Here’s a beautiful illustration, a plain, unknown figurehead preserved, it says below, at the Maritime Museum of Antwerp. If you look at her from the front she has a doleful expression, but when she was at the prow, the place for which she was made, she wasn’t seen from the front; rather she displayed her profile to the sailors, and that profile is impassive, generic, a clarity unclouded by any anguish. “Only noble simplicity and quiet grandeur can sustain the sight of the Gorgon, bear like a caryatid the intolerable weight of reality …” Well said in the booklet, but the fact is that when it comes to us, on the other hand, it comes crashing down on us, it flattens us, it crushes our head to a pulp. Take a look at those x-rays in your drawer, see how mushy my brain is.
Just imagine whether the noble, inexpressive face of this figurehead from Antwerp could ever be reduced to this, even Dachau would leave her cold. How could it be otherwise; inside and out there is nothing, and nobody can do anything to this nothingness, no fist can squeeze it and crush it, that’s why I like them so much, these prow figures. I like carving and sculpting them too. I wish I could copy all of the figures in this catalogue, oblivious to passion, sorrow, identity, that way being immortal would of course be worth it … It says here that Thorvaldsen, a master of neoclassic sculpture, served his apprenticeship in his father’s workshop, where he carved figureheads for the Danish fleet, like me, a creator of these figures that nobody will be able to send to forced labour camps.
Look how well they turn out, the torso grows out of a whirlwind that, at the base, seems to ripple the waves and extend to the fluttering garment, an undulating line that will dissolve into amorphousness, but meanwhile … And those eyes wide open on the beyond, on imminent, unavoidable catastrophes. Maria’s eyes … not at all like mine, blind … see, this is how I do the eyes, carving out the wood, creating a cavity, only emptiness can sustain the sight of emptiness; look how much sawdust there is on the floor, it’s the eyes of my figureheads, ground up and pulverized, like my brother Urban used to do with the sapphires and emeralds, blue eyes and green eyes, as cold as the Iceland sea …
40
DURING THE RETURN to Reykjavík, Brarnsen falls into a fissure, he shouts up from those dark depths. I lower myself down, sliding along the frozen walls, I’m beside him. It must be his hip, we won’t be able to budge from here. Brarnsen watches my face. I don’t say a word, I continue running my hands lightly over his leg, barely touching it so as not to hurt him. There’s nothing to be done, it’s impossible to pull him out. In a couple of hours you’ll be able to get up, I tell him, you just have to lie still and stay as warm as possible. Take this, I take off my jacket, slide it under his head, the jacket slips out of my hands and covers his face. Wait, I’ll arrange it better, and I shift the fur even further over his head, as if being clumsy Meanwhile I pull out my pistol; while he gropes around without seeing a thing, I load it quickly, hold it to his temple underneath the fur, the shot is deafening in the fissure, but he doesn’t get to hear it, the impact is violent despite the fur, the blood spurts all over me, I wipe myself off with wet hands then I clean them rubbing them on the ice. No need to turn up your nose, a compassionate doctor only makes the wound more painful, doctors are good and if they send you to the other world it’s out of love. History is an operating theatre for surgeons with a firm wrist. I was only an assistant surgeon, but I learned the job well.
41
IN ICELAND there are no trees or hardly any. But revolution requires trees, forests. To cut them down, of course. The revolution marches forward, penetrates the vast Siberian taiga; the new man advances in the forest, the hammer and sickle fell the untamed forest of slavery, every ancient tree that falls becomes so many sheets of paper that record that progressive epic, columns of figures in five-year plans. Those numbers, those statistics are poems, the poetry of the revolution which sweeps down like a strong wind from the steppes—“Poets tell many lies, we’ve long known it …”
—You again, Apollonius? I know, the statistics give us the numbers, for every fallen tree a thousand, ten thousand pages of lies. However, the others lie even more. Those who want to keep men enslaved—like the Fascists, the Nazis, the capitalists, the …—must lie, it’s their job as warder of the Lager, as Kapò of themselves. But we shouldn’t have lied, and maybe not even cut down trees …
In Iceland I didn’t cut down even a single one, on the contrary, I drafted a law that prohibited them from being touched, whether they still existed or not, laws are made in any case to protect dead men and dead things. And if they hadn’t deposed me for treason, just when they were about to sing my glory—
42
I READ Magnus Finnusen’s poem as soon as I returned to Reykjavík, but by the time he read it aloud, a few days later, in Madame Malanquist’s tavern, he had already revised and adapted it to celebrate the end of my revolution along with all the others who were raising a glass to my downfall. And so he proclaimed the lowering of the flag of Terror, the end of sedition, and I was not the good bear who came from the sea but a vicious bear carried away on a detached ice floe that vanishes in the mists. I didn’t make a fuss when I saw the Danish flag being raised on the flagstaff; my only thought was that wheat too would go sky high, from where I had lowered it. It was August 22, but everything had already ended a week earlier—dear God, nothing ever ends, not even with death, in fact here I am—when the Orion sailed into port and Captain Jones, who already had precise instructions and was in league with Count Trampe, accused me of insubordination, arbitrary acts of war against the Danes as well as secret agreements with them, attested to by my uniform. In fact I had boarded his ship wearing my old uniform as commander of the Admiral Juhl. Blue coat, gold buttons, epaulets, knee-high breeches and tricorn, which kept slipping off my head.
I didn’t say a word, I bowed and handed over my sword. I merely asked—or rather, I demanded, I ordered—that the people not be made aware of my arrest and he had no choice but to comply, because otherwise my people would have risen up and he would have had a narrow escape. Woe to anyone who touches my people’s Jorundar—that’s what they call me in Iceland. Then we went ashore. On the streets I stopped as usual to talk with people, saying that I was going to London to uphold their cause before the Lord of the Admiralty and my great friend Sir Joseph Banks and promising to return soon. Afterwards we all went to Madame Malanquist’s.
When we walked in, Finnusen was reciting his ode that was patched up like new, Vidimus seditionis horribilem daemonem omnia abruere, he declaimed and I laughed with all the others. So he, emboldened, asked me if I wanted my funeral beer, placing a keg in front of me; I grabbed him by the belt and slammed him into the keg, then I pulled him out, sending him flat on the floor, I took off my tricorn, turned it over and plunged it into the beer, as if it were a jug, and began pouring it down my throat announcing that Captain Jones was buying rum for everybody so they could drink to the health of the King of England or of Denmark, as they wished, I took a turn dancing with Gudrun Johnsen, who earlier had had her eye on me, and I even intoned the song of Ragnar among the serpents, that Provost Magnussen had taught me in Bessastadir. “Grim stings the adder’s forked dart; The vipers nestle in my heart … Fifty times and one I stood Foremost on the field of blood, Tinging my sword with blood, And no king my equal have I ever met.” Not even one, battles that is, thank the Lord. With those poor rachitic, malnourished wretches it would have been difficult to tinge red swords rusted for centuries, I thought, looking around me in the tavern as I sang and drank my funeral beer, the beer you drink when you bury a ruler—still, when it came to battles, I too certainly had some to talk about. Algoa, the Kattegat, Guadalajara—“From my earliest youth I learned the task, To tinge my sword with hostile blood, Me to their feast the gods must call; The brave man wails not o’er his fall.” Rather than wailing, I felt like laughing, me and everyone else, what with that beer that I was handing around, gesturing wildly. I even tripped over the keg, yes, the song was right, “I soon shall quaff
the drink of gods”—and such an urge to piss, it stands to reason, given all the drinking. “I soon shall quaff beer with the gods. The hours of life have glided by,” and how! “but smiling shall I die …”
Jones, on the other hand, went away furious, amid the general hullabaloo; only old Magnus Stephensen, to whom he had granted provisional power, remained taciturn and dignified, and uttered a solemn Latin phrase concerning the fickleness of fate and the vanity of all earthly glory. His malignant gaze said that now I would be the one to reign over Nyö, given that they were putting my head underwater, but I went on drinking, and gave my tricorn hat to a little boy, pulling it down over his face. Keep it for me until I get back, I won’t be gone long. I went to the beach with a whole train of people, I stretched out in the boat and ordered the oarsmen to catch up with the Orion, saying that I did not want to travel on the Margaret and Ann with Trampe and the other turncoats like Phelps and Savignac who were returning to London.
The boat eases away and I, lying on the bottom, keep on drinking. I drink to my funeral; too bad we can’t be our own mausoleum, drink our own ashes, like Queen Artemisia drank those of her royal lover, and then exhale them in a belch. I lift my head up from the edge of the boat, the waves rise up to me, over me, the crests glide away on either side, between one wave and another I see the coast, my kingdom moving farther and farther away—a towering blue wave dips down, it’s a rippling flag, my own blue flag which covers me, ever darker, ever bluer.
43
THEY WOKE ME between Cape Reykjanes and Fuglasker Rocks. The wind is violent. Gowen, the captain of the Orion—Jones took command of the Margaret and Ann—wants to head out to sea, but he’s unable to straighten the ship. I find myself on the bridge, without anyone having said anything. I order us to sail between the Cape and the rocks. My commands are as swift as that wind; they flit between one gust and another, it’s as if I can see every jib and every staysail, I tighten and slacken them as needed to dart between the masses of water, I could even manage to avoid cannonballs. All of a sudden the Margaret and Ann, far ahead of us, is in flames. The Orion pursues it like a shark, the other ship is at the mercy of the wind and water, buffeted here and there, the flames spread. The Orion advances through the rushing waves, comes alongside it. I leap onto the Margaret and Ann and order the lifeboats to be lowered, in less than an hour everyone is on board the Orion. I am the last to leave the ship, the act of a captain before going back in irons.
Phelps’s oil and tallow, which the Margaret and Ann is loaded with, feed the flames, which spread like wildfire on all sides. The wood burns, pieces of sail and rope fall and lick at the ship’s masts like tongues of fire; then everything crashes down, incandescent torrents, a scrap of flag plunges straight down, a warrior distorted in the blaze like in the Hall of Knights in Christiansborg. The ship is ripped apart, its copper bottom breaks off and floats red-hot, a fallen sun that scorches the sea. Suddenly a huge explosion, the powder magazine blows up and even the cannons explode, firing broadsides against the sky and into the clear night—volleys of cannon fire to mark my end, the night blooms with these shots, a dark rose bursts open in scarlet petals.
When the Orion moves off, a brazier lies burning on the sea, blood dripping into a dark goblet. The fire dies hard, everything dies hard, life resists fiercely and that’s why it hurts, it would be better to end it quickly. Now the sea is calm, Gowen is able to resume command and return to Reykjavík with the Orion, to depart again on September 1 and reach Liverpool eighteen days later.
It was a vile act to lock me up in the Toothill Fields prison, in London, on charges of having left England without permission, breaking my word of honour, and of having plotted against His Majesty’s government, on the pretext of helping those starving wretches. “So then, you supposedly did it for the sake of those godforsaken devils with their rickets and ringworm, who do you think you’re kidding?”—and on and on for hours, in that fetid cell, questions and interrogations and …—And to think that, from the time I landed until the day before I was locked up, I was at the Spread Eagle Inn again, where I had taken lodging, with the most encouraging assurances from Sir Joseph Banks …
44
WHAT’S THAT RED GLOW, a huge lit cigarette in the already darkened room? Oh, the closed-circuit television, the announcement of the group session, in the large auditorium on floor −1. Below ground, in short. Group therapy, present or not, near or far; you can nudge the person seated beside you and chat with whomever you want, even those who are right side up at the Antipodes, thanks to these PCs at our disposal. All together, crowds, masses, waiting for it to start. The auditorium is packed, it ripples like a sea. Where are the accused, the inmates in this valley of Judgment? I see only Kapò, watchdogs who incite one another with savage bites in the enormous slaughterhouse; tons of meat butchered and ground, they say dog meat is good, perhaps having had some in the Lager.
“How many can there be, the damned, the imprisoned, the condemned, patients held by force, Kapò?” Loads of them, an immense throng. You should know better than me, with those records and those clerks at your service, but I realize that with all those numbers your computers crashed. A computer is a brain and brains go haywire, it’s their specialty. But we shouldn’t be finicky about numbers. Numbers are alive, you can touch them, feel them. Numbers on playing cards, on a register, on coins, on bills, on your arm, on a roulette table, on cells.
You see them at the gaming table as well—I can vouch for it, given that I lost everything there—lucid and feverish, scribbling sums to uncover the secret order in the joust of probabilities, the mysterious laws that govern the chaos of the game and of the world, that make the ball spin around like a planet in space but also hold it in check, keep it from abandoning its trajectory and losing itself in the infinite void and force it to stop on the five, on the twelve. Maybe we’ll discover that order, accumulate the gold of time in front of us, that golden dust that slips through your fingers and gets left on the green carpet, on the great barren meadow jam-packed with the multitudes of those who wanted to be like God.
They stole the gold, the sacred fleece, and now they await the judgment of the People’s Court, all crammed into the enormous casino with that red wallpaper, blazing candles, human clusters crushed to the right and left of the green table, the altar of the Lord. Innocent, guilty, in any case damned, hanging from that table like animals from a hook, scorched by the flame of the candles that casts a bloody light on the sweaty faces and on the hands hauling in the chips. The red of the room is a blaze that envelops everything, around the table everyone is distorted like the Danish knights and kings in the Christiansborg Palace in flames.
Okay, I almost always lost at those tables, but I also enjoyed myself and losing what little I had didn’t matter much then … The biographers disapprove and I play my role as an unrepentant penitent. The important thing is to resemble your own portrait, it doesn’t matter who painted it. My life is what others tell me. Otherwise, what could I possibly know about the time I was born, when I started walking, whether or not I cried at night? All this was told to me by others and I repeat it, just as I heard it. What’s that? No, you don’t understand. This doesn’t only apply to early childhood. It applies to every moment of life. Do you think I know how my face looked yesterday, when you put me near that machine again, how my eyes were, my hands, you think I could describe them? Of course not, I didn’t see myself, I don’t know myself. But if you tell me, I know it and I can recount it.
I was released soon enough from Toothill Fields, but outside it was even worse. Cripplegate, Whitechapel, Southwark, Smithfield, St. Giles’s—sinking lower and lower, in increasingly sordid rooms, my clothes dirtier and dirtier—at least I played, even if I always lost. Instead, after those summers at Cherso—long, drawn out, I don’t even remember how many, two, maybe one or not even that—I never had the time or opportunity to play. Not cards or anything. My childhood, my adolescence, my youth ended quickly, abruptly. Ponza, the Guadarra
ma, the Velebit, Dachau, Goli Otok and … and what came next, after Goli Otok? I don’t remember, so many years crammed into a sack, heavy as lead. The sack wrapped in sailcloth slips out the opening of the hatch—“Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God We therefore commit his body to the Deep,” says the burial service for those who die at sea. It sinks quickly to the bottom. The water closes over it with a muffled sound.
45
NONE OF THIS STORY, Vidali and Bernetich told me in Trieste when I came back from Goli Otok, was to be spoken of and would never be known. Indeed I kept silent, like everyone else. Even the archive in Fiume, containing all our history, was burned in 1955, by Marini, nom de guerre Banfi: five valises full of documents, it took him a whole day to burn them. It was hard work, the pages curled up and slipped out of the pile in flames, they had to be kicked back into the centre or even shoved in, burning your hands. Our names expanded before turning into ashes, they crackled and flew between the gusts created by the heat. Some photographs as well. The face wavers, is distorted, vanishes into black smoke, a tongue of fire envelops the portrait of a young man with a red kerchief, the serpent sucks him into its burning throat, all the Argonauts disappear in the jaws of the dragon. We never told the story and now we no longer know it; things must be told continuously, otherwise they’re forgotten. The Party transferred us all to the Oblivion Ward.
Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) Page 16
