50
BRIEF SUMMER in Traù, a brief summer of liberty and glory. We fought well against the Germans and the Blackshirts, ready as we were to die for the Internationale’s future humanity. Who said heroes are no longer born? The Yugoslavian liberation army was heroic, it stopped the overpowering German war machine, made it bite the dust; I’m proud of those brothers of mine with the red star.—“Merito damnabis Eorum sententia qui affirmare solent effeotam esse naturam nec producere tales viros quales priscis temporibus extiterunt omnia mundo senescente degenerasse ...”—Where is this mumbo-jumbo coming from now? Who do you think you’re impressing? Illustrious family books and memoirs. I’d just like to know where you dug it up. We comrades are the true, ancient, future nobility. Here it is, my name. Coriolanus Cepio, Koriolan Cipiko, nightingale of bygone times, Caesar and Titus Livius of Dalmatia and South Pannonia, as he called Bosnia, an island that emerged from the ancient Pannonian sea. Author of Petri Mocenici imperatoris gesta, also known as De Bello asiatico, beginning of book 1. My father was proud to show it to me. He knew about heroes, Coriolanus Cepio, he knew that they had not died in ancient times but that the earth produced more and more of them, like his Pietro Mocenigo, whose deeds against the Turks he had sung, like that Alvise—or Alvižo—ipikoipiko his grandson or great-grandson with his Woman at the prow in Lepanto, confronting Ucciali, like me, great-grandson of his great-grandson on that same bloodied sea.
Ex hoc maxime apparet how false is the rumour that heroes belong only to ancient times, Nestor’s senile ranting beneath the walls of Ilium. Instead, the more time passes, the more heroes are born, and this is the curse of the earth, of the catastrophes in which men are heroic, just for having to confront them, and the laundry hung out to dry in the alley is a forest of torn flags hanging from a bloody, leaden sky.
I should have realized it, when I saw several Titoist partisans kill those soldiers of the Bergamo Division who had scattered and surrendered. But I was concerned with organizing the Garibaldian division to fight the Germans and the Blackshirts who were raging like beasts against the Slavs, and so I didn’t look back at those men of ours killed during the first days of freedom, which for them meant death.
Don’t damage partisan unity in any way, the Party ordered. There was so little time to think, in those seventeen days, because on September 26 the Germans arrived, seized everything again, and they too began shooting Slavs and Italians; at least it was a relief, against the Germans, to know which side you were on.
No, not even I had time to think about everything, in those seventeen days. But I had to think about Marica, because of her brother. Until that time the Chetniks had been to some extent with us, to some extent against us, but when the Italians surrendered, on September 9, Tito’s partisans became the ones in charge in Traù and decided that it was time to finish off those enemies of the revolution, and that Apis’s unit, although it had killed a great many Ustashi, had to be eliminated.
Actually they told me it had to be disarmed and neutralized. And so, when Marica, trusting me as she lay in my arms, told me where her brother and his men were hiding, I would never have thought, relaying it shortly afterwards to Comrade Vukmanovic of the VII Corpus, that ... that’s how it happened, in the uproar and chaos of those days a man gets confused, they tell him something they ask something he replies. A word, distracted and innocent, how can you imagine it will lead to bloodshed? The blood wells up, rises like high tide, strangles; that stream gushing from the lips seems like wine at first.
In those places, my friend, a great deal of blood flows, Ustashi Chetniks Blackshirts SS Drusi. Blood is contagious, all you have to do is press a key—click on the mouse, thank you, I know that’s what you say—and the tiny arrow makes it spurt wherever it stops. On these Dalmatian sites, then ...—Wait, watch the arrow, it knows where to go and where to strike, what to pull up from that well of the past hidden behind the screen as if under a lid ... beautiful spots, these coasts ... Here, if you want I’ll print it out for you.—“There for centuries the Uscocchi, such as Martin Possedaria or Giurissa Aiduch, wore the skin of those flayed, and the women incited them with opprobrious words to go out to sea and strike the Turks and Venetians and Ragusans with arrows and gnaw them with their teeth, and when they had cut off Cristoforo Veniero’s head under the Morlacca they then dipped their bread in his blood.”—
—Heads are easily cut off, in those parts. Four noggins for a penny, partisan heads lopped off by the Ustashi and set in the middle of the road, Ustashi heads cut off by partisans, German heads, Italian heads—it’s sometimes strange to feel it still on your neck, that head. Márja, the Uscocca woman—ancient history, I know, but so what, everything is present, everything is happening now—had eleven husbands, whom she’d married one after the other during the wake of the previous one, holding one single banquet for the wedding and the funeral, death and love are one big bed. She was a sorceress who conjured up the bora on the Quarnero, but if she gave her word it was her word, and she wouldn’t repay even betrayal with betrayal.
Srean Boži, she had said on Christmas Day in Senj, where the bora originates, offering her mouth to a certain Santissimo from Italy who shortly afterwards, captured by the Venetians who had come to avenge the pillaging of scarlet and purple fabrics at the mouth of the Neretva, blabbed what Márja had ingenuously told him. In a word he revealed that the Uscocchi, led by her brother, were about to attack Pago and had hidden the brazzere, submerging them in the sea near the gulf of Mandre, that they were travelling miles and miles in a night with the men taking turns at the oars, and were preparing to haul the boats up, to pounce upon the Venetian galley anchored in the port of Mandre. Santissimo indicated the place and that same evening eight Uscocchi were swinging from the battlements of the castle of Purissa, eight hanged and others killed and thrown into the sea, Márja’s brother as well, but she wouldn’t hear of disowning her husband, her twelfth and a traitor, and when relatives and friends asked her to swear to dip her bread in his blood if they were to catch him, she bowed her head and replied that when her brother, surprised by the Venetians, was about to strike Santissimo who had come with them to point out the place, it had been she who gave him a shove and made him drop his sword on the ground, and so the Venetians had struck him and almost hacked him to pieces, and then thrown him into the sea.—“So then Mate Aiduch went toward her, drawing his sword, but no matter how hard he struck her along with two others the blades could not find their way into her breast that spilled, white, from her scarf, until finally a rapier thrust caught her in the belly, killing the child before it did her.”—And this perhaps was her revenge against Santissimo, to lead to death not him but his son, and she fell to her knees, wildly wielding blows and reciting the Confiteor.
Who knows if she was also asking forgiveness for the blows she was dealing out at that moment, for the slash that cut off the ear of a man who came too close to her; though she was confessing her faults and sins to Almighty God, to blessed Mary ever Virgin, to blessed Michael the Archangel, and to all the Saints, she was not beating her breast but was trying to strike that of others, because life is sin and the blood that flows violently and loudly in our veins demands spilling other blood which flows from other veins. The Confiteor uttered with the final breath is perhaps the only thing that can be said, since it does not claim to explain or justify anything, but simply confesses having done wrong, the utterance of a man who repents having sunk his teeth into another man.
Even for Goli Otok, all we had to do was ask for forgiveness and instead everyone explains the how and why, the necessity, the history, the Third International, the dialectic; I don’t know how Marica died, I only know that it was she who saved me when Apis, surprised by our men, was already taking aim, shouting hatred and contempt at me; it was she who seized his machine gun and so he was cut down and fell into the sea, then she fled with three or four of her own, that’s what Maurizio told me. They found her in the woods, a gunshot wound to her forehead, mea culpa,
mea maxima culpa, Márja’s final thrust, before she fell face down on the ground, a blow that almost ran through her killer, was also a sin, never as grave as mine. It would have been better if Marica had saved her brother and let me die; for her and for the son she carried in her womb it would have been the same, the Titoists or the Germans would have killed them in any case, a day more a day less makes little difference when you die, but I would have had a better fate.
Márja’s body was tossed onto the beach, to the crows and seagulls. A woodworker from Pola saw her on the shore, naked and terrible like a snake when you’re not sure if it’s dead or may still bite, and with that gash in her belly, an obscene caesarean cut to tear out a life that didn’t want to leave. Some time later, in his workshop, the Pola craftsman carved a figurehead fierce and proud like that woman thrown to the seagulls, an unripe mulberry whose kiss puckers up your mouth, and Alvise Cippico put it on his prow like a pointed lance with which to ram Ucciali the Calabrian and then, returning home after the great victory of Lepanto—which a few years later, like all victories, was as if it had never happened—placed it in the cool, dark atrium, where she remained for many years and centuries—admired, ogled, avidly caressed.
I read that she was still in the palace atrium after it was confiscated by the socialist regime. One fine day she simply disappeared and since then nothing more was heard of her, except for townspeople’s gossip that suggests all kinds of hypotheses. Professional thieves, they say, would have stolen the precious gold and silver objects from the nearby cathedral treasury instead. And deep down, almost everyone is convinced that it’s a real abduction—as if the figurehead were not a thing but a living creature, which is not stolen but kidnapped. In any case they took her away from me, her too.
51
A BEAUTIFUL PALACE, that Palazzo ipiko of mine where my figurehead disappeared. It’s in all the tourist guides. A national monument, protected by the Fine Arts Commission, with its ornate Gothic-style facade, triple-arched windows, the Renaissance portal by Ivan Duknovi. A historic building. I’m at home in History. It’s a duty to be present at historic days, even though they’re becoming more and more numerous. What is a man, alone with his life, without memorable tidings that illuminate it like fireworks light up a crowd huddled in the dark? He’s a shadow, obscurity You have to be there with Destiny, walk behind it like an honour guard and march under its triumphal arches, as applause rises from the darkness that yawns on all sides—or even insults, it doesn’t matter much.
Historic days are multiplying. Even when the governor lines up the convicts on the green in Hobart Town, facing the sea, it’s a historic day. More modest, it’s true, but still historic, and then when you think that someone may have landed there many years earlier—when there was nothing, only that sea—to found the city, that too was a historic day, as was the inauguration of the penitentiary, where that very same founder later ended up, and your visit, Doctor, every morning around ten o’clock, when you come by our beds with your train of assistants. Kardelj and Rankovi’s visit among our ranks in Goli Otok was also historic, amid shouts of “Tito Partija!”
In History it’s like being at the gaming table, first you win then you lose, you double your bet on Austerlitz, but the next time Waterloo comes up. Of course I was at Waterloo, why do you doubt it? Come now, don’t act like a Prosecutor at the People’s Court, Comrade Doctor, don’t you too start believing I’m a liar. I too was a victor at Waterloo, because that eyewitness report of mine earned me a pardon and thus spared me from prison or the gallows for having left England without authorization.
I know how things went that day. Yes, me; it’s my name, I don’t care if so many others are called that.
Contrary to what has been said and repeated, the Duke of Wellington was not losing when the Prussians arrived. He was attacked by surprise, that much is true, I was there when French cuirassiers who suddenly appeared behind the hill broke through our long, thin red line above Hougoumont. It was our most advanced division, which was about to form a square, but was hit before it had time to do so, when it was still a long red stripe, a snake slithering through the grass, and all of a sudden those horses were all over it, sabres rising and falling radiant in the rainy, grimy air, the snake was hacked to pieces, each coil writhed and was cut into ever smaller pieces, it jerked and coiled around a sword torn from a hand gripping it as the man fell from his horse, his sword wound tightly by those raging, dying coils. Hidden in that farmhouse, amid straw and broken beams, I don’t ...
52
A BREATHLESS, headlong chase, horses colliding, in Hougoumont, under the French attack; two German companies from Nassau, decimated, leave their positions and retreat with increasing haste, the soil explodes all around like numerous small volcanoes. Stumble, get up again, a hoof bashes in a head sunk face down in the mud, the barricades and wooden shelters scattered on the hill are in flames—go through the fire and come out on the other side, there you’ll be safe, beyond a huge insurmountable burning wall. A horse passes me staggering, the rider clinging to the animal’s neck can barely stay in the saddle; I grab his sleeve, almost by accident, and the German slides to the ground by himself, without my pulling him down on purpose, he’s still falling when a French spear pins him to the ground; I’m in the saddle spurring the horse on, I hear the burst of a grenade and the horse explodes under me, when it rolls to the ground its viscera wind around its legs.
I just made it in time not to end up under the horse, at least not entirely, one leg is stuck under the animal’s weight, but I don’t try to pull it out or get up, I lie there motionless, face in the mud, beside the wounded, pawing horse. Lying there like that no one pays any attention to me, I even close my eyes. The mud on my face is warmish, the battle doesn’t penetrate under there, bursts and thuds are muffled, it’s like at sea when you put your head underwater; I can taste the mud on the tip of my tongue, the dirt on my knees that I licked away as a child ...
When I stood up again and realized I had no broken bones, there was no one on that slope anymore, aside from the dead. By the time I reached Ghent, where the court of Louis XVIII was, I’d recovered the boldness needed to recount Wellington’s defeat, with a wealth of detail. And I recovered even more of that boldness when, a few hours later, as sentries and messages arrived from Brussels, I quickly realized, from a few phrases heard in passing, that the situation was reversing or had already been reversed—I realized it early enough to turn my story around and announce Wellington’s victory, being careful not to deny the story of that initial flight and indeed confirm it in those small indelible details that attest to the authority of the narrator and the reliability of the witness, but continuing the story until it was turned around and above all changing the viewpoint and focus, so that the story, which at first was entirely about the battle, shrinks and becomes an episode among many that make up the total event, the historic day, the battle of Waterloo won by Wellington.
Realizing something later on, moreover, is not always a disadvantage. How did that insolent Frenchman put it? Ah yes, that the Duke of Wellington was lucky to have those somewhat slow reflexes, at least with respect to Napoleon. Had he been as quick as his adversary, in no time he would have noticed that he was losing and would have retreated, losing definitively—this way instead, thanks to the fact that he didn’t instantly realize what was about to happen, he found himself winning, maybe even without being immediately aware of it this time ...
53
IT’S NOT TRUE that that description of the attack at Hougoumont derives from the story told to me by Count Lobau who commanded a position at Waterloo. Naturally, I spoke with the Count; we travelled together to Ghent. The boat glided along a peaceful canal, slicing through the images of poplars reflected in the water which for a moment darted away like a school of fish, old mills faded in the evening. The Count, standing upright to his full height, was recounting, in that stentorian voice of his that in battle could be heard even over the firing of guns and cannons, how
his company from Nassau was attacked when it was about to form a square, about the thin red stripe slithering like a snake through the grass, about horsemen fleeing, how he jumps on a horse left without a rider and the horse immediately collapses beneath him, struck by a grenade ...
Of course I was there, at Hougoumont, in the midst of that turmoil. Anyone who wonders exactly where I was and where the Count was must never have been in the midst of battle. Otherwise he would know that at such a time, with grenades exploding mud splashing horses whinnying and men screaming, nobody knows what’s happening around him, whether the grenade was thrown by his men or by the others, whose blood it is that he sees all around him, perhaps on his own jacket.
Lord Uxbridge lost a leg at Waterloo and had it buried with due solemnity, an actual funeral with soldiers at attention paying final respects. However, I wouldn’t swear that it was actually his own leg, it’s possible the attendants at the field hospital made a mistake and took someone else’s. But what difference does it make? It happens even with a whole body, especially after such a massacre; the dead all look alike and soldiers even more so ...
54
I DON’T KNOW how the Germans managed to capture me on Mount Nevoso, in Leskova Dolina, where a comrade from the Tomsi Brigade brought me after the battle of Masun, where I had fallen and was left behind, slightly wounded. I was Strijèla at that time, Commander Strijèla in charge of a group of former Italian soldiers from the Bergamo Division, which, after September 8, I helped organize into a partisan unit; in Istria, where we had moved, the unit operated in contact with the Budicin Battalion of Rovigno. I was no longer called Nevèra, but Strijèla—in those days of fraternal war against the Nazis and Fascists, it seemed fitting to me to assume a Slavic name. Besides I liked it, I call myself ipiko more than Cippico. Trst je nas, they wrote on the walls, Zivot damo Trst ne damo, It’s not Tito who wants Istria, it’s Istria that wants Tito—Nonsense, I said to my comrades, it’s not true but it doesn’t matter, if the proletarians of the world are united there are no more borders and Istria is neither Italian nor Yugoslavian but international, the Internationale’s future humanity.
Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) Page 18
