Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (17 page)

What freedom, Doctor, not like in here! Yes, because we weren’t thinking about our own freedom, to get out of prison and go take a stroll, but about that of everyone, freedom too is yours only if it belongs to everybody. Megalomanias, you say, romantic national-popular delusions of grandeur from bygone days? Yes, stating them now, as I do for you, because it’s sad that none of you know and don’t remember anything anymore. But to achieve and experience them, as we did at one time ...

We never spoke about personal sorrows and difficulties, let alone in our letters home, so as not to give the censor who read them the satisfaction of delighting in those weaknesses. But mainly not to burden the families with our problems, not to make our destiny weigh heavily on a mother, a woman or children, who should live their own lives and not ours in chains. I had no one but I wasn’t aware of it, because I too was accustomed to not talking about sorrow and by never mentioning it I forgot about it.

Even being transferred was a sorrow, a farewell to your comrades. Ponza, Ventotene, Fossano, Procida, Civitavecchia, Pianosa,
Volterra, Piacenza—you go up one step after another, those prisons are stations of progress, you go up with your head held high, it’s our common journey, the Milky Way of our peregrination toward salvation. You stop at a hostel and if you can’t resume the journey you pass your knapsack to someone else.

YES, DOCTOR
, I lied as well. Well, lied—my autobiographer embellished things a little, as almost always happens when you write. I saw my autobiography in the back of that antiquarian bookstore on Salamanca Place—and I immediately read it with enthusiasm, it’s understandable. I hardly expected it to be a trite copy of real life. Otherwise why would I have read it, just to find out things I already knew? It was the rest that interested me.

It’s true that during the return journey from Hobart Town to London on the
Alexander
, once we rounded Cape Horn I headed directly for Rio de Janeiro, despite the scarcity of water and provisions on board, but I wasn’t the one who decided it, it’s the winds that drove me on that course. We sailed along the coast of Parama; brushwood and lichens amid the brackish muddy sludge, says the ship’s log. It takes little effort to run into a ship of Admiral Villeneuve’s Franco-Spanish fleet and seize it; with a lightning-swift manoeuvre that takes advantage of the only bit of wind, we approach quickly, leap over the side and board it before the Spaniards can fire off a single shot, sailors and soldiers surprised at their stations, not yet mustered for sword combat. The sabres rise and fall, they flash like rays of sunlight dancing on the water and deliver stabbing
blows against the ships’ broadsides. A Spanish officer in front of me, run through by a pike, falls slowly to the deck, opening his mouth and frantically gulping air.

The ship was sold in Santa Catharina. That’s right, I confirm. The port is teeming with slaves, their backs shiny and resinous, white eyes gleaming among red kerchiefs and filthy tatters. The red shawl, a flower blooming in the evening, full lips laughing. Now I seem to remember—for that matter, why would one write unless it’s because he forgets, and therefore to rediscover forgotten things? And even if I don’t remember having written it myself, this page that someone is now shoving under my nose, so vivid and lush ... I would like to see things this way, but—but yes, on the other hand, this must have been exactly how it was, the honeysuckle winding around the locked gates and white columns of a patio. Evening enveloped us, in that garden, in the green dusk that fell before darkening the streets, birds flew swift and grazing like arrows, stars emerged suddenly among the branches and plummeted down, enormous white cut flowers. Beyond the gates and on the facades of the buildings the light of the dying day, of oil lamps and candles resisted the advancing shadows, opening luminous gaps and rents, gleaming window slits, in the looming wall. In the garden however the darkness swallowed everything; a giant flower opened, a black corolla into which everything rushed headlong.

And that woman hiding behind the yellow flowers of the ipé tree, concealing her face and large slanted eyes from the light of the moon and that of the building’s windows which pursued her, like a harpoon pursues a fish to snatch it from the dark waters ... why is there nothing further written, what do I do, now, that rosy foot darts like a fish, disappears into the depths, and she too slides into a ravine of darkness, a black dew rests on those leaves and on those
flowers—hibiscus, white, violet and pink quaresmeiras, colourless in the night—a coconut, my head, opens, inside there is only darkness, which expands and swallows things up ...

What really happened that night, in that darkness? Nothing? What happens to a man is always too much, the hold jam-packed with things sinks to the bottom and down there you don’t stop and take inventory. The Admiralty’s records, in any case, can be trusted. So then, after stopping over in St. Helena, where the news of Austerlitz had just arrived, on June 26, 1806, the
Alexander
puts in at Gravesend, on the Thames.

I THINK IT WAS
Sir Joseph Banks, the distinguished scientist and explorer, president of the Royal Society, who sent me to Copenhagen—shortly after our arrival in London—on that mission that later led to all those accusations of betrayal that rained down on me: British spy for the Danes, a deserter who went from the British over to the enemy. It happens, when you are sent on a mission; maybe it’s even true, as far as—Who is it now?—“Even those whom the Party sent to Russia, for example, easily became deviationists, maybe even Fascist spies, like Gianni Vatta, Vattovaz, who handled connections with the Yugoslavian party and had done much to bring about agreement between Serbian comrades and Croatian comrades and then, when he went to Moscow to report and emphasized that the national problem of various fellow parties should not be underestimated, it came out that he was playing both sides and he disappeared forever in Siberia.”—However, mistakes can happen, like in Jarama when we fired on a group of our own men, because we didn’t know they had already taken that hill and we thought the Francoists were still there. Even the Party sometimes—

In Copenhagen, however, I didn’t betray anyone. Yes, I saw to it that I was received by the prime minister, Count Schimmelmann, I
presented a grandiose plan for Danish trading in the South Seas and asked that they give me a fleet for Otaheiti. But I was thinking of a Denmark allied with England, for the benefit of both, and therefore did not act wrongly toward Sir Joseph and his mission as at least two biographies, in fact, reveal—gentlemen of the Court, I present them as requisites of the defence—I sent him a confidential report, through Captain Durban who was leaving for London on the
Atrea
. I even openly defended, in discussion with Harbo, the chamberlain, the need, at that moment, for the English naval blockade against Denmark.—“Well, sometimes it’s necessary to defend distasteful acts of necessity, as we had to do with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, for example, true? Sad, revolting in fact, but inevitable.”—Everything, my dear friend, is inevitable after the fact. Even the duel with chamberlain Harbo, when he called me a traitor. With pistols, at ten paces. I experience a strange euphoria, I feel light, like when you’ve drunk a little too much but not really too much; death and its possibility are in the air, but like a faint humming. I let myself go with the flow of things, which know how they should go, and with my body, which knows what to do. I see the chamberlain’s large, flushed face, his mouth tensed into a grimace, his eyes lying in wait. Who knows how my mouth looks, I think, as I take aim; I try to see by moving my lips and opening and closing them a few times, I shoot. The chamberlain, hit in the arm, drops the pistol; after a while it’s all over, I’m much more shaken by the news that Captain Durban, instead of going to London, fled to Gothenburg with my confidential memorandum. Tell me, how was I a traitor?

Why have I had to continually defend myself against the charge of treason? Why this irreversible legacy, me, a traitor, an enemy of the people, a Danish spy, a British spy, an agent for the Cominform, for the West ... When, a little later on—after Denmark, an ally of
Napoleon, had declared war on England—I agreed to command the
Admiral Juhl
, a 170-ton, 28-gun brigantine, for nuisance operations against the British fleet, I did so, as I stated in London after being taken prisoner, with the intention of bringing the ship to surrender to His Majesty’s Navy.

What’s that? Of course we seized British ships on the Kattegat and defended ourselves when the
Sappho
gave us trouble, but I had to do it, for my sailors as well as for my family, so they wouldn’t face problems in Copenhagen. That’s why during the interrogation in London, after being taken prisoner, I asked that the
London Gazette
be sent to Copenhagen—the March 5, 1808, issue, that’s right—which reported news of the fighting, our fierce resistance, and described the pride with which, on the deck of the
Sappho
, I unfastened my sabre from my handsome blue uniform and surrendered it to Captain George Langford.

A fine ceremony, in any case. Thinking back on all those things, as I reread them, even the most tremendous become as insubstantial as soap bubbles, later however something must have happened, History scored me with its knife and I’m covered with burning scars. I’m the hodgepodge created afterwards, the disguised dinosaur, the memory cartridge reinserted but damaged—it’s understandable, we’re still at an imperfect stage of the art, a muddled precursor conceives too soon one who is born too late ...

NO, I DON’T REMEMBER
anything important happening in Barcelona, Comrade Luttmann said that time, walking with us at Battery Point and trying to look thoughtfully out to sea, where the old cannon that guarded the city once stood on the promontory, another dark, blind eye aimed at the world’s expanse. He had come to visit the Party’s organizations among the emigrants in Australia, especially the Giulians, who like me arrived after the Second World War, and it wasn’t a good idea to demoralize them—to demoralize us; I too had gone to that meeting, at least I think so, even though I was no longer a member, but, how can you say ... Nothing important for whom? Who is it that something actually happens to in an execution, the condemned man or the executioner who, after opening the trap door pressing the button or pulling the lever, goes home and helps his son with his homework without looking him in the eye right away? Maybe that time in Spain Comrade Luttmann put the blindfold over the wrong eye and aimed the machine gun on our fellow anarchists as well.
No pasarán
, they too shouted with us, and instead they passed and we opened the way to them, a platoon of one-eyed men with the good eye blindfolded, firing into that bunch, not realizing they were firing at their own. We mowed
down our ranks, communists against anarchists, socialists against communists, and made an opening for death. The Fascists love death,
Viva la muerte
, death loves a breach through which it can enter. The revolution is a testudo of overlapping shields, but if a shield slips and another cracks, the testudo groans and gives way, burying those who are under it; the enemy clambers up the walls and falls upon you, you can’t tell who’s a friend and who’s a foe under there and you strike out wildly, in all that dust and darkness you don’t need a blindfold to blind you. Even then I should have realized that the venture was unfavourable to the gods from the start and that we would return without the golden fleece, with only rags drenched with fraternal blood shed by a fratricidal or rather suicidal hand. From its origins the fleece was stained with sacred blood; that of Phrixus, the guest, killed by Eeta.

But on that PCI flag that Comrade Gallo handed over to the Fifth Regiment on September 18, 1936, in Madrid, there is also our own blood, and there is honour and shame for all, in that flag.—“But how can you possibly recognize brothers, yourselves, in the night?”—Ah, it’s you again, always eager to play with these new contraptions to bring up old stories. Which then, if the real Apollonius ... “The
Argo
pressed on, leaving the island called the Mount of Bears, after the fraternal hospitality shown by the Doliones and Cyzicus their king, who reigned over that land, and after exchanging gifts and pledges of peace. But when night came the rushing wind did not hold steadfast, but contrary blasts caught them and held them back till they again approached the hospitable Doliones. And they stepped ashore that same night; nor did anyone note with care that it was the same island; nor in the night did the Doliones clearly perceive that the heroes were returning; but they deemed that Pelasgian war-men of the Macrians had landed. Therefore they donned their
armour and raised their hands against them. And with clashing of ashen spears and shields they fell on each other, like the swift rush of fire which falls on dry brushwood and rears its crest. I too, I too ensnared by that fate no mortal may escape, on that same night in the battle with them.” With us, because they were our own, when we mowed them down like grass.

How can you see in the dark? The barricades burned on those May nights, the police of Catalonia’s red government fired and the FAI anarchists fired, everyone against everyone else, against the traitors of the libertarian revolution and against the traitors of unity of action. General Lister restores order in Aragon, the order is death.
Viva la muerte
, shout the advancing Francoists as we kill one another, maybe it’s true that OVRA and the Gestapo fomented discord, otherwise how could we have been so insane? In the dark you can’t see a thing and men attack each other indiscriminately. Later, with a little light, you see the truth, which is just a huge pile of corpses.

Yes, we were in the dark. Still, and this will be loudly trumpeted in the valley of Josaphat, we fought against darkness, even though we sometimes hit the wrong target, while they, the black and brown shirts, created the darkness that made us lose our way.