Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Magris, Claudio

  However, those blacks are elusive; they slip away like animals in the forest, without disturbing a blade of grass. A confused shuffling of feet in the wind, a song lost in the embers of a fire; dry leaves everywhere, says the song, dry leaves scattered and songs lost in the wind, crumbled leaves no longer leaves—the song was once a milestone, a sacred boundary marker delimiting the land and allocating space to this one and that one; now the stones fall, overturned by our advance, the song vanishes and the space disappears, there is no longer a place to live.

  I also recruit a couple of convicts and a pair of former convicts who already have a ticket of leave in their pockets, familiar with forests, able to creep through the bush like the blacks and fall upon them like shadows; I suggest outflanking the runaways by moving toward Blue Hills. Mungo, the Aboriginal guide, at first leads us on the right track, then, as he moves farther into the ancestral forest with us, he begins to be afraid; sometimes his teeth chatter, he hears the voices of his forebears, he starts turning back, making enormous, futile circles, to divert us from the fugitives, until I put him in irons.

  The Aborigines—especially those of the fierce, belligerent tribes on Big River or Oyster Bay—know how to hide and can also fight. They slip away like fish through your fingers underwater; for them the forest is a sea, after a while the whites find it hard to breathe as if they were at the bottom of a river. The humidity steaming off the plants is stupefying, your foot steps on exposed, scorching stones, the sun between the branches is a gelatinous medusa. The blacks learned guerrilla fighting from the elusive convicts and from the bushrangers, they trigger false alarms, driving herds of kangaroos that make the closest squads come running, and meanwhile they glide away; they mix their tracks with those of the wallabies; rain and the mud are their allies, the world is a swamp.

  The squads advance inexorably; after the mass conscription proclaimed by Sir George there are a great many men, three thousand two hundred, two thousand convicts (two out of five armed), a thousand settlers and two hundred policemen—convicts against Aborigines, chained dogs against dingoes on their last legs. Viva la muerte—What’s that, Doctor? What do you mean you didn’t say anything, you don’t mean to tell me that it was I, what do I have to do with it—Yes, convicts against blacks, the damned against the damned, we against you—But what do I have to do with it, now, no, earlier, much earlier, and now after so long, half a century which is more than a century and a half, Van Diemen’s Land, Catalonia, Barcelona … we hunted them down, those blacks, and also those anarchists and Fascists and the Fascists hunted us, and we—Stop confusing me with these stories that have nothing to do with it and are making me dizzy, there’s no use pretending to sit there nice and quiet, mouth shut. You’re a ventriloquist, my friend, I know your trick. One of those people who can speak without moving his lips so it seems like the words are coming from who knows where, maybe from mine—Now then, if you’re still interested in the Black War, let me go on with the story—

  Nine Roving Parties and a single line, each squad in contact with another, between Echo Lake and Waterloo Point to the north and the sea to the east. The line advances, closes in, the circle tightens, the line shrinks, constricts, after two weeks it narrows down to a thirty-mile span; but when the circle closes completely and contracts at the centre, and the squads reach East Bay Neck, at the end of October 1830, where they expect to find all the blacks cornered and herded together, there are only two blacks.

  81

  THE ABORIGINES are great at vanishing. When Togerlongeter, chief of the Oyster Bay tribe, also known as Tupelanta or as King William, gets caught in a trap set in the forest, his companions forcibly rip off his hand, which remains in the jaws of the trap, a piece of meat on a butcher’s hook, and he goes off with the shattered stump, the blood flowing and clotting like resin. They even leave false tracks, which drive some of us in the wrong direction and into dangerous areas where, what with landslides, mudslides caused by the rain, flooding and a spear or two, some men lose their lives. In return, some blacks, such as Mosquito, end up being hanged. The hands of a convict already condemned to the gallows tighten the noose around the neck of a black man, you’re not always too sure whose, in that dark forest with all those faces painted like grotesque masks.

  How can you recognize someone in the night, even your own brother or your own face reflected in the dark water? “The Argo pressed on, leaving the island called the Mount of Bears, after exchanging gifts and pledges of peace. But when night came the rushing wind did not hold steadfast, but contrary blasts caught them and brought them back … 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.” We should have sailed down here with a huge mutinous fleet, red flags in the wind, the Argo first of all, to warn you, black brothers; we should have come ashore and awakened you, black Abel, taught you to resist to rebel to live. Instead we came as fratricides and executioners.

  The fleece was left in the dragon’s jaws and the beast gnaws and sucks it, slobbering. Medea made a mistake; maybe she bungled and reversed her spells and put Jason and herself to sleep, not the sleepless dragon, who strikes first and then offers peace to his stunned prey. Little by little the Black War quiets down. Limeblunna, a chief, is captured; Umarrah, with his two brothers, his wife, his wife’s three brothers, and two sisters, waves his arms over his head three times as a sign of inviolable peace and surrenders. Peace; for those defeated, a violation worse than war. On Swan Island eighteen women tortured by seal hunters; on Great Island natives driven off to the most inhospitable parts, found weeks later nearly dead from starvation and thirst, carcasses on the cliffs.

  Was it for this that I founded Hobart Town—for progress, for the penal colony, for my chains and those of everyone else? Jason brings death and adversity to Colchis, the Argo leads to the great waters of hell. Rebel, resist, mutiny. A great mutiny, but not on the high seas, by then it’s already too late; we have to stop the ship before it leaves port. Ah, Pistorius was right, the ancients understood that taking to the sea is an impious act, a violation of sacred confines and the order of the universe.

  To live is to sail? That’s right, Doctor, or whoever you are, a colleague hiding somewhere. Why go to sea, leave behind the trusted cove and sail out in the open, on the waves? The sea is life, the arrogant claim of living, expanding, conquering—therefore it’s death, the incursion that plunders and destroys, shipwreck. The ships set out festively, flags flying; the fleets reach distant continents and islands, they pillage, ravage, destroy, Nelson bombards Copenhagen, Jason steals the fleece and kills Absyrtus, we come to Terra Australis Incognita; a few of those blacks are still alive but barely, we crossed the sea to slaughter them all.

  We should have stayed home and left them in peace. Indeed, the revolution, the world’s great redemptive change, would be the power to enforce those prohibitions and those limits imposed by the gods; stay home and play with the stones, on the shore, in the shallow water of tidal pools left by the receding tide. Even the revolution often begins by “dressing ship,” numerous red flags in the wind, and in the end you realize that they are hanged men instead.

  Things don’t go too well for Jason either but it’s only fitting, that way he learns to launch the first ship in the water, to seduce people with the mirage of conquest and the sea, worthless shams. Medea foots the bill. My Norah chains me to that filthy pallet; I go down a slippery slope with her, I’m used to this indignity, it must be the effect of one of those herbs she brought with her from Colchis. I too end up under the table with her, until the guards arrive and throw us in jail. It happens more and more frequently; fortunately each time my proficiencies in slaughtering the blacks get me out soon enough. A little more worse for wear. Dirtier too, because, like Norah, little by little I almost stopped washing myself. My odour doesn’t bother
me. Nor does Norah’s and she knows it, when she shoves me onto the bed and takes me in her hand—I have less and less desire, with all that rum she pours down my throat, getting angry if I pull away, so that I prefer to knock back another gulp or two rather than have her scratch my face. Sometimes she even scratches me down there, when she sees that I’m too droopy; she fondles me pumps me squeezes me fiercely, often to no avail, yet those fingers are also gentle and I do feel a little pleasure after all—less than at one time, but what does that mean.

  She also likes to pull that shaggy blanket over my face, almost suffocating me; she laughs and says maybe I’ll get a little harder that way, but I can’t breathe and those sheep hairs in my mouth make me feel like retching. The fleece suffocates, it brings death to whoever touches it. The Argo crosses the sea to steal it or rather to kill and die. It must be returned immediately, before it’s too late and before it brings more bloodshed, but to whom? Every previous possessor, robbed by a subsequent one, is in turn a usurper who appropriated it unlawfully. Give it back to the animal, killed and flayed in homage to the gods always thirsting for blood; only on the sheep’s back was the fleece in its rightful place.

  But the animal is flayed and the fleece is covered with the grime of centuries. Sometimes, if I look at it—for example that rug at the Healthcare Centre—it seems blackish to me, skin removed from an Aboriginal captured by us in the bush and sacrificed to our gods—I’m not sure which ones, but certainly ours.

  I discovered, my friend, that only we—yes, in short, we from up there, who came down here and to every part of the world to be masters, we from the old world which is also stronger and therefore younger than the others, than the decrepit civilizations to whom we went to deliver the final blow—I discovered that only we have gods. They live in our heads as in a sanctuary, tyrants who tell us what to do and even though this causes bloodshed, teach us not to let it bother us, it’s a divine service. The others, those blacks whom we flush out of their forests—and all the others, more or less like them in barren lands around the globe where sooner or later people like us arrive to hunt and kill them, in fact, have already arrived, almost everywhere—those natives, I mean, don’t have gods. They have statues, totems, painted trees, voices that speak through wind, water or thunder, ancestors and animals honoured with respect, but those aren’t gods, they’re the murmur and flow of life that are listened to with veneration, yet playfully—a handful of leaves in the air, a puppet of wood or sand created by children and painted or decorated with shells, but for fun, with all the solemnity and lightheartedness of a game. Even the menacing faces of some of their simulacra are not really menacing; they’re like the carnival masks our children wear, which seem monstrous and leering but it’s all in fun and in fact children enjoy putting them on and taking them off, just like these savages whom we are doing away with, with those painted, grease-smeared faces, who want to seem like demons and instead, when they laugh, and they laugh for any silly little thing, are as candid as children.

  We, on the other hand, are serious. Our gods, Doctor, have forbidden us to play. The gods don’t fool around and because of this we, obedient to their clue, have subjugated a world in which no one plays anymore. In church you don’t play and you don’t joke around. However, Father Callaghan said that if you don’t know how to behave and play like little children you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven; at least I think that’s what he said, I don’t remember too well. Even in here, my friend, you don’t play and you don’t joke around; these people of yours in the white coats are a real caste of priests and sorcerers. It’s full of gods in here—those boxes that light up, those phosphorescent, milky images, look at how reverently those white-robed priests of yours treat them. Those gods must like blood, since they draw samples so often. One can see immediately that they’re obeyed without argument in here.

  Well, maybe Norah no longer has any, gods that is. Life has scraped the image of God off her face, that God who at one time, on the shore of a different sea, sculpted her features—how enchanting it was, that pure, passionate face, sculpted by grace. Now that image of God is no longer there, lost along the way, scratched off … But unlike so many, almost everyone, she did not replace it with the simulacra of other, false gods. Now she doesn’t serve any god. Maybe because the gods love incense, flags, guns, money, and she loves rum, in fact she smells like rum. And when I’m inside her, the few times that it still happens, I too am no longer a slave of the gods.

  She makes me repeat Mena coyeten nena, bawdy, her thighs spread, on that sweaty pallet. She says the words excite her, the moaning of an animal in heat. But then she clings to me; she can also be tender, in her own way, and that body with its strong gamy odour is also my own flesh, weak corruptible corrupt, hers and mine, one single flesh, my bride of Lebanon blackened by the smoke of years, disfigured by the brash, harsh creases with which life shaped your mouth, my bride. Not before God, since I’m not sure what that is, not before man, those louts who deride you, drunk, in the tavern and deride me, humiliated by your indecency, but before this vast emptiness of the river-sea, united until death—for a short time yet, for always—before everything, all things fleeting and sacred like us.

  Together forever, wherever—especially in jail, where her drunken violence lands me. Marriage means sharing a destiny in good times or bad, so it’s written, therefore also in disgrace. If Maria … She likes to occasionally paint and deface her face and body like the Aboriginal women and roams around the streets of Hobart Town all black, heedless of people’s scornful laughter. Medea is dark, like the Colchis from which she comes. In bed—that is, on those rags on the ground in our hovel—she occasionally orders me to call her Walloa, the ferocious chieftain of Sorell who killed Captain Thomas and Mr. Parker by his own hand, and threatens to kill me, squeezing me savagely, almost as if she wanted to make my increasingly rare semen spurt out. But when she falls asleep snoring, continuing to hold that limp piece of flesh of mine in her moist, sweaty palm, that hand is safety, the valve of a shell that protects the mollusc from the sea’s fury.

  82

  THE PAY for those who participated in the Black War is one hundred and fifty pounds, for everybody except me—I get twenty-five. I set up a small farm, an arid plot of land that doesn’t yield a thing and instead eats up the little money that I have left. Our hovel is more and more ramshackle, the last bit of cash is spent almost solely on rum. Bonegilla, by comparison, was a luxury—porridge, perhaps rancid, beans, roasted potatoes and sometimes even cold meat.

  Yes, at Bonegilla we rebelled, mutinied—later, I think, much later—but there I was still a man, despite the Lager at work inside me, in my blood, in my brain; something that gnaws you and consumes you entirely, in the end even a common cold is enough to send you to the other world and in fact here I am, Dr. Ulcigrai. This must be the other world; different than we imagined it, but still the other world. When you get here, it doesn’t matter if you’re disguised as a doctor or as a patient, you’re fucked. At Bonegilla, however, that thing inside me had not yet fully completed its work, something in me still resisted, later instead—

  But I didn’t give up, a man must always provide for himself and his family. Freelancer at the Colonial Times, critic of Adam Smith and the impious Malthus—he opposes the designs of the Creator who wants as many creatures as possible to participate in eternal bliss. Children are a blessing. I, we … If Marie, if Maria, if I—What’s that?—Observations on the Funded System—ah yes, my pamphlet on the English national debt, the first text of political economy written on the southern continent, an ingenious proposal to eliminate that enormous deficit.

  Two hundred copies, all unsold. The job at Rowland Wolphe Loane’s farm fares even worse; I’m still studying the “Farm and Garden Calendar” in Ross’s Almanack, to learn something about gardening which I’m supposed to do, when they fire me, without even giving me the shillings to pay Norah’s fines for brawling and drunkenness.

  I make do by writing a Christmas
sermon for the families in December 1832, and some articles for the Colonist, but when I claim my pay for the latter the court rules that “the well-known Ex-King of Iceland, Jorgen Jorgensen” only writes the addresses on the envelopes. I sign onto a customs officers boat that patrols the stretch between Hobart Town and Launceston and investigate smuggling, discovering that the magistrates are in league with the thieves, but I’m accused of slander. When Norah gets three months in jail for drunkenness, I lose a job that I had painstakingly obtained in Oatlands, at a farm.

  Could it be the Party throwing a monkey wrench into the works wherever I went, as Commander Carlos had hinted in a veiled threat so I would keep my mouth shut regarding Goli Otok? But who would dream of talking about it? I don’t want to make trouble for anyone. We came down here to work; certainly not an Asiatic invasion, as the Australian authorities, who treated us like an inferior race, bellowed—Workers of the world, unite, until we pull together there will always be bosses who treat us like animals—of course, for them the whole world is populated by animals they want to treat like animals. It may be that when they look at themselves in the mirror, and see that ugly mug of theirs in which everything is snuffed out except greed and fear, they think it’s someone else’s face.