Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) (29 page)

No, I harbour no resentment toward him, partly because, when I saw him go out, with his back only imperceptibly curved, I realized that it was broken, and that I had returned as a man who was finished but had come back to finish him, as he had vaguely sensed that time, in that same room, when he sent me off with the other Monfalconesi. He was removed shortly afterwards, they had to find someone to take more of the blame for that disastrous break with Tito, so that a little less blame would fall on the others, on the Party Moreover that interview, let’s call it that, helped prepare me for when I entered the other room. On the wall was a portrait of the Leader, “Eeta son of the sun that grants light to mortals, with his terrible gaze.” Hadn’t Comrade Gilas, before assigning us to
bojkot
and
kroz stroj
, we who were loyal to the Leader, written that without the Leader not even the sun would be able to shine as it shone? “Eeta, like the sun adorned with gleaming rays.”

Comrade Vidali, aka Commander Carlos, the Mexican jaguar, held out his strong, manly paw, its missing thumb causing my hand to slide up to his elbow, something that usually irritated him a great deal though not that time. I wasn’t surprised at what he said about my article, nor when Bernetich added that nothing would ever be known about that story, though now instead many people know about it. I expected all that, but I did not expect them to tell me that for the time being the Party could not find me a job, not even within the organization, times were difficult and money was scarce, unfortunately Moscow’s gold was a fiction invented by the right, if only it were true, in short, in Trieste and in the region there was no place for me. Moreover—he added in passing, almost hastily—I couldn’t complain seeing that I hadn’t done anything in response to the charge I had been given by the Party when Blasich sent me to Yugoslavia with the Monfalconesi—namely to report and inform them, with due discretion, about the attitude, inclinations and initiatives of the comrades who set out with me—not a thing, never a confidential report, as they had asked of me, not one line. Granted, that tragic split between Yugoslavia and the Cominform came about and upset everything, but earlier, prior to that time, I certainly could have, indeed, should have made an effort. So then ... In Rome, however, the Party would surely find me something, maybe in southern Italy.

So I didn’t even tell him that in the Silos, in the refugee camp, in that old granary full of poor devils who had left Fiume and Istria and lost everything (because for the Yugoslavians, at that time, being Italian was enough to be a Fascist), I too had found a place, a straw
pallet in the dark, away from the roof opening—By God, I had a right, I too was an Italian from across the border and I had taken worse than they had from the Titoists. I even found that cousin of mine from Fiume there, the one who had taken me into her home in Angheben, when I had just returned from Australia on the
Ausonia
—earlier, much earlier, perhaps even before I dropped anchor at the mouth of the Derwent, in an even more distant time. She sat there, silent, the only thing she could tell me about someone is that he was dead. Like Miss Perich-Perini our teacher, for example. What’s that? well, many others, it’s not important. But those other exiles, strays like me, banished like me, wouldn’t leave me in peace once someone snitched that I was a Communist, a traitor, someone who had given Istria away to Tito, an accomplice to their hardship, which was also mine, and not just because my house, when I went away to Fiume, had been given to one of them and his family, someone who had lost everything like me. Now I had lost everything, even the house; I’m certainly not saying it was his fault, the blame belongs to the Fascists who wanted the war and those Italians who thought they could keep kicking the Slavs in the ass forever. We are all victims of Il Duce, I said, but they jumped on me and roughed me up pretty good, I landed some nice punches too, thank God, I would have smashed their faces in, those idiots, but I would have done myself in as well, because being one of the chickens hanging head down, tearing each other apart before they wring your neck, is foolishness that deserves to be punished.

In any case there were three or four of them and I was only one, but I’m used to these power ratios, in this the Party was an excellent training ground. I wasn’t even surprised when the police, whom someone had called during that mayhem, clubbed me a few times but not those others, though I was the one on the ground. They
also brought me down to the station and interrogated me and even slapped me around some, because I was being a wise guy and called them comrades; however, they made it clear that my papers, what with Italy Yugoslavia citizenship nationality residence domicile etc., were far from in order, and that they could make a lot of trouble for me, in any case given the way things stand don’t even think about finding a job and, in short, I would do well to clear out as soon as possible, if so many decent, ill-fated Italians were going to Australia I could thank my stars for going there too—assuming that they would take me, because ASIO, the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, certainly did not want to infest and infect their country with Communists.

Fortunately later at ICEM—right, the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migrations, which had its little ticket bureau in Passeggio Sant’Andrea—I found a manager whose brother had died in Dachau, in the hospital, shortly after the liberation of the Lager, whom I had attended and helped. He had in fact given me a letter that I had brought home to his family, and so that guy at ICEM was moved and helped me get my papers for Australia and here I am, I made it. Down the Bay, as they said since the time of the first penal colonies; even in Miholaš
ica, with Maria, we said “Down the Bay” when we went down to the sea, all by ourselves. Australia has always been the fallback card when the noose tightens around your neck, the infernal alternative down here to that inferno up there. In the hold of the
Woodman
...

HOLD, SO TO SPEAK
. Not only did surgeon Rodmell, as I said, quickly appoint me his assistant—I was the only one who saw to the sick, calomel, decoctions, packs—and have me dine at the petty officers’ table. That half a guinea for each prisoner who arrives safe and sound is a great humanitarian idea, the only way to protect the convicts a little; much better than inspections by some representative of the House of Commons, asking whether they have any charges to make regarding any mistreatment they’ve suffered, the prisoners will answer no in any case, because otherwise, as soon as the commission leaves the ship, they’ll get flogged for the duration of the trip. Even in Dachau and Goli Otok, when those representatives from the Red Cross or from the delegation of French comrades arrive, all the detainees praise the meals and lodging, knowing what will happen once those well-meaning gentlemen have returned home.

The first day, when I’m still down below, they steal almost all of what little I brought with me. I even saw who it was, but I don’t say anything. It’s unseemly and stupid for little fish in the mouth of the whale to tear each other apart. A few objects aren’t worth either some scars on the thief’s back or a deadly brawl in the hold. When
I go up on deck, thanks to Rodmell, I persuade the captain and the officers not to listen to the denunciations. We all know they’re the quickest way to enjoy better treatment. Even a little tobacco or some illegal sugar, a piece of bread stolen from the storeroom, a gripe against the officers, all a valuable commodity for someone who goes and blabs it to the higher-ups and gets rewarded for it, though it’s risky, because in the dark you’re quick to get an iron rod on your head and disappear over the side.

When you’re in an inferno, it’s understandable, it’s human, to betray, to lie; even for just a moment of relief. No preaching; you have to have been there, in that darkness, in order to moralize. And if you’ve been there, you know that you would do anything rather than end up in the depressurization chamber or even just in
bojkot
; you’d be ready to eat your brother, alive, writhing between your teeth, like the crabs in Japanese restaurants, they’re all over, not to mention in Australia.

But it is precisely for this reason, because our spine is so weak and it’s so easy to bend and break it—and those swines do all they can to break it and turn us into swines like them—this is precisely why we must not let them. Better to be beaten to death like Umberto Gioco, Dachau serial no. 53694, or Mario Moranduzzi, no. 54081, who escaped from Kottern and were recaptured, than be the one who beat them to death, like Massimo Gregorini, three times a Kapò, a dog among German dogs, no longer a man, if he ever was one. No, sooner end up in the mouth of those animals than become a hyena who feeds on his dying comrade; after all you’re an irritant and he has no stomach for you, you’ll be the sword or the fire that the magician thinks he can swallow, that instead burn and rip through his viscera, the mole that perforates the earth, the revolution that one day will re-emerge from the sewers like a rising sun.

I don’t mind feeling like a sun sinking below the horizon though. The rum, which is never wanting at the table, is good. I even pray, as is fitting when you place your trust in the immense sea.

Drinking and praying, confronted by that deserted sea. Writing home would mean streaking that great emptiness, a cry slashing through the silence. Hooker informed me that Marie is in Edinburgh; she thinks I’ve gone to South America for good, maybe shipwrecked, she realizes that she will never see me again. What peace in my heart. A rusty anchor floats up from the bottom, that meadow at the bottom of the sea will bloom again, delicate and pure. The air on the open sea is fresh, it’s been some time since we left the cliffs of Dover behind.

TRAVELLING THROUGH THE NIGHT
, travelling across the sea. Not like an albatross with outspread wings. Like a serpent of the abyss. The train races through the night, the windows lit in the darkness, the scales slither along, piercing the shadowy waters. Its belly is full of shipwrecked survivors, but the monster is long and supple, a torpedo that strikes unremittingly. Trieste Rome Frankfurt Hanover Bremerhaven; the journey is long, days and nights, but especially the nights. I look out the porthole, it’s difficult to sleep with so many of us crammed into the compartment. The train, the hold, the sealed boxcar ...

Vagrants, guilty and homeless like convicts. Black waters of the night. For a moment the porthole illuminates clumps of trees, shafts of light, fluorescent underwater shrubs, lifeless houses, sunken carcasses; an enormous moonfish vanishes in a spume denser than the black sky.

It wrings your heart, when they carry you off, far away, then later you begin to talk, to tell stories. A handful of broken tales, a fistful of sand scattered into the sea. When you’re up to your neck in deep waters it does you good to talk, even if little of that gurgling can be understood and the words are sobs, air bubbles floating out of
the mouth of someone who has been pushed under, they rise to the surface and burst—at the seaside you were expected to score with the chicks, dunking their heads underwater. The only place you couldn’t do it was at the Pedocin, with its separation of men and women.

Words in the darkness, small fish that slip out of the net and are sucked back into the eddies—you can confess anything, squeezed in that compartment, dead tired and unable to sleep, real infamies and invented ones. In that darkness, it’s strangely pleasurable to feel that you’re worthless, garbage dumped from the ship. Throwing trash out the windows, throwing yourself into the darkness, is prohibited. Crossing the boundaries of Hell is prohibited, profaning the divine Samothrace, the tremendous mysteries of the gods unutterable to us mortals.

“Those mysteries, which it is not lawful for me to sing.” But in the dark, on the journey that takes us who knows where, it’s a spiteful relief to profane those unutterable mysteries—you can’t see each other’s faces, sacrilege has no face, and so you recount everything you’ve seen and wouldn’t have had to see if the enlightened gods of Olympus were ruling the world and not the ancient divinities of the Night and Erebus.
Erebus
and
Terror
, the last two ships I saw leave Hobart Town for the Antarctic night with Commodore Ross. Each one talks about how he became a man, the horrible initiations of violence, of infamy and of death—The Argonauts in Samothrace hear the scream of the Great Mother when the serpent rapes and impregnates her, the groan of the newborn god hacked to pieces, the rumble of the waters that roar into that dark tunnel and wash away the blood.

A foul, insignificant mystery that cannot be uttered—the sacred initiation that makes you a man when you can see with your own
eyes the lurid darkness that surrounds you, mephitic exhalation of the Stygian bogs, when you realize there is infamy and immediately commit it, when the mud you used as a child to make castles on the beach hardens and becomes your arid, inert heart. During the celebration of the ineffable mysteries of Samothrace, they say, Zagreus, the newborn sacred bull-calf—perhaps it was a lamb—is torn to pieces by the Dactyls, small reckless demons devoted to the Great Mother, the Triple Goddess. “One seized his head and each of the others seized a leg, and while the music raged around them they tore the infant god in pieces, and sprinkled his blood on the Argonauts, to madden them.” So they say. And in the throes of ecstasy, they ripped the mangled carcass into shreds, eating the flesh greedily ...