Belladonna
Page 4
Those 750,000 bunkers in which Albanians crouched for decades in the mud, “at the ready,” lying in wait for their enemy, are today being refurbished as narrow, dark living spaces, little cafés or discotheques, tourists visit them with a smile and tepid surprise and buy miniature models of the half-century of horror with which a whole nation was riddled. The tourists place those souvenirs, those little bunkers, which remind people from somewhat more fortunate countries of nothing at all, on shelves or, in the case of those in the shape of an ashtray, use them to extinguish their smokes.
He will go to Albania, he has not managed to go yet, but he will. When a group of his acquaintances went to Albania in 2008, Andreas Ban had to have an operation on his nodule, just then, it coincided the way some real, urgent business that cannot be put off coincides with dreams that afterward leave a hole in the heart. His surname, Ban, is of Illyrian origin, Albanian, Arnaut, his roots are shriveled up somewhere there under the mountain massifs among the long since disintegrated bones of weary warriors, before his distant ancestors fled to Istria in the face of the Turkish invasion in the fifteenth century. Nevertheless, coincidence or not, through the reality of Andreas Ban, Albania draws miraculous threads like rusty fasteners, apparently forgotten threads, which like the tributaries of every history at times come to life to rearrange the tidily placed blocks in the lives of those close by. But then, as he looked toward the Albanian border imagining a world walled up, petrified, and the sad small impoverished lives from which smiles, even tears, have been stolen, of that, Andreas Ban had no inkling.
Many years later, in a book entitled Trieste, Andreas Ban finds a chapter about the life of an Italian family in Albania during the Second World War. In that chapter he comes across the name Ruben Ketz, and Andreas Ban raises his eyebrows and says, Impossible. There are many different people with the same name and surname, Andreas Ban assures himself as he reads the book entitled Trieste in which the Italian-Jewish-Fascist Tedeschi family moves to Valona in 1939, where some six hundred Jews still live, and that the then sixteen-year-old Haya in her old age remembers only Fanny Malli because she used to walk her rabbit on a lead, and Ruben Ketz because he had pockets full of black pebbles and spoke Albanian better than she did. After that insignificant, allegedly fictitious fact a faint unease settles in the thoughts of Andreas Ban, quite incidental for his life. But, as time goes on, new cracks in the history of the Ban family open up, benign cracks, admittedly, painless, yet nonetheless gaps which once again confirm that our existence is more invented and imagined than real, and so now Andreas Ban does not know what to do with his present state, confused, chaotic and exhausted, now that he is beset by all kinds of major health issues that deposit the alluvium of a suppressed, unspoken and rigged reality.
At the end of the 1960s, Andreas Ban’s sister, the one who dies of a stroke in Ljubljana in 1997, marries a certain Carlo Ketz, a civil engineer from Trieste, whom she divorces a short time later, because of “temperamental incompatibility.” They have no children. Almost immediately after the divorce, Carlo Ketz is placed in the psychiatric department of the San Giovanni hospital in Trieste, which was modeled in the 1960s after the psychiatric hospital in Gorizia by the renowned Franco Basaglia and on the facade of which stood in once-bright red letters the graffito Therapy is freedom, while the building itself was for a short time renamed Casa Rosa Luxemburg. Andreas’s former brother-in-law Carlo Ketz is subjected to treatment for loss of identity, that is for his low sense of himself and his times, after which, given that he is having increasing difficulty understanding who he is, he decides to become several people whose destinies he lives in parallel, like those Tereza Acostas, which only confirms that this illness connected with the awareness of the self, with a distorted reflection of our lives, is not a specific kind of illness, but a phenomenon more or less common in the fragmented, perforated times we live in.
The San Giovanni hospital is integrated into its surroundings in a humane way, young people stroll around, there is a discotheque nearby, little cafés, restaurants and confectioners, even a small theater, the landscape is lovely, as it was around some Nazi concentration camps, the architecture is Secessionist, the neighborhood multiethnic with an interaction of cultures, oh, wonderful, the patients go out when they feel like it, some, admittedly, accompanied, in other words, it could be said that Carlo Ketz, the former husband of Andreas’s sister, is, in his middle age, currently living in the psychiatric wing of the San Giovanni hospital peacefully and integrated, as if he were not where he is, but among us.
Franco Basaglia, aware of how destructive psychiatric institutions are for the human identity branded “from the cradle to the grave,” advocates democratic psychiatry and the deconstruction of psychiatric hospitals which mercilessly catapult a person even deeper into a mental and spiritual abyss. When the patient finds himself clamped between the walls of a psychiatric hospital, says Dr. Basaglia, he steps over into a new dimension of emotional emptiness, into institutional neurosis. Andreas Ban thinks that to fall into institutional neurosis it is not necessary to be hospitalized, it suffices to sit in any office, to be an employee, even in a university, perhaps especially in a university, because university staff are packed behind an impenetrable rampart of false autonomy and academic corruption, about which Kafka has already had something to say. When he enters a psychiatric hospital, says Dr. Basaglia, a person enters a space originally conceived to make him harmless, tame, calm, gentle and submissive, everything in the spirit of a Christian, especially a Catholic worldview, one of the most destructive worldviews, which, loaded with lies, kills the spirit, which is in fact a tedious propaganda play lasting centuries, a badly costumed production full of hollow texts and kitsch staging, at the head of which, under a heavy cloak threaded with gold, and in small red Prada shoes, the grotesque figure of the Pope parades.
When a person is placed in a psychiatric hospital, affirms Dr. Basaglia, those “responsible” have in fact thrust him into a space in which, treated with medication, they metamorphose him into someone acceptable to the outside world. Paradoxically, says Dr. Basaglia, the patient instead undergoes a complete annihilation of his individuality. If mental illness is essentially characterized by a loss of individuality and freedom, in a mental institution the patient loses himself entirely, becoming the object of his illness from which he recovers with difficulty. In such institutions patients are deprived of a future, in such institutions people stumble around without a present, deprived of decision-making and resistance, constantly dependent on the will, directives and dictates of others, says Dr. Basaglia.
Where am I, asks Andreas Ban, inside or out?
The fact that Carlo Ketz, the former husband of Andreas Ban’s older sister, was “interned,” Andreas Ban discovers while he is living in Skopje in the 1970s, in the Marshal Tito barracks, VP 4466, examining his roots, as he faces the Albanian frontier, prepared to defend his homeland from the attack of an enemy force that is invisible and never seen.
But it is only when he comes across the surname Ketz in Trieste that a chapter opens up before Andreas Ban, which he knows nothing about and whose heroes dash into the footnotes of his life. Whence the Italian family Ketz, how does it end up in Albania? Does the Ketz family have any connection with his sister’s husband, whom he had seen only once, thirty or forty years earlier, at their wedding? Why did Carlo Ketz fall apart, and now, if he is still alive, is he assembling the debris of his days? So, seeking and annihilating his past, in the corners of which he is losing himself, peeling away the layers of time that clasps him in the embrace of forgetfulness, Andreas Ban feeds himself with other people’s lives on his journey toward death, that most powerful goddess of ultimate oblivion.
In 2010, two years after the operation for carcinoma of the breast, at the invitation of his Belgrade friends from the 1990s settled in Nova Gorica, Andreas Ban crosses the nonexistent border and visits the retrospective exhibition of Zoran Mušič (1909–2005) in Gorizia.
By chance, if there is such a thing as chance, at the exhibition he meets Haya Tedeschi, the one from the book Trieste, because someone whispers, There’s crazy Haya; it seems she’s found her son and repented of her sins. Andreas Ban invites aging Haya Tedeschi to Café Joy to tell him about Albania and that Ruben Ketz who had pockets full of black pebbles and spoke Albanian better than she did.
That’s how Andreas Ban discovers that, as early as the 1930s, Italy casts its eye on Albania and offers the country credits that it cannot repay. King Zog gives in to Italian blackmail and in 1936 signs twelve economic-financial agreements, which will undermine Albania’s independence. Rome demands that Tirana place an Italian administration at the head of the Albanian police, that it affiliate with the Italian customs union, that it guarantee Italy control of Albanian sugar production, a monopoly on the organization of the mail and telegraph systems and the distribution of electricity, that the Italian language be introduced into all Albanian schools and that Albania accepts Italian colonizers. Albania is already run by a number of Italian companies, particularly construction firms. Ferrobeton, Simoncini, Marinucci, Tudini and Talenti and many others are already there. As well as Italian banks.
After the Italian invasion of Albania, in April 1939, there are twenty thousand Italians living in Tirana alone, Haya Tedeschi tells Andreas Ban. That’s when we arrive in Valona, she says. My father was a banker. The engineer Massimo Ketz lived nearby, he could have been around forty years old, an employee of the Immobiliare company that built the Durrës–Elbasan railroad. Sensing the impending war, Massimo Ketz sends his family, his wife Marcella and two sons, Carlo and Ruben, from Valona back to his Fascist homeland of Italy, to his father’s luxurious villa in a suburb of Monfalcone, where the family continues to live its separate, peacetime life, multiplying and dispersing, procreating and dying, according to the laws of life and human nature, until the present day, says Haya Tedeschi. As early as 1940, my little ten-year-old friend Ruben Ketz, says Haya Tedeschi, the one who had pockets full of black pebbles and spoke Albanian better than I did, disappears from the picture and enters a different story. I discovered the rest recently, says Haya Tedeschi, when I was at the Trieste Red Cross, where I had gone to look for new information about the disappearance of my son and met Ruben Ketz, whom I would of course not have recognized, nearly seventy years had passed since we parted. In the office of the Trieste Red Cross, someone suddenly shouted signore Ruben Ketz! and I was, naturally, startled. Ruben was looking for information about his family; then he told me what had happened since they left Albania.
So, when he has settled his wife and sons in Monfalcone, before his flight to Albania, in Trieste the engineer Massimo Ketz tries on some field boots (for his return to Valona), which are tenderly drawn onto his foot by the shop assistant, the Slovene Dora Dag, a tall red-haired beauty with white hands and no rings. That same evening, in the Trieste restaurant run by the married couple Perica on Piazza Cavani, between the engineer Massimo Ketz and the shop assistant Dora Dag (b. 1900) a passion erupts that neither can understand, after which Massimo Ketz says, Come with me to Valona.
I remember them arriving, says Haya Tedeschi, because we only left Albania in 1943.
Then, in 2010, in Café Joy in Gorizia, Andreas Ban also learns from Haya Tedeschi that Dora Dag leaves her husband and two children in Trieste and flies with Massimo on the airline Ala Littoria to Tirana. Massimo and Dora, along with several thousand Italian and Italian-Albanian families, survive the war, survive the German occupation of Albania and live to see the regime of Enver Hoxha after which a heavy iron curtain of immobility and fear falls over their lives, forty years of poverty, hunger, surveillance, arrests, release, renewed incarcerations, pursuits and executions, general misery during which, until 1992, there was no prospect of returning to Italy. Even though after the war Enver Hoxha needed the Italian colonists and their offspring to rebuild the country, they were later, as “agents of imperialism,” “saboteurs” and “enemies of the revolution,” deprived of their language, nationality, memory and existence, and forgotten, living out their bunkered lives in a trap.
Dora and Massimo from the Mediterranean Vlorë, sunk in gardens and olive groves,
Ah, what a beauty, our Valona, says Haya Tedeschi,
in 1947, by order of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Albania, Dora and Massimo are moved to Burrel, a little town of some fifteen hundred inhabitants in the north of the country, where they die — Massimo in 1982, Dora three years later. For their children, Giuseppa (1942), renamed Zefi,
I remember when she was born, said Haya Tedeschi,
and Rosa, Roza (1945), reality immersed in suffering rolling by heavily and slowly.
Albanians still call Burrel the birthplace of Skënderbeu and Ahmet Zogu, the Land of Kings. In communist times, it was a mining town covered in invisible particles of poisonous chrome, which constrict the lungs, so that breathing becomes doubly difficult. In Burrel, the engineer Massimo Ketz supervises the mine by digging in it. In Enver Hoxha’s time, Burrel is best known for its cruel prison for criminals and political traitors. Massimo Ketz spends time in that prison on several occasions, for spreading “anticommunist propaganda and agitation” among miners. The Sigurimi controls his life.* The metastases of Sigurimi creep everywhere, into every nook of life. At Easter, secret agents rummage through trash cans looking for colored eggshells, at Christmas for broken decorative balls and wrapping paper, even though decorative balls and paper are not available, they look for dried pine branches and then they arrest people. In prison, Massimo Ketz gets to know Fatos Lubonja, sentenced to twenty-five years of which he spends seventeen in Burrel and Spaç and whose novel, written on cigarette paper, he does not manage to read; he meets Pjetër Arbnori, sentenced to twenty-eight years, hears appalling stories, sees beaten bodies, toothless skulls. The hideous times of a rampaging mind, the interminable rule of an ouroboros.
In 1992, the new Albanian government allows Roza Bufi, née Ketz, to travel to Italy to look for her half brothers, Carlo and Ruben Ketz, said Haya Tedeschi. Whether there was a meeting also with the children of Dora Dag, married name Ketz, I don’t know. At that time, fifty-eight-year-old Carlo Ketz lives in a bachelor flat right beside Trieste’s San Giovanni hospital, occasionally visiting psychiatrists. I’m well now, states Ruben’s brother Carlo Ketz. For fifty years Carlo Ketz had lived with the conviction that his father, Massimo Ketz, had perished on the Albanian front, defending it for the Fascist Kingdom of Italy, and had no clue that any Roza Bufi, née Ketz, existed. So he told her, Dear Roza Bufi, this is my family, pointing to the old framed sepia photographs hanging on the wall. They were people dressed in velvet and silk. The men wore shirts with frills and jabots down the front, the women wore lace gloves and smiled wistfully. Ruben says, said Haya Tedeschi, that Carlo Ketz used to visit antique shops from Trieste to Koper and Rijeka, buying framed strangers’ lives and his imagined past.
And so, for the nth time Andreas Ban confirmed that we are all traveling along parallel tracks, tracks that touch for only an instant through the crazed sparks that scatter from under the wheels of an eternally rushing train.
Avete delle vecchie fotografie, famigliari? Delle fotografie famigliari, echoes in Andreas Ban’s head.
That’s a man from Trieste who comes regularly, looking for his relatives, says Oskar the secondhand bookseller.
Ecco la mia nonna, ho trovato la mia nonna, says the Italian. Comprerò tutto.
He bought my relatives, Andreas Ban tells Oskar, strangers’ lives.
Maybe not so much strangers’ lives as it seems, Oskar concludes.
Now, two or three years later, as he listens to Haya Tedeschi, all that remains for Andreas Ban is to smile at the realization that the old man in Oskar’s antiquarian bookshop, his former brother-in-law Carlo Ketz, had once again wandered, even if briefly and only for a moment, into his life, the scattered rags of which he had dragged to dista
nt hiding places.
* * *
* Albanian secret state police; Stasi, KGB, Securitate equivalent.
Yes, Andreas Ban has a good time in Skopje, apart from the fact that even then he is plagued by scrambled thoughts. In the Skopje Drama Theater, he sees a play by Arthur Kopit, he doesn’t remember the title, something about the way a lie becomes the truth and the truth a lie. He reads the recently published poems of Bogomil Gjuzel, A Well in Time, poems about weeping without weeping, about robbed Hamlet who has no one to dine with, and so, terribly alone, with a plate of hunger before him, he sits in the castle of Elsinore surrounded by guards — ghosts; he listens to Gjuzel asking how one can now bear witness to the legibility of this world of memories, how one takes hold of the threads of stories so tangled that they are barely recognizable, woven into knots and rags, he hears Gjuzel fear that the proscribed and forbidden, locked in a trunk, might appear alive at the door and shout, I am a kid cooked in its mother’s milk! In verse, Gjuzel transforms temple stairways into pigs with an unavoidably familiar stench, until darkness like dust covers the losers and the victors mixed together in heroic blood and cowardly excrement. Andreas only now understands that, like a cursed visionary in the particles of existence scattered about like randomly tossed peas, Gjuzel reads our perpetuated today:
And the wind brought people
who had let their plows rust;
solitary people tilling the sky,
reaping the harvests of summer nights,
the fat grain of early stars,
leaving it all unwinnowed.