Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (14 page)

For a time, with Maria, I thought I had come home. But when the Party asked me to go to Turin to reorganize a cell which dealt with school contact networks that had been just about dismantled by a series of arrests, I didn’t even think of saying no, nor did I want to, because I could not have loved Maria with dishonour and cowardice in my heart. I would have preferred to operate there, in defence of the Slavs of my territory, Slovenes and Croatians whom I saw so shamefully trampled by the Fascists as well as looked
upon so badly by many Italians—perhaps anti-Fascist yet full of prejudice—but the Party thought that I was too well known there in my region.

I had already lost the job at Sidarma, after the first albeit brief arrest for anti-Fascist activities. And so I went to Turin. Love cannot live enslaved, either by its own chains or those of others. And Maria thought and felt as I did: indeed, it was she who taught me love, it was in her arms that I became a man. How could I have kissed that smile yet bow my head? I left with a heavy heart, but not disheartened. I knew that we would not make love for who knows how long, maybe never again, but when you have done it so many times with intensity and passion, and you are part of the other person, one single flesh, you no longer worry about your own body or that of the one you love, and it is precisely because your desire to make love is so great that you can renounce it, if the good fight requires it of you.

It was from Father Callaghan, in Hobart Town, that I had learned words like
one single flesh
or
the good fight
. As a good Irish Catholic, he was always on the side of the oppressed, like those clergymen who had intrepidly yet vainly organized the revolt of the convicts in New South Wales, the Rising of the People that was to be triggered by the code word “Saint Peter,” and that led the insurrectionists to the gallows. Yes, Doctor, I know, a hundred and twenty years earlier, but what difference does it make. Earlier or later is the same thing when you have a noose around your neck. Nothing new under the sun. No, on the contrary, Father Callaghan thundered, everything is new and happens for the first time; every sin is eternally in God’s eyes and the prince of this world, your executioner, has already been judged. He taught catechism as it should be taught, and how to serve Mass, but he also taught how to fight for freedom and dignity—a Christian is a free man among free men, he would say, who knows
no peace as long as one of his brothers in Christ remains unjustly in chains, and love develops the muscles that are capable of breaking those chains.

No, I did not abandon Maria, Doctor, Comrade Blasich, and all you others. In Turin I lived on Ormea Street, under the name of Flavio Tiboldi, with all my false documents in order; the Party was well organized, in fact, they warned me in time that the police were on my trail and I made off before they could get their hands on me. Claudio Vincenzi, on the other hand, who operated with me, was caught and badly beaten, and even his family got mixed up in it. So I didn’t have the heart to drag Maria into who knows what calamities and misfortunes—I didn’t write to her, I didn’t tell her anything, I disappeared, but to protect her, to keep her safe—

Maybe I had learned the Party’s line too well, deciding for the good of others, even when sending them off to die. How did I not see that love means climbing into the other person’s boat and letting her climb into yours, putting out to sea even when the sea rages under the bora that swoops down on the Quarnero, how did I not realize that leaving her on land is a cowardly action more base than letting her leave by herself?

I left her on land, I lost sight of her face. It vanishes in the sea of years and events, and along with that face, swallowed up by the waves, I too sink and am lost; I am no longer anybody, yet this doesn’t help me avoid the cyclops, the dark, blind eye aimed at me.

I don’t see a thing, Maria disappears and the world is dark. After the shipwreck the sea returns the figurehead, corroded and eaten away by the water, the worn features almost mere wood again, the folds of her garment the grooves of a tree trunk, mouth nose and eyes chinks or nodes of a tree. Help me find her again, Doctor! You know where she is, otherwise how did you get those photographs of
her—Yes, it’s her, look at the calendar, turn the pages, the months. What’s that? All right, it’s not a calendar; I called it that because with those pictures of half-naked women it reminded me of the calendars found in barbershops at one time. Well then, a catalogue, a book, it’s all the same. What matters is that she’s there inside, her image. Turn the pages—there she is, who knows how she ended up in that Ringkobing Museum in Denmark ... Look at the beautiful head, yes, wrinkles on the face, cracks in the wood, skin that shrivels and puckers, it’s understandable, the years go by for everyone, but you can see at once that it’s her under those excoriations of time, it must be her. Pass the calendar around, casually, discreetly, don’t say it’s a photo to identify her, maybe someone has seen her and can put me on her trail.

SOME HOVELS
are like the hold and the bed is no better than the pallet where the sailor lies down at night. Or even the plank-bed of a prison, although the one on Carey Street, where I ended up for debt when I came back from Iceland, was really hard. When I got out of there, I thought Marie would never be able to find me after I lost everything I got from the sale of my clothes—gambling in a café near Covent Garden—and holed up in a basement in St. Giles’s, which I shared with a lanky red-haired guy whose face was disfigured by eczema. The floor was packed dirt, a chair served as a nightstand for clothes and a water basin, but the room soon became more comfortable, since the roommate who shared the pallet never returned, not even to take his rucksack from the chair, and in the evening I could put a lit candle on the chair and read the hymnal.

Night sounds could be heard in the cellar, drafts made the candle flicker, dark shadows quivered on the walls, obscene black tongues of the dogs of hell, but the soul that trusts in God is solid as a rock and I, on my straw mattress, read in bed, serene and indolent as a gentleman. Most of all, by myself, and this is what counts. A heart is too tight for two to fit in. Indeed, when another person enters, it’s total confusion, squeezing together and tossing and turning.

In that peace and solitude I organized my writings about the Icelandic venture, I rearranged the story of that endeavour, only recently completed—not ingloriously, despite appearances. It’s so much easier than not replying to Marie’s letters. I wrote feverishly, because I knew that Hooker and Mackenzie, that other malicious hack, intended to publish their own version—altered by Mackenzie out of malice and by Hooker out of ingenuousness. I reread a few sentences aloud and I was satisfied, I drew a breath. And when a letter from Marie arrived—I don’t know how, perhaps it’s you who delivered it to me, Doctor—I no longer felt emptiness around me, protective and reassuring, but a dismay that spread through my soul.

Flee—from one hole to another, Cripplegate, Whitechapel, Southwark, Smithfield, St. Giles’s. A descent as inexorable as a trickle of moisture sliding down a wall, every move lighter and every hovel more squalid. I went out, but rarely, in the morning. Gin on an empty stomach tightens the belly, an acidic burning sensation rises in the throat, but a flushed face feels good in that damp, fetid air. At the beginning feeling dirty bothers you, but little by little you get used to it. The overgrown beard, the sweat that dries on you, your shirt glued to your skin become as familiar as your own body, whose odour never troubles you; they’re another layer of epidermis protecting you against the outside world. I understand why the Iora, on the Austral continent, go around smeared with rancid fish oil, which they never wash off.

I step over the garbage, I set out down the narrow streets toward the Thames. The river is greenish and black, the waves curl in a lurid froth; occasionally my steps take me near the asylum, people lower buckets from the windows and draw that brownish water. A hum rises from the river, at times it grows and becomes a threatening
rumble; voices overlap and are lost, crows and seagulls shriek, in the pale sunlight a shred of fog gleams like daybreak.

I tear up Marie’s letter. A seagull swoops upon a shred of paper whirling down, in his furious, famished haste he swallows it; I try to imagine which of those irrevocable words, which I read shortly before, ended up in that rapacious rostrum. That evening I also left behind that basement in Smithfield; I spent my last pennies to send the Icelandic manuscript to the publisher Murray, who later—at least so he said—hid it away somewhere and was no longer able to find it.

WHEN I MET MARIA
, under that sky in Fiume that was melting in the sultry heat, I had just disembarked from the
Ausonia
, which had brought me back to Italy, thrown out of Australia because of events in Townsville and illegal Communist activities, but I didn’t feel at all like an exile, a stranger, and not just because I was returning to places that felt like home. Because I thought the whole world was my home, that fellow comrades and those who inflict torture can be found everywhere, and above all that being thrown out—or in—for defending liberty was a badge of pride. The first night in the cooler, the first hangover, the first kiss. Exiles have something regal about them, and a true sovereign does not always remain seated on the throne like on the privy, but stakes his kingdom to make it freer and greater, and chooses exile rather than the servitude of being an abettor. And if kings mistake the throne for a commode with chamber pot, from which they never get up and where they continue shitting even as the courtiers pay their respects, like those French kings do, they get their heads cut off, like they did to the royals in France.

The beatings I took in prison in Townsville did not weigh on me. Of course, while I was being walloped it hurt and I even screamed,
unashamedly, because a man should not be ashamed of being weak, nor of being a hero. But after a few months, with my bones reset, I forgot about it. Those jailers, like all warders, were poor devils just like us; they didn’t know what they were doing and I even felt sorry for them, though I would have gladly smashed their faces in, because they didn’t realize that by raising their hands against us they were manufacturing their own chains. I was sure that, if we had had time to explain things to them, they would have become our friends and comrades. Every man, I thought at that time, is a potential comrade, even if he doesn’t know he is, and is destined to become one sooner or later. Later instead ...

In any case. I was more embittered by the dissension that tore our movement apart and made life so difficult for our Anti-Fascist Concentration of Australasia, the controversies between
La Riscossa
and
L’Avanguardia Libertaria
, the expulsion of Bertazzon, as an anarchist, from the Matteotti Club in Melbourne—he too expelled, but by us, that is, by himself, not by the police, like me. Only soon afterwards did I realize our talent for tearing each other apart, our fate as losers who lose because they rip one another to pieces, while the others, so united instead, lambaste us.

Even the revolution has its chickens with their heads upside down, pecking one another fiercely like the capons in Renzo’s grasp—I didn’t need prison to read
I Promessi sposi
or other great books, unlike other comrades who discovered them in the clandestine schools the Party organized in Fascist jails. I completed my studies normally, like one should, despite my scattered life. Not just what I heard from Valdieri, in the evening at my home. Secondary school too, that’s right. A high school with all the proper qualifications, the Dante Lyceum in Trieste, with instructors who knew ancient Greek like they knew Italian. Fascists too, some of them, like Masi; I went to
boo him, at the rally in 1925, when Facchinetti, the Republican candidate, wearing a patch over the eye he lost in the Great War, put him in his place. A blindfolded eye, him too, but blindfolded the right way, so as not to see his own fear and be able to move forward. I didn’t finish high school, because we went back to Australia. Blasich was in the last year when I entered high school, then he went to the Normal School in Pisa. I don’t know if he was already a Communist then, he certainly didn’t act as if he was. Maybe it was the Party who ordered it.

But why so many
kroz stroj
, so many upside-down chickens in the revolution’s ranks, tearing each other apart with their pecking? Chickens are stupid, they don’t even realize who it is who’s doing them in, they don’t know who or what to believe in anymore ...

Living is believing; it’s faith that makes up life, you can’t appreciate this; you’ve lived inside here, in a void, and you can’t know that faith can move mountains, by God, does it move them! If you don’t believe in love you’re not even able to make love anymore. I know. I haven’t done it for a long time and I no longer feel like doing it, and I don’t think it’s because of my age—how old, for that matter?—nor because of those pills of yours; if one is in love nothing stops him and if he’s not in love nothing stirs him. This is my sin, my betrayal; a man who doesn’t make love and has lost the longing to do so is a traitor. It’s right to keep him in here. Even if he were set free he wouldn’t know what to make of it, of the world of life of colours of the evening light; a eunuch in a harem doesn’t know where to begin. Even the revolution no longer exists, it has never existed, since the time we stopped believing in it.

Maria’s face, that day, revealed her complete faith, all the grand and beautiful and lofty things she believed in, which had sculpted her face, intrepid and bold. Could she have loved me if she had met
me for the first time, after a rag had already wiped my face clean of all the things in which I believed, namely myself? Nausicaa sees Ulysses’ scar, as he lies naked on the shore, but mine is not the scar of Ulysses, it is the festering, fetid wound of Philoctetes, the slash of Cronos’s scythe that castrates every Heaven forever—so we need to conceal that foul mutilation, we can’t undress to make love.