Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (25 page)

Márja’s body was tossed onto the beach, to the crows and seagulls. A woodworker from Pola saw her on the shore, naked and terrible like a snake when you’re not sure if it’s dead or may still bite, and with that gash in her belly, an obscene caesarean cut to tear out a life that didn’t want to leave. Some time later, in his workshop, the Pola craftsman carved a figurehead fierce and proud like that woman thrown to the seagulls, an unripe mulberry whose kiss puckers up your mouth, and Alvise Cippico put it on his prow like a pointed lance with which to ram Ucciali the Calabrian and then, returning home after the great victory of Lepanto—which a few years later, like all victories, was as if it had never happened—placed it in the cool, dark atrium, where she remained for many years and centuries—admired, ogled, avidly caressed.

I read that she was still in the palace atrium after it was confiscated by the socialist regime. One fine day she simply disappeared and since then nothing more was heard of her, except for townspeople’s gossip that suggests all kinds of hypotheses. Professional thieves, they say, would have stolen the precious gold and silver objects from the nearby cathedral treasury instead. And deep down, almost everyone is convinced that it’s a real abduction—as if the figurehead were not a thing but a living creature, which is not stolen but kidnapped. In any case they took her away from me, her too.

A BEAUTIFUL PALACE
, that Palazzo
ipiko of mine where my figurehead disappeared. It’s in all the tourist guides. A national monument, protected by the Fine Arts Commission, with its ornate Gothic-style facade, triple-arched windows, the Renaissance portal by Ivan Duknovi
. A historic building. I’m at home in History. It’s a duty to be present at historic days, even though they’re becoming more and more numerous. What is a man, alone with his life, without memorable tidings that illuminate it like fireworks light up a crowd huddled in the dark? He’s a shadow, obscurity You have to be there with Destiny, walk behind it like an honour guard and march under its triumphal arches, as applause rises from the darkness that yawns on all sides—or even insults, it doesn’t matter much.

Historic days are multiplying. Even when the governor lines up the convicts on the green in Hobart Town, facing the sea, it’s a historic day. More modest, it’s true, but still historic, and then when you think that someone may have landed there many years earlier—when there was nothing, only that sea—to found the city, that too was a historic day, as was the inauguration of the penitentiary, where that very same founder later ended up, and your visit, Doctor, every morning around ten o’clock, when you come
by our beds with your train of assistants. Kardelj and Rankovi
’s visit among our ranks in Goli Otok was also historic, amid shouts of
“Tito Partija!”

In History it’s like being at the gaming table, first you win then you lose, you double your bet on Austerlitz, but the next time Waterloo comes up. Of course I was at Waterloo, why do you doubt it? Come now, don’t act like a Prosecutor at the People’s Court, Comrade Doctor, don’t you too start believing I’m a liar. I too was a victor at Waterloo, because that eyewitness report of mine earned me a pardon and thus spared me from prison or the gallows for having left England without authorization.

I know how things went that day. Yes, me; it’s my name, I don’t care if so many others are called that.

Contrary to what has been said and repeated, the Duke of Wellington was not losing when the Prussians arrived. He was attacked by surprise, that much is true, I was there when French cuirassiers who suddenly appeared behind the hill broke through our long, thin red line above Hougoumont. It was our most advanced division, which was about to form a square, but was hit before it had time to do so, when it was still a long red stripe, a snake slithering through the grass, and all of a sudden those horses were all over it, sabres rising and falling radiant in the rainy, grimy air, the snake was hacked to pieces, each coil writhed and was cut into ever smaller pieces, it jerked and coiled around a sword torn from a hand gripping it as the man fell from his horse, his sword wound tightly by those raging, dying coils. Hidden in that farmhouse, amid straw and broken beams, I don’t ...

A BREATHLESS
, headlong chase, horses colliding, in Hougoumont, under the French attack; two German companies from Nassau, decimated, leave their positions and retreat with increasing haste, the soil explodes all around like numerous small volcanoes. Stumble, get up again, a hoof bashes in a head sunk face down in the mud, the barricades and wooden shelters scattered on the hill are in flames—go through the fire and come out on the other side, there you’ll be safe, beyond a huge insurmountable burning wall. A horse passes me staggering, the rider clinging to the animal’s neck can barely stay in the saddle; I grab his sleeve, almost by accident, and the German slides to the ground by himself, without my pulling him down on purpose, he’s still falling when a French spear pins him to the ground; I’m in the saddle spurring the horse on, I hear the burst of a grenade and the horse explodes under me, when it rolls to the ground its viscera wind around its legs.

I just made it in time not to end up under the horse, at least not entirely, one leg is stuck under the animal’s weight, but I don’t try to pull it out or get up, I lie there motionless, face in the mud, beside the wounded, pawing horse. Lying there like that no one pays any attention to me, I even close my eyes. The mud on my face is
warmish, the battle doesn’t penetrate under there, bursts and thuds are muffled, it’s like at sea when you put your head underwater; I can taste the mud on the tip of my tongue, the dirt on my knees that I licked away as a child ...

When I stood up again and realized I had no broken bones, there was no one on that slope anymore, aside from the dead. By the time I reached Ghent, where the court of Louis XVIII was, I’d recovered the boldness needed to recount Wellington’s defeat, with a wealth of detail. And I recovered even more of that boldness when, a few hours later, as sentries and messages arrived from Brussels, I quickly realized, from a few phrases heard in passing, that the situation was reversing or had already been reversed—I realized it early enough to turn my story around and announce Wellington’s victory, being careful not to deny the story of that initial flight and indeed confirm it in those small indelible details that attest to the authority of the narrator and the reliability of the witness, but continuing the story until it was turned around and above all changing the viewpoint and focus, so that the story, which at first was entirely about the battle, shrinks and becomes an episode among many that make up the total event, the historic day, the battle of Waterloo won by Wellington.

Realizing something later on, moreover, is not always a disadvantage. How did that insolent Frenchman put it? Ah yes, that the Duke of Wellington was lucky to have those somewhat slow reflexes, at least with respect to Napoleon. Had he been as quick as his adversary, in no time he would have noticed that he was losing and would have retreated, losing definitively—this way instead, thanks to the fact that he didn’t instantly realize what was about to happen, he found himself winning, maybe even without being immediately aware of it this time ...

IT’S NOT TRUE
that that description of the attack at Hougoumont derives from the story told to me by Count Lobau who commanded a position at Waterloo. Naturally, I spoke with the Count; we travelled together to Ghent. The boat glided along a peaceful canal, slicing through the images of poplars reflected in the water which for a moment darted away like a school of fish, old mills faded in the evening. The Count, standing upright to his full height, was recounting, in that stentorian voice of his that in battle could be heard even over the firing of guns and cannons, how his company from Nassau was attacked when it was about to form a square, about the thin red stripe slithering like a snake through the grass, about horsemen fleeing, how he jumps on a horse left without a rider and the horse immediately collapses beneath him, struck by a grenade ...

Of course I was there, at Hougoumont, in the midst of that turmoil. Anyone who wonders exactly where I was and where the Count was must never have been in the midst of battle. Otherwise he would know that at such a time, with grenades exploding mud splashing horses whinnying and men screaming, nobody knows what’s happening around him, whether the grenade was thrown by
his men or by the others, whose blood it is that he sees all around him, perhaps on his own jacket.

Lord Uxbridge lost a leg at Waterloo and had it buried with due solemnity, an actual funeral with soldiers at attention paying final respects. However, I wouldn’t swear that it was actually his own leg, it’s possible the attendants at the field hospital made a mistake and took someone else’s. But what difference does it make? It happens even with a whole body, especially after such a massacre; the dead all look alike and soldiers even more so ...

I DON’T KNOW
how the Germans managed to capture me on Mount Nevoso, in Leskova Dolina, where a comrade from the Tomsi
Brigade brought me after the battle of Masun, where I had fallen and was left behind, slightly wounded. I was Strijèla at that time, Commander Strijèla in charge of a group of former Italian soldiers from the Bergamo Division, which, after September 8, I helped organize into a partisan unit; in Istria, where we had moved, the unit operated in contact with the Budicin Battalion of Rovigno. I was no longer called Nevèra, but Strijèla—in those days of fraternal war against the Nazis and Fascists, it seemed fitting to me to assume a Slavic name. Besides I liked it, I call myself
ipiko more than Cippico.
Trst je nas
, they wrote on the walls,
Zivot damo Trst ne damo
, It’s not Tito who wants Istria, it’s Istria that wants Tito—Nonsense, I said to my comrades, it’s not true but it doesn’t matter, if the proletarians of the world are united there are no more borders and Istria is neither Italian nor Yugoslavian but international, the
Internationale’s
future humanity.