Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (18 page)

“At dawn both sides perceived the fatal and cureless error,” but we only perceived it later on, after many dawns. Maybe only down here at Battery Point, upon hearing those words, Nothing important happened. It’s always too late. “And for three whole days they lamented and rent their hair, they and the Doliones. Then three times round his tomb they paced in armour of bronze and performed funeral rites and celebrated games, as was meet, upon the meadow-plain, where even now rises the mound of his grave to be seen by men of a later day.” The red flag parades down La
Rambla in Barcelona before leaving Spain—November 15, 1938, I remember it perfectly, your pills work—glory is defeat, exiting the scene.

I know, afterwards something did happen. Those names denounced as dangerous, as spies, traitors, opportunists, deviationists reappear honoured on bronze plaques and they too, the brothers whom we brought down and who brought us down, shake our hand fraternally, because the night in which the powerful enemy lay in wait was long and dark and it was so easy, in that darkness, to attack each other blindly. Now everything is fine, everyone rehabilitated—rehabilitated of the world unite, no, scatter before it’s too late.

ON THE HIGH SEAS
, when you encounter the Flying Dutchman and shipwreck is inevitable, tradition has it that the sailor, to save himself, grabs on to the figurehead. Eurydice doesn’t turn around, floating in the turbulent waters she stares astonished and aloof at the emptiness of the sky, the sea, not at Orpheus clinging to her skirts. So many Eurydices among the figureheads, bosom appearing and disappearing in the peplum, in the darkness; the dark depths of the waters await them. Clinging to her, I was saved. I would have liked to bring her home with me, like so many sailors do, maybe place her on my grave, even though the priests grumble and interfere, because they don’t want those half-naked women on hallowed ground. The sea brought many figureheads back to shore, but not Maria. Or rather, yes, it brought her back too, but after a very long journey across all the oceans, to the ends of the earth, down here, Doctor, a voyage that corrodes and consumes day after day, and by the time you arrive, you’re destroyed.

In Iceland too it’s nighttime six months out of the year and the sea is dark. When Sir Joseph spoke to me about Iceland again—I was still a prisoner on parole at the Spread Eagle Inn, after the
Admiral Juhl
affair—I showed I knew something about it. I am Danish, after
all, that island I was going to present him with was ours. Shortly afterwards I even wrote him a report on how to improve the Icelanders’ conditions, suggesting that he annex Iceland to England. In order to protect the Icelanders—who, I maintain with certainty, desire nothing more than to become British subjects, though they don’t dare show it for fear of the Danes—it would be advisable to impose the annexation by force. Whereas, in fact, it would be a free, enthusiastic choice on the part of the people, as in Czechoslovakia in 1948. Iceland, moreover, would be an excellent base for maritime trading, a valuable fulcrum against the Napoleonic blockade.

I immediately link up with Savignac and Phelps, two merchants who join the Icelandic expedition, supplying the
Clarence
with a cargo insured for a thousand guineas and a plan to sell food to the starving Icelanders and buy quantities of tallow cheaply, to be resold at a profit. In the library of the Royal Society I found a few Nordic things, just to refresh my memory; even when I described the blazing Christiansborg Palace to Sir Joseph, I recited the words written by a poet. It makes sense, I remembered them better than what I had witnessed, not only because I had just read them but also because in general I remember words better than things, in fact, I remember only words, but those I recall quite well, even when I no longer remember what they mean.

THAT STORY
about being king of Iceland, however, is hogwash, good only for the drunks at the Waterloo Inn who enjoyed bowing to me and calling me that. They spread it around to discredit me, to nail me down—it’s so easy to nail a man, just one small initial lie or even just one true thing, isolated from the rest, a piece of a man’s life without that whole life, which out of context that way is more untrue than a lie, and that unfortunate guy is screwed.

But I’m one of the few whom they couldn’t manage to trap. They thought they let me rot forever in Port Arthur, for example, and instead here I am. Now they’re the ones who are dead, so sure of having thrown me in that communal grave in Hobart Town, where now there’s that park not far from the bookstore where I found my autobiography. People stroll through that park—I go there too, Doctor, on the afternoons I’m allowed out, when you think I’m out walking here in Barcola or in Miramare. Here, so to speak; it’s you who think so and all the better for me, a free bird on the loose, whom everyone thinks they’ve put in a trap. Captain Jones thought so too, after the three weeks of my Icelandic reign, when he was bringing me back to Liverpool on the
Orion
, in chains—in the end they had to remove them soon enough, we were still in sight of
Cape Reykjanes, because with that sudden storm, if they hadn’t untied me and put me on the bridge to steer the ship, we would all have smashed on the rocks of Fuglasker.

Nevertheless, in Iceland, I never dreamed of proclaiming myself king. We Jorgensen, His Excellency the Protector of Iceland, Commander-in-Chief by Sea and Land, my second proclamation, that of July 11, states. That’s right, July 11, 1809, it’s pointless for you to waste time checking it, no one knows it better than me. I did it—and I’m proud of it—for those poor Icelanders. They were starving to death by the dozens, vanishing into the darkness like flakes of snow, and before dying they were covered by pustules, their skin flaked off like fish flung up on the shore, their legs all swollen. In those times of war and blockades on the seas, nothing could get through to the island and, as if this weren’t enough, the Danish governor, that Count Trampe—who didn’t even have time to stop snuffling and belching when I deposed and arrested him, seizing him by the scruff of the neck as he lay on his sofa, where he was snoring loudly, half drunk, and flinging him into the outer room—that scoundrel Count Trampe prohibited the sale of a little wheat to the famished population at less than twenty-two dollars a barrel, so that almost no one could afford to buy even a handful and they continued to die. One of the first things that proclamation of mine declares, in fact, is that the price of wheat be fixed subject to our, that is my, unappealable decision.

True revolution liberates the world. It’s also what makes the revolution a deception, causing it to go to the dogs, because we want to liberate everyone, even our blackshirt brothers, while all they want to do is lock us up. But we also forced too many people, our own people, to see the rising sun in stripes ...

When the
Clarence
, which left London on December 29,
approached Iceland, no sun could be seen in the Arctic night, but the aurora borealis streaked the sky with iridescent lights, scarlet banners unfurled in a wind of infinite space, verdant springtimes bloomed in the dark; and I believed in the sun that was supposed to rise for everyone and that I was bringing to those rachitic starving wretches pockmarked by St. Anthony’s fire. I didn’t see the sun in Dachau either, with or without stripes; I saw only the darkness of death, but I never doubted, in that Arctic night of the world, that the sun would reappear. Maybe I wouldn’t see it, I thought, but I knew that it had only dropped below the horizon, like it does, and that it would reappear, as I had seen it rise again in the east after the death of so many friends and comrades. Now I no longer know where to look, where east and west are—it’s as if not only the sun has disappeared but also the horizon.

When the
Clarence
was unable to enter the bay of Reykjavík, however, by God did I know where east and west were, did I discern which direction the wind would come from and make out the shoals and rocks just below the water. I was Jorgen Jorgensen, His Majesty’s best sailor, and I found myself on the bridge almost without realizing it, next to the captain who looked away embarrassedly. I shouted orders to men I couldn’t even see, buried under towering waves that crashed over them; without me they would all have been smashed to smithereens on the Vestmannaeyjar, the first islands in those parts to be bathed in human blood, in the dark night of time, when Ingólfur Arnarson, the first Viking, sailed toward Iceland.

Ash tree of the lineage, says the skald, master of the sword. Jorgen like Ingólfur, the man who came to bring life to the island of fire and ice, the bear brought by the ice floes, of which the saga tells, the king who came from the sea. So sang the ode that Magnus Finnusen, the poet, wrote months afterwards for me, when
I returned to Iceland for a second time and liberated the Icelandic people and revived the Althing, the assembly of free Vikings who in past centuries met together once a year, on the Thursday of every tenth week in summer, to determine the law and resolve disputes, to establish how much a murderer had to pay to compensate the family of a slain man.

I had time to read it, that ode, but not he to recite it, because three weeks later, on the day set aside to pay honour to me, Captain Jones, who arrived from London on the
Orion
, put me in chains, and so Magnus Finnusen changed his composition a little here and there and dedicated it to him, describing me in the poem as a tyrant and insurrectionist, Vidimus seditionis horribilem daemonem omnia abruere. It’s not surprising, it’s not the first time a hero of the people has been labelled a traitor.

Finnusen spun it out, in his ode; that’s what the skalds in ancient times did, he said, or the authors of the sagas, I don’t remember anymore, however all you have to do is go and look in the autobiography, where I include his ode written first for me and then altered and adapted to Captain Jones, my jailer. That long poem was suitable for both of us, however. Of course Magnus went on at length about those ancient things, but he was very careful not to mention the people who were starving to death, because when they took down my flag, the blue flag with the three white stockfish that I had created for my liberated Iceland, and raised the Danish flag once again, the price of wheat rose along with it, and people started dying again.

In any case I managed to bring the ship into the bay, avoiding those rocks just under the water that the fog obscured. The clouds were torn here and there, rifts through which a very faint light rained down. White birds covered the dark cliffs like snow and rose
up in flight, frightened by the ship—a snowfall that swirled thick and fast in the air and the land turned dark again.

The boat approached us when we were in the middle of the bay, in calm waters—broad, sunken faces under filthy fur hats, rheumy eyes, beards hacked with a knife, they stretched out their hands looking up with the moist eyes of a dog. I gave them some hardtack; one of them grabbed my hand with a glove that covered only his palm and the back of his hand, I shook those dirty fingers.

This story too they took away from me. Upon the return to London—the second return, when it was all over—taking advantage of the fact that I had been thrown in jail in Toothill Fields on charges of having left England without permission, breaking my word of honour, they printed not my book but those of Hooker and Mackenzie, which recount the Icelandic revolution in their own way. They had disposed of my manuscript, so I had to rewrite it and meanwhile the other books had already been published. Nearly identical to mine.

Even Magnus Finnusen, who three weeks earlier had been my bard, altered the ending of his ode, when I was deposed and arrested. Read it, Doctor—it’s even mentioned in the extensive book by that Dan Sprod—Vidimus seditionis horribilem daemonem, that would be me, armis succintum omnia abruere, atrum vexillum erexit dicens se pacem et libertatem adferre. What do you think of this Latin, Comrade Professor Blasich from the Normal School of Pisa and from the headquarters on Via Madonnina, you didn’t expect this Latin from up there, did you? And yet Latin was studied at the school in Bessastadir, along with Greek, Hebrew and theology. I immediately allocated a thousand dollars for the requirements of that glorious ancient school, with its venerable volumes, full of ancient stories that ended badly, and the Icelandic Bible—a thousand real
dollars, taken from the Danish officials whom I deposed and forced to exchange that money for my pale blue banknotes, newly printed by my government along with my proclamations. I myself was the headmaster of that school, along with Bishop Videlinus and Provost Magnussen; I signed the decree for my appointment, and I knew what my responsibilities were.

All those books in the venerable library of Bessastadir tell stories that ended badly, dragons that futilely guard cursed treasures and are slaughtered, but gold is as fatal as the fleece and what happens to the hero who kills its guardian is worse than what happens to Jason; he is pure and invincible yet he will fall, treacherously betrayed, and his blood will call forth other blood, like the revolution—the reflux of blood strangles the lineage, the red kerchief constricts the throat, princesses are trampled by white horses. In those unchanging tales, the world, men and the gods run up against a great destructive conflagration in the end, so how could I expect my situation to be the only one to end well? All stories end up on the pyre ...

LET THEM SAY
what they want, about me and my revolution; lies and denigration are what the revolutionary gets in return. But who is it now, hiding behind a pseudonym, dragging out that deposition of Captain Liston, which maintains that it was he who disarmed the guards of the Danish governor in Reykjavík, Count Trampe? We had just arrived from London the second time, on the
Margaret and Ann.
It was a Sunday in June, a low, wan sun dripped from the sky like blood from the pelt of an animal skinned and hung out to dry. I wanted to press the governor to proclaim free trade and thereby allow a little wheat to be sold to the spent Icelandic population at a reasonable price.