Blameless, p.4
Blameless, page 4
If I’d had that shop, I wouldn’t need my Museum. You could go in there, touch things, even shoot a cloth bullet at the snout of a stuffed bear and he wouldn’t get upset, Popel liked to let children play. His place had everything under the sun; at Christmas time, fir trees decorated with Nuremberg glass globes that reflected the lights and shadows and, under the tree, a large nativity scene, with lots of shepherds and several Magi—three are too few, he’d say, and he’d add a couple of Moorish Caspars mounted on their camels. Then he’d get the black hussars, we’ll put them in too, that way they’ll learn to be good and see that war is a game, otherwise it’s idiocy.
When he tinkered with the Christmas tree his thick white beard got tangled in the branches, like snow, a nice, soft, inviting snow—I’d like to lie beneath a snow like that. He had everything and was able to repair any toy that broke; he’d reattach a head, glue a leg back on . . . Had it been possible to fix up that doll when she broke—screw the pink arm back on after it had fallen off, firmly reseat the two glass buttons in their sockets—Sior Popel would certainly have been capable of it, he was a magician. But without him . . . “What do you think, that we’re Popel?” It was always Christmas at that kindly German’s. Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht—even Poldo, my dog, would leap up in my arms, licking my face and closing his eyes, blissful, and Sior Popel would give him a slice of prosciutto that he kept on a shelf. I’d study the doll and the black hussars, while they were still there. They would have been better off staying there; Sior Popel watched me, he too a little bemused, like me at times . . .
It’s so strange that he’s gone, I thought he would be there forever, like a tree, like the forest of boats that bobbed on the sea not far away. Oh Rena Vecia, / i camini no fuma più! / Xe morto sior Popel, / paneti no’l porta più!; Sior Popel is dead, no more smoke from the chimneys, no more panettone. Even the two glass buttons on the doll’s face had become dull and opaque, in the dim shadows of the house. Sometimes they seemed vacant, like those of the cat mummy later on in Old Town’s underground sewers. So I no longer lined up the hussars for a nice, peaceful parade; instead I put them in a small boat in the pond, or someplace else, I pushed them to shoot at one another and fall into the water and even though it was me who hit them it was all the same, like in war for that matter. But I wasn’t sad.
12.
After the family moved to Trieste, he enrolled at the Nautical Institute—“despite hating the sea.” As a student he apparently didn’t amount to much; an essay on trade at the port of Trieste had been deemed well-written—a fine Italian, Professor Venassi had said—but off topic, since it focused almost exclusively on maritime transports of military equipment, transports that were almost nonexistent. It’s clear that the conversation between his mother and the teacher must have resulted in consequences for him at home, though he himself approved them, an advocate even then, in a school setting, of “sound authoritarian principles.”
He hated the sea . . . nothing strange about that, Luisa thought; phobias, obsessions and manias are fearful of the sea’s great liberation that dissolves and washes away nightmares. With his mess-tin, the prisoner empties the water that enters his cell, he knows that the powerful surge has come to sweep away his bars, but he’s afraid of the immense ocean waters—of that ever tempestuous ocean that is the world. He grabs hold of the bars; the gills of freedom have atrophied, if he yields to the current he’ll drown. And so the prisoner constructs barricades against the terrifying liberator; dams made of paper, notes, objects, hunks of wall, carcasses, wreckage. Fill all the cracks through which the great liberation might enter; sea and wind, the ocean’s Roaring Forties, too strong for poor musty lungs. Yet as a child he loved that boat so much . . . Who knows if he too suffered from migraines like my mother, Luisa wondered as she leafed through those papers. My mother had really loved the sea and when she no longer loved it, when she was no longer able to love it, after what had happened, after the devastating discovery, she’d begun to suffer from migraines; I remember how they would attack her suddenly, seeming to grip her temples in a vise, a small gentle terrified rabbit between the teeth of a stone marten.
In the sea, in one that’s deep and black—blue-black, the most enchanting hair on a woman is that which is so black as to appear blue, like yours, Doctor, which in our area is very rarely seen—in the sea, as I was saying, you can descend only within the ironclad walls of a submarine, which keep out the immense dark waters. In the sea you are all right only when you are not in the sea, underwater but not in the water; maybe in the belly of a big fish, like Jonah or Pinocchio. At least until a hook rips into the fish’s throat and the submarine, hit by a torpedo, explodes; blown apart, the whale, along with everything in its belly, becomes prey to swarms of minnows and other small fish that hurl themselves on it and encircle it in a shimmering cloud.
13.
(At the center of the atrium, on the back wall, a screen with his portrait, while at intervals the voice repeats: “Used submarines. Bought and sold.”)
U-Boot 20, Austro-Hungarian Navy, World War I (evidently he had managed to buy it or have it given to him; in used condition, however, as indicated by the puncture torn in its side), hit off the coast of Venice, in shallow water, not far from the Grado lagoon.
Elongated, an elegant armor-plated dugout. Two diesel engines and two electric motors, one 88-mm cannon, a 14-mm submachine gun and two torpedo-tubes on the front. The machinery of death is often long, extended, pointy. Spears, swords, mounted bayonets; rifle and gun barrels—rounded, of course, but lengthened—missiles. Bombs, it’s true, tend to be pot-bellied. Like death, which is by no means gaunt but is fat instead, and it’s not surprising, given how voracious it is. The torpedo is perhaps the ideal form, rectilinear and at the same time rounded.
A gash on its side, a sperm whale caught between the enormous claws of a Kraken. It’s nice to go underwater in a submarine. Strictly speaking a submersible, suitable for navigating in the depths as well, but in particular on the surface, while the submarine, a more evolved model—the age of the evolution of species is over, now it’s time for the evolution of machines—is essentially made to navigate in the depths.
A video comes on, you descend in an aquarium, from the belly of the submarine the waters in which it sinks seem calm—aside from the torpedoes and mines, but that’s life, which is always a surprise. Sometimes even an unpleasant surprise. You descend; out there, in the water, as midshipman Ivo Saganić, assigned to U-Boot 20 Kaiser Joseph, once saw while diving in a wetsuit, the colors are toned down; increasingly subtle streaks, the blue softens before turning violet. Too bad submarines, the military ones, don’t have portholes. Languid uncertain jellyfish drift in front of the diving suit’s transparent window, the eye watches, enthralled, illusory flies streak past the crystalline lens fooled by some defect in the vitreous organ. The eye sees what the brain tells it to see, even if it isn’t there. Many have seen the Kraken, the giant crab of the deep, which does not exist. You descend, little by little the different colored rays of light darken, first the reds, then the oranges, the yellows, the greens, and finally the purples and ultraviolets. At ten meters deep it is already evening.
You descend into the ever darker crypt of a cathedral, the vault above is still blue, a stained-glass canopy flecked with flashes of light, gradually dimmer, more opaque. Time, there below, slows down, compresses. Minutes of sleep, years. How long did you sleep, how long did you dream of sleeping? In that blue in which you descend that is soon no longer blue, everything seems to happen with centuries-old lethargy. The fisherman Urashima—Ivo clearly remembers the little book he was given by Saint Nicholas, a German edition of fairytales, the black gothic characters of the title above the white-crested waves shown on the cover—dives off the boat into the arms of the sea princess, heart sinking to the bottom; non-time of happiness and death. Ulysses doesn’t realize that he’s spent seven years in the cave with Calypso, Urashima doesn’t realize that he’s spent four hundred years in the arms of the sea goddess. But who’s counting? Years are made of days and for there to be a day the sun must rise and set, but when there was no sun that could rise and set in the great primordial dark cloud and no earth that could rotate around it, and when there is no yesterday and no tomorrow in a kiss, the days no longer exist and cannot be counted. I am down here to wage war, midshipman, but down here it seems impossible to think about war, about its gathering speed, about the torpedo that rushes out, swiftly boring into the sea, a wall of time.
Struck off the coast of Venice, the submarine managed to re-ascend, slowly and obliquely, and emerged, resting on a sandbar; an Austrian corvette picked up the crew, including four killed in the attack, and returned to Pola. Midshipman Ivo Saganić is more fortunate than the others, because, unlike the sailors and officers who come from small towns and remote villages, he lives in Promontore, right on the sea, that sea from which he has surfaced and returned, and where his wife, Mila, her hair as long as a mermaid’s, is waiting for him. Urashima is homesick, he misses his father his mother his brothers and sisters and asks the sea goddess to let him go, he will come back soon. Midshipman Ivo Saganić is sorry about the four sailors who died and about the submarine, which by then had become his boat, maybe more so than the one that awaits him moored almost in front of his house, still he is happy to return, however briefly; when the gods send a message you leave or return without asking any questions. As the submarine ascends—slowly, because it is moving sideways, the angle separating its emerging course from a horizontal line is very shallow—he thinks about the depths receding and vanishing, about all the plants and fish they’re passing through, about the sguazeto, the thick stew, that awaits him at home or at the Trita Trita tavern, where maybe they’ll go to celebrate, he and Mila.
To tell the truth, he would rather go straight home, but his shipmates may want to spend at least an hour getting drunk, and he, one of the few who is married, doesn’t want to act standoffish or seem like a Simandl, a henpecked husband, as the Austrians say—he is and feels Austrian, like all of them, a subject of the emperor, but definitely not German, he’s Istrian and Italian—so they will probably end up at the Trita Trita, with its black wine the cemetery of youth and its white wine the graveyard of youth, but he’ll quickly leave them. For one thing because later he will have to go back to the sea, under the sea. Urashima will very soon rejoin the goddess at the bottom of the sea, who didn’t say anything when he left but only gave him a small chest warning him never to open it.
There are many ways to wait for a husband who lives for a long time at the bottom of the sea—who perhaps is dead—and when midshipman Ivo Saganić saw that his wife, the lovely Mila, more beautiful than the loveliest queen of the sea, had not waited for him alone, nor with only their son, little Tonko, he almost didn’t recognize the house, the boat bobbing at anchor in front of the calm sea, the courtyard and the staircase leading up to the door, where Mila stood straight and silent, more distant than when he was at the bottom of the sea, the few steps and few meters between them were years and decades. Urashima, when he returns to his village, doesn’t find anything left except the mountains; his house is no longer there, nor any of the houses he knew, no one remembers a family with his name, in the cemetery there are other tombstones, the eroded, almost illegible names don’t tell him anything either; four hundred years have passed, he learns, since a typhoon destroyed a village that once stood in that place, and so he goes to the seacoast all alone, opens the chest, maybe there’s a message from the goddess in there that will explain it all to him, a magic spell that will save him, but there is only dust immediately scattered by the wind. He looks at himself in the limpid, gentle waves at his feet, they show him a face etched by furrows, like the tombstones of those old graves, and long hair white as snow.
Urashima’s knees give way and he slumps on the sand, midshipman Ivo Saganić on the other hand stared at Mila for a long time as she stood in the doorway, then he turned, went to the shore and for a long time stared at the sea, it seems no one saw him again after he set out on the road to Medulin. The records of the Imperial Marina would certainly show something, given that a few days later the crew of U-Boot 20 was called back to the sea on another vessel, but the sudden reversal of Austria, at the end of the war, meant that those records were lost.
14.
And what about all those notes on the mulberry tree, in notebook number 36? Black Mulberry, he writes, Morus nigra L. An excellent defense, like White Mulberry, capable of combating respiratory illnesses (coughs, bronchitis, asthma, colds, sore throats); reducing fevers. Deworming. Depurative, sedative, effective against insomnia and headache, bactericidal; it vanquishes faintness, cachexia, hyperglycemia, hypertension, edema, dropsy, aphthous fever, lesions, snake and insect bites, mycosis, oral ulceration, gastric ulcers, depression. Emollient, diaphoretic, hypoglycemic properties. It enriches the blood, cures neurasthenia, hypertension, diabetes, vertigo, tinnitus, anemia and arthritis. The council of the city of Vicenza, on November 30, 1478, sanctions the loss of an eye for anyone who steals a mulberry tree plant. The false fruit of the mulberry tree is called a sorosis; a thin epicarp, brittle endocarp, and fleshy, succulent mesocarp.
The mulberry is a monoecious plant, that is, there are inflorescences of both sexes in the same specimen. The fruit, the sorosis, is just that, a false fruit, only an infructescence . . . Each fruit is false, a living lie. Two pretend to be one and fabricate a false one; pistils and stamens are also engaged to put on a burlesque Tristan and Isolde. False fruit, false parents, false love, disguised war. War of the sexes. If there were only one—only one sex, one man, homo, not vir—what a shame that some languages don’t have the neuter. Well, only one thing, neutral, nobody to fight against . . . In German there’s the neuter. Great people, the Germans. Even when they exaggerate. Put aphrodisiacs in the Museum as well; even the member that enters the vulva, the first time, and sometimes not just the first, causes bloodshed.
Mulberries fall from the mulberry tree. They fall, squashed on the ground, tinging the soil with stains of dark blood from the great, venerable, multi-branched mulberry tree in the center of the piazza in Crno Selo, the village—sometimes boastfully called city—clinging to a slope on the side of the Velebit, overlooking the Adriatic once sailed by the Uskoks. A few houses (one, an old building in Habsburgian government office style, not without a shabby nobility) clinging to a precipitous slope leading to a booming, frothy sea from which dirt paths rather than actual streets branch off. A natural well, the coolness of water in broiling summer on the white, dazzling rocks of the Dalmatian Coast. My father, he writes, once took us to Dalmatia, before the war—he loved those white rocks, I loved the mulberries that melted in my mouth, ran down my chin, stained my shirt. My mother . . . I don’t know what my mother loved. She scolded me when I got dirty. It’s difficult to wash away those purplish stains, the innocent blood of fruits, animals, women on their impure days, it’s hard to remove the stains. Only those of brother shed by brother fade quickly, a coat of whitewash and it’s done, like afterward, on the walls of the Risiera and its environs.
The few inhabitants of Crno Selo are called Di Giovanni, perhaps grandchildren of a grandfather Ivančić; etymologies of blood—the blood of reclaimed forebears, of brothers who, having grown up seeing mutual friends and former friends savage one another while shouting Mare Nostrum or Jadransko More, had decided, each turning against the other, to be Slavs or Italians and had spilled blood they felt was baseless and illegitimate to remove it from their veins, crushing their various happy childhoods like grapes in a vat or olives in a press. Hands bloodied by juicy mulberries and by their own wounds and those of others, at the moment it’s not always clear; whether in the heated breath of summer or that of battle makes little difference in the end. A red-white-green arm of the sea rather than red-white-blue or vice versa makes that much more blood flow, Black Shirts burn villages, foibe, sinkholes, in the Karst hide corpses.
Crush the grapes, red and black. There are vats and there are vats, presses and presses; the ones at home that crush a couple of flasks and those in large wineries, dozens, hundreds of presses operated by men who don’t even see them, pushing a button that sets them in motion, surging, swollen reddish rivers. Man is a karstic doline, a sinkhole; the underground river roils, swells, vomits the wine, choking the drinker and it’s not immediately clear which is wine and which is blood. In Crno Selo the harvest was modest compared to the immense yield of the presses and vats used at the Risiera, itself a modest subsidiary of the large corporation “Adolf Hitler & Co.,” bankrupt and auctioned off before it could become “Adolf Hitler & Successors.”
The old mulberry tree is there, gnarled and knobby, scores of years have marked it with protuberances and bulges; brazen, juicy mulberries, more numerous than the hands of inhabitants who should have picked them, drop from that woody heritage and mix with soil, mud and a puddle or two in a dense vinaceous residue, History’s cancerous menstrual.
Men and empires fall, mulberries brimming with juice plop from branches onto visitors’ heads; the dark red splatters and stains everything. Clothes ruined, people jumping back. When bombs fall, people are terrified and there’s a lot more red. And those silkworms besides, aren’t they ghastly eating the leaves of the mulberry, which is there only to be ravaged, eaten? Eaten so that someone may have silk, beautiful silk, light as air, caressing the hand that strokes it, a diaphanous veil over shoulders or face, a silken cord with which the sultan strangled those who fell out of favor. No matter where we start, he concluded, it always comes down to weapons.
15.
Among the spears and howitzers, six crates with 20,000 books on the subject of war. Among them, 428 from the Deutsche Bücherei Triest and the Hitler-Jugend Bibliothek, probably having come from the Italian-German Association—formerly the Italian-German Cultural Association (evidently at the end of the war culture was no longer considered so essential), the former Kulturverein Friedrich Schiller, though at a time when Germans in Trieste, and not only in Trieste, were gentlemen, perhaps the most gentlemanly. Nevertheless, books are books, even when they are stupid; they always make good weapons, and not just because of their heavy sharp spines that can be used to break heads. Books must always be respected and protected. Even the ones we don’t like.
