Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Magris, Claudio

  The beatings I took in prison in Townsville did not weigh on me. Of course, while I was being walloped it hurt and I even screamed, unashamedly, because a man should not be ashamed of being weak, nor of being a hero. But after a few months, with my bones reset, I forgot about it. Those jailers, like all warders, were poor devils just like us; they didn’t know what they were doing and I even felt sorry for them, though I would have gladly smashed their faces in, because they didn’t realize that by raising their hands against us they were manufacturing their own chains. I was sure that, if we had had time to explain things to them, they would have become our friends and comrades. Every man, I thought at that time, is a potential comrade, even if he doesn’t know he is, and is destined to become one sooner or later. Later instead ...

  In any case. I was more embittered by the dissension that tore our movement apart and made life so difficult for our Anti-Fascist Concentration of Australasia, the controversies between La Riscossa and L’Avanguardia Libertaria, the expulsion of Bertazzon, as an anarchist, from the Matteotti Club in Melbourne—he too expelled, but by us, that is, by himself, not by the police, like me. Only soon afterwards did I realize our talent for tearing each other apart, our fate as losers who lose because they rip one another to pieces, while the others, so united instead, lambaste us.

  Even the revolution has its chickens with their heads upside down, pecking one another fiercely like the capons in Renzo’s grasp—I didn’t need prison to read I Promessi sposi or other great books, unlike other comrades who discovered them in the clandestine schools the Party organized in Fascist jails. I completed my studies normally, like one should, despite my scattered life. Not just what I heard from Valdieri, in the evening at my home. Secondary school too, that’s right. A high school with all the proper qualifications, the Dante Lyceum in Trieste, with instructors who knew ancient Greek like they knew Italian. Fascists too, some of them, like Masi; I went to boo him, at the rally in 1925, when Facchinetti, the Republican candidate, wearing a patch over the eye he lost in the Great War, put him in his place. A blindfolded eye, him too, but blindfolded the right way, so as not to see his own fear and be able to move forward. I didn’t finish high school, because we went back to Australia. Blasich was in the last year when I entered high school, then he went to the Normal School in Pisa. I don’t know if he was already a Communist then, he certainly didn’t act as if he was. Maybe it was the Party who ordered it.

  But why so many kroz stroj, so many upside-down chickens in the revolution’s ranks, tearing each other apart with their pecking? Chickens are stupid, they don’t even realize who it is who’s doing them in, they don’t know who or what to believe in anymore ...

  Living is believing; it’s faith that makes up life, you can’t appreciate this; you’ve lived inside here, in a void, and you can’t know that faith can move mountains, by God, does it move them! If you don’t believe in love you’re not even able to make love anymore. I know. I haven’t done it for a long time and I no longer feel like doing it, and I don’t think it’s because of my age—how old, for that matter?—nor because of those pills of yours; if one is in love nothing stops him and if he’s not in love nothing stirs him. This is my sin, my betrayal; a man who doesn’t make love and has lost the longing to do so is a traitor. It’s right to keep him in here. Even if he were set free he wouldn’t know what to make of it, of the world of life of colours of the evening light; a eunuch in a harem doesn’t know where to begin. Even the revolution no longer exists, it has never existed, since the time we stopped believing in it.

  Maria’s face, that day, revealed her complete faith, all the grand and beautiful and lofty things she believed in, which had sculpted her face, intrepid and bold. Could she have loved me if she had met me for the first time, after a rag had already wiped my face clean of all the things in which I believed, namely myself? Nausicaa sees Ulysses’ scar, as he lies naked on the shore, but mine is not the scar of Ulysses, it is the festering, fetid wound of Philoctetes, the slash of Cronos’s scythe that castrates every Heaven forever—so we need to conceal that foul mutilation, we can’t undress to make love.

  And yet it all began so well, even down here. When, during the strikes of 1934, our consul in Melbourne urged unemployed Italians to get hired and replace the striking Australian workers and we all went around, together and united, in our red shirts—there were Istrian Croatian comrades with us as well—boycotting the strikebreaking, to make it clear to those scabs that they too were comrades and that—How could I have thought that, years later, some of us would find ourselves on Goli Otok, still together though perhaps some in bojkot and others that put them in bojkot?

  What do you mean, what does this have to do with love? If you don’t get it on your own, it’s pointless for me to explain it to you. Even I don’t really understand it. Listening to these things, hearing them replay in my head, confuses me, it makes me dizzy—where is it that they stuck this diskette inside me that raves with my voice? Or maybe with yours, which mimics mine so well? It’s so easy, those disks are so thin, all you need is a crack to slip them in and I’m full of cracks, cuts, open wounds; it’s so easy to stick one of those smooth thingamajigs in me. In Dachau they put salt and acid substances under the skin, but these words burn too. You must have stuck one of those disks in me, like in the evening when you make us listen to a little music because they say it has a relaxing effect. And so I hear all these things that my simulated voice is saying; well simulated, I must say, it sounds just like mine, but it’s a trick, one of those false, convincing pieces of evidence that police worldwide know how to fabricate so well.

  In fact it’s all hogwash. This Maria ... I’d be better off not thinking about it, distracting myself in front of the television. There, here I am in front of the TV, which you allow us to watch in the evening, indeed you practically force us to. The antenna doesn’t work, that face is breaking up, a fine dust, a dusting of snow, a blank; the disk is a broken record, the needle screeches and keeps rasping the same word, the same syllable, it’s no longer a story, certainly not mine in any case, only scratching grating ricocheting ...

  17

  FORGIVE ME, Dr. Ulcigrai, this time it’s my fault, I let myself get carried away by passionate memories and created some confusion. That story about Marie comes later, as you may have already realized. But you’ll grant me your indulgence, I hope, if I allowed myself to be overwhelmed by memories of love and spoke of her before the right time, the heart has its reasons. So then—to pick up where we left off—well, on November 14, 1804, the Alexander left Hobart Town. In Sydney we heard the latest news from Europe. Napoleon proclaimed himself emperor and had the Duke of Enghien shot. The indignation made me forget the massacre of the blacks in Hobart Town. That infamy made such an impression on me that years later, in the hold of the Bahama, the prison ship on the Thames where they stuck me for a couple of weeks after the Icelandic affair, I wrote a wonderful tragedy, Enghien and Adelaide, reported by more than one of my biographers. Here, read a few lines—see what a beautiful ending. The exceedingly pure Adelaide, breathing her last breath, merely says: “May I?” No, it’s understood that no one may anything. “Finally, we begin using our head. I like that hatred for the Corsican usurper, for someone who thinks he can reshape reality and history at will, change men. You think you can straighten things out and you end up lopping off heads ...”—Maybe mine too, that’s why I mutter and rave—they say guillotined heads still mumble for a few instants, ah that expanded instant, someone at the movie stopped the projector and all you see is the open mouth, blood saliva pain words, solidified lava ... There, it unfroze. What kind of jokes ...

  On North Island, in New Zealand, where we stopped with the Alexander, some Maori climb on board, swaying as if they were seasick, maybe it’s their way of curtsying. Two of them, Marquis and Teinah, want to go to England and I quickly agree; I had a plan in mind to expand trade in the South Seas and thought the two of them could be very useful.

  I dec
ided to return to England, heading straight for Cape Horn, to avoid the Spaniards, and then go up toward Rio de Janeiro. We sailed with the Roaring Forties, then the Furious Fifties, then four days of savage winds and storms diverted us a thousand miles off course. Yes, a thousand, there’s no point in making that face. Why this conspiracy of never wanting to believe me, of calling me a liar, a deviationist, a traitor? I know that too many things happened to me to seem real, but it’s not my fault, I would have been the first to be happy if the load had been lighter. With those additional thousand miles provisions weren’t sufficient for the voyage we’d planned and I decided to make a stop in Otaheiti, to have the ship repaired and resupply myself with victuals and water. When we entered Matavai Bay, the first thing I saw was the hulk of the Harbinger stranded on the beach. On its listing, upturned side you could still read its original name under the new name, Norfolk, by which it had undertaken that final voyage. Changing a ship’s name, sailors say, brings bad luck.

  18

  FORGIVE ME AGAIN, Doctor, it was just a sudden dizziness, for a moment I couldn’t see anything anymore, just a dazzling dust mote that was hurting my eyes. It happens. Now it’s gone and everything is clear, like Maria’s face. The fault of that revolving door with the glass panes, at the Café Lloyd in Fiume where we would go sometimes in the evening. One time I saw her arriving; I was already inside waiting for her, she crossed the street, smiled at me from beyond the transparent door and entered it, making the panels turn; as she passed between them her figure and her face were mirrored in those revolving plates of glass and shattered into changing reflections, a handful of luminous, fragmented splinters. And so, between one revolving panel and another, she vanished.

  I must have stayed there a long time watching those glittering door panes; years sitting inside there, as the door revolves more and more slowly and nobody comes in. It’s understandable that your head spins too and after a while you don’t even remember so well who it was that disappeared between one pane and the other, whose smile it was. For a moment, for instance, catching a glimpse of her in the street, I thought it was Mangawana; that she too had crossed the great sea. It was I who called her that, under the huge eucalyptus trees leaning out over the waters of the Derwent: that ancient Aboriginal name, to tease her about her dusky skin, dark like my mother’s. Instead it was Maria—yes, she was also Mangawana, because Maria was the sea into which all rivers flow. Loving a woman does not mean that you forget all the others, but rather that you love them and desire them and have them all in her. When we made love on the solitary beach of Levrera or in that room in Miholašica, there was also the austral forest at the edge of the ocean, Terra Australis Incognita.

  Instead in Fiume, that day ... When Maria, seeing that I was incapable of leaving, took my hand, placed it on her breast, then led me to the door, in the scented dawn, helping me to go—the journey is the beginning of the return, she smiled at me, but I knew, at least I think I did, that there would be no return, by decree of the gods whom I—by some distortion of my heart’s will—had set above my heart and that smile.

  Perhaps I never loved her as much as I did at that moment, when I lied about returning and embarked on the search for the fleece; while she held my hands a moment longer, and at the same time, gentle yet resolute, helped me disengage mine—Hypsipyle bidding farewell to Jason: “Go, and may heaven bring thee back again with thy comrades unharmed, bearing to the king the golden fleece, even as thou wilt and thy heart desireth; and this island and my father’s sceptre will be awaiting thee, if on thy return hereafter thou shouldst choose to come hither again. Still remember Hypsipyle when thou art far away and when thou hast returned; and ...”—“Well, don’t you know how the rest goes, like in school?—Come on ... Here, repeat with me, “and leave me some word of bidding, which I will gladly accomplish, if haply heaven shall grant me to be a mother.”—Enough, we’re not in school, prompting during an oral quiz ... We don’t want to recite the whole book, now, do we? And don’t ask me, please, if the gods ... what do I know, what can I know ... Jason doesn’t meet her eyes either when he solemnly replies: “Hypsipyle, so may all these things prove propitious by the favour of the blessed gods.” When I raised my eyes, she wasn’t there anymore, she had vanished—no, she was there, like always, but I didn’t know who she was, a beautiful figurehead without a name that the fury of the storm tore from the sunken ship, she drifts along rising and falling with the waves, her large eyes turned upwards, to an emptiness even greater than that of the sea.

  19

  IN NEW CITÈRA I too got on well. At least I think so. I quickly forget things. Those nights on the shore, the breaking of the surf, the women’s hair, the wild, sweet smell of their skin, garlands of white flowers—I had forgotten them, in fact, but when I read the diaries of Bougainville and Cook in Sir Joseph Banks’s library—of course I read them, even my biographers say so—I immediately recognized those plants, those voices, those colours just like in my diary, written shortly afterwards, to capture those memories. And that somewhat paler skin of the soles of the feet, the women’s naked feet ...

  In Otaheiti I left Peggy. I spoke with her as if she were a daughter, but she’s not my daughter; at least I don’t think so, though you can never be sure about these things. Peggy Stewart, fourteen years old, is the daughter of John, one of the mutineers on the Bounty, who was taken away in chains on the Pandora, which had come to pick up the rebels, and drowned when the Pandora ended up shipwrecked on the coral reef, while her mother died of melancholy. Peggy is the only converted native; like the two Spanish missionaries thirty years earlier, so too the thirty British missionaries—dissenters and Methodists—led by Reverend Jefferson have been unsuccessful in their attempts. The enormous King Pomare who gorges himself on taro, fresh fish, coconut and duck meat, says Master Christ he very good when he asks for a brandy, but if they don’t give it to him he curses Jesus and extols the gods of Otaheiti.

  Reverend Jefferson wanders around among the huts, his face jaundiced, his gaze dejected; he pushes aside the clumps of hibiscus with annoyance, walks along the shore without even looking at the deep blue surf that breaks and dissolves into snowy white. On that island, where bodies flourish in a splendour that seems incorruptible, the Reverend has shrivelled up like a withered fruit. That paradise is fatal for a man who for some time has grown accustomed to no longer living in Eden and has gotten used to the miasmas of the fallen world. In London, in the foggy, malodorous streets, Reverend Jefferson’s face was certainly less yellowish: he moved about in that turbid stream with an ease learned over the centuries by his kind, thriving amid that impurity like a backwater fish in slime.

  The blossoms of foam in the surf, the indigo blue of the sea in the distance, the glory of the hibiscus and the gusts of the trade winds are dangerous for lungs accustomed to polluted air. Too much light and too much sun for wilted plants, which are burned by them and perish. Even the rising sun, which we stared at for so long, blinded us and burned us.

  But we still have enough strength to fatally wither that paradise that inspires sadness. Peggy Stewart doesn’t play with the others; she sits bamboozled under a palm tree, sings psalms with the pastors, so many pastors for a single lamb. Where is the mark of salvation, why is that forehead clouded rather than illuminated by the promise of the Kingdom?

  Jack—a very quick-witted Tahitian who together with another native, Dick, decided to go to Europe on the Alexander—does nothing but criticize religion and the bullying of the whites. Listening to Jack, an ambitious idea came to me: to write a book about Christianity seen through the eyes of a pagan Polynesian. It’s like seeing it for the first time. What’s a cross, two transverse boards, to a native who dives among polyps and sharks?

  But I certainly didn’t mean to write an erroneous, evil book against our true faith. I have never been a denier, a deviationist, as they’ve said about me many times. The idea for my book was something different. Little by little, by recounting all the wicked or at lea
st clumsy acts of the missionaries, we would arrive at the pure, glorious revelation of Christian truth that would emerge from the blunders, a shining star in the black of night. Even the revolution is true despite its missionaries. Aside from everything else, it’s also a good technique for saying all the good and bad you want about something. I started drafting a few pages during the voyage, two months later, in July 1805, when the Alexander put out to sea, loaded with water, fruit, coconuts, taros, salt pork, carrying Jack and Dick with it as well.

  20

  THE ALEXANDER rounds Cape Horn in October. The horizon very near, closer and closer. A wall of water advances and surges over our heads, a single colossal wave curved like a vaulted arch closes in behind the ship; thunderous bursts shatter that horizon raising columns of foam that crash into the sky and fall back, opening black, churning craters in the water. The sea serpent grips the ship, but we manoeuvre the foresail as the bow veers, a headwind strikes near Devil’s Island, we’re quick to haul the sheet aft to escape the serpent’s coils. The currents flowing from the sea slam into one another, gusts of wind scatter huge white flowers over the dark sea, then suddenly sever them, howling in the night, like when the jailers’ blows shattered my bones, each wave another blow, more salt in the wound. That I didn’t yield was not out of courage but because I didn’t understand anything anymore, not even what they were asking me and what I could say to make them stop.

  My ship rounded Cape Horn. Not me, I was left here, on this side of the wall that never collapsed, a huge wall of water as high as the sky, white crests like enormous sharp glass fragments; my hands are bloodied, they open and I fall back, to the foot of the wall. The winds and waters rage, they clash crash collide together; they suck me into the whirlpool, crazed Coriolis forces that swirl clockwise and counter-clockwise with me in the middle, in the black hole that swallows me up, dizzy and inert. The hurricane rages but in the black hole time has stopped, huge seas, raging and frozen. In the Lager blood throbs with an age-old slowness, a wound takes thousands of years to heal and here I am, sinking very slowly, almost not moving, at a standstill, further and further down. I slide down the towering walls of water; the sky is an ever smaller, ever darker porthole, I can’t see either forward or backward, in the frothy whirlpool. Did those revolving glass doors at the Café Lloyd in Fiume, where Maria vanished, turn clockwise or counter-clockwise, forward or backward? There, they’re turning again, handfuls of shattered glass are sent flying into the café where I am sitting.