Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (15 page)

And yet it all began so well, even down here. When, during the strikes of 1934, our consul in Melbourne urged unemployed Italians to get hired and replace the striking Australian workers and we all went around, together and united, in our red shirts—there were Istrian Croatian comrades with us as well—boycotting the strikebreaking, to make it clear to those scabs that they too were comrades and that—How could I have thought that, years later, some of us would find ourselves on Goli Otok, still together though perhaps some in
bojkot
and others that put them in
bojkot
?

What do you mean, what does this have to do with love? If you don’t get it on your own, it’s pointless for me to explain it to you. Even I don’t really understand it. Listening to these things, hearing them replay in my head, confuses me, it makes me dizzy—where is it that they stuck this diskette inside me that raves with my voice? Or maybe with yours, which mimics mine so well? It’s so easy, those disks are so thin, all you need is a crack to slip them in and I’m full of cracks, cuts, open wounds; it’s so easy to stick one of those smooth thingamajigs in me. In Dachau they put salt and acid substances under the skin, but these words burn too. You must have stuck one of those disks in me, like in the evening when you make us listen to a little music because they say it has a relaxing effect. And so I hear all these things that my simulated voice is saying; well simulated, I must say, it sounds just like mine, but it’s a trick, one of those false, convincing pieces of evidence that police worldwide know how to fabricate so well.

In fact it’s all hogwash. This Maria ... I’d be better off not thinking about it, distracting myself in front of the television. There, here I am in front of the TV, which you allow us to watch in the evening, indeed you practically force us to. The antenna doesn’t work, that face is breaking up, a fine dust, a dusting of snow, a blank; the disk is a broken record, the needle screeches and keeps rasping the same word, the same syllable, it’s no longer a story, certainly not mine in any case, only scratching grating ricocheting ...

FORGIVE ME
, Dr. Ulcigrai, this time it’s my fault, I let myself get carried away by passionate memories and created some confusion. That story about Marie comes later, as you may have already realized. But you’ll grant me your indulgence, I hope, if I allowed myself to be overwhelmed by memories of love and spoke of her before the right time, the heart has its reasons. So then—to pick up where we left off—well, on November 14, 1804, the
Alexander
left Hobart Town. In Sydney we heard the latest news from Europe. Napoleon proclaimed himself emperor and had the Duke of Enghien shot. The indignation made me forget the massacre of the blacks in Hobart Town. That infamy made such an impression on me that years later, in the hold of the
Bahama
, the prison ship on the Thames where they stuck me for a couple of weeks after the Icelandic affair, I wrote a wonderful tragedy,
Enghien and Adelaide
, reported by more than one of my biographers. Here, read a few lines—see what a beautiful ending. The exceedingly pure Adelaide, breathing her last breath, merely says: “May I?” No, it’s understood that no one may anything. “Finally, we begin using our head. I like that hatred for the Corsican usurper, for someone who thinks he can reshape reality and history at will, change men. You think you
can straighten things out and you end up lopping off heads ...”—Maybe mine too, that’s why I mutter and rave—they say guillotined heads still mumble for a few instants, ah that expanded instant, someone at the movie stopped the projector and all you see is the open mouth, blood saliva pain words, solidified lava ... There, it unfroze. What kind of jokes ...

On North Island, in New Zealand, where we stopped with the
Alexander
, some Maori climb on board, swaying as if they were seasick, maybe it’s their way of curtsying. Two of them, Marquis and Teinah, want to go to England and I quickly agree; I had a plan in mind to expand trade in the South Seas and thought the two of them could be very useful.

I decided to return to England, heading straight for Cape Horn, to avoid the Spaniards, and then go up toward Rio de Janeiro. We sailed with the Roaring Forties, then the Furious Fifties, then four days of savage winds and storms diverted us a thousand miles off course. Yes, a thousand, there’s no point in making that face. Why this conspiracy of never wanting to believe me, of calling me a liar, a deviationist, a traitor? I know that too many things happened to me to seem real, but it’s not my fault, I would have been the first to be happy if the load had been lighter. With those additional thousand miles provisions weren’t sufficient for the voyage we’d planned and I decided to make a stop in Otaheiti, to have the ship repaired and resupply myself with victuals and water. When we entered Matavai Bay, the first thing I saw was the hulk of the
Harbinger
stranded on the beach. On its listing, upturned side you could still read its original name under the new name,
Norfolk
, by which it had undertaken that final voyage. Changing a ship’s name, sailors say, brings bad luck.

FORGIVE ME AGAIN
, Doctor, it was just a sudden dizziness, for a moment I couldn’t see anything anymore, just a dazzling dust mote that was hurting my eyes. It happens. Now it’s gone and everything is clear, like Maria’s face. The fault of that revolving door with the glass panes, at the Café Lloyd in Fiume where we would go sometimes in the evening. One time I saw her arriving; I was already inside waiting for her, she crossed the street, smiled at me from beyond the transparent door and entered it, making the panels turn; as she passed between them her figure and her face were mirrored in those revolving plates of glass and shattered into changing reflections, a handful of luminous, fragmented splinters. And so, between one revolving panel and another, she vanished.

I must have stayed there a long time watching those glittering door panes; years sitting inside there, as the door revolves more and more slowly and nobody comes in. It’s understandable that your head spins too and after a while you don’t even remember so well who it was that disappeared between one pane and the other, whose smile it was. For a moment, for instance, catching a glimpse of her in the street, I thought it was Mangawana; that she too had crossed the great sea. It was I who called her that, under the
huge eucalyptus trees leaning out over the waters of the Derwent: that ancient Aboriginal name, to tease her about her dusky skin, dark like my mother’s. Instead it was Maria—yes, she was also Mangawana, because Maria was the sea into which all rivers flow. Loving a woman does not mean that you forget all the others, but rather that you love them and desire them and have them all in her. When we made love on the solitary beach of Levrera or in that room in Miholaš
ica, there was also the austral forest at the edge of the ocean, Terra Australis Incognita.

Instead in Fiume, that day ... When Maria, seeing that I was incapable of leaving, took my hand, placed it on her breast, then led me to the door, in the scented dawn, helping me to go—the journey is the beginning of the return, she smiled at me, but I knew, at least I think I did, that there would be no return, by decree of the gods whom I—by some distortion of my heart’s will—had set above my heart and that smile.

Perhaps I never loved her as much as I did at that moment, when I lied about returning and embarked on the search for the fleece; while she held my hands a moment longer, and at the same time, gentle yet resolute, helped me disengage mine—Hypsipyle bidding farewell to Jason: “Go, and may heaven bring thee back again with thy comrades unharmed, bearing to the king the golden fleece, even as thou wilt and thy heart desireth; and this island and my father’s sceptre will be awaiting thee, if on thy return hereafter thou shouldst choose to come hither again. Still remember Hypsipyle when thou art far away and when thou hast returned; and ...”—“Well, don’t you know how the rest goes, like in school?—Come on ... Here, repeat with me, “and leave me some word of bidding, which I will gladly accomplish, if haply heaven shall grant me to be a mother.”—Enough, we’re not in school, prompting during an
oral quiz ... We don’t want to recite the whole book, now, do we? And don’t ask me, please, if the gods ... what do I know, what can I know ... Jason doesn’t meet her eyes either when he solemnly replies: “Hypsipyle, so may all these things prove propitious by the favour of the blessed gods.” When I raised my eyes, she wasn’t there anymore, she had vanished—no, she was there, like always, but I didn’t know who she was, a beautiful figurehead without a name that the fury of the storm tore from the sunken ship, she drifts along rising and falling with the waves, her large eyes turned upwards, to an emptiness even greater than that of the sea.

IN NEW CITÈRA
I too got on well. At least I think so. I quickly forget things. Those nights on the shore, the breaking of the surf, the women’s hair, the wild, sweet smell of their skin, garlands of white flowers—I had forgotten them, in fact, but when I read the diaries of Bougainville and Cook in Sir Joseph Banks’s library—of course I read them, even my biographers say so—I immediately recognized those plants, those voices, those colours just like in my diary, written shortly afterwards, to capture those memories. And that somewhat paler skin of the soles of the feet, the women’s naked feet ...

In Otaheiti I left Peggy. I spoke with her as if she were a daughter, but she’s not my daughter; at least I don’t think so, though you can never be sure about these things. Peggy Stewart, fourteen years old, is the daughter of John, one of the mutineers on the
Bounty
, who was taken away in chains on the
Pandora
, which had come to pick up the rebels, and drowned when the
Pandora
ended up shipwrecked on the coral reef, while her mother died of melancholy. Peggy is the only converted native; like the two Spanish missionaries thirty years earlier, so too the thirty British missionaries—dissenters and Methodists—led by Reverend Jefferson have been unsuccessful in their attempts. The enormous King Pomare who gorges himself on
taro, fresh fish, coconut and duck meat, says
Master Christ he very good
when he asks for a brandy, but if they don’t give it to him he curses Jesus and extols the gods of Otaheiti.

Reverend Jefferson wanders around among the huts, his face jaundiced, his gaze dejected; he pushes aside the clumps of hibiscus with annoyance, walks along the shore without even looking at the deep blue surf that breaks and dissolves into snowy white. On that island, where bodies flourish in a splendour that seems incorruptible, the Reverend has shrivelled up like a withered fruit. That paradise is fatal for a man who for some time has grown accustomed to no longer living in Eden and has gotten used to the miasmas of the fallen world. In London, in the foggy, malodorous streets, Reverend Jefferson’s face was certainly less yellowish: he moved about in that turbid stream with an ease learned over the centuries by his kind, thriving amid that impurity like a backwater fish in slime.

The blossoms of foam in the surf, the indigo blue of the sea in the distance, the glory of the hibiscus and the gusts of the trade winds are dangerous for lungs accustomed to polluted air. Too much light and too much sun for wilted plants, which are burned by them and perish. Even the rising sun, which we stared at for so long, blinded us and burned us.

But we still have enough strength to fatally wither that paradise that inspires sadness. Peggy Stewart doesn’t play with the others; she sits bamboozled under a palm tree, sings psalms with the pastors, so many pastors for a single lamb. Where is the mark of salvation, why is that forehead clouded rather than illuminated by the promise of the Kingdom?

Jack—a very quick-witted Tahitian who together with another native, Dick, decided to go to Europe on the
Alexander
—does nothing but criticize religion and the bullying of the whites. Listening to Jack,
an ambitious idea came to me: to write a book about Christianity seen through the eyes of a pagan Polynesian. It’s like seeing it for the first time. What’s a cross, two transverse boards, to a native who dives among polyps and sharks?

But I certainly didn’t mean to write an erroneous, evil book against our true faith. I have never been a denier, a deviationist, as they’ve said about me many times. The idea for my book was something different. Little by little, by recounting all the wicked or at least clumsy acts of the missionaries, we would arrive at the pure, glorious revelation of Christian truth that would emerge from the blunders, a shining star in the black of night. Even the revolution is true despite its missionaries. Aside from everything else, it’s also a good technique for saying all the good and bad you want about something. I started drafting a few pages during the voyage, two months later, in July 1805, when the
Alexander
put out to sea, loaded with water, fruit, coconuts, taros, salt pork, carrying Jack and Dick with it as well.

THE
ALEXANDER
rounds Cape Horn in October. The horizon very near, closer and closer. A wall of water advances and surges over our heads, a single colossal wave curved like a vaulted arch closes in behind the ship; thunderous bursts shatter that horizon raising columns of foam that crash into the sky and fall back, opening black, churning craters in the water. The sea serpent grips the ship, but we manoeuvre the foresail as the bow veers, a headwind strikes near Devil’s Island, we’re quick to haul the sheet aft to escape the serpent’s coils. The currents flowing from the sea slam into one another, gusts of wind scatter huge white flowers over the dark sea, then suddenly sever them, howling in the night, like when the jailers’ blows shattered my bones, each wave another blow, more salt in the wound. That I didn’t yield was not out of courage but because I didn’t understand anything anymore, not even what they were asking me and what I could say to make them stop.