Blameless, p.34
Blameless, page 34
But even the creation, though it seemed good to its creator when it first came from his hand, had soon, very soon, begun to grow wild and wither and, as it was written, to moan and suffer as if the birth had not yet really taken place but were struggling to make its way through the pain, closer to suffocating than to seeing the light. And each time an awkward mix of estrangement and intimacy had soon arisen between her and the other, the others, who practically became one single figure, the tongue-tied discomfiture of those who have so much to say but find it difficult to say and would, should, must hide those difficulties that can nonetheless be read in the face and gestures of the other, in the effort to disguise them that makes him even more of a stranger. Yes, every creation is again the last of the thirty-six imperfect ones, which the Talmud spoke of, and the need to conceal it, first of all to ourselves, was the deception created by that first blissful kiss that so often brought with it defeat, disillusionment and pain.
How much freer and more spontaneous, virgin in its ironic awareness of game over, is the relationship between exes, who still love each other but in a different way, a way that doesn’t hurt, because they know they can’t really love, that they are two rivers that don’t flow into each other, nor into the same sea, but diverge, without pretending to merge their waters and their course, but with a deep, genuine closeness that doesn’t need to pretend to be something else. Love that grows apart, that has already grown apart, is real love, because it is limited—and knows it is limited—it cannot cross the line of reciprocal distance and solitude, yet it conserves for all time the memory of that kiss that is no longer possible and that is an indelible part of each of them.
Yes, it’s at that moment, with that first kiss that deception begins, or at least it had been that way for her. Not for her father and mother. She didn’t even want to think that there had simply been no time for them to grow apart, that the wind shear on the runway at Aviano had come sooner than estrangement, not just because their love seemed to be constitutionally immune to disaffection, a body that due to some rare chemical combination is impervious to that bacillus and that contagion. She could not imagine her father and mother as exes. The very idea made her laugh; they would have been ridiculous in a role that wasn’t meant for them, and she enjoyed picturing them as awkward and out of place in it. For them, shared love—passion, tenderness, complicity—was like an animal’s habitat, the only space in which to live. The bird malfini, on that island of flowers and light, soars through the air like the note of a song rising from the woods, when he hops on the ground he’s an ungainly clown.
I, on the other hand, seem born for the part. Loving and leaving—not necessarily loving each other any less than her parents had loved each other, but loving in a different way. A different arrangement of the great score of love, Mozart played on the concertina or on the drums in a jazz bar, different and the same, a pang that hurts and goes away. But why had it been necessary for her, often enough at least, to leave in order to save love from deception? She was almost home, Carlo was waiting for her—it was the only thing he could still do, wait—in the bed that was his whole world, since multiple sclerosis had broken through his body’s trenches. The bed, a large white raft that held him afloat above the muddy flow of time and from which he would never disembark, or only when he would no longer notice that he had reached the shore. Our bed? Soon, Luisa thought as she went up the stairs, she too would climb onto that raft, to sleep beside him, close by yet far away, after helping him eat, wash, change. What was she doing there, what exactly was she lying next to him? No longer his woman, not yet his ex; always and forever his woman but in a different way, and not because soon it would no longer be possible to sleep beside him—nearby, yes, in another bed moved alongside, which was not, however, would not be his raft. The death that was slowly taking possession of him had come too late and too soon—by now Luisa was no longer shocked by this wicked thought. Too late, meaning when it was almost over between them though it wasn’t over yet and everything was drifting in illusory uncertainty, because they both knew and didn’t yet want to know that the end was quite certain and that only the ending itself was dragging its feet, pausing, starting up again to no avail.
If Carlo had gotten sick before, when they were one flesh, everything would have been different—misery pain fear, true, but they would have been powerless against their bond and she would have lain beside him as always, like a wife, the body that was wasting away beside her would have been like her own, one’s own body that is never repulsive. But the blow had come when something had died or at least dimmed—Luisa didn’t know why, there is no why in these things and it’s senseless to wonder; Carlo’s body was still his, but she was breaking away from it even though she still hadn’t broken away and didn’t want to think about it. The illness had fallen between them when they were no longer one thing but not yet separated, and their living together was a tacit postponement of what would have happened if the illness had not come, because it had never occurred to Luisa to abandon the man beside her whose fibers were giving way, although he wanted her to and insisted forcefully. And so they were together, but only because they hadn’t left each other after realizing that they were irrevocably foreordained to leave each other, though the decree was now invalidated by the illness.
But the blow had also come too soon, it had come before they left each other as was inevitable and now no longer possible. If it had come when they were already distant, Luisa would have rushed to support him, to be with him in every way up until the last, with all the love that remains after a true love ends, which is still love, no less intense though different, brief like all things but indestructible until death takes both parties. It would have been different, holding each other without equivocation or wavering; not an embrace in the fullness of love, which is not subject to fading and shifting, nor the uncertain embrace indulged in to put off the end, but the embrace of two people who have loved each other and therefore will always love each other though in a different way, no less genuine where the heart is concerned.
Now however Luisa was sleeping next to a man who was no longer her lover—though certainly not because of the illness that prevented it, that wasn’t it—and who was not yet, and now could no longer become, the friend in whom the lover is transformed—at least that had been her experience with the three or four other men in her life. There was something indecent and promiscuous in the physical intimacy with Carlo, which continued because there had not been time to end it, the awkwardness tainting gestures, feelings and thoughts; it wasn’t Carlo’s illness that came between them, but an uneasiness, unspoken even to themselves though to no avail, a sweat that comes not from fatigue or heat, but from discomfiture.
How is it she had gradually snuffed out that flame, sacred or cursed, within her instead of conveying it like an ancient temple’s torch, like the red glow that evening passes on to morning? She had let the years slip by in a kind of suspension, a cloud drifting along, never scattering in sun or rain. She felt doubly unfaithful, to both of her progenitors, who had been promised and enjoined to be as numerous as grains of sand in the sea and stars in the sky, and only by obeying that order had survived the holds of slave ships and the Risiera. Can he be winning his senseless battle, otherwise forever lost, with me, with me alone? Or will everything always begin anew? Quando noi trascoreremo / cominceremo a far l’amor, when we pass on / we’ll start making love again; funny that old song comes to mind, she thinks as she sinks into sleep, not far from but not close to the body beside her.
53.
The end . . . a Museum was a good figurative representation for his inverter. When you come to the last gallery, you turn back to exit, you retrace the route you followed earlier, rediscovering everything you thought you had left behind, and you leave through the same door from which you entered. The final room, at least before going back. The fire. Afterward, except for the journals or the calendar hanging in the kitchen, for him there had been nothing more. Luisa clearly remembered having been among the first to arrive that morning, as soon as she’d heard about the blaze, about as useless as the firefighters who, rather than smothering the remaining embers that had not been extinguished by the night’s rain, were rummaging through the smoking ruins.
A person’s death, incomprehensible and inexpressible, even more so than his life. His flesh burning in the flames, irreducible to words. But his stage exit had to be a part of his Museum, even though he, the only witness, could not describe it. The final war—lost, like all wars. But who—had it been he who said it over and over—who recounts wars? Master Sun said . . . Sun Tzu, maybe Sun Wu, or someone else, maybe no one or God knows who. 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. Master Sun said . . . No one dares ask how he knows what he says.
Describe his end, a word he did not accept? Perhaps only those who die can recount their own death, as Moses does when he writes the Pentateuch, something he never tired of reminding everyone, a true fixation. When you write about me, write what you want, however you want . . . well then, maybe just to keep my word to him . . . The warehouse at 7 A.M.: charred—here and there, where the fire had blazed more intensely—like the flesh that rose from the chimney of the Risiera. A few hours earlier, intact; full of things, of objects, of fire-resistant swords, indestructible like the soul of the man about to doze off in his bizarre bed.
The coffin-bed is at the foot of an armored car, between a dented mortar and a panoply affixed to the wall, from which hangs a Japanese katana and a naginata from the Kamakura period, with a very curved blade that widens toward the tip. As he does every night before going to sleep, he rubs his thumb lightly over the edge of the blade after removing the wooden sheath of lacquered magnolia and the silk case covering it. He repeats the gesture a few times pressing harder with his thumb, never too hard, he wants to see how far he can go without causing a single drop of blood to appear. Whose blood? Tonight there’s no one there. Strange, to move about without casting a shadow, not even passing in front of that pair of lamps. So no one is moving, in fact there’s no trace of blood on his hand. However a samurai should also be able to graze an opponent’s cheek with a swift, light slash that just for a moment leaves a thin, pale pink streak, like Saladin who with a single stroke slices the odalisque’s veil into seven pieces that then drift down through the air, or Zorro who in the old movie severs a lit candle in two with his sword, without toppling it or snuffing out the wick.
He, in truth, is not cut out for capers like that; clumsy and awkward as he is, he can’t even hammer in a nail without banging his finger, or have a drink at the table without spilling it on himself. At most he’s able to hang that katana, certainly not wield it. Even now, bumping the coffin to settle in more comfortably, he unintentionally overturns the small console table where, when he gets up in the morning, he places the Samurai mask—a hoate type of mask—that he wears over his face at night. It’s part of a koshozan, the handwritten tag says—or rather would say, if anyone could decipher his pointy, spastic writing, a real electroencephalogram of Trieste—a bowl-type helmet used in Japan from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, but he managed to detach the mask from the helmet, because, when he lies down, he prefers to wear a Prussian spiked helmet on his head. He always had a passion for everything German, the Museum is crammed full of German stuff.
He restores the table to an upright position and smothers some papers that the cigarette had set fire to, a feeble spark already extinguished before he stamped it out. He undresses and sits in the coffin, settling back against a concave leather saddle from a regiment of uhlans, its hollow quite comfortable on the back; he sets up the small battery-operated projector, illuminating a blank screen stretched between two antiaircraft gun mounts several meters in front of him. He inserts, removes, reinserts photographs, transparencies, slides into the projector. Slowly, then more quickly, faster and faster, he reinserts those he’s already seen, removes them, replaces them, a face appears for a moment then disappears, it must have fallen on the floor, he can’t find it, that half a face torn from his notebook is now broader, snub-nosed, what was the name of that old movie, oh, right, The Mask of Fu Manchu, torturers with vaguely Asiatic faces and somewhat slanted eyes. Slavs too have those broad faces and Mongolian eyes, the Slovenians and Croatians clubbed to death at the Risiera and the Ukrainians whom Globus and Oberhauser brought to Trieste from Lublino in ’43 and clubbed to death looked alike, just as German Jews look more German than the Germans. The face of that Karpenko in the porter’s booth, that sour smell, of course, borscht . . .
A damp night, an air of misery about him. The small electric heater, plugged into the only outlet in the big room that still works, is on. The smoke of countless cigarettes slowly dissipates, drifts in front of the projector and the screen like a cloud. “Dear professor, in response to your letter, I must inform you that it is impossible to consult those files which you have asked to see, because they are material that at the time was classified by the Allied Military Government and shipped to London in October 1954, along with the entire archive of said AMG, shortly before it handed over the reins to the incoming Italian authorities . . .” All documents, even those of the Passport Office. Like the one issued for the United States in 1952, complete with a visa from the U.S. consulate, to Ivan Demjanjuk, a murderer in Lublino and at the Risiera, a visa that the U.S. consulate, in Rome, denied however to the originators of neorealist films, suspected of being communists . . .
The droning of the dilapidated projector, the screeching of unseen insects in nocturnal frenzy. Fortunately there is notebook no. 65, the journal in which he copied the wall writings and drawings by the Risiera’s inmates, markings that were later whitewashed. “Arrested September 24, 1944 husband Aldo Sereni born Dec. 19, 1896. Left October 12. Jolanda Moriz Abbazia leaves 1/11/45. For?—4/IV 944 Kabiljo Albert Levi Ida Manzato Evarisio arrived here Marcherita Levi Grünwald arrives here 11/30/44, leaves for X 1/11/45.” But that’s not what matters. The dead, the prisoners, even those tortured, shouldn’t be concealed, or whitewashed, everyone quick to deplore, to condemn, contrite; the dead pass on, the living make merry. Speaking of the living . . . “Dr. Zanchi from the Industrial Union came with a German from Adria-Gesellschaft, a certain Beckmann, I think, they spoke to Allers—the one with the scar.” In pencil, at the bottom: “El ghe ga dito se el podeva invitarlo a zena, da l’avocato Tittoni Sluga, che ghe saria stadi anche quei de l’Adria-Gesellschaft e anca de l’Associazione italo-germanica,” “He asked him if he could invite him to dinner, at attorney Tittoni Sluga’s home, that those from the Adria-Gesellschaft and the Italo-Germanic Association would also be there . . .”—Ida Levi, Evarisio Manzato, respects to the victims of the war tragedy; Dr. Zanchi, engineer Beckmann, never existed, at least they never passed through those doors. Dinner at the home of attorney Tittoni Sluga, never happened. A coat of whitewash and there you are. The murderers’ fingerprints remain on the walls, a bloodstained thumbprint on an ID card.
The prints of those murdered as well, but identifying the thumb is more difficult, because it was smashed to a pulp with a sledgehammer—Otto Stadie loved crushing the prisoners’ fingers, it was a habit of his. But never mind, pay respects to the victims, the city wants law and order, Ordnung und Legalität, if there’s a New Order Party from Berlin, never mind, we’ll adapt, the fingers of Giacomo Pertici, formerly Perticich, director of the Industrial Union, will not end up under that hammer; if he wins his freedom all the better, the Fascist mayor is the first to rejoice, after all, some of his Home Guard died on April 30 under German fire, as did others in that of the Yugoslavs. It’s no use being pedantic and bringing up the fact that some in the Home Guard helped the Nazis. 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. Victims of the world be fruitful and multiply, that way every executioner may denounce one whose work was even more wholesale. Yes, I killed your father, but you, thank God, killed my father and my mother and it’s a great satisfaction that the skeletons in your closet are more numerous than those in mine.
In any case, the important thing is order and peace. And freedom, of course, we’re all anti-Nazi; at least after ’45, even the last Fascist mayor hoped that his status as a Resistance fighter would be recognized. Respects to the victims and disgrace to the murdering hands, but never mind those that only cordially shook them or maybe even drank a toast together at dinner or kept their papers in order. It’s one thing to dig around among the bodies and ashes to retrieve a gold filling and . . . Enough cigarettes, for tonight, there’s already too much smoke, it’s hovering and swirling lazily in front of the mouth of that old cannon. Smoke and darkness; that cuirass on which a large helmet rests is also shrouded in fog, it’s strange that all it takes is a few cigarettes, quite a few, all right, to obscure the Museum, the world. Whorls of smoke spread out in the shadows, snakes coil around the cuirass, the warrior remains impassive, under the helmet fiery eyes glint, lit by the lamp’s reflective glare. Vacuous, vague shadows, plumes of smoke, a rank smell rising from the butts in the ashtray—true, okay, from the floor, there is no ashtray, I toss the butts on the ground or in the mouth of that howitzer, sometime or other I’ll empty it. Now the smoke is more dense, it’s enveloping that tank, maybe it’s not a tank but a big buffalo in the jungle ready to charge, no one in here is afraid of it, fear doesn’t exist in the Museum because death doesn’t exist, that hideous masquerade has lost its tricks and before long will no longer scare anyone, because they will finally realize that it’s only a broom covered with a black sheet.
