Madness of Ithaca

Its own grief is enough for each day, said Jesus in the mountain.

1.
That December day when I burnt all the manuscripts I had worked on for two decades, I knew I was doing a wise job.

Every day has its own December, and that is enough.

2.
I have said it repeatedly that I was never serious with literature. I always loved painting and chemistry.

Maybe this is the only explanation to the fact that I am a typical writer without ambition, totally indifferent towards what I write.

I am amongst those writers that have never read a published line from F. Rreshpja.

3.
When the door opened, a stranger blond woman appeared. She asked for someone, and I shivered.

He was a childhood friend of mine, whom I had dearly loved.
-He died yesterday, - I said – I just returned from the funeral.
-No, I just met him, - she said thoughtfully. -I thought he came here.
She approached the fire and took out a letter, - Here, this is it.
I shivered. A few days ago, he had asked me to draw a self-portrait.

"I can’t," -I said, "my wrists are damaged. Don’t ask any more drawings from me!"
-Do it, he said.
And I wrote this poem titled Vignette.
-This is what I asked for, he said, I didn’t want it drawn.

I published the poem.

After seventeen years of silence as an author registered at Index expurgatorius. M. Z. intervened.
Many months later, while we were eating a poor lunch with salami, seated on a cement stool of a park, I wanted to share this story, but I wasn’t sure it was true.

However, this wasn't the madness of Ithaca.
Another Ithaca was awaiting.

VIGNETTE

A lonely willow covered with winter
Abandoned by birds and leaves
Wind, as a squirrel jumps over the wood
With the cone of rain within teeth.

Happy nights like bells
Ringing in the branches of memory
Drawn in the background of thunders
Little moons that autumn sheep ate.

Fallen from the broken glass of the sky
The crystal of ice stars the nights
And over the pastels of the snow whitens
The sad willow, unlucky as Serembe.

4.
Who was that great Blind man singing my destiny?

5.
The last time I saw a crowd of writers, was a Wednesday.
The winter day in every week of my life.

I was returning from the Central Committee. The Secretary, R. A. announced that I would only get convicted for a short time. He transmitted the order, to go to Sh. R. "I will never come," I told him.And I left.

On my way I saw Xh.S. He was desperately sitting on the side of a sidewalk. He told me to head towards Dritero's house. "Why?" I asked.

A meeting was to be held at the Association. The group of writers were in the bar and outside. No one greeted me.
But back then, I was a spoiled poet.

From a faraway table, I.K. was gazing me. May God protect you! I thought. You don’t have any talent as a diplomat if you look at me.
After a bit he called me. I pretended I didn’t listen.
-Ismail is calling you, - a writing commissar told me – don’t you hear him?
I didn’t know this writing commissar, so I got angry he talked to me like that. I didn’t know what on hell happened and I got offended.
Now this man is a dissident writer teaching me what handcuffs are.

7.
- Are you writing anything beautiful? – I asked as always.
-Why are you always asking me this question?
-Because in art, I am only interested in beauty.

8.
I never met Ismail. We saw each other once in 1982 in Tirana, but I didn’t talk to him. A meeting with me could destroy him.

9.
I stood up. The crowd of writers of E. H. kept spying with enemy eyes. Foreign! Enemy! Poor Albanian literature!,I thought.
Poor De Rada and Fishta!

Miserable small minded crowd. Curse of the forests and celluloses!

I turned my head and saw Ismail gazing at me. He stood up. "Where are you headed to, Ismail, to De Rada?"
We weren’t mentioning Paris back then.

10.
- Fred, where are you going? – someone asked me while eating.
- I am going to nail myself in my own cross.

I will never mention the name of this person. Maybe I will return to these halls, maybe this mess will have ended. I won’t mention many other names. God forgive them!
I never talked about the writers of my birth city; they all agreed for my arrest. The writers of my city were too unimportant to harm me.This was the person that destroyed me.

Maybe he regretted as he speaks highly of me for two decades.
I would rather have him cut my throat.

I have tried cuts: they don’t hurt as much as the betrayal of a friend.

I have been more betrayed than cut.

11.
So, the most ruthless of my enemies were my friends.
Thank God, I don’t have anyone left anymore.

12.
Out, at the door of the organization I met Petro Marko. Intelligent but guileless, he knew nothing about me. He left the meeting, and we went to have a drink at Vjosa, at the top floor, in our favorite corner.
My God, how happy I was at the company of a person who loved me so much and I never understood why. The last times I went to meet him after so many years, I was unlucky. He was too sick.
I arrived too late in Tirana. Sappho waited for me.

13.
When I came the second time, it was night. But he had died. He had left the bequest to be buried in his birth village.
Sappho waited for me again. As a statue of grief. Dear Petro, I grieved you with tears, but I didn’t have money to come over there, by the sea. I am an old politically convicted, unemployed, penniless man.

From that night I should have understood the madness of Ithaca!

14.
I went to the hotel and cried for Petro Marko. Then I prayed for my mother and remembered all my dead, that night in that expensive hotel of Tirana, hotel of broken glasses. Hotel without linens.

15.
1991. It was the first time after so many years that I was meeting a crowd of writers. Gloomy and choleric.
Mad anti-Enverists. Declared dissidents in the columns of “Drita”. Ismail was somewhere far, like beyond time. Bilal wasn’t there anymore. Ah, his dream for Çamëri, for the white sheep in the dusk, for the moon of reeds.
Jakov had died. Even Lasgush. Only those mad anti-Enverists had remained, miserable and mediocre, as always, available for hymns and epic poems, among stairs and corridors.

If I meet Dhimitër Xhuvani, then God loves me!

16.
Twenty years ago, in one of the investigation rooms in the old prison of Tirana, I confronted a stubborn witness. He insisted that I had offended Enver Hoxha. When I saw him crying for the holiness of E. H. I punched him.
They handcuffed me and broke my bones.
Now after twenty years, he came and shook my hand.
-Careful!, - I said – I have a broken hand, as you know.
-I heard that you are not a member of Party X.
-I am too determined of the freedom that I have myself won. I lost everything for this freedom.
-So, you are an Enverist, -he said.

I punched him too hard with an old prison technique in the stairs of the Association. He fell behind. His mouth got full of blood. I felt ashamed. I wanted to help him but I couldn’t even touch him. Disgust!

17.
In a meeting he swore to kill me. In my court he sent a declaration against me. I, myself, never attacked him.
To be honest this also came from my disgust. Lately, I have been defending him when attacked by his friends.
-What is your problem with him? – I said – you were his friends. Now you ask to be his wolves. Shame on you!

Surely, this was part of the madness of the Island I had myself invented.

18.
I have kept regular notes with personal research and testimony from foreign press, unpublished observations from the political life, those I have been able to guard with documents from secret meetings and special foreign missions. These make some deposed files that will maybe be published from someone else.

19.
Ithaca was the madness of Homer. If he had gotten off again in an island of that kind, he would have become an ordinary romancier like Varnalisi. The trophy of Ulysses over them shouldn’t be true, and there wouldn’t have been pathos and pleasure in the bed of Penelope for the old couple. Centuries later, this would have been called a happy end.

20.
The storming of Troy was left behind. The old singer left the arenas of blood blinded and majestic, towards the island of his dream. For all matters, he should have sought a new Troy, and not fought with the poets of old, where defeat awaited him: after you have read the end of the Odyssey, you realize that another Illiad can never be written again.

21.
I have always thought that Ithaca was Homer's folly, and that the whole tribe of poets befell this fate. The day I wrote and recited Ithaca, a prominent poet denounced me to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. I decided to publish this poem. It will probably be my last publication.

No, islands do not exist.
There is no Ithaca in this world!
Somewhere, everywhere,
Rain, you little infant crying for thousands of years
For your unconsoled light,
Ithaca appears and disappears,
Under thunder passions.

I have an old waiting and
I don’t know where to leave it.
Now I should have been somewhere beyond the rain.
At the window the naked child
Watches me with eyes of water.

Day after day I need to rush towards something that isn’t there
I am not an invented Ulysses,
But I did invent my own Ithaca,
As I have a vital need for islands.

22.
Ithaca is a dream. It is the desire to rest a day under a blue sky, after thirty-five years of cursed fugitive from a Poseidon with the name E. H.

What is that endless death God, made in six days?!
The seventh day he got tired and rested.

But my Sunday is lost.

23.
Here is the Ithaca that I invented:
Some wretched poets, disgusted by E. H., the failed rhyme-liners, had long heard that the muses were somewhere. All their lives waiting for manna, like the Jews in the desert, mad and ignorant. Maybe sometimes I will talk, sometimes when I recover from the allergy, but when oh God? These people have defeat inside; these people are defeated by themselves.

24.
I had a lot of fun. But when I'm sad, I joke.

Ithaca again. Association of Writers and Artists of Albania. Here they refused to accept me (although a senior member since 1967) but later they quickly offered me a large salary which I, of course, despised. This is the Criminal-Literary House of the Labor Party. Well, those days I was in the middle of Tirana with no money and no hotel

25.
Homer is serious: with the blindness of talent, he may have discovered his birthplace, somewhere under the olives of the island, by the shores where only the gods used to shepherd.

But there is no God anymore. Homer now deals with small things, with pigs, counts sheep, and no longer has the squeamishness with which he talks about myths.

26.
The true artist is called to this world to sing the beauty of the human soul, to sing shocks and goodness, to perfect man. The aristocracy calls the artist to denature him, to make him a preacher, a magician of myth. Here is the difference between mythology and art. For the magician, creation is treason, while the artist is a demiurge.

27.
In antiquity, Lucian asked: who are you dear, and how do you want to become a god if you bark? This aristocracy, calls the artist to bark. If the pharaohs change, so does the way of barking. It’s not only the socialist realism that barks. All political poetry that we read every day is a bark. There are newspapers that when you take them in hand, you feel as if they will bite you.

28.
Even the simplest of woods shelters in its memory all the colors and shapes of the leaves it used to have and knows how foolish it is to bloom while winter hasn’t passed: such bravery is usually paid with all the flowers and all the leaves.

Then, where is Ithaca?

29.
Oh God! A man has the right to rest one day, after the horrors that only the mind of a great Blind man could conjure up.
No one has needed islands more than I have.
But all the islands are illusive.

30.
All my relatives that I used to shelter in my small room, where very few things from the belongings of a poet have remained from the raids, checks and investigators, know that I burn everything I write.
I am comforted by the fact that none of them have ever reprimanded me for this.

31.
I was waiting for my day. I certainly knew that my day was very far away; we were separated by mountains of time. I spent many nights in front of the glassless window, staring at the stars like a fool, in a temperature of minus 10 degrees C, wrapped in the blanket of the investigation.

32.
It has occurred to me, in the mornings, while waiting in the yard of the jail, my bowl got filled with snow.I was a disobedient poet. But I bared much because I knew my day was somewhere: a clear blue island where I would seriously deal with poetry at last, to show people how much I loved them.

33.
I had an investigator who wanted to kill me with a typewriter because I did not sign the papers that had language errors. I have had interrogators handcuffing me until my fingernails bled. Then they would bite me like dogs on my shoulder and arm. I saw my flesh in his teeth!      

34.
All this I am ready to endure again, but to be told that one of these investigators has become anti-Enverist and Democratic, I can't stand. Anyone who would say such a thing to me would be my worst enemy.

35.
Sick and delicate, several times I was crushed to the cement of the dead, with a terrible guardian over my head that wanted to know how a man dies from acute hemorrhage, and how he reacts when they try to put out the cigarette in his eye.

I was sure that this guardian was not human, otherwise, in time I would have cursed the entire human race.

I have no intention of writing about such things, but I want to say that I have endured a lot.

37.
Pushed from an old beautiful spell, after I burned manuscripts I had worked on for years, I went to search for writing machine strips and envelopes.
Two nights ago, I had read Homer.
The night before, I had stayed with one of my best friends, dead.  

So it wasn’t the time for poetic nonsense. As I said, it was December.

Spring was too far.

39.
Black birds ran in the air as if frightened by a coming winter. I felt sorry for the birds. It suddenly occurred to me
a terrible fear: mother!
She needed care. She slept.
Beautiful, slightly pale, with long black hair thrown to one side.
Oh, mother, if you run away to the stars, I don't know what to do in this world!
It would not be long before I would kiss the hands of the man I loved as God by the grave!      

41.
You have no right to exploit my people, to violate the dignity of the poor!
This is the message of Providence given by Isaiah (3:13-15) in the Old Testament.
Only in Albania a minister who steals gives an interview.
Only in Albania, a man steals ten meters of pipe, and leaves a city without water, a city that has had aqueducts since before Christ!

42.
My beloved country! My pitiful and wretched earth!
Like all poets, I had invented an Ithaca. But who will sell me now?
Maybe I'll be back for another solitude.
I probably won't go back, ever. Only God knows that.

43.
My country has had the worst fate in the whole East. This fate must follow it again as in our Balkan ballads. Hope is a virtue. However, hasn't it been said that there are also those who are sick of virtue?

But, after all, each day has enough of its own sorrow, said Jesus on the mountain. God will think for tomorrow.

46.
My Sunday is lost!
Now I can say that I have never had a Sunday in my life.

I was very unfortunate in the calendar of days, I felt especially the absence of Sunday very much.          

47.
A bird fell outside. It is the spirit of the wood that is dying under the misfortune of the moon.I wrote that the rains are the pride of the sky phenomena.

48.

I am sorrowful like the leaves falling in a rainy aquarelle. I received a letter today, from a person I once loved.After twenty years.
The sword has fallen, there is no more war of classes.

49.
There was once a watercolor of rain that flowed like the tears of the world, human!
I wrote on the back of the paper.

There used to be a fall of leaves wrapping around your bare shoulders.

50.
I turned my back to the day, not to see how the island I had dreamed of so much for decades, all disappear.

Farewell Ithaca!

April 1992