Giuseppe Garibaldi: A Private Life

1881, Caprera

The desk has to be arranged before the hand is asked to work, because disorder on the table tends to become disorder in sequence, and sequence, if once allowed to decay, rarely restores itself without distortion; so I place the letters from the mainland to the left, the parliamentary reports beneath them, the earlier notebooks to the right, the medical paper I have no intention of rereading underneath the blotter where it cannot intrude visually even if it continues, by implication, to intrude physically, and only then do I permit the pen to be lifted, though even that movement now requires more calculation than it once did, since the fingers resist closure in damp weather and the joints object to effort they formerly accepted without consultation. Caprera encourages method because it offers little else. The sea repeats itself below the rocks with a regularity that could be mistaken for tranquillity if one had never served in places where repetition is merely another name for attrition. Ministers write from the mainland in phrases that appear generous until one sorts them. Newspapers perform gratitude more lavishly when the man being thanked is at sufficient distance not to correct the arrangement. Italy prefers me commemorative, which is a way of saying that the state finds a past Garibaldi more useful than a present one, since the past one can be quoted selectively without requiring consultation. I prefer documents because documents, however often abused, can still be reordered, contested, annotated, and corrected, while statues cannot.

If I do not put these matters into a sequence defensible on its own terms, then sequence will be supplied from outside, and it will inevitably be neater than events were, which is always suspicious. There are already several convenient Garibaldis in circulation: the red-shirted improviser useful for patriotic anniversaries, the troublesome radical who ought to have obeyed the monarchy more quietly, the incorruptible patriot who wanted only unity and never strategy, the restless adventurer who mistook audacity for politics. None is entirely false. That is what makes them serviceable. Falsehood in history is most durable when composed of accurate fragments extracted from faulty order. I have spent enough of my life observing how battles are remembered to know that memory begins simplifying before the smoke has cleared. The same rule applies to nations. They tidy themselves retrospectively because the untidy origin is too compromising for later administrations. I have no special confidence that these pages will escape such handling. I have only the narrower confidence that leaving them absent would assist the wrong interpreters.