Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (21 page)

SING THE SWORD
, wield the sword. While I’m riding through this barren, fissured emptiness, Magnus Finnusen, as he promised me in Bessastadir, is composing his poem, the song of Jorgen, Protector of Iceland, master of the sword and ash tree of the lineage, the bear brought by the ice floes, the king who came from the sea with sword and scales. I want a proper poem and if necessary I’ll give him a hand, old Pistorius’s school is not unworthy of that of Bessastadir. A fine poem about my complete life—complete, therefore including my death.

Writing and performing one’s own death, like an actor who has studied his part. Then I will know who I am, since it’s death, the pyre, the grave, that tells the life story of a man, even to himself, more so than biographies and autobiographies. In Reykjavík I will prepare my funeral beer in any case, as solemn funeral rites require. The horses continue on, the future is a painted canvas and life tears it to shreds without regard. Maybe I’ll drink up that funeral beer of mine beforehand.

ON A FARM
, not far from the lava caves of Stefán Hellir, there is a pole of infamy, a post with the head of a horse. The farmer, a bony, scrofulous man, doesn’t remember whom it’s for. There are so many infamies committed, it’s only fitting to plant a pole and hold them up to disgrace. Even his sinful daughter was put to death in the swamp where women were drowned. The girls scream when they shove their heads under, once one managed to escape, swimming to the opposite shore. I’ll take their bastards under my protection, I’ll make them my guard, like the sultan and the janissaries. And the mothers will get aid, as long as they stay away.

ALMOST AT THE BOUNDARIES
of my kingdom. Of the world? In Myvátn, ice and scalding mud. Jets of lava erupt and plummet into the icy water, rocks cling together, an interrupted embrace. Sadness hangs over things, veins of blue streak the grey sky—an aperture toward that cerulean light, toward North … The icy sea rages, white crests, a realm of snow. North is that poignant light, like in Nyhavn. The sea … black, white, untamed. The grey seeps from the sky, unbearable.

WITH MARIA
, in Lussino, we would take a boat, often from Cigale bay, the most beautiful one of the island, and go out to the open water. I’m going with you, I don’t trust waiting for you, who knows if you’ll come back later, she said laughing, because it was in that bay—in Croatian it’s called Cikat,
cekati
means to wait—that women awaited the return of their men who had gone to sea. Leave, return, await the return—When I set ashore in Iceland for the first time, in January, there was a statue of snow behind a house, a woman with an exquisite, fearless face, looking up, a figurehead made of ice, some children were playing around her. She’ll wait for me, I thought as I was leaving, she’ll await my return. But in June, when I returned, she was no longer there, a moist mud stuck to my shoes.

DO YOU LIKE IT
? Look at that face—beautiful and generic, the caption says, like beauty should be, purified of every incidental, particular dross, of any doleful individual expressivity If only I could erase the lines carved by my heart, that are mine and accursedly mine alone, from my own face as well, the way I plane and smooth them from the face of this figurehead. A good idea, Doctor, this idea of making us work, of not letting us grow melancholy, twiddling our thumbs; to each his own task, his specialty. Ergotherapy,
Arbeit macht frei
, I’m familiar with the treatment. I can’t complain, since I enjoy sculpting and carving these women of wood. To tell the truth, I wouldn’t even need those beautiful illustrated catalogues you give me to copy the figures from. I’m no novice, I even earned a few bucks making or repairing a couple of figureheads for ships that reached Hobart Town with their prow and its figure in bad shape. I also take pleasure in having those wooden breasts beneath my hands, planing them until they become smooth and it’s a joy to caress them, oh nothing lewd, for heaven’s sake, it’s that they remind me of those odd jobs of those days, I’ve even tried to model those pouting lips of Norah’s, eager and impelling up until the end, but … I realized that the faces of these women who accompany men at sea must be
polished, serene, imperturbable; woe if they were to show passion, personality. Besides, who could afford to display a personality? Only a fool, made of phony, interchangeable flesh rather than of good wood that doesn’t con you—if it’s oak it’s oak and if it’s pine it’s pine, there’s no ruse, while flesh, especially human flesh, is always deceptive. In any case, men suspended over the depths already have too much fury in their hearts and require serenity, namely, impersonality as colourless as water.

Here’s a beautiful illustration, a plain, unknown figurehead preserved, it says below, at the Maritime Museum of Antwerp. If you look at her from the front she has a doleful expression, but when she was at the prow, the place for which she was made, she wasn’t seen from the front; rather she displayed her profile to the sailors, and that profile is impassive, generic, a clarity unclouded by any anguish. “Only noble simplicity and quiet grandeur can sustain the sight of the Gorgon, bear like a caryatid the intolerable weight of reality …” Well said in the booklet, but the fact is that when it comes to us, on the other hand, it comes crashing down on us, it flattens us, it crushes our head to a pulp. Take a look at those x-rays in your drawer, see how mushy my brain is.

Just imagine whether the noble, inexpressive face of this figurehead from Antwerp could ever be reduced to this, even Dachau would leave her cold. How could it be otherwise; inside and out there is nothing, and nobody can do anything to this nothingness, no fist can squeeze it and crush it, that’s why I like them so much, these prow figures. I like carving and sculpting them too. I wish I could copy all of the figures in this catalogue, oblivious to passion, sorrow, identity, that way being immortal would of course be worth it … It says here that Thorvaldsen, a master of neoclassic sculpture, served his apprenticeship in his father’s workshop, where he carved
figureheads for the Danish fleet, like me, a creator of these figures that nobody will be able to send to forced labour camps.

Look how well they turn out, the torso grows out of a whirlwind that, at the base, seems to ripple the waves and extend to the fluttering garment, an undulating line that will dissolve into amorphousness, but meanwhile … And those eyes wide open on the beyond, on imminent, unavoidable catastrophes. Maria’s eyes … not at all like mine, blind … see, this is how I do the eyes, carving out the wood, creating a cavity, only emptiness can sustain the sight of emptiness; look how much sawdust there is on the floor, it’s the eyes of my figureheads, ground up and pulverized, like my brother Urban used to do with the sapphires and emeralds, blue eyes and green eyes, as cold as the Iceland sea …

DURING THE RETURN
to Reykjavík, Brarnsen falls into a fissure, he shouts up from those dark depths. I lower myself down, sliding along the frozen walls, I’m beside him. It must be his hip, we won’t be able to budge from here. Brarnsen watches my face. I don’t say a word, I continue running my hands lightly over his leg, barely touching it so as not to hurt him. There’s nothing to be done, it’s impossible to pull him out. In a couple of hours you’ll be able to get up, I tell him, you just have to lie still and stay as warm as possible. Take this, I take off my jacket, slide it under his head, the jacket slips out of my hands and covers his face. Wait, I’ll arrange it better, and I shift the fur even further over his head, as if being clumsy Meanwhile I pull out my pistol; while he gropes around without seeing a thing, I load it quickly, hold it to his temple underneath the fur, the shot is deafening in the fissure, but he doesn’t get to hear it, the impact is violent despite the fur, the blood spurts all over me, I wipe myself off with wet hands then I clean them rubbing them on the ice. No need to turn up your nose, a compassionate doctor only makes the wound more painful, doctors are good and if they send you to the other world it’s out of love. History is an operating theatre for surgeons with a firm wrist. I was only an assistant surgeon, but I learned the job well.

IN ICELAND
there are no trees or hardly any. But revolution requires trees, forests. To cut them down, of course. The revolution marches forward, penetrates the vast Siberian taiga; the new man advances in the forest, the hammer and sickle fell the untamed forest of slavery, every ancient tree that falls becomes so many sheets of paper that record that progressive epic, columns of figures in five-year plans. Those numbers, those statistics are poems, the poetry of the revolution which sweeps down like a strong wind from the steppes—“Poets tell many lies, we’ve long known it …”

—You again, Apollonius? I know, the statistics give us the numbers, for every fallen tree a thousand, ten thousand pages of lies. However, the others lie even more. Those who want to keep men enslaved—like the Fascists, the Nazis, the capitalists, the …—must lie, it’s their job as warder of the Lager, as Kapò of themselves. But we shouldn’t have lied, and maybe not even cut down trees …

In Iceland I didn’t cut down even a single one, on the contrary, I drafted a law that prohibited them from being touched, whether they still existed or not, laws are made in any case to protect dead men and dead things. And if they hadn’t deposed me for treason, just when they were about to sing my glory—

I READ
Magnus Finnusen’s poem as soon as I returned to Reykjavík, but by the time he read it aloud, a few days later, in Madame Malanquist’s tavern, he had already revised and adapted it to celebrate the end of my revolution along with all the others who were raising a glass to my downfall. And so he proclaimed the lowering of the flag of Terror, the end of sedition, and I was not the good bear who came from the sea but a vicious bear carried away on a detached ice floe that vanishes in the mists. I didn’t make a fuss when I saw the Danish flag being raised on the flagstaff; my only thought was that wheat too would go sky high, from where I had lowered it. It was August 22, but everything had already ended a week earlier—dear God, nothing ever ends, not even with death, in fact here I am—when the
Orion
sailed into port and Captain Jones, who already had precise instructions and was in league with Count Trampe, accused me of insubordination, arbitrary acts of war against the Danes as well as secret agreements with them, attested to by my uniform. In fact I had boarded his ship wearing my old uniform as commander of the
Admiral Juhl.
Blue coat, gold buttons, epaulets, knee-high breeches and tricorn, which kept slipping off my head.

I didn’t say a word, I bowed and handed over my sword. I merely asked—or rather, I demanded, I ordered—that the people not be made aware of my arrest and he had no choice but to comply, because otherwise my people would have risen up and he would have had a narrow escape. Woe to anyone who touches my people’s Jorundar—that’s what they call me in Iceland. Then we went ashore. On the streets I stopped as usual to talk with people, saying that I was going to London to uphold their cause before the Lord of the Admiralty and my great friend Sir Joseph Banks and promising to return soon. Afterwards we all went to Madame Malanquist’s.

When we walked in, Finnusen was reciting his ode that was patched up like new, Vidimus seditionis horribilem daemonem omnia abruere, he declaimed and I laughed with all the others. So he, emboldened, asked me if I wanted my funeral beer, placing a keg in front of me; I grabbed him by the belt and slammed him into the keg, then I pulled him out, sending him flat on the floor, I took off my tricorn, turned it over and plunged it into the beer, as if it were a jug, and began pouring it down my throat announcing that Captain Jones was buying rum for everybody so they could drink to the health of the King of England or of Denmark, as they wished, I took a turn dancing with Gudrun Johnsen, who earlier had had her eye on me, and I even intoned the song of Ragnar among the serpents, that Provost Magnussen had taught me in Bessastadir. “Grim stings the adder’s forked dart; The vipers nestle in my heart … Fifty times and one I stood Foremost on the field of blood, Tinging my sword with blood, And no king my equal have I ever met.” Not even one, battles that is, thank the Lord. With those poor rachitic, malnourished wretches it would have been difficult to tinge red swords rusted for centuries, I thought, looking around me
in the tavern as I sang and drank my funeral beer, the beer you drink when you bury a ruler—still, when it came to battles, I too certainly had some to talk about. Algoa, the Kattegat, Guadalajara—“From my earliest youth I learned the task, To tinge my sword with hostile blood, Me to their feast the gods must call; The brave man wails not o’er his fall.” Rather than wailing, I felt like laughing, me and everyone else, what with that beer that I was handing around, gesturing wildly. I even tripped over the keg, yes, the song was right, “I soon shall quaff the drink of gods”—and such an urge to piss, it stands to reason, given all the drinking. “I soon shall quaff beer with the gods. The hours of life have glided by,” and how! “but smiling shall I die …”

Jones, on the other hand, went away furious, amid the general hullabaloo; only old Magnus Stephensen, to whom he had granted provisional power, remained taciturn and dignified, and uttered a solemn Latin phrase concerning the fickleness of fate and the vanity of all earthly glory. His malignant gaze said that now I would be the one to reign over Nyö, given that they were putting my head underwater, but I went on drinking, and gave my tricorn hat to a little boy, pulling it down over his face. Keep it for me until I get back, I won’t be gone long. I went to the beach with a whole train of people, I stretched out in the boat and ordered the oarsmen to catch up with the
Orion
, saying that I did not want to travel on the
Margaret and Ann
with Trampe and the other turncoats like Phelps and Savignac who were returning to London.