Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo opens with two conflicting scents. On the one hand, that of the ‘garden for the blind’ at the Villa Salina, “a pleasure strong if somewhat crude to the nose”. Proust-like, biographers have traced the smell to the author’s childhood stays at his mother’s family palace at Santa Margherita di Belice.
I suppose it would not do much good to one’s respectability to talk of a borderless world past the age of 30
The other smell is that of rotting flesh. The novel is set at the time of Garibaldi’s invasion of Sicily and the feudal social order it overturned. A young soldier of the Fifth Regiment had been wounded in the stomach and had gone to die, alone, in the garden of the Villa Salina. The discovery of the body and its “pile of purplish intestines” reminded the Prince of Salina that his family and its privileges were not as securely barnacled as all that. History was about to catch up with and overtake them.
Cut to September 2012 and to the finding of another dead man. The setting this time was Portman Avenue, a tranquil suburban street in west London. The body was twisted and the brains had spilled out of the dashed skull.
Unlike with Lampedusa’s corpse there was no uniform that would fix (and perhaps placate) it as one of the many necessary by-products of a unique set of events. It was just a T-shirt, a pair of jeans, some Angolan currency and a mobile phone. And yet this body too was a reminder that history has a nasty habit of violating the leafiest of bowers.
It was clear the young man had fallen from a great height and died of his injuries. Portman Avenue is located under a Heathrow flight path. It did not take long for the coroners and the police to work out that the body was that of a stowaway on a flight from Angola. By the time the wheels were lowered on approach to Heathrow he would have been close to death from extreme cold and lack of oxygen.
Using information stored on his mobile phone the police managed to piece his story together. Last week, BBC News took up that story in a short documentary feature called The Man Who Fell to Earth. It was one of the most moving pieces of journalism I’ve ever come across.
Jose Matada was from Mozambique. Having survived the floods that periodically ravage that country, he spent time working in the mines for a pittance and later as a handyman in South Africa. We know this because the London police traced one of his former employers, a Jessica Hunt, who described him as kind, gentle, and full of hope.
In his last text message to his family he said he was leaving to look for a better life in Europe. Only the borders of fortress Europe meant he had to find an unconventional way of getting there.
He now lies in an unmarked grave in London, one poignant step up from the thousands of Africans who lie at the bottom of the Mediterranean. It was the same borders that caused, indirectly perhaps but no less surely, to their deaths. Matada’s family in Mozambique is one of very many waiting for a phone call that will never come.
I suppose it would not do much good to one’s respectability to talk of a borderless world past the age of 30. John Lennon got away with it at 31, but he was John Lennon.
The common mortal substitute is for one at least to keep in mind that borders are bloodthirsty by nature. Certainly we grow up thinking that they’re worth dying, and presumably killing, for. Nationalism requires that belief, at least in principle.
But that’s not my topic at this time. The type of death I have in mind is that of the people who got killed trying to cross the Berlin Wall, for example. Their names can be seen today in various places where the Wall stood. They’ve become tourist attractions, but then so has Auschwitz. What strikes me about those names and stories is the uselessness of it all.
As I write, I have beside me a copy of National Geographic. It’s from 1982 and carries adverts for the Canon F1 and the Datsun Bluebird. The title of the main article is Two Berlins – A Generation Apart. In the first paragraph, the researcher asks the mayor of East Berlin what would happen if the Wall were taken down. “What you are asking is a philosophic question. Let us get back to reality,” comes the terse reply.
One evening barely seven years later, guards at the Bornholmer Straße border crossing let the first group of East Germans through the gates. News images from the time show people jumping around and weeping with joy. They also show the faces of the border guards. Written across them is one question: Is this what the warnings, bullets, and bodies were about?
I once found myself discussing property investments with a friend and colleague who happens to be an expert on Cyprus. He told me that provided one could wait long enough, border zones made for excellent investment value. Thing is, borders may be real enough while they exist. But they never do so forever. When they collapse into memory, they become just another place where people buy homes to live as free men and women.
And this is my point really, that the ultimate banality of borders makes them unworthy recipients of our blood offerings.
The Berlin Wall may seem far removed, and in any case most of us today accept that it was a mindless instrument of chronic terror. But it’s worth remembering that for many at the time, it made sense (so to say). It probably even appeared necessary and unavoidable.
As do the walls and borders, physical or otherwise, of today. They include the ones built and maintained by those who say, “I am not a racist but ...”.
I would also add the borders manned (perhaps unwittingly) by MEPs who sit in their Villa Salinas and talk of the ‘threat’ and ‘burden’ of migration. We saw quite of lot of that last week.
When our Bornholmer Straße moment comes – and it will, as surely as night follows day – the memory of a thousand corpses will come back to haunt us. It was all so banal we will say, not worth a single drop of their blood.
mafalzon@hotmail.com