Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) Read online

  “But it’s pointless to go on reciting the ABC’s. We all admire these people, these comrades from Monfalcone and the others who, along with them, are leaving everything behind to go and construct socialism in the closest country, that is to say, that of our neighbours.

  “Yugoslavia has been destroyed by war; we must build a world, a new world, and the Monfalconesi will go at it hammer and tongs ... of course the situation is complex, the Yugoslavian Party has its problems, the remains of old ideological, nationalist dross ... For that matter we here in Trieste are familiar with it. And Comrade Tito, certainly congenial, sometimes even too ... and these extraordinary comrades, ready to sacrifice everything, enthusiastic, and enthusiasm is precious, but ... the national issue is also delicate there, especially after Yugoslavia took Istria. Of course, the question of nationalism doesn’t exist for us, it’s a bourgeois relic, but meanwhile, politically, until a people and its ruling class are mature, we have to deal with these positions, not think that we’ve overcome them when they’re still facing us, walls that remain sturdy ... it would be a typical extremist error, and these comrades ...

  “In short, it would be good to have someone with a head on his shoulders there on site to observe, report, cooperate and assist, naturally to avert as well, if need be and if possible, in any case to keep an eye out ... and especially to inform us, to let us know the internal composition, the groups, the sympathies ... The Party should be aware of everything. With discretion, of course, above all not to offend those extraordinary comrades ... then too because, if they were to become aware of it ... it might not be pleasant.” He looked at me with a satisfied air, pleased with himself. “Besides, we all know that being sent on a Party mission is no picnic ...

  “And you’re more useful there than here. Perhaps the Party thought that to be the Secretary of a federation—important, certainly, autonomous, but still local—an official like me is all that’s needed, while for a delicate, risky assignment ... within certain limits, of course ... And so, if I may speak frankly, as comrades should, that little misunderstanding between the two of us over the secretary position is closed—Oh, I know you weren’t seeking it, it was only rumour, but rumours can be dangerous for the Party—I know you, you’re interested in other things, more adventurous things—like them,” he smiled radiantly, “fundamentally you’re already one of them, it’s fitting that you go with them—while I sit here in the office awaiting orders from the Central Committee and correcting Greek compositions between one phone call and another ... but if it’s what the Party wants ... We’ll let you know how to communicate reports to us, whom to get in touch with.” He stood up, holding out his hand. “Comrade Tavani will explain all the details to you. Farewell, Comrade.”

  And so, dear Cogoi, I departed. That farewell from Comrade Blasich was solemn, unexpectedly almost noble, affectionate, a leave-taking for someone exiting a scene, to whom you can therefore open your arms sincerely, moved by his departure. Blasich would no longer have anything to fear regarding his secretarial post and what it had to offer. I went down Via Madonnina, along with the runnels of muddy water, awkwardly holding in my hand that edition of the Argonautics which he had given me at the last minute, with unusual impulsiveness. “Here, as a memento ...,” he said. “I don’t know if you’ll have time, but—you like good literature, don’t you? And with the translation on the facing page ...” I felt myself vanish in that greyness, under the rain and amid the people; at a certain point I imagined Blasich, at the window, watching me grow smaller and fade away—I can almost see myself, my back drenched, my shoulders a little hunched, the rapid stride of someone disappearing over the horizon.

  4

  A LITTLE ORDER, I agree, I was just about to say so, for one thing because otherwise I’m the first to get lost. Moreover it’s not my fault; with all these questions piling up, the responses get tangled up too, because each time I have to stop and think and by the time I answer there’s already another question, and so it seems like I’m answering chaotically. For that matter, it’s a technique used in all interrogations.

  And don’t say you’re not asking me anything because I can sense your questions just the same; I can read them on your clamped lips, in the faces you make, even over there, in those other rooms, or who knows where, when everyone questions all those things about me. I hear them in my ears, your repeated cries, shouts, questions questions questions; everyone wants to know everything, drag everything that’s his out of a poor devil’s head, thoughts, images, memories, facts. There are so many things in your head, smiles, seas, cities, screeching hurricanes; the wind coils among the shrouds shrieking, enters the convolutions of the brain and can’t get out, an eddying whirlwind between one hemisphere and the other, right and left, here and there, boreal and austral. I saw that photograph of mine, Dr. Ulcigrai, on your table, I knew it was mine by the name, though the name is debatable ... but I would have recognized myself just the same in that nocturnal galaxy exploding in the immensity, in that grey and white corolla that exfoliates in the darkness, Identi-Kit for wanted prisoner Salvatore Cippico-ipiko, passport photo of convict Jorgen Jorgensen, official portrait of His Majesty King of Iceland, a section obtained through Brainvox magnetic resonance imaging, I heard your henchman say in the usual sibylline jargon of inquisitors.

  Yes, there are many things in a man’s head. Or there were, because they take them from you, they empty you out; those black plates, scored with white filaments like shooting stars in the night sky, that bear my name, are the image of the dark, empty space that’s in your head after they’ve taken everything from you throughout your entire life. That milky obscurity, those clots floating through infinity are me—if this is the portrait of a man, can one tell his story, does he have a story, a life, this mushy pulp? But then Maria, white daisy in the dark glade, her eyes slanted, tender, ironic ... those dark stars, gleaming in the night ...

  I have some difficulties, however, with those translucent portraits of mine in your folder, Dr. Ulcigrai. I recognize myself more clearly in the photo printed in the Hobart Town Almanack that accompanies my autobiographical sketch. I doubt that your x-rays are as durable and I’d like to see them, after a century.

  It’s sharp, distinct. Moreover you’re already familiar with it, it must have been you who stuck it in that magic lantern of yours the other day, like my uncle Bepi used to do sometimes in the evening ... I’m making magic, he would say. As you see I’m diligent in following your urging not to let ourselves idle away in here, to cultivate our interests, as you say, to take part in your games—well, if only ... No nothing, nothing, it’s great in fact, I make use of the library and I’ve even learned to manage with these screens a little, at my tender age—of course if we wanted to go see what my age really is—childhood perhaps? I heard that underling of yours talk about game therapy; so with all these little machines, this must be the room where children play games in the nursery—How old would you say the man in this portrait is? A vigorous man, with large, pale, almost colourless eyes that are expressionless, gazing out with serene innocence and looking beyond. The world is mirrored in that water, a mere blink of the eye and there’s nothing left in that rippled water, it all slips away Unclouded, unfathomable eyes, a gaze that holds no fear of God. See things without wondering what they mean? Otherwise you pay dearly, I know something about it. High forehead, dishevelled grey hair, big nose and full, avid lips. He’s wearing an old tailcoat that’s all patched, but with a foulard around his neck ...

  I’m not all that different, I look like me. This shouldn’t surprise anyone, not even you, Dr. Ulcigrai. Even Dolly the sheep—I saw the photos—looks like Dolly, because she is Dolly, and you know it better than I do, Doctor, because you learned it, at least I hope so, through somewhat more extensive study than reading those newspapers in your clinic, like I do. Furthermore I see that you liked this story about the sheep, about me and the sheep, about the clone, you were convinced by it. Fortunately—and here I was afraid that all of
you, being so skeptical ... It’s true, scientists always think that others are talking nonsense, but they take everything literally. I’m only trying to explain who I am, who we are. And so, like when you want to get something across to children, it’s important to be clear and simple, like in the fairy tales. Which, in any case, tell the truth.

  But then History, of course, changes a face. So if Dolly gets hoof-and-mouth disease, her muzzle sheds its fur and erupts in sores, she no longer looks like Dolly, so much for the diploid that was placed inside her.

  Sometimes I don’t look like myself either. Look at the photo where I’m with Maria, for example, my face when I see her smile, a white surf breaking upon the shore, and look at my face when I returned from Goli Otok, those eyes of mine that would rather not look at anything, and tell me if there isn’t a greater difference than between the passport photo and that old portrait. Maybe it was Westall who did it when he came to Van Diemen’s Land on the Investigator to paint the fresh, brand-new world on behalf of the Royal Society of Sciences—a world that turned out to be as decrepit as its people, who were on their last legs. We, when we arrived, dealt them a final blow; we pulled the plug on a dying breed, a colonial euthanasia and therefore somewhat violent—like all euthanasias for that matter.

  If they’d been capable of working, we would have worked them like horses, like the convicts in the penal swimming hole, but since they were worthless as slaves and were only good for suffering and dying, we cultivated this inclination, we did away with them altogether. Even the encyclopedia here in the library says so: “Tasmania ... Persecuted and massacred by the first settlers, and later decimated by diseases introduced by the Europeans, the Tasmanians became completely extinct in 1876.” The last one died asking only that they not put her skeleton on display in the museum and in fact they did so, an example of a race doomed to extinction and to being violated even after extinction. I myself can tell you, since it was I who dropped the first anchor, harbinger of annihilation, in this estuary; I who brought death, the Coriolis force destined to drag those half-naked people, painted with coloured, evil-smelling grease, into the foul whirling hole.

  Who’s there now, who is this message from? Aha, your nick is Jorundar, I know you, you can’t fool me! ...—“Even she, Mangawana, my wife for one night in the forest, had a strong odour that evening among the leaves, she tasted gamy. I grabbed her kicking feet, like you take hold of an animal, and clasped her breasts, but later I kissed her on the lips and on the hand, those long, beautiful fingers, like you kiss a white woman. It’s not true that I didn’t like women, I was just too shy to talk about it, but that evening, in the forest ...”—Where did you come from, what do you think you’re doing? It doesn’t bother me, it’s useless for you to try to confuse me with these tricks. I’m a navigator, aren’t I? On all the seas, North and South, and on this Internet of yours. Then too, you’ve betrayed yourself badly, my dear Cyberidiot, if you think you’re being ironic with that nickname when instead—it’s obvious that you’re copying it extemporaneously Jorundar did not yet exist that night; he comes later, it’s only in Iceland that they called me that. My name, that night, was Jorgen—your night, Mangawana, my wife, my ancestress, Mena coyeten nena, I love you, dark earthy Eve in my arms ...

  “Just as later, who knows, maybe a granddaughter or great-granddaughter of the daughter of that night, in the arms of my father; the account gets muddled, it’s not easy to find birth certificates for those born in the bush, dropped while standing up, legs spread. Jan Jansen.”—Wrong again; I don’t know how many of you there are online, but each of you knows less than the other. I was called Jan Jansen when I was on board the Surprize. However, I knew nothing about it; shortly after that night I left Hobart Town on the Alexander, a twenty-month voyage with hurricanes that kept driving us back. In any case, anyone born of a black Eve in the forest was born dead, with no right to exist, the non-existent issue of an extinct race that no longer lives and can no longer procreate. No one is born: if something happens in the jungle and a pulp of clotted blood is found under a bush, it’s an animal matter.

  But blood courses along, an unseen, almost dry trickle in the desert that nonetheless spills out in the distance, it rushes into a face when the heart trembles ... When my father took Mangawana in his arms, he didn’t care whose granddaughter or great-granddaughter that brown girl from Tasmania was—and why should it have mattered to him? He called her that in jest, at tender moments; he liked those old indigenous names that had vanished. I too called that dark girl who worked with us in Sydney, in the editorial office of Il Risveglio, by that name, when—No, it’s not a delirious fiction, Doctor, as you insinuate in those papers and tapes of yours. Of course I listened to them, then I put them back in place. You’re quick, you are, to tell lies. “Distorted oedipal fantasies, personality dissociation. Confuses his sexual and romantic experiences in Australia, with a woman of Aboriginal or mixed blood, with his alleged double’s raving about his erotic experiences—that double of whom he considers himself a clone—and projects these delusions onto his parents, as sublimated incestuous fantasies.” What rubbish! “Naturally he says he’s not surprised by these diagnoses, that he’s used to having all possible accusations thrown at him. The usual defence mechanism known to one and all, the typical denial.” Right. The accused, naturally, denies! Aggravating circumstances, before all the courts. You know what you’re doing, when you put all these things in my mouth and make me repeat them, using the excuse of making sure I understood the question, and then you record what you’ve dictated to me. But that still doesn’t mean ...

  My father married my mother in 1906. He had just arrived from Trieste—at a time when immigrants, especially those from our areas, were few and coming down here was difficult, the Immigration Restriction Act of the Australian government discouraged those who were not Anglo-Saxon. Even after 1945, when many came down here—especially from our area, people from Trieste, Istria, Fiume, Dalmatia, shortly afterwards I too returned—even then it wasn’t easy, with that displaced persons tag they labelled us with, still, fifty years earlier it was worse, but my father managed to do it. He started out cutting sugar cane in Queensland, but moved to Tasmania almost immediately, and his fishing gear store in Hobart Town did quite well.

  On the wall, behind the counter, he put up a beautiful painting by Vincenzo Brun, pseudonym Almeo, which depicted fishing boats in the Adriatic. Now that’s a sea, he pronounced pompously, I’d like to see you in the Quarnero, in the Morlacca channel, when the bora blows, or, worse yet, on San Pietro in Nembi—right, Ilovik in Croatian, no need to tell me—with clashing seas when the bora and the tramontana blow at the same time. And he would show and explain those two-masted trawlers and swift sailing boats, the bragozzi and the passere, which the Australians would have done well to build too, he said, hulls and keels made expressly to cross the Bass Strait.

  Of course he also knew that those sudden storms, the neverin and nevèra, are frightening, true, but typhoons are another thing entirely, as is that furious ocean south of Port Jackson. I travelled it when Dr. Bass had just baptized his strait and circumnavigated Van Diemen’s Land with Captain Flinders, discovering that it was an island. I crossed the Bass Strait on the Harbinger; they didn’t want to take me aboard because of my Danish nationality and because I had arrived illegally both on the Surprize and the Fanny, but then Michael Hogan, who made money on anything that came his way, from whales to the slave trade to the transport of convicts, found me a position as second-in-command, practically without pay. Even my two sententious biographers, Clune and Stephenson, pointed it out, with unbefitting sarcasm, in that book of theirs that I found in that bookshop on Salamanca Place, not far from where my father’s store was, one Thursday afternoon. An entire shelf dedicated to me, modestly. There’s even a handwritten label in capital letters, Jorgen Jorgensen. I don’t know if those volumes are more or less reliable than your charts and reports, Dr. Ulcigrai, still I read them with relish and I also took a lot
of notes, as you can see. And, as you suggested I do, every so often I copy a few paragraphs from them, maybe even on the computer, even though ...

  I crossed those waves and dark foamy waters on the Harbinger, which was to follow the Lady Nelson through Bass Strait, taking advantage of its course, with a cargo of rum to be sold upon arrival in Port Jackson. So we ploughed those enormous rollers, whitish waves of seemingly black foam. The great South is black, even the sea is black. We also discovered an island that Bass and Flinders had not come upon and we christened it King Island—in honour of the governor of New South Wales, my biographers explain. It must surely be so, I don’t recall, but I must have written it, somewhere, otherwise how could they know it.

  By contrast I seem to recall quite well the beach full of elephant seals, spongy masses rubbing against each other, tumbling over one another like muddy waves, rolling in the surf, raucous snorting when they mate, barking when they fight, it’s sometimes difficult to distinguish the two ...—Still, the first is scarier, if you lose you don’t just get bitten once or twice, you lose yourself, everything, I don’t even know what exactly—