Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Magris, Claudio

  23

  I THINK IT WAS Sir Joseph Banks, the distinguished scientist and explorer, president of the Royal Society, who sent me to Copenhagen—shortly after our arrival in London—on that mission that later led to all those accusations of betrayal that rained down on me: British spy for the Danes, a deserter who went from the British over to the enemy. It happens, when you are sent on a mission; maybe it’s even true, as far as—Who is it now?—“Even those whom the Party sent to Russia, for example, easily became deviationists, maybe even Fascist spies, like Gianni Vatta, Vattovaz, who handled connections with the Yugoslavian party and had done much to bring about agreement between Serbian comrades and Croatian comrades and then, when he went to Moscow to report and emphasized that the national problem of various fellow parties should not be underestimated, it came out that he was playing both sides and he disappeared forever in Siberia.”—However, mistakes can happen, like in Jarama when we fired on a group of our own men, because we didn’t know they had already taken that hill and we thought the Francoists were still there. Even the Party sometimes—

  In Copenhagen, however, I didn’t betray anyone. Yes, I saw to it that I was received by the prime minister, Count Schimmelmann, I presented a grandiose plan for Danish trading in the South Seas and asked that they give me a fleet for Otaheiti. But I was thinking of a Denmark allied with England, for the benefit of both, and therefore did not act wrongly toward Sir Joseph and his mission as at least two biographies, in fact, reveal—gentlemen of the Court, I present them as requisites of the defence—I sent him a confidential report, through Captain Durban who was leaving for London on the Atrea. I even openly defended, in discussion with Harbo, the chamberlain, the need, at that moment, for the English naval blockade against Denmark.—“Well, sometimes it’s necessary to defend distasteful acts of necessity, as we had to do with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, for example, true? Sad, revolting in fact, but inevitable.”—Everything, my dear friend, is inevitable after the fact. Even the duel with chamberlain Harbo, when he called me a traitor. With pistols, at ten paces. I experience a strange euphoria, I feel light, like when you’ve drunk a little too much but not really too much; death and its possibility are in the air, but like a faint humming. I let myself go with the flow of things, which know how they should go, and with my body, which knows what to do. I see the chamberlain’s large, flushed face, his mouth tensed into a grimace, his eyes lying in wait. Who knows how my mouth looks, I think, as I take aim; I try to see by moving my lips and opening and closing them a few times, I shoot. The chamberlain, hit in the arm, drops the pistol; after a while it’s all over, I’m much more shaken by the news that Captain Durban, instead of going to London, fled to Gothenburg with my confidential memorandum. Tell me, how was I a traitor?

  Why have I had to continually defend myself against the charge of treason? Why this irreversible legacy, me, a traitor, an enemy of the people, a Danish spy, a British spy, an agent for the Cominform, for the West ... When, a little later on—after Denmark, an ally of Napoleon, had declared war on England—I agreed to command the Admiral Juhl, a 170-ton, 28-gun brigantine, for nuisance operations against the British fleet, I did so, as I stated in London after being taken prisoner, with the intention of bringing the ship to surrender to His Majesty’s Navy.

  What’s that? Of course we seized British ships on the Kattegat and defended ourselves when the Sappho gave us trouble, but I had to do it, for my sailors as well as for my family, so they wouldn’t face problems in Copenhagen. That’s why during the interrogation in London, after being taken prisoner, I asked that the London Gazette be sent to Copenhagen—the March 5, 1808, issue, that’s right—which reported news of the fighting, our fierce resistance, and described the pride with which, on the deck of the Sappho, I unfastened my sabre from my handsome blue uniform and surrendered it to Captain George Langford.

  A fine ceremony, in any case. Thinking back on all those things, as I reread them, even the most tremendous become as insubstantial as soap bubbles, later however something must have happened, History scored me with its knife and I’m covered with burning scars. I’m the hodgepodge created afterwards, the disguised dinosaur, the memory cartridge reinserted but damaged—it’s understandable, we’re still at an imperfect stage of the art, a muddled precursor conceives too soon one who is born too late ...

  24

  NO, I DON’T REMEMBER anything important happening in Barcelona, Comrade Luttmann said that time, walking with us at Battery Point and trying to look thoughtfully out to sea, where the old cannon that guarded the city once stood on the promontory, another dark, blind eye aimed at the world’s expanse. He had come to visit the Party’s organizations among the emigrants in Australia, especially the Giulians, who like me arrived after the Second World War, and it wasn’t a good idea to demoralize them—to demoralize us; I too had gone to that meeting, at least I think so, even though I was no longer a member, but, how can you say ... Nothing important for whom? Who is it that something actually happens to in an execution, the condemned man or the executioner who, after opening the trap door pressing the button or pulling the lever, goes home and helps his son with his homework without looking him in the eye right away? Maybe that time in Spain Comrade Luttmann put the blindfold over the wrong eye and aimed the machine gun on our fellow anarchists as well. No pasarán, they too shouted with us, and instead they passed and we opened the way to them, a platoon of one-eyed men with the good eye blindfolded, firing into that bunch, not realizing they were firing at their own. We mowed down our ranks, communists against anarchists, socialists against communists, and made an opening for death. The Fascists love death, Viva la muerte, death loves a breach through which it can enter. The revolution is a testudo of overlapping shields, but if a shield slips and another cracks, the testudo groans and gives way, burying those who are under it; the enemy clambers up the walls and falls upon you, you can’t tell who’s a friend and who’s a foe under there and you strike out wildly, in all that dust and darkness you don’t need a blindfold to blind you. Even then I should have realized that the venture was unfavourable to the gods from the start and that we would return without the golden fleece, with only rags drenched with fraternal blood shed by a fratricidal or rather suicidal hand. From its origins the fleece was stained with sacred blood; that of Phrixus, the guest, killed by Eeta.

  But on that PCI flag that Comrade Gallo handed over to the Fifth Regiment on September 18, 1936, in Madrid, there is also our own blood, and there is honour and shame for all, in that flag.—“But how can you possibly recognize brothers, yourselves, in the night?”—Ah, it’s you again, always eager to play with these new contraptions to bring up old stories. Which then, if the real Apollonius ... “The Argo pressed on, leaving the island called the Mount of Bears, after the fraternal hospitality shown by the Doliones and Cyzicus their king, who reigned over that land, and after exchanging gifts and pledges of peace. But when night came the rushing wind did not hold steadfast, but contrary blasts caught them and held them back till they again approached the hospitable Doliones. And they stepped ashore that same night; nor did anyone note with care that it was the same island; nor in the night did the Doliones clearly perceive that the heroes were returning; but they deemed that Pelasgian war-men of the Macrians had landed. Therefore they donned their armour and raised their hands against them. And with clashing of ashen spears and shields they fell on each other, like the swift rush of fire which falls on dry brushwood and rears its crest. I too, I too ensnared by that fate no mortal may escape, on that same night in the battle with them.” With us, because they were our own, when we mowed them down like grass.

  How can you see in the dark? The barricades burned on those May nights, the police of Catalonia’s red government fired and the FAI anarchists fired, everyone against everyone else, against the traitors of the libertarian revolution and against the traitors of unity of action. General Lister restores order in Aragon, the order is death. Viva la muerte, shout the advancing Fra
ncoists as we kill one another, maybe it’s true that OVRA and the Gestapo fomented discord, otherwise how could we have been so insane? In the dark you can’t see a thing and men attack each other indiscriminately. Later, with a little light, you see the truth, which is just a huge pile of corpses.

  Yes, we were in the dark. Still, and this will be loudly trumpeted in the valley of Josaphat, we fought against darkness, even though we sometimes hit the wrong target, while they, the black and brown shirts, created the darkness that made us lose our way.

  “At dawn both sides perceived the fatal and cureless error,” but we only perceived it later on, after many dawns. Maybe only down here at Battery Point, upon hearing those words, Nothing important happened. It’s always too late. “And for three whole days they lamented and rent their hair, they and the Doliones. Then three times round his tomb they paced in armour of bronze and performed funeral rites and celebrated games, as was meet, upon the meadow-plain, where even now rises the mound of his grave to be seen by men of a later day.” The red flag parades down La Rambla in Barcelona before leaving Spain—November 15, 1938, I remember it perfectly, your pills work—glory is defeat, exiting the scene.

  I know, afterwards something did happen. Those names denounced as dangerous, as spies, traitors, opportunists, deviationists reappear honoured on bronze plaques and they too, the brothers whom we brought down and who brought us down, shake our hand fraternally, because the night in which the powerful enemy lay in wait was long and dark and it was so easy, in that darkness, to attack each other blindly. Now everything is fine, everyone rehabilitated—rehabilitated of the world unite, no, scatter before it’s too late.

  25

  ON THE HIGH SEAS, when you encounter the Flying Dutchman and shipwreck is inevitable, tradition has it that the sailor, to save himself, grabs on to the figurehead. Eurydice doesn’t turn around, floating in the turbulent waters she stares astonished and aloof at the emptiness of the sky, the sea, not at Orpheus clinging to her skirts. So many Eurydices among the figureheads, bosom appearing and disappearing in the peplum, in the darkness; the dark depths of the waters await them. Clinging to her, I was saved. I would have liked to bring her home with me, like so many sailors do, maybe place her on my grave, even though the priests grumble and interfere, because they don’t want those half-naked women on hallowed ground. The sea brought many figureheads back to shore, but not Maria. Or rather, yes, it brought her back too, but after a very long journey across all the oceans, to the ends of the earth, down here, Doctor, a voyage that corrodes and consumes day after day, and by the time you arrive, you’re destroyed.

  In Iceland too it’s nighttime six months out of the year and the sea is dark. When Sir Joseph spoke to me about Iceland again—I was still a prisoner on parole at the Spread Eagle Inn, after the Admiral Juhl affair—I showed I knew something about it. I am Danish, after all, that island I was going to present him with was ours. Shortly afterwards I even wrote him a report on how to improve the Icelanders’ conditions, suggesting that he annex Iceland to England. In order to protect the Icelanders—who, I maintain with certainty, desire nothing more than to become British subjects, though they don’t dare show it for fear of the Danes—it would be advisable to impose the annexation by force. Whereas, in fact, it would be a free, enthusiastic choice on the part of the people, as in Czechoslovakia in 1948. Iceland, moreover, would be an excellent base for maritime trading, a valuable fulcrum against the Napoleonic blockade.

  I immediately link up with Savignac and Phelps, two merchants who join the Icelandic expedition, supplying the Clarence with a cargo insured for a thousand guineas and a plan to sell food to the starving Icelanders and buy quantities of tallow cheaply, to be resold at a profit. In the library of the Royal Society I found a few Nordic things, just to refresh my memory; even when I described the blazing Christiansborg Palace to Sir Joseph, I recited the words written by a poet. It makes sense, I remembered them better than what I had witnessed, not only because I had just read them but also because in general I remember words better than things, in fact, I remember only words, but those I recall quite well, even when I no longer remember what they mean.

  26

  THAT STORY about being king of Iceland, however, is hogwash, good only for the drunks at the Waterloo Inn who enjoyed bowing to me and calling me that. They spread it around to discredit me, to nail me down—it’s so easy to nail a man, just one small initial lie or even just one true thing, isolated from the rest, a piece of a man’s life without that whole life, which out of context that way is more untrue than a lie, and that unfortunate guy is screwed.

  But I’m one of the few whom they couldn’t manage to trap. They thought they let me rot forever in Port Arthur, for example, and instead here I am. Now they’re the ones who are dead, so sure of having thrown me in that communal grave in Hobart Town, where now there’s that park not far from the bookstore where I found my autobiography. People stroll through that park—I go there too, Doctor, on the afternoons I’m allowed out, when you think I’m out walking here in Barcola or in Miramare. Here, so to speak; it’s you who think so and all the better for me, a free bird on the loose, whom everyone thinks they’ve put in a trap. Captain Jones thought so too, after the three weeks of my Icelandic reign, when he was bringing me back to Liverpool on the Orion, in chains—in the end they had to remove them soon enough, we were still in sight of Cape Reykjanes, because with that sudden storm, if they hadn’t untied me and put me on the bridge to steer the ship, we would all have smashed on the rocks of Fuglasker.

  Nevertheless, in Iceland, I never dreamed of proclaiming myself king. We Jorgensen, His Excellency the Protector of Iceland, Commander-in-Chief by Sea and Land, my second proclamation, that of July 11, states. That’s right, July 11, 1809, it’s pointless for you to waste time checking it, no one knows it better than me. I did it—and I’m proud of it—for those poor Icelanders. They were starving to death by the dozens, vanishing into the darkness like flakes of snow, and before dying they were covered by pustules, their skin flaked off like fish flung up on the shore, their legs all swollen. In those times of war and blockades on the seas, nothing could get through to the island and, as if this weren’t enough, the Danish governor, that Count Trampe—who didn’t even have time to stop snuffling and belching when I deposed and arrested him, seizing him by the scruff of the neck as he lay on his sofa, where he was snoring loudly, half drunk, and flinging him into the outer room—that scoundrel Count Trampe prohibited the sale of a little wheat to the famished population at less than twenty-two dollars a barrel, so that almost no one could afford to buy even a handful and they continued to die. One of the first things that proclamation of mine declares, in fact, is that the price of wheat be fixed subject to our, that is my, unappealable decision.

  True revolution liberates the world. It’s also what makes the revolution a deception, causing it to go to the dogs, because we want to liberate everyone, even our blackshirt brothers, while all they want to do is lock us up. But we also forced too many people, our own people, to see the rising sun in stripes ...

  When the Clarence, which left London on December 29, approached Iceland, no sun could be seen in the Arctic night, but the aurora borealis streaked the sky with iridescent lights, scarlet banners unfurled in a wind of infinite space, verdant springtimes bloomed in the dark; and I believed in the sun that was supposed to rise for everyone and that I was bringing to those rachitic starving wretches pockmarked by St. Anthony’s fire. I didn’t see the sun in Dachau either, with or without stripes; I saw only the darkness of death, but I never doubted, in that Arctic night of the world, that the sun would reappear. Maybe I wouldn’t see it, I thought, but I knew that it had only dropped below the horizon, like it does, and that it would reappear, as I had seen it rise again in the east after the death of so many friends and comrades. Now I no longer know where to look, where east and west are—it’s as if not only the sun has disappeared but also the horizon.

  When the Claren
ce was unable to enter the bay of Reykjavík, however, by God did I know where east and west were, did I discern which direction the wind would come from and make out the shoals and rocks just below the water. I was Jorgen Jorgensen, His Majesty’s best sailor, and I found myself on the bridge almost without realizing it, next to the captain who looked away embarrassedly. I shouted orders to men I couldn’t even see, buried under towering waves that crashed over them; without me they would all have been smashed to smithereens on the Vestmannaeyjar, the first islands in those parts to be bathed in human blood, in the dark night of time, when Ingólfur Arnarson, the first Viking, sailed toward Iceland.

  Ash tree of the lineage, says the skald, master of the sword. Jorgen like Ingólfur, the man who came to bring life to the island of fire and ice, the bear brought by the ice floes, of which the saga tells, the king who came from the sea. So sang the ode that Magnus Finnusen, the poet, wrote months afterwards for me, when I returned to Iceland for a second time and liberated the Icelandic people and revived the Althing, the assembly of free Vikings who in past centuries met together once a year, on the Thursday of every tenth week in summer, to determine the law and resolve disputes, to establish how much a murderer had to pay to compensate the family of a slain man.

  I had time to read it, that ode, but not he to recite it, because three weeks later, on the day set aside to pay honour to me, Captain Jones, who arrived from London on the Orion, put me in chains, and so Magnus Finnusen changed his composition a little here and there and dedicated it to him, describing me in the poem as a tyrant and insurrectionist, Vidimus seditionis horribilem daemonem omnia abruere. It’s not surprising, it’s not the first time a hero of the people has been labelled a traitor.