Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (2 page)

Born in Hobart Town, in Tasmania, on April 10, 1910. If you say so. Widowed—gross mistake. Married. Marriage is indissoluble, it doesn’t give a damn about death, yours or mine. Usual occupation, none—actually yes, in fact, convict. And interrogee. Has held several jobs in the past. In Australia appears to have worked as a turner, then as a typographer at the printing office of the Communist Party in Annandale, Sydney, and as a journalist for
Il Risveglio
and
La Riscossa
in the same city. A member of the Anti-Fascist League of Sydney since 1928 and the Matteotti Circle of Melbourne, a militant activist, involved in the Russell Street riots in Melbourne in 1929 and those in Townsville in 1931. Deported from Australia in 1932, he returned to Italy, where earlier as a boy he had lived with his father, between the end of the First World War and the advent of Fascism. How satisfied you seem to be, reading all this, Doctor, you’d think it was your work, you aren’t even aware of those erasures and touch-ups.

Thanks to you, not to me; I’m somewhat inept when it comes to using that contraption, with all those keys, and if they hadn’t told me that it’s called a PC, like that other one, the Party, I wouldn’t even have tried it. Computer psychotherapy, new technological treatments for mental disorders. It’s so much easier to break into a file cabinet this way. All it takes is a couple of key strokes, instead of all that wheedling to distract the dragon and steal the treasure, and it’s you who step into that file, into your life, and rewrite or reinvent it however you like.—Well, just a few modifications to dates and places plus a disguised name or two, modest alterations, no sense in overdoing it, then too I wouldn’t even have been capable of it. Anyway I don’t have many objections to that chart of mine. So then, where were we ...

Worked for a time as a clerk in the Monfalcone shipyard and at the Sidarma shipping company. Fired after being arrested for propaganda and anti-Fascist activities. Activist in the underground Communist Party. Arrested a number of times. Confirmed. Took part in the war in Spain. A soldier in Yugoslavia; after September 8, a partisan. Deported to Dachau. In 1947, emigrated to Yugoslavia along with two thousand “Monfalconesi” who went there to construct socialism. Worked in the Fiume shipyards.

After the split between Tito and Stalin, was arrested by the Yugoslavians as a Cominform supporter and deported in 1949 to the Gulag of Goli Otok, the Naked or Bald Island in the Gulf of Quarnero. Like the others, was subjected to bestial, back-breaking labour, torture and cruelty. His delirious disorders and pronounced delusions of persecution likely date back to that time. I’d like to see you, Dr. Ulcigrai, after undergoing that kind of treatment, Dachau and Goli Otok, a double dose of intensive therapy. Next of kin to be notified, none. That’s right, none. Apart from everything else, it would be risky if anyone were to be notified about me—sooner or later somebody is liable to snitch, maybe convinced he’s doing the right thing because they told him you’re an enemy of the people, a traitor.

Emigrated to Australia in 1951. An exceptionally strong constitution. Scarring from osseous tuberculosis contracted at Dachau. Other scars on various parts of the body. A mythomaniac tendency to exaggerate his misfortunes. Easy to say, for someone who hasn’t been inside for even a day. Paranoid thoughts—right, after having been in all the Lagers in the world I have a mania about thinking they’re out to get me. Obsessed by deportation to Goli Otok at the hands of the Yugoslavians in 1949. Maybe you’re wondering about the reason for this obsession, another brilliant rhetorical question ...

Still, I like those rhetorical questions—it must have been Reverend Blunt who told me that’s what they’re called—because they teach you that questions never have an answer, unless you already have one in mind and state it yourself, as you often do, putting words in my mouth, but then it’s pointless to bother asking. Though perhaps not, it’s good to hear someone answer what you already know; it’s only your own voice you’re hearing, like when you’re shouting in the wind
up there on the ship’s mast. The shout is lost at sea, you’re the only one who heard what you shouted, but you’re not too sure it’s your voice, maybe a gust of wind brought you someone else’s, shouted from the top of another vessel that has vanished over the horizon, like the many I saw vanish in the years I spent at sea; the ship ploughs swiftly ahead, leaving behind voices rising from the deck and from the hold, birds that circle above the stern and are then left behind, lost. For a while you can still make them out, those voices, then it becomes an indistinct shrieking, the wind smacks you in the face and the wings of birds flap in your ears, voices, shouts, words, all one unruly, whipped-up swarm in your head.

Whomever it belongs to, a voice is nonetheless a solace after hours and hours of being alone in a dark, fetid cell or up there on the mast, amid heavy seas that surge up, impervious, cannonades of spray against walls of cloud. There’s quite a bit of shouting, alone or in a crowd—no, you’re never alone, someone’s always on your back—but there’s never anyone to answer when you ask for something you need. They all keep quiet then, like Sir George who remains silent when he receives my entreaties to forward my Petition for Pardon to London, after so many years in the penal colony down here.

I even mention Achilles and Agamemnon in there—as I read in that book I wrote, I bring them up saying that only kings and heroes like them require a Homer to sing their deeds—in order to make an impression on the governor and those at the Van Diemen’s Land Company. They should get it through their heads, and keep in mind, that not only can I handle an axe to repair the blade of an oar or cut a road through the forest—even better than many other convicts—but I can also wield a pen; it’s true that I set sail when I was fourteen years old on an English collier carrying coal
from Newcastle to Copenhagen and sailed for four years between London and the Baltic, but I’ve read my share of books—and even written them—and I know the ancients maybe even better than our chaplain Bobby Knopwood knows the Bible.

But with this lot it’s a waste of effort. The only books they’re capable of reading are the company ledgers, with those fine profits resulting from its monopoly, and the Admiralty’s registries. Comrade Blasich—Professor Blasich, who taught high school—was a swine and sent me to that hellhole Goli Otok on purpose I think, but at least, with his Greek and Latin, he was able to appreciate culture; besides, the Party has always admired intellectuals and taught us to admire them, even when it silenced them, maybe forever.—But what difference does it make now, why are you asking me about Blasich, that’s a different story, what do I have to do with it, let me catch my breath, don’t confuse me, I’m confused enough as it is, like everyone else, for that matter ...

Just let me finish, I was talking about Achilles and Agamemnon, who have a Homer conveniently at hand to sum up their exploits, while I have to do it all on my own, live, fight, lose and write. And it’s only fitting. It would be unseemly if they had to also start recapping the day—what with their battles, divine apparitions and the downfall of lineages and cities; it would be like requiring them to personally aid the wounded and bury the dead. They have slaves devoted to Aesculapius and gravediggers for that, just as they have stewards who cut their meat for dinner, and a bard who sings at the end of the meal and puts their lives in order, while they listen to him all sluggish and somnolent.

Right, somnolence is a regal quality. Things drift away, muffled as though under a blanket of snow; do whatever has to be done, even kill or die, but indifferently. The rich, the powerful, possess this
beatific unconcern, and we scum of the earth are here to shatter it for them, yet I too possess this sovereign virtue, and that’s why I’m still here, regardless of all the things that have fallen upon me, always, since I was a child, like the ceiling of the Hall of Knights, the walls and heavy portraits enveloped by flames in the fire at the Royal Palace of Christiansborg in Copenhagen, and there I am, indifferent to the blaze and the destruction, to the Black Tower that collapses with a roar, to the embers raining down on me; a child, but already regally lethargic amid the bedlam of the catastrophe, I who later reigned in Iceland for three weeks, indifferent as well to the ridiculous brevity of my reign, king only by virtue of this somnolence, which has protected my heart from the sharp hostility of things ... What’s that? No, Doctor, don’t delude yourself, those pills and medications of yours have nothing to do with it, this calm is my own doing—as for the rest, however, galley slave, common seaman, convict, sentenced to manage the sails, fell trees in the forest, split rocks, quarry sand in the icy sea, write and ...

And that rabble questions the opening sentence of my autobiography—which I wrote just for them, because Dr. Ross wanted it for the
Hobart Town Almanack.
That anonymous busybody, who takes pleasure in provoking me with messages that mimic me, when you bring us into the lab and let us fool around in front of those screens, never answers my questions, but merely repeats what I say. He repeated that sentence too and immediately found fault with it. Of course it isn’t true, nobody can recount his own life or know himself. A person doesn’t know what his voice sounds like; it’s others who recognize it and distinguish it. It’s you who know when it’s me speaking, just as I know you, all of you, them, not-me. How could Achilles recount his own wrath? That furious delirium, for him, is something that tightens your guts and makes your lips
tremble with rage, like when you vomit because the ship is pitching in the waves, or because you drank too much, like my Norah used to do at the Waterloo Inn, and elsewhere, when she was allowed to leave the penal colony—me too, okay, but she was my wife and the only way to show my respect for her in front of all those people who snickered in the tavern, since by now they knew how it would end up once she began drinking, was to get drunk along with her. To have and to hold, for better or for worse, till death do us part, that was our course, the course we travelled together, a man and a woman in chains. But when I put that mob in its place, I couldn’t really say if I was a man fighting for his honour, standing up to misfortune’s unspeakable indecency, or just a drunken sot who fails to finish his sentences and tries to answer in kind to the louts who deride him and bow to him, calling him King of Iceland.

Yes, Doctor, we’ll talk about that Iceland story, of course I want to talk about it, the best story of my life. I see that it’s of great interest, there are many people, even on that monitor of yours, who want to hear it and perhaps retell it in their own way. It’s when I read that story that I understood who I am—when I reread it, since I also wrote it. I know, Hooker wrote it too, the great scientist who was part of the expedition and who honoured me with his friendship, even though, to tell the whole truth, he bungled the passages about my exploits a bit and falsified the story of that great revolution—they all falsify the revolution, tarnishing with their spite and lies those who tried to liberate the world. That’s why I had to write the true story of those events myself, my own story—but all in good time, Iceland too, let’s not tangle up the threads, which are already too entwined. I do my best, but it’s difficult to keep a multitude of things in order.

Even I don’t always understand what happens to me and what goes through my mind, though I have to continually take up my pen
to rectify the inaccuracies and lies written about me by everyone, from that unknown who took it upon himself to reprint my book on the Christian religion as a religion of nature, adding a slanderous biography of me in his own hand, to those venomous articles, all false, that appeared in
Borba
, in
La Voce del Popolo
, and who knows where else. I know, later they had second thoughts, they all change their mind when it’s too late. But meanwhile ... Lies about me, about us. That we were Stalin’s agents, or Fascists in disguise, and that it wasn’t the Party which sent us to Yugoslavia, which told us and made us repeat that Tito was a traitor to the revolution, that he had sold out to the West. And when I came back from Goli Otok, many comrades acted as if nothing had happened; on the contrary, they conspired so that no one, at least in our area, would give me a shred of work, and so I went down there, I came back down here, to the other side of the globe, to my Tasmania. It was also called Van Diemen’s Land, but earlier on, at another time.

At least I think so. I’m not sure, even though I sorted out the events and chronologies, that is, although I wrote and now retell and repeat the true and faithful story of my life as I write it or dictate it to this recorder, when we talk together. Naturally all of you will then capture it in your net and transcribe it however you want on those small screens of yours, in fact I thank you for this URL that you assigned me. I don’t really know what that acronym means, but I like the word
site.
“Three sailors go to Egypt / oh what a fine site / they go to see ...” Do you know that song? It was sung in our region once. If you want, I’ll sing it for you, so you can record it. Of course later you’ll write whatever you want, however you want; when I press the keys like you taught me and read or listen to it again, I always discover new things. No, it doesn’t bother me, don’t worry. In fact, as far as I’m concerned ...

It doesn’t matter so much if I’m unable to see it, my life, just as I can’t see myself while I drank and ranted in the tavern, at the Waterloo Inn. When I write, and even now when I think back on it, I hear a kind of buzzing, blathered words that I can barely understand, gnats droning around a table lamp, that I have to continually swat away with my hand, so as not to lose the thread.

It’s nothing new, right? That too is written on the chart. Hears voices that repeat what he’s thinking. It’s true, I hear them. And you don’t, Doctor. Stereotypical hallucinations. Delusion disorders. It doesn’t upset me, I’m used to insults. Displays—I display—a lively intelligence, but with an evident ideo-affective dissociation that disturbs his spatio-temporal orientation, mental images that he fails to place in the context of his own existential experience but tends to elaborate in a delirious fiction. He is not at all reluctant to recount it, either orally, on the recorder, or in writing; sometimes even on the computer, which he manages to use a little, with some help, along with the others during the computer psychotherapy sessions. He seems convinced that he is still in Australia, and above all that he is the clone of a certain Jorgen Jorgensen, a deported adventurer who died in Tasmania in the mid-nineteenth century, whose autobiography he sometimes says he read and sometimes claims he wrote—as though you couldn’t write and then read the same book, what an idea!