Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (9 page)

The ceiling of the Hall of Knights falls in, tongues of fire envelop the portraits of Danish kings and noblemen, serpents of flame coil around the breastplates and ermine cloaks, ripping the canvases from the wall, the ancient faces are distorted in the flames, the eyes flicker and die like sparks, the figures shrivel and curl up, fetuses returning to nonentity. The great clock is a white blotch in the gusts of burning wind. When, soon afterwards, I embarked as a ship’s boy on the British collier
Jane
—I was fourteen years old—I remember how glad I was not to leave anything behind, that there was no childhood place I could return to.

YOU’VE GOT MAIL
. Cooperate, go on, open it. There’s a message.—“
Del mio fato no me lagno, go trovà un altro bagno
.” About my lot, I complain not, another place to bathe I’ve got.—Riddle-me-ree. Nobody knows? Go on, it’s that little poem by Cesare Colussi. He came down here to the Antipodes on the
San Giorgio
, in 1952, a year after me, I mean one hundred and forty-nine years after me. Of course, it’s not great poetry, you don’t have to tell me that, in all modesty I know something about these things. It’s no accident that I wrote two novels, a tragedy and a comedy, not to mention various essays, which only envy on the part of London’s literary clique has prevented me from publishing. Like the one about the journey to Iceland, moreover, which would have been a sensation. However, I find Colussi engaging, with his passion for ocean bathing. So content to have found a nicely sheltered beach near Melbourne, where he could sail along the coast with his little boat, and thus ease his nostalgia for the Lanterna in Trieste, the Pedocin they called it, that lice-infested old bathing establishment where I too went as a boy, well known for the fact that men and women are kept strictly separated—even today, according to what I read in
Il Piccolo
that you let me peruse to make me think I’m
up there. Absolutely right, men over here, women over there, that way you avoid painful complications, fuss and bother, messy scenes.

But it’s not enough to keep men and women separated. The men too should be separated from one another. No, I take it back, in fact being alone is too much, you begin to enjoy hurting yourself. It’s like being isolated in
bojkot.
If only I were alone, without this screen, this tape, without myself, what a relief. Incognito, private. A bit like being at the Lanterna, without those female legs too close at hand. Colussi went there up until the end, to the Lanterna. Me, no, of course, I too went to a bathing resort but a different kind, the penal spa at Goli Otok—“Magnificent ocean bathing for tourists, hotel reservations at ...”—If you think it’s funny showing me this illustrated brochure distributed last month by the Croatian Visitors and Tourism Agency ...

Colussi came down here because, not being able to find work, his pants were falling off him, so he emigrated, like so many others. I don’t know why I came down here. Down the Bay, they used to say in King George’s time to refer to the Austral penitentiary. But what else could I have done, when the beast that held me in its jaws spit me out, after it had already thoroughly chewed me up? Things still went well for me, not even a year. Others, Adriano Dal Pont, for example, remained there until 1956: they had to wait for Comrade Longo to come and persuade Tito to permanently close that slaughterhouse and feed his dogs canned meat instead of living flesh. And when I left the island of the dead, how could I have stayed there, in Trieste? Run into Comrade Professor Blasich in the street, as if nothing had happened, or go to the Lanterna and gaze at the sea where everything disappears, where my life had disappeared? I had had enough of ocean bathing.

How do you get Down the Bay? That Apollonius should know, the one who claims to tell the story, to be Orpheus among the Argonauts. The
Woodman
set sail from Sheerness at the mouth of the Medway, the
Nelly
from Bremerhaven, and the train to Bremerhaven, where they put us on board the
Nelly
, set off from Rome and, before that, from Trieste. And the sealed boxcar to Dachau—no, that we can’t even talk about.

The ships, trains, convoys, aircraft depart from many places, but the destination is the same and they arrive at night. The anchor is lowered to the bottom; from the portholes it’s dark outside; maybe on the other side of the earth it’s daytime, the long perpetual day of the Nordic summer, and here, where we are, it’s polar night, six long endless months. In Port Arthur the harshest punishment was being shut up for weeks in an utterly dark cell. I said weeks, but I don’t know whether they are months, days, years, because in there, in that darkness, you don’t know when time passes, whether you’ve been there for an hour or forever, maybe time has stopped. At least so they’ve told me, because I haven’t been in those cells. In others, yes, later on.

Here it’s dark, Doctor, it must be the bottom where the anchor sank. The sleeping quarters in the refugee camp are dark too, the lower floors are plunged in shadow; entering the Silos, the old grain deposit in Trieste, built at the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where they put us up with all the other emigrants before our departure for Australia, was like entering a dark and a smoky purgatory—it was Maria who said this, years later, when she too passed through that purgatory to atone for my sins. Her voice, at the edge of the shadows, lights up every corner of that maze. The dismal granary opens like a corolla; there is only the vast blue sky, full of wind.

Maria had opened the cage, but the bird with its wings bound did not take flight and so she too was lost for nothing ... I don’t even really remember how I ended up here with you, Doctor, on what ship I arrived, or rather returned down here.

What a strange word,
return
... To return with the golden fleece, after no matter how many circumnavigations. Maybe around the world, like that time on the
Alexander
from Hobart Town to London, five hundred and eighty-seven days, trying several times in vain to round Cape Horn and battered here and there by the storms, from Otaheiti to St. Helena, where news of the battle of Austerlitz had just arrived—further marvellous symmetries, learning of the culmination of the Empereur’s glory there where shortly afterwards he too would end up as an exile and prisoner.

Five hundred and eighty-seven days is a long time, but it would be worth it if it brought us home. You’ll return from your mission satisfied, you’ll see, Tore, Comrade Blasich told me, we’re sending you among the barbarian Slavs of Colchis, at the ends of the earth, but you will return upon completion of your mission, peace among peoples and among comrades, the red flag illuminated by the sun setting over the sea resplendent like a golden fleece.

In reality, I was only going to Fiume, seventy kilometres from Trieste. Why was the return journey so long? Comrade Professor Blasich would say that argonauts always have to travel a long way, according to some they even go up the Danube, or perhaps the Don, crossing the Sarmazia and the Sea of Cronos, sailing back down the ocean to return through the Pillars of Hercules—mare tenebrarum, vast waters of the West, sunset as golden as the fleece—an ancient coin found in Ribadeo, in Galicia, bears the effigy of a ram with a golden coat. He, Jason, returns with the fleece, but I, if I rummage through my pockets, can’t find a thing, at most this yellow wafer of
yours, Doctor, a gold coin that melts in your mouth and puts you to sleep; the dragon dozes off, like when he drinks Medea’s magic potions, and when he wakes up the treasure is gone. Where is the red flag, who stole it?

No voyage is too long and perilous if it brings you back home. But do houses to return to still exist, did they ever exist? I thought Via Madonnina was one, but after Goli Otok it became the door to darkness. And Comrade Professor Blasich—the impresario of Charon and those jam-packed ferries of his—if he’s alive it’s because he got off the boat in time and perhaps he’s still rereading and annotating those
Argonautics
of his. He must certainly have had another copy, besides the one he gave me. Yet he would smile contemptuously when I spoke to him about my readings—he who had studied classical philology at the Normal School in Pisa. A certified Communist, a bourgeois intellectual of the workers’ movement. But I too had done some reading, in high school and, before that, thanks to my father’s library in the back of his store, and thanks to his friend Valdieri: he too dragged into that drainpipe of a world by the Coriolis forces, Valdieri had completed university and then had some trouble with the police in Naples, because he was active among the anarchists. I listened to him at the table in the evening, when he told my father that the Greeks had been humanity’s childhood and perennial youth, an unsurpassed period, and that only revolution could lead a liberated humanity back to that greatness.

Revolution, I thought, was therefore a return home. Instead the Greeks had written about and understood something else, something terrible, the tragedy and senselessness of the world. The stench of Philoctetes, Jason who brings the light of civilization to the barbarity of Colchis and along with it brings new barbarism.
The glory and infamy of progress, the bourgeoisie that destroys the sirens with an insurance policy on Ulysses’ ship; earplugs for the sailors, ears open for the masters to hear that unprecedented song, but arms and legs bound properly, so that the song that devastates the world becomes innocuous.

It was meant to annihilate all power, that song; instead, the one who dies and vanishes into nothing is the one who intones it, the siren of revolution. Already over back then, at the beginning, a discovery that convulses the mind and heart, Ajax who slaughters the herds and flocks. A mistake of the gods to blind men and make them culpable ...—Of course, I too was culpable, for the blood shed by my hand and that shed from my veins, for death given and received, for everything; even for existing, even for losing. Especially for losing; it’s a mortal sin, when you’re fighting for the revolution. This retreat of ours—“Fall back, advance ... history is not linear, my friend, it zigzags, at least it has for some time; it surges but stands still, a jostling struggling groping crowd at a rock concert in the square, no Long March because we’re already there, we’ve always been there, and the world is not infinite, only the Internet is infinite, the reality that doesn’t exist. Win, lose, it’s all the same; a game. The fault lies in not having realized it in time—But let’s not talk about blame, please, there’s a limit even to retro style, guilt hasn’t existed for a long time now.”—On the contrary it’s rampant, even though you pretend not to see it like everyone else, I can just see your smug little smile ... It’s everywhere, our guilt for having lost the battle of Gog and Magog, for not being able to give more meaning to man’s history ... The only consolation is that at least we know it, while they think they’ve won; they march pompously along the gangplank amid the applause and haven’t realized that there is no net below them and that from there you fall straight into the scalding cesspool.

—About my lot, I complain not, another place to bathe I’ve got. Goli Otok, a penal bathing resort to refresh the memory of those of Port Arthur and Dachau. How did that brochure go, the one that someone jokingly came out with in such poor taste?—“An extraordinarily clean sea, immaculate surroundings, immersed in silence.”—the world’s utter silence with regard to suffering and infamy—“Goli Otok island of peace, island of absolute freedom.”—The tourist agency sounds like the Central Committee, and the photograph, with that blue water and those white cliffs, is just as persuasive. We
pijeskari
, sand quarriers, had to stay in that water up to our chests, even in winter, scraping the bottom with a shovel to collect the sand and load the wheelbarrows, up and down with the shovel, in the icy water. After a while you don’t even feel the cold anymore. The shovel goes up and down, and if you’re not quick to bring it up full of sand, you get a walloping: one fellow got his nose broken and he went on standing there, soaked to the chest, his face cracked open, blood and mucus like ice. The shovel rises, lowers, you can’t feel your hands anymore. The salt rubs them raw more than the wind, it’s not surprising. The sea has no pity, but why should it be the only one to have it?

In any case, it’s always the sea. The sea is like the Party—it’s others who know where you need to go; it’s not you who determines the currents and the tides, you merely follow them. “My name was William Kid, when I sail’d, when I sail’d, My name was William Kid when I sail’d, My name was William Kid, God’s laws I did forbid, And so wickedly I did, when I sail’d.” The voice of the ballad singer would try to outdo the shouts of the orange vendors and drunks at St. Giles’s, when the
Jane
docked in London for a few days, during those first four years at sea. God’s laws I too did forbid, when I sailed—I tried, that day in Nyhavn, to pretend some emotion over
bidding my parents farewell, my father’s restrained sadness, my mother’s tears, my siblings’ embrace.

Maybe I really did cry, I was fourteen years old. My sister Trine’s hair, falling to her shoulders, engulfing me like a wave as she threw her arms around my neck. A moving passage, go take a look at it in the autobiography. I too was sincerely moved when I wrote it and I’m moved when I reread it, but at that time, I realize, my only emotion was relief at the departure, at the ship slipping away toward dark horizons rocked by the winds, the wake disappearing behind it. I left behind the sceptre of Iceland as well, later on, just as one lets go of a mooring line when putting out to sea, and so I let go of my father, my mother, everything. Afterwards, however, later still, I found myself always carrying everything with me, my heart, the hearts of others, flags ... a heavy burden that crushes you. My back broken. But upright. Think what satisfaction.

It’s the sea that brought me to Goli Otok, way before the
Punat
, that Charon’s trawler, brought me back there, after the UDBA, Tito’s political police, arrested me in the dead of night and flung me into its hold, onto the heap of other comrades in chains. Many of them didn’t even know that Goli Otok existed, before being sent off to become deranged and die on that piece of arid, burning moon, and maybe become worse torturers than their torturers—it happens at times, I saw it at Port Arthur as well, the cellmate who torments you to please the guard and be rewarded by an hour’s rest or a tot of rum.