Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (28 page)

“
BUT THE MOON
, my brethren,” Blunt cackled, “which sinks plunging into the darkness of the night, is a symbol of man, who does not shine with his own light, since by himself he would be swallowed up by shadow, but receives his light from God, as the moon does from the sun. Man must die, like the moon that wanes, to be reborn in the eternal dawn of God’s sun. Jericho was destroyed by seven trumpet blasts; we too, when God tells us that the time has come in a voice more clarion than seven trumpets, will be destroyed like Jericho. Foolish as the moon, wise as the moon, those for whom the bell is about to toll! because the Lord has made wisdom foolish and foolishness wise! Some of you will soon be in the house of the Father—it’s no use grumbling back there, you scoundrels, you’d do better to remember that not even the gallows spares you a few lashes on the back until a few hours beforehand—some of you, as I was saying, will soon be home, may God assist you in your final hours. Others will have to journey for a long time yet, before reaching port. The world is a bitter sea, which tosses the small ship about, and wherever one’s gaze turns on the black surface of the waves, only images of death can be seen.

“Woe to the man who relies on his own strength and ability as a helmsman, though he has sailed through reefs and storms, though he has rounded Cape Horn amid the fury of the winds. With the eastern wind, O Lord, you shatter the ships of Tarsus. Terrible is the storm of the world’s sea, worse than any hurricane on the oceans, but if the mast of the ship is the wood of the cross and you embrace it fervently, no infernal wind that rises from the dark waters can pull you into the abyss. Do not fear, hold tight to that mast, and the ship will make it through the fury of the high waters as did Noah’s Ark.

“Yes, you will, we will founder, my brethren. Christian truth is not that sweet honey with which the pagan sirens daze the seafarer causing him to perish in the deep vortexes. Christian truth is a medicine that heals, but it is bitter like death, like the sea: it makes you spit up your black soul to the last dregs of bile, like the huge rollers make you vomit over the rails, but only if you have emptied the hold of your heart of all depravity and poison will you reach port. Yes, you will founder! The port is death—if you do not founder in faith, as the Apostle says, you will not find salvation and will suffer a far more terrible shipwreck, in the waters of eternal darkness!

“The old Adam must die so that the new man can be born, the sailor must fall into the sea to reach the blissful shore. Do not lament because only the Lord can rebuke the waves; rejoice, the whistling of the wind among the sails is the announcement of the final battle and the approaching port. And though the world does not remember you, since ships leave no trace behind on the sea, the Saviour, the helmsman who guides you to port, will not forget you ...”

I too declaimed out loud, when I dictated those sermons that I would hear the following day in church. Sometimes Blunt arrived too early and sat down, waiting for me to finish composing the sermon he needed. He was a small man who breathed heavily above
a protruding belly, his mouth thin in his fat, sweaty face, tufts of hair sticking out of his ears. He looked blankly out the window, running his tongue over his lips; occasionally he winked, it wasn’t clear if this was due to a tic or because he was engaged in some crafty discourse, speaking softly to himself. Once, entering the kitchen, I saw him from behind, in his black topcoat, with a hand under the skirt of a scullery maid. Neither of the two said anything—they stood there, in the eternity of that moment, a surge of blood bringing a flush to the pastor’s cheeks. The Reverend did not move. I took some bread and left without saying a word, silent like the other two. Half an hour later, when he picked up the manuscript, the Reverend did not seem embarrassed.
De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine
, out of the Depths I call to you, O Lord. The body sweats, putrefies; the flesh we carry rots like that badly preserved meat in the prison larder. A hand under Marie’s skirt? It’s all so disgusting and so innocent.

The sermons end up creating an uproar—in part because Pastor Blunt goes on and on, and maybe gets the pages mixed up—with some convicts snickering, others, more moved, punching them to make them keep quiet, and still others intoning the chantey of the lovely Mary and her Tom whose cock only rises firm and straight as it should when they put the noose around his neck.

The bell of the Holy Sepulchre peals often; the list with the names of the condemned is generally posted on Wednesday, and after a while you get used to reading it like the numbers for the races or the lottery. Almost everyone climbs up on the wagon using their own legs; a few have to be pushed forcefully and actually propped up, then they’re gone, just time for a prayer and it’s quickly done. Even Reverend Blunt protested, saying that there were too many at one time and that they didn’t give him enough time to recite
the prayer with the solemnity that is called for. How many people, throughout the world, die every minute?

At one time black waves covered the world, everything was just an immense dark sea in the night. The land was an island and might be submerged at any moment. The magnificent vast austral ocean; so much sea and so little land, like in the beginning, islands that sprang up like corals and can easily disappear again, heavy rains that veil it all. The Last Judgment will take place under water. Man is the bait with which the Lord will catch the dragon, the original Leviathan, just as seamen catch fish, shoving pieces of flesh in their mouth with a hook that sticks in their throat.

MEANWHILE
, however, with those accusations of Cominformism, I mean atheism, I’m in trouble. The most defamatory denunciation, that of not believing. You have to believe. In God, in the Party, in the Flag. There’s no place for anyone who doesn’t believe and you may as well get rid of him. How can I explain the truth, make them understand that I’m a believer, someone who has always believed everything? I know it’s difficult; it’s rare to see witnesses for the defence in People’s Court, they would end up at the wall even before the defendant.

Who can help me? Perhaps Lord Castlereagh recalls my qualities and can get me out; it would be his duty to, in part to clear his conscience, since it was he who had my Copenhagen bombarded; it would be a kind of reparation. But darkness is descending on Lord Castlereagh; he sees hatred and conspiracy everywhere around him, he spends hours in his rooms ranting about plots and schemes. His wiliness, by which he held ministers and the crowned heads of half of Europe at bay, in the end serves him only to deceive his physician and find the razor that he had hidden from him. Then he rings the bell—his last imperious act, almost as if wanting to command even after death—and when Dr. Bankhead comes running, finding a head
almost severed by a slash to the throat, he is unable to understand the final blood-strangled words.

The protest against that atheist book of mine reaches the desk of Robert Peel, Home Secretary, who does not want hangings for religious matters that do not concern him; he orders that the sentence be carried out immediately and that I be sent to forced labour on the first ship leaving for Australia.

I leave, but with no regrets. My only request is that Hooker see to it that Marie thinks I’m dead, vanished at sea. I write another letter to my brother Urban, in Copenhagen. I write it in the carriage, as they’re transporting me to Woolwich. The governor of Newgate has me accompanied by a heavy escort, for fear that I might escape, but it doesn’t bother me, it makes me feel like I’m in Iceland and that those men on horseback, whom I can see through the window, are my honour guard. When I write to my brother that I am leaving for an important mission in Madagascar, I almost believe it myself. The carriage passes the Spread Eagle Inn, the Cathedral of St. Paul’s, London Bridge, but it doesn’t sadden me to see those places again and to have to leave. After a month on the prison ship
Iustitia
, where the cat-o’-nine-tails whistles far more often than in Newgate—even if I’m one of the few who don’t feel it on their backs—I’m put aboard the
Woodman
with a group of one hundred and fifty convicts: 419 tons, its captain Daniel O’Leary, it takes off from the mouth of the Medway on December 6, 1825. The
Nelly
, on the other hand, sailed on August 15, 1951.

A LUXURY VOYAGE
, a real cruise. They make me laugh, those people who complain about how old and dilapidated those ships are, the stench of the cabins, the heat, the filth and the unappetizing food. For someone coming from the Lagers, it’s royal treatment. Lazarus ships, they called them, they transported us Triestine, Istrian and Dalmatian emigrants to Australia—aptly named, ships returning from the realms of death. Lazarus, come forth from Dachau, step out of the
Punat’s
hold; the stone rolls away from the tomb, the diploid emerges from the hatch, a child comes out of the waters of the dark cave, the resurrected rises from hell.

This ship too is headed Down the Bay, to the hell of Port Arthur. There are numerous hells, everywhere. I recognized the captain, the same old Charon going by the name of Daniel O’Leary; the ruse is successful, a facelift that makes him seem much younger, but you can still see the wrinkles even though they are well camouflaged, see his hair white with age under the dye. It’s easy to dupe him, the old man, after centuries and centuries he’s beginning to get muddled. To begin with, since we left Sheerness, at the mouth of the Medway, on December 6, 1825, I haven’t spent even one single night in leg irons or lying in my feces, like
the other one hundred and fifty convicts, one hundred and forty-nine, to be exact.

When Robert Burk, his hanging sentence commuted to forced labour for life for having killed a tavern-keeper while drunk, breaking his head with a stool, began to vomit a reddish fluid all over the place—we had just seen the cliffs of Dover disappear, that whiteness lost in a milky distance—I realized immediately that the surgeon Rodmell didn’t know which way to turn and I suggested vesicants applied to the neck along with diaphoretic pills that are good at producing perspiration and lowering fever, as I had learned from the second medical assistant on the
Lady Nelson
, a capable young man who later ran off with the wife of a captain and lost an eye in a duel with him. Rodmell values the convicts’ lives, ever since the government decided to give the ship’s surgeon half a guinea for every prisoner who arrives in good health—since given the fevers, dysentery, infections and captains who got rich by skimping on prisoners’ rations until they dropped, the ships were reaching their destination with only half of their human cargo, and even those in a sorry state due to scurvy and malnutrition, unfit for forced labour as they should be. And so, after gravely pulling out Wiseman’s
Eight Chirurgical Treatises
, found in infirmary libraries for half a century, and immediately putting it back in place, he condescendingly appoints me as his aide and has me dine at the petty officers’ table.

I journey or rather I return. Return home, to the city I had founded in a distant time. With the fleece? Royal mantle, red flag chastely wrapped around the hips and then hidden under towels. “And each one started up eager to touch it and clasp it in his hands. But the son of Aeson restrained them all, and threw over it a mantle newly-woven; ... and with their rowing the ship sped on.”—How many of us will make it down here? The crossing is long—on
these dilapidated ships, without even a cutwater to fend the waves, bobbing about like corks, 127 days without stopping, they say it’s 146 if you stop in Cape Town and 156 if you stop in Rio, as some captains do, avid for the possibility of trafficking and smuggling offered by the Brazilian capital.

So few days? I’ve been travelling for years; arrival in port is uncertain. Burials at sea are sad and quick; after the first few times the captain tires of it and has the bosun recite the funeral rites, mumbling them hastily, Amen, plop, the whirlpool settles, the wake vanishes, a checkmark on the register. The stowaway found in the drinking-water tank of the
Liberty
, which was carrying 182 emigrants from Bremerhaven to Australia, was discovered as we were sailing toward Port Philip Bay, in Victoria—one of the emigrants, a refugee from Rovigno whom I had met at the Silos in Trieste, told me he was all decayed and putrefied. The sea is vast, there will still be room for those who die, for millennia.

In the entire world there was no other place for me to rest my head after Goli Otok. Comrade Blasich, when I appeared before him, weeks earlier, on Via Madonnina, like a dog slinking into a doorway, had looked at me for a moment, a long moment—there was a mirror in the administrative office, he had his back to it, standing in front of me, and I saw our two faces, mine in the mirror and his facing me. Perhaps it was only at that moment that I saw the erosion in my face ... no, not from the years, the years have little effect, often they don’t devastate but enhance a face, they mould it tougher and more vital, just as the sea not only erodes the shore but brings it shells and shards of bottle glass bright as emeralds, stones whiter than pearls. In my face I saw lost beliefs, the scars of disillusionment and betrayal, mine and that of others, and I realized that he too, Comrade Professor Blasich, saw his face in mine, just as
I saw it in the mirror, and read there the steady trickle of hours and years of dissimulation, of lies and omissions.

For a moment his eyes widened; there was a cry, a dismay in those eyes that for the first time glimpsed the truth in my face, and his thin lips parted in an impending cry of confession, help or fear, but his eyelids quickly narrowed, a slit in a trap that won’t allow its prey to escape, and he told me that he was on his way out for a meeting with some workers from Muggia who were on strike and whom he had to convince to vacate the occupied factory, and that I should go over to Comrade Vidali and Comrade Bernetich who were expecting me, he said limply shaking my hand, and whom he had told not to pay too much attention to that article of mine about Goli Otok, that I had written it in understandable distress, and that it was certainly not to be published, of course not, not even I would have wanted it, he was sure of it, but was to be viewed within the context of that entire painful situation, he had told them. In fact, for the Party, or rather for its leaders—he was already out the door, heading for the stairs—it was very useful material for reflection.