Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Magris, Claudio

  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.

  63

  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.

  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 Miholašica, 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 ...

  64

  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 plac
e 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.

  65

  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 ...