Blindly (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) by Claudio Magris

can tell you’re nostalgic for our far-off lands, since there are even books on Triestine painting in the library of this hospital down here. So then, here we are ... “Born in Trieste, a studio in Melbourne on Flinders Street, exhibitions at the Victorian Artists Society and even in New Zealand, after 1905 we lose track of him.” Indeed, the Pacific is an immense evening in which to disappear—my father wasn’t all wrong, as I was saying, if Gino Knesi, who learned to sail his boat in Lussino before he too came down here as an emigrant, after Lussino became Yugoslavian in 1945, was the victor in the Sydney–Hobart regatta, more or less my course.
    My father, then, was married in 1906. In Sydney He also had his photograph taken by Degotardi, the renowned photolithographic studio founded by Giovanni Degotardi, born in Lubiana, and it seems that Alberto Vittorio Zelman, also originally from Trieste, played at his wedding—an eminent Australian violinist, director of the Melbourne Philharmonic Society, concert performer, an instructor at the Conservatory, etc. etc., worthy son of the author of the memorable and forgotten work
Il Lazzarone
, memorable and forgotten like every noble human effort.
    In the photograph, taken by Degotardi Jr. Jr., you can see my mother’s somewhat brownish skin, those unusual, prominent Asiatic cheekbones, Australo-Asiatic in this case—Pannonian cheekbones, my father, who loved them very much, used to say, because they reminded him of those of certain women in Fiume of Hungarian origin. In fact Maria ... Yes, my mother, who was from Launceston,certainly had some Tasmanian blood—extinct blood, from the race that was erased from the face of the earth, officially wiped out, and therefore, if it had survived in some unknown recess of the forest, it had done so illegitimately. I wish that clandestine blood were in my veins as well, sucked in when I was in her womb, an alien abusive invader yet welcomed with love and accepted as her own. My own blood was even shed in Spain, in Germany and in Yugoslavia, under the delusion that I was shedding it so that no one could ever again exterminate a race ...
    It’s because of my mother that my father, who had met her in Queensland when he was still cutting sugar cane and married her in Sydney, went to Tasmania, where she had been born and raised, where I was born—in 1910, Doctor, believe me, don’t go on about it. That’s where, years later, I had the good fortune to discover and read that autobiography of mine written at the time for the
Almanack
of the Van Diemen’s Land Company in Hobart Town. A somewhat sketchy autobiography, full of gaps, but the space allotted me was what it was. Besides, if I had to compete with my biographers and recount everything that happened to me, I’d be the first to lose my head; it would be like lighting a flame under a powder keg, a huge explosion and the ship blows up ...

5
    AH, CHILDHOOD , you want my childhood, my adolescence, yes of course, it’s obvious, Doctor, you want to understand, to go back to the origin and cause of it all. Well, you can’t complain; you can’t expect to go further back than that, it seems to me. We’re going back, back, gradually further back, to the zygote, to the original diploid happily transplanted—no, unhappily, but that’s another matter and I know it doesn’t interest you, happiness doesn’t interest anyone. In any case, however, transplanted to live and survive, despite all the Lagers in the world. I already know what you’re about to tell me, I can read it in your face, though you’re still so undecided—after all you can’t shut a patient’s mouth, it’s one of the first rules of therapy. These things were discovered later on; at the time I was born, there couldn’t have been a Dolly, it’s all an invention on my part. Precisely, a scientific invention. You’re all the same, you scientists. Envious, avid to be the first to discover the truth; up to that time