Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (23 page)

It wasn’t the first time I had been there, in Traù. I had hidden in the house of a certain Tihomir, who had known my father when, years earlier, he navigated a shuttle boat that serviced the Spalato—Fiume line, stopping at almost every port and on the islands as well. We had taken it to Cherso a couple of times, to go to Fiume, sparing ourselves the ferry from Porozine and the local bus, and my father had become friends with him; he was a member of the Yugoslavian Communist Party, and was banned in 1921. So we had gone with him to Traù a couple of times, always on that old wreck, where he also had a scull. I liked Traù, surrounded by the sea, beautiful and regular with its squared sides, like a figure in a geometry book that defines and limits things. For some time I haven’t been able to stand anything infinite, a real allergy that makes my eyes smart like onions do; I even prefer looking at the sky when it’s framed by a window, maybe with bars, like in that noisier large room of yours, Doctor.

I liked looking at the sea, losing myself in the tremor of its dazzling reflection. I also liked the smell of that sea, mixed with the odours of tar and roasted fish with garlic, and I liked to touch the wing and the mane of the lion of San Marco, to feel the stone solid and warm beneath the sun. It’s comfortable, leaning against the lion. And from there you can clearly see the palace and the cathedral of San Lorenzo, with all the figures on Master Radovan’s portal.

I also liked the three Magi riding at the top—the climb is difficult but they gaze upward and continue on, it’s clear that they can’t get lost and end up badly, they’ve been riding for centuries and their red star has never set. The lion’s paw with its claws as well as its muzzle, on the book, unfathomable under the mane, were
somewhat smashed when I returned, because some hotheaded Slav nationalist, on that famous night of December 1932, had decided to go at them with a hammer.

The revolution, however—or so I thought—after winning and maybe breaking a few heads, would not destroy but would preserve and safeguard all vestiges of man’s history, a history finally completed though its suffering would not be forgotten; the Roman eagles, the crosses, the crescents, the Venetian lions, stars of David, Egyptian and Aztec pyramids, all under the red flag …

Twenty years later, to tell the truth, in the tragic mayhem of that August of 1943, I didn’t have much time to mourn the lion’s broken snout and claws, but I would have liked to remove the thorns from those injured paws. Maybe in part because, on the eve of those days of bloody harvest, I leaned against that lion not alone but with Marica in my arms, though blood was already flowing from the vats—shootings in the villages, ambushes in the woods, reprisals, deportations. It was Christmas, Christmas 1942.
Hristos se rodi. Sre
an Boži
, Christ is born. Merry Christmas, Marica said offering her mouth. An innocent Christmas kiss, as was the custom, which turns into a different kiss—time expands, stops, plunges into that mouth. There, on that leonine stone, my life stretched out, the entire course of a river with its meanders, its cascades, its expanses. That bit of my life is larger than my life, a minute contains hours and an hour contains years, even if it dissolves so quickly.

RIGHT, DISSOLVES
. If that were all, no problem. A kiss, after all, is just a kiss, a young soldier on leave is clearly entitled to have a little fun. Marie too, I got fed up with her when she started making a fuss, in fact I almost left her out of my autobiography, as my earlier biographers had more or less done. How can love be sustained? I’m not saying a woman. A woman, you can accept. Even if you go to the ends of the earth amid a thousand misfortunes, to the Antipodes, you can always bring a woman with you and even respect and love and defend her in front of everyone, even if she’s an old slattern or worse, like I did with my Norah, even when she fell down drunk in the streets of Hobart Town.

A woman is fine, but love? It pounces on you, it crushes you. It’s already hard enough to live, survive, dodge the blows that come from all sides, slacken the sail or haul aft at the right instant before the boat crashes or capsizes; to grow old, become ill, see your friends die, come to terms with the infamy, shame and betrayal in your heart. And as if this burden weren’t enough, love too? It’s too hard a struggle, you can see why sometimes all you can do is desert.

“
EVERYTHING WAS ARRANGED
/set for desertion even earlier, that evening in Gravesend, wasn’t it? No extemporizing, few excuses … Your John Johnson …”—Ah, you again, this time with that false name of mine, all the better, that way I have nothing to do with it …

Marie had returned, no, I had returned, it doesn’t matter, we had found each other again and, strangely enough, everything seemed perfect, easy. Being together, living together, running away … I felt as if I were no longer afraid, even though—She could have helped me leave England. But that’s not the reason why—no, not only that. Her brother was on patrol on the Thames, with his troops that monitored the few landing stages from which a boat could leave the shore. Marie was very close to Abs—actually his name was Absalom; they were almost the same age, grew up together. It was easy for her, instigated by me—how strange, that sudden, deceptive control over a woman, unapproachable until a moment before, and then abruptly ready to do anything for you—to convince her brother to patrol the river farther north, saying she had seen people hiding boats among the reeds. Thus, from the unguarded shore, we would be able to put our dinghy in the water and reach the ship,
where the quartermaster, who had already pocketed the stipulated sterlings, would set me up among the crew, under the name of George Rivers.

Yes, I know I was an idiot to tell Marie that she too would be coming with me, to take advantage of her since she took my every word as gospel truth—it’s love, they say, but I don’t know if that’s true. To love means to understand, therefore to mistrust, to know that falsehood lurks, that living is lying … But at the time she and I, they, didn’t … In any case I had to tell her that, otherwise who knows what a fuss she would have made. At the last moment—to spare her for a little while, to let her breathe a little more easily—I would tell her the truth; that it was impossible, that as soon as I had quietly arranged things, once I was free and safe, I would send for her. I swear I would have done so. But Went, that spy, squealed to the police, so they caught me and threw me in Newgate. Abs, Marie’s brother, was tried immediately, for complicity, and sent to Port Arthur. I never heard anything more about him, not even later on, when they sent me down there too. They say he threw himself into the water from the rocks near Puer Point, like the children, and that the sharks tore him to pieces, but I don’t think so. I never heard anything more about Marie either, for a long time. What’s that? No, I don’t know anything about a baby, leave me alone, what do I have to do with it, it’s absurd …

So much for dissolving, then. Love and death.
Viva la muerte.
Easy to say, a little less so if you actually die or kill. It’s good that you keep me locked up here. Not because of these stories that I can’t remember, even if that one there shoves them under my nose; but I know why … Everything started out so well, during that Christmas of 1942 and the following months; even that increasingly atrocious war and the ever more difficult political work—among my comrades-at-arms,
hunters surrounded by savage beasts, the partisans sinking their teeth into us like barracudas into an exhausted whale, and me a whale about to become a barracuda—seemed like a sunrise to me. We liked going into the courtyard of Palazzo
ipiko. It’s good they took it away from you, Marica teased me, that’ll teach you to change names and go over to the enemy, besides with that uniform the name of a renegade and traitor fits you; and I told her that she resembled the Woman placed in the atrium of that palace, which oddly enough bore my name or close to it, and that she was the figurehead on the prow of my ship, like the Woman had been on the prow of the galley of Alvise or Alvižo
ipiko—he too rinsed clean, like me—in Lepanto, face to face with the galley of the terrible Ucciali, the Calabrian fisherman who became the pirate king of Algiers.

To tell the truth the Woman seemed like anything but a docile slave, naked and fierce as she was, one of those lean women with no breasts who in bed devour you like a famished she-wolf. Even Marica, beautiful and proud like a pennant in the wind, was sometimes a battle flag, and there was something frightening in her merciless lovemaking. She despised those bastards from the coast so quick to change their names, those Dalmatian Croats whose names suddenly became Italian or those Dalmatian Italians with the Slavic names who exchanged their soul and their name like words shouted and distorted in the wind—We Chetniks won’t let ourselves be branded at will like cattle by masters who come and go, we have no master and we’ll all die rather than let an Ustashi, a German or an Italian trample on Serbian soil, she would say.

Her brother Apis was the leader of a more or less scattered group of Chetniks and had rounded up many of the Serbs who lived between the coast and the Dinaric Alps, where the nevèra
rages down upon the sea. They fought against everyone—against the German invader and their Ustashi dogs but also against us, I mean against us Communists, who were beginning to nip at the Germans’ flanks, and to some degree they flirted with us, I mean with us Italians, who had managed to seat a king of our own on the throne of Zagreb, like on a chamber pot, but since we too had a king we were also able to appeal to their Colonel Draza Mihajlovi
, who was promoted general only to go before our execution squad. By “our” I mean us Communists, since Tito was one of ours or better yet we were his and I too was there to work for the revolution or rather for him—it’s strange to think about it now, after he put me to work for him at Goli Otok.