Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Magris, Claudio

  Towering cliffs, when they can’t take it anymore the children hurl themselves down crashing onto the rocks before ending up in the sea. How can you expect someone not to scream, not to hurl himself down as well, head first against those cliffs, filthy red dust, filthy blood on my scraped face—do you remember how bloody my face was when they brought me here? I would have liked to smash my head too, no, the world’s head, handsome round strutting its fine colours—look, there’s even one on that table, a globe, what a pleasure it would be to crack it open, reduce its sickening flesh to a pulp.

  Those children, their bodies smashed down there. Their eyes, when I saw them obeying the guards, were more unbearable than their broken bodies; empty, old, decrepit child’s eyes. And you expect someone not to lose his composure, not to put a blindfold over both eyes and fire indiscriminately, at whoever’s next, even at God?

  Naturally they brought me here all in pieces, in that state of rage: I had lost some pieces, hurled off that cliff, from where those children jump. But those cliffs too will crumble one day, vanishing into the sea with an obscene churning, and the entire world will sink to the bottom. Ah, if there were only sea, sea, without even an island where a foot might leave any trace of suffering.

  88

  WHEN I CAN, I get away—even from Norah—and run off to the kitchen in the governor’s official residence. Authority, in the kitchen, is represented by Bessie. Bessie Baldwin, to be exact; cook and assistant pastry chef, famous for her delicious dishes. There I am always welcome.

  Bessie was sent down here for having squashed a cake in the face of the owner of the Edenwall pastry shop in Westminster, where at age twenty-one she was working as an errand girl, after he, angered by her request for a pay increase of a penny a week, verbally abused her and raised his hands against her. Seven years of forced labour. On the ship Gilbert Henderson, which transported her to the Antipodes together with a hundred and eighty-two other women and twenty-four children being sent as she was to the penal colony, when the ship’s surgeon, John Hamett, tried to force her to go to bed with him, as he was in the habit of doing with the female convicts in his power, worn down by the brutality of their mistreatment, Bessie sent him running by breaking a hefty candle over his head. Punished further for this slip-up upon landing and thrown in the special women’s house of correction, she persuaded the other inmates to fight for their dignity and protest the abuses; and when Sir John Franklin arrived for an official visit with his wife, Lady Jane, and with Reverend Knopwood, apologetic and a little tipsy as usual, Bessie organized a clamorous protest by the three hundred detainees, all with their petticoats raised, loudly slapping their arses and displaying them to the authorities, with no thought for the dozens of lashes that would shortly rain down on those behinds for this.

  Even the governor must have appreciated the courage of that insolent gesture, since he took her into his own kitchen. Since that time, Bessie has been working in that kitchen, inventing recipes and tasty dishes, a true culinary genius. I sit in front of her, eating but mainly watching her—those hands that have no need to defend themselves and can make the dough in peace, rolling it out and crimping the sheets, sprinkling salt, kneading, mincing, stirring, measuring out ingredients, pouring them into a dish. Well, perhaps this is revolution, freeing your hands from the need to strike and restoring them to tenderness … If Medea, at the right moment, had grabbed Jason by the collar and given him a good shaking, maybe later …

  Thank you, Doctor, I’m familiar with that little book, in fact I’m the one who brought it here. Truly well stocked, that old bookstore on Salamanca Place. They are Bessie’s recipes, recorded by one of Sir John’s housekeepers. Recipes both simple and complex. Fish soups of all kinds and oxtail soup, broths, steamed kangaroo meat, oyster sauces, cakes composed of a variety of ingredients, dishes for gala dinners and for brief stops when on reconnaissance in the untamed bush. The measure and quantity of various ingredients, cooking times, the most suitable containers. There’s life in these recipes, more so than in certain volumes of verse. When I leave, she almost always, though reluctantly, gives me half a bottle of rum for Norah. Well, mainly for her. I don’t know if I could empty it alone … As if it were possible not to be alone …

  89

  THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY comes out in 1838, as it says here. I set down my pen as you would lower a sail, by now the only thing my hand raises is a glass. The autobiography knows where and when to place the final period.

  A few things go on happening, but very little. A little money that comes and goes, a small business deal that ends badly, a couple of unanswered petitions to acquire a plot of land, the news of my mother’s death—what difference does it make, alive or dead, what does alive mean, up there in Copenhagen, years and years without hearing anything about her, or dead, up there in Copenhagen, underground somewhere. Then too, at what time did she breathe her last, before or after moonrise, did she have time to see it or not, that day? I see the moon as in a kind of nimbus, enveloped by all the eyes that have gazed upon it; I wonder if her gaze too, that final day, is among them. How do you know who is alive and who is dead?

  At night I go down to the wharves in Hobart Town, to watch the whaling ships return with their catch, and to drop a little money in the taverns. I greet the ships with nonchalant dignity, as if, with a vague wave of my hand, I were giving them tacit permission to dock. They all know me, the man who harpooned the first whale at the mouth of the Derwent, the cartographer who mapped Bass Strait, the regular from the Waterloo; to the convicts I tell stories about the London underworld and the depravities of Newgate, with the missionaries I talk about my theological studies and the conversions made in Otaheiti; I suggest treatments for the sick, I gamble and lose with the sailors, I ask for news about the outstanding royalties on my books, about the office for Danish Trading in the South Seas that was never opened, about my writings, so ignored by everyone, about the national debt or the Aborigines.

  On the wharves, at night, I talk, I talk with anyone, with no one—just not to go home, or to go home later at least. Some days, getting up from that pallet of rags where we are reduced to sleeping, I don’t even wash my face, I don’t remove that odour from the night, I don’t know if it’s mine or Norah’s.

  I rinse it when they ask me to be one of the speakers at a meeting organized to protest the proclaimed government proposal to reform the penitentiary system and treatment of the settlers. The city’s bigwigs are the ones who organize it—Charles Swanston, president of the Derwent Bank, other bankers and large landowners, the attorney Thomas Horne and the ever-present Reverend Knopwood. They remember that human wreck who, as a former inmate, can be of use in contesting the government’s intention to end the deportations of convicts to the Austral continent, particularly their assignment to the settlers, depriving farmers of valuable needed hands.

  There I am, alone on the podium; I speak, the wind drifts across my face and neck, under my filthy shirt. I speak lucidly, with fluent eloquence. I defend the penal system and the deportations, I praise their rehabilitating value against the ingenuousness and false charges of the do-gooders who hold forth twenty thousand kilometres away, I justify the need for forced labour for the land and for the moral gains that this work bestows on the prisoners themselves. The crowd applauds me, moved by a man who has suffered so much without losing heart or harbouring resentment. The applause is long, it lulls me like a wave, a gentle powerful swell that breaks against the rocks. My life, in the end, has been a good one. I don’t even notice when they make me come down, propping me up and prodding me a bit until I find myself in the crowd, swallowed up by a dark sea, indifferent faces looking up at the new speaker on the podium, and there’s nothing left for me but to go home.

  I’m afraid to go home, I’m afraid of Norah. More and more she drowns herself in drink; the alcohol oozes from her pores with her sweat, she lives in a continuous stupor and wakes up only for a brawl, which lands her in prison. She drags me down, into that depravity whe
re she is foundering with regal pride. Yes, I’m even afraid to go and see her when she’s in jail for a few days or a few weeks; I beg the authorities to force her to detoxify, to keep her inside a little longer, maybe they could put her back in the penitentiary A woman is fine, as long as she’s holding you up, but when you have to shore her up, you shake her off. I’m not the first, and I won’t be the last. In essence even that time in Pesek, how could I, just like that …

  Afraid or not, I return home, to the freezing hovel, a chill that rises from the Antarctic with the autumn rains. Norah is like an animal, Medea with Circe’s magical arts but directed against herself. A sow is wallowing in the golden fleece, but the ancient spell still works, because the swine rooting around in the trough of his own life is me, I’m the animal, not her, regal in the undaunted courage with which she founders in the muck. Long months of torpid oblivion in which we forget that love exists, brief hours of indifferent lust that subjects me to all the roles of a lackey, flashes of fury; the Furies grab me by the throat, they rack me mercilessly, and yet countless fragments of tenderness, of an old love shattered and scorned, in that imperious, dissolute body, while I—barren and empty, a ridiculous husband humiliated and beaten, perhaps even cuckolded, maybe it happened once, under the table at the tavern between one drunken jag and another, I don’t know, there’s nothing left in my heart, the Fury’s bites ripped it out of my chest, but they were kisses, she wanted to open my heart to pour hers into me—

  Ripped to shreds, my heart, but also at peace between your sagging breasts, one flesh even if it’s rancid, sacred bride of Lebanon marred by the years and by pain—tonight they’ll laugh, as usual, when you run after your dispirited, humiliated man in the street and beat him, the King of Iceland at the mercy of his shrewish wife’s club, the convict who gets a taste of the cat-o’-nine-tails from you, but soon afterwards in our hovel, on that filthy, yellowed fur, in the heart’s icy solitude I will cling tight to you, in your arms, joined until death do us part. Or until July 17, 1840, owing to the quantity and also the poor quality of a liquor. The coroner, Robert Steward, writes in the register “God visited her.” The revolving doors of the café spin around, they fling your beautiful, rigid body at me. Norah, Maria, dead in a foreign land. I am Charon, who ferried them across death’s waters.

  90

  WELL LOOK WHO’S HERE.—That’s right, it’s me again. You’re back with us quickly. Clearly I was happy here, when they brought me here in pitiable conditions, after that time at Battery Point. Yes, I kicked and smashed anything I happened to get my hands on, but afterwards I must have been happy. And so, shortly after the Erebus and the Terror cast anchor at Sullivans Cove, you saw me again.

  Okay, maybe not you, but someone else, a colleague of yours, if you weren’t on duty or were on vacation, in any case all you doctors look alike. And the wards too, the beds. That’s why you want me to believe that I’m up there rather than down here—at least at the beginning, then you must have realized that I wouldn’t fall for it. In fact it feels like being up there, with that cardboard horizon, the Gulf of Trieste and the coast of Istria as far as Salvore—well simulated, I must say, but I’m not fooled by it. I’m on the deck of the Erebus, or the Terror, that’s where I am, apt names for a journey through the darkness and ice of the Antarctic seas, where Commodore James Clark Ross, an old friend of our governor Sir John Franklin, wants to study magnetic variations. Apt names for me too, for the Antarctic seas of my death.

  Commodore Ross is greeted with great festivities, music featuring Strauss waltzes, the military band of the 51st Regiment playing, parties, banquets. On board there is also Joseph Dalton Hooker, the son of Sir William. I met him at the Waterloo Inn, he was kind enough to deign to come and see me in that tavern, where as usual I was paid a glass of rum or a slice of salt pork for writing petitions, letters and pleas for those illiterate drunkards—a good tavern lawyer, yes, I’m that too.

  Hooker Jr. is a botanist, like his father; the as yet unknown Austral continent attracts scientists, eager not so much to discover as to name and classify the world. Hooker Jr., Hooker Sr., the mother of one and wife of the other is named Marie, my Marie was neither wife nor mother—no, especially not a mother—time solidifies, expands, a huge lizard continuously losing its tail, pieces of me sink in the dark waters. I touch my arms, my face, my chest to feel if I’m all there; water has flooded the hold and carried off almost everything. I see that young Hooker can read the tears in my eyes so I begin speaking with grand gestures, talking about my exploits, Iceland, the exploration of the Great Lake, Sheldon’s capture. I look at him in his handsome uniform, wearing the assurance that youth, health and social prestige afford him. Tears well up again, and I realize that he sees them as a sign of senility or drunkenness, the indecorous frailty of a man who is washed up. I loved your father, I tell him, and perhaps he too … but my follies … and yet I can explain, everything can always be explained …

  On the contrary, nothing can be explained. Not even that sudden fury of mine, that shout, that rage. Erebus, Terror, I saw the names on the sides of the ships rocking in the bay, a sea was opening up under the sea and swallowing them, swallowing me, I was plunging into the vortex, I was the frothy roar of the vortex and I was sucking myself under whirling around centrifugally. Young Dalton talks about me and about his father; Iceland, the Spread Eagle Inn, the eagle’s glass eyes, the clumps of that snow-white grass—Pieces of me float here and there on the raging waters, they come up like a reflux, each goes off on its own, sucked down by the Coriolis forces they vanish in the black hole of the whirlpool—Ante Rastegorac holds me upside down in the shithole, I’m disappearing, no, those wastes are mine, they’re me, you have no right, I jump in the water to catch them, to save them, I’ll glue them back together and I’ll be myself again. Let me go, don’t shove me around that way; it wasn’t me who started fighting, Doctor, it was all those people who rushed at me; they wanted to stop me, tie me up, prevent me from going to look for my pieces that were sinking and disappearing; those people, that crowd, that mob, those waves that were submerging me—I had to resist, fend the waves with my strokes, force my way through that throng.

  It was that display window that made the blood rush to my head. Spiridione Pavlidis’s idea, a scheming, enterprising Greek dealer who, among many other things, opened that television shop on Sandy Bay Road. Televisions of all kinds, which he almost always kept switched on, to attract attention and entice customers. Every so often I stopped to watch those boxes, those faces, those scenes, those colours and those gestures that appeared and disappeared, my uncle Bepi’s magic lantern when I was a child.

  But that December evening, I don’t know why, Pavlidis had tuned all the television sets to the same channel and the man with the strawberry mark on his forehead, the last king of Colchis, was talking and talking, he talked from every luminous rectangle—so many faces so many strawberry marks on the foreheads and at a certain point I saw Red Square, numerous Red Squares, and the red flag being lowered, all my flags were being lowered and the voice of someone you couldn’t see and who wasn’t the man with the strawberry mark on his forehead was saying something about the red flags ending up in the dust and about the rising sun setting. So many voices, the same voice, was coming from those luminous boxes and then something exploded in my head and in my heart—those red flags that were being lowered flew out of the boxes, unfurled until the sky was covered with them and then they dropped, they came down, a huge worldwide lowering of the flag, a bloody sun that plummets smashes bursts and disappears.

  The end of everything, the end of me. The fleece is a skinned pelt, red with blood, hanging in the sky, it comes down and pulls the sky down with it. So many men with strawberry marks on their foreheads are speaking; other voices, the same voice, an endless echo talks about the end. The flag comes down, it falls on top of me, it envelops me, it suffocates me; I try to struggle out, pull it off me, I kick and punch, I scream; they wrap it around my head and around my a
rms. The fleece, a straitjacket. And so you immobilized me and then sent me home, according to you, that is, to the home of Comrade Miletti-Miletich, who after having shared several jail cells with me, also shared his hole in the wall on Via Molino a Vapore for a while, not to leave me out on the street, until, I don’t know why, they came and dragged me off from there too, I only remember that I made a bit of a fuss, in fact a big fuss, but it didn’t do any good. There’s no sense in making a scene—they told me, you told me, we told ourselves—no one does anymore, just like they don’t write sonnets anymore, why didn’t you play with that videogame instead. Don’t worry, even in the videogame the bad guys, the Nazis, lose and even if they win it’s all the same. Enjoy the zapping, the view, your sea …

  So, you want to make me believe that I’m back looking out at my gulf. The Terra Australis Incognita takes in emigrants but has no place for the insane, it sends them back home, so they told me, but I don’t believe it. Certainly for the dead it’s always had a place, an immense island of the dead, and so here I am, down here, I remained here with you, all those lowered red flags buried me under a blanket thicker than the one that covers me in St. David’s Park—The flags flutter, ripple, flow together; one huge flag, a stage curtain that is lowered, obscuring the world and so much the worse for those who are under it and get it on their heads. The Iron Curtain falls like a guillotine and cuts the heart in two, my heart.

  91

  “HI, R U THERE?”—What nonsense. Now you see why I prefer the recorder. However, I really like this little window that pops up, best wishes, happy new year. Here’s the report on those works in wood, which are just about completed. I hope you can see that this is the figurehead of Ljubo, the Dalmatian. He had sailed all his life with her, the book says, until, as an old man, they put him ashore and made him a lighthouse keeper. He missed her, but he wasn’t sad because he saw her come and go, passing by below him, upright on the prow of his old ship. But one day he saw her weeping, because the ship had been sold to a shipowner who had assigned it to other shores, and so they would never see each other again. But during the last voyage on its old route the ship sank and the waves brought her to the rocky coast of his island; so he pulled her up and took her inside, to his room at the top of the lighthouse. And years later when they decided that the old light had to be extinguished and old Ljubo put into a home—this isn’t a rest home in here, an old people’s home, is it? It never occurred to me, but—in any case they had to separate again, but she took him by the hand and led him to an enchanted realm at the bottom of the sea, down here. I sank Maria in the black waters of death, I even tied a stone to her feet, and she instead took me by the hand and brought me to a happy place, where we are finally together. Look how nicely I did her, how content she too is—It was really a good idea of yours to make me do this work, Arbeit macht frei.