Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (6 page)

“Just as later, who knows, maybe a granddaughter or great-granddaughter of the daughter of that night, in the arms of my father; the account gets muddled, it’s not easy to find birth certificates for those born in the bush, dropped while standing up, legs spread. Jan Jansen.”—Wrong again; I don’t know how many of you there are online, but each of you knows less than the other. I was called Jan Jansen when I was on board the
Surprize.
However, I knew nothing about it; shortly after that night I left Hobart Town on the
Alexander
, a twenty-month voyage with hurricanes that kept driving us back. In any case, anyone born of a black Eve in the forest was born dead, with no right to exist, the non-existent issue
of an extinct race that no longer lives and can no longer procreate. No one is born: if something happens in the jungle and a pulp of clotted blood is found under a bush, it’s an animal matter.

But blood courses along, an unseen, almost dry trickle in the desert that nonetheless spills out in the distance, it rushes into a face when the heart trembles ... When my father took Mangawana in his arms, he didn’t care whose granddaughter or great-granddaughter that brown girl from Tasmania was—and why should it have mattered to him? He called her that in jest, at tender moments; he liked those old indigenous names that had vanished. I too called that dark girl who worked with us in Sydney, in the editorial office of
Il Risveglio
, by that name, when—No, it’s not a delirious fiction, Doctor, as you insinuate in those papers and tapes of yours. Of course I listened to them, then I put them back in place. You’re quick, you are, to tell lies. “Distorted oedipal fantasies, personality dissociation. Confuses his sexual and romantic experiences in Australia, with a woman of Aboriginal or mixed blood, with his alleged double’s raving about his erotic experiences—that double of whom he considers himself a clone—and projects these delusions onto his parents, as sublimated incestuous fantasies.” What rubbish! “Naturally he says he’s not surprised by these diagnoses, that he’s used to having all possible accusations thrown at him. The usual defence mechanism known to one and all, the typical denial.” Right. The accused, naturally, denies! Aggravating circumstances, before all the courts. You know what you’re doing, when you put all these things in my mouth and make me repeat them, using the excuse of making sure I understood the question, and then you record what you’ve dictated to me. But that still doesn’t mean ...

My father married my mother in 1906. He had just arrived from Trieste—at a time when immigrants, especially those from our areas,
were few and coming down here was difficult, the Immigration Restriction Act of the Australian government discouraged those who were not Anglo-Saxon. Even after 1945, when many came down here—especially from our area, people from Trieste, Istria, Fiume, Dalmatia, shortly afterwards I too returned—even then it wasn’t easy, with that displaced persons tag they labelled us with, still, fifty years earlier it was worse, but my father managed to do it. He started out cutting sugar cane in Queensland, but moved to Tasmania almost immediately, and his fishing gear store in Hobart Town did quite well.

On the wall, behind the counter, he put up a beautiful painting by Vincenzo Brun, pseudonym Almeo, which depicted fishing boats in the Adriatic. Now
that’s
a sea, he pronounced pompously, I’d like to see you in the Quarnero, in the Morlacca channel, when the bora blows, or, worse yet, on San Pietro in Nembi—right, Ilovik in Croatian, no need to tell me—with clashing seas when the bora and the tramontana blow at the same time. And he would show and explain those two-masted trawlers and swift sailing boats, the
bragozzi
and the
passere
, which the Australians would have done well to build too, he said, hulls and keels made expressly to cross the Bass Strait.

Of course he also knew that those sudden storms, the neverin and nevèra, are frightening, true, but typhoons are another thing entirely, as is that furious ocean south of Port Jackson. I travelled it when Dr. Bass had just baptized his strait and circumnavigated Van Diemen’s Land with Captain Flinders, discovering that it was an island. I crossed the Bass Strait on the
Harbinger
; they didn’t want to take me aboard because of my Danish nationality and because I had arrived illegally both on the
Surprize
and the
Fanny
, but then Michael Hogan, who made money on anything that came his way, from whales to the slave trade to the transport of convicts, found
me a position as second-in-command, practically without pay. Even my two sententious biographers, Clune and Stephenson, pointed it out, with unbefitting sarcasm, in that book of theirs that I found in that bookshop on Salamanca Place, not far from where my father’s store was, one Thursday afternoon. An entire shelf dedicated to me, modestly. There’s even a handwritten label in capital letters, Jorgen Jorgensen. I don’t know if those volumes are more or less reliable than your charts and reports, Dr. Ulcigrai, still I read them with relish and I also took a lot of notes, as you can see. And, as you suggested I do, every so often I copy a few paragraphs from them, maybe even on the computer, even though ...

I crossed those waves and dark foamy waters on the
Harbinger
, which was to follow the
Lady Nelson
through Bass Strait, taking advantage of its course, with a cargo of rum to be sold upon arrival in Port Jackson. So we ploughed those enormous rollers, whitish waves of seemingly black foam. The great South is black, even the sea is black. We also discovered an island that Bass and Flinders had not come upon and we christened it King Island—in honour of the governor of New South Wales, my biographers explain. It must surely be so, I don’t recall, but I must have written it, somewhere, otherwise how could they know it.

By contrast I seem to recall quite well the beach full of elephant seals, spongy masses rubbing against each other, tumbling over one another like muddy waves, rolling in the surf, raucous snorting when they mate, barking when they fight, it’s sometimes difficult to distinguish the two ...—Still, the first is scarier, if you lose you don’t just get bitten once or twice, you lose yourself, everything, I don’t even know what exactly—

Better to keep away from the islands, in that strait. The rollers race along, surging immense and black toward the black horizon,
a far cry from the Adriatic, the Quarnero and the Morlacca. Still, even those waters of ours must be a good training ground, and my father wasn’t all wrong when he held forth in his store in front of that painting by Brun—You want to know more about this Brun? Hold on ... I can tell you’re nostalgic for our far-off lands, since there are even books on Triestine painting in the library of this hospital down here. So then, here we are ... “Born in Trieste, a studio in Melbourne on Flinders Street, exhibitions at the Victorian Artists Society and even in New Zealand, after 1905 we lose track of him.” Indeed, the Pacific is an immense evening in which to disappear—my father wasn’t all wrong, as I was saying, if Gino Knesi
, who learned to sail his boat in Lussino before he too came down here as an emigrant, after Lussino became Yugoslavian in 1945, was the victor in the Sydney–Hobart regatta, more or less my course.

My father, then, was married in 1906. In Sydney He also had his photograph taken by Degotardi, the renowned photolithographic studio founded by Giovanni Degotardi, born in Lubiana, and it seems that Alberto Vittorio Zelman, also originally from Trieste, played at his wedding—an eminent Australian violinist, director of the Melbourne Philharmonic Society, concert performer, an instructor at the Conservatory, etc. etc., worthy son of the author of the memorable and forgotten work
Il Lazzarone
, memorable and forgotten like every noble human effort.

In the photograph, taken by Degotardi Jr. Jr., you can see my mother’s somewhat brownish skin, those unusual, prominent Asiatic cheekbones, Australo-Asiatic in this case—Pannonian cheekbones, my father, who loved them very much, used to say, because they reminded him of those of certain women in Fiume of Hungarian origin. In fact Maria ... Yes, my mother, who was from Launceston,
certainly had some Tasmanian blood—extinct blood, from the race that was erased from the face of the earth, officially wiped out, and therefore, if it had survived in some unknown recess of the forest, it had done so illegitimately. I wish that clandestine blood were in my veins as well, sucked in when I was in her womb, an alien abusive invader yet welcomed with love and accepted as her own. My own blood was even shed in Spain, in Germany and in Yugoslavia, under the delusion that I was shedding it so that no one could ever again exterminate a race ...

It’s because of my mother that my father, who had met her in Queensland when he was still cutting sugar cane and married her in Sydney, went to Tasmania, where she had been born and raised, where I was born—in 1910, Doctor, believe me, don’t go on about it. That’s where, years later, I had the good fortune to discover and read that autobiography of mine written at the time for the
Almanack
of the Van Diemen’s Land Company in Hobart Town. A somewhat sketchy autobiography, full of gaps, but the space allotted me was what it was. Besides, if I had to compete with my biographers and recount everything that happened to me, I’d be the first to lose my head; it would be like lighting a flame under a powder keg, a huge explosion and the ship blows up ...

AH, CHILDHOOD
, you want my childhood, my adolescence, yes of course, it’s obvious, Doctor, you want to understand, to go back to the origin and cause of it all. Well, you can’t complain; you can’t expect to go further back than that, it seems to me. We’re going back, back, gradually further back, to the zygote, to the original diploid happily transplanted—no, unhappily, but that’s another matter and I know it doesn’t interest you, happiness doesn’t interest anyone. In any case, however, transplanted to live and survive, despite all the Lagers in the world. I already know what you’re about to tell me, I can read it in your face, though you’re still so undecided—after all you can’t shut a patient’s mouth, it’s one of the first rules of therapy. These things were discovered later on; at the time I was born, there couldn’t have been a Dolly, it’s all an invention on my part. Precisely, a scientific invention. You’re all the same, you scientists. Envious, avid to be the first to discover the truth; up to that time there’s nothing, only crude primitive beliefs, damnatio memoriae for those who came before. And yet that brilliant stranger—an immigrant in Australia, himself a displaced person—had already discovered everything by then, even at that time he was able to make us all immortal, sheep men and diploids; even then he in fact sentenced me to the eternal
punishment of living. My parents, I think, could not have children and he, thinking he was doing something good ...

O death, where is thy sting? The double-helix cross has blunted it; it’s only fitting that a cross, it doesn’t matter which one, should be victorious over death—and over us, the dead called back to life, seamen who have finally fallen asleep in a tavern and are suddenly roused by the press gang bursting into the joint looking for hands for His Majesty’s crew, rudely awakened and forced, perhaps with a cudgel, to get up, drag themselves onto the ship—like they did to me that time in Southampton—and clamber up the shrouds again, swab the deck, hold the course, once again beset by storms and cannon fire. Why awaken those who are sleeping? I would have been so happy if they had let me rest in peace; it’s horrible, that idea of having to wake up all together, on the last day, a joyful last day that instead becomes a wretched first day, the beginning of eternity, of that Lager that will never end ...

SO THEN CHILDHOOD
, childhoods, I’m getting there, it’s all written here, all you have to do is read it. That wing of the Danish Royal Palace, in Christiansborg, is empty and silent, aside from the ticking of the clocks in my father’s adjoining workshop and the rich voice of Magister Pistorius when he is giving lessons to me and my brother. On days when the Supreme Court is in session, the judges pass through the long corridors in their red togas, led by the guards. The corridors are dark, an occasional shaft of light filters through the few tightly shuttered windows, and the halberds, passing through those beams, flash for an instant like lightning in the night, then flicker and die out in the shadows. Almost like those little windows that I open and close quickly, when I follow them with the arrow on the screen, in order to enter that childhood palace ...—The antechamber door, beyond which lies the courtroom, closes behind the silent procession. The commander of the Lager also comes by with his henchmen, as we line up silently, high walls separating us from the world—we ourselves are the dead stones of that wall. In Dachau and Goli Otok, outdoors under the sky, it was darker than in the palace corridors. Gilas and Kardelj too, when they came to visit the Gulag, passed between our ranks, our walls of darkness,
like those judges in the red togas. Every court wears the colour of blood—but this was later, a long time after the end of childhood.