, who knows what it’s called today Maybe now that you’re going back to Fiume you’ll find her again, your Maria, whom you surely abandoned there that time, like always. She’ll make a fine mother, and a fine mother, remember Lenin’s words, is worth more than a People’s Commissar. Who knows how she’ll smile at you, this Maria of yours, what a welcome she’ll give you. “Do ye therefore stay and settle with us; and shouldst thou desire to dwell here, and this finds favour with thee, assuredly thou shalt have the prerogative of my father Thoas; and I deem that thou wilt not scorn our land at all; for it is deepsoiled beyond all other islands that lie in the Aegaean sea.”
No, I did not abandon her, I did not run away. I don’t know who, what inner voice, is insinuating this cowardly story about my running away—this hateful voice that impersonates me, as if the words were coming from my mouth, but only to falsify my life. If only I could make it shut up—It wouldn’t be you, would it, Doctor? Perhaps you’re a ventriloquist, and this entire story sucking me into its vortex is yours, it’s you who’s telling it, still, you must be quite skilled at making others say what you want, without their even being aware of it. An old policemen’s trick: they talk, they make you repeat what they say and they transcribe it, then you sign it and you find that those words of theirs came from your lips ...
I did not run away. How could such an idea have occurred to me, after Maria and I had gone swimming together in those bays, at Iii at Ika at Laurana, or on the islands in the Quarnero, Cherso, Canidole, the Levrera, San Pietro in Nembi with its cross-currented sea so declaimed by my father, the beach of Miholašica—the scent of sage, myrtle and pine, the blaze of oleanders, the incessant chirping of cicadas, hours as unhurried as the tides, a burning bush of summer and of love. In Oriule, large brown and gold spiders weave enormous webs, fragile yet immortal. Maria comes out of the water once, many times; her foot leaves its imprint on the sand and the surf erases its mark.
I had been back in Europe for a short time, expelled from Australia. Expelled, yes, in 1932, for having participated—along with Frank Carmagnola and Tom Saviane—in a demonstration against Mario Melano, the Italian consul in Townsville and a Fascist: we showed him and his acolytes a thing or two. As a result the Australian government shut down our two newspapers, La Risco
ssa and L’Avanguardia Libertaria, and deported a number of us, including me. And so I came back. I disembarked in Fiume, where a cousin of my father had offered to put me up at her house, on Angheben Street—later, in 1947, when I returned there with the others from Monfalcone, it was called Zagrebaka Ulica and they had carried off everything that second cousin of mine owned and thrown her out of the house. Thus she too went to Trieste, like thousands of Italians from Istria and Dalmatia, and was in a refugee camp at the Silos, where I too would end up—who could ever have imagined it at the time?—after countless shipwrecks and derailments.
For a time, with Maria, I thought I had come home. But when the Party asked me to go to Turin to reorganize a cell which dealt with school contact networks that had been just about dismantled by a series of arrests, I didn’t even think of saying no, nor did I want to, because I could not have loved Maria with dishonour and cowardice in my heart. I would have preferred to operate there, in defence of the Slavs of my territory, Slovenes and Croatians whom I saw so shamefully trampled by the Fascists as well as looked upon so badly by many Italians—perhaps anti-Fascist yet full of prejudice—but the Party thought that I was too well known there in my region.
I had already lost the job at Sidarma, after the first albeit brief arrest for anti-Fascist activities. And so I went to Turin. Love cannot live enslaved, either by its own chains or those of others. And Maria thought and felt as I did: indeed, it was she who taught me love, it was in her arms that I became a man. How could I have kissed that smile yet bow my head? I left with a heavy heart, but not disheartened. I knew that we would not make love for who knows how long, maybe never again, but when you have done it so many times with intensity and passion, and you are part of the other person, one single flesh, you no longer worry about your own body or that of the one you love, and it is precisely because your desire to make love is so great that you can renounce it, if the good fight requires it of you.
It was from Father Callaghan, in Hobart Town, that I had learned words like one single flesh or the good fight. As a good Irish Catholic, he was always on the side of the oppressed, like those clergymen who had intrepidly yet vainly organized the revolt of the convicts in New South Wales, the Rising of the People that was to be triggered by the code word “Saint Peter,” and that led the insurrectionists to the gallows. Yes, Doctor, I know, a hundred and twenty years earlier, but what difference does it make. Earlier or later is the same thing when you have a noose around your neck. Nothing new under the sun. No, on the contrary, Father Callaghan thundered, everything is new and happens for the first time; every sin is eternally in God’s eyes and the prince of this world, your executioner, has already been judged. He taught catechism as it should be taught, and how to serve Mass, but he also taught how to fight for freedom and dignity—a Christian is a free man among free men, he would say, who knows no peace as long as one of his brothers in Christ remains unjustly in chains, and love develops the muscles that are capable of breaking those chains.
No, I did not abandon Maria, Doctor, Comrade Blasich, and all you others. In Turin I lived on Ormea Street, under the name of Flavio Tiboldi, with all my false documents in order; the Party was well organized, in fact, they warned me in time that the police were on my trail and I made off before they could get their hands on me. Claudio Vincenzi, on the other hand, who operated with me, was caught and badly beaten, and even his family got mixed up in it. So I didn’t have the heart to drag Maria into who knows what calamities and misfortunes—I didn’t write to her, I didn’t tell her anything, I disappeared, but to protect her, to keep her safe—
Maybe I had learned the Party’s line too well, deciding for the good of others, even when sending them off to die. How did I not see that love means climbing into the other person’s boat and letting her climb into yours, putting out to sea even when the sea rages under the bora that swoops down on the Quarnero, how did I not realize that leaving her on land is a cowardly action more base than letting her leave by herself?
I left her on land, I lost sight of her face. It vanishes in the sea of years and events, and along with that face, swallowed up by the waves, I too sink and am lost; I am no longer anybody, yet this doesn’t help me avoid the cyclops, the dark, blind eye aimed at me.
I don’t see a thing, Maria disappears and the world is dark. After the shipwreck the sea returns the figurehead, corroded and eaten away by the water, the worn features almost mere wood again, the folds of her garment the grooves of a tree trunk, mouth nose and eyes chinks or nodes of a tree. Help me find her again, Doctor! You know where she is, otherwise how did you get those photographs of her—Yes, it’s her, look at the calendar, turn the pages, the months. What’s that? All right, it’s not a calendar; I called it that because with those pictures of half-naked women it reminded me of the calendars found in barbershops at one time. Well then, a catalogue, a book, it’s all the same. What matters is that she’s there inside, her image. Turn the pages—there she is, who knows how she ended up in that Ringkobing Museum in Denmark ... Look at the beautiful head, yes, wrinkles on the face, cracks in the wood, skin that shrivels and puckers, it’s understandable, the years go by for everyone, but you can see at once that it’s her under those excoriations of time, it must be her. Pass the calendar around, casually, discreetly, don’t say it’s a photo to identify her, maybe someone has seen her and can put me on her trail.
15
SOME HOVELS are like the hold and the bed is no better than the pallet where the sailor lies down at night. Or even the plank-bed of a prison, although the one on Carey Street, where I ended up for debt when I came back from Iceland, was really hard. When I got out of there, I thought Marie would never be able to find me after I lost everything I got from the sale of my clothes—gambling in a café near Covent Garden—and holed up in a basement in St. Giles’s, which I shared with a lanky red-haired guy whose face was disfigured by eczema. The floor was packed dirt, a chair served as a nightstand for clothes and a water basin, but the room soon became more comfortable, since the roommate who shared the pallet never returned, not even to take his rucksack from the chair, and in the evening I could put a lit candle on the chair and read the hymnal.
Night sounds could be heard in the cellar, drafts made the candle flicker, dark shadows quivered on the walls, obscene black tongues of the dogs of hell, but the soul that trusts in God is solid as a rock and I, on my straw mattress, read in bed, serene and indolent as a gentleman. Most of all, by myself, and this is what counts. A heart is too tight for two to fit in. Indeed, when another person enters, it’s total confusion, squeezing together and tossing and turning.
In that peace and solitude I organized my writings about the Icelandic venture, I rearranged the story of that endeavour, only recently completed—not ingloriously, despite appearances. It’s so much easier than not replying to Marie’s letters. I wrote feverishly, because I knew that Hooker and Mackenzie, that other malicious hack, intended to publish their own version—altered by Mackenzie out of malice and by Hooker out of ingenuousness. I reread a few sentences aloud and I was satisfied, I drew a breath. And when a letter from Marie arrived—I don’t know how, perhaps it’s you who delivered it to me, Doctor—I no longer felt emptiness around me, protective and reassuring, but a dismay that spread through my soul.
Flee—from one hole to another, Cripplegate, Whitechapel, Southwark, Smithfield, St. Giles’s. A descent as inexorable as a trickle of moisture sliding down a wall, every move lighter and every hovel more squalid. I went out, but rarely, in the morning. Gin on an empty stomach tightens the belly, an acidic burning sensation rises in the throat, but a flushed face feels good in that damp, fetid air. At the beginning feeling dirty bothers you, but little by little you get used to it. The overgrown beard, the sweat that dries on you, your shirt glued to your skin become as familiar as your own body, whose odour never troubles you; they’re another layer of epidermis protecting you against the outside world. I understand why the Iora, on the Austral contine
nt, go around smeared with rancid fish oil, which they never wash off.
I step over the garbage, I set out down the narrow streets toward the Thames. The river is greenish and black, the waves curl in a lurid froth; occasionally my steps take me near the asylum, people lower buckets from the windows and draw that brownish water. A hum rises from the river, at times it grows and becomes a threatening rumble; voices overlap and are lost, crows and seagulls shriek, in the pale sunlight a shred of fog gleams like daybreak.
I tear up Marie’s letter. A seagull swoops upon a shred of paper whirling down, in his furious, famished haste he swallows it; I try to imagine which of those irrevocable words, which I read shortly before, ended up in that rapacious rostrum. That evening I also left behind that basement in Smithfield; I spent my last pennies to send the Icelandic manuscript to the publisher Murray, who later—at least so he said—hid it away somewhere and was no longer able to find it.
16
WHEN I MET MARIA, under that sky in Fiume that was melting in the sultry heat, I had just disembarked from the Ausonia, which had brought me back to Italy, thrown out of Australia because of events in Townsville and illegal Communist activities, but I didn’t feel at all like an exile, a stranger, and not just because I was returning to places that felt like home. Because I thought the whole world was my home, that fellow comrades and those who inflict torture can be found everywhere, and above all that being thrown out—or in—for defending liberty was a badge of pride. The first night in the cooler, the first hangover, the first kiss. Exiles have something regal about them, and a true sovereign does not always remain seated on the throne like on the privy, but stakes his kingdom to make it freer and greater, and chooses exile rather than the servitude of being an abettor. And if kings mistake the throne for a commode with chamber pot, from which they never get up and where they continue shitting even as the courtiers pay their respects, like those French kings do, they get their heads cut off, like they did to the royals in France.
Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) Page 10
