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

Author:Magris, Claudio [Magris, Claudio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2012-08-21T04:00:00+00:00

44

WHAT’S THAT RED GLOW, a huge lit cigarette in the already darkened room? Oh, the closed-circuit television, the announcement of the group session, in the large auditorium on floor −1. Below ground, in short. Group therapy, present or not, near or far; you can nudge the person seated beside you and chat with whomever you want, even those who are right side up at the Antipodes, thanks to these PCs at our disposal. All together, crowds, masses, waiting for it to start. The auditorium is packed, it ripples like a sea. Where are the accused, the inmates in this valley of Judgment? I see only Kapò, watchdogs who incite one another with savage bites in the enormous slaughterhouse; tons of meat butchered and ground, they say dog meat is good, perhaps having had some in the Lager.

“How many can there be, the damned, the imprisoned, the condemned, patients held by force, Kapò?” Loads of them, an immense throng. You should know better than me, with those records and those clerks at your service, but I realize that with all those numbers your computers crashed. A computer is a brain and brains go haywire, it’s their specialty. But we shouldn’t be finicky about numbers. Numbers are alive, you can touch them, feel them. Numbers on playing cards, on a register, on coins, on bills, on your arm, on a roulette table, on cells.

You see them at the gaming table as well—I can vouch for it, given that I lost everything there—lucid and feverish, scribbling sums to uncover the secret order in the joust of probabilities, the mysterious laws that govern the chaos of the game and of the world, that make the ball spin around like a planet in space but also hold it in check, keep it from abandoning its trajectory and losing itself in the infinite void and force it to stop on the five, on the twelve. Maybe we’ll discover that order, accumulate the gold of time in front of us, that golden dust that slips through your fingers and gets left on the green carpet, on the great barren meadow jam-packed with the multitudes of those who wanted to be like God.

They stole the gold, the sacred fleece, and now they await the judgment of the People’s Court, all crammed into the enormous casino with that red wallpaper, blazing candles, human clusters crushed to the right and left of the green table, the altar of the Lord. Innocent, guilty, in any case damned, hanging from that table like animals from a hook, scorched by the flame of the candles that casts a bloody light on the sweaty faces and on the hands hauling in the chips. The red of the room is a blaze that envelops everything, around the table everyone is distorted like the Danish knights and kings in the Christiansborg Palace in flames.

Okay, I almost always lost at those tables, but I also enjoyed myself and losing what little I had didn’t matter much then … The biographers disapprove and I play my role as an unrepentant penitent.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.