Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Magris, Claudio

  But is it true that they don’t make them anymore, those figureheads, like the book says? If so maybe I’m the last to make them. But is there ever a last, in any field? It says here that in 1907, when the U.S. Navy decided to remove figureheads from the prow, an officer composed a poem that mourned their sailing from Tierra del Fuego to Baffin Bay in bygone times and lamented the fact that they had disappeared forever. The bards, you know, love farewells and dirges; the Muse bids adieu to the defunct heroes of the past.

  They want to find the last creator of figureheads, more glorious than the first, because the end is more majestic than the beginning and makes the heart beat faster. But a few pages later, here’s another “last,” a certain William Rumney, who used his daughter as a model and died in 1927, when his art was by then “almost forgotten.” But turn the page and lickety-split a little further on here’s an even more recent one, Bruce Rogers, 1935. And on page 63 another one pops up, Jack Whitehead, Isle of Wight, 1972.

  Don’t blame me, I’m not the one who writes these things; it’s your book that is causing confusion, with all those beautiful figures and those names. It’s pathetic, this race for the checkered flag, this mania to be the glorious last of a line. The last no longer exist; nothing disappears and the red of evening, the glory of what is setting, reflects on no one.

  There is no last, the great drama empties the graves and makes everyone stand; the dead arise and grandma’s special breads, which only she knew how to make, are once again on the table at Easter, wrapped by the well-known Grandma’s Bakery and Pastry Shop. Universal cloning, there will be no more deaths; the same faces around forever, no love affair consigned to the past, but each story repeated exactly as it was, O death, where is thy sting? And yet at times it should be necessary, you’d like to be able to disappear and no longer exist, to have been and no longer be …

  Luxuries of the past, today eternal life is mandatory. It’s not at all strange to read that in 1972 the young Bernd Alm, who had gone to see the exhibition of Whitehead and Gaches, thought that he too could earn a living restoring or carving those fatal figures or, better yet, making copies of those that had been lost. Others quickly followed his example. And the nostalgia for the figureheads of one time quickly summoned the forgers to work, who set about recreating the most famous ones, copying them from illustrations, passing them off as genuine and then, not long afterwards, selling them as imitations but as master reproductions, which as such appeal to humanity’s kitschy soul. An apt fate, moreover, for a figure that rose from the waters, the realm of lies and treachery.

  Even the ones I’m making here—there are already a fair number of them, I’ve almost filled up the storeroom—are a series of fakes, but authentic fakes. Master reproductions, if I may say so without being guilty of immodesty. They’re all here, never so clear and recognizable as now: this one is Maria, that one is Marie, that other one Marica, then Márja and Norah and Mangawana; there’s also the revolution, with its Phrygian cap and red flag. All recaptured, they won’t get away again, all composed and rigid and full of dignity, and I won’t lose them again; I keep watch over them, I take care of them, dust them, clean them, finally at peace with myself, not guilty. Not that I’m presumptuous enough to think that I am truly the last, of course not, the next forger is perhaps already at the door, no one is ever the last in a woman’s heart—

  92

  I GOT UP in a good mood, that morning. January 20, once the date on the marble was easily readable; I want to believe that my gravestone has been cared for as it should, after I took such good care of those of others. I felt limber, my legs strong, full of vigour. Forget the autobiography, it’s obvious that none of this is in there much less in the biographies. Given the circumstances, only I can know the truth about the Last Day—last, so to speak, indeed here we are still—about what happened and how.

  Can you hear me, up there, sitting on that bench? I can’t hear you very well, I must have something in my ears: maybe dirt, or dust or the earplugs I wear in order to sleep. That day, January 20, I had a yen for the sea, the wide open sea. A carriage was leaving for Port Arthur, because they had sent word that they needed a doctor—not for the convicts, of course, you don’t bother a doctor for that cannon fodder, but for Evans, one of the head overseers—so that morning Dr. Bentley decided to go. They let me get in without any problem, when I asked if they could give me a ride. I didn’t feel like going as far as Port Arthur, to see the penal holes in the icy water, the children’s cliff. I wanted to go a little way down, just a little toward the south; to look at the immense open sea, beyond which there’s nothing.

  They left me off where the narrowest part of Maingon Bay begins, telling me to meet them at the same place for the trip back. I went down toward the bay, toward the open sea. Down the Bay, once again. I walked unerringly and swiftly into the immense white light that made you squint your eyes and tried to spot the green patch of eucalyptus trees, where the shore was low and you could approach the water. A dazzling light, so strong and clear that it grows dark before your eyes and you can hardly see anything; like now, I know you’re here, up there, above me, but I can’t see you, this darkness, down here, is blinding. God’s promised light, perhaps too intense for us—we who have passed on to a better life are in darkness, the exceedingly brilliant, radiant display on Tabor blinds us, we can’t see a thing, like in the dead of night.

  The coast, beyond that beach, rose abruptly, and became a blackish, towering wall of basalt, dropping sheerly to the water, an inaccessible wall defended by sharp projections. The roar of the waves came from offshore, monotonous, incessant; huge breakers crashed against the dark cliffs, birds vanished in the frothy spray, swallowed up by a black abyss. Above the promontory, which could now be seen clearly, clouds gathered, rising from the sea, bleak towers reaching toward the sky, dissolving and breaking up in the wind; the sun tears them apart and flows into the breach, the burning flank of the Admiral Juhl struck by the English broadsides, crumbling in the sea. Those towers up there were plummeting, you could almost hear them crashing in the rumble of the breakers that furiously battered the rocks.

  I went down to where the shore descended gently to a stretch of beach and the pounding of the waves against the basalt walls, farther off, faded away. The ship had run aground on a pebbly beach, in a quiet cove protected by a reef that broke the sea’s fury. Its caved-in stern was lapped by the waves, the water went in and out with muffled shudders. The hole was large, the bite of an enormous shark; farther on, along the reef, you could see the huge, pointed rock on which the sea had tossed it.

  On its blackened sides the wood was peeling off here and there like coarse bark; it had a nice smell and so did the tar. I took off the sheepskin I had around my shoulders and spread it on the ground. There among the stones the yellowish fleece seemed like one of those patches of golden sand that speckled the beach in spots. I was tired, after making my way down the rugged terrain; I felt a little twinge in my stomach and a sour taste in my mouth. I stroked the wood, rough and welcoming to my touch. In Nyhavn too, as a boy, I used to like to touch the ships’ wood, sniff it, feel it under my bare feet. That’s my land, my roots. All land, moreover, even this one that ended up on top of me, is a ship floating above a watery abyss; at least that’s what Pistorius told me in Copenhagen, when I was little more than a child. Actually, he said that’s what some ancient peoples believed, but it seemed that this did not diminish the veracity of that image, even for him. Other peoples, Pistorius went on, believed that the earth was flat instead and supported by four columns resting on four elephants standing on the shells of four enormous turtles swimming in an immense ocean. Be that as it may, I like the idea that the original foundation on which the world, as well as my grave, rests is the great sea, and that all men, whether they know it or not, are sailors.

  I had seen the small ship stranded on that beach other times and each time I thought it strange that the figurehead looked into the bay and not out at the open sea. The a
stonished, dilated gaze of figureheads is focused on the sea and its unvarying horizon, on the disasters that are about to come from that horizon and which men cannot see. The figurehead of that ship too was gazing upward toward the distance, face composed and lips parted; her hand held a rose to her chest, trying to clasp the fluttering dress carved out of the worn wood, seemingly lifted by a gust of wind, which extended the rippling of the waves into that of the garment’s folds, revealing her regal breasts.

  Her gaze was that of someone staring at something irrevocable. Usually that unbearable view came from the sea, but perhaps it was no mistake that the prow figure should be facing the bay, like the rest of the ship that ended up on the beach. In that direction lay Port Arthur, and no disaster at sea could compete with Port Arthur and the other horrors that occur only on land. It’s on land that hells are found. Those who die at sea are fortunate.

  A little farther on, along the beach, a gull lay bashed among the stones, occasionally flapping its wings in an effort to rise. When I approached, it tried to flee, but quickly fell back, exhausted. It had lost a lot of feathers; one wing hung at its side, askew. From that piece of life, which flinched hopelessly, an odour of decay already emanated. Can you smell it now, does it reach you from down here, up there where you’re sitting? I can a little, yes, despite my stuffed nostrils. Even in Newgate you could smell that odour, when I was writing my book about the Christian religion—the true religion of nature, the truth of the heart and of all creation, although it was difficult to think so looking around Down the Bay, seeing the black rocks, scored and grooved like the backs of the convicts who were being flayed by the whip not far from there. There was a petty officer, Barclay, who flogged them because he wanted their backs, with those scars, to resemble the back of a tiger. Blood oozes from those furrows on their backs, it pools, it gathers in a murky stream and runs off to stain red the ocean that covers the world, that ever raging sea whose depths are one big charnel house of agony and dying, an immense ossuary

  Yes, even in Newgate or on the lower deck of the Woodman—here too, I’m not sure where—you smell the stink of decay, of sweat wounds the vomit of men with irons around their ankles, sleeping three or four to a pallet, waiting for the deckhand to come and throw a bucket of water on the floor to rinse away the feces at least. A stench you can never be free of, once you’ve smelled it—the stench of food scraps that attract rats; of your own body which down there, in chains, goes bad more quickly, like the rations of meat, not salted enough, stored in the hot, stifling cargo space. Some leftovers must have ended up down here as well, near me, I can smell the odour on me.

  Even the soul decays and goes bad, for the greater amusement and edification of the rabble enjoying the spectacle, when the wagon carries the carcass of the condemned man—and with it his soul, the breath of life exuding from that carcass’s pores, breath that comes from feeling his stomach churn with fear—to hang in the square in Hobart or Tyburn, while people come to blows over a good seat on the benches of the platform. Not long afterwards, on the table of the surgeon who dissects the corpse, those pieces of flesh are not so very different from those thrown to dogs or to the condemned men themselves on the eve of the execution, as their last meal. Maybe these bones that ended up down here, around me and on top of me, and which prevent me from moving, were spit out by them as well.

  There’s not even a reason to protest, because man and people and human beings are flesh and everything that is flesh faces death. Grass dries up and ends up in the trash, which at the end of the day the convicts carry off and burn in a large ditch. The smell of garbage is sickly-sweet, human flesh too, when it burns, is cloying; I smelled that odour in Copenhagen, in the fire at the Royal Palace, and even more intensely in the forest, when we found the remains of those three escaped prisoners. All flesh decays, as would soon happen to that of the dying gull.

  Christianity is the true religion of nature, because it plainly reveals death and the putrefaction of all things, including the immortal soul. Fortunately at Newgate I hadn’t realized it yet, or at least I hadn’t mentioned it in my book, or else Reverend Blunt would have given me a taste of the whip to chase those impious notions out of my head, instead of sharing those few morsels of meat that he had the guard bring when he got hungry—the Newgate district is famous for its excellent mutton.

  Yes, it’s really fortunate that those bad thoughts hadn’t occurred to me then, as they must have occurred to me later on, however, much later—maybe another beach, a different sea, but always too sunny and too cold, rocks to drag up out of the water, my head is booming, kroz stroj, a meaningless word, is bouncing around in here, down here, kroz stroj kroz stroj. Flesh, racked and harrowed in the great meat grinder.

  I picked up the gull, which was struggling weakly, and went toward the water. The bird’s body trembled, soft and fragile, in my hands. It’s easy to say, as the brilliant atheist writers whom I so brilliantly refuted say, that nothing is corruptible in the universe, that nothing dies or is destroyed, that their atoms merely split up and then combine into new forms. A drop falls into the ocean, dissolves, flows on, is lost, forgotten, continues to flow.

  On that beach too it was all just an ebbing and flowing of the tide. At Newgate the jailers tossed a bucket of water in the cell to clean it, the water swept away the wastes and the mice, sucking them into the drain that ended up in the Thames and from there into the sea, where the rust-brown sewage became a limpid bluish green … another surge flowed out of the bucket, the prisoners too were garbage that came and went from the cells; the tide rises and recedes, the cell empties and fills up again, one wave after another, one wagon tosses in some wretches caught red-handed with their hand in the till and another hauls them off to the gallows at Tyburn or to the belly of the prison ships departing for the Antipodes, thus making room for others.

  Why was that gull trembling, just because he didn’t know that he too, like everyone else, could not die? And the ones who at Tyburn or in the square in Hobart, with the noose already around their necks, acted like show-offs and sang bawdy songs in a confident voice, maybe on the contrary they were glad to be forgotten and to forget, to disappear somewhere where no one, not even they themselves, would ever hear of them again, sailors who go ashore at an unknown port, sign the register, pocket their pay and vanish forever from the rolls of all the Admiralties. The attendant knocks the chair out from under the condemned man’s feet and sets it aside for the next time, informing the public of the day and time.

  The night warder announces nightfall. Comrades of the world, unite. The rising sun has fallen into a deep, black well, but if we all grab the pulley and pull hard together, the bucket will come up, like the shovelful of sand came up, from the bottom of the icy sea at Goli Otok, that we pijeskari had to load onto the wheelbarrows. The bucket will come up, we will wipe that sludge-encrusted sun with our red flags until it is cleansed of any blood or mud stains and rises high in the sky, free and light as a balloon escaping from a child’s hand.

  The well is deep, the bucket is heavy, occasionally it slips backward, falls back down, and if you lean over to stop it you could fall with it. Maria, Marie, Márja, Marica, Norah, down there in the putrid waste dump of the heart, to die, to rot. Black divinities of the abyss, shadowy rites of Hecate in which Medea, sorceress of the night, indulges. No, it’s my heart that’s black, which tore Medea from the night that to her is tender and welcoming, to hurl her into the light of a merciless day, of a foreign sun that burned her. I look into the black well, that slime is the reflection of my face. I am down there, I thrive in that sludge; man is an autophagic and stercoraceous insect, he enjoys devouring himself.

  The bottom of the well, amenable cesspool of mystery. Everyone always prone to worship them, those mysteries, to revere the darkness of an empty room, heavy curtains drawn to hide the emptiness, to prevent us from realizing that the god of shadows is a trick, like in the tunnel of horrors at the amusement park. The sacred rites of Samothrace, the tremendous
mysteries of the gods, unutterable to mortals, of which it is not lawful for us to sing. Then too, what is there to sing of. Sacred mystical orgies, initiatory rites? A maenad that copulates with a snake, the cult of Rea, the great triple goddess, a case of the hots in a brothel, old-fashioned orgies, two or three vulgar favours … The Dactyls, small naked demons, tear Zagreus to pieces, the infant god in the form of a calf—maybe a ram or a lamb, it’s all the same. There are some who fuck more enthusiastically if they see a flayed animal flinch.

  At Eleusis, the initiate at the end contemplated the supreme mystery, an ear of wheat. At Samothrace there is some coupling, though they don’t say so—obscene acts of sailors on leave during a long crossing, then the Argonauts resume the voyage, perhaps without even paying the madam, but it’s not appropriate to talk about those things. Jason says nothing about his mysteries, why should he tell about the abominable thing he did to Medea. In the black hole of the shithole, head down in kroz stroj, I vomited but at least I could see the rising sun, hidden at the bottom of that muck. Here, Down the Bay, in Terra Australis Incognita, upside-down again, I’m just a little dizzy, but I can’t see anything anymore …