Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (36 page)

We, on the other hand, are serious. Our gods, Doctor, have forbidden us to play. The gods don’t fool around and because of this we, obedient to their clue, have subjugated a world in which no one plays anymore. In church you don’t play and you don’t joke around. However, Father Callaghan said that if you don’t know how to behave and play like little children you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven; at least I think that’s what he said, I don’t remember too well. Even in here, my friend, you don’t play and you don’t joke around; these people of yours in the white coats are a real caste of priests and sorcerers. It’s full of gods in here—those boxes that light up, those phosphorescent, milky images, look at how reverently those white-robed priests of yours treat them. Those gods must like blood, since they draw samples so often. One can see immediately that they’re obeyed without argument in here.

Well, maybe Norah no longer has any, gods that is. Life has scraped the image of God off her face, that God who at one time, on the shore of a different sea, sculpted her features—how enchanting it was, that pure, passionate face, sculpted by grace. Now that image of God is no longer there, lost along the way, scratched off … But unlike so many, almost everyone, she did not replace it with the simulacra of other, false gods. Now she doesn’t serve any god. Maybe because the gods love incense, flags, guns, money, and she loves rum, in fact she smells like rum. And when I’m inside her, the few times that it still happens, I too am no longer a slave of the gods.

She makes me repeat
Mena coyeten nena
, bawdy, her thighs spread, on that sweaty pallet. She says the words excite her, the moaning of an animal in heat. But then she clings to me; she can also be tender, in her own way, and that body with its strong gamy odour is also my own flesh, weak corruptible corrupt, hers and mine, one single flesh, my bride of Lebanon blackened by the smoke of years, disfigured by the brash, harsh creases with which life shaped your mouth, my bride. Not before God, since I’m not sure what that is, not before man, those louts who deride you, drunk, in the tavern and deride me, humiliated by your indecency, but before this vast emptiness of the river-sea, united until death—for a short time yet, for always—before everything, all things fleeting and sacred like us.

Together forever, wherever—especially in jail, where her drunken violence lands me. Marriage means sharing a destiny in good times or bad, so it’s written, therefore also in disgrace. If Maria … She likes to occasionally paint and deface her face and body like the Aboriginal women and roams around the streets of Hobart Town all black, heedless of people’s scornful laughter. Medea is dark, like the Colchis from which she comes. In bed—that is, on those rags
on the ground in our hovel—she occasionally orders me to call her Walloa, the ferocious chieftain of Sorell who killed Captain Thomas and Mr. Parker by his own hand, and threatens to kill me, squeezing me savagely, almost as if she wanted to make my increasingly rare semen spurt out. But when she falls asleep snoring, continuing to hold that limp piece of flesh of mine in her moist, sweaty palm, that hand is safety, the valve of a shell that protects the mollusc from the sea’s fury.

THE PAY
for those who participated in the Black War is one hundred and fifty pounds, for everybody except me—I get twenty-five. I set up a small farm, an arid plot of land that doesn’t yield a thing and instead eats up the little money that I have left. Our hovel is more and more ramshackle, the last bit of cash is spent almost solely on rum. Bonegilla, by comparison, was a luxury—porridge, perhaps rancid, beans, roasted potatoes and sometimes even cold meat.

Yes, at Bonegilla we rebelled, mutinied—later, I think, much later—but there I was still a man, despite the Lager at work inside me, in my blood, in my brain; something that gnaws you and consumes you entirely, in the end even a common cold is enough to send you to the other world and in fact here I am, Dr. Ulcigrai. This must be the other world; different than we imagined it, but still the other world. When you get here, it doesn’t matter if you’re disguised as a doctor or as a patient, you’re fucked. At Bonegilla, however, that thing inside me had not yet fully completed its work, something in me still resisted, later instead—

But I didn’t give up, a man must always provide for himself and his family. Freelancer at the
Colonial Times
, critic of Adam Smith and the impious Malthus—he opposes the designs of the Creator who
wants as many creatures as possible to participate in eternal bliss. Children are a blessing. I, we … If Marie, if Maria, if I—What’s that?—
Observations on the Funded System
—ah yes, my pamphlet on the English national debt, the first text of political economy written on the southern continent, an ingenious proposal to eliminate that enormous deficit.

Two hundred copies, all unsold. The job at Rowland Wolphe Loane’s farm fares even worse; I’m still studying the “Farm and Garden Calendar” in
Ross’s Almanack
, to learn something about gardening which I’m supposed to do, when they fire me, without even giving me the shillings to pay Norah’s fines for brawling and drunkenness.

I make do by writing a Christmas sermon for the families in December 1832, and some articles for the
Colonist
, but when I claim my pay for the latter the court rules that “the well-known Ex-King of Iceland, Jorgen Jorgensen” only writes the addresses on the envelopes. I sign onto a customs officers boat that patrols the stretch between Hobart Town and Launceston and investigate smuggling, discovering that the magistrates are in league with the thieves, but I’m accused of slander. When Norah gets three months in jail for drunkenness, I lose a job that I had painstakingly obtained in Oatlands, at a farm.

Could it be the Party throwing a monkey wrench into the works wherever I went, as Commander Carlos had hinted in a veiled threat so I would keep my mouth shut regarding Goli Otok? But who would dream of talking about it? I don’t want to make trouble for anyone. We came down here to work; certainly not an Asiatic invasion, as the Australian authorities, who treated us like an inferior race, bellowed—Workers of the world, unite, until we pull together there will always be bosses who treat us like animals—of course, for them the whole world is populated by animals they want to treat like
animals. It may be that when they look at themselves in the mirror, and see that ugly mug of theirs in which everything is snuffed out except greed and fear, they think it’s someone else’s face.

They think everyone else is that way and it’s reasonable that they would want to keep people with such a face out of their houses, in the wind and cold, or inside, but in jail, in the Lager. The Bonegilla camp, in 1952, was a true Lager—Italian workers deceived, abandoned, enslaved, our
Risveglio
wrote; Communist agitators, Australian police and diplomats thundered, Stalin’s fifth columnists, and our governors and ambassadors and consuls saying that yes, that maybe, that no, that our emigrants were not Communists and the Italian government would be the first that would never, that maybe one or two, but generally speaking no, good people, and yet they understood that the Australian government, but these understandable difficulties would be overcome and Italy was confident that in the near future and that meantime.

There were thousands of us; convicts, emigrants, displaced persons. Of course I was there too, even if the name is different—and there’s no need to explain why. Troops intervened, four tanks even entered the camp at Bonegilla; it’s true, unlike the peaceful protest of two weeks earlier, at the beginning of July, that time a few huts and the church were set on fire. The Communist agitators at
Il Risveglio
—to be truthful those from
La Fiamma
as well, ultra-Fascists but still emigrants, scum of the earth—wrote all sorts of things about that repression and about the governments that closed an eye to it, like Reverend Knopwood did with those Aborigines who were killed off. Then things calmed down and later I found a job at the Tasmanian Hydro Electric Commission. It was there, at Hobart Town, that I encountered Maria.—No, she’d remained up there, behind that revolving glass door at the Café Lloyd.

OH ALL RIGHT
, I also wrote out the envelopes for the
Colonist
, only the envelopes, down here everyone manages as best he can. Fortunately Dr. Ross noticed me and asked me to write my autobiography for the
Hobart Town Almanack
, so as to correct that apocryphal biography of mine—published in the fraudulent edition of the
Religion of Christ
, which caused me so many problems and provoked accusations of impiety—and thereby re-establish the truth. I immediately got to work. It’s so nice to have a pen in your hand, even when you’re not writing. The Waterloo Inn is poorly lit, just enough light to see the paper and read the words. All around you the world blurs, Norah drinks and blurts out something bawdy, she comes in and out of the tavern, a coarse word drifts from the other tables and is lost in the stagnant staleness, I too drink, I drink and write, I’m no longer sure who’s drunk and who’s not, whether Norah is returning from yet another lockup or on her way to one; on one occasion she stays away for a couple of months, it seems, it’s pleasant to ignore things, let them slide off like drops of rain on a jacket. And all thanks to a pen and some paper on which to restructure your life. I’m grateful to you for giving me a pen and paper here inside as well. That screen isn’t enough for me. I
learned to use it a little, since you insisted, but—I like the recorder better, it works on its own, I don’t even notice whether it’s there or not. But paper is better than anything.

So many things to say, so many to leave out, partly because the number of pages I have is limited. I list numerous mistakes—like my gambling vice—since the purpose is to expose the great errors of my life so that a moral lesson can be drawn from them. In order for this lesson to be clear, a little order must be brought to the tangle of events … So I shift and change the facts and dates of some events, to make them appear more consistent; I also state that I left Iceland of my own free will and that I was among those who crossed Bass Strait for the first time, on the
Lady Nelson.
I forgive all those who denigrated, betrayed, denounced me. I forgive the Party, namely myself, and repeat a phrase I heard somewhere—this man’s life would make a perfect novel, if it were written with the utmost fidelity to the truth. I’ve been described as a gambler, a thief, a spy, a wretch, a jailbird and worse, even a pirate. Nothing serious.

With a pen in hand, I am History, the Party; I can’t complain about my misfortunes and play the victim, but must faithfully side with reality, which, without pen and paper, I can’t manage to see. It seems fitting to me, indeed requisite, to celebrate the merits of Sir George Arthur, who leaves the colony at the end of his mandate, and to defend the penal institution that bears his name against the slurs written in England and against the biased, ill-informed books of the do-gooders. The cells, the dozens of lashes with the cat-o’-nine-tails, the electroshock—None of this entire story, Comrade, will ever be known. Norah comes in drunk, she makes fun of me, calling me Your Majesty amid the laughter of the other drunks, I stand up, she grabs the sheets of paper from me,
I snatch them back and dash out, she chases after me brandishing a piece of wood. The autobiography is published in 1838, but several pages got lost along the street, who knows where they ended up, as she ran after me, furious …

THIS IS GALATEA
. She was found on an African beach following a shipwreck, and was worshipped like a goddess by the aborigines; other figures ended up adorning inns and taverns, so that the sailors might feel a little more at home even when they were on land.

You see, figureheads were evicted from the sea and so they manage as best they can, I’ve discovered more than one of them displaying a coiffure in a beauty salon window or modelling a dress in an apparel store—well disguised of course, a proper mannequin, but she didn’t escape my attention. Still, I pretended not to notice anything, everyone gets by as best they can. We buried one of them—read what it says here—the one from the
Rebecca
, a whaling ship from New Bedford, among the rocks by the sea. Under the bones of the waves, as they say in Iceland, we drank beer in her honour, her funeral beer; women should have one too, it’s only fair, we got drunk and sang the Office for the Dead on her grave of sand and stones. Lewdness too, as is fitting; death is lewd and sorrow is lewd. I’d like to piss on my grave, the flowers on a grave have to be watered, don’t they? I even do it, when nobody can see me, there in St. David’s Park.

On the figurehead from the
Rebecca
all we did was pour some beer, but we didn’t do it on purpose, it’s just that we were a little
drunk; besides, the waves quickly washed it away, that rank odour vanished in the salt sea air and now there’s not a trace, not even the grave, the tide scraped and sucked it away, maybe now she rises and falls on the open sea, corroded by the water, wood that is no longer distinguishable from any other remains of a shipwreck. Even a face composed of flesh soon deteriorates, the fish devour it and it quickly becomes unrecognizable, an unrecognizable piece of flotsam from the sea. It was I who pushed Maria, on the open sea and under the sea; I threw her to the sharks as food and so I was spared by them. Savage teeth tore her from my arms—no, it was I who let her go, who shoved her into those jaws, all the more voracious because her heart was bleeding and the brutes get even more excited at the taste of blood, the slave drivers lash out more enthusiastically when they see red trickling down their captives’ backs.

And so she disappeared in that shadowy sea, in that darkness. But I read that sometimes shipwrecked figureheads return. Maria disappeared on the open sea, the ship vanished over the horizon, and when I heard that it was returning to port I also heard that it was returning without her—she was no longer there, they must have treacherously thrown her overboard, of course, how could I think that one small push … I read, in the catalogue, about a sculptor who chose his beautiful girlfriend to be the model for the figurehead of a ship on which she was about to leave on a long voyage—for her, soon afterwards, the longest voyage of all: she died. Every day he watched the sea disconsolately, he couldn’t believe she was dead and when the ship re-entered the port and he saw the figurehead, standing upright on the prow, identical to her—he leapt into the water to go to her, longing to embrace her, but he went under. Waterlogged and dazed, water in his nose in his mouth in his ears, it was impossible to see the ship as it passed
by, to see whether she was there or not. She wasn’t there, Eurydice vanishes; look how beautiful she is, this Eurydice wiping her tears with the edge of the mantle that envelops her. She too is in La Spezia, the caption says; we’ll see if I’m able to successfully recreate her, that mantle is the dark water, the night, the bottom of the sea, I’ll pull it over my head and we’ll stay under there, close together, clinging to one another …