What a strange word, return ... To return with the golden fleece, after no matter how many circumnavigations. Maybe around the world, like that time on the Alexander from Hobart Town to London, five hundred and eighty-seven days, trying several times in vain to round Cape Horn and battered here and there by the storms, from Otaheiti to St. Helena, where news of the battle of Austerlitz had just arrived—further marvellous symmetries, learning of the culmination of the Empereur’s glory there where shortly afterwards he too would end up as an exile and prisoner.
Five hundred and eighty-seven days is a long time, but it would be worth it if it brought us home. You’ll return from your mission satisfied, you’ll see, Tore, Comrade Blasich told me, we’re sending you among the barbarian Slavs of Colchis, at the ends of the earth, but you will return upon completion of your mission, peace among peoples and among comrades, the red flag illuminated by the sun setting over the sea resplendent like a golden fleece.
In reality, I was only going to Fiume, seventy kilometres from Trieste. Why was the return journey so long? Comrade Professor Blasich would say that argonauts always have to travel a long way, according to some they even go up the Danube, or perhaps the Don, crossing the Sarmazia and the Sea of Cronos, sailing back down the ocean to return through the Pillars of Hercules—mare tenebrarum, vast waters of the West, sunset as golden as the fleece—an ancient coin found in Ribadeo, in Galicia, bears the effigy of a ram with a golden coat. He, Jason, returns with the fleece, but I, if I rummage through my pockets, can’t find a thing, at most this yellow wafer of yours, Doctor, a gold coin that melts in your mouth and puts you to sleep; the dragon dozes off, like when he drinks Medea’s magic potions, and when he wakes up the treasure is gone. Where is the red flag, who stole it?
No voyage is too long and perilous if it brings you back home. But do houses to return to still exist, did they ever exist? I thought Via Madonnina was one, but after Goli Otok it became the door to darkness. And Comrade Professor Blasich—the impresario of Charon and those jam-packed ferries of his—if he’s alive it’s because he got off the boat in time and perhaps he’s still rereading and annotating those Argonautics of his. He must certainly have had another copy, besides the one he gave me. Yet he would smile contemptuously when I spoke to him about my readings—he who had studied classical philology at the Normal School in Pisa. A certified Communist, a bourgeois intellectual of the workers’ movement. But I too had done some reading, in high school and, before that, thanks to my father’s library in the back of his store, and thanks to his friend Valdieri: he too dragged into that drainpipe of a world by the Coriolis forces, Valdieri had completed university and then had some trouble with the police in Naples, because he was active among the anarchists. I listened to him at the table in the evening, when he told my father that the Greeks had been humanity’s childhood and perennial youth, an unsurpassed period, and that only revolution could lead a liberated humanity back to that greatness.
Revolution, I thought, was therefore a return home. Instead the Greeks had written about and understood something else, something terrible, the tragedy and senselessness of the world. The stench of Philoctetes, Jason who brings the light of civilization to the barbarity of Colchis and along with it brings new barbarism. The glory and infamy of progress, the bourgeoisie that destroys the sirens with an insurance policy on Ulysses’ ship; earplugs for the sailors, ears open for the masters to hear that unprecedented song, but arms and legs bound properly, so that the song that devastates the world becomes innocuous.
It was meant to annihilate all power, that song; instead, the one who dies and vanishes into nothing is the one who intones it, the siren of revolution. Already over back then, at the beginning, a discovery that convulses the mind and heart, Ajax who slaughters the herds and flocks. A mistake of the gods to blind men and make them culpable ...—Of course, I too was culpable, for the blood shed by my hand and that shed from my veins, for death given and received, for everything; even for existing, even for losing. Especially for losing; it’s a mortal sin, when you’re fighting for the revolution. This retreat of ours—“Fall back, advance ... history is not linear, my friend, it zigzags, at least it has for some time; it surges but stands still, a jostling struggling groping crowd at a rock concert in the square, no Long March because we’re already there, we’ve always been there, and the world is not infinite, only the Internet is infinite, the reality that doesn’t exist. Win, lose, it’s all the same; a game. The fault lies in not having realized it in time—But let’s not talk about blame, please, there’s a limit even to retro style, guilt hasn’t existed for a long time now.”—On the contrary it’s rampant, even though you pretend not to see it like everyone else, I can just see your smug little smile ... It’s everywhere, our guilt for having lost the battle of Gog and Magog, for not being able to give more meaning to man’s history ... The only consolation is that at least we know it, while they think they’ve won; they march pompously along the gangplank amid the applause and haven’t realized that there is no net below them and that from there you fall straight into the scalding cesspool.
—About my lot, I complain not, another place to bathe I’ve got. Goli Otok, a penal bathing resort to refresh the memory of those of Port Arthur and Dachau. How did that brochure go, the one that someone jokingly came out with in such poor taste?—“An extraordinarily clean sea, immaculate surroundings, immersed in silence.”—the world’s utter silence with regard to suffering and infamy—“Goli Otok island of peace, island of absolute freedom.”—The tourist agency sounds like the Central Committee, and the photograph, with that blue water and those white cliffs, is just as persuasive. We pijeskari, sand quarriers, had to stay in that water up to our chests, even in winter, scraping the bottom with a shovel to collect the sand and load the wheelbarrows, up and down with the shovel, in the icy water. After a while you don’t even feel the cold anymore. The shovel goes up and down, and if you’re not quick to bring it up full of sand, you get a walloping: one fellow got his nose broken and he went on standing there, soaked to the chest, his face cracked open, blood and mucus like ice. The shovel rises, lowers, you can’t feel your hands anymore. The salt rubs them raw more than the wind, it’s not surprising. The sea has no pity, but why should it be the only one to have it?
In any case, it’s always the sea. The sea is like the Party—it’s others who know where you need to go; it’s not you who determines the currents and the tides, you merely follow them. “My name was William Kid, when I sail’d, when I sail’d, My name was William Kid when I sail’d, My name was William Kid, God’s laws I did forbid, And so wickedly I did, when I sail’d.” The voice of the ballad singer would try to outdo the shouts of the orange vendors and drunks at St. Giles’s, when the Jane docked in London for a few days, during those first four years at sea. God’s laws I too did forbid, when I sailed—I tried, that day in Nyhavn, to pretend some emotion over bidding my parents farewell, my father’s restrained sadness, my mother’s tears, my siblings’ embrace.
Maybe I really did cry, I was fourteen years old. My sister Trine’s hair, falling to her shoulders, engulfing me like a wave as she threw her arms around my neck. A moving passage, go take a look at it in the autobiography. I too was sincerely moved when I wrote it and I’m moved when I reread it, but at that time, I realize, my only emotion was relief at the departure, at the ship slipping away toward dark horizons rocked by the winds, the wake disappearing behind it. I left behind the sceptre of Iceland as well, later on, just as one lets go of a mooring line when putting out to sea, and so I let go of my father, my mother, everything. Afterwards, however, later still, I found myself always carrying everything with me, my heart, the hearts of others, flags ... a heavy burden that crushes you. My back broken. But upright. Think what satisfaction.
It’s the sea that brought me to Goli Otok, way before the Punat, that Charon’s trawler, brought me back there, after the UDBA, Tito’s political police, arrested me in the dead of night and flung me into its
hold, onto the heap of other comrades in chains. Many of them didn’t even know that Goli Otok existed, before being sent off to become deranged and die on that piece of arid, burning moon, and maybe become worse torturers than their torturers—it happens at times, I saw it at Port Arthur as well, the cellmate who torments you to please the guard and be rewarded by an hour’s rest or a tot of rum.
But it only happened to a few of us. Almost all of us remained more unbreakable than the stones we had to smash with a hammer and carry up and down all day—Every so often they fed one or another of us to the Ustashi, thrown in there at the end of the war, who took pleasure in tormenting the hated Communists once again, this time by order of other Communists, and some men couldn’t take it. Antonio De Pol, for example, had been captain of the Fifth Regiment in Spain and had lost an arm there without giving up, but when two ex-Ustashi broke his other arm in Goli Otok and peed in his mouth, he couldn’t take it anymore, he climbed up a cliff and jumped off, crashing against the rocks.
As I said, I was already familiar with Goli Otok and Sveti Grgur, those two islands of death. I had passed near them from time to time as a boy, after we had gone back to Italy, with my father’s floozy; he never tired of revisiting those places of his childhood, those seas that he had vaunted in his shop in Hobart Town, displaying Brun’s painting. We would return with the boat full of dentexes, scorpion fish and even giltheads, which are the most wily ones, until they go into heat, then they swallow the first line as if all they wanted to do was get hooked and get it over with. I would begin to see the two islands, first Sveti Grgur and then Goli Otok, when we left the bay of Lopar, at Arbe, with the mistral. I watched Arbe fade away in the distance—I didn’t know, I couldn’t know, at the time, that by retreating in the pale blue sky it was advancing toward the future, a horrible future in which it too would become a hell like the other two islands, a Lager where the Italians would massacre Slovenians, Croatians, Jews, anti-Fascists, partisans, even children—In Hobart Town, Uncle Jure, who had emigrated a short time before my father, used to play angel-devil with me, a sheet of paper with a blue sky on one side and a red and black hell on the other, you think you’re holding that beautiful celestial blue in your hand and instead you suddenly find those dark flames ... But when we set out from Lopar, I didn’t think the paper could be turned over. The white sail would grow taut in the wind that swept across my face, from the stern I watched the wake, in the endless blue, and I would fall asleep.
Little good it did me to sail close-hauled. I would have been better off learning to spot bad weather before it’s too late to moor the boat, that way I wouldn’t have ended up under Ante Rastegorac who, even with his one eye, saw immediately where to strike in order to do the most harm. Better to live for the sea rather than for the Party. The thing is that they resemble one another—something vast and all-encompassing that always knows what must be done, even when you fall into the water in winter and the bora blinds and suffocates you with the foggy vapours of the fumarea. The Party too seemed like one of those violent storms that tomorrow will bring fair weather, so never mind if someone falls into the sea or gets thrown in. But then one day the Party vanished, overnight, as if all of a sudden a giant sponge had drained the entire sea, Adriatic and Austral, leaving litter and clots of mud, and all the boats stranded.
How can you go home again if the sea has been sucked down a vast drain that opened up beneath it, emptying it who knows where, into a void? The earth is arid and dead, but there won’t be another one, nor another heaven. Go back where, how? The Argo, fleeing Colchis with the stolen fleece, ends up in the Syrtis, from which there is no return. “For on every hand are shoals, on every hand masses of seaweed from the depths; and over them the light foam of the wave washes without noise.” The Argo has run aground, the fleece hangs crumpled; the heroes on the deck are breaking up like the old ship. Jason is silent, as always, at this point he can’t even focus his bewildered gaze on the sea, because there is no more sea.
“And sorrow seized them when they gazed on the mist and the levels of vast land stretching far like a mist and continuous into the distance.” Do you hear how beautiful the translation is? Yes, I always liked to read aloud, even in high school, when I was preparing for exams. Everyone has always tested me. “All the scene was possessed by a dead calm,” the wind died down and in the Argonauts’ hearts perhaps the desire to return also died. How, where to return from Goli Otok? “Better were it,” Jason, having run aground, says, “to have perished in venturing some mighty deed.” Yes, to die in Guadalajara, in Dachau, in Colchis fighting the warriors who sprang from the dragon’s teeth, not in Goli Otok, strangled by the red kerchief that we had tied around our necks. For, as I gaze far around, on every side do I behold a sea of shoals ...
But with unshaken strength and untiring shoulders let us lift the ship up and bear her, on backs that are unflagging though flayed to the bone by the scourging of tireless tormentors—“And this report have I heard most truly; that ye, O mightiest far of the sons of kings, by your might and your valour over the desert sands of Libya raised high aloft on your shoulders the ship and all that ye brought therein, and bear her twelve days and nights alike.” The Argo, borne on their shoulders, crosses the desert and in the end reaches the sea once more, finds the way home again. Our ship, on the other hand, collapsed on top of us; we were left crushed under the keel. “Yet who could tell the pain and grief which they endured in that toil? Surely they were of the blood of the immortals, such a task did they take on them, constrained by necessity. ...” Oh, you too know and love this passage ... Yes, who can ever recount it? Certainly not a hallucinating mythomaniac with a tendency to exaggerate his own misfortunes, as you say, this is something quite different from a Nosological History ...
8
I LOVED THE SEA more than women, before I understood that they are one and the same. But I only understood this later, much later than that night in London when, fleeing from that girl, I ended up running into a press gang that dragged me onto a scow on the Thames and from there on board a fine warship, the Surprize. Yes, I fled. It happens. Haven’t you ever been afraid? That body that is no longer yours, you don’t even recognize its odour, a sour sweat—you’re no longer in control, you can’t order yourself not to sweat, not to have that odour.
I like to give orders—also to obey, it’s all the same, it’s I who decide, even whether to submit to the Party, for example. You know what you have to do and you do it. But that night in London, after disembarking from the Jane, that night in that tavern with that girl, I didn’t know who was giving the orders and who was obeying. My body was there, remote, sweaty, chilled; I felt that when it came to love, even the five-minute variety, no one gives orders and no one decides. What do you do, with a girl like that, what do you say to her, who is it that makes the first move, what will it be like ... Clear out of there, cut and run, even brutally if she won’t take no for an answer, as soon as you turn the corner the fear, and shame, will pass. I’ll be able to get a pint of cold beer somewhere, which I can’t seem to get down now, ah yes, beer, cold, frothy, you can feel your arms again, your legs; even the sweat is different, a good sweat. It’s a delight when the beer slides down your throat and into your belly, and when, soon afterwards, you go to take a piss, even your pecker is free and easy again, relaxed; every once in a while, who knows why, it makes your pants bulge, but that’s its business and you pay no attention to it, any more than when you belch, especially since it’s quick to settle back in place.
Of course, that time I didn’t get to drink any beer, the press gang grabbed me almost immediately, there in the alley, before I could duck into another tavern. But that’s not the point. What I find a lot more objectionable are those malicious stories insinuated by my biographers, more or less all of them—Clune, Stephenson, Davies, and now even that Dan Sprod, who thinks he’s so smart. It’s true that I wrote that I was the only one of my siblings not to be nursed by my mother, I went and checked, and so they had a
great time with my not having been breast-fed, surely I don’t have to explain these obsessions to you, since they are common even in here ... Aside from the fact that I’m not the one who says that, it’s Thomas, in the Adventures of Thomas Walter—I wrote that novel in prison, in Newgate, even that pedantic biographer of mine says so, and I invented all of it—Oh well, all of it, no one ever invents anything, for that matter, and when one writes “I” ... yet how could one say “he” instead, which is an even greater lie than “I”? You don’t mean to tell me you’re talking to him now ... All right then, that time I did not make love, let them go ahead and write it. I like a biography that recounts everything you don’t do—Still you had to be there, that night, to understand ... that confusion, in the tavern and outside, the crowded streets, the shouts and brawls, someone lying in the gutter, half dead, the peddlers passing nearby hawking honeyed fruitcake at the top of their lungs, people flocking to Mother Proctor’s Pews scuffling to get the best place from which to watch the hangings at Tyburn gallows, the roosters ripping each other to pieces in the cockfights at the Cockpit, the chained bear tearing the dogs limb from limb at the Bear Garden and those large tents with their monsters, those dazed brutes ... And in all this pandemonium, two lost, solitary creatures, me and you, a girl without a name, what should we have done if not flee, rather than uttering false words of love or faking loving gestures, even for five minutes? That night I fled, a deserter from the battlefield of love, savage like all battlefields. If only I had always fled like that, later on as well, perhaps now—later instead I was no longer able to flee, or abandon the flag—you should always have three or four of them, flags that is, if you hand over the right one to those in command, saying that you tore it away from the enemy in the dust of battle, you’ll even get a reward, and they’ll pay for your wine at the tavern besides ... but instead, look where the red flag ended up taking me, that flag forever in my grasp, a far cry from cut and run—
Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) Page 7