Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

by Magris, Claudio

  Down here no one remembered the stories heard that night on the train. It’s Maria who remained in that deep pit. Slipped in, left behind—maybe it was I who pushed her; when you’re drowning and someone clings to you, you shake them off, you say the hell with it and let them go down, it’s human, in that stormy nighttime sea. But no, it was I instead who clung to her, to my figurehead, when the huge wave crashed down on me. After I ended up at Goli Otok, she went to stay in Arbe, with her brother, a lieutenant in the Yugoslavian Navy who, with his launch, patrolled the coasts of the two accursed islands from which no one returns. “And no mortal enters there / neither local nor stranger, or crosses that threshold, / since it is utterly forbidden by the terrible divinity / whose breath excites the rabid fury of the dogs / with the fiery eyes.”

  I knew Maria was there, beyond that inviolable expanse of sea. Thanks to her brother Absinthe—that wasn’t really his name, they called him that because he often drained a glass or a bottle—she managed to get that package to me. Bread, Pago cheese and that ticket that he unknowingly handed to me in the waxed paper. She planned the getaway well, that evening. She convinced her brother to take her with him on the launch, along with only one sailor, for the usual quick inspection tour around the islet and to take a swim, on the way back, at Samari, the bay of Arbe that faced Sveti Grgur. It’s only fitting, two hells facing one another—both in some way created by my own comrades. By my comrades-at-arms in Arbe, by my comrades in Sveti Grgur. We at Goli Otok were still in the water, gathering rocks. It was easy for her—when her brother and the sailor fell asleep, dulled by the Luminal that she had put in their wine—to take the launch, which she knew how to handle, approach the jagged coast of that Bald Island where I was hiding, and bring me to Krušica and then, having crossed Cherso’s ridge, take me in another boat to Istria, to a beach between Brestova and Albona.

  The boatman who brought us to Istria was one of Vidali’s men, a member of the network that he had organized for his failed conspiracy against Tito. Maria’s brother, when he awoke, terrified, must have feared that they would take him for one of those conspirators, for an accomplice of theirs, and so they say he lost his head ... But I was already on the other side, safe and sound, in Italy. The Mexican jaguar wasn’t successful, with that crazy scheme of wanting to overthrow Tito by having the sailors in Pola and Spalato mutiny, maybe that too was only a rumour, however those occasional odd jobs allowed someone who managed to escape from the island, like me, to cross the border, he organized them well and so, two nights later, a courier familiar with obscure routes led me to the other side, through the area around Pesek, and since that time, Doctor, I have never again set foot in a socialist country, I moved farther and farther away from the Promised Land—they’ve told me it’s no longer there, it vanished, Atlantis swallowed up by a tsunami. The roulette wheel flung the ball out of orbit; only on the moon, I think I read, does the red flag still wave, fired up there by a Soviet spaceship—wave, so to speak, up there there isn’t a breath of air, the fleece suspended from the gnarled oak hangs motionless.

  We should really go and get it back, that fleece, our limp red flag. Maybe going back, in reverse, like the Argo driven into the sea and even into the sky by launching end on. Sailing up there, among the constellations, to recover what is ours, banished from the earth.

  70

  I TOO USE CALOMEL, but that’s the only thing Rodmell knows to prescribe. When, once past the Tropic of Cancer, an epidemic of cerebrospinal fever breaks out among the convicts, all he knows how to do is increase the doses, ten, twenty, thirty pills. Four men die all the same and just before dying they even go crazy; one grabs a lamp, wants to light it and throw himself into the dark waters he sees crashing on all sides, shouting that he wants to see the darkness that is about to swallow him up. Rodmell, on the other hand, has the good fortune to drop dead almost without warning early one morning; he falls off the chair, lies on the ground gasping a little and dies. I remember the decoctions and packs of Dr. Rox, the physician at Newgate prison, and after a few days the epidemic ends with no further casualties. I move up from the petty officers’ table to that of the officers.

  71

  THAT KIND OLD WOMAN in Krušica, seeing me trembling and numb, gave me a yellowish blanket, an old sheepskin that we pulled over our heads, Maria and I, to sleep for a few hours. Maria had snatched me out of the jaws of the serpent, where I had been thrown by him, the Leader, Eeta radiant like the sun adorned with gleaming rays, who looked out at us from the portraits with his terrible gaze, with those cruel, imperious little eyes from which there was no escape. “Have you therefore neither regard nor fear of my sovereign power, / nor for the Colchian forces defending my sceptre?” he demanded in a terrifying voice. And we obeyed, we went down there, to construct his realm and then sacrifice ourselves on his behalf and end up, because of him and for obeying him, on the Naked, Bald, hellish island of Goli Otok. It was the other who had taken his place, the rebel and traitor, the emboldened Marshal; it was he who was now the radiant sun adorned with gleaming rays, looking out at us from his portraits hung everywhere like tavern signs, with eyes seemingly kind and jovial but which deep down were cold and ruthless, at least until he heard our choir of the damned, Tito Partija, Tito Partija!

  That evening in Krušica, in Maria’s arms, under that discoloured sheepskin. I slept in the hollow between her head and shoulder, in that cove, Down the Bay at last. Above, in the night sky, the Argo sailed in a sea of phosphorescent sargassos; stars bloomed, gleaming medusas of venomous purple.

  The first of our new nights, I thought. The last, however, of subterfuge and deception. They had informed us that the courier, that night in the area around Pesek, would lead us to the other side one at a time; two at a time was too risky, Maria would cross over three days later, it was safer that way. Better a week, safer still, he told me later, in Trieste, someone I had never seen before and who had also arranged other escapes, more complicated than mine. Yes, of course, than your escapes, he amended quickly—when I protested that there were two of us. I should have known that when fate—or the Party, fate’s Central Committee—decided that the opening was too narrow for someone ...

  You don’t always make it through the Symplegades rocks, when you come up from Hades and return from the sea of the dead.—“There’s no escape / from the fatal misfortune / driven by the swift turmoil of the winds / the Symplegades collide hurtling toward one another / and the crashing thud resounds on the open sea and in the vast heavens ... The dove wheels uneasily between the cliffs with the divine ambrosia in her beak,” but the rocks close together like sharp-edged razors and clip her wings, “the bird plunges headlong into precipitous death ...,” the ship shatters on the rocks.

  The dove plummeted, its wing broken. Maria, Blasich told me speaking for Carlos—the commander was in a hurry and almost ran out, stumpy and lame as he was, there was a wine-coloured blotch on his averted face, shame or maybe I’m deluding myself—Maria was a Yugoslavian citizen and enrolled in the Yugoslavian Communist Party, which had not yet become fraternal again, that soon, perhaps, as far as, even though and however—it wouldn’t do, now that the painful fratricide seemed to point to—no, not yet about to end, unfortunately, if only—but it wouldn’t do to exacerbate the bloody wound with unwarranted interference—and give asylum to Maria, accused by Rijeka’s prosecutor—it was the first time he didn’t say Fiume—later on, yes, without doubt, in any case the Party would follow the matter closely and take whatever steps, with all due vigour, certainly not now, and—and so Maria therefore on that side and me here, the border cutting love in two like an apple, one half falls in the mud and soon it too rots.

  Did I say yes, to Blasich? No, I didn’t say anything. Consenting silence? Could be. There I was, in that room, the weariness of centuries weighing on my shoulders—“The diploid was suddenly reminded of his years, a senile ultra-centenarian ...”—I knew I had to say something, to say no to something horrible, but in a flash everyth
ing flew out of my head, I didn’t understand what Blasich was talking about, what the drowned officer had to do with it, found half-shattered on the rocks in the middle of the sea near the islet of Trstenik, the waves had carried him there from the bay of Samari, where he had fallen or jumped onto the rocks. He was floating like a log, a small wandering island; that’s how islands are born, from blood, even the Absyrtides, my Miholašica, were born from the body of Absyrtus hacked to pieces and thrown into the sea, the flower blooms from death, tsunamis and underwater volcanoes cause magnificent islands to emerge from the sea.

  But who is that man, why did he throw himself into the sea; what do I have to do with it, I didn’t even know Maria had left him there, asleep. So much the better, I heard Blasich say—his voice came to me from far away, over centuries—otherwise they would have tried him then and there for complicity in your escape or for negligence or maybe not even tried him but certainly shot him. Another reason why it was better, for now, not to interfere with Maria, even for her sake; if it came out that she had our support it would be worse for her, they would pass her off as a spy or as an agent of ours and who knows how she would end up. Instead this way, conviction, yes, that was inevitable, but then she would get through it, a way would be found, an opportune way, discreet—and then—he nudged me stunned and consenting toward the door, like you’re doing now, Doctor, yes, I’m going to bed, I’m tired, yes, yes, I took all the pills, even a couple more, just for my throat, I like candy drops, and I’m really tired.

  Say something, rebel, it’s an abomination, no not Maria, send me back to Goli Otok instead, but I’m shocked, dazed, I don’t understand what he’s telling me, Comrade Blasich, the waves crash onto the deck, spill over me—what a roar, the thud of the waves against the side of the ship, heartbeats of an enormous, monstrous heart breathing heavily out there—once, at the mouth of the Derwent, the sailors caught a shark, hoisted it on board and cut it open, tearing out its heart and leaving it on the deck to beat tumultuously for a good half-hour, a sponge dripping with blood that shrivelled up and died in the sun. The heart of the world beats so loud it muffles the beating of my own heart, the world is a huge whale and I am in its belly, with so many slimy things, under the big heart that flinches and contracts over me and one fine day will end up bursting, a gash that opens in the animal’s chest and spews everything out, even me, a scrap of filth that floats on the water and gets tossed up on the beach.

  72

  “SHE PLUNGED, poor woman, into the sea, for the / impious death of the children; / she stretched her foot over the seashore / and with her two children she lost her life. / What could be still more awful? / Marriage bed of women / full of pain, how many things you have done to us humans, / all of them bad!”—What did I see ...—Coward, show your face, don’t keep hiding ...

  No, I didn’t see anything, I just heard something. I knew and I didn’t know that she was pregnant; it’s so difficult, for a man—it’s moving, it’s embarrassing, you don’t really know how it is, if she is or isn’t, if it’s actually a child or—something, something that—maybe that’s why she, so proud, didn’t want to talk about it—now I know, my son, our son, the rising sun in her belly—You can’t see it, when it’s still inside there, below the horizon, in the dark, but it’s there, a small great sun on its way, to bring daylight to your heart—but instead. They say it was a guard, a Herzegovinian, who kicked her in the stomach during the interrogation, but that she purposely provoked him, daring him to give her those murderous kicks; she put the knife in his hand, so that—So many butchers for just one child. Heroes learn from the gods to devour their own children—me safe, over here, and Maria, the two of them, over there—how could I have even asked about her, after I—on the Isle of the Dead, opposite Port Arthur, there are only weeds to scrape away.

  73

  LIFE IS A JOURNEY, the preachers say so over and over again. Blunt had a real mania about it and it was a piece of cake for me, at Newgate, all I had to do was trot out Bunyan’s pilgrim, the soul on its way from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, changing a detail or two just a little, adding or modifying some image, and he had his sermon and I my half shilling.

  Displaced persons, galeotti, bloody newaustralians, convicts, dagos, wogs, quick, all aboard, we’re leaving for the City of Destruction, Terra Australis Incognita. The Ocean is a river that surrounds the land, an immense Acheron flowing and rushing into Hades. Life is a journey, a cruise and deportation.

  Down there, at the last stop, people like Father Callaghan say, it’s not the end but the beginning of true life, a better life, you will not die but be transformed—and how! tell me that exile and the Lager don’t transform you. O death, where is thy sting? The king is dead long live the king, the diploid sits on the throne. The ship sets sail with its cargo of diploids for the unknown austral continent; there the Internationale’s future humanity of clones, convicts cloned and immortal, forever in chains, will be reborn. But at the end of the dark corridor of Christiansborg Palace, behind those heavy drapes, is a window overlooking the great light of the sea—the train too will emerge from the tunnel into the light, the whale will rise to the surface blowing and spewing in the luminous light. Maybe down there, at the port of arrival, the belly of the ship that carries us in its darkness, scores of blind fetuses pressed against one another, will split open. The pregnant belly gives birth, the mice scurry out of the ship.

  If true life begins at the journey’s end, on the ship we are still in the recently impregnated belly. Who knows who ejaculated us here, here inside and here below, clinging to the slick walls of the dark hold; it must have been an enormous cetacean, a huge obscene member that, violent and excited, penetrates the hold, rubs against this mossy cavity, discharges a slimy fluid and here we are, all brothers, twins almost, in any case equals, deportees all look alike. Soon this life that is death will end; we’ll disembark and begin the death that is true life, the eternal life of the penitentiary.

  The ship rocks, tosses about, occasionally it ends up grounded on a shoal or against a rock, it springs a leak. All you’d have to do is move a few metres, over to the corner where the waves don’t lap, but how can you—how can they, I’m up on deck—with those irons on their right ankle, fourteen pounds or more, if you couldn’t pay the guard the unjust tax to lighten them; children, who can’t pay, wear double chains. The suction of waves washing back into the ocean overturns the buckets full of urine and blankets soaking in it to disinfect them of lice; the seawater pouring into the mouth of the convict immobilized by irons returns his piss from the day before. The bora that descends from the Quarnero batters the Punat, those bound and handcuffed down below roll around the hold. One of the UDBA men fell on top of Darko, a comrade from Ika, and he, bound hand and foot, finding the agent suddenly close to him, faces glued together, almost bit off an ear, then they broke every bone in his body, he was strong but I think he died. They say that John Wooley too, on the Ganymede that transported him Down the Bay, to the penitentiary, bit off the finger that Quartermaster Gosling stuck in his mouth to remove a pinch of tobacco.

  If only the journey were to end, for good—if the Punat, the Woodman, the Nelly were to disappear below in a vortex of no return, with all of us, departed at last, having never existed. How many times, seeing the timbers of my ship—my timbers, my lives—being shattered by the fury of the waves, did I hope that the ship would surrender once and for all. But instead each time the evil carpenter would repair the hulk, replacing a piece of timber, so many pieces, so many timbers, but the frame, the ship, the soul of the ship was always the same, immortal in its repeated shipwrecks and trials.

  The ship endures oceans and typhoons, headed decidedly toward the port of misfortune. This Court orders and adjudicates that you be deported overseas, to a place to which His Majesty, on the recommendation of his Private Council, considers it appropriate to assign you, for the remainder of your lives—a remainder without end.

  I can’t complain, I make
the crossing up on deck and in a cabin, rather than in the hold. And when the Woodman, following the course of the Roaring Forties, reaches its destination, the Hobart Town Gazette, on May 6, writes, wait, here it is, that among the convicts who disembarked under the supervision of armed soldiers “there is also a native of Denmark, named Jorgen Jorgensen, formerly a dispenser of medicine in Newgate, and well known to most of the prisoners in the Colony. He is a very intelligent man and speaks several languages. He was here at the first formation of the Colony, chief Mate of the Lady Nelson, commanded by Lieutenant Simmons.”

  It sounds like the announcement for a gala in the society pages. I disembark from the Woodman almost smugly, gazing with a critical eye at the changes that have taken place in the city and making some harsh remarks about the placement of the new buildings and the confusion of warehouses on the banks. It’s natural that I be assigned as Collector of Port Dues and Customs, since the office’s director, Mr. Rolla O’Ferrall, newly arrived from England, can’t even do simple arithmetic. Sixpence a day and lodging at the naval bureau. The other convicts, almost all of them, end up breaking their backs transporting stones and rotting in their cells.

  74

  THOSE IN CHAINS, actually in chains, number six thousand, but the convicts, Doctor, add up to a great many more. Pardoned, allotted to settlers or assigned to some office, like me. In all, there are thirteen thousand of us—and in 1804, gentlemen, all of Van Diemen’s Land had just four hundred and thirty-three inhabitants. Now more than five hundred people live in Hobart Town alone. Clean streets, quite a few houses of stone and brick, two beautiful bridges, the spires of St. David’s Cathedral, the governor’s residence, the soldiers’ barracks, the huts of the prisoners who are fortunate enough not to wind up in Port Arthur, a hospital, warehouses and depots, pens for livestock, wharves, taverns. Better than at Bonegilla, the first refugee camp for emigrants to Australia, after the Second World War, with those unlit cubbyholes, that filth—I heard that twelve children died the year before we arrived, I think.