Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Magris, Claudio

  Ah, if instead of …

  46

  BUT NEVER MIND, that’s your life, you lived it and you sign your name to it from the first to the last line. You who are many, Comrade, the conditional you of the grammar that we were taught by Miss Perich-Perini our teacher, the Internationale’s future humanity, you who were always on the wrong side at the wrong time. Here, in the court constructed from pieces of the Berlin Wall—it seems it fell, so I heard, but it never existed, I tell you, it was a ruse, fragile clay, a shove would have been enough to bring it down, from the very first day, but who would have thought? The Party is before the court and you, witness for the prosecution, one of many, unknown soldier of the revolution, you stand, swear to tell the truth, they show you the photograph with that genial moustache and the small eyes of a malicious elephant and you recognize him, it’s him, the dragon who stole the fleece and reddened it with rivers of blood, the pure bungled glorious flag of the future, a sun smothered in darkness.

  You stand, witness for the prosecution on behalf of the immense obscure swarm crammed into the valley of the final day, you pick up your tattered book; so many pages, the list of charges is enormous, it will take months, years to read it to the court. You clear your throat, you take up those pages, barely managing to hold them together, then you raise your head and say loudly “Workers of the world, unite.”

  So then, all charges are dropped and there are no defendants? No, Mr. President. Your Honour the Judge, President of the Republic, Hospital Administrator, who knows who. There is a defendant and I have no trouble indicating him. This is not the first time, moreover, that a comrade accuses a comrade who made a mistake. I’m not sure of his name, but I know who he is. It’s me. The documents speak for themselves and, as you can see, the file is extensive. Workers of the world, unite, it’s written here. I confess to being guilty of having deliberately helped to undermine this union, to foment divisions. Small discords and irreparable lacerations. Venial sins, Father Callaghan would say, and mortal sins. Therefore I too am guilty, perhaps unknowingly, Viva la muerte, when your number’s up, it’s up.

  47

  MARICA’S NUMBER WAS UP, for example, at the height of the Liberation celebration. Just a few days, seventeen. All liberations are brief, half-hour walks in the prison yard.—“Seventeen days, from September 9 to 26, 1943, Nevèra’s words.”—Thank you, that wasn’t necessary. I remember dates quite well, and then too I am Nevèra, if I may. It’s the faces, the eyes, the voices that grow fainter and fainter in the fog. The women too. The glass steams up and hides Maria’s smile. I hasten to wipe it clean, but the more I rub the pane, the more opaque it becomes and if I finally manage to clear a spot in that grime, swabbing at it, that smile, that face on the other side is no longer there. She went away, maybe she got tired of waiting; maybe I was mistaken and confused her with someone else. With this soot from so many years it’s easy to get mixed up.

  The brief liberation of Spalato and Traù when our Bergamo Division, which was occupying the area, surrendered to Tito’s partisans, the day after the September 8 reversal—I was in the fourth company, a private, though in the clandestine Party I was something more, even if not much. Smrt fašizmu, sloboda narodu, death to Fascism, freedom to the people. And I, an agent of universal history, an operative sent down there to eliminate Marica. Unaware of it, of course, but when the Party sends you on a mission you never know the real aim of your assignment, what you will set in motion. For that matter, even in life you never know what will happen once you start something. The Party is as vast and inscrutable as life; that is to say as insensible and ingenuous as life, it gropes its way along, it, too, convinced of being its own justification. This is why it went belly up; life can’t last, it becomes corrupted, infected, dies. We are all dead, Doctor. This attempt to keep a patient alive at all costs is hopeless; a Party of intubated sufferers in an intensive care unit and there’s the plug, all too visible, within reach of the first joker who wants to pull it.

  Yes, when I went to Traù—a conscripted soldier hauled out of the Fascist jails in Italy and sent to Yugoslavia with the Italian Royal Army, but still active in the Party with whom I had maintained contacts even in prison—I was unaware that I had been sent there for Marica’s damnation, or rather my own. All I knew, when I got to Traù, was that I was to work at organizing Party groups and cells among our soldiers sent there to risk their lives, even before the events of July 25 and September 8. In fact a few weeks later, on September 26, after the Germans arrived and reoccupied Spalato and Traù, the Garibaldian Communist brigades of the Italian Division began operating in the general melee of everyone fighting everyone, and as we awaited a more important Party figure, I found myself temporarily acting as deputy political advisor, under the code name of Nevèra.

  I was glad to be in Traù, even before those few happy days with Marica. Of course she was my girlfriend, and it was all my fault. Maurizio—that too a nom de guerre, you understand—spoke of it as if it were his fault, but that was only to give people the impression that he was her sweetheart, cocky young man that he was. I’m glad for him, that way he was happier in the final days before he died in Spalato. Courageously, I must say, like a true comrade.

  It wasn’t the first time I had been there, in Traù. I had hidden in the house of a certain Tihomir, who had known my father when, years earlier, he navigated a shuttle boat that serviced the Spalato—Fiume line, stopping at almost every port and on the islands as well. We had taken it to Cherso a couple of times, to go to Fiume, sparing ourselves the ferry from Porozine and the local bus, and my father had become friends with him; he was a member of the Yugoslavian Communist Party, and was banned in 1921. So we had gone with him to Traù a couple of times, always on that old wreck, where he also had a scull. I liked Traù, surrounded by the sea, beautiful and regular with its squared sides, like a figure in a geometry book that defines and limits things. For some time I haven’t been able to stand anything infinite, a real allergy that makes my eyes smart like onions do; I even prefer looking at the sky when it’s framed by a window, maybe with bars, like in that noisier large room of yours, Doctor.

  I liked looking at the sea, losing myself in the tremor of its dazzling reflection. I also liked the smell of that sea, mixed with the odours of tar and roasted fish with garlic, and I liked to touch the wing and the mane of the lion of San Marco, to feel the stone solid and warm beneath the sun. It’s comfortable, leaning against the lion. And from there you can clearly see the palace and the cathedral of San Lorenzo, with all the figures on Master Radovan’s portal.

  I also liked the three Magi riding at the top—the climb is difficult but they gaze upward and continue on, it’s clear that they can’t get lost and end up badly, they’ve been riding for centuries and their red star has never set. The lion’s paw with its claws as well as its muzzle, on the book, unfathomable under the mane, were somewhat smashed when I returned, because some hotheaded Slav nationalist, on that famous night of December 1932, had decided to go at them with a hammer.

  The revolution, however—or so I thought—after winning and maybe breaking a few heads, would not destroy but would preserve and safeguard all vestiges of man’s history, a history finally completed though its suffering would not be forgotten; the Roman eagles, the crosses, the crescents, the Venetian lions, stars of David, Egyptian and Aztec pyramids, all under the red flag …

  Twenty years later, to tell the truth, in the tragic mayhem of that August of 1943, I didn’t have much time to mourn the lion’s broken snout and claws, but I would have liked to remove the thorns from those injured paws. Maybe in part because, on the eve of those days of bloody harvest, I leaned against that lion not alone but with Marica in my arms, though blood was already flowing from the vats—shootings in the villages, ambushes in the woods, reprisals, deportations. It was Christmas, Christmas 1942. Hristos se rodi. Srean Boži, Christ is born. Merry Christmas, Marica said offering her mouth. An innocent Christmas kiss, as was the custom, which turn
s into a different kiss—time expands, stops, plunges into that mouth. There, on that leonine stone, my life stretched out, the entire course of a river with its meanders, its cascades, its expanses. That bit of my life is larger than my life, a minute contains hours and an hour contains years, even if it dissolves so quickly.

  48

  RIGHT, DISSOLVES. If that were all, no problem. A kiss, after all, is just a kiss, a young soldier on leave is clearly entitled to have a little fun. Marie too, I got fed up with her when she started making a fuss, in fact I almost left her out of my autobiography, as my earlier biographers had more or less done. How can love be sustained? I’m not saying a woman. A woman, you can accept. Even if you go to the ends of the earth amid a thousand misfortunes, to the Antipodes, you can always bring a woman with you and even respect and love and defend her in front of everyone, even if she’s an old slattern or worse, like I did with my Norah, even when she fell down drunk in the streets of Hobart Town.

  A woman is fine, but love? It pounces on you, it crushes you. It’s already hard enough to live, survive, dodge the blows that come from all sides, slacken the sail or haul aft at the right instant before the boat crashes or capsizes; to grow old, become ill, see your friends die, come to terms with the infamy, shame and betrayal in your heart. And as if this burden weren’t enough, love too? It’s too hard a struggle, you can see why sometimes all you can do is desert.

  49

  “EVERYTHING WAS ARRANGED/set for desertion even earlier, that evening in Gravesend, wasn’t it? No extemporizing, few excuses … Your John Johnson …”—Ah, you again, this time with that false name of mine, all the better, that way I have nothing to do with it …

  Marie had returned, no, I had returned, it doesn’t matter, we had found each other again and, strangely enough, everything seemed perfect, easy. Being together, living together, running away … I felt as if I were no longer afraid, even though—She could have helped me leave England. But that’s not the reason why—no, not only that. Her brother was on patrol on the Thames, with his troops that monitored the few landing stages from which a boat could leave the shore. Marie was very close to Abs—actually his name was Absalom; they were almost the same age, grew up together. It was easy for her, instigated by me—how strange, that sudden, deceptive control over a woman, unapproachable until a moment before, and then abruptly ready to do anything for you—to convince her brother to patrol the river farther north, saying she had seen people hiding boats among the reeds. Thus, from the unguarded shore, we would be able to put our dinghy in the water and reach the ship, where the quartermaster, who had already pocketed the stipulated sterlings, would set me up among the crew, under the name of George Rivers.

  Yes, I know I was an idiot to tell Marie that she too would be coming with me, to take advantage of her since she took my every word as gospel truth—it’s love, they say, but I don’t know if that’s true. To love means to understand, therefore to mistrust, to know that falsehood lurks, that living is lying … But at the time she and I, they, didn’t … In any case I had to tell her that, otherwise who knows what a fuss she would have made. At the last moment—to spare her for a little while, to let her breathe a little more easily—I would tell her the truth; that it was impossible, that as soon as I had quietly arranged things, once I was free and safe, I would send for her. I swear I would have done so. But Went, that spy, squealed to the police, so they caught me and threw me in Newgate. Abs, Marie’s brother, was tried immediately, for complicity, and sent to Port Arthur. I never heard anything more about him, not even later on, when they sent me down there too. They say he threw himself into the water from the rocks near Puer Point, like the children, and that the sharks tore him to pieces, but I don’t think so. I never heard anything more about Marie either, for a long time. What’s that? No, I don’t know anything about a baby, leave me alone, what do I have to do with it, it’s absurd …

  So much for dissolving, then. Love and death. Viva la muerte. Easy to say, a little less so if you actually die or kill. It’s good that you keep me locked up here. Not because of these stories that I can’t remember, even if that one there shoves them under my nose; but I know why … Everything started out so well, during that Christmas of 1942 and the following months; even that increasingly atrocious war and the ever more difficult political work—among my comrades-at-arms, hunters surrounded by savage beasts, the partisans sinking their teeth into us like barracudas into an exhausted whale, and me a whale about to become a barracuda—seemed like a sunrise to me. We liked going into the courtyard of Palazzo ipiko. It’s good they took it away from you, Marica teased me, that’ll teach you to change names and go over to the enemy, besides with that uniform the name of a renegade and traitor fits you; and I told her that she resembled the Woman placed in the atrium of that palace, which oddly enough bore my name or close to it, and that she was the figurehead on the prow of my ship, like the Woman had been on the prow of the galley of Alvise or Alvižo ipiko—he too rinsed clean, like me—in Lepanto, face to face with the galley of the terrible Ucciali, the Calabrian fisherman who became the pirate king of Algiers.

  To tell the truth the Woman seemed like anything but a docile slave, naked and fierce as she was, one of those lean women with no breasts who in bed devour you like a famished she-wolf. Even Marica, beautiful and proud like a pennant in the wind, was sometimes a battle flag, and there was something frightening in her merciless lovemaking. She despised those bastards from the coast so quick to change their names, those Dalmatian Croats whose names suddenly became Italian or those Dalmatian Italians with the Slavic names who exchanged their soul and their name like words shouted and distorted in the wind—We Chetniks won’t let ourselves be branded at will like cattle by masters who come and go, we have no master and we’ll all die rather than let an Ustashi, a German or an Italian trample on Serbian soil, she would say.

  Her brother Apis was the leader of a more or less scattered group of Chetniks and had rounded up many of the Serbs who lived between the coast and the Dinaric Alps, where the nevèra rages down upon the sea. They fought against everyone—against the German invader and their Ustashi dogs but also against us, I mean against us Communists, who were beginning to nip at the Germans’ flanks, and to some degree they flirted with us, I mean with us Italians, who had managed to seat a king of our own on the throne of Zagreb, like on a chamber pot, but since we too had a king we were also able to appeal to their Colonel Draza Mihajlovi, who was promoted general only to go before our execution squad. By “our” I mean us Communists, since Tito was one of ours or better yet we were his and I too was there to work for the revolution or rather for him—it’s strange to think about it now, after he put me to work for him at Goli Otok.

  The Germans got angry with us—yes, of course, us Italians—when we courted the Chetniks instead of joining them in slaughtering them. It didn’t matter to them that the Chetniks fought more against us Communists, defenders of an invaded Yugoslavia, than against them, its invaders; we don’t need anyone to get rid of Tito and the Communists, they said, not even Italian allies. In fact, after September 8, they began slaughtering Italian soldiers as well and so, for a time, we were actually who we were, royal army, former royal army, and former partisans some in royal uniform and some not; yes, for a brief time things seemed clearer, it was clear who we were and who they were. To shoot one another or cut each other’s throat you need to at least know whom to fire at and whom to avoid.

  You’ll say that I never did learn and that I shot myself when I thought I was bumping off an enemy. That may be. It’s easy, crouching in the dark, to mistake your own shadow gliding along the wall for that of someone else.

  But meanwhile I had Marica, as harsh as the Woman in the atrium of the palace that bore my name or close to it. The Woman came from the sea, from a broad, distant sea resonant of fierce battles, but I watched her through the dark door of the palace, I saw that naked bosom emerge from the shadows of the dark atrium. Even Marica’s ardent bre
ast told me that love is a pause during battle, a fruit bitten in haste, your mouth parched, panting under the ruthless onslaught of summer. That Alvise-Alvižo, my ancestor or not, must have known that women give you courage. Maybe he was afraid, despite all those Obradoviches Chrescoviches Dobiscoviches Vidobinoviches Steffiloviches Francinoviches Nicoliches Gozdineviches Riboboviches he had on deck, men ready to commit piracy and kill and die for him, for the cross, but even more so for the lion of San Marco, who held the cross in his paws like a bone already sucked clean. But having men alongside you isn’t enough to overcome fear; you need a woman. And since he couldn’t have one on board in flesh and blood, he at least had the Woman placed on the prow of his galley, to give him courage when he faced the terrible Ucciali …

  Yes, women are our great shield and we hold it up between us and life, to take life’s blows. My great shield, Maria Marie Marica—as long as I carried the shield I was safe, but I was afraid, I dropped it—I fled, the shield abandoned on the ground, trampled by horses and wagons, saving my hide instead, which wasn’t worth that of the ram flayed in Colchis. Each time death was about to catch up to me, I let love, a piece of my heart, drop; I threw it to the ravenous pack at my heels and fled, lighter.