More refugee camps, dim hells—she found a job as a clerk at the EPT, Electric Power Transmission Pty Ltd., where Triestine was spoken almost exclusively, since it was our people who worked there, and later at a shipping company in Hobart Town. When I saw her there, in that tavern, that face a little softer, almost shapeless, her insuppressible nobility under the coarsening weariness ... she calls herself Norah. Many of those who come down here change their first and last names; even to me it would seem strange to call her Maria, I don’t know why, although—
78
NORAH CORBETT, my wife before God and man. Especially before those drunkards at the Waterloo Inn and at the other taverns, where she drinks more than they do. It was in one of them that I met her. Irish, the daughter of farmers, sentenced to deportation for life, for theft. Repeatedly flogged for answering back, in the women’s forced labour colony in Hobart Town, and for twice slapping the guards who put their hands on her, flogged again because she laughed brazenly under the blows of the cat-o’-nine-tails and slapped her rear end. She was thrown out of school as a girl so she’s illiterate and proud of it. Her mouth is wide, full lips in a somewhat swollen face; in those beautiful slanted brown eyes—they must have been darker, once—you can make out a light now clouded by alcohol, even her flabby breasts must once have been beautiful. I think my hands remember them, there, another time, on the shore of a different sea, a long time ago, yes, I mean a long time before now, Doctor—
You came down here for me, to follow me faithfully in my misfortune. Medea follows Jason who has returned to the city where he is prince. I am even more a prince, because I founded it. It’s I who sucked you down here—it’s not my fault, even Jason was denigrated for how he treated you in Corinth, but you have to understand.
What I could do, if a primitive woman from the ends of the earth finds herself exiled and a foreigner in her husband’s land and if he isn’t too eager to have her seen ... What happened happened, though it occasionally wrings the heart. Your figure in the shadows, among the bushes, that evening in Pesek as I passed by on the other side; in shadow but distinct, eyes shining in the darkness, the belly that now I seem to see was slightly swollen already, no it’s not possible, at that time not even you knew it—And yet ... I stayed inside you a long time, after making love, we liked being that way, me inside you, like in the sea. Sometimes I fell asleep, inside you, in the seaside grotto; in the Plava Grota, below Lubenice, at first you can’t see a thing, then your eyes adjust and everything is bright blue, Maria’s smile in that luminous darkness. I stay inside you a long time, we still feel each other intensely, fainter but still intensely; then I happen to make you laugh, you like it, you command me to, you laugh loudly, coarsely, I love the vulgarity of that laugh, it makes you contract your muscles and I’m expelled from the underwater cavern, an exiled refugee, puny and limp, a displaced person, banished from Eden and once more in front of a door that closes.
Norah doesn’t care about putting a hanky or cloth under herself, on that old yellowish blanket you can’t see anything anyway, a stain like all the others. The fleece is full of stains, centuries of blood sweat and fluids; it’s under us, under her sweaty flesh, the right place for it, where it doesn’t harm anyone. It also has that strong, exciting animal odour. The revolution’s flag can also be used to lie on, to make love. Norah, immediately afterwards, knocks back a big swig of rum. Even before, for that matter. Not even sex makes her drink less, though she promises me not to have more than two glasses of beer per day; not surprisingly, rum and beer are her magic herbs that she always carries with her, the potions and filters she uses to put dragons to sleep along with any fear of dragons in her heart.
Indeed, when they promise her a stein of ale for every answer, she testifies against four bandits arrested by me, heedless of any threats. Of course, when I go to pick her up to bring her to court to confirm her testimony—I had put her up at the Waterloo Inn, it seemed safer there—I find her boozing with some nasty characters, I grab her by the arm to drag her out of there, but she rebels, she’s drunk, she breaks a chair over my head I slap her the others join in. A general melee, after which I find myself in the cooler, suspended from my job with the police, while she is perhaps still at the tavern drinking, vomiting, sleeping under the table until they close and hurl her out, leaving her on the ground. She’s used to it; with all that rum and also a little body fat, weight she put on thanks to the rum and the dishes her friend Bessie passes her on the sly from the governor’s kitchen, she doesn’t feel the cold.
I like that overblown flesh of hers; it’s restful between those ample breasts, I press my face into her sweaty skin and I feel sheltered. There was a seal lying on a rock near a grotto between Traù and Sebenico, more toward Sebenico, which you could see from Tihomir’s scull when we went out rowing along the coasts. From afar it looked like a woman, plump like Stani, who sold fish in the fish market and who they said still had the most beautiful ass from Zara to Spalato, despite being withered and crushed more by life than by the years. But as the boat approached, the seal dove under and disappeared. You could see her float down to the bottom, dark blue and chubby like Stani. It must be nice to be able to sink gently in that pale blue that turns blue and then black; there below you don’t feel a thing, if someone throws a stone at you, it falls so slowly that it doesn’t harm you.
Tihomir recalled the tale of the seal who, when she was down below in a grotto, in waters luminous and transparent as moonlight, took off her skin and was a beautiful, slender girl, without all that fat but still curvy with two round, firm tits; she danced alone, her feet making small waves which lapped gently against the grotto walls with pale blue foam. You could even see her under that transparent water if you approached slowly in the scull, but it was dangerous; she might be a Vila, though her fingers weren’t webbed like a duck, and Vilas should not be angered, they are good faeries and even make love with men, but only out of compassion, and they have only female children, God help him if a man acts arrogant with them and wants to take command.
As though I could try to command Norah. She knew how to kiss and be kissed, but when she drank—and she almost always drank—she grabbed a broom a stick or a chair and didn’t see straight anymore. Maybe she too had only one good eye and closed that one instead of the other. Stani, on the other hand, I would see gazing at the sea with her eyes wide open, with that weary, worn-out gaze of hers, though you could see how beautiful she must once have been. Janez, her husband, was always drunk and beat her; maybe he had surprised her once in the grotto without her skin and carried her off and hidden her, for spite, like people who put a cricket in a cage and blind it to make it sing and then don’t even listen to it.
I would have liked to sneak into Janez’s house like a thief, break open drawers or trunks, find the seal skin and give it to Stani, who would put it on and then disappear happily into the sea. Certainly Anka and Jure, her two children, would not like it, but she would bring them many seashells and pearls from the bottom of the sea and coral from Zlarin, a nearby island rich in that red gold that lies hidden underwater, and she would come and play with them among the waves, throwing the ball and catching it on the tip of her nose.
Norah sometimes wanted to be taken like an animal and it reminded me of what sailors do with seals, but often they also kill them afterwards, the flesh wants blood, I don’t know why but that’s how it is, I, on the other hand, after making love the way Norah wanted to, would kiss her back and feet tenderly and hold her hand. So then I was a little less alone and maybe she too, like me on the brink of the great black vortex, was a little less alone.
United to face I don’t know what—the emptiness, the Terra Australis Incognita, the continent of ice that, they say, stretches far and wide to the south and where the Erebus and the Terror will soon venture under the command of Commodore Ross. When I felt her close to me, I understood what it meant that, no matter what happened, she was my wife. If only I had understood it earlier, in Fiume ... Under t
he satisfied gaze of Reverend Robinson—a fine man, who also defended me against those false accusations of atheism—she signed the marriage registry of the Church of St. Matthew in New Norfolk with a nice big X, here it is, on January 25, 1831, I remember, it’s written here.
Mena coyeten nena, I love you. I had learned those words fighting the blacks in the bush and driving them toward the reserve at Bruny Island—they’d hauled me out of jail, where I’d ended up because of Norah, to enlist me in that expedition, in fact, to have me practically lead it. I fought them, those savages, there was nothing else I could do, but I also studied their language, their customs, their way of life. In fact I started writing a dictionary, more or less. I watched them dying; there was nothing I could do, we had come there to destroy them, apart from our willingness and iniquity Fate had sent us down here, all convicts in chains at its command; even the governor, even His Majesty across the seas, mere instruments of destruction, and it was only right to obey, that’s the revered order in the world and on a ship.
In short, it was right—or rather inevitable—to transport all those blacks, for better or worse, which is to say for worse, to Bruny Island. After all in the span of a few years more than twenty whites were killed at the hands of blacks, and it’s hopeless to delude ourselves that we can win them over with persuasion and fine manners. No, when it’s necessary, it’s necessary; even the Party isn’t made for sensitive souls but for the inflexible requirements of History, and compassionate physicians only make the wound more painful, I don’t mean you, Doctor. The Black War proclaimed by Sir George is an abomination, but it’s inevitable and I don’t pull out—moreover the order is to avoid bloodshed, capture them alive and deport them, for every black who is captured there’s a five-pound bounty. Most likely he’ll drop dead in those barren desert lands where we dump him, like the people we found on their last legs at Great Island; they were dying of hunger and thirst, gaping like fish left stranded on the rocks when the tide goes out. We all die, individuals and peoples and empires, and it’s not my fault if it’s their turn now.
But they should at least be remembered; no one should vanish as if he had never existed, that’s another reason why I write the epitaphs for the convicts buried on the Isle of the Dead, not just for those two shillings they give me for every inscription. I collect the words of those black ghosts in the jungle, like Reverend Bedford did; I try to reconstruct verbs, conjunctions, the sequence of sounds that describe time rushing by, vanishing, its traces evaporating like smoke in the air. They have a lot of words, many different languages. For kangaroo they say íla, wula, riéna, lena, line, rárina, tömnana. For swan, robigana, rowendana, pübli, kalangúna. The sky is covered by clouds, cloud is wa’rantina, the sky’s darkness. A lie is manintayana, although the blacks don’t lie and one of them, Montilangana, gets himself in bad trouble when he candidly says that he killed some whites. Yes, these blacks really have a problem lying. There’s reality and that’s that. If it’s snowing, it’s snowing. How can you say it’s not snowing, what sense does it make? They like that passage from the Scriptures that the Reverend makes them recite: Nar-a-pa, yes, Poo-by-er, no. Let your “yes” be “yes,” and your “no,” “no.” Often the Reverend, half tipsy, merely recites and repeats with them, like a litany: Nar-a-pa, Poo-by-er.—“An excellent memory for things that he invents, rather than for those that may have happened to him. Nosological Hist ...”—Click, there, erased, what do you care about what did or didn’t happen ...
Mena coyeten nena, I like to say to Norah, I love you—it vaguely reminds me of something, other dark-skinned arms at the seashore, but we are both tipsy and I get confused, she drinks and gets angry if I don’t get drunk too, I can’t remember how many times we ended up in jail for wrecking some tavern, both of us plastered. Still, she likes those words that I collect and that she doesn’t understand; she even learned a song from some blacks who came to the tavern begging for a little booze and who got drunk with her, Taby-ba-tea, Mocha, my boey-wa, Taby-ba-tea, Mocha, my boey-wa. She has a sudden whim not to go to bed until she finishes the song and if I reach out my hands impatient to remove her blouse she shoves me back with her knee and continues singing, Loma-ta-roch-a-ba-long-a Ra, Loma-ta-roch-a-ba-long-a Ra.
Why is it important to understand that singsong verse? Not even Jason understands Medea when she murmurs her spells and invokes her gods of the night, and maybe Medea doesn’t understand the magic formulas she’s murmuring and the people in church don’t understand the prayers they’re mumbling and not even I understood those words I had to say, in that game in the courtyard, in Fiume, cassezigonaiedè siraicrumpira zielahisciaseplema ... Norah also asks me how the black women make love and if I say I don’t know she gets angry and throws the first thing she lays a hand on at my head—She doesn’t believe me, since those women, bullied by their savage husbands, willingly go with whites; they do well to do so, a woman is made to command a man and straddle him, Norah too likes to get astride me and wring me dry, she even sticks the bottle in my mouth while she’s on top of me, she makes me drink to perk me up and start again, once I almost choked on that rum that went down the wrong way. Pelasgian women, Blasich says in his plagiarized little paper, mount their men and toss them away when they’re worn out; even Jason, when the aged Medea takes him back in old age, has to pay dearly for all that gigolo arrogance of his youth.
Norah also gets drunk when I obtain a conditional pardon, which would have allowed me to go anywhere except England, if I hadn’t been arrested that same evening for smashing up a tavern with her—in actuality I was trying to restrain her, she broke a bottle over my head, because I called her Maria, I used the table as a shield to defend myself shattering bottles, glasses and a window, I swear to you I’ll never say it again, I beg you, forgive me, never again ... Loma-ta-roch-a-ba-a-long Ra, she continues singing raucously to herself in the cell; I’m the one who taught her that song, composing my dictionary to preserve those words of the blacks as we’re bumping them off, but I forgot what they meant, it must have been the rum and all the commotion, I don’t know, I don’t understand what Medea is mumbling in front of the dragon who is already nearly asleep. Never mind, not even the Aborigines, the few that remain, understand one another, the two hundred that Reverend Robert Clark found on Flinders Island spoke eight or ten different languages. At least their words should survive, more enduring than that ancient race itself, the most ancient of the South Seas.
79
SEE HOW WELL I get by, with these women of wood you give me to model so that I am distracted and don’t get any nasty ideas in my head? By the way, I heard of someone who cut the head off his ship’s figurehead; it must have been a lover’s revenge, but I don’t understand these things—if you leave each other, it means you were meant to leave each other, right? Whether it be women, men, figureheads, revolutions, when it’s over, it’s over. Even with Maria—no, with Maria it will never be over, that’s the tragedy—Of course with figureheads, judging from the stories written in this calendar—yes, catalogue, I know, in a word a book, I already told you that those illustrations and photographs of women with half-naked breasts remind me of the calendars in the barbershops of one time—with those wooden women, as I was saying, you have to be careful, look at what the caption says about this one, Atalanta, she’s called, she’s in La Spezia, and at least two men killed themselves for her, a caretaker who spent hours caressing and kissing her, and then smashed himself by leaping into the dry dock, and a German official, a certain Kurtz, who actually brought her into his room before shooting himself. But let me tell you, the sailors who use them just to find a little release have more common sense, it’s understandable, all those months at sea, the voyage down here is long, so you can understand, but at least there are no tragic scenes, that’s something ... Instead these malicious bitches want to bring about your ruin, your misfortune ... accursed figureheads, sorceresses, even made to burn with living sorceresses, like that Flemish woman who served as a model, both of t
hem burned at the stake, while the sculptor got away with both hands lopped off.
You won’t cut mine off, will you? You never know, I’ve seen a lot of things in places more or less like this ... I behave well, I don’t do anything foolish, I’m respectful. How could you not be respectful, with these beautiful figures? Look at this enchanting mouth, the unreadable smile, the same smile she wore when she sank that day with her ship, the Falkland, near the Scilly Isles, the book says. Just think, to sink into the depths smiling like that—Not that it’s easy to model that wooden smile ... And those Eurydices who return to the shadows ...
80
OF THE NINE GROUPS of Roving Parties organized during the Black War by the Committee for the Protection of Settlers, as a result of Sir George Arthur’s proclamation, I command three, which operate west of the main road toward the Clyde and the Shannon. A squad led by Batman catches sixteen of them, without firing a shot; Batman decides to kill two already captured. Sir George immediately orders an investigation and it’s only right. We are bringing them civilization and we have to make them understand. Revolution and progress can’t always be gentle. It’s for their own good that we must force them; anyone who’s a do-gooder can’t help but want to civilize the savages and inflict it on them. Moreover they would end up becoming extinct, left to themselves in those inhospitable forests of theirs. Of course if it were true what that Quaker from Kelvedon said, that some settlers gave them bread and butter with arsenic …
Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) Page 25