T-HE JOURNEY
71
nomous sovereign mad voices of the multiplying city-states. I ask
myself whether they really exist. Tursi, Heraclea, Dolcedorme, Orsaz–
ja? Are they only names, or obliterated segments of a map? Is an
"independent socialist democratic republic" perhaps no more than
a mobile transmitter concealed in an attic, fondled by a trembling
ideologue: one as futile as Seguros?
And I am ready for sleep at last; the blood seems to
sink
to my
feet. In the privy there is still a faint light. I stand and piss against
the wall: a queer urine burning, relic of the volcanic wine? Standing
with patience I examine the names and the phallic drawings: the
faded socialist slogans and the indecipherable Greek. Sailors' obscenities
no doubt. Graffiti, thighs cracked open in emulation of the fissured
volcano, a carefully-drawn schooner. And I notice again (I had
seen it several times on my last trip, and in various cities) the strange
face that seems to stare at me, recently engraved: a Byzantine face,
yet Negroid too. The eyes are mismatched, one higher than the
other; there is a small triangular beard. Beneath the face is a thumbless
hand: three fingers slightly curled around a thin tube-a shepherd's
pipe, an oddly thin phallus, a sailor's great rope? Scrawled beneath
this
odd face, perhaps by the same hermetic scribe, are a few words
in Italian. Unusual words, I cannot make them out.
Then the mainland and Bari. The schooner left us three miles
south of the city.
It
swung inshore before dusk for a surreptitious
landing watched only by a small child, a girl gravely burned on the
left side of the face. An unnecessary precaution, one that compelled
us to scramble the last yards through water and up the beach. No
carabinieri walked this beach; there was only the silent child. The old
city was white and African on its promontory, and the fortress cathe–
dral squatting among terracotta palazzos, beyond the ruin of the
harbor.
Seguros walks ahead of me, small and indomitable, burdened
by his mission. His equipment is elaborately trussed to his back and
extends well above his head. The ditto machine rises there, and the
long roll of maps, while the sack of leaflets and proclamations bulges
from between the shoulders: a brown and fleshless lump. He carries the
typewriter in one hand, the cardboard suitcase in the other. Seguros:
the little man of burning faith, who expects even here in Bari to come
upon Latin compatriots who will offer both money and adherence
