To dim, to dull the perceptible, as did Buddha, and not to notice that mutability of things which so pleases Biagio. He meets Zorzenon’s wife again, at her wits’ end, exhausted and terrified, traipsing from prison to consulate to embassy the length and breadth of Yugoslavia. Toio is confined on Goli Otok, the barren island where Tito has set up a concentration camp for Stalinists. She tells her story in a voice more exhausted than anxious. Yet she can never tell it right through, she keeps going back to the beginning, she interrupts and repeats herself. She tells how, when Tito broke with Stalin, the communists from Monfalcone protested and then ended up along with Croat fascists and common criminals on Goli Otok and Sveti Grgur, two islands of the northern Adriatic that had been turned into prison camps like those some of them knew in Germany – or even like those in the Soviet Union, that are known to exist despite the official silence and the discounting of any shred of evidence as slanderous fantasy. The community of evil, as Enrico knows, is alive and well.
The woman describes Goli Otok. Her murmuring words flow like water, harmless, even caressing at first hearing, but containing tales of horror. So it is that books – all books – are easy, while people and things are difficult. Forced labour in freezing conditions, beatings, deaths, heads thrust into cesspits, and worst of all the bojkot – when the comrade who obstinately refuses to submit is mercilessly battered by his fellow prisoners hopeful of improving their own conditions.
Toio’s wife has received no definite news for some time now – not even to know whether he is dead or alive. She goes to one office after another, writes to consulates and ministries, but no one can give her any information. She is sent from pillar to post in Yugoslavia; in Italy they don’t know where even Istria is, let alone the whereabouts of two small islands. And when they finally grasp something of the story, they smile complacently and joke that it will do the communists good to learn what communism is really about; while the English and Americans do not even want to listen to anyone who is pro-Stalin and anti-Tito. And the communist newspapers, although they rage against the Yugoslav revisionists, never mention concentration camps and forced labour.
She is penniless and, like countless other women in the same boat, receives no financial help for the children. Some Croatian families give them food and a place to sleep when they can, while Toio – if he is still alive – and the others battle on in the Lager in Stalin’s name, refusing to submit.
She leaves for Zagreb and the Superintendent of the prisons. They give her a few slices of ham and some fruit. This is the life, rich in its changing scenes, that appeals to the poets and bards of myths and metamorphoses. Enrico closes his eyes: he wants to transcend earthly perception like Buddha. To be awoken signifies precisely that – sleep. Even the waves reflection hurts the eyes. The sea surrounding the hell of Goli Otok is as enchanting as it is cruel. What else can one expect from the perfidious sea?
“Dear Paula, 17th October is drawing near. With every passing year I perceive Carlo’s greatness ever more clearly . . . year after year I feel closer to him, the perfect saint and sage.” Paula lends Enrico money for which, as for anything that binds him to her, he is both happy and grateful. The only time he entertains the idea, even if only fleetingly, of leaving Salvore, is when he hears that there is a cottage available near hers at Cormons in the Collio mountains.
Have they not perhaps always lived together? It is now almost seventeen years since their last meeting. And the number of times they have met since those three days together at Pirano and Salvore in 1909 can be counted on the fingers of one hand. But what does it matter if branches grow apart, provided that the same sap flows through them? “I wish for both of us,” he wrote, “that our hopes (which are more or less identical) are not disappointed in the New Year, as so often in the past. But as long as our wishes are united it makes little difference if they remain unfulfilled.”
He does not go to visit Paula. His pass has expired and he would have to submit to too many bureaucratic procedures to renew it: applications, stamps, even a photograph. He asks her to go to Carlo’s grave for him on 17th October, and to place there in his name, as Signora Emma used to do, violets wreathed in the yellow horse-chestnut leaves from Piazza Ginnastica – where he and Carlo used to go after school.
Instead, Paula comes to visit him on his birthday, 1st June 1956. What are seventy years? Carlo is twenty-three, Paula seventy-one. How old are those dark eyes? Lini prepares something to eat. The sea sparkles beyond the pines, they feel the wind on their faces. Paula bends down, picks up a pine cone and throws it at a tree; she misses and laughs. If only that moment could last for eternity, that laugh without future, that pine cone, and that brown spot on the hand that holds it – the imprint of the passing years – intimacy and trembling, familiarity hesitant to take that hand, for nothing after all has happened, and their life has been spent together. Paula comes back twice more. Twice is a lot, like those three full days at Pirano and Salvore.
He must really go to Gorizia, to the cemetery. He does not now require a pass, since the tomb is situated in the Yugoslav section, in Nova Gorica. But there is no hurry. People want to do everything in a hurry. One day he will also go to Bassanìa, but right now he needs peace. Travel means organization, deciding on dates and times, finding out about buses. Recently he has been even more reluctant than usual to sort things out, happy enough to let himself be pushed this way and that by conflicting and confused messages on all sides. He dates a letter to Gaetano as 20th (circa) May, since in that moment he can neither remember what day it is nor be bothered to find out. No matter if it’s actually the 23rd.
Someone, he can no longer remember who, has urged him to write his memoirs. But he is not keen on the idea. His memories are his own property. It is madness to give them away to others, like Tolstoy’s idea of giving everything to the poor. Besides, even if he wanted to write his memoirs, how could he? One needs peace and quiet, the certainty that no one is going to come and knock on the door. True – Punta Salvore, compared to elsewhere, is a serene haven. But even here you can’t be sure that you’ll have no callers. To write, you have to be sure.
He now spends even more time walking by the cliffs. For when people ask him something, even Lini, he either does not understand them or, just as he is about to reply, he can no longer remember the original question. It is better so. He has no difficulty understanding the cries of the seagulls. As always he goes around without shoes, and he must have become more resistant to cold, since he puts nothing over his summer shirt even when an icy bora is blowing – though, admittedly, he does feel better when Lini pushes a woollen jumper over his head and arms. He spends even longer, sometimes hours on end, gazing at the sea. Catching sight of sea urchins in the shallows he thrusts his hand in to the water and pulls them out. Despite wounding himself on their spines, he straight away forgets the pain and plucks at them afresh.
Talk turns to Toio. A woman from Salvore, who has been to Trieste, has seen his wife. He and the others were liberated a few years ago and returned to Monfalcone, where he discovered that his house had been taken by refugees from Yugoslavia. People now treat him as a Titoist who betrayed his country. Not even the Communist Party wants to know, for it is people like him who remind the Party of what it prefers to forget, namely the Stalinist movement against Tito. Perhaps, his wife said, they might emigrate to Australia. Enrico listens, but without understanding anything or remembering who this Toio person is.
He is happier than ever. The world around him is tranquil at last. After the storm the breakers have now ceased their furious crashing on the shore, the roaring has stilled to a whispering backwash. Everything grows quiet, which is good. Sometimes as he stoops inside the caves along the beach he loses his balance, stumbles, and has to lean against the rock wall. Once he loses his way home: he must have gone further than he thought; perhaps he has finally reached Bassanìa. Then a woman with broad flanks and open smiling eyes half-buried in the deep-set lines of her peasant skin takes him
by the arm. He recognizes her but cannot for the moment recall her name. After a few minutes he finds himself at home.
Paula comes to visit him and finds him on the beach steadying himself on Lini’s arm, staring at the waves colliding as they wash in and out. It is late, already November 1959. Enrico speaks in monosyllables, repeatedly shaking his head. Paula leans against a tree, just as she leaned against a chest of drawers on that 17th October when she heard about Carlo.
Now in the strip of pines by the beach workmen are installing campsite facilities. They work hard and stake out the land, but they’re a bunch of amateurs and keep forgetting their wooden pegs in the ground. Enrico stops and struggles to pull them out. The men have no idea: they take the pegs from him and put them back again – in the wrong place as before. But they are polite at least and escort him home. He wants to explain that they’ve got it wrong but finds himself mumbling and becoming flustered – it must be because he doesn’t speak Croat.
With Lini too he speaks little. But no matter. She undresses him, puts him to bed, lies down and embraces him for a while. The scent of her skin, dry and pungent like a wild flower, that has always pleased him, reminds him vaguely of something he can’t quite place, and he gropes towards her before letting his hand fall back upon the sheets. Lini caresses him and goes to her own bed.
They admit him to hospital at Capodistria. While there he recognizes no one, and after a few days they send him home again. As they are helping him from the ambulance, the Busdachin woman, who is supporting him, notices how he raises his eyes to look around: the red earth, the pine tops, the sea beyond. Just for a moment a smile, or so it seems, plays upon his motionless lips. They put him to bed and leave him alone. Lini knows he wants it that way. She leaves the room, looking at him as she closes the door.
Enrico lies there, his eyes fixed on a stained and cracked corner of the wall. Illuminated by Carlo’s lamp the stain at first grows bigger and more discoloured, and then shrinks – a fish-scale, an island, the rapacious eye of a cimango, a nipple, a scattered handful of sand, ink that flicks on to the faded grey of the classroom. The crack in the ceiling near the portrait of Schopenhauer gapes, the light flickers to and fro making the wall tremble. Nino moves the lamp, Carlo’s eyes glow in the shadows and sink into dark-brown waters, Paula lifts her eyelashes, the sea spreads on all sides, one knee hurts, but only slightly, and then the pain subsides. The lamp’s oil overflows. The body is a balloon that a child inflates with all his breath. It lights up inside, grows and fills the whole sphere of the heavens with a clear, steady, even glow. There is nothing more – no one to hear the gentle bursting as a pine needle punctures the balloon or the welling up of the oil as it bubbles over to choke the flame.
The rest of the story following that 5th December 1959 is briefly told. Lini keeps watch alone over Enrico all night long. It is not much different from many recent vigils. She gazes at him earnestly but without tears, every so often taking his hand in hers. She buries him in the cemetery at Salvore and continues to live in the house. Fourteen years slip by, one inside the other like the Chinese boxes she played with as a child. Wine and pelinkovec rinse the years of their colour, leaving them opaque, and on some days morning and afternoon are indistinguishable. Compared with Carlo I meant nothing to him, she tells visiting nephews and nieces. In her relations with the Busdachins she is often brusque or unresponsive, although on some evenings she sits with the old woman beneath the olive trees. She finds peace in that broad face with its kind, quizzical look.
Paula dies in 1972. She wrote that Rico’s death caused her less distress than did their last meeting. When they find Lini at the foot of the stairs on 3rd December 1973, she has been dead for several hours. She must have fallen from the top landing, where the drinks cupboard is located, and fractured her skull. After the funeral her relatives gather together a few books and papers, including Tolstoy’s letter, and lock everything else, books, pamphlets, and all odd sheets of paper in the large studded trunk by the window. Lia gives the lamp to her daughter Anna who lives at Gorizia, where she is married to one Luzzatto, a relative of Carlo’s mother.
Ten years afterwards, a new critical edition of the works of Michelstaedter is published and, because of its scholarly rigour and completeness, it becomes the definitive text. A note in the Epistolario, later reprinted in a number of other publications, anticipates the passing of Enrico Mreule by twenty-six years, supposing him to have died at Umago in 1933.
A Different Sea Page 9