Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (22 page)

The boat eases away and I, lying on the bottom, keep on drinking. I drink to my funeral; too bad we can’t be our own mausoleum, drink our own ashes, like Queen Artemisia drank those of her royal lover, and then exhale them in a belch. I lift my head up from the edge of the boat, the waves rise up to me, over me, the crests glide
away on either side, between one wave and another I see the coast, my kingdom moving farther and farther away—a towering blue wave dips down, it’s a rippling flag, my own blue flag which covers me, ever darker, ever bluer.

THEY WOKE ME
between Cape Reykjanes and Fuglasker Rocks. The wind is violent. Gowen, the captain of the
Orion
—Jones took command of the
Margaret and Ann
—wants to head out to sea, but he’s unable to straighten the ship. I find myself on the bridge, without anyone having said anything. I order us to sail between the Cape and the rocks. My commands are as swift as that wind; they flit between one gust and another, it’s as if I can see every jib and every staysail, I tighten and slacken them as needed to dart between the masses of water, I could even manage to avoid cannonballs. All of a sudden the
Margaret and Ann
, far ahead of us, is in flames. The
Orion
pursues it like a shark, the other ship is at the mercy of the wind and water, buffeted here and there, the flames spread. The
Orion
advances through the rushing waves, comes alongside it. I leap onto the
Margaret and Ann
and order the lifeboats to be lowered, in less than an hour everyone is on board the
Orion.
I am the last to leave the ship, the act of a captain before going back in irons.

Phelps’s oil and tallow, which the
Margaret and Ann
is loaded with, feed the flames, which spread like wildfire on all sides. The wood burns, pieces of sail and rope fall and lick at the ship’s masts like tongues of fire; then everything crashes down, incandescent
torrents, a scrap of flag plunges straight down, a warrior distorted in the blaze like in the Hall of Knights in Christiansborg. The ship is ripped apart, its copper bottom breaks off and floats red-hot, a fallen sun that scorches the sea. Suddenly a huge explosion, the powder magazine blows up and even the cannons explode, firing broadsides against the sky and into the clear night—volleys of cannon fire to mark my end, the night blooms with these shots, a dark rose bursts open in scarlet petals.

When the
Orion
moves off, a brazier lies burning on the sea, blood dripping into a dark goblet. The fire dies hard, everything dies hard, life resists fiercely and that’s why it hurts, it would be better to end it quickly. Now the sea is calm, Gowen is able to resume command and return to Reykjavík with the
Orion
, to depart again on September 1 and reach Liverpool eighteen days later.

It was a vile act to lock me up in the Toothill Fields prison, in London, on charges of having left England without permission, breaking my word of honour, and of having plotted against His Majesty’s government, on the pretext of helping those starving wretches. “So then, you supposedly did it for the sake of those godforsaken devils with their rickets and ringworm, who do you think you’re kidding?”—and on and on for hours, in that fetid cell, questions and interrogations and …—And to think that, from the time I landed until the day before I was locked up, I was at the Spread Eagle Inn again, where I had taken lodging, with the most encouraging assurances from Sir Joseph Banks …

WHAT’S THAT RED GLOW
, a huge lit cigarette in the already darkened room? Oh, the closed-circuit television, the announcement of the group session, in the large auditorium on floor −1. Below ground, in short. Group therapy, present or not, near or far; you can nudge the person seated beside you and chat with whomever you want, even those who are right side up at the Antipodes, thanks to these PCs at our disposal. All together, crowds, masses, waiting for it to start. The auditorium is packed, it ripples like a sea. Where are the accused, the inmates in this valley of Judgment? I see only Kapò, watchdogs who incite one another with savage bites in the enormous slaughterhouse; tons of meat butchered and ground, they say dog meat is good, perhaps having had some in the Lager.

“How many can there be, the damned, the imprisoned, the condemned, patients held by force, Kapò?” Loads of them, an immense throng. You should know better than me, with those records and those clerks at your service, but I realize that with all those numbers your computers crashed. A computer is a brain and brains go haywire, it’s their specialty. But we shouldn’t be finicky about numbers. Numbers are alive, you can touch them, feel them.
Numbers on playing cards, on a register, on coins, on bills, on your arm, on a roulette table, on cells.

You see them at the gaming table as well—I can vouch for it, given that I lost everything there—lucid and feverish, scribbling sums to uncover the secret order in the joust of probabilities, the mysterious laws that govern the chaos of the game and of the world, that make the ball spin around like a planet in space but also hold it in check, keep it from abandoning its trajectory and losing itself in the infinite void and force it to stop on the five, on the twelve. Maybe we’ll discover that order, accumulate the gold of time in front of us, that golden dust that slips through your fingers and gets left on the green carpet, on the great barren meadow jam-packed with the multitudes of those who wanted to be like God.

They stole the gold, the sacred fleece, and now they await the judgment of the People’s Court, all crammed into the enormous casino with that red wallpaper, blazing candles, human clusters crushed to the right and left of the green table, the altar of the Lord. Innocent, guilty, in any case damned, hanging from that table like animals from a hook, scorched by the flame of the candles that casts a bloody light on the sweaty faces and on the hands hauling in the chips. The red of the room is a blaze that envelops everything, around the table everyone is distorted like the Danish knights and kings in the Christiansborg Palace in flames.

Okay, I almost always lost at those tables, but I also enjoyed myself and losing what little I had didn’t matter much then … The biographers disapprove and I play my role as an unrepentant penitent. The important thing is to resemble your own portrait, it doesn’t matter who painted it. My life is what others tell me. Otherwise, what could I possibly know about the time I was born, when I started walking, whether or not I cried at night? All this
was told to me by others and I repeat it, just as I heard it. What’s that? No, you don’t understand. This doesn’t only apply to early childhood. It applies to every moment of life. Do you think I know how my face looked yesterday, when you put me near that machine again, how my eyes were, my hands, you think I could describe them? Of course not, I didn’t see myself, I don’t know myself. But if you tell me, I know it and I can recount it.

I was released soon enough from Toothill Fields, but outside it was even worse. Cripplegate, Whitechapel, Southwark, Smithfield, St. Giles’s—sinking lower and lower, in increasingly sordid rooms, my clothes dirtier and dirtier—at least I played, even if I always lost. Instead, after those summers at Cherso—long, drawn out, I don’t even remember how many, two, maybe one or not even that—I never had the time or opportunity to play. Not cards or anything. My childhood, my adolescence, my youth ended quickly, abruptly. Ponza, the Guadarrama, the Velebit, Dachau, Goli Otok and … and what came next, after Goli Otok? I don’t remember, so many years crammed into a sack, heavy as lead. The sack wrapped in sailcloth slips out the opening of the hatch—“Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God We therefore commit his body to the Deep,” says the burial service for those who die at sea. It sinks quickly to the bottom. The water closes over it with a muffled sound.

NONE OF THIS STORY
, Vidali and Bernetich told me in Trieste when I came back from Goli Otok, was to be spoken of and would never be known. Indeed I kept silent, like everyone else. Even the archive in Fiume, containing all our history, was burned in 1955, by Marini,
nom de guerre
Banfi: five valises full of documents, it took him a whole day to burn them. It was hard work, the pages curled up and slipped out of the pile in flames, they had to be kicked back into the centre or even shoved in, burning your hands. Our names expanded before turning into ashes, they crackled and flew between the gusts created by the heat. Some photographs as well. The face wavers, is distorted, vanishes into black smoke, a tongue of fire envelops the portrait of a young man with a red kerchief, the serpent sucks him into its burning throat, all the Argonauts disappear in the jaws of the dragon. We never told the story and now we no longer know it; things must be told continuously, otherwise they’re forgotten. The Party transferred us all to the Oblivion Ward.

Ah, if instead of …

BUT NEVER MIND
, that’s your life, you lived it and you sign your name to it from the first to the last line. You who are many, Comrade, the conditional you of the grammar that we were taught by Miss Perich-Perini our teacher, the
Internationale’s
future humanity, you who were always on the wrong side at the wrong time. Here, in the court constructed from pieces of the Berlin Wall—it seems it fell, so I heard, but it never existed, I tell you, it was a ruse, fragile clay, a shove would have been enough to bring it down, from the very first day, but who would have thought? The Party is before the court and you, witness for the prosecution, one of many, unknown soldier of the revolution, you stand, swear to tell the truth, they show you the photograph with that genial moustache and the small eyes of a malicious elephant and you recognize him, it’s him, the dragon who stole the fleece and reddened it with rivers of blood, the pure bungled glorious flag of the future, a sun smothered in darkness.

You stand, witness for the prosecution on behalf of the immense obscure swarm crammed into the valley of the final day, you pick up your tattered book; so many pages, the list of charges is enormous, it will take months, years to read it to the court. You clear your throat, you take up those pages, barely managing to hold them together,
then you raise your head and say loudly “Workers of the world, unite.”

So then, all charges are dropped and there are no defendants? No, Mr. President. Your Honour the Judge, President of the Republic, Hospital Administrator, who knows who. There is a defendant and I have no trouble indicating him. This is not the first time, moreover, that a comrade accuses a comrade who made a mistake. I’m not sure of his name, but I know who he is. It’s me. The documents speak for themselves and, as you can see, the file is extensive. Workers of the world, unite, it’s written here. I confess to being guilty of having deliberately helped to undermine this union, to foment divisions. Small discords and irreparable lacerations. Venial sins, Father Callaghan would say, and mortal sins. Therefore I too am guilty, perhaps unknowingly,
Viva la muerte
, when your number’s up, it’s up.

MARICA’S NUMBER WAS UP
, for example, at the height of the Liberation celebration. Just a few days, seventeen. All liberations are brief, half-hour walks in the prison yard.—“Seventeen days, from September 9 to 26, 1943, Nevèra’s words.”—Thank you, that wasn’t necessary. I remember dates quite well, and then too I am Nevèra, if I may. It’s the faces, the eyes, the voices that grow fainter and fainter in the fog. The women too. The glass steams up and hides Maria’s smile. I hasten to wipe it clean, but the more I rub the pane, the more opaque it becomes and if I finally manage to clear a spot in that grime, swabbing at it, that smile, that face on the other side is no longer there. She went away, maybe she got tired of waiting; maybe I was mistaken and confused her with someone else. With this soot from so many years it’s easy to get mixed up.

The brief liberation of Spalato and Traù when our Bergamo Division, which was occupying the area, surrendered to Tito’s partisans, the day after the September 8 reversal—I was in the fourth company, a private, though in the clandestine Party I was something more, even if not much.
Smrt fašizmu, sloboda narodu
, death to Fascism, freedom to the people. And I, an agent of universal history, an operative sent down there to eliminate Marica. Unaware
of it, of course, but when the Party sends you on a mission you never know the real aim of your assignment, what you will set in motion. For that matter, even in life you never know what will happen once you start something. The Party is as vast and inscrutable as life; that is to say as insensible and ingenuous as life, it gropes its way along, it, too, convinced of being its own justification. This is why it went belly up; life can’t last, it becomes corrupted, infected, dies. We are all dead, Doctor. This attempt to keep a patient alive at all costs is hopeless; a Party of intubated sufferers in an intensive care unit and there’s the plug, all too visible, within reach of the first joker who wants to pull it.

Yes, when I went to Traù—a conscripted soldier hauled out of the Fascist jails in Italy and sent to Yugoslavia with the Italian Royal Army, but still active in the Party with whom I had maintained contacts even in prison—I was unaware that I had been sent there for Marica’s damnation, or rather my own. All I knew, when I got to Traù, was that I was to work at organizing Party groups and cells among our soldiers sent there to risk their lives, even before the events of July 25 and September 8. In fact a few weeks later, on September 26, after the Germans arrived and reoccupied Spalato and Traù, the Garibaldian Communist brigades of the Italian Division began operating in the general melee of everyone fighting everyone, and as we awaited a more important Party figure, I found myself temporarily acting as deputy political advisor, under the code name of Nevèra.

I was glad to be in Traù, even before those few happy days with Marica. Of course she was my girlfriend, and it was all my fault. Maurizio—that too a
nom de guerre
, you understand—spoke of it as if it were his fault, but that was only to give people the impression that he was her sweetheart, cocky young man that he was. I’m glad
for him, that way he was happier in the final days before he died in Spalato. Courageously, I must say, like a true comrade.