Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (35 page)

SEE HOW WELL I
get by, with these women of wood you give me to model so that I am distracted and don’t get any nasty ideas in my head? By the way, I heard of someone who cut the head off his ship’s figurehead; it must have been a lover’s revenge, but I don’t understand these things—if you leave each other, it means you were meant to leave each other, right? Whether it be women, men, figureheads, revolutions, when it’s over, it’s over. Even with Maria—no, with Maria it will never be over, that’s the tragedy—Of course with figureheads, judging from the stories written in this calendar—yes, catalogue, I know, in a word a book, I already told you that those illustrations and photographs of women with half-naked breasts remind me of the calendars in the barbershops of one time—with those wooden women, as I was saying, you have to be careful, look at what the caption says about this one, Atalanta, she’s called, she’s in La Spezia, and at least two men killed themselves for her, a caretaker who spent hours caressing and kissing her, and then smashed himself by leaping into the dry dock, and a German official, a certain Kurtz, who actually brought her into his room before shooting himself. But let me tell you, the sailors who use them just to find a little release have more common sense, it’s understandable,
all those months at sea, the voyage down here is long, so you can understand, but at least there are no tragic scenes, that’s something ... Instead these malicious bitches want to bring about your ruin, your misfortune ... accursed figureheads, sorceresses, even made to burn with living sorceresses, like that Flemish woman who served as a model, both of them burned at the stake, while the sculptor got away with both hands lopped off.

You won’t cut mine off, will you? You never know, I’ve seen a lot of things in places more or less like this ... I behave well, I don’t do anything foolish, I’m respectful. How could you not be respectful, with these beautiful figures? Look at this enchanting mouth, the unreadable smile, the same smile she wore when she sank that day with her ship, the
Falkland
, near the Scilly Isles, the book says. Just think, to sink into the depths smiling like that—Not that it’s easy to model that wooden smile ... And those Eurydices who return to the shadows ...

OF THE NINE GROUPS
of Roving Parties organized during the Black War by the Committee for the Protection of Settlers, as a result of Sir George Arthur’s proclamation, I command three, which operate west of the main road toward the Clyde and the Shannon. A squad led by Batman catches sixteen of them, without firing a shot; Batman decides to kill two already captured. Sir George immediately orders an investigation and it’s only right. We are bringing them civilization and we have to make them understand. Revolution and progress can’t always be gentle. It’s for their own good that we must force them; anyone who’s a do-gooder can’t help but want to civilize the savages and inflict it on them. Moreover they would end up becoming extinct, left to themselves in those inhospitable forests of theirs. Of course if it were true what that Quaker from Kelvedon said, that some settlers gave them bread and butter with arsenic …

However, those blacks are elusive; they slip away like animals in the forest, without disturbing a blade of grass. A confused shuffling of feet in the wind, a song lost in the embers of a fire; dry leaves everywhere, says the song, dry leaves scattered and songs lost in the wind, crumbled leaves no longer leaves—the song was
once a milestone, a sacred boundary marker delimiting the land and allocating space to this one and that one; now the stones fall, overturned by our advance, the song vanishes and the space disappears, there is no longer a place to live.

I also recruit a couple of convicts and a pair of former convicts who already have a ticket of leave in their pockets, familiar with forests, able to creep through the bush like the blacks and fall upon them like shadows; I suggest outflanking the runaways by moving toward Blue Hills. Mungo, the Aboriginal guide, at first leads us on the right track, then, as he moves farther into the ancestral forest with us, he begins to be afraid; sometimes his teeth chatter, he hears the voices of his forebears, he starts turning back, making enormous, futile circles, to divert us from the fugitives, until I put him in irons.

The Aborigines—especially those of the fierce, belligerent tribes on Big River or Oyster Bay—know how to hide and can also fight. They slip away like fish through your fingers underwater; for them the forest is a sea, after a while the whites find it hard to breathe as if they were at the bottom of a river. The humidity steaming off the plants is stupefying, your foot steps on exposed, scorching stones, the sun between the branches is a gelatinous medusa. The blacks learned guerrilla fighting from the elusive convicts and from the bushrangers, they trigger false alarms, driving herds of kangaroos that make the closest squads come running, and meanwhile they glide away; they mix their tracks with those of the wallabies; rain and the mud are their allies, the world is a swamp.

The squads advance inexorably; after the mass conscription proclaimed by Sir George there are a great many men, three thousand two hundred, two thousand convicts (two out of five armed), a thousand settlers and two hundred policemen—convicts against Aborigines, chained dogs against dingoes on their last legs.
Viva la muerte
—What’s that, Doctor? What do you mean you didn’t say anything, you don’t mean to tell me that it was I, what do I have to do with it—Yes, convicts against blacks, the damned against the damned, we against you—But what do I have to do with it, now, no, earlier, much earlier, and now after so long, half a century which is more than a century and a half, Van Diemen’s Land, Catalonia, Barcelona … we hunted them down, those blacks, and also those anarchists and Fascists and the Fascists hunted us, and we—Stop confusing me with these stories that have nothing to do with it and are making me dizzy, there’s no use pretending to sit there nice and quiet, mouth shut. You’re a ventriloquist, my friend, I know your trick. One of those people who can speak without moving his lips so it seems like the words are coming from who knows where, maybe from mine—Now then, if you’re still interested in the Black War, let me go on with the story—

Nine Roving Parties and a single line, each squad in contact with another, between Echo Lake and Waterloo Point to the north and the sea to the east. The line advances, closes in, the circle tightens, the line shrinks, constricts, after two weeks it narrows down to a thirty-mile span; but when the circle closes completely and contracts at the centre, and the squads reach East Bay Neck, at the end of October 1830, where they expect to find all the blacks cornered and herded together, there are only two blacks.

THE ABORIGINES
are great at vanishing. When Togerlongeter, chief of the Oyster Bay tribe, also known as Tupelanta or as King William, gets caught in a trap set in the forest, his companions forcibly rip off his hand, which remains in the jaws of the trap, a piece of meat on a butcher’s hook, and he goes off with the shattered stump, the blood flowing and clotting like resin. They even leave false tracks, which drive some of us in the wrong direction and into dangerous areas where, what with landslides, mudslides caused by the rain, flooding and a spear or two, some men lose their lives. In return, some blacks, such as Mosquito, end up being hanged. The hands of a convict already condemned to the gallows tighten the noose around the neck of a black man, you’re not always too sure whose, in that dark forest with all those faces painted like grotesque masks.

How can you recognize someone in the night, even your own brother or your own face reflected in the dark water? “The
Argo
pressed on, leaving the island called the Mount of Bears, after exchanging gifts and pledges of peace. But when night came the rushing wind did not hold steadfast, but contrary blasts caught them and brought them back … 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.” We should have sailed down here with a huge mutinous fleet, red flags in the wind, the
Argo
first of all, to warn you, black brothers; we should have come ashore and awakened you, black Abel, taught you to resist to rebel to live. Instead we came as fratricides and executioners.

The fleece was left in the dragon’s jaws and the beast gnaws and sucks it, slobbering. Medea made a mistake; maybe she bungled and reversed her spells and put Jason and herself to sleep, not the sleepless dragon, who strikes first and then offers peace to his stunned prey. Little by little the Black War quiets down. Limeblunna, a chief, is captured; Umarrah, with his two brothers, his wife, his wife’s three brothers, and two sisters, waves his arms over his head three times as a sign of inviolable peace and surrenders. Peace; for those defeated, a violation worse than war. On Swan Island eighteen women tortured by seal hunters; on Great Island natives driven off to the most inhospitable parts, found weeks later nearly dead from starvation and thirst, carcasses on the cliffs.

Was it for this that I founded Hobart Town—for progress, for the penal colony, for my chains and those of everyone else? Jason brings death and adversity to Colchis, the
Argo
leads to the great waters of hell. Rebel, resist, mutiny. A great mutiny, but not on the high seas, by then it’s already too late; we have to stop the ship before it leaves port. Ah, Pistorius was right, the ancients understood that taking to the sea is an impious act, a violation of sacred confines and the order of the universe.

To live is to sail? That’s right, Doctor, or whoever you are, a colleague hiding somewhere. Why go to sea, leave behind the trusted cove and sail out in the open, on the waves? The sea is life,
the arrogant claim of living, expanding, conquering—therefore it’s death, the incursion that plunders and destroys, shipwreck. The ships set out festively, flags flying; the fleets reach distant continents and islands, they pillage, ravage, destroy, Nelson bombards Copenhagen, Jason steals the fleece and kills Absyrtus, we come to Terra Australis Incognita; a few of those blacks are still alive but barely, we crossed the sea to slaughter them all.

We should have stayed home and left them in peace. Indeed, the revolution, the world’s great redemptive change, would be the power to enforce those prohibitions and those limits imposed by the gods; stay home and play with the stones, on the shore, in the shallow water of tidal pools left by the receding tide. Even the revolution often begins by “dressing ship,” numerous red flags in the wind, and in the end you realize that they are hanged men instead.

Things don’t go too well for Jason either but it’s only fitting, that way he learns to launch the first ship in the water, to seduce people with the mirage of conquest and the sea, worthless shams. Medea foots the bill. My Norah chains me to that filthy pallet; I go down a slippery slope with her, I’m used to this indignity, it must be the effect of one of those herbs she brought with her from Colchis. I too end up under the table with her, until the guards arrive and throw us in jail. It happens more and more frequently; fortunately each time my proficiencies in slaughtering the blacks get me out soon enough. A little more worse for wear. Dirtier too, because, like Norah, little by little I almost stopped washing myself. My odour doesn’t bother me. Nor does Norah’s and she knows it, when she shoves me onto the bed and takes me in her hand—I have less and less desire, with all that rum she pours down my throat, getting angry if I pull away, so that I prefer to knock back another gulp or two rather than have her scratch my face. Sometimes she even scratches me down
there, when she sees that I’m too droopy; she fondles me pumps me squeezes me fiercely, often to no avail, yet those fingers are also gentle and I do feel a little pleasure after all—less than at one time, but what does that mean.

She also likes to pull that shaggy blanket over my face, almost suffocating me; she laughs and says maybe I’ll get a little harder that way, but I can’t breathe and those sheep hairs in my mouth make me feel like retching. The fleece suffocates, it brings death to whoever touches it. The
Argo
crosses the sea to steal it or rather to kill and die. It must be returned immediately, before it’s too late and before it brings more bloodshed, but to whom? Every previous possessor, robbed by a subsequent one, is in turn a usurper who appropriated it unlawfully. Give it back to the animal, killed and flayed in homage to the gods always thirsting for blood; only on the sheep’s back was the fleece in its rightful place.

But the animal is flayed and the fleece is covered with the grime of centuries. Sometimes, if I look at it—for example that rug at the Healthcare Centre—it seems blackish to me, skin removed from an Aboriginal captured by us in the bush and sacrificed to our gods—I’m not sure which ones, but certainly ours.

I discovered, my friend, that only we—yes, in short, we from up there, who came down here and to every part of the world to be masters, we from the old world which is also stronger and therefore younger than the others, than the decrepit civilizations to whom we went to deliver the final blow—I discovered that only we have gods. They live in our heads as in a sanctuary, tyrants who tell us what to do and even though this causes bloodshed, teach us not to let it bother us, it’s a divine service. The others, those blacks whom we flush out of their forests—and all the others, more or less like them in barren lands around the globe where sooner or later people
like us arrive to hunt and kill them, in fact, have already arrived, almost everywhere—those natives, I mean, don’t have gods. They have statues, totems, painted trees, voices that speak through wind, water or thunder, ancestors and animals honoured with respect, but those aren’t gods, they’re the murmur and flow of life that are listened to with veneration, yet playfully—a handful of leaves in the air, a puppet of wood or sand created by children and painted or decorated with shells, but for fun, with all the solemnity and lightheartedness of a game. Even the menacing faces of some of their simulacra are not really menacing; they’re like the carnival masks our children wear, which seem monstrous and leering but it’s all in fun and in fact children enjoy putting them on and taking them off, just like these savages whom we are doing away with, with those painted, grease-smeared faces, who want to seem like demons and instead, when they laugh, and they laugh for any silly little thing, are as candid as children.