Pirate Utopia

by Bruce Sterling

  The leaders of Occupied Fiume were poets and political radicals, but they had to notice so much innovation and initiative. Lieutenant Secondari and Frau Piffer were both well-rewarded. Secondari was made a gang-boss within the “Strike of the Hand Committee,” the fiercest pirate commandos of Fiume. Frau Piffer was transformed into a “Corporate Syndicalist,” and made the dictator of her factory.

  For their night together, out on the town, Frau Piffer wore her shining new Syndicalist ensemble, granted to her by the grateful Fiume regime. Frau Piffer’s Futurist paramilitary outfit had dazzling zigzag lines in shades of Italian orange, white, and green, plus a shining silk sash heavy with bronze medallions.

  Frau Piffer was portly, married, and eleven years older than Secondari. Frau Piffer was an ugly, older woman from a newer, better world.

  “It might be best if Maria avoids Cabiria,” Secondari mused. “I just remembered a scene in that movie where a little girl is flung into the flaming belly of a brazen beast-god.”

  “We should see Cabiria together some night soon,” Frau Piffer urged. “You work much too hard, Lorenzo. Every night you’re out on those raiding boats, stealing diesel fuel. You should see more of the local people. Try to make some real friends.”

  “Oh, Cabiria is just a peacetime movie,” said Secondari. “I don’t care a damn about the ancient past.”

  The pirates arrived at the movie house. This Fiume cinema was a small musical-comedy theater. It sat within a modest piazza, crowded with glum examples of bad provincial Austro-Hungarian architecture.

  The ticket-seller was a teenage girl. She had insolent bobbed hair, narrow plucked brows, and scarlet lipstick. She sat within a glass booth, reading a cheap German romance novel. Muffled jazz music blasted from her radio set.

  Since Secondari was half-deaf, he hated conversing with the locals of Fiume. In fact, Secondari hated leaving his Torpedo Factory for any reason at all, except for enthusiastic pirate raids. Using low-slung, rapid Italian assault boats, his “Strike of the Hand Committee” raided the whole Adriatic. Half spies and half black-marketeers, operating mostly on moonless nights, the utopian pirates of Fiume stole supplies from half-abandoned Great War military depots. Secondari knew exactly what to steal, so he went along on every pirate raid. He generally manned a cannon.

  Secondari brusquely rapped at the glass ticket-booth with the brass head of his gentleman’s cane. “Miss, I built that radio with my own hands! So turn it off and pay attention to me.”

  The startled girl dropped her romance book. She struggled with the dials of her wooden radio box. The jazz music grew much louder, and the ticket-girl shouted in dismay.

  “My gallant troops are here to see your movie!” Secondari bellowed at her. “Let us all in at once!”

  The ticket-seller pointed angrily at the clock-tower, then at the nine Croat pirates, who were puffing smuggled Turkish cigarettes and knocking mud from their jackboots.

  Secondari threw open his trenchcoat, revealing a black shirt, black jodhpur trousers, a bandolier of grenades, two holstered Glisenti semi-automatics, and a trench dagger the size of his forearm.

  He plucked a newspaper clipping from his wallet, which was stuffed with five kinds of currency. “Now, you see here, miss! Your own advertisement states—no, look at this clipping, it’s from yesterday’s issue of The Fiume Head of Iron—it distinctly states that Miss Menichelli’s feature begins at five pm!”

  “Let me talk to her,” said Frau Piffer.

  Secondari stepped aside.

  “Ciao, Tanja!” Frau Piffer chirped. “Is that Barney Bigard and his Jazzopators? They’re great, aren’t they? Turn that down a little! Use that big brown knob.”

  The ticket-seller successfully reduced the radio jazz racket. She made some muffled remark about Frau Piffer’s new uniform.

  “I’m a Corporate Syndicalist nowadays,” Frau Piffer announced, preening at her lapels.

  “So, what’s that?” silently mouthed the ticket-girl, from behind her glass.

  “Well, I don’t know that yet! You’ll have to ask the Constitutionalist about that! He’s a genius!”

  The ticket-girl made some flippant remark to the effect that all the leaders of Occupied Fiume were geniuses, but all the geniuses had to pay to watch her movies, anyway.

  “Now Tanja, your father is a good Communist, isn’t he? So why don’t you let us inside there, without some exchange of cash? We’re from the Torpedo Factory! I could see to it that you and your girlfriends get some very nice little pistols.”

  Tanja the ticket-girl twirled one kiss-curl over her lacquered fingernail. She then boasted about the Italian soldiers who were already inside her theater, happily watching her movies.

  The Occupation troops of Fiume were the Arditi, the Alpini, and the legendary Royal Grenadiers of Sardinia. These fierce Italian elite troops feared no man and adored all women.

  Frau Piffer stiffened. “You’d better watch that tongue of yours, young lady! Lieutenant Secondari is my business associate! Our relationship is entirely chaste and revolutionary.”

  Vividly waving her hands behind the glass, Tanja scoffed.

  Frau Piffer then switched to speaking German. Being a Fiume girl, Tanja also spoke excellent German.

  Since Fiume was an Italo-Balkan port city, the people of Fiume spoke an entire Babel of tongues. Unfortunately, the Great War had smashed Secondari’s right ear. Even when the Fiumans spoke good Italian, Secondari was hard-put to hear them. He entirely failed to understand their Serbo-Croatian speech. Their Hungarian was a profound mystery to him.

  The rich people of Fiume spoke some French, but Secondari hated the arrogant rich, and didn’t much like the French, either. The English language was well known in Fiume’s banking and shipping circles. Secondari could speak and write English rather well. However, the Great War had deafened him. Civilian life would always be a conspiracy to him.

  The two Fiume women rattled along, parrying and bargaining, as if selling fish. The city life of Fiume was kinked like tarry harbor rope with Gordian knots of this kind. Secondari’s thoughts drifted toward Futurism, as his thoughts generally did.

  His next logical step was entirely clear to him. He had to manufacture naval torpedoes—that should be easy, in a Torpedo Factory—and then some radio-controlled, airborne Futurist torpedoes.

  In Turin, Italy’s national plans for flying torpedoes were gathering dust in the blueprint drawers of the War Ministry. Many brilliant Italian military innovations had been sadly doomed by the Armistice.

  The new civilian government in Rome was weak, impoverished, and gutless. The civilians had mutilated Italy’s great victory during the Great War. They were trying to put the Great War behind them, instead of ahead of them, where it properly belonged.

  The secret agents of the Fiume “Strike of the Hand Committee” would steal those flying torpedo plans from inside Italy. Then Secondari would illicitly copy these unbuilt war-machines within his pirate factory.

  The Anarcho-Syndicalist city-state would then own and brandish flying Futurist torpedoes. Even a civilian fool could see that this feat would change the destiny of the world.

  Lorenzo Secondari was not an inventor. He lacked the creative skills for that. Instead, he was what he most wanted to be: a free pirate. Given the stolen plans, he had no doubt that he could successfully build flying radio torpedoes. Anyone who doubted his capacities deserved a hard lesson.

  Frau Piffer glanced up from her negotiations. “Do you have any ready-money, Lorenzo?”

  “Aha! Yes, indeed I do! Tell this tawdry creature that I have a good stock of American dollars.”

  “Dollars are only good for buying dynamite,” Frau Piffer mourned. “Do you have any postage stamps?”

  Secondari scowled. The Revolution had been selling its exotic postage stamps to foreigners, ever since the anarchist liberation of September 1919. Along with drugs, jazz music, and easy divorce, the postage stamp racket was a way of scraping by. The Fiumans often used th
eir postage stamps as their makeshift internal currency.

  “Postage stamps always stick inside my wallet,” Secondari complained. He selected a legitimate British five-pound note from among a sheaf of fake ones. The Fiume “Strike of the Hand Committee” was wonderfully adept at forgery. However, British currency notes were hard work.

  “Five pounds is much too much money!” Frau Piffer said. “She would have to give you change in dinars.”

  “Dinars! Outrageous!” Secondari yelled. “The ‘Kingdom of Yugoslavia’ cannot exist! I should arrest her for offering me Yugoslav money.”

  The impatient Croat pirates were shuffling at the delay. Some of Fiume’s ubiquitous street urchins had shown up. They were begging the pirates for cigarettes.

  One of the Croat pirates tossed his fine fur coat into the gutter. He tore his blue-striped nautical shirt from his tattooed back. He handed this to a young boy.

  Secondari was not to be outdone by this splendid revolutionary gesture. He picked up the pirate’s fur coat, dusted it off, cordially handed it back, then gave the Croat his favorite Swiss Army knife, direct from his own pocket.

  He then confronted Frau Piffer. “Get this mess over with,” he ordered.

  Frau Piffer shouted at length at the ticket-seller, who was rebellious, but unable to resist a uniformed adult. “All right,” Frau Piffer said at last. “I’ve fixed it. We’ll give her some jazz records, later.”

  “Good work.”

  “We’ll have to sit upstairs in the balcony. No gunfire. Also no brandy, no pipes, and no cigars.”

  Frau Piffer distributed the movie tickets to the pirates, then bought them nine boxes of popcorn. The happy marauders settled upstairs into the cheap seats, jostling their pistol belts and scratching at flea-bites. They immediately began smoking.

  “Turin has movie palaces five times the size of this place,” Secondari griped. “I should steal this theater! I could run pirated movies in here.”

  “Lorenzo, have you been snorting cocaine again?”

  “No, I haven’t,” Secondari lied. The Ace of Hearts, his patron in the Fiume secret police, had given him a steady supply of the useful Peruvian herb. All the flying aces made much use of cocaine. Cocaine sharpened the senses for combat.

  Newsreels commenced on the silver movie screen. These newsreels were American in origin because American newsreels were everywhere, and therefore easy to steal.

  The first newsreel concerned American big-game hunters in Africa. The second reel featured “Tarzan.” Tarzan was the American version of a Nietzschean Overman. Tarzan was a superhuman anarchist, but since he lived in a jungle, he did not have to smash the State.

  The feature began, and the theater’s hired pianist played along. Secondari scarcely heard the tinkling piano, but he did not mind. Since it was silent, the cinema was the one form of modern art in which a deaf man could fully participate.

  The Turinese film featured the famous diva, Pina Menichelli, as a Russian countess, exiled and living in Italy. La Menichelli was a gorgeous creature of aristocratic privilege, from a fabulous Czarist world of sables and diamonds.

  Of course her noble Russian life had been shattered by the Twentieth Century. The Russian Countess had wandered to Turin, bearing the livid infection of her doom, and the Italian noblemen within her high social circle… They were all degenerate dabblers and dilettantes. Feeble, nerveless, archaic dolts with slicked-back hair, celluloid collars, and boiled shirt-fronts. Not one of these despicable toffs and weaklings had any Futurism to offer to this beautiful woman.

  As the tragic film progressed, the Countess devoured these wretches like a female Moloch. Then she turned her fatal rage upon herself. Secondari was stirred to his core.

  Until he’d left Torino for the revolution in Fiume, he had never realized that his own Kingdom of Italy was so entirely like Czarist Russia. But the Fiume Revolution had raised his political awareness. Italy, just like Russia, had a weakling King, a rotten Parliament, and a starved population. One rush and a push by hard and determined men, and Rome would topple into its own streets.

  As for La Menichelli, her director and her screenwriter could not save the actress from her bitter fate. Wafting across her silent screen, Pina Menichelli was a silver ghost: a lovely creature from some better world that had been denied existence.

  The tragedy was hard to bear, but it was followed by a short, comic two-reeler: An Interplanetary Romance. This low-budget diversion concerned an Italian gent in love with a pretty girl from Mars.

  The sprightly comedy was directed by “Yambo,” a Genoese journalist best known for his boys’ adventure books. Yambo’s movie was ingenious, but it had been filmed on the cheapest kind of celluloid. The movie jammed on its metal reel, bubbling and smoking. The silver screen went stark white.

  The usher had to apologize to the indignant movie crowd—restive Italian soldiers, mostly, along with their screeching local girlfriends. To calm them, the usher hastily offered up a makeshift song and dance, along with the theater’s pianist.

  The dancing usher was quickly hooted off the stage. The resourceful management somehow located a radically different act: a blind poet with a fiddle. This bearded Balkan derelict wailed away with his bow on the single taut wire of his instrument.

  His eerie peasant racket was unbearable, even for a deaf man. The Italian troops were leaving the theater in disgust. Secondari also rose from his plush seat.

  “Sit down now, he can sing,” Frau Piffer protested. “It’s a beautiful language, once you know it.”

  “I prefer the Slavs silent,” Secondari said. He rose and shuffled past his line of nine Croat pirates, who were staring at the blind singer and wiping their tearful eyes.

  Frau Piffer obediently followed him. They collected her Futurist hat in the lobby.

  “You sure did stare at that pretty actress,” she told him.

  “La Menichelli? She’s a goddess! She’s a diva, a Nietzschean superhuman! Imagine dying in the embrace of a gorgeous creature like that!”

  “I never heard you talk that way before.”

  “You never took me to a movie before.”

  “Well, I suppose that you like girls well enough, then. If they are your Turinese movie-star girls.”

  “I have no time for women in my life, you know all that.” Secondari shrugged. “Forget it. I’m hungry now. I have some money. Thank God the blockade is over. Let’s go eat something nice, in a nice place.”

  “What good ideas you have sometimes, Lorenzo! I know such a nice place for the two of us! My cousin cooks there. We’ll have some squid first, a soup, a pasta, then we can share some baked bronzin.... My cousin will be so nice to us. He never makes any scandals....” Frau Piffer cheerily pushed open the door to the piazza. She instantly went pale with terror.

  Secondari glanced outside, over Frau Piffer’s gaudy, striped, Syndicalist shoulder. During the movie show, some Communists had gathered outside, in a typical Communist street demonstration.

  These local malcontents, to judge by their pickets and banners, were the staffers from Fiume’s oil refinery. Their oil refinery was sitting derelict, since the League of Nations had denied Fiume any shipments of crude oil.

  “You’re a Communist yourself, my dear,” he said to Frau Piffer. “So why are you afraid of these fools?”

  “Because these are Bolsheviki, they’re Leninists! My cell is from Red Vienna.” Frau Piffer put one plump hand to her waxed red lips. “And what if they see me now, in my Futurist outfit? Oh my God! Quick, give me your trench-coat! There must be some back way out of here.”

  Secondari barked with laughter. In Turin, the Communist demonstrations were huge, raging seas of angry industrial workers. The Fiume demonstration outside was maybe thirty local people. They were carefully parking their bicycles, and readying some silly drums and whistles.

  The oil workers were all draft dodgers. They all had industrial deferments. They’d never heard one shot fired in anger in the Great War. They were scarc
ely men at all.

  “Go and fetch my pirates from upstairs,” he told Frau Piffer. “We’ll scatter those small-town Commies like mice.”

  “Oh no, please, don’t shoot them! These are my own friends and neighbors! Oh look, there’s Tanja’s dad—that nice Signor Adelardi! I didn’t know he’d become a Bolshevik now! That’s terrible!”

  Secondari sighed. He shrugged out of his trenchcoat, and gallantly fitted it over the gaudy Syndicalist uniform of Frau Piffer. His trenchcoat’s shoulders hung halfway to Frau Piffer’s elbows. The coat’s hem dragged along the theater floor.

  “Do you feel any better now?” he said. Frau Piffer nodded mutely. Frau Piffer ruled her female factory workers with a rod of iron, but outside her own gates, she was as meek as a nun.

  A cluster of Italian soldiers left the movie house. Secondari joined them. He wandered freely through the crowd of Communist protesters.

  Secondari was a Fiume Revolutionary pirate. Therefore, he always wore black. He wore black jackboots, a thick black shirt, black puttees, and black jodhpur pantaloons. For special revolutionary occasions, Secondari had a black kepi hat, and a black cummerbund to wrap around his waist. Secondari had worn this all-black ensemble ever since joining the “Desperates.” He didn’t own any other form of clothing.

  Secondari also carried two Glisenti nine-millimeter automatic pistols, a razor-sharp Arditi dagger, and three live trench grenades. No one in the busy crowd took any notice of him. They didn’t recognize him personally, or care about his weapons.

  Secondari lifted his cane. This handsome Turinese gentleman’s cane had once belonged to his late grandfather. He used this creation of teak, iron, and brass to beckon sarcastically at Frau Piffer.

  She crouched behind the theater door in her pathetic fear. Frau Piffer had her virtues, but boldness was not among them.

  But the Communists had grown bolder. They banged drums and shrieked with whistles, but since Secondari was deaf, he was spared most of the noise.

  The Marxists were harmless fools. Just because a few Jews and Freemasons had seized Moscow, they imagined that Communism would rule the whole world some day.