Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) Read Free Page A

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 lipstremble 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 pento 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