Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (24 page)

The Germans got angry with us—yes, of course, us Italians—when we courted the Chetniks instead of joining them in slaughtering them. It didn’t matter to them that the Chetniks fought more against us Communists, defenders of an invaded Yugoslavia, than against them, its invaders; we don’t need anyone to get rid of Tito and the Communists, they said, not even Italian allies. In fact, after September 8, they began slaughtering Italian soldiers as well and so, for a time, we were actually who we were, royal army, former royal army, and former partisans some in royal uniform and some not; yes, for a brief time things seemed clearer, it was clear who we were and who they were. To shoot one another or cut each other’s throat you need to at least know whom to fire at and whom to avoid.

You’ll say that I never did learn and that I shot myself when I thought I was bumping off an enemy. That may be. It’s easy, crouching in the dark, to mistake your own shadow gliding along the wall for that of someone else.

But meanwhile I had Marica, as harsh as the Woman in the atrium of the palace that bore my name or close to it. The Woman
came from the sea, from a broad, distant sea resonant of fierce battles, but I watched her through the dark door of the palace, I saw that naked bosom emerge from the shadows of the dark atrium. Even Marica’s ardent breast told me that love is a pause during battle, a fruit bitten in haste, your mouth parched, panting under the ruthless onslaught of summer. That Alvise-Alvižo, my ancestor or not, must have known that women give you courage. Maybe he was afraid, despite all those Obradoviches Chrescoviches Dobiscoviches Vidobinoviches Steffiloviches Francinoviches Nicoliches Gozdineviches Riboboviches he had on deck, men ready to commit piracy and kill and die for him, for the cross, but even more so for the lion of San Marco, who held the cross in his paws like a bone already sucked clean. But having men alongside you isn’t enough to overcome fear; you need a woman. And since he couldn’t have one on board in flesh and blood, he at least had the Woman placed on the prow of his galley, to give him courage when he faced the terrible Ucciali …

Yes, women are our great shield and we hold it up between us and life, to take life’s blows. My great shield, Maria Marie Marica—as long as I carried the shield I was safe, but I was afraid, I dropped it—I fled, the shield abandoned on the ground, trampled by horses and wagons, saving my hide instead, which wasn’t worth that of the ram flayed in Colchis. Each time death was about to catch up to me, I let love, a piece of my heart, drop; I threw it to the ravenous pack at my heels and fled, lighter.

BRIEF SUMMER
in Traù, a brief summer of liberty and glory. We fought well against the Germans and the Blackshirts, ready as we were to die for the
Internationale’s
future humanity. Who said heroes are no longer born? The Yugoslavian liberation army was heroic, it stopped the overpowering German war machine, made it bite the dust; I’m proud of those brothers of mine with the red star.—“Merito damnabis Eorum sententia qui affirmare solent effeotam esse naturam nec producere tales viros quales priscis temporibus extiterunt omnia mundo senescente degenerasse ...”—Where is this mumbo-jumbo coming from now? Who do you think you’re impressing? Illustrious family books and memoirs. I’d just like to know where you dug it up. We comrades are the true, ancient, future nobility. Here it is, my name. Coriolanus Cepio, Koriolan Cipiko, nightingale of bygone times, Caesar and Titus Livius of Dalmatia and South Pannonia, as he called Bosnia, an island that emerged from the ancient Pannonian sea. Author of
Petri Mocenici imperatoris gesta
, also known as
De Bello asiatico
, beginning of book 1. My father was proud to show it to me. He knew about heroes, Coriolanus Cepio, he knew that they had not died in ancient times but that the earth produced more and more of them, like his Pietro
Mocenigo, whose deeds against the Turks he had sung, like that Alvise—or Alvižo—
ipikoipiko his grandson or great-grandson with his Woman at the prow in Lepanto, confronting Ucciali, like me, great-grandson of his great-grandson on that same bloodied sea.

Ex hoc maxime apparet how false is the rumour that heroes belong only to ancient times, Nestor’s senile ranting beneath the walls of Ilium. Instead, the more time passes, the more heroes are born, and this is the curse of the earth, of the catastrophes in which men are heroic, just for having to confront them, and the laundry hung out to dry in the alley is a forest of torn flags hanging from a bloody, leaden sky.

I should have realized it, when I saw several Titoist partisans kill those soldiers of the Bergamo Division who had scattered and surrendered. But I was concerned with organizing the Garibaldian division to fight the Germans and the Blackshirts who were raging like beasts against the Slavs, and so I didn’t look back at those men of ours killed during the first days of freedom, which for them meant death.

Don’t damage partisan unity in any way, the Party ordered. There was so little time to think, in those seventeen days, because on September 26 the Germans arrived, seized everything again, and they too began shooting Slavs and Italians; at least it was a relief, against the Germans, to know which side you were on.

No, not even I had time to think about everything, in those seventeen days. But I had to think about Marica, because of her brother. Until that time the Chetniks had been to some extent with us, to some extent against us, but when the Italians surrendered, on September 9, Tito’s partisans became the ones in charge in Traù and decided that it was time to finish off those enemies of the
revolution, and that Apis’s unit, although it had killed a great many Ustashi, had to be eliminated.

Actually they told me it had to be disarmed and neutralized. And so, when Marica, trusting me as she lay in my arms, told me where her brother and his men were hiding, I would never have thought, relaying it shortly afterwards to Comrade Vukmanovic of the VII Corpus, that ... that’s how it happened, in the uproar and chaos of those days a man gets confused, they tell him something they ask something he replies. A word, distracted and innocent, how can you imagine it will lead to bloodshed? The blood wells up, rises like high tide, strangles; that stream gushing from the lips seems like wine at first.

In those places, my friend, a great deal of blood flows, Ustashi Chetniks Blackshirts SS Drusi. Blood is contagious, all you have to do is press a key—click on the mouse, thank you, I know that’s what you say—and the tiny arrow makes it spurt wherever it stops. On these Dalmatian sites, then ...—Wait, watch the arrow, it knows where to go and where to strike, what to pull up from that well of the past hidden behind the screen as if under a lid ... beautiful spots, these coasts ... Here, if you want I’ll print it out for you.—“There for centuries the Uscocchi, such as Martin Possedaria or Giurissa Aiduch, wore the skin of those flayed, and the women incited them with opprobrious words to go out to sea and strike the Turks and Venetians and Ragusans with arrows and gnaw them with their teeth, and when they had cut off Cristoforo Veniero’s head under the Morlacca they then dipped their bread in his blood.”—

—Heads are easily cut off, in those parts. Four noggins for a penny, partisan heads lopped off by the Ustashi and set in the middle of the road, Ustashi heads cut off by partisans, German heads, Italian heads—it’s sometimes strange to feel it still on your neck, that head.
Márja, the Uscocca woman—ancient history, I know, but so what, everything is present, everything is happening now—had eleven husbands, whom she’d married one after the other during the wake of the previous one, holding one single banquet for the wedding and the funeral, death and love are one big bed. She was a sorceress who conjured up the bora on the Quarnero, but if she gave her word it was her word, and she wouldn’t repay even betrayal with betrayal.

Sre
an Boži
, she had said on Christmas Day in Senj, where the bora originates, offering her mouth to a certain Santissimo from Italy who shortly afterwards, captured by the Venetians who had come to avenge the pillaging of scarlet and purple fabrics at the mouth of the Neretva, blabbed what Márja had ingenuously told him. In a word he revealed that the Uscocchi, led by her brother, were about to attack Pago and had hidden the
brazzere
, submerging them in the sea near the gulf of Mandre, that they were travelling miles and miles in a night with the men taking turns at the oars, and were preparing to haul the boats up, to pounce upon the Venetian galley anchored in the port of Mandre. Santissimo indicated the place and that same evening eight Uscocchi were swinging from the battlements of the castle of Purissa, eight hanged and others killed and thrown into the sea, Márja’s brother as well, but she wouldn’t hear of disowning her husband, her twelfth and a traitor, and when relatives and friends asked her to swear to dip her bread in his blood if they were to catch him, she bowed her head and replied that when her brother, surprised by the Venetians, was about to strike Santissimo who had come with them to point out the place, it had been she who gave him a shove and made him drop his sword on the ground, and so the Venetians had struck him and almost hacked him to pieces, and then thrown him into the sea.—“So then Mate
Aiduch went toward her, drawing his sword, but no matter how hard he struck her along with two others the blades could not find their way into her breast that spilled, white, from her scarf, until finally a rapier thrust caught her in the belly, killing the child before it did her.”—And this perhaps was her revenge against Santissimo, to lead to death not him but his son, and she fell to her knees, wildly wielding blows and reciting the Confiteor.

Who knows if she was also asking forgiveness for the blows she was dealing out at that moment, for the slash that cut off the ear of a man who came too close to her; though she was confessing her faults and sins to Almighty God, to blessed Mary ever Virgin, to blessed Michael the Archangel, and to all the Saints, she was not beating her breast but was trying to strike that of others, because life is sin and the blood that flows violently and loudly in our veins demands spilling other blood which flows from other veins. The Confiteor uttered with the final breath is perhaps the only thing that can be said, since it does not claim to explain or justify anything, but simply confesses having done wrong, the utterance of a man who repents having sunk his teeth into another man.

Even for Goli Otok, all we had to do was ask for forgiveness and instead everyone explains the how and why, the necessity, the history, the Third International, the dialectic; I don’t know how Marica died, I only know that it was she who saved me when Apis, surprised by our men, was already taking aim, shouting hatred and contempt at me; it was she who seized his machine gun and so he was cut down and fell into the sea, then she fled with three or four of her own, that’s what Maurizio told me. They found her in the woods, a gunshot wound to her forehead, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, Márja’s final thrust, before she fell face down on the ground, a blow that almost ran through her killer, was also a sin, never as
grave as mine. It would have been better if Marica had saved her brother and let me die; for her and for the son she carried in her womb it would have been the same, the Titoists or the Germans would have killed them in any case, a day more a day less makes little difference when you die, but I would have had a better fate.