Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (37 page)

DO
I
LIKE
taking walks around this island? Of course, in fact I’m grateful for this freedom I enjoy. Not everyone here has that privilege. In that room, for example, at the end of the corridor, in that other section, I once opened the door and looked in, then someone immediately rushed over—those beds with the straps, I understand, those are people who aren’t well, it’s right not to let them go strolling around the island, there are bushes, rocks, they could fall and hurt themselves. Of course I realized that we’re on an island. Don’t worry, I won’t tell the others and get them worked up, I understand that it’s kept hidden from them so as not to upset them—it’s always disquieting, being on an island, you feel cut off from the world, even if the arm of the sea is so narrow. I, on the other hand, like being over here, across the sea, it’s like in school when they took us to summer camp. Here at least I can play my old cards my own way, as if they hadn’t run out; the old film studio hasn’t yet been dismantled and at least nobody pities me for being an old nostalgic, they take me seriously. On the other side, however, out there, by now nobody gives a damn …

I recognized it immediately, my Isle of the Dead, even though so much time has passed. You’ve changed the inside of the barracks
and even the church a little, and you’ve chiselled off the gravestone epitaphs so as not to make your guests melancholy; I recognize those stones, you pulled them out of the ground and piled them up there in back, but I remember when they stood modest but austere over the graves. I myself had many of them placed; I also dictated the inscriptions and epitaphs for those comrades in adversity more unfortunate than I, lying there underground while I strolled above them, though reflecting on their destiny and the words with which to briefly and decorously remember them. I even got two shillings for every gravestone, and an increasing number of convicts died, in Port Arthur, given that more and more of them arrived.

When I first came to this Isle of the Dead there were already graves but not yet gravestones for the convicts. The Reverend John Allen Manton had buried the first prisoner, John Hanck, and those who followed him, under a simple mound of earth.

It’s all well and good that time and harsh weather erase men’s traces, but a little decorum is only proper. Even a convict is entitled to a gravestone—true, that too won’t last long, but good manners should be preserved, even with the dead. Even in here, Doctor, good manners are preserved, I have to admit it. You have the delicacy never to tell the truth directly to all of these inmates of ours, to us in short, namely that we’re dead; indeed, you operate in such a way that no one even notices that he’s already in the cemetery, that he’s walking—when given permission to walk—on his own grave. Just like when I left that antiquarian bookstore, where I bought my autobiography and a couple of my biographies, and went to take a little walk on my grave in St. David’s Park, a short distance away from the sea-river. Yes, it’s somewhere down there, where the city’s old cemetery once stood. At least I think so … what happened later, where they found me, what they did with that diploid, with that
nucleus, with all those chromosomes, forty-five, I think, no, forty-six, I don’t know, but—A fine grave, a public park. Children playing, old men on a bench. The earth, an immense cemetery. They should leave us in peace, a little respect for the dead, and instead …

I sit on a bench, looking out at the sea-river; perhaps I’m down here, or a little farther on, it doesn’t matter, I start reading my autobiography. I wrote an epitaph for myself as well—a little longer but it’s quite understandable, a little self-esteem is inevitable. I had even prescribed—as agreed with Reverend Manton and with the stonecutters cooperative I had set up, all semi-free convicts like me—that the graves and gravestones not be arranged in rows, but rather scattered randomly, in clumps, like in a copse. Those down below there had already marched in rows too often in their lives. Jack Mulligan, the glory of heaven awaits those who have known darkness on earth. Timothy Bones, I have sinned more than His Majesty’s judge who sent me down here knows, but another judge sees that my life was not just base actions. † June 18, 1838. Sarah Eliza Smith, dead at age four, this lovely bud in Paradise will bloom.

On the back of the gravestone you could write the deceased’s history, concisely yet providing all the essentials. Gravestones are condensed novels. Or rather, novels are expanded gravestones; a verb—he sailed—which becomes a highly detailed chronicle of storms, doldrums, piracies, mutinies. My autobiography is one of these expanded headstones. For this reason it should be forgiven if it contains some indulgent exaggeration of my adventures and fails to mention any foibles. De mortuis nihil nisi bene. No one should speak ill of the dead, or even of those sentenced to life.

Or for life? But this sentence was promulgated very early on and it’s useless to contest His Majesty’s courts, as the do-gooders do,
because their jurisdiction ends there. They could, in theory, cease issuing death sentences—I’m not sure it would be a good thing, with so any scoundrels around—but they can’t suspend life sentences. Me, for example, who is it that pulled me out from under there, who stole that nucleus, who sent me back to this unknown Austral island which is the world, to this Lager?

For a while I didn’t think about it anymore, I forgot about it. I worked quietly at my little job at the Tasmanian Hydro Electric Commission, sometimes I thought I felt Maria’s eyes on me, like the witch eyeing Hansel and Gretel while fattening them up for her gruesome meal, and then, with a pang, for a moment I recalled Fiume, when Maria was in fact Gretel, who gave me her hand, and holding that hand I was no longer afraid of any witch, but it was just for a moment, then it went away. And I resigned myself, I went on working, I drank a little more than I should, I waited for it to be time to go to sleep. You would never have gotten your hands on me and brought me in here were it not for that time when Luttmann came …

HE HAD COME
to visit the emigrants on behalf of the Party, Luttmann had, and I don’t know what got into me to get so hopping mad that way, just because of those words of his at Battery Point. What are a few words, after all, true or false, soon lost in the millions of words that come out of people’s mouths and evaporate like bubbles? Why get so worked up, then? Wait a minute, I’m the one asking you, Doctor, given that you know everything about me, that you read, or maybe even wrote, my nosological history, my novel …

No, I don’t remember anything important happening in Barcelona—Comrade Luttmann, the Commander Falcon of Jarama, was looking out at the sea, not at the girl who had asked him that question, a girl from Gradisca, who had come down here almost as a child, with her mother and two brothers, her father had been killed in the final days of the war in Spain. No, Luttmann did not meet her eyes; he gazed out at the sea without seeing it, he too looked where there was nothing to be seen. He didn’t meet my eyes either, when I started shouting soon afterwards—he didn’t see a thing, only the black sea, and when you don’t see anything you can also start shooting, for no reason, just for the fun of it, like throwing stones into a dark chasm, if there’s no one there no one gets hurt,
and even if there is someone down there but you don’t see him it’s as if no one were there, the stone cracks a head but the chasm is too deep to hear a cry. Nelson didn’t see anyone die looking through the spyglass with his blindfolded eye, he didn’t hear the cries of those who fell under his cannons either. In Goli Otok the cries of those in
kroz stroj
were lost at sea, the comrades fall but the Party doesn’t know anything about it.

The old cannon at Battery Point hasn’t fired for centuries—Luttmann wasn’t firing at anyone either, the Party hasn’t had any cannons for a long time, in fact it was struck in the face by their recoil and was left dumbfounded. But he too had fired, in Barcelona, now he no longer knew at whom—nothing important, that gunfire those nights, those comrades fallen on the barricades themselves forming a barricade,
No pasarán
, instead they passed through, they all pass, the cannon exploded and tore through the wall, an enormous rupture. That breach is me, my body, my heart in pieces—nothing important?

I had gone there to listen to him, with the others; I don’t remember how, but I started shouting, he averted his eyes, I even jumped him, almost, they stopped me first, all I could see were arms legs and some contorted faces, mouths screaming, I struck out wherever I could. That was when we met, Doctor, they dragged me here, to you—or to someone like you, I don’t remember, in any case someone with a long white coat, like yours. True, all the guards here are white, they’re the ones who won—you or someone else, I don’t know, he was kind however, but by then I was calm and collected, more than anything I was worn out.

HOW COULD
I possibly be anything but worn out? Not because of Luttmann’s words, which for that matter only you know, Doctor, it’s you who reported them to me, don’t tell me you invented them, just like that, to provoke me?

How could one possibly not lose one’s head passing below Puer Point with the boat, beyond Opossum Bay? The scored reddish rocks rise tall over an agitated sea; they seem brittle, almost a hope that evil and its bastions might crumble at any moment. No, they won’t give way, red with blood congealed for all eternity. The children and adolescent prisoners are up there; amid lashings and unspeakable abuses they learn to work the land, to make bread and repeat a few verses of the Bible by heart, but most of all to be tortured and to torture—History is the rape of childhood.

Towering cliffs, when they can’t take it anymore the children hurl themselves down crashing onto the rocks before ending up in the sea. How can you expect someone not to scream, not to hurl himself down as well, head first against those cliffs, filthy red dust, filthy blood on my scraped face—do you remember how bloody my face was when they brought me here? I would have liked to smash my head too, no, the world’s head, handsome round strutting its
fine colours—look, there’s even one on that table, a globe, what a pleasure it would be to crack it open, reduce its sickening flesh to a pulp.

Those children, their bodies smashed down there. Their eyes, when I saw them obeying the guards, were more unbearable than their broken bodies; empty, old, decrepit child’s eyes. And you expect someone not to lose his composure, not to put a blindfold over both eyes and fire indiscriminately, at whoever’s next, even at God?

Naturally they brought me here all in pieces, in that state of rage: I had lost some pieces, hurled off that cliff, from where those children jump. But those cliffs too will crumble one day, vanishing into the sea with an obscene churning, and the entire world will sink to the bottom. Ah, if there were only sea, sea, without even an island where a foot might leave any trace of suffering.

WHEN I CAN
, I get away—even from Norah—and run off to the kitchen in the governor’s official residence. Authority, in the kitchen, is represented by Bessie. Bessie Baldwin, to be exact; cook and assistant pastry chef, famous for her delicious dishes. There I am always welcome.

Bessie was sent down here for having squashed a cake in the face of the owner of the Edenwall pastry shop in Westminster, where at age twenty-one she was working as an errand girl, after he, angered by her request for a pay increase of a penny a week, verbally abused her and raised his hands against her. Seven years of forced labour. On the ship
Gilbert Henderson
, which transported her to the Antipodes together with a hundred and eighty-two other women and twenty-four children being sent as she was to the penal colony, when the ship’s surgeon, John Hamett, tried to force her to go to bed with him, as he was in the habit of doing with the female convicts in his power, worn down by the brutality of their mistreatment, Bessie sent him running by breaking a hefty candle over his head. Punished further for this slip-up upon landing and thrown in the special women’s house of correction, she persuaded the other inmates to fight for their dignity and protest the abuses; and when Sir John Franklin arrived for an
official visit with his wife, Lady Jane, and with Reverend Knopwood, apologetic and a little tipsy as usual, Bessie organized a clamorous protest by the three hundred detainees, all with their petticoats raised, loudly slapping their arses and displaying them to the authorities, with no thought for the dozens of lashes that would shortly rain down on those behinds for this.

Even the governor must have appreciated the courage of that insolent gesture, since he took her into his own kitchen. Since that time, Bessie has been working in that kitchen, inventing recipes and tasty dishes, a true culinary genius. I sit in front of her, eating but mainly watching her—those hands that have no need to defend themselves and can make the dough in peace, rolling it out and crimping the sheets, sprinkling salt, kneading, mincing, stirring, measuring out ingredients, pouring them into a dish. Well, perhaps this is revolution, freeing your hands from the need to strike and restoring them to tenderness … If Medea, at the right moment, had grabbed Jason by the collar and given him a good shaking, maybe later …

Thank you, Doctor, I’m familiar with that little book, in fact I’m the one who brought it here. Truly well stocked, that old bookstore on Salamanca Place. They are Bessie’s recipes, recorded by one of Sir John’s housekeepers. Recipes both simple and complex. Fish soups of all kinds and oxtail soup, broths, steamed kangaroo meat, oyster sauces, cakes composed of a variety of ingredients, dishes for gala dinners and for brief stops when on reconnaissance in the untamed bush. The measure and quantity of various ingredients, cooking times, the most suitable containers. There’s life in these recipes, more so than in certain volumes of verse. When I leave, she almost always, though reluctantly, gives me half a bottle of rum for Norah. Well, mainly for her. I don’t know if I could empty it alone … As if it were possible not to be alone …