Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Magris, Claudio

  Of course it’s strange how the Germans and the Domobranci and those Blackshirts who were with them—torturers who came from Arbe, from that Lager that General Roatta had set up near the bay, where they killed so many Jews and so many Slavs, even children—could have known about that hideout in Leskova Dolina, almost invisible in the woods. Someone must surely have revealed it to them, but I can’t believe it was a comrade who perhaps a few days earlier had hoisted the red flag with me over some newly liberated Slovenian village. Have you ever visited one of those villages, Doctor? If you have a chance to return to Europe, to our area, go and see those towns. There isn’t one that doesn’t have a stele with the red star and the names of those slaughtered by the Nazi-Fascists; so many names, dozens of names in a village of two or three hundred inhabitants, it’s as if they killed hundreds of thousands in Rome.

  55

  BETRAYED, BETRAYERS, all taking aim with one eye blindfolded, the world over. Why was I so surprised when in Fiume they accused me of being an agent of American imperialism, like all Cominformists? Universal History is nothing but slander and betrayal; the sky over the valley of Josaphat is an infrangible ceiling with a crack down the middle, a large vagina open in the night, from which millions of anonymous denunciations rain down on the crowd of those condemned. The judges take them all as truth without even reading them, they don’t have time to—quite frankly, for that matter, it would be impossible.

  56

  LOOKING UP, the sky is a dark purple, whereas it gradually fades to pale blue as it nears the horizon. Up from where? Well, we can’t claim that that Brarnsen was a scientist, indeed it’s enough that he was able to describe the colours of his balloon voyage as well as he did. But even in Berlin the hot air balloon, which Prince Puckler-Muskau graciously let me ride in, rises swiftly in indigo blue, the people and linden trees become smaller and smaller, the Spree is soon a thin ribbon and the noises and cries that greet us are muffled in a murmur that is actually the rustling of the wind.

  That dazzling blue sucks you in like a vortex. The clouds, above us—for a while there are still some above and some below, but then ...—had almost closed in; a small opening remained from which the light broke through violently, a glittering disk that to the dazzled eye appeared black—the mouth of a cannon, a blindfolded eye. Then that eye vanished, the clouds split apart in a choppy, mottled sea.

  The prince was kind to invite me to fly on his captive balloon, along with Mr. Reichhard, the distinguished scientist from Berlin. Thus I saw, from high above, the city where I had gone after Waterloo to gather information that the Foreign Office, ever mistrustful, was somewhat obtuse not to use. The balloon travelled through the clouds, occasionally diving into a spume in the dark air, banks of mother-of-pearl unravelled, pink and green filaments vanished in the air.

  The aurora borealis in Iceland ... snowy whiteness, gentle bosom of the night. Suddenly there was no longer any fog or clouds, only a faint milky flickering and then empty sky—the balloon rushed into that dazzling blue and purple, and the horizon rose and fell, the clouds below fled—sheets of ice, white gravestones, fleeting funereal angels above an endless cemetery.

  With those dives made by the hot air balloon the champagne uncorked by the prince spurted overboard, a spray of golden bubbles evaporated in the fine particles of the rarefied, frigid air—see here, Doctor, how well the prince describes it, that’s just how it was, I can say so since I was up there, you were kind to lend me this old book in beautiful Gothic characters that seem to have leapt out of some Triestine family library, maybe you think that this way I’ll end up believing that I’m in Trieste, like you want me to. In any case we spilled more of that champagne into space than we drank. Igneous fluid, Mr. Reichhard explained as he took his measurements with the eudiometer, opposes attraction among ultimate particles of matter and, when it prevails, the solids volatilize like soap bubbles, like drops of champagne, the universe is a laughing gas. Everything is a big chuckle up here, the elements have fun freeing themselves from reciprocal ties, they separate and divorce in mindless mirth; cosmic space is a coke-snorting bash.

  You don’t believe me, that I went up there? Between us, we know very well how things went, everything falling, plummeting, maybe not even that, just remaining on the ground and crashing all the same.

  With the Mir you couldn’t end up any worse than that, that shipwreck going down ... You can’t sink any lower than that, not even Down the Bay ... Three hundred days of darkness in space, with all those rockets and those ... what do you call them, missile launchers, thank you, that propel the spaceship into orbit ... Very kind, Doctor or whoever you are who take such good care of me and leave me so many fine things, like gifts on the bed on St. Nicholas Day. Generosity that’s a bit self-serving; however, you unwrap it, open the box and find a piece of coal for naughty children ... Giving me this CD about Comrade Krikalev’s space voyage on the Mir, are you trying to make me see how short a distance it was between the Soviet Union and nothingness?

  After numerous days the spaceship lands on the collapsed rising sun, the world plunges into a black hole, but earlier I was climbing, climbing ...—“Such pure air.”—The prince was holding on to the ropes with nonchalant grace—“To think that down there the great cadaver has been putrefying for millennia, giving off its mephitic miasmas .—It’s no wonder that only a fifth of the air is breathable and I’m amazed it’s even that much.—... and up here you don’t smell anything, no stench ... Soon we’ll be at 12,000 feet, we can do what that good Jacobean patriot did, who to celebrate the proclamation of the Constitution went up in a balloon from the Champs-Elysées and up there began to recite aloud the Declaration of Human Rights, confident that the Almighty was listening, and then, descending, began tossing down copies of the Constitution, on people’s heads.

  “—This seems more interesting indeed and Mr. Reichhard could calculate, given the weight of each booklet, the acceleration of its motion during the fall and the thickness of the cranium, at what height you’d have to be to send Citizens who catch the Constitution on their noggin to the other world.”—You see, Comrade Sergej? Comrades, among other things, have gone out of style, more so than princes ...

  Gentlemen, do you think you’ve won only because for now we have lost? The Mir navigates in empty space I stay fixed you advance perhaps retreat I left the homeland of workers on May 18, 1991, red flag hammer and sickle the Internationale from all the loudspeakers quickly overcome by the roar of the launch ... I leave the constellations behind, even the Argo moves slowly through the sky, where the gods have assumed it. On the left sleeve of my spacesuit a small red flag is sewn, a shred of the fleece. Those witticisms of two-bit aristocratic parasites don’t disturb me. Be that as it may, I lower a lever in the command cabin on the spaceship and release into space leaflets lighter than the air that isn’t there, strips only one sentence long, Proletarians throughout the universe, unite.

  Of course there are workers even in this cosmic void. The big bang, entropy, the motion of the planets and the light of the stars are an immense tyranny, an absolute power that surely crushes a person, no matter what he does, no matter the form or nature of his oppressors. Perhaps they are pulverized in that cosmic dust flung here and there in the emptiness. Antimatter, the dark mass of the universe that no one can see—Workers of the world, unite. The banners flutter in the darkness, carnival conga lines, Comrade Sergej Krikalev salutes you, fist clenched in the black night, I hurl those words into the night. A fine luminous dust, droplets from the Milky Way, pearls of champagne fizz and evaporate, a night of celebration. Mir, peace, peace and glory on earth and in heaven to those of goodwill, that red star on the cosmic horizon points the way and ...

  “But look, there, look!” The balloon had descended, it was just below a steep, windswept mountain of clouds, which were breaking up in the gusts. The gigantic balloon suddenly reflected at the top swayed on foamy crests that slowly unravelled, the three enormous silhouettes were surrounded by a rai
nbow. Slowly I raise my arm in a clenched fist and one of the three figures above raises his, pushing his fist up to touch the rainbow.

  Measuring things, the play and effects of light, studying the laws of refraction, not letting yourself be fooled by sand that from afar, in the desert, seems like a watery oasis, or by a face that hides the process of its disintegration. The sky is blue and that blue does not exist, because anyone who falls into it is surrounded by a colourless void—A person waves his arms about and clamours, like that figure up there, the angle of the rays moves by half a degree and that clamouring is over, there’s no one there anymore, only the yawning emptiness of the sky. The sky is sleepy, it’s decrepit; winds and rains refresh its makeup continually, but the clouds quickly return to mark the wrinkles and bags under its eyes and at night you can even see the exanthem that mottles its skin. I tip my hat and salute myself, a tribute to the king on that throne of clouds and snow—let God sneer all He wants, when He hears it said that the heavens denote His glory.

  While I was—am, will be—up-here-down-here in the Mir, the Soviet Union ceased to exist, the red flag was lowered from the Kremlin and exists only on the left sleeve of my spacesuit. The Mir now truly orbits in space—Workers of the world, break ranks. For three months the Party, the measure of all things, and the homeland of workers have existed only on the Mir, on this ship sailing through infinite space, and in the finite space in my head, the head of Sergej Krikalev, last and sole citizen of the U.S.S.R. Therefore I am Everything, the Party, the State, submerged in my dark cerebral pulp, primordial slime in ferment, waters fecundated by the genitals of the revolution that up there was castrated with its own sickle. It’s a struggle to descend down there, into the dark, impenetrable sea, but my arms cut through the tangle of algae, arms still strong and youthful, here time flows slow and dense like those oily algae. The Mir makes its descent, returns to earth, but the earth is gone, as I was rotating around it, it disappeared—Up here you stay young, the revolution is still the dawn of these suns of the future all around, on earth, on the other hand, who knows how many wrinkles on the faces of comrades, of brothers, with whom we grew up ...

  But whether you age sooner or later than me, Doctor, is of little interest to me. I’m not your brother, you know. Much less your twin, that pamphlet is obsessed with twins, but I don’t understand what they have to do with anything and why one ages before the other. Maybe staying on earth, in short living, is more consuming ... who knows then if the comrades ... I’ll see them soon, I’m descending, I’m landing—Evening also descends and the balloon descends even faster, almost as if wanting to escape the blaze that engulfs the sky; the descent is too fast, we have to get rid of the ballast and we start throwing everything we can get our hands on out of the ship, including two roasted pheasants and several bottles, maybe even ... no, I’m here, see here I am. The balloon plummets in the flaming evening, a crystal globe bursts into flame and plunges headlong into the Hall of Knights.

  The land is close approaching, already the branches of the trees hook the balloon, which gets tangled up in the foliage, the flapping of a capercaillie. Mr. Reichhard busies himself with the ropes and valves, we start pulling away from the branches to descend, the Zum Einsiedler Inn must be nearby, but I don’t see it, I can’t find it, there’s nothing there anymore—Where are the red flags, the hammer and sickle, who stole the golden fleece? A scrap of newspaper flung here and there by the wind says only that the Soviet Union, that of Stalingrad, disappeared on December 31, 1991, blown away, the rising sun extinguished like a tiny candle on a birthday cake. I take a few uncertain steps in the abandoned spaceport, this spacesuit with the red flag on its arm seems like a theatre costume for those plays at the Hobart Town parish that Father Callaghan had us perform. Two or three wizened old men emerge from a hut, I think I recognize them, they must be the crew in charge of the launch pad, but now they look like a couple of mummies ...—I feel tired, bones and muscles aching after only a few steps in this deserted space; I too am suddenly aging, as can be expected, having returned down here. Only Maria’s smile can never grow old, a daisy at dawn. It must be because she retreats more and more swiftly from these ruins ...

  57

  “I HAVE BEEN THREATENED too much.”—I must have written this ... here it is, 1817, July 25. But why did I then add: “Don’t lose sight of the details. Don’t bet everything at once against the bank”? What details? now it’s all so confused—the years, the ship, the wall that collapses and me under the rubble—my body is a violated border, the Iron Curtain fell on me, it cut me in two, one piece here one piece there, each one writhes on its own—those years, from 1817 to 1820, vanished in a vortex—“Dark period,” I read, “desirous, if I could, to blot it from the records of my existence.” High, violent fevers, torpid lethargies, waking up kicking out at reality, curling up in sleep. The room I rented from Sarah Stourbridge on Warren Street, Fitzroy Square, after being conditionally released pending trial—thanks to Hooker’s intercession—is a hole that sucks you into emptiness, night after night. The sword goes back in its sheath.

  An immense throng teems in the streets of London, ravenous rats and mangy cats scatter in the darkness, in a carriage some prostitute gets fucked without even undressing. The city is a battlefield; the clouds have a livid aura, tattered battalions march off and vanish in the night.

  Yes, of course, I also keep busy, look here at the curriculum vitae in the appendix, under another name I publish a brief biography of Captain Flinders and an essay on Madagascar—written in Newgate, in prison—which could have been so useful if they hadn’t been pigheaded and insisted on treating it as false a priori. It’s entirely true, the thorn bushes that claw at the sky, that giant baobab, from whose branches a lemur stared at me that day with the big eyes of a famished child—it must have seen the earth as it was before the deluge, that tree, if the chronology of the botanists and that of the Bible are right. The indigenous people worship a single God, Andriamanitra, he who clears the forest of trees, the insatiable one, the central pole of the earth, creator of all things—another name of his is Days, the indeterminate flow of time, at which he alone never shudders. Nonetheless, he cares little about what happens down there, down here, and the masters of the world are really the razana, the ancestors, who after death became the soul of things. For the Malagasy death is a celebration, because it transforms the individual into a leader, a god. That’s why he is celebrated by sacrificing a zebù; once, during the funeral honours of a chieftain, I saw them kill fifty of them, the blood steamed and gushed, the animals fell writhing, large fires burned on either side of the corpse ...

  Maybe the release from Newgate should also be celebrated on the wagon, I thought while writing this monograph about Madagascar in that cell, since the gallows is also a way to become an ancestor. I didn’t receive even one shilling for that book, only the usual accusation of falsehood. But it’s not true, what they accused me of, that I learned all those things about Madagascar, including the story about King Radam, son of Andrianampoinimerinandriantsimitovianimandriamoanjioka, from Jacques Roulin, that French slave dealer who was in the cell with me. I was there, on that large island, when I travelled on the Lady Nelson, driven by storms to deviate widely from her route. It’s not my fault if that landing wasn’t recorded in the Admiralty’s registers. If I’ve confused the names of some of the bays, it’s only because, after so much time and so many misfortunes, memory occasionally cracks, like the ground during an earthquake, and lets things slip out through its chasms. But I witnessed those things—the ceremony of the exhumation of the corpse, for example, people greeting it and talking to it as if it were alive and the bones being carried around the village, in triumph. It’s nice, this celebration of the dead, of the flesh that decays underground and then returns, as if anticipating resurrection—those dry, dusty bones, as admired as the cheeks of a young girl ... It’s so hard to carry them around all your life, those bones, on land and at sea. And those feasts, those dances ... Scr
ipture says that humbled bones shall exult ...

  I go out only in the evening, from that room on Warren Street. I wander around London in the rain for hours and hours. A mouse slinks into a sewer. Who knows how hard it’s raining at the mouth of the Derwent, on that sea-river. The moon is gaunt, yellowish. How long, Lord? The last thing to go is a pocket watch from my father, along with the mattress, sheets and other pieces of Sarah Stourbridge’s furniture. It’s a relief when, on May 15, the woman, along with police officer Henry Crocker, brings me before magistrate R. Birmie of Bow Street, on charges of theft of a bed, 40 shillings, a cushion, 5 shillings, two blankets, 4 shillings, and a duvet, 2 shillings.

  At the trial, on December 4, Judge Newman and the twelve jurors find themselves facing a man who declares himself guilty—and how could it possibly be otherwise, if someone is wrong, it must be me, like so many comrades, not the Party. Guilty, yet also innocent—but this doesn’t interest their Lordships and rightly so. The judge’s words, “to be hanged by the neck until you be dead, and may the Lord have mercy on your soul,” reach me from afar, they concern someone else.