XXVIII. ISLANDS

From now on, these walls are his everyday life. Four square metres, if you’re feeling generous. Here a desk. There a bed. A wardrobe for clothes and for moths. A window. Or, rather, an attempt at a window. But whether the light comes from a cellar or an aquarium, Gramsci cannot say. It is flat, as if it had been extinguished years ago.

On the prison island of Ustica, his first stop, he had seen incomparable sunsets and one-of-a-kind rainbows. Nature there was mild and remote, a small sliver of Sicily washed into the sea, a smidgeon of volcanic rock. The trip had been postponed three times on account of rough seas. They had to wait in the jail of Palermo. Their nerves were frayed. During the night, Molinelli fell unconscious three times, wracked by convulsions. On 7 December, they finally arrived, and would stay twenty-four days, feeling like Robinson. Robinsons and Fridays founding a communistic island state, peeling potatoes, cleaning lettuce and free to do whatever they wanted during the day. Gramsci shares a hut with Bordiga, Ventura, Sbaraglini, Conca and a friend from Abruzzo. His roommate, Ventura, often wakes in the middle of the night, screaming and thrashing. The other one, Conca, stays up, propped on his pillow, smoking cigars and sighing. In the mornings, Gramsci drags himself through the hallway, the gait of a man who has not had any coffee yet, in Bordiga’s opinion. It was only after coffee that life began, that or whatever they’d been assigned in its place.

All in all, however, it isn’t so bad: they cook for one another every day at noon. In the afternoons, they sit outside in the still-warm November sun, play cards on the heated stump of a tree and turn brown while in Moscow it is already deep winter, the streets frozen, people’s eyelashes white with frost. Once a week, the postal ship arrives.

‘I feel like I am going to break apart at any moment,’ Gramsci writes to Giulia while being transferred to Milan. On 20 January, they’d torn him away from his island idyll. Locked in an automobile, he’s being driven through the winter cold of northern Italy. He is shivering as if with fever, his teeth are rattling so loud that it keeps him awake. He is certain he will not live through the trip, that his heart will freeze on account of the cold. He is sleeping in transit, the darkest hole between two holes, a cell for travelling prisoners. The unlucky are kept there for up to a week. Gramsci lies on the straw sack with his legs tucked underneath him, he can hear bugs inside it, he rubs his wrists, blue because of the cold and the heavy handcuffs. When he is out in the courtyard during the day, he meets a lifelong inmate quoting Nietzsche. He laughs and is in a good mood although he has been imprisoned for twenty-two years, and Gramsci hopes that he can hang on to that over the course of his first days, weeks, months in that prison which is now his new home. The lifelong inmate triumphs exuberantly over the rules of the jail. That’s how you have to do it, Gramsci thinks and hugs his legs, hugs them tight, real tight, so that nothing of his will touch the ground if he falls asleep.

A few days later, Gramsci arrives in Ancona. He avoids looking at himself in the, oftentimes missing, glass or shard of mirror. It will be grey, with red eyes, surrounded by dark blue shadows. In the prison-registration office in Ancona, there is a short-tempered young man in uniform who has something to say about everything. ‘Speak more clearly!’—‘Can’t you stand up any straighter?’—‘Stop carrying on like that, this isn’t any casino, here you have to act decently.’—‘What are you grinning for? This isn’t a brothel, but an office!’—‘Look at me kindly when I speak to you!’ The man in front of Gramsci turns around, and their eyes meet. His face is closed, his gaze probing yet lifeless. Then Nino recognizes him: the lifelong inmate. He now looks like a bone that has been completely leached. A few days in transit have managed to break even him. Gramsci’s naturally tanned skin colour will not return; that is the first thing to which he bids farewell when he comes out of transit into his new home, the cell which shall only allow him cold light, and not much at that. You cannot regret things, you have to let go of the unnecessary while keeping the necessary alive against the whole atmosphere of the prison with its values, routines, hardships and imperatives, the tiniest tings which mechanically follow one after the other for days, months, years, grains of sand in an immense hourglass. Every molecule within him resists, and yet he knows that he too can break, that imprisonment can break a prisoner to such a degree that he is no longer capable of any moral resistance. Sometimes that little heap of shivers even turns back to the very prison van which brought him to Milan.

Only he who learns how to breathe underwater will survive in the aquarium. You have to get used to the fact that everything drifts past, every impression is muddled and blurred. But, having taken the plunge, at long last you risk opening your eyes, and you understand that it’s really not all that lonely down there. A fly flies busily back and forth above the bed. A snail secretes its slime, leaving behind a silver trace on the wall. Ants have founded colonies close to the door. As long as you don’t become an ant, watching them make their way about, observing how they follow invisible lines carrying the tiniest yet too-big grains, is an interesting way to kill time, and Gramsci has to think of how, when he was eleven, he would carry the registers—heavier than himself—in the land- registry office of Ghilarza, for eight, nine hours a day and on Sunday mornings too for nine lire a month, which was next to nothing but necessary, for ever since his father had been arrested they had no income and his mother didn’t dare ask for help, she didn’t want to be a beggar or admit to the shame, not in front of others and certainly not to herself. Nine lire a month, that was two pounds of bread a day. His mother Peppina would sew their worn-out socks late into the night, and the children did not dare desire a thing, for any desire would destroy the strictly established balance of we can manage.

His brother Mario steals the neighbour’s cat and has the baker cook it. Peppina stuffs him into his sisters’ clothes so he won’t run out of their one-storey house that is smack in the middle of Ghilarza, its pink lava-stone walls seemingly ashamed for the family too. And Gramsci thinks about how he escaped in order to watch rabbits dance in the moonlight, about how he pointlessly tried to chase off a fox with some stones but which only disappeared in an orange flash once a shot was fired off in the distance. About sitting on the outcroppings and looking over the fields, endless fields that, once considered, do not fit into these cells. About catching frogs and hedgehogs, about hiding in the bushes with a friend, waiting for a whole family of hedgehogs to come into the moonlight, mother, father and three little babies, their backs skewered with so many apples as to be almost unrecognizable. Then he and his friend jump up and put them wiggling and squeaking into a sack. They bring them back to Gramsci’s house where, for a few months, they stay in the courtyard. They catch roaches and beetles and let Gramsci feed them lettuce. He examines their stomachs and snouts and now, lying on his jailbed, he attempts to call to mind every one of their quills. He can’t, and has to think of the day he walked into the courtyard and they were gone, how he looked in every corner, tried to entice them with more salad greens, whistled, stamped his feet, even raised the sandy dust with a stick as if they’d buried themselves without a trace.

‘Somebody must’ve taken them,’ his sister says. ‘And eaten them.’

Perhaps Mario brought them to the baker, and they can’t hold it against him, they too were often dizzy with hunger. Gramsci thinks of his sister’s smile that hides the sadness in her face, he thinks of his brother Mario, how his mother would paint his feet black with shoe cream when the girls’ clothing no longer kept him from running off. He thinks of the smell of the saltworks. He thinks of Giulia’s thin neck, the small birthmark on her left shoulder blade. He thinks of her sitting in front of him, and he kisses her back which bends slightly forward and is so skinny you can see her spine, the ribs . . . she weighs 50 kilos, she should gain 10 at least, he wants to admonish her, and yet he simply caresses the range of her spine. Her hair stands up, everything is alive. He edges closer, embraces her, his fingers pull at her breasts, she leans back her head, suppresses her heavy breaths while Eugenia walks back and forth outside the door and he sees every single one of Giulia’s eyelashes as her lids start to flutter. He sees them and counts them and sees the pale blue in-between, reads it all as if a philological issue he was bringing closer through his analysis.

‘I imagine you smiling,’ he writes to Giulia, ‘and that makes me happy.’ Every second Monday he is allowed half an hour to write a letter, never more than two, and primarily to relatives, which prevents him from writing to Piero Sraffa and his comrades in the Party. But he can write to Giulia, and he writes her first of all. Even on days when he is feeling cheerless and apathetic, he writes her. Not a single day is allowed to pass, not a single one of these precious thirty minutes. Often he doesn’t even have enough time to correct what he’s written. Half an hour. Every two weeks.

Otherwise nothing has any meaning. Every day he reads six newspapers—apparently Trotsky has been expelled from the Party, Stalin has become the absolute ruler in Russia—but he doesn’t know which to trust, much less what information they have kept from him, as if he were an incompetent child. And what good are the headlines to him, now, when he can no longer be involved in politics? He does not write a single line about politics in his letters, it could harm him and, worse, the addressees, Giulia and Tania. He is haunted by the idea of doing something to last ‘for ever’, he writes his sister-in-law. That is the only possible response to the censor.

In addition to the papers, he receives one or two journals and once a month makes a random and crude selection of around thirty books from the prison library or from Tania: from Wilhelm Busch’s Max and Moritz to a chivalric romance novel where Sicily was located at the pole. He studies Russian and German, translates Grimm’s fairytales and learns Pushkin’s ‘The Squire’s Daughter’ by heart. But, contrary to what he had thought, it is difficult to study in prison. He is too tired, every night the warders jolt him from sleep. He doesn’t know whether it’s intentional or not, whether they enjoy torturing him or not, and which would be worse? He is angry, he wants to get up, but feels too weak. He closes his eyes. Giulia. Over and over again. Giulia. The thread which keeps him to the world. Even though he can now only remember her laugh with great difficulty.

‘You are my Japan,’ he writes to her. A place he cannot imagine. And if he fails to envision such an important and distant island, if he cannot manage to grasp it through his senses, then he no longer knows a thing. Nothing at all. And his own life is lost to him as well. It is November in the window now, a cut of November.

Giulia’s letters rarely reach him, and he wonders whether a few don’t get lost along the way, what with the double censor or, considering Eugenia, maybe even a triple one. The Soviet authorities, then the Italians . . . it’s a wonder anything arrives at all.

One morning, Gramsci is called to the prison director’s office. ‘A bit more quickly,’ the warden says to him when he arrives, a brief escape from the ghostly monotony, but the further they make their way down the corridor, the more uneasy Gramsci begins to feel. He doesn’t know how far they will go with their interrogation. He only knows that he will not say a thing. That he has to be certain he will not say a thing.

‘What does Kitai mean?’ the director asks, his explosive mass teetering dangerously forward in his chair.

China, Gramsci thinks, but stays silent. That was so easy, he could have looked it up in a dictionary.

‘And what does it have to do with Austria?’ he adds, squinting.

Gramsci hesitates. He can only guess, no, he cannot guess at all, how this letter connects Austria and China and what he is allowed to say and what he is not. He is playing a game of blind man’s buff against this man, about whom he knows nothing, and as to the content of the letter he only knows the words the man slams towards him, not the connections.

‘And who are the people having their sleds dragged by dogs?’ the director snaps.

Gramsci is fighting three opponents alone: the director, a cloze text and a censor. He knows that there is no way he can win. It’s time to retreat and give the letter up as lost, but to allow a piece of Giulia to be lost is even more impossible. He must at least see the few words, the one hundred or two hundred words, or read them if he cannot take them with him. He must concentrate, he doesn’t know the connections but he knows what she usually writes to him about. About her illnesses which have nothing to do with China or Austria, well, perhaps a little to do with Austria but definitely nothing to do with dogs and sleds. About her work, which could perhaps have something to do with sleds but which certainly would not mention either of the two countries. About the family which in its elegant city flat also has nothing to do with sleds. Without any doubt, however, she would tell him about their sons.

‘Do you even have a wife?’ Gramsci asks. ‘You do not seem to understand how a mother writes when she wants to tell the father about their child.’

All at once the director seems self-conscious; these 90 kilograms of superiority cannot win. He doesn’t have any children, but he does have a wife, and, well, at one point they had wanted children but no, it’s true, he doesn’t know the way a mother writes, though he would like to be able to imagine it, and the fact that he could misinterpret a child’s game for encryption, that he himself had such a difficult time differentiating between reality and deception, concerns him. He doesn’t know how to respond, he simply hands Gramsci the letter. And even if it is some kind of trap, he no longer cares to extend this moment any longer than necessary.

Gramsci smiles politely and leaves the office with a boyish bow. Out in the hallway, he has to keep himself from breaking into a run or even a skip. In the end, though the censor is always right, at least this one time he won. Back in his cell, he is finally able to read about Delio lying on his bed, to his right Austria, to his left China, Crimea by his legs, and by his head the people having their sleds pulled by dogs. Sled dogs. The first lesson in geography.