Blameless, p.1
Blameless, page 1
Blameless
BOOKS BY CLAUDIO MAGRIS IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION
Blindly
Danube
A Different Sea
Inferences from a Sabre
Microcosms
Voices
Blameless
Non luogo a procedere
CLAUDIO MAGRIS
TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN BY ANNE MILANO APPEL
The Margellos World Republic of Letters is dedicated to making literary works from around the globe available in English through translation. It brings to the English-speaking world the work of leading poets, novelists, essayists, philosophers, and playwrights from Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to stimulate international discourse and creative exchange.
English translation copyright © 2017 by Anne Milano Appel.
Originally published in Italian as Non luogo a procedere by Garzanti, S.r.l., Milano, Gruppo editoriale Mauri Spagnol, 2015.
© Claudio Magris, 2015.
© 2015, Garzanti, S.r.l., Milano, Gruppo editoriale Mauri Spagnol.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2016952989
ISBN 978-0-300-21848-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Francesco and Paolo
CONTENTS
Translator’s Note
Blameless
Author’s Note
Translator’s Glossary
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
Like the unnamed protagonist in Blameless (Non luogo a procedere, Garzanti, 2015), Claudio Magris is a collector. And like his protagonist, he is after the truth.
The maniacal collector who devotes his life to creating a Comprehensive War Museum for the Advent of Peace and the Disarming of History collects everything he can get his hands on: swords, cannons, cartridges, submarines, tanks, guns, weapons of all kinds, but also refuse and debris, old scrap iron, litter, discarded slips of paper containing scribbles, obscene sketches or graffiti copied from walls. Magris, on the other hand, collects stories, which are then woven into the fabric of his narrative: the story of Luisa de Navarrete, the Black Pearl of the Caribbean; of the improvident but well-intentioned Maximilian and his Carlota, and their doomed Mexican Empire; of the ethnologist, anthropologist and botanist Albert Vojtěch Frič, obliged to give lectures to make ends meet; of Cherwuish, the Chamacoco Indian from Paraguay whom Frič brought to Prague, and so on.
Collections of various types are found throughout the novel. In addition to weapons and stories, the Museum itself is a metaphoric manifestation of collecting. Other collections that figure in the narrative include the protagonist’s controversial notebooks, some of them mysteriously missing; the incriminating list of names copied from the Risiera’s walls; the toy soldiers that only play at war; the famous cactuses that made Frič a well-known authority throughout Europe and that he had been forced to give away, along with the crates of plants, animal skins and trophies that he had brought back from Paraguay. Even the chapters form collections of a sort: there is a set of numbered chapters and there are those labeled “Luisa’s Story,” whose contents constitute a story within a story.
At some point the obsessive Museum collector, like Saul thrown by his horse, sees the light: “A flame is lit in him and for him, his obsessions disappear.” He starts going after the truth, after evidence, meticulously and compulsively copying the implicating inscriptions left by inmates on the walls of the Risiera Prison. He’s still a collector, but now he collects names, the names of those about to die, of those who came to visit, of those who’d died, of their informers and executioners. “He was searching for the truth, the sorrow, the infamy.” Like the fictional Museum collector, Magris too is looking for the truth, for evidence of culpability and complicity.
In many respects Blameless continues a dialogue, a testimony, begun in Blindly (Alla cieca, Garzanti, 2005), the novel that preceded it. Indeed, it might be more accurate to say a conversation that began well before Blindly, since there is a conflation of themes in Magris’s work, where the author-as-witness wrestles with the past and its countless instances of victimization and abuse, determined to shine a light on skeletons hitherto kept concealed in closets. Both Blindly and Blameless tell a story of wrongs endured and inflicted. Of victims and oppressors, hunter and prey, “dannati contro dannati.” Of prisoners and their warders, of slaves and their masters, of the betrayed and their betrayers everywhere. And over it all the pall of silence, of shrouding the truth. By those unwilling to attest to it: another form of the occhio bendato, of turning a blind eye, disinclined to see.
In Blameless, Magris’s eye, far from being blindfolded, is firmly and unsparingly fixed on the specific embodiment of evil represented by the Risiera—the old rice factory in Trieste used during World War II by the Nazis to detain and execute political prisoners and to hold Jews later deported to Auschwitz—as well as on the carefully guarded secrets of the shameless, sadistic oppressors who flourished in the aftermath of the war: “The dead pass on, the living make merry.” The antidote to apathy and unconcern is the inexorable process of exhuming the past, of not allowing its atrocities to remain whitewashed, as the walls of the Risiera were.
Since the past might pose a threat, no one wanted to remember; memory was excised: “Neurosurgery has made astonishing progress. In Trieste it was on the cutting edge. A huge brain, the city. . . . They managed to remove a nice piece of that brain’s hippocampus, the part that contained the Risiera. Excellent scalpel job, meticulous work. . . . The seahorse extracted with such skill is sitting in a glass case at the Museum of Natural History. The memory of the atrocities is well-guarded and isolated inside the armor of osseous cutaneous shields, no one dreams of going to see what’s behind the integument.” Once the memory is erased, the thing never happened: “The smoke from the Risiera’s chimney drifts out, recycled and blameless.”
The novel’s tone is often ironic, with a strong undercurrent of bitterness. Sometimes the irony is directed at those who prosper and fare well in the postwar ambience of cordial conviviality: “We’re all anti-Nazi; at least after ’45.” And: “Who thinks about that anymore, water under the bridge, we’re all friends now, together again, allies.” Or those who embellish or twist the facts, exaggerating their own role or blurring their allegiances: “The Resistance is a complex business and those who resisted multiply all the more as the years go by; even those who died at that time, the dead on all sides, multiply and reproduce. Underground or in the ashes they must fuck like crazy, their number is growing and everyone is pleased about it because they can accuse their enemies of greater butchery than the one they themselves are responsible for.”
At other times the biting sarcasm is directed at the Nazi way of thinking:
Not everyone suffers equally, not everyone has the same sensibility. The Aktion T4 program for euthanasia is very humane; it eliminates the disabled, the handicapped, people who don’t have the proper credentials to suffer like others. It’s the superior races that know pain, the pain of creating and destroying, of destroying to create. Blacks, for instance, suffer less than whites. Jews, less than the Germans. That’s why they often seem so brave, when they enter the gas chamber. Sensitive people would suffer more. It’s not about fear, we have more courage than anyone, but sensitivity. Even to dirt, for example. The Germans are clean, they would not be able to stand the stench and filth of the camps like the Jews.
Along the way, the novel offers some interesting insights about translation and Magris’s views on it. At one point the unnamed protagonist tells Luisa, the woman assigned the task of planning the Museum: “Dr. Brooks, when you write about me, please write ‘I’ or ‘he,’ it makes no difference, write what you want, however you want, even when copying my words, because the hand that writes is the real author.” A sentiment which mirrors the observation often expressed by Magris, that the translator is a coauthor.
In the novel’s final image, men are dumped into the sea like garbage: “Throwing garbage into the sea is a crime and so is throwing men in, but the judge declares there is no cause to indict”—“Im Sinne der Anklage, unschuldig, innocent for the purposes of the prosecution.” Ultimately, like Alla cieca, this book represents an act of faith and commitment, the author’s determination to rip off the blindfold and reveal the senselessness of wars, cruelty and oppression. To abolish indifference—“absolution before trial, the decision not to prosecute”—and to attest to truth. Yet the unsettling questions planted by the narrative remain like the afterimage of a flashbulb, lingering in the eye well after we look away, forcing us to confront the horrors of the world and also the darkness within ourselves. As Galileo Galilei said, “Non basta guardare, occorre guardare con occhi che vogliono vedere.” It is not enough to look, one must look with eyes that want to see.
Blameless
1.
“Used submarines—bought and sold.” The ad in the Piccolo banditore was dated October 26, 1963. Overwhelmed by debt, tempted by million-dollar promises made by various administrations and ministries, strangled by moneylenders, persecuted by the owners of the properties where he had situated his aircraft and bombed military bridges, he had evidently felt forced to try to sell some relic of particular tonnage, though, at the very moment when he was preparing to sell, he was immediately seized by his Furies once again and had also tried to buy—who knows with what money, but anyway to buy—submarines, Panzers or minesweeping equipment.
It could be the opener in the lobby of the Museum, as soon as you walked in. On the wall facing those entering, a large black screen, rippled by an indistinct flickering, the sound of water in the background; his face appears in the darkness, a photograph from the early 1970s. Head emerging from the black waters, eyes feverish, cunning; beads of sweat, droplets of water sliding down the Pannonian cheekbones. In the middle of the room, the submarine, a U-Boat of the Imperial Royal Navy of World War I, purchased or acquired by some means. Used submarines—bought and sold. The voice pompous, insinuating. Reconstructed, with a skillful processing of various audio recordings at Radio Trieste. An innocuous commercial notice that, thanks to the reconstruction of the voice—reassembled, that is, genuine, absolute, not the random, mutable one at the moment when one speaks—becomes an enticement, the proposition of a pimp in the shadows. Entering the Museum the way you enter night, neon-lit promises; it could be a good idea, Luisa thought. Even though the highlight, the most sought-after, talked-about attraction, those famous notebooks, were missing. An initiatory rite that lacks the dulcis in fundo, the ear of corn that ordains the initiate.
The family had been clear about it, in the letter sent to the editor of the Corriere Adriatico and published with a certain prominence. “You will allow us, as his heirs, to express our surprise and disappointment over the article published in your newspaper on March 12. We do not understand by what right and by what authority you can announce that his diaries—thousands of pages contained in numbered notebooks, with various cross-references and annotations—will also be placed, along with the extensive collection of martial material, in the Museum dedicated to the documentation of war for the promotion of peace, a Museum that, with one of his fanciful but always rational images, he had decided to call ‘Ares for Irene,’ the god of war who becomes an apostle of peace. We are the first to applaud the fact that the Foundation created by the province and the municipality has decided to set up the Museum, the dream to which he had devoted his life, renovating the buildings, stables, garages and grassy area—surrounded by the track and suitably covered—of the old Hippodrome. It is our hope that this time the project will at last be successfully accomplished; it’s been talked about forever, with plans and promises made, a typical shaggy dog story. But as far as those journals are concerned, they are and will remain our exclusive property, as heirs, despite the fact that captious and to us incomprehensible bureaucratic and legal holdups have in effect temporarily seized some of them from us, though it is still our right to dispose of them in the way we see fit, always of course not in our own interest, but in that of the citizenry, the community, humanity, following his example, the example of a man who sacrificed everything—his career, his property, his health, the well-being of his family and finally his very life—to his mission, to his ideal, to his grand scheme.
“We are prepared, once again, to bequeath it all, to hand it all over—since the moral patrimony of the Museum belongs to everyone—to make available to the world those cannons, submarines, tanks and weapons of all kinds that he collected for decades in order to document the horrors of war and the need for peace. It is disgraceful that for years no public institution has taken steps to find a suitable location in which to house the Museum. Regarding the diaries in general, however, and in particular those that have strangely disappeared, so rich in priceless but also heated material, as has been noted many times in the Corriere Adriatico itself, we are certain, esteemed Editor, that your newspaper, aware of the importance and sensitivity of the material, will not . . .”
Rather than in the letters-to-the-editor section, the newspaper had published it on page three, turning it into a conspicuous feature, with clearly prominent headings and subheadings. It wasn’t surprising that they would once again want to talk the issue up a little. The matter always struck a chord, especially after the trial, which, as often happens with trials, had left things more uncertain than before. Luisa set aside the newspaper, which she had laid over the stack of notebooks, pads, sheets of paper, cards, CDs and DVDs on which she’d been working, trying to organize and if necessary incorporate the notes scribbled in his own hand; the latter were intended to describe each piece in the Museum, explaining its function, its history and that of its inventor, of the factory that had produced it, of the engineers and others who had worked there, of the military unit to which it had been assigned, of the battle in which it had been demolished, of the person who had driven it or aimed it or loaded it or who had died in its wreckage. For example, she thought of displaying the equipment for undersea mine dredging next to the mercury-vapor rectifier; she felt they went well together, underwater death and death caused by mercury exhalations, death procured, avoided or deferred, depending, but death all the same. Death is fitting for Museums. All of them, not just a War Museum. Every exhibit—paintings, sculptures, objects, machinery—is a still-life and the people who flock to the halls, filling and emptying them like apparitions, are practicing for a future permanent visit to the great Museum of humanity, of the world, in which each of us is a still life. Faces like fruit picked from a tree and placed on a plate. Although he on the other hand, on this very point . . .
Luisa got back to work at the computer in the office assigned to her when the Foundation had given her the job of planning the Museum. No more than one room, though sizable, formerly one of the stables. She liked it, that room surrounded by so many vast vacant spaces. From one of the windows she could see several pieces already temporarily situated in the big adjacent room. Oblong, faintly cylindrical and greenish, the mine-dredging machine resembled a manatee, a sea creature moving gracelessly but silently to seize its prey. Outside, in the dusk, the wind-driven branches of an oak reached toward her window like talons, claw-like tentacles leaped out of the darkness into the light cast by the street lamp and retreated, swaying, into the shadows, their prey eluding them, who knows for how much longer. Luisa shivered; for a moment she seemed to feel the years like a wall of dark water pounding at her temples, a migraine that absurdly made her think about love—or maybe about its ending, since for her it had almost always been the same thing.
That furrow near her mouth, which overall was pleasing, wasn’t exactly a wrinkle, though every now and then it felt to her like a scar. A kiss, a bite—I’m becoming just like him; as a result of reading his papers, of identifying with him and dealing with his machine guns and swords, now that I’ve gotten into the habit of taking some of those papers and photographs home in the evening so I can ponder how to display them until I fall asleep, I’ll end up believing, like him, that everything is war and every mark a scar. She ran a finger lightly over the blade of a sword temporarily hung on the wall; the line it left on her skin, though distinct, quickly vanished.
He, despite his horrific end, was probably unaware of the scars that everything leaves on the heart; perhaps he didn’t hear life snarling in the dark, and didn’t see the dark, absorbed as he was by looking down at the ground, hunting, searching and collecting those senseless objects, single-masted vessels, shrapnel, dented mess-tins, bugles, crushed cartridge cases, explosive fuses. His flashlight, at night, illuminated only land that had been plowed, uneven ruts, shallow sinkholes, a rusted helmet gleaming in the grass.
That’s how he’d spend his nights, exhausted but immune, thrilled about those cold, dead things that he dug up or was given by retreating armies or scrapyards being dismantled, unaware of life swirling around him as it does around everyone, threatening death and destruction—not the good, already-dead death that doesn’t hurt you, but the living, continuous dying of body and heart, the light growing dimmer in the soul, a coldness in the bones, more deadly than the flames that would engulf him in his final hour, in that long, comfortable coffin that he had chosen to sleep in, in that hangar with his tanks, missile launchers and yataghans piled in a jumble, the scrap iron from all the wars that were the milestones of his existence, the tank he got in 1945, the dinghy from 1947, the fragments and structures of the demolished swing-bridge, the Ponte Verde, artificial boundary between the canal and the sea. And there he was, alone with his coffin in that warehouse chock-full of weapons awaiting the Museum, alone when the fire broke out. His realm; his because it was uninhabited, emptied of all the living who obstruct peace because they require war in order to live, even at home, within the family, even in bed—sometimes, Luisa thought, taking notes for the mine-removal machine, when you wake up a little early and the faint light of dawn can barely be glimpsed behind the shutters, you look from one pillow to the other and catch sight of your sleeping companion, as if from across a trench. There won’t be any attack, but you are on the alert, in the vague expectation of gunfire. When she’d had to study the Thirty Years’ War at school, she had immediately thought about the family. Not about hers, no . . . but in general. As for her, she still hadn’t figured out whether not having one of her own was a good or a bad thing, and why thinking about it left her heart feeling empty for a moment.
