Pirate Utopia

by Bruce Sterling

  The Communists were distributing Marxist propaganda. Secondari accepted a broadsheet, from a weedy Fiume civilian with a red star pasted onto his jaunty straw boater hat.

  Secondari glanced over the cheap, grimy paper. It was their usual Commie rubbish about justice, class struggle, and the labor theory of value. The Communists had been saying the same things since the remote 1840s. How could that quaint rubbish possibly be Futurism?

  Two of the burlier Communists passed him, carrying a banner-sign strung from two tall wooden poles. “Death to The South Slav Committee of Agram.” Who was that? Who cared? What difference could it make to the world?

  Police arrived to oversee the growing tumult. General Vadala’s Italian police were under military command.

  Secondari heartily despised the Occupation police. He hated all police everywhere, because he was a pirate.

  His immediate superior in piracy was the Ace of Hearts. The Ace of Hearts was the head of the revolutionary secret police. The secret police in Fiume were secrets even to the Italian military police.

  Annoyed by the capering Communists, Secondari wobbled back into the theater. The night air had grown colder, and his bad ear was aching sharply. His interior sense of balance was disturbed by his war wound. He leaned with care on his grandfather’s cane.

  He found Frau Piffer in an anxious conclave with the teenaged ticket-seller.

  “Aren’t you satisfied yet?” he interrupted. “Let’s go eat dinner.”

  “The Communists came here to kill all the Croats,” said Frau Piffer. “Because the Croats are Yugoslavs.”

  The ticket-seller pursed her sticky red lips—she had the same tint as Frau Piffer’s own lipstick, and probably the same black-market supplier. Speaking in German, she suddenly emitted a startling stream of hatred. Her crazy rant had something to do with Croats, and Yugoslavia, and gunfire in the streets, and war atrocities.

  “You two girls lack proper political awareness,” said Secondari, in Italian. “My pirates aren’t Yugoslav royalists, they’re Croatian nationalists! They hate Yugoslavia much more than you two little ladies do.”

  “Didn’t I tell you to hide those ugly brutes in the factory?” cried Frau Piffer, shivering in terror. “Croats can’t march around Fiume like they own this town!”

  “But Blanka, you yourself are a Croat!” said Secondari, losing his tact. “‘Blanka’ is a Croatian name! And you, there, you little movie girl—‘Tanja,’ what kind of name is that? You’re not Italian either!”

  Shamefaced, the ticket-seller muttered something inaudible.

  “But we’re all Italians now!” Frau Piffer insisted. “The mob will kill those dirty foreigners like dogs.”

  The ticket-seller lifted her chin, spoke Italian, and solemnly promised that everyone would be murdered as soon as her next feature let out.

  Secondari glanced at the miserable street demonstration. His temper was fraying. Why was Fiume so like this, so full of minute, antlike struggle?

  There was no real fight to be found around here, in that cobbled plaza with its cheap billiard halls and bad restaurants.

  Secondari knew what a genuine war looked like. He’d been in the world’s greatest war for four years. Real war meant bayoneting Austrian Jaeger troops in trenches dynamited from frozen Alpine granite. That was real warfare. Militant Communist oil workers were soft, portly, middle-aged idiots with retirement plans.

  An armored car rolled upon the scene. “Hey, wait!” Secondari said. “That’s not fair.”

  This armored car had been stolen from the regular Italian army. Almost every piece of military equipment in Revolutionary Fiume had been stolen from Italy.

  It had not occurred to Secondari that the political factions inside Fiume would steal Italian weapons from their own pirate regime. But the Communists had done exactly that. The local Communists had pirated an Italian armored car. It was five meters long and as tall as a two-story building.

  Secondari hadn’t given the Communists any permission to behave as pirates. He found their crime intensely annoying. The stolen armored car—a standard Lancia-Ansaldo IZM, of the 1918 vintage—was ridiculously defaced. A red hammer and sickle had been sloppily daubed onto its turret. A red battle-flag was lashed to the muzzle of the turret’s heavy machine-gun.

  Secondari left the cinema, wobbling quickly on his cane. He shouldered his way through the drum-beating, whistling crowd of Communists, until he reached the elongated metal bulk of the armored car. He hauled himself aboard it.

  A young civilian oil worker was perched high in the turret. He was leaning down to flirt with a pretty girl in the crowd.

  Secondari poked the Marxist with the iron ferrule of his cane. “Get out,” he ordered.

  “What?” the Communist said.

  “Get out of this Lancia vehicle, you can’t have it.”

  The young Communist spoke to the crew deep inside the armored car. He bent down and grabbed something as they handed it up to him. It was a pistol.

  The Communist tried to chamber a round. Secondari plucked a grenade from his own belt. He pulled the pin and dropped the grenade into the car.

  The Communists scrambled from the vehicle, screaming. Secondari waited for the grenade to burst. He used his left hand to shield his one good ear.

  The grenade failed to detonate. It was a factory second. The Torpedo Factory had built a dud.

  Disappointed by this, Secondari climbed into the Lanzia. He slammed and latched the turret door. He found the dud grenade, which had rolled under the skeletal metal seat. The grenade looked all right, but some factory girl had failed to arm it correctly. Secondari slipped the loose pin back into the bomb, and attached it to his bandolier.

  Then he gunned the Lancia’s huge engine. He grabbed the crowbar-sized stick-shift, and jammed the armored car into first gear.

  He then rolled briskly through the piazza, scattering the panicking Communists. He chased down the most stubborn and reluctant ones, crushing their banners and drums beneath the Lanzia’s colossal tires. The Marxists recognized the trend, despite their belief in historical materialism. They ran away.

  Secondari then parked the armored car beside the movie theater. A bemused crowd of Alpini were observing the scene. The Alpini were not scared of an armored car, because the Alpini weren’t scared of anything. However, they didn’t know what to make of the situation.

  Secondari popped the turret open and hauled himself half-out, head and shoulders.

  “Do any of you beloved combat comrade sons of bitches want to give me any trouble tonight?” he shouted.

  Slowly, the Alpini applauded him. Some doffed their feathered Alpine hats in respect. Others whistled, and the biggest one, who was staggering drunk, even yodelled.

  “Send out those flea-bitten Croat bastards of mine! And if any Commie son-of-a-whore wants to quarrel with the deaf man here”—Secondari pounded his own chest with his fist—“you can tell those faggots to come storm my factory gates! You understand that?”

  The Alpini understood this quite well. They were touched to hear such salty battlefield language again. They had heard men speak like that every day during the Great War, but civilians never spoke realistically.

  After a brief delay and confusion, the nine Croatian pirates sheepishly emerged from the movie house. They climbed onto the steep, armored hull of Secondari’s armored car.

  Secondari then drove his pirates down the silent streets of Fiume. Nobody offered any trouble to him. The armored car was entirely his own.

  He parked the stolen car next to the other trophies he had piled in the factory’s assembly yard. Armored flame-throwers. Pneumatic drills for mountain warfare. Great spidery heaps of disused radio antennas. So many awesome and efficient things that a stricken world had bent every possible effort to build, and then forgotten.

  Only Heroic Supermenwould defy the whole world from a modest Adriatic town called “Fiume.”

  The name “Fiume” simply meant “River,” or “Rijeka,” in
Croatian. The Italian folk of “River” lived mostly on the western bank of their river, while the Balkan Croatians of “Rijeka” clung mostly to their river’s eastern bank.

  The ancient river of Fiume/Rijeka flowed from tall, obscure, and barren mountains where millions of Italian and Austrian soldiers had recently been killed. The river of River always had pure, clean water. The river of River never ran dry.

  Futurism had brought Lorenzo Secondari to this river, because he was a heroic superman. Fiume was the spiritual capital of the greatest event of the Twentieth Century. He, Lorenzo Secondari, was there among the future’s Men of Destiny.

  Secondari had long treasured this superhuman idea about himself. Since he was Turinese, he had read Friedrich Nietzsche during his high school days. Nietzsche had written his best works inside the city of Turin. Nietzsche was therefore the favorite philosopher of restless Turinese teenagers.

  After reading Nietzsche, on the subject of the Overman, and the Overman’s high-minded scorn for the slave mentality delimited by “good” and “evil,” Secondari had recognized that the everyday world was quite unworthy of him, too. He hadn’t said much about this personal conviction, however. He was a teenage boy from Turin, so race-cars and airplanes interested him much more than philosophical aspirations did.

  The Great War had changed everything about that, however. In the Great War, the superhuman Lorenzo Secondari had been killed.

  On the fateful afternoon of November 22, 1917, an Austrian mortar round had struck and killed Secondari during an artillery duel on the icy heights of the Adamello front.

  The Austrian mortar’s concussion had blown the life right out of the body of Lorenzo Secondari. Secondari was entirely clear about this experience. He remembered every vivid detail.

  Lorenzo Secondari was unsurprised to find himself dead in battle. He had rather expected to die as a soldier, for Lorenzo Secondari had successfully killed a huge number of enemy Austrians. Secondari had, in fact, deliberately joined the Italian artillery corps in order to efficiently exterminate the maximum number of Austrians.

  Being Piedmontese, Secondari understood the historical role of Piedmont in destroying Austro-Hungarian despotism. Members of his family had been fighting the Austrians for centuries. His ancestors had consecrated their lives to an Austrian defeat.

  In this vast historical struggle, Lieutenant Lorenzo Secondari had fallen. He was one among five million similarly dead Italian soldiers. He had paid the last, full price of his patriotic devotion.

  So he was dead in the Alps, with his soul floating outside his shattered mortal body.

  However, the army medic within Secondari’s military unit was from Turin, just like himself. This gifted young doctor was a student of Turin’s greatest medical scientist: Cesare Lombroso.

  Using Lombroso’s psychically advanced séance tech-niques—(for the first time ever employed on a battlefield)— this Turinese medic had contacted Secondari’s wandering soul. The doctor had restored the soul to Secondari’s still-warm corpse.

  This gifted Turinese doctor had also been killed by the Austrian artillery, a mere six days later. So the battlefield medic had never found the time or opportunity to inform anyone of his feat. During the Great War, many acts of similar heroism had gone unrecorded by authority.

  However, Secondari was entirely clear and lucid about the matter. He remembered his death in combat. He remembered his resuscitation by the doctor. He remembered that the Italian Army, using an iron spiderweb of “teleferica” ski-lifts, had reeled him downhill from the frozen mountain height.

  Secondari had silently plummeted, swaying and reeling, without one whisper of noise, down, down, down, to the world beyond his battlefield. Then he lay on his canvas stretcher and silently bled, until a Red Cross ambulance, silent, came.

  That silent journey, he also remembered with great clarity. The silent ambulance was full of Italian wounded and dying, and driven by an American volunteer. They’d spoken some English together, he and the American driver, as the medic handled Secondari’s blood-soaked stretcher. The American’s mustached lips had moved, but without a sound.

  Many days later, back in Turin, in a drab hotel transformed into a military hospital, Secondari lay alone in his cot. He was alive in a great and lasting silence. He had broken ribs, a shattered collarbone, and thirty-eight large and small shrapnel wounds. His right ear no longer existed. It had been torn from his head.

  Secondari was heavily sedated, yet in full, intimate contact with vast, swirling panoplies of mystical reality. Day by day, tormented by his many wounds, Secondari revived. He writhed in fevered anguish during Caporetto, the worst Italian defeat of the Great War. He regained his feet during Vittorio Veneto, when the Italian Army conclusively destroyed Italy’s thousand-year-old imperial enemy. The Empire of Austria-Hungary was swept from the map of Europe. It was no more.

  The Great War ended. Austria-Hungary’s dead remains were a rabble of new republics. The fallen Empire of Germany was also a new republic. The victorious Kingdom of Italy remained a Kingdom.

  For Lieutenant Lorenzo Secondari, the peacetime world of the victorious Kingdom of Italy was a ghostly place. It was almost silent. Lieutenant Secondari, war veteran, could still read and write. He could scarcely hear a word.

  His balance was gone because his inner ear was wrecked, but when he used his dead grandfather’s cane, he could walk, well enough.

  He returned to engineering school for a while, where he could not hear the lectures properly. He frequented the school’s library, where he sat alone, reading the latest English-language magazines, about popular science and popular mechanics. These American magazines had grown quite strange, since the Great War had ended. The Americans were full of plans to build personal radios, and plans to build personal airplanes. Nothing built for a king or a nation, everything built for one man.

  The harried military doctors wrote an official letter to Secondari. They predicted that his left ear would get better. It did, somewhat: because there was dull roaring, then ringing, and then, one day, he heard coherent sound. His right ear scarcely existed, but sometimes he heard noise with it, mostly while dreaming.

  The Italian Army demobilized Secondari. He found himself among a new Italian army, the shabby horde of the post-war unemployed.

  Inflation raged through Italy. The peacetime Kingdom of Italy was half graveyard and half clearing-sale.

  Secondari spoke to people of influence in Turin, hoping to find something worthy to do with himself. Sadly, no one in Turin could recognize his superhuman qualities. Once they learned that he had died in battle, the people of Turin were perturbed. His own family doubted what he told them. They insulted him with their pity.

  Angry scenes ensued—especially with his older brother. Secondari’s older brother had never joined the Royal Army, being much too busy running the family enterprise of arms dealing. Those who fired the weapons did not prosper. Those who built the weapons had done well by the Great War.

  Secondari came to realize that he despised his older brother. He loathed that placid, civilian charmer, already going to fat, with his boulevardier’s mustache, his stickpin and tie, his gray gloves, and his eager, twinkling, lecherous eye for a factory girl.

  He could not stay in a city that would shelter such a man. He would have to find a holocaust city, a place fit for himself.

  The city of Fiume was a martyr to the world’s peace.

  Fiume had long been an Austro- Hungarian seaport: a subjection that the locals always resented. When Austria- Hungary shattered to bits, the large Italian faction of the population naturally expected to become part of Italy.

  The League of Nations had frustrated this natural hope. Instead, the peacemakers callously donated Fiume to the new, unheard-of Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

  In her anguish and her shame, Fiume cried out for heroes—men of vision, who would save imperilled Fiume from the evil machinations of American President Woodrow Wilson.

  The city’s cry of
pain was heard. Saviors arrived in a convoy of stolen Italian military trucks.

  On September 12, 1919—a date as important as that of any great battle of the Great War—the Italian rebels had “deserted forward into the Future,” and invaded Fiume. The people of Fiume showered the soldiers with roses in the palmy streets.

  The Prophet, the Seven of Ronchi, and the Ace of Hearts. These uniformed Futurist Overmen were the avant-garde of the Twentieth Century. These were the visionaries, the men willing to defy the whole world to see justice done for one town.

  Lorenzo Secondari had limped and wobbled into Fiume about a month later. Like many other Fiume adventurers, he had arrived uninvited, unknown, hungry, and penniless.

  The “Desperates” were the wretched and the lost. These young men arrived in Fiume from all over war-stricken Italy. The Desperates came from anywhere where life was hard, but honor was still bright.

  Because of Secondari’s deafness, he had quickly blundered into a meaningless quarrel with a fellow, bewildered Desperate. He and his foe were on the point of a pistol duel, when the Prophet had personally intervened.

  The Prophet had saved Secondari because the Prophet tenderly cherished every Desperate who joined his cause. Being a great poet, the Prophet saw deep into the souls of everyone he met—men, and especially women.

  So the Prophet gazed, with his one remaining good eye, into Secondari’s two eyes. Then he reached up with his gray-gloved hand. He tenderly touched the stub of Secondari’s blasted ear.

  In that intimate encounter, the Prophet had seen all and forgiven all.

  Aware that Secondari could not properly hear his words of wisdom, the Prophet had written Secondari a personal letter. This ardent, fatherly missive was boldly scrawled across three pages of the Prophet’s personal stationery. Each precious page featured a stamped Latin motto, and a handsome woodcut of an Arditi dagger ripping the League of Nations to shreds.

  The Prophet’s letter was a generous gift to a troubled, wounded soldier. Frank, terse, and manly, this letter was a transformational screed. The letter made it clear to Secondari that he had a Cause: the Future—and a role to play: the creation of a pirate utopia.