Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (10 page)

But it only happened to a few of us. Almost all of us remained more unbreakable than the stones we had to smash with a hammer and carry up and down all day—Every so often they fed one or another of us to the Ustashi, thrown in there at the end of the war, who took pleasure in tormenting the hated Communists once again,
this time by order of other Communists, and some men couldn’t take it. Antonio De Pol, for example, had been captain of the Fifth Regiment in Spain and had lost an arm there without giving up, but when two ex-Ustashi broke his other arm in Goli Otok and peed in his mouth, he couldn’t take it anymore, he climbed up a cliff and jumped off, crashing against the rocks.

As I said, I was already familiar with Goli Otok and Sveti Grgur, those two islands of death. I had passed near them from time to time as a boy, after we had gone back to Italy, with my father’s floozy; he never tired of revisiting those places of his childhood, those seas that he had vaunted in his shop in Hobart Town, displaying Brun’s painting. We would return with the boat full of dentexes, scorpion fish and even giltheads, which are the most wily ones, until they go into heat, then they swallow the first line as if all they wanted to do was get hooked and get it over with. I would begin to see the two islands, first Sveti Grgur and then Goli Otok, when we left the bay of Lopar, at Arbe, with the mistral. I watched Arbe fade away in the distance—I didn’t know, I couldn’t know, at the time, that by retreating in the pale blue sky it was advancing toward the future, a horrible future in which it too would become a hell like the other two islands, a Lager where the Italians would massacre Slovenians, Croatians, Jews, anti-Fascists, partisans, even children—In Hobart Town, Uncle Jure, who had emigrated a short time before my father, used to play angel-devil with me, a sheet of paper with a blue sky on one side and a red and black hell on the other, you think you’re holding that beautiful celestial blue in your hand and instead you suddenly find those dark flames ... But when we set out from Lopar, I didn’t think the paper could be turned over. The white sail would grow taut in the wind that swept across my face, from the stern I watched the wake, in the endless blue, and I would fall asleep.

Little good it did me to sail close-hauled. I would have been better off learning to spot bad weather before it’s too late to moor the boat, that way I wouldn’t have ended up under Ante Rastegorac who, even with his one eye, saw immediately where to strike in order to do the most harm. Better to live for the sea rather than for the Party. The thing is that they resemble one another—something vast and all-encompassing that always knows what must be done, even when you fall into the water in winter and the bora blinds and suffocates you with the foggy vapours of the fumarea. The Party too seemed like one of those violent storms that tomorrow will bring fair weather, so never mind if someone falls into the sea or gets thrown in. But then one day the Party vanished, overnight, as if all of a sudden a giant sponge had drained the entire sea, Adriatic and Austral, leaving litter and clots of mud, and all the boats stranded.

How can you go home again if the sea has been sucked down a vast drain that opened up beneath it, emptying it who knows where, into a void? The earth is arid and dead, but there won’t be another one, nor another heaven. Go back where, how? The
Argo
, fleeing Colchis with the stolen fleece, ends up in the Syrtis, from which there is no return. “For on every hand are shoals, on every hand masses of seaweed from the depths; and over them the light foam of the wave washes without noise.” The
Argo
has run aground, the fleece hangs crumpled; the heroes on the deck are breaking up like the old ship. Jason is silent, as always, at this point he can’t even focus his bewildered gaze on the sea, because there is no more sea.

“And sorrow seized them when they gazed on the mist and the levels of vast land stretching far like a mist and continuous into the distance.” Do you hear how beautiful the translation is? Yes, I always liked to read aloud, even in high school, when I was preparing for exams. Everyone has always tested me. “All the scene was possessed
by a dead calm,” the wind died down and in the Argonauts’ hearts perhaps the desire to return also died. How, where to return from Goli Otok? “Better were it,” Jason, having run aground, says, “to have perished in venturing some mighty deed.” Yes, to die in Guadalajara, in Dachau, in Colchis fighting the warriors who sprang from the dragon’s teeth, not in Goli Otok, strangled by the red kerchief that we had tied around our necks. For, as I gaze far around, on every side do I behold a sea of shoals ...

But with unshaken strength and untiring shoulders let us lift the ship up and bear her, on backs that are unflagging though flayed to the bone by the scourging of tireless tormentors—“And this report have I heard most truly; that ye, O mightiest far of the sons of kings, by your might and your valour over the desert sands of Libya raised high aloft on your shoulders the ship and all that ye brought therein, and bear her twelve days and nights alike.” The
Argo
, borne on their shoulders, crosses the desert and in the end reaches the sea once more, finds the way home again. Our ship, on the other hand, collapsed on top of us; we were left crushed under the keel. “Yet who could tell the pain and grief which they endured in that toil? Surely they were of the blood of the immortals, such a task did they take on them, constrained by necessity. ...” Oh, you too know and love this passage ... Yes, who can ever recount it? Certainly not a hallucinating mythomaniac with a tendency to exaggerate his own misfortunes, as you say, this is something quite different from a Nosological History ...

I LOVED THE SEA
more than women, before I understood that they are one and the same. But I only understood this later, much later than that night in London when, fleeing from that girl, I ended up running into a press gang that dragged me onto a scow on the Thames and from there on board a fine warship, the
Surprize.
Yes, I fled. It happens. Haven’t you ever been afraid? That body that is no longer yours, you don’t even recognize its odour, a sour sweat—you’re no longer in control, you can’t order yourself not to sweat, not to have that odour.

I like to give orders—also to obey, it’s all the same, it’s I who decide, even whether to submit to the Party, for example. You know what you have to do and you do it. But that night in London, after disembarking from the
Jane
, that night in that tavern with that girl, I didn’t know who was giving the orders and who was obeying. My body was there, remote, sweaty, chilled; I felt that when it came to love, even the five-minute variety, no one gives orders and no one decides. What do you do, with a girl like that, what do you say to her, who is it that makes the first move, what will it be like ... Clear out of there, cut and run, even brutally if she won’t take no for an answer, as soon as you turn the corner the fear, and shame, will
pass. I’ll be able to get a pint of cold beer somewhere, which I can’t seem to get down now, ah yes, beer, cold, frothy, you can feel your arms again, your legs; even the sweat is different, a good sweat. It’s a delight when the beer slides down your throat and into your belly, and when, soon afterwards, you go to take a piss, even your pecker is free and easy again, relaxed; every once in a while, who knows why, it makes your pants bulge, but that’s its business and you pay no attention to it, any more than when you belch, especially since it’s quick to settle back in place.

Of course, that time I didn’t get to drink any beer, the press gang grabbed me almost immediately, there in the alley, before I could duck into another tavern. But that’s not the point. What I find a lot more objectionable are those malicious stories insinuated by my biographers, more or less all of them—Clune, Stephenson, Davies, and now even that Dan Sprod, who thinks he’s so smart. It’s true that I wrote that I was the only one of my siblings not to be nursed by my mother, I went and checked, and so they had a great time with my not having been breast-fed, surely I don’t have to explain these obsessions to you, since they are common even in here ... Aside from the fact that I’m not the one who says that, it’s Thomas, in the
Adventures of Thomas Walter
—I wrote that novel in prison, in Newgate, even that pedantic biographer of mine says so, and I invented all of it—Oh well, all of it, no one ever invents anything, for that matter, and when one writes “I” ... yet how could one say “he” instead, which is an even greater lie than “I”? You don’t mean to tell me you’re talking to him now ... All right then, that time I did not make love, let them go ahead and write it. I like a biography that recounts everything you don’t do—Still you had to be there, that night, to understand ... that confusion, in the tavern and outside, the crowded streets, the shouts and brawls,
someone lying in the gutter, half dead, the peddlers passing nearby hawking honeyed fruitcake at the top of their lungs, people flocking to Mother Proctor’s Pews scuffling to get the best place from which to watch the hangings at Tyburn gallows, the roosters ripping each other to pieces in the cockfights at the Cockpit, the chained bear tearing the dogs limb from limb at the Bear Garden and those large tents with their monsters, those dazed brutes ... And in all this pandemonium, two lost, solitary creatures, me and you, a girl without a name, what should we have done if not flee, rather than uttering false words of love or faking loving gestures, even for five minutes? That night I fled, a deserter from the battlefield of love, savage like all battlefields. If only I had always fled like that, later on as well, perhaps now—later instead I was no longer able to flee, or abandon the flag—you should always have three or four of them, flags that is, if you hand over the right one to those in command, saying that you tore it away from the enemy in the dust of battle, you’ll even get a reward, and they’ll pay for your wine at the tavern besides ... but instead, look where the red flag ended up taking me, that flag forever in my grasp, a far cry from cut and run—

OH WELL
, even fleeing sometimes tricks you. If I hadn’t run away from the girl, I wouldn’t have run into the press gang and I wouldn’t have ended up in the Royal Navy. There it’s the cat-o’-nine-tails that’s in command, four dozen lashes even for a minor infraction, and with great solemnity. The commander orders the first officer to assemble the crew on deck, so they can watch the punishment, the first officer transmits the order to the master-at-arms, who summons the sailors. The officers are in full dress uniform. The guilty man, naked to the waist, is tied to an iron grate. The handle of the cat-o’-nine-tails is covered with a red cloth; the ropes, an inch thick, are knotted.

The man’s flesh contracts, twitches, sizzles and crackles under the force of the blows; his blood flows dark. All flesh is born to suffer, to end up in someone’s jaws. It’s fitting that tribute be paid to that suffering, since it is the reality of life, the majesty of its law. Flogging is hard work, after two dozen lashes the sailor can’t do it anymore and hands the cat-o’-nine-tails to someone else. The man being punished screams, but does not protest. When, some weeks later, two French frigates are encountered, those same sailors assembled on deck and their flogged companion will fight with the same dash, giving it their all.

The Admiralty’s regulations, including punishment with the cat-o’-nine-tails, are not questioned, just as the laws of winds and rains are not questioned. Nor those of hospitals. I understand, the reality principle. All you have to do is talk calmly and you’ll be all right ... Indeed. You won’t even experience the cat-o’-nine-tails on your back—True, once it happened to me too, but only that one time, what do you think. Do what they tell you, it matters little whether you’re shooting at the English from the
Admiral Juhl
or at the French from the
Surprize.

Splotches of blood are left on the deck, but they are quickly scrubbed away with a few buckets of water and some rags. At sea things are soon forgotten.

Later on, instead, that mania to discuss everything ... Maybe my father is to blame. Tore, he would say proudly, even when the Fascists threw me inside, you just don’t swallow unjust things. I remember when I read the Immigration Restriction Act—I had just learned to read, I understood little, but enough to be opposed to it. White Australia Policy, white Anglo-Saxon English-speaking Australia, out with blacks of all stripes. I understood at once that I too was and would always be black anywhere I went, not because of my mother’s ancient blood but because there are exiles everywhere, sooner or later you too become one.

Down there, down here, when they wanted to get rid of a miserable wretch they didn’t like, the law called for them to give him a dictation test in English, in a language that wasn’t his. A few wrong words were enough to make a man an outcast. Since that time, whenever they’ve grilled me, I felt like I was taking that dictation test, and that we men were schoolboys harassed by sadistic teachers. Even you people, here, do nothing but dictate to me and force me to repeat what you want to hear ... maybe you make me trip up on
purpose. Even when I went to school in Fiume, my teacher Miss Perich, later Perini, gave me low marks in dictation because, having just arrived from Australia, I made spelling errors. And later on too, there were many times when I didn’t know the language the jailers spoke to me and my replies were often incorrect. Really incorrect, that’s the tragedy, like when, in Fiume, I said that the Cominform’s resolution against Tito was just.

And so I wanted to change the law, the language and the grammar of the jailers. Revolution begins in your head, in the order, or rather disorder, of your thoughts, that turn everything, even you, upside down, replacing the harsh, false language of your tormentors—“With the risk that, unless you quickly learn another, you’ll end up stammering and botching the dictation. Then too you have to keep pace, no more spelling errors, or mistakes in grammar or syntax. It’s ridiculous to still believe in rules; the Tablets of the Law have been shattered, not by Moses’ wrath but for no reason, just for the sake of doing it. The world, out there—no, excuse me, inside here, there is no more out there, no beyond—has changed. No one flunks anymore. No more laws, just all the interpretations you want, if it itches, scratch it ... heads or tails as you please, it’s all justifiable”—And instead it is precisely these new rules that make poor wretches flunk. Break them, overturn them—revolution is necessary because it upends the world in your head; it turns the phony upside down, rightfully so, so that his clothes will fall down and reveal his private parts—“But after a while, if you don’t hold on firmly, the blood goes to your head as well, you get dizzy, you too find yourself with your legs in the air like the savages in the Antipodes ...”—Terra Australis Incognita, unknown like the entire earth. But you have to learn how to pick yourself up each time as if it were nothing, a graceful pirouette and the tumbler lands on his feet.