Microcosms (Panther)

by Magris, Claudio

  Back on board, we waited for the moment when the nets were to be pulled in. The wood was still warm underfoot, the good feeling of contact with things, with what there is beneath us. Splitting open a water melon that spurted red on the deck, Marco chatted away in his Venetian dialect, and he himself could not say whether it was an Italianized Croatian or a Croatianized Italian. What he did know was that his father had been a Croatian patriot, but following the Second World War he was thought of as the enemy because he owned a small factory and so he decided to leave the island, which had become Yugoslav, and opted for Italy. But to do this he had to declare that his mother tongue was Italian, like that of his neighbours who were also leaving, and since then he had never been quite sure of what his place was in the world. Marco had stayed behind, even though deep down he had good memories of Italy, despite the war, the war he had fought as an Italian sailor in the Mediterranean. But he hadn’t been afraid of the war, nor the mines, the torpedoes, the death. He had been afraid of just one thing, which gave pace to his story like a refrain – hunger.

  Conscripted in wartime, Marco had tried to avoid the navy, which was offering itself up to the British radar like a sacrificial lamb. And so, reporting for duty at Genoa, he claimed to be a farmhand who had never set eyes on the sea, and added that, as a farmhand, he was used to eating eggs, milk, meat, cheese and fruit every day. Despite this he was assigned to the navy where he deliberately rowed incorrectly during a regatta, even snapping an oar, to try to convince his superiors of his seamanly ineptitude, but all he earned was a few days in solitary confinement on bread and water, much to his distaste, in spite of his protests that he was used to eating eggs, meat, milk fresh from the cow, and cheese. He was then assigned to a destroyer that patrolled between Sicily and Africa. In his story aerial attacks and naval battles faded into the background – a little spot of bother, that was all – while the really painful note regarded the food even though the captain, an understanding Sicilian, had given him double rations.

  One day the destroyer was struck by a torpedo, which hit the ammunition store. Marco said he remembered nothing of the explosion; all he knew was that he found himself in the sea – one of three survivors – hanging on to a wooden plank. Nearby a shipmate was treading water in desperation, his leg injured – “They amputated it, but not now, later at the hospital, but I haven’t reached that point yet, I’ll tell that bit later,” he said, thus solving the demanding epic problems of narrated time and storytelling time. Marco had grabbed hold of his shipmate, letting him share the slender plank and keeping hold of him for a whole day, without worrying too much about the sharks, until they were picked up by an Italian ship. At the hospital in Palermo, disappointed at not being injured and thus obliged to return to active service, Marco had pretended to have strong pains in one leg, and moaned loudly; but when he saw the large syringe with which the nurse intended to administer a painkiller, the sight frightened him more than the bombs and the shipwreck and he hurriedly declared himself fit.

  After Italy’s about-turn and the end of the war, Marco had returned to Lussino, Yugoslav by that time, where a letter he was carrying for the family of an exiled fellow islander had led the police to arrest him as a spy. And here Marco recounts those terrible months in that terrible period – the threats, the beatings, and one particular occasion when he thought they were about to shoot him and he crossed himself, for which they slapped him and so he promptly blasphemed to gain a bit of credit. But the most terrible thing was the hunger. “No eggs, milk, meat, not even cheese.” One day the police let him go, telling him, however, that he had to keep his ear to the ground and report anyone who complained against the regime. “Stuff like that, Christ, I’d never done anything like that,” but the idea of being free…. And he found a solution: every Saturday he sneaked off to the police and scrupulously named all those who used swear words, those who complained that it never stopped raining or that there weren’t enough fish, or those who were quarrelling with their mother-in-law, and those in whose opinion life was brutish and nasty. After a few weeks of these reports, the police gave up on their clueless informer and Marco returned to his life’s work, fishing.

  His story had been rambling, digressive, constantly breaking off before picking up the thread, all tangled up in non-sequiturs, forward leaps and flashbacks. In the meantime night had fallen, the big reddish moon had turned white some time previously, the wake of the boat was dark silver. Marco gave the order to haul in the nets. The sound of the winch engine blended with the lapping of the waves. Soon the first nets emerged, emptying onto the deck shovelsful of livid, pulsating fish on the wet wood, piles of hake, countless scampi cautiously moving their claws then suddenly banging their heads two or three times in a frenzy before lying motionless. The lantern wavered over the deck, over dying fish and crustaceans in strange vitreous colours, momentarily transforming the heaving pile into an enormous serpentine Gorgon’s head.

  Many of the fish were already dead, their swollen eyes protruding. A few crabs ran towards the bulwarks, but they almost always stopped, dead, before reaching them. As they collected the nets Marco and the boy continually used their feet to recompose the formless heap which tended to spread, pushing the creatures that slipped away back towards the centre. Sometimes, inadvertently, their booted feet would crush a fish or a crab and a little slime would run over the deck, clots of what had once been life, wretched, repulsive yet appetising, like flesh that suffers and dies, that rots and yet provokes longing and excites the tastebuds when it ends up between our teeth, the stuff of procreation, of eating and dying. The fish came up from the deep, the prosecution’s witnesses to the perfidy of the universe, to the evil and the pain of killing and dying, but soon they became strangely familiar; in the hand their scales looked like the skin of the fingers that held them, stung by the salt spray and refreshed by the water. Holding them and touching them, one is ashamed to recall the instinctive revulsion with which one sometimes brushes off an insect that lands on one’s arm.

  After a few hours’ work the boat turns towards Lussino, to lose no time in selling the fish. Pulling out some pecorino, sheep’s-milk cheese from Pago, together with some wine, Marco resumes his story and brings it to an end. Some years after the war the Yugoslav army had called him up again for a brief exercise, a march from Lussinpiccolo to Cunski, a town some ten kilometres away. Marco had worse memories of that modest march, in August, than he had of the war. He had no faith in army rations, so he asked his wife to prepare some pancakes with cheese and told her to bring them to him nice and warm, in a thermos container, in time for lunch. And so his wife had set off an hour or two after him and had followed the route taken by the battalion, arriving at midday and delivering the pancakes. Just at that moment they were ordered to fall in for an hour’s political instruction. Rather than waste his wife’s efforts, eating the pancakes later and therefore cold, Marco had continued his meal, and so arrived late and earned himself a small punishment. “They were really good, those pancakes,” he said, the boat now within sight of the harbour, “good and warm, and then that cheese … cheese as it used to be, not like the cheese you get today.”

  “The sea, the sea … the eye of man, o disciples, this is the sea: visible things are the rage of this sea. Of him who has gone beyond the raging waves of visible things, of him, o disciples, is it said: he is a Brahman, who in his internal space has crossed the sea of the eye with its waves, with its swell, with its depths, its monsters.”

  Thus speaks Buddha to his followers. If the desire to live is the cause of evil and pain, the sea is devastating because it intensifies the joy in and the thirst for life, its seduction lies in its infinite repetition and regeneration. In the sea’s light visible things acquire an absolute intensity, too intense for the senses that perceive them, an unbearable epiphany – Apollo flaying Marsyas. More than the abyss or the leviathan of the deep, it is the surface of the sea that shows us glimpses of annihilation, it is its transparency of the void, its refl
ection that blinds the senses with their need for shade, for halftones, for mediocrity. The purely visible is a flame that burns, says another of the Buddha’s sermons, and the sea is the realm of the purely visible. On Levrera, opposite Miholaščica, there are moments when the summer, as it stops suddenly and remains suspended, is a burning bush.

  The sea is a great trial of the spirit. In their “journey to paradise” on the shores of the Adriatic, the two lovers in Musil’s The Man without Qualities in the end cannot bear its tension, a happiness that hurts. The sea wears, corrodes, consumes. “The sea is defeating us,” says ’Ntoni during the storm in Verga’s The Malavoglia. But the epic nature of the sea teaches the freedom to recognize oneself as having been vanquished, while still fighting; it frees us from the longing for affirmation and victory that is the mark of an obsession with impotence. And this splendour that is sometimes too intense is also an invitation to abandon oneself, to sleep; the great expanse of water quenches thirst, it helps us understand that if the surf wipes out the footprint in the sand, the fact is not too tragic. Love of the sea and love for death, as Thomas Mann had it? Whatever, in its swell one learns one’s own insignificance and this helps placate the fury of the waves that Buddha spoke of.

  The brochures recommend a stop at Goli Otok, “the island of peace, its shores lapped by extraordinarily pure water, an immaculate environment steeped in silence, an island of absolute freedom.” Goli Otok, the Naked Island, near Arbe, was the final berth in a tragic odyssey undertaken by some of History’s rejects. After the Second World War, while some three hundred thousand Italians abandoned Istria, Fiume and Dalmatia, now occupied by Yugoslavia, some two thousand Italian workers from Monfalcone and other towns along the Isonzo river and in lower Friuli decided to move, with their families, to Yugoslavia. Their purpose was to contribute to the construction of socialism in the country that had freed itself from the Fascism of the Nazis and was now the closest example of the advent of Communism, which was to mark the end of exploitation, of injustice, of oppression. Many of them had been militant anti-Fascists, had fought in Spain, and had been prisoners in the German camps. Cooperating in the construction of socialism was for them more important than belonging to a state or a nation, more important than the upset of leaving one’s own land and facing real hardship; the socialist, or the human, cause was worth the sacrifice of so many personal situations and feelings.

  What the Monfalconesi, as they were called, brought to Yugoslavia, a country devastated by the war, by the backwardness inherited from the monarchic regime, by the errors of the new economic policy, was their enthusiasm and their skills as workers and technicians in the shipyards and other industrial sectors. Most of them went to work in Fiume, others in the arsenal and shipyards of Pola and in various places in the heart of the country. Unlike almost all men, even their new mates and colleagues, they worked not to survive, rather they lived to work at the construction of a new order.

  In the mines of Arsa or in the shipyards at Fiume, the Monfalconesi spared neither strength nor stamina. In 1948, at the time of Tito’s rift with Stalin, they remained faithful to the USSR, to the country and the party leader that represented the orthodoxy of the faith that had given them the strength to face Fascism and Nazism fearlessly, and to undergo imprisonment and torture in the German camps, to forsake all things in choosing Communist Yugoslavia. In the words of Djilas, who would later become a symbol of libertarian dissidence, was it not true that without Stalin the sun would never even be able to shine as it does? Now, in their view, Yugoslavia was betraying the world revolution while they themselves were foreigners and traitors in the eyes of the Yugoslav regime.

  The match, on the chessboard of world history, was a matter of life and death and Titoist Yugoslavia, which has the undeniable merit of being the first to dare to make a significant break with Stalinist barbarism, fought the threat with means that were in their turn barbaric. Fearful of conspiracies and internal coups, the regime persecuted the Stalinists using Stalinist methods, in the process arresting many others who were not involved in any way. They created their own camps in various places throughout the country and even used old prison and extermination camps set up during the monarchists’ and the Ustashi’s war against Tito’s Communists. The worst and most notorious were created by Ranković, the ruthless Interior Minister, at Goli Otok and nearby Sveti Grgur, two desert islands, nothing but rock of a burnt and blinding white.

  These camps were the final destination (together with Yugoslav Stalinists, Ustashis, war criminals and run-of-the-mill criminals), of those Monfalconesi who were not lucky enough to be expelled and who remained, as almost all of them did, faithful to their credo. Goli Otok and Sveti Grgur were hell – solitary confinement, starvation, beatings, heads down the toilet, exposure to the frost, relentless forced labour, “self-incrimination” sessions whereby one repented of one’s heresy and had to demonstrate one’s conversion by inflicting blows and torture on those companions who were more reluctant to reform.

  Ligio Zanini recounts in his autobiographical novel, Martin Muma, how as they arrived on the island, the deported had to pass through a corridor formed by the other internees, who were required to beat the new arrivals while singing the praises of Tito and the party: “Tito – Partija! Tito – Partija!” Those who refused were sent into boikot, into total solitary, fair game for the most gratuitous violence. Zanini was born and raised in Rovigno and had been enthusiastic in greeting the annexation of his land by Yugoslavia, convinced that the advent of Communism meant justice for all, even for Istrian Italians like himself. His courage led him to Goli Otok and he had enough of it in reserve to preserve his morale in the midst of so much humiliation. Later he declined to return to Italy, because it did not seem right to him to start eating once more from the plate into which he had spat, and the remainder of his blameless, courageous life was spent on the sea as a fisherman, conversing in his Rovignese dialect poems with the seagull Fileipo.

  The names of the deported are a chorus from the Day of Judgment; names that also appeared in the lists at Buchenwald, in the files of the Fascist Special Courts, in the annals of the Resistance and the war in Spain. The mark of infamy that stamped them as enemies of the people also marked their relatives, depriving them of every social and legal protection and leaving them a prey to poverty. Djilas, who visited Goli Otok and called it, “the most shameful stain on Yugoslav Communism,” says that the party leaders were unaware of the worst cruelties inflicted by common criminals whose violence was unleashed by the mechanisms of persecution set in motion by the authorities; they were in the end beyond any possible control. Other Titoist leaders, like Kardelj, sought to justify Goli Otok, citing the exigencies of the moment, the need to stamp out any potential nucleus of Stalinist subversion. It is undeniable that subsequently the Yugoslav regime did generally pursue a policy of progressive, notable expansion of freedom.

  Everyone was silent about this tragedy and this disgrace: Yugoslavia for obvious reasons, the Soviet Union and its satellites – while throwing every possible slander at Tito – so as not to draw attention to its own camps, the West so as not to weaken Tito in his revolt against Stalin, and Italy because, as usual, the country had other things on its mind, as Giacomo Noventa says in a poem of his. In the meantime the Monfalconesi resisted, in Stalin’s name. Those who some years later returned to Monfalcone found themselves, as Communists, open to intimidation and sometimes aggression from Italian ultranationalists. The police regarded them with suspicion, while the Italian Communist Party sought to sweep them under the carpet because with their unfailing loyalty they were unwanted evidence of the party’s one-time Stalinist and anti-Titoist policy, which was now a source of shame and embarrassment. During their absence some of the homes of the survivors of Goli Otok had been assigned to Istrian refugees who had lost everything with the Yugoslav occupation – a harsh symbol of a two-fold, double-crossed exile.

  Thus these people found themselves always on the wrong side at the wro
ng time, out of place in History and in politics, fighting – with indelible dignity and courage – for a cause which, had it prevailed, would have seen the birth of many more slave-camps in the world, created to crush free men like themselves. To pluck this bloody footnote of world history from oblivion means saving the moral inheritance of that strength and the spirit of sacrifice that allowed the Monfalconesi and their companions in misfortune to resist annihilation, even if that resistance came from faith in a cause that was worse than the cause that persecuted them. This moral inheritance ought to be garnered up even by those who did not march behind the Monfalconesi’s banner; it would be terrible if, when faith in “the god that failed” collapsed, those human qualities were to disappear with it – dedication to a public good, loyalty, courage – qualities which that very faith had helped to forge. No one sings “Tito – Partija!” any longer; but on the other hand someone, on leave from the war in Slavonia or Bosnia, recounts horrors so much worse than those of Goli Otok, while the brochures are still applied, like sticking plasters on sores, all over the surface of the world.

  Lubenizze is high above the sea and often bears the brunt of a powerful Bora; it is almost deserted and among the inhabited houses, surrounded by rubble and unsafe walls, elderly women predominate. Rosarija lives in a neat little house in the midst of the ruins of other, dilapidated, homes. She lives alone; every now and then a sister comes from Cherso with a little something, to supplement her paltry pension. On the walls there are many photographs of her father, who died very old not many years ago, and who always lived with her when he was not at sea; together with the precise nomenclature and chronology of the village’s clergy, he is the only object in her life and her memories.