Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) Page 2

  But with this lot it’s a waste of effort. The only books they’re capable of reading are the company ledgers, with those fine profits resulting from its monopoly, and the Admiralty’s registries. Comrade Blasich—Professor Blasich, who taught high school—was a swine and sent me to that hellhole Goli Otok on purpose I think, but at least, with his Greek and Latin, he was able to appreciate culture; besides, the Party has always admired intellectuals and taught us to admire them, even when it silenced them, maybe forever.—But what difference does it make now, why are you asking me about Blasich, that’s a different story, what do I have to do with it, let me catch my breath, don’t confuse me, I’m confused enough as it is, like everyone else, for that matter ...

  Just let me finish, I was talking about Achilles and Agamemnon, who have a Homer conveniently at hand to sum up their exploits, while I have to do it all on my own, live, fight, lose and write. And it’s only fitting. It would be unseemly if they had to also start recapping the day—what with their battles, divine apparitions and the downfall of lineages and cities; it would be like requiring them to personally aid the wounded and bury the dead. They have slaves devoted to Aesculapius and gravediggers for that, just as they have stewards who cut their meat for dinner, and a bard who sings at the end of the meal and puts their lives in order, while they listen to him all sluggish and somnolent.

  Right, somnolence is a regal quality. Things drift away, muffled as though under a blanket of snow; do whatever has to be done, even kill or die, but indifferently. The rich, the powerful, possess this beatific unconcern, and we scum of the earth are here to shatter it for them, yet I too possess this sovereign virtue, and that’s why I’m still here, regardless of all the things that have fallen upon me, always, since I was a child, like the ceiling of the Hall of Knights, the walls and heavy portraits enveloped by flames in the fire at the Royal Palace of Christiansborg in Copenhagen, and there I am, indifferent to the blaze and the destruction, to the Black Tower that collapses with a roar, to the embers raining down on me; a child, but already regally lethargic amid the bedlam of the catastrophe, I who later reigned in Iceland for three weeks, indifferent as well to the ridiculous brevity of my reign, king only by virtue of this somnolence, which has protected my heart from the sharp hostility of things ... What’s that? No, Doctor, don’t delude yourself, those pills and medications of yours have nothing to do with it, this calm is my own doing—as for the rest, however, galley slave, common seaman, convict, sentenced to manage the sails, fell trees in the forest, split rocks, quarry sand in the icy sea, write and ...

  And that rabble questions the opening sentence of my autobiography—which I wrote just for them, because Dr. Ross wanted it for the Hobart Town Almanack. That anonymous busybody, who takes pleasure in provoking me with messages that mimic me, when you bring us into the lab and let us fool around in front of those screens, never answers my questions, but merely repeats what I say. He repeated that sentence too and immediately found fault with it. Of course it isn’t true, nobody can recount his own life or know himself. A person doesn’t know what his voice sounds like; it’s others who recognize it and distinguish it. It’s you who know when it’s me speaking, just as I know you, all of you, them, not-me. How could Achilles recount his own wrath? That furious delirium, for him, is something that tightens your guts and makes your lips tremble with rage, like when you vomit because the ship is pitching in the waves, or because you drank too much, like my Norah used to do at the Waterloo Inn, and elsewhere, when she was allowed to leave the penal colony—me too, okay, but she was my wife and the only way to show my respect for her in front of all those people who snickered in the tavern, since by now they knew how it would end up once she began drinking, was to get drunk along with her. To have and to hold, for better or for worse, till death do us part, that was our course, the course we travelled together, a man and a woman in chains. But when I put that mob in its place, I couldn’t really say if I was a man fighting for his honour, standing up to misfortune’s unspeakable indecency, or just a drunken sot who fails to finish his sentences and tries to answer in kind to the louts who deride him and bow to him, calling him King of Iceland.

  Yes, Doctor, we’ll talk about that Iceland story, of course I want to talk about it, the best story of my life. I see that it’s of great interest, there are many people, even on that monitor of yours, who want to hear it and perhaps retell it in their own way. It’s when I read that story that I understood who I am—when I reread it, since I also wrote it. I know, Hooker wrote it too, the great scientist who was part of the expedition and who honoured me with his friendship, even though, to tell the whole truth, he bungled the passages about my exploits a bit and falsified the story of that great revolution—they all falsify the revolution, tarnishing with their spite and lies those who tried to liberate the world. That’s why I had to write the true story of those events myself, my own story—but all in good time, Iceland too, let’s not tangle up the threads, which are already too entwined. I do my best, but it’s difficult to keep a multitude of things in order.

  Even I don’t always understand what happens to me and what goes through my mind, though I have to continually take up my pen to rectify the inaccuracies and lies written about me by everyone, from that unknown who took it upon himself to reprint my book on the Christian religion as a religion of nature, adding a slanderous biography of me in his own hand, to those venomous articles, all false, that appeared in Borba, in La Voce del Popolo, and who knows where else. I know, later they had second thoughts, they all change their mind when it’s too late. But meanwhile ... Lies about me, about us. That we were Stalin’s agents, or Fascists in disguise, and that it wasn’t the Party which sent us to Yugoslavia, which told us and made us repeat that Tito was a traitor to the revolution, that he had sold out to the West. And when I came back from Goli Otok, many comrades acted as if nothing had happened; on the contrary, they conspired so that no one, at least in our area, would give me a shred of work, and so I went down there, I came back down here, to the other side of the globe, to my Tasmania. It was also called Van Diemen’s Land, but earlier on, at another time.

  At least I think so. I’m not sure, even though I sorted out the events and chronologies, that is, although I wrote and now retell and repeat the true and faithful story of my life as I write it or dictate it to this recorder, when we talk together. Naturally all of you will then capture it in your net and transcribe it however you want on those small screens of yours, in fact I thank you for this URL that you assigned me. I don’t really know what that acronym means, but I like the word site. “Three sailors go to Egypt / oh what a fine site / they go to see ...” Do you know that song? It was sung in our region once. If you want, I’ll sing it for you, so you can record it. Of course later you’ll write whatever you want, however you want; when I press the keys like you taught me and read or listen to it again, I always discover new things. No, it doesn’t bother me, don’t worry. In fact, as far as I’m concerned ...

  It doesn’t matter so much if I’m unable to see it, my life, just as I can’t see myself while I drank and ranted in the tavern, at the Waterloo Inn. When I write, and even now when I think back on it, I hear a kind of buzzing, blathered words that I can barely understand, gnats droning around a table lamp, that I have to continually swat away with my hand, so as not to lose the thread.

  It’s nothing new, right? That too is written on the chart. Hears voices that repeat what he’s thinking. It’s true, I hear them. And you don’t, Doctor. Stereotypical hallucinations. Delusion disorders. It doesn’t upset me, I’m used to insults. Displays—I display—a lively intelligence, but with an evident ideo-affective dissociation that disturbs his spatio-temporal orientation, mental images that he fails to place in the context of his own existential experience but tends to elaborate in a delirious fiction. He is not at all reluctant to recount it, either orally, on the recorder, or in writing; sometimes even on the computer, which he manages to use a little, with some hel
p, along with the others during the computer psychotherapy sessions. He seems convinced that he is still in Australia, and above all that he is the clone of a certain Jorgen Jorgensen, a deported adventurer who died in Tasmania in the mid-nineteenth century, whose autobiography he sometimes says he read and sometimes claims he wrote—as though you couldn’t write and then read the same book, what an idea!

  And even if I had read it before writing it, it wouldn’t change anything. It’s so difficult to determine what comes first and what comes later, Goli Otok, Dachau or Port Arthur; suffering is always in the present, here and now. He has—I’m said to have—the feeling that he’s not been told the truth about his origins. I’d like to see how you’d feel, Doctor, if they told you when and why you started being a traitor, if they claimed to tell you what you did and what you planned to do, your past and future offences, like the UDBA agents claimed to explain to me—even you think you know who I am and who I’m not better than I do. Your, that is my, Nosological History, Doc. No. 485, is indeed a fine fiction ...

  Not that I don’t have my problems. When in Newgate, amidst that thieving, murderous scum—though I made them respect me from the outset, I had after all witnessed and doled out death on the deck of the Admiral Juhl or the Surprize, under the Danish flag and the British flag—when I wrote about the truth of our religion revealed in the Scriptures and in nature, in that cell in Newgate where I had been unjustly thrown by the judges of His Majesty George IV, I realized that prophets hear the word of God, that it comes to them as tremendous, a thunderclap in their ears, and that to tell it to others they turn around, addressing those left at the foot of the mountain, looking down like Reverend Blunt from the pulpit when he preaches in the prison chapel, and they repeat it, but that word, spoken through their mouths, comes out muffled, distorted, it is no longer the word of God but of someone else.

  That’s what happens to me when I encounter the words I use to try to recount my experiences; I don’t seem to recognize them anymore, neither the words nor the events. Who is it who’s throwing these globs of mud in my mouth, “bay” “bojkot” “revolution,” words, a pie in the face, what a funny taste they have, I can’t guess what it is, better to swallow them whole, get them down quickly ... Sir George, the enlightened governor of our Austral colony, once said, in a benevolent tone, that my adventures seemed incredible to him, and I too am beginning to have trouble believing them; when I think about them, they come back up as if regurgitated, who knows what a face I make when I feel them weighing on my stomach.

  It’s been raining since yesterday, an incessant rain that hammers the eucalyptus leaves and the ferns, shiny and bright in the murky, humid air, an insurmountable wall of water, and everything is on the other side, the faces, the voices, the years ... Istria too, up there, is on the other side, in another world, it’s strange how from here I seem to see it so clearly, so near, like when you look at it from the coast of Barcola, but then it vanishes, dissolves ... There were scores of black swans, that day we sailed up the estuary of the Derwent River on the Lady Nelson, a century ago, maybe two, flocks of black swans in the sky, and occasionally I would shoot one down. The meat had a pungent, gamy taste, I threw a few scraps to the convicts in chains, whom we had come to drop off and who were chewing their hardtack. The banks of the Derwent River were covered with clumps of drenched, shiny grass, waterfalls and cataracts white as snow plunged into the river from great heights, their fine particles glinting in the sunlight, rotted logs got trapped in coves of brownish water formed by the meandering current, a kangaroo ran off into the bush. A forest brimming with confusion stood where Hobart Town now stands, the light filtered in and disappeared like birds in the tangle of branches, fungi and lichens clung to giant trees a thousand years old.

  It was there in that bay, at Risdon Cove, that we landed, that we put ashore the convicts sentenced to forced labour; that’s how Hobart Town was born. I remember the day perfectly, September 9, 1803. I went to check my autobiography and I’m glad to see that this date is reported accurately, it shows the author’s diligence and meticulousness. Hobart Town, the first civilian, military and penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land. Above all penal. Every city is founded on blood; it’s not surprising that the Risdon Creek massacre occurred a short time later, perhaps the Aboriginal who climbed naked on the Lady Nelson that first day to trade us his spear for a roasted swan may have been among those massacred.

  I’m just saying that, since afterwards no one bothered to find out how things really went; even our Reverend Knopwood turned a blind eye. Everyone always turns a blind eye to these things, massacres I mean. Nelson did too, when he continued to bombard my Copenhagen for hours and hours after the Danish fleet, trapped in the strait, had been sunk; the city, battered and in flames, had raised the white flag and Admiral Parker himself, the British commander, had sent a ceasefire signal.

  But Nelson brings the spyglass to his blindfolded eye, observes the carnage with the wrong eye, the blind one, and sees only the black patch, no white flag, I’m damned if I see it, the shells continue to fall on people who no longer defend themselves, then come the surrender ceremonies, admirals and dignitaries in full dress, swords handed over and magnanimously returned, a blindfold is convenient, it helps you close an eye to the slaughter.

  Butchery down here and up there, the aurora borealis and the aurora australis herald the same bloody sun and everyone exalts the rising day, so much the worse for those for whom it no longer rises. The rising sun ... History, the Party taught us, or rather the bloody prehistoric times in which we live and will continue to live until the world is redeemed by the ultimate revolution, has a tragic need to combat barbarism with barbarous acts. And so it’s hard to tell anymore who is the barbarian, Tito or Stalin, us or them, Nelson or Bonaparte. That one ended up in St. Helena—I put ashore there more than once—and I, King of Iceland, wound up here, I’m not exactly sure where. “Don’t worry, as long as someone knows, it doesn’t matter who, someone who’s heard about the voyage and the disastrous return.”

  Who would have thought at the time, when we transported the convicts here, that so many years later I too would come here in chains, like them—in chains, so to speak, they never put me in irons on the ship that carried all those wretches here from London, I was a prisoner on the Woodman but they made me act as surgeon and eat with the officers. But I would never have believed that one day I would return to Hobart Town that way, as a convict, back when I harpooned the first whale in the bay ever to be hunted and killed in those parts since the day of Creation. The bay was a favourite of the whales; they came to play and splash about, thinking it was still the dawn of time, that blissful era at the beginning when there was no harpoon to fear, and instead harpoons have been stabbing and slashing and causing blood to spout since time immemorial. The world is old, everything is old; even those increasingly fewer Aborigines are decrepit, a race that should have already disappeared at the time of the Flood. Nature was distracted, but we arrived on the scene to correct her inattention.

  I continued harpooning whales on the Alexander as well, during its return to London from Hobart Town—it took us nearly twenty months, because we encountered a terrible wind at Cape Horn that blew us off course, forcing us to sail three thousand miles farther than expected, passing through Otaheiti, St. Helena and along the Brazilian coast, in an ocean that was never-ending. Now the rain conceals everything, streams of water dense as a palisade and long, pendulous eucalyptus leaves obscure the view toward the sea, but the sea is there behind it, boundless, an immense nightfall that descends over things—by contrast, as a boy in Copenhagen, when I went to see the ships at Nyhavn, the wind in the rigging making the flags flap, the smell of the sea and that luminous blue sky were like a fresh, breezy morning, calling you to run away from home.

  I know, Doctor, I know what young Hooker said, pathetically trying to follow his illustrious father along the paths of science, botany in particular. That I talk nonsense and make up stories, too many
kangaroos and too many whales, even Cape Horn rounded too many times, not to mention the plagiarism. And what am I supposed to have plagiarized, his father’s book on Iceland? Aside from the fact that, if anything, he’s the one who used my unpublished and conveniently missing diary; no one knows better than I, having had to endure it unjustly, how futile the accusation of plagiarism is. Can there possibly be anything that isn’t copied? However, when I decided to write my story that time it’s because it didn’t seem right to me, as I note at the outset, humbly relying on God’s mercy and the readers’ charitable hearts, that—wait, here it is—“that my sad but instructive vicissitudes might descend unwept into the darkness of a long, silent night ...”

  2

  SO THEN, you want to know if my name is Tore. I see there are a lot of you asking me that. Do I know what online means?—Aye-aye, captain. English is still the language of the seas and even Argo, as you decided to call this contraption, just to be funny, is the name of a ship. Of the ship. Navigare necesse est, it was even written on the pamphlet giving us directions on how to become Cybernauts. Although I prefer the tape recorder, as you can see; yes, I like using my voice, especially when I want to tell someone to go screw himself. Like you now, all of you so quick to pressure a poor devil with indiscreet questions, spying on him, never letting him out of your sight. Right, Argo is also the name of that dragon with a hundred eyes ... Still, I’m not so sure that there are really so many of you, maybe you’re alone too, there on the other side, and don’t want anyone to know who you really are—“Hang on, in this game, seeking the truth is not allowed. However, you like to interrogate, but when it comes to responding ...”—Oh all right, my name is also Tore (Salvatore) Cippico-ipiko (Cipico), and for that matter I had other names as well, it should be obvious, during those years of underground fighting. A far cry from chatroom screen names. Even Commander Carlos, Carlos Contreras, founder of the glorious Fifth Regiment, nucleus of the Spanish Republican Army—No pasarán, we shouted, they shall not pass, then they broke through, but it cost them dearly, inch by inch, Viva la muerte, they shouted, and we doled it out to many of them, that death, and we weren’t afraid to take it—even Carlos, who had lived in the blissful shadow of the sword, accustomed to no longer being able to distinguish his own blood, spilled liberally and fearlessly, from that of others—even Commander Carlos had a great many names, when the Party sent him around the world in the name of the revolution, and in fact was supposed to send him down here as well, to organize the Australian Communist movement. When he tried in vain to organize a mutiny of the sailors in Spalato and Pola against Tito and we were in the Gulag of Goli Otok subjected to kroz stroj, by then instead he was called only by his humble real name, Vittorio Vidali.