Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (13 page)

Fifty blacks and scores of kangaroos left lying on the ground; no one is to blame—Reverend Knopwood says—these things unfortunately happen when we don’t know each other well and don’t yet understand one another, in truth anyone would have been frightened hearing those black, naked, greased men shouting like lunatics; it’s human to think the worst and think about defending oneself.

Even the Reverend shoots. At the black swans, because he is avid for their meat and gorges himself on it as much as he can,
even though he complains that they have a fishy taste and has asked Dr. Brown if, as a man of science, he can come up with a way to remedy this drawback. The swans, shot in the water, list like a vessel assailed by a cannon, slowly they keel over, flap their wings, then roll over on their side. The long neck uncoils like a snake, the vitreous eye is frozen forever in an inane, terrified malevolence; if one of them is snatched and pulled under by a fish that is quicker than the boat, Reverend Knopwood, red and ravenous, becomes furious.

Black swans, kangaroos of the world, unite! The Anti-Fascist League, which Frank Carmagnola founded in Sydney in 1926, numbered about three hundred members in the city; two years later, just back from Italy, I too worked hard turning out
Il Risveglio
in the Communist Party’s printing office. The Party sent me here and there throughout half of Australia. Even to Melbourne, to help establish the Matteotti Club, which brought all the anti-Fascists together. We gave Battistessa and the other Fascist squad members who came to wreck it a good trouncing too. And on Russell Street, at Temperance Hall, two years later, we soundly thrashed all those ruffian Blackshirts who were celebrating the anniversary of the march on Rome. It was one of the few times, otherwise I was almost always on the receiving end.

Thank you, Doctor, a little water is just what I needed. You’re thirsty too, I see. In any case, as long as it’s those others who give it to you, the foes and scoundrels, if you have guts you can take it. The worst is when it’s your own who toss you into the snakepit, and after a while you no longer know if they’re your own or if they’re the bastards whom you and your side have always tried to wipe out. And after a while longer, you don’t even know if you too are one of your own or if you’ve become one of them. That’s why after Goli Otok it’s no longer clear which ones are our own ... And me? Am I
the one who brought the convicts in chains ashore in Hobart Town, on the
Lady Nelson
, or the one who came to the same port on the
Woodman
with his own feet shackled?—Okay, it’s true, I found a ruse to get them off, I already told you. In any event, though my ankles were less livid, I was still a man with a noose around his neck; often I didn’t remember having it and it almost seemed like a foulard, but if they suddenly got it into their heads, they could give it a tug at any time and put an end to it, I was still a man sentenced to death leniently granted forced labour for life, or rather a dead man forced to remain on shore, rejected by Charon’s boat. And to think that, many years earlier when I left Hobart Town for London on the
Alexander
, I wondered if I would ever see it again ...

“
DEAR JORGEN
, a previous letter of mine went unanswered and another has been returned to me, but I am hoping that this one will reach you. A secretary of Mr. Jermyn has been kind enough to see to it that it is delivered to you, should you have changed your address again in the meantime. But since ...”—Where on earth did this letter come from, was it you who gave her the address? How could you take the liberty, what are you trying to do, create a psychodrama? Aside from the fact that I don’t believe it’s from Marie, it’s not her style—It must be a forgery by one of my biographers, itching to add a little romantic pap. I had decided not to say a word about this affair, in fact I’m surprised to have mentioned it in the autobiography. Then too, is there ever a reason why people can’t manage to stay together, to go to sleep and awaken as one, to share the evening and the morning? Go ahead embellish it and sneer all you want; you, Doctor, not being a seaman, can’t understand. On ships, with no women and no love, you forget about happiness, about the impossibility of being happy, the shame of it. Jason, on the
Argo
, has only his companions, no woman. Sure, Atalanta, but she was making it with Meleager, she doesn’t exist for Jason, nor does he for her, it’s not an issue. Jason quickly walks out on women—Hypsipyle
remains in Lemnos, pregnant in fact, while he clears out, and this almost always happens. It’s not by chance that the one time he takes a woman with him, Medea, it spells endless trouble, especially for her. I don’t want to ruin any woman, that’s why I fled, even before things really got started. Once you start, everything is already lost.

I liked to write to her, yes, and also to receive her letters, I found this one in the pocket of my frayed jacket—the uniform of Protector of Iceland, I wore it not to give myself airs but because I didn’t have any others, after they took me by force from Reykjavík to London, and I had to pawn even my clothes with a moneylender from Stepney to pay for that hole-in-the-wall at the Spread Eagle Inn, but I never gave away that uniform. Because, because ... Things happen and that’s that. Or they don’t happen.

Marie Philippina Frazer, eighteen years old. I met her in London, through Sir Joseph Banks. Yes, I asked her to marry me. Naturally I expected a refusal from that pure and pious angel, so much younger than me, and above all I expected that a gentleman and scientist like her father, a celebrated maker of mathematical instruments, would make me pay for such impudence. How can a man hand over a young girl, a chaste virgin, to a seaman accustomed to all the depravity of the hold and the dregs of society—it’s rape, infamy, disgraceful parents who get rid of a daughter, after keeping her shut up at home, pure and intact as a flower, only to have some swine deflower her with the blessing of the king and of God, pimps more vile than those who keep the list of hookers supplied in Covent Garden, delighting in violating and sullying what is immaculate.

Ah, the filth of life, the stink of armpits and heart—it’s fear that secretes that smelly sweat, that sour breath in the mouth, how shameful a morning kiss after a night away. I know, Maria, I mean Marie, knew neither fear nor disgust, she wasn’t afraid of the price
to be paid in misery and filth—for her love was everything, to desire, grow old and decline together, even twisting and turning in bed without being able to sleep, after too many nights without kisses—and yet one flesh, glorious though sagging, consumed together—

Of course, if at the time—now ... but how does one choose between love and apprehension, the solitary vice of a sailor without a woman, the secret vice known to all—Filthiness borne alone is easier, it’s less risky than living and finding happiness as a couple. Marie is behind the door, but I don’t open it, I turn back without making a sound. So no one will hear those steps, that ignominious flight when faced with the only true adventure. Fleeing, deserting.

I left the following morning—how could I have met her gaze, after drawing my hand back from the handle of that door? I left her a letter. I imagine her, as she opens and reads it—her eyes wide, a figurehead who perceives the inescapable catastrophe, Eurydice who sees Orpheus turn and abandon her forever to the void ... what a nice reproduction of Eurydice this is, with those upturned eyes in which the shipwreck can be read ... It’s at the Portsmouth Naval Museum, it says here. Who knows who sent it to me here, and why, some malicious person who wants to make me remember, make me suffer ...

“
STRANGER
, why stay ye so long outside our towers?”—Easy for Comrade Professor Blasich to make fun of me, before sending me off to die or worse, when I spoke to him about Maria, about that encounter, there in Fiume, on that summer day. A sticky summer, the heat oozed from a hazy sky that melted like asphalt in the streets. I had just returned from Australia, I looked around under the opaque sun, the murky eye of a squinting sky. I saw ships docked in front of the crude, assorted structures along the shore, buildings caked with pannonic mud facing an oily sea that extended to the ends of the earth. I didn’t know which way to go and it was Maria, coming down the street and seeing me so uncertain, who asked me where I wanted to go and showed me the way to Angheben Street.

She smiled at me, a smile stronger than destiny. I had arrived. That smile dissolved the close air like a fresh wind, a white daisy opening in a meadow that up till now was brown. “Stranger, why stay ye so long outside our towers?”—Blasich repeated the line, reciting his beloved
Argonautics
. In poems, Tore, he told me, the stranger always meets good fortune; when the sea tosses him on an unknown, hostile shore, there is always a Nausicaa or a Hypsipyle or a Medea for the Ulysses or Jason of the day. In Lemnos, Jason, as usual, doesn’t
know what to do, he remains uncertain at the entrance to the city and it is Hypsipyle who, blushing, addresses him and leads him to the palace, as Maria led you to ... what was the name of the street? oh yes, Angheben, who knows what it’s called today Maybe now that you’re going back to Fiume you’ll find her again, your Maria, whom you surely abandoned there that time, like always. She’ll make a fine mother, and a fine mother, remember Lenin’s words, is worth more than a People’s Commissar. Who knows how she’ll smile at you, this Maria of yours, what a welcome she’ll give you. “Do ye therefore stay and settle with us; and shouldst thou desire to dwell here, and this finds favour with thee, assuredly thou shalt have the prerogative of my father Thoas; and I deem that thou wilt not scorn our land at all; for it is deepsoiled beyond all other islands that lie in the Aegaean sea.”

No, I did not abandon her, I did not run away. I don’t know who, what inner voice, is insinuating this cowardly story about my running away—this hateful voice that impersonates me, as if the words were coming from my mouth, but only to falsify my life. If only I could make it shut up—It wouldn’t be you, would it, Doctor? Perhaps you’re a ventriloquist, and this entire story sucking me into its vortex is yours, it’s you who’s telling it, still, you must be quite skilled at making others say what you want, without their even being aware of it. An old policemen’s trick: they talk, they make you repeat what they say and they transcribe it, then you sign it and you find that those words of theirs came from your lips ...

I did not run away. How could such an idea have occurred to me, after Maria and I had gone swimming together in those bays, at I
i
i at Ika at Laurana, or on the islands in the Quarnero, Cherso, Canidole, the Levrera, San Pietro in Nembi with its cross-currented sea so declaimed by my father, the beach of Miholaš
ica—the
scent of sage, myrtle and pine, the blaze of oleanders, the incessant chirping of cicadas, hours as unhurried as the tides, a burning bush of summer and of love. In Oriule, large brown and gold spiders weave enormous webs, fragile yet immortal. Maria comes out of the water once, many times; her foot leaves its imprint on the sand and the surf erases its mark.

I had been back in Europe for a short time, expelled from Australia. Expelled, yes, in 1932, for having participated—along with Frank Carmagnola and Tom Saviane—in a demonstration against Mario Melano, the Italian consul in Townsville and a Fascist: we showed him and his acolytes a thing or two. As a result the Australian government shut down our two newspapers,
La Riscossa
and
L’Avanguardia Libertaria
, and deported a number of us, including me. And so I came back. I disembarked in Fiume, where a cousin of my father had offered to put me up at her house, on Angheben Street—later, in 1947, when I returned there with the others from Monfalcone, it was called Zagreba
ka Ulica and they had carried off everything that second cousin of mine owned and thrown her out of the house. Thus she too went to Trieste, like thousands of Italians from Istria and Dalmatia, and was in a refugee camp at the Silos, where I too would end up—who could ever have imagined it at the time?—after countless shipwrecks and derailments.