Read Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) for Free Online

slides out of the shoe, which the little stream carries off to a drain a little farther down. I found myself on the sidewalk, on the other side of the street, with an aching foot, wearing only a drenched sock. The old woman deftly released her hold, wiped my face with her hand and quickly went off, turning into the first cross street. Before rounding the corner she turned. Her eyes blazed, a dark, sweet, vulgar fire; she murmured a blessing and disappeared, again the headlights of a car made the fur she held in the tattered bundle under her arm shine like gold in the darkness of the street and of the air.
    Comrade Blasich, shortly afterwards, made fun of me seeing me come in with only one shoe, but then he broke off, looking at that foot of mine almost uneasily. The Party headquarters was large and sprawling; small rooms, corridors, stockrooms, a large hall for conferences, an internal staircase that wound upwards, spiralling like a chute, to the areas of the upper floors that overlooked Via della Cattedrale, high on the hill of San Giusto. Now it seems to me that that staircase was a shortcut between two universes, you enter at the point where they are planning the revolution and you come out in another world; the city is at our feet, indifferent, beyond the sea, jagged pale blue mountains can be seen, a broken wall, the peaks are splinters of glass scraping the sky. Revolution is a word as senseless as the ones children make up and repeat over and over until even things around you become as nonsensical as that word. I for example used to recite salmoiraghirhodiatoce rhodiatocesalmoiraghi, I must have seen them in some ad. I think they were two different ads butit doesn’t matter, salmoiraghirhodiatoce rhodiatocesalmoiraghi, after a while the whole world became a meaningless babble, things melted, heaving and surging, a thick, amorphous chocolate. And now revolutionrevolutionrevolution.—“Great, my friend, we’re on the right track. Revolutionrevolutionsalmoiraghirhodiatoce, if we understand this, recovery is not far off. Matrix revolutions, simulated turmoil that doesn’t happen to anyone, those slaves in irons whom you broke your back to liberate don’t exist, avatars of avatars of nobody in a video game. No more proletarians, a keyboard replaces the working class, workers of the world unite in a chip and leap out on command only when a key is struck. Learn to keep pace with the times. It’s easy, because they don’t have a pace; all you have to do is not insist on the march of progress. Schluss with delusions of grandeur, redeem the world, engage in revolution, get sunstroke beneath the rising sun. Why go out and look for trouble? That weeping and gnashing of teeth, out there, is a program like any other, it’s not worth the trouble to ...”
    Why ask me questions, if you’re only going to interrupt me? As I was saying, Blasich was sitting in the administrative office, behind him a portrait of the Leader with his small cruel eyes and kindly moustache. “Eeta son of the sun that grants light to mortals, with his terrible gaze.” Indeed, those classical citations were a mania of his, a vain affectation. He watched the steam rising from his coffee cup and wiped the left lens of his eyeglasses—only that one, as usual—with his handkerchief. On his neck, his pale, reddish hair, almost albinic, was sweaty, his even paler eyebrows aged the smooth-skinned, childlike face. “I think the best place for you is the Fiume shipyards,” he said in a calm and persuasive professorial voice; on his table were notebooks, class assignments that he had brought from school to correct, and the
Argonautics
of ApolloniusRhodius, open perhaps to the passage assigned for translation. He was known for the rigour of what he demanded of his students: without Greek, he said, we cannot comprehend the humanity that we must liberate and create. “That’s where the best men go, the most qualified, and also the most politically