Zone (15 page)

hiersein ist immer herrlich
, Rilke received by Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis mocked from afar the somber James Joyce, who at the time was being welcomed by the stiff professors of the Berlitz School and rebuked by his young wife every time he came home drunk, the little uncouth Irishman staggering in the wind, one of many visitors, many train cars that met there, on the endless jetties of a harbor that today is almost deserted, I went there for the first time on leave between two fronts with Andrija and Vlaho, I dragged them to Trieste then Zagreb going through Rijeka the grey and through Opatija the most respectable of Austro-Hungarian seaside resorts where we stayed for about an hour, just long enough to realize that the average age of those taking the curative waters was close to that in Vichy, Evian, or rather Karlovy Vary, it was the end of the winter of 1992, spring hadn’t yet arrived, Vlaho, ill, was treating himself with
rakija
, he was vexed because a prostitute had refused to go to bed with him with the excuse that he was sick to death with a cold, he had caused a scandal in the sordid bar in Novi Zagreb, provoking general hilarity,
c’mon, it’s just my nose dripping, not the rest, I don’t have clap in my schnozzle
—since then he was grumpy, we mischievously suggested he take advantage of the sulfurous waters of Opatija and of the old ladies, surely less demanding than the professionals so careful of their health, what’s more all these aged respectable German ladies were certainly there to take care of themselves too, they’d be understanding, Vlaho shrugged his shoulders saying
oh, very funny, very funny, so, where are we going?
and what with one thing leading to another we arrived in Italy, before leaving again for Herzegovina passing through Dalmatia, a two days’ rest at the home of the more or less cured Vlaho, insulted all day long by his grandfather the Partisan who raised every glass shouting
smrt fašizmu
, Vlaho answered
heil Hitler
as he emptied his own to enrage him, in the middle of the vines a few kilometers away from Split where the UNPROFOR soldiers were dancing, their helicopters flew over us and we, we had to hitchhike soldier-style to reach Mostar—today these memories are a kind of old Yugoslav movie, the images seem to have aged, grown out-of-date, they’re no longer mine, only the sensations remain: shame, fear, pleasure, danger remain, the smells too, the contacts, Andrija’s face, Vlaho’s hand, clutching his glass or his rifle, he was our dismantling and oiling champion, even the most exotic weapons, the most unlikely ones he could strip them bare almost with his eyes closed, arm a mine or a wire trap as easily as he scratched his ass or blew his nose, without ever realizing, we thought, what he was manipulating, with a dexterity of a rodent with a nut, rapid, precise, he ate in the same way, quickly, his fore-paws joined, his chummy face opened in an immense smile at the sight of drink or food or a new weapon: Vlaho is a field mouse, a dormouse or a rat, and above all a male child, war was his element, for it was simple, funny, and virile, in a world where
becoming a man
didn’t mean growing up but sharpening yourself, reducing yourself, pruning yourself like a vine or a tree from which you take away the branches little by little, the female part, or the human part, who knows, a classic garden hedge sculpted into the shape of a warrior, you could just as easily say into the shape of a phallus, a rifle, the male archetype we were all trying to resemble, strong, skillful, prehistoric hunter free of a brain, capable of all kinds of boasts, swaggering, proud but submissive to anyone stronger and to his hierarchical superior, scorning the weak, women and homos, anything that doesn’t look like him, in fact, Vlaho, Andrija, the others, and I little by little we were transformed into soldiers, into professionals, of course we squeezed out a tear from time to time, but it was soon hidden and erased disguised as sweat or smoke in the eye, an embrace and there you are, or at least that’s what we’d have liked, sometimes everything collapsed, Achilles’s shield pierced, the beautiful greaves torn off, the spear broken, and then he was just a naked child curled up calling for his mother or his brothers moaning crying in his sleeping bag or on his stretcher, I remember the day Andrija the invincible collapsed for the first time, the warrior of warriors whom we’d never seen without his shell: around Vitez, one morning like all the others in a village like all the others, when tensions were at their height with the Muslims, a warm morning, a little misty, a munitions transport going north, a few kilometers from Travnik the deadly beauty one fine morning with a smell of spring, with Sergeant Mile and Vlaho the crazy driver at the steering wheel, I don’t remember why we stopped near that building, probably because there was a corpse on the threshold, an old man, an entire cartridge clip in his head and chest, machine-gunned from quite close up and his dog too, a Croatian house, the door was open, a smell of incense wafted out as from a church, a dark interior and wood furniture, shutters closed they must have been shot at night, the guy and his mutt, why had he opened his door, why had he gone out, Mile signed to us, a trembling orangey light was coming from a room in the back, a tiny fire, something’s burning, all three of us move towards it, Vlaho remains behind to watch the entrance, a big bedroom with candles everywhere, dozens of candles still lit and on the double bed an old lady stretched out her hands on her chest a black or dark-grey dress her eyes closed and I don’t understand, Andrija takes off his helmet as a sign of respect, he takes off his helmet sighs and mumbles something, Mile and I imitate him without understanding, all three of us are in the process of watching over an old woman who doesn’t know she’s a widow, that her husband who lit all these candles for her was shot with his dog on his doorstep by unknown men or neighbors, she has heard nothing, on her deathbed, not the machine-gun volleys outside, not the footsteps in her house, not the laughter of those who jammed that large crucifix straight upright into the middle of her stomach, its absurd shadow is dancing on the wall next to the lowered faces of Andrija and Mile, bare-headed, and it’s Vlaho’s voice that wakes us up,
u kurac
, he has just entered the room,
fuck, what the hell are you doing here, are we going yes or no
, he glances crazily at the grandmother at her desecrated body, I put my helmet back on, Mile puts his helmet on, and we leave like robots not saying a word we climb into the Jeep Andrija sits down next to me he remains silent his eyes gazing into space the tears are beginning to flow onto his cheeks he gently wipes them away with his sleeve, he doesn’t sob he looks at the countryside the houses the trees I watch him he cries like a silent fountain without hiding it, why, he’s seen lots of corpses, young, old, male, female, burnt black, cut into pieces, machine-gunned, naked, dressed or even undressed by an explosion, why this one, Andrija will die a few weeks later, he’ll have time to avenge his own tears, to cauterize his tears in the flames, to ravage enemy bodies in turn, houses, families, exulting with Ajax son of Telamon, with Ulysses in the ruins of Troy, Andrija the furious was avenging that unknown grandmother he never mentioned again, I still have in my mind’s eye the shadow of Christ on the flowered wallpaper, in the gleam of the candles, nothing had been disturbed, no vengeful inscription on the walls, nothing, it was a strange miracle this crucifix stuck God knows how into the flesh of this old woman, Andrija upset without showing it by this sign, Sergeant Mile didn’t say anything either, Eduardo Rózsa cracked too one day, and Millán-Astray, and Achilles son of Peleus, one day one fine day when nothing prepared you for it, and I too, I cracked, fissured like a clay wall slowly drying, in Venice it was a collapse followed by ghostly wandering through the hallways of the Zone, you die many times and today in this train all the names in this secret suitcase draw me to the bottom like the cinderblock attached to the legs of a prisoner thrown into the Tiber or the Danube, in the middle of middle-class Emilia, a train where the travelers are all sitting nicely, a car of passengers ignoring each other, pretending not to see the fate they share, these shared kilometers entrusted to the Great Conductor friend of model railways of halberds and of the end of the world, some facing forward and others with their back to their destination, like me, their gaze turned to the rear, to black night, to Milan the departure station: Millán-Astray Franco’s friend, the thin one-eyed one-armed general the Legionary responsible for splendid massacres in Morocco had a guilty passion for decapitation, he liked to slit the darkie’s throat with a bayonet, that was his weakness, not to say his hobby, in 1920 he founded the Spanish Foreign Legion, after a stay in Sidi Bel Abbès with the French who are always proud of their military cunning, a natural colonial mutual aid, the French Legionnaires made a great impression on Millán who was neither one-eyed nor one-armed at the time, just obsessed, fascinated with death, Millán formed his Legion in Morocco for Spain to which the poor, the hoodlums, the banished from all over Europe rushed, and he welcomed them singing them hymns—the Spanish Legionaries whom I came across in Iraq looked like young newlyweds dressed for their weddings, they sang while they marched quickly,
soy el novio de la muerte
, to their nuptials like those of their ancestors in Africa, to whom Millán said
you are dead, full of lice, vulgar, you are dead and you owe this new life to death
, you will live again by giving death, as good fiancés you will serve, pay court to the Reaper with passion, hand Lady Death the scythe, sharpen it buff it polish it brandish it in her place in Morocco first then after the beginning of Franco’s anti-Red crusade on the very soil of the homeland, in Andalusia, in Madrid then on the Ebro in the last great offensive, in Morocco against the bloody Berbers tamers of mares, in the military disasters of the Spanish protectorate that allowed the ephemeral creation of the first independent republic in Africa, the natives’ Republic of the Rif, the republic of Abd el-Krim el-Khattabi whose creased, yellowed bank bills you can still find at the second-hand stores in Tétouan, Abd el-Krim the hero, the gravedigger of Spaniards was on the point of losing Melilla after the disaster of the Battle of Annual in July 1921 where 10,000 poorly armed, malnourished Spanish soldiers perished, without leaders and without discipline, one of the most resounding military blunders after the Somme and the Chemin des Dames, which would make the liberal monarchy of Alfonso XIII the Roman exile tremble: did he know, in his room in the Grand Hotel on the Piazza Esedra, with his collection of slippers and his princely visits, that his enemy of the time, the Berber cadi with the ponies, had found asylum in Cairo, at the court of King Farouk the anglophile: I picture him smoking a hookah by the Nile, for years, until, one day in 1956, the new king of independent Morocco suggested he return home—he refuses, maybe because he likes Nasser and Tahia Kezem too much, or maybe because he prefers to have his blood sucked by Cairo mosquitoes rather than by a Sharifian king, he dies without ever seeing his country again or holding a weapon, aside from a 9-millimeter Campo Giro picked up from the mutilated corpse of General Silvestre, commander of the Rif Army, the buffalo-horn-plated butt of which, smooth and scratchless, bears the arms of Alfonso XIII sent into exile by the defeat of his general and his brand-new pistol, Silvestre the murdered with the undiscoverable scattered body, replaced by the brothers Franco Bahamonde and Juan Yagüe, eagles with poetic names, and their elder brother Millán-Astray with the absent eye, to whom his legionaries offered pretty wicker baskets garnished with decapitated Berber heads, to his great delight, just as before him, around 1840, Lucien de Montagnac, a colonel who was also one-armed, the pacifier of Algeria, staved off colonial boredom by decapitating Arabs like artichokes—I suddenly see Henryk Ross’s photo of the Łódź ghetto, a crate full of men’s heads next to another larger one where the headless bodies are piled up, that would have delighted Astray the one-eyed or Montagnac the ill-tempered, admirers of the samurais with the slender swords and of those saints who carried their own decapitated heads: long after his wars, Millán-Astray the bird of prey translated the Japanese
Bushidō
into Spanish, code of honor and of honorable death, of decapitation of the conquered soldier, law of the friend who slices your neck and thus saves you from suffering, just as the French revolutionaries adopted the guillotine for its democratic painless aspect, a king’s death for everyone, the leader’s rolling in a basket, whereas before the Revolution decapitation was reserved for nobles, with commoners dying in spectacular torments, drawn and quartered or burnt for the most part, if they survived questioning—in Damascus not long ago they hanged opponents from immense streetlights on the Square of the Abbasids, from the raised basket used in Paris to trim trees, I remember one day a hanged man who had stayed up too long ended up being decapitated from his body and fell his head rolled between the cars provoking an accident which caused one more death, an innocent little girl, probably just as innocent as the guy whose shoulderless face had frightened the driver, also innocent, just as there are lots of innocent men among the killers in the suitcase, as many as there are among the victims, murderers rapists throat-slitters ritual decapitators who learned to handle their knives on lambs or sheep, then Zeus did the rest, in Algeria my Islamists were the world champions of decapitation, in Bosnia the mujahideen killed their prisoners in the same way, the way you bleed an animal, and my own entrance to the Boulevard Mortier bore the sign of seven monks’ heads abandoned in a ditch, I can’t escape decapitation, these faces pursue me, up to Rome and Caravaggio with his head of Goliath David’s fist closed in the bloody hair or in the so-refined Palazzo Barberini Judith with her sword in Holofernes’s throat, the blood gushes so nicely, the beautiful widow looks both disgusted and resigned as she severs the carotid artery, the servant holds the bag that will surround the damp relic its eyes wide open, its hair sticky, a somber image among the religious scenes, the Saints Jerome, the portraits of bishops become popes, the innocent girls wild Judith neatly beheads the Babylonian general, to save her people in the same way Salome obtained the head of the Baptist, beheaded in his cell by a brutal guard, with a thick knife, as shown by Caravaggio, again, on the immense canvas in the cathedral of the Order of the Knights of St. John in Malta, summer of 1608, when the order was incorporated, a year after arriving in the impregnable island, forty years after the Ottoman siege when Jean de Valette shot Turkish heads out of his cannons like cannonballs, to frighten the enemy, Michelangelo Merisi di Caravaggio the Milanese would have liked to die beheaded, he died ill on a beach in Argentario, facing the grey sea that he had never painted, or that he had always painted, in the dark immensities where the bodies of beautiful boys and saints are born, of murderers prostitutes soldiers disguised as saints, Caravaggio great master of darkness and decapitation