(A Via Dolorosa that many years later I would walk in the middle of the night, in Jerusalem, my eyes full of tears . . . for the cold, for the stirring emotions. That long, sweet, painful, and unforgettable steep flight of stairs.)
I focused, reading more carefully the information available on this singular pathology: case studies, statistics, timing. Among the motivations that can drive a pyromaniac to set a fire, which are usual either/or and rarely coincide, I found some that might have acted on Arbus simultaneously: having ruled out the entries “vandalism,” “personal profit,” and “concealment of a corpse” (at least I hope . . .), the others rang familiar to my old classmate’s character: “excitement” . . . “mental disturbance” . . . “extremism” . . . “discouragement” (whatever that term is supposed to mean . . .), and then perhaps “vendetta,” yes, vendetta . . . but a vendetta against whom, exactly? Against what?
Discouragement . . . But had Arbus ever once been discouraged in his life, or perhaps I should put it, had anyone or anything ever once actually managed to discourage him? Perhaps this was the chief detail of the whole story: from age thirteen on, from as much as I had been able to see of him and understand, nothing could intimidate Arbus, nothing and no one was sufficiently powerful or threatening or seductive to sway him from his intentions. In a certain sense, not even he could meddle with whatever direction he had set off in . . . For this reason as well, at school we considered him not to be entirely human, and it was also for this virtue or character flaw of his that I had made friends with him, and that I admired him and, to some extent, feared him. This world did not contain a valid deterrent, a threat, or a penalty of sufficient gravity to inhibit him. He was proof against pleas, promises, rewards, warnings, and intimidations. Deep down, I thought, with a shiver of appalled realization, he wasn’t all that different from another protagonist of this book . . .
On one thing, I am in agreement with the psychologists who had been keeping him under observation: his almost total inability to express his emotions. And the shame that he felt, by proxy, when it was someone else who did it for him: first of all, his mother.
“LIKE NERO . . .?!”
“Yes, Nero. Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, who went by Nero, an underestimated emperor . . . slandered by history. I know that this will make you laugh, but it was him I was thinking about . . . that textbook figure, the madman from the movies, who plucks at his lyre, rapt with inspiration, while Rome is in flames. I was every bit as inspired, and in fact there was a music playing inside and outside me, I could distinctly hear the melody above the crackling of the flames, or perhaps it was as if that sound of cracks and pops were following the rhythm of a dance, a village dance, first slow, then faster and faster, its pace picking up . . . as if possessed by the devil. I was incapable of resisting the impulse: in fact, it seemed to me that it was neither useful nor even reasonable to try. And once the fire was raging, I was proud that it had been my hand that had caused it all, and I rejoiced as I gazed at the consequences . . . in observing that if I set out to do a certain thing, well, then, that thing happened . . . it was real, and I was real, too, seeing that it was only thanks to me that it had happened. Everything was burning, burning . . .”
THE CONNECTIONS IN THE NETWORK of my mind can be extremely fast or quite slow, depending on whether the elements to be connected are or are not dear to my heart. When the material it’s working on has no immediate importance for me, my brain zips along at stunning speed, a matter of nanoseconds and the most unthinkable relations are established, the farthest-flung notions come barreling in on me en masse; but just let the matter at hand have something to do with me, and my mind seizes up, gets distracted . . . when I have the person I would have liked to tell X and Y in front of me, just like that, X and Y vanish into thin air, and my mind turns blank, empty. I can say nothing.
Without the idea of asking him while he was here, visiting me, even grazing my mind, and getting a confirmation of the fact from him directly, two or three days after his confession, I had a sudden and unsettling flash in my head, accompanied by an unusual cold tremor in my hands, and the instantaneous certainty that the fire that broke out in the Arbus home, when he was still just a boy, and which had destroyed half the apartment, all his mother, Ilaria’s clothing and her possessions and her memorabilia, as well as all that remained of his father’s library, after the professor had abandoned his family in order to pursue his (ridiculous) dream of sexual happiness, was due not to a short circuit in the electrical wiring as had always been claimed, but had been intentionally set by my classmate. Why, of course, of course . . . of course! I said to myself, while my hands, rubbed vigorously back and forth on my thighs, regained their warmth and finally stopped trembling. Why are the simplest things always explained in incongruous and mysterious ways, when all you’d really need to do is keep your eyes open and apply basic logic to work your way back to the true causes? Knowing my classmate as I did, and his many eccentricities, why had it never occurred to me that he was guilty of that arson? The spotlight on what had happened that day should have flicked on instantly, when he had told me about the blaze he had set, when he pitilessly burned all his sister Leda’s dolls: all that had changed was the order of magnitude of the fire, from the balsa-wood dollhouse to the apartment inhabited by flesh-and-blood human beings. The members of his family. But if that episode from his adolescence hadn’t been enough, still, how had I failed to see when he told me about how he had set fire to the woods?
“SUNDAYS ARE TERRIBLE. I didn’t know what to do. For that matter, up there in the mountains a Sunday is a day that’s no different from all the other days of the week, and yet I felt the crushing boredom as if I were in the city, in August. And at the same time, I felt a strange excitement. If it weren’t for the fact that the language those damned priests taught us simply turns my stomach, I’d say that I had fallen into a mystical state of mind, that’s right, mystical, or else prehensile, on the alert. The woods were silent: just a faint breeze passing through the beech branches, a creaking sound here and there, the rustling of those wonderful places. And that murmuring tore at my heart and I pricked up my ears, trying to hear something inaudible . . . a hiss, a hidden lament . . . the presence of something alive that wasn’t just the sound of the trees and of the animals hidden in their trunks or high in their branches. It almost annoyed me to see the incredible towering height of those trees, my head spun when I looked up at the light piercing the lofty foliage of those beeches. Seventy-five feet . . . a hundred . . . massive trunks rocketing upward, like so many accusations leveled against the sky, pointing heavenward. Hundreds of beeches all around me, nothing but beeches, such incredible monotony. Why all this squandered space, why this repetition?
“I was on duty all alone, that day, since in fact it was a holiday, and I was driving aimlessly around in my jeep, like a layabout with no idea of where to go. Driving at random I found myself emerging, in defiance of probability, in the same clearing, as if I’d been driving around in circles. I was supposed to monitor an area so vast that the very word ‘monitor’ loses its meaning. And monitor what, after all? Make sure that the ants were doing their jobs? Or that some wing nut wasn’t lurking behind a boulder, wearing a checkered hat with earflaps, ready to gun down some unsuspecting bear? I hadn’t seen a single bear or wolf in months. They must have moved to higher altitudes to escape the heat. I like the wilderness and the solitude, but that day I perceived it like a fault, some burden of guilt. Guilt for what? Of the many greater-or-lesser possibilities, perhaps the sin of not loving. Failing to love myself, first and foremost, and also failing to love other people. And if I’m going to be truthful, failing to love even the places into which I had withdrawn, fooling myself into the scornful belief that woods and animals were less hostile and unpleasant to me than human company. I had thought they were ideal subjects for my study and devotion. But who was I to take upon myself the duty to protect them? Wasn’t I, rather, the creature who needed protecting, who neede
d care? And yet the very idea made me laugh. Yes, certainly, me, me, me . . . what’s the sense of saying it, thinking it? Me, me, me . . . what does this obsessive first person singular even mean?
“The stillness of the summer day was reaching an unbearable point. A breaking point. I stopped the jeep and got out. The dense layer of dried twigs, leaves, and ferns crunched under my boots. Then I sat down on a rock, my head bowed. I tried to remember, with fury, with care and precision, undertaking an immense effort of the will. And, I don’t know how, I remembered everything, all of it, from the first minute of my conscious life until the very instant I had stepped out of that jeep. It was the only time that I managed to see and grasp all at once my entire existence. A portentous thing, it all appeared to me, laid out in the correct order. Things had gone exactly as they were meant to go, up till then.
“As I raised my eyes, I noticed one tree that stood out from all the others, a particular beech, ancient, stout, with massive limbs, concealed beneath sparse foliage. As it had grown, it had managed to keep the other trees at a distance, creating beneath it a circular clearing at least fifty paces deep.
“I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life, neither before that day nor since. But I suddenly had an urge for a cigarette and so I went back to the jeep to see if my work colleague had by any chance left a pack in the door pocket. He had. I pulled out the pack and opened it: it contained four national-brand cigarettes and a lighter. It was against the rules to smoke, of course, since that was one of the main reasons for forest fires, but my coworker smoked anyway, taking all conceivable precautions. I would do the same thing. As I leaned forward to shut the door of the jeep, my gaze darted behind the passenger seat, where there was a two-and-a-half-gallon gas can. Practically full. My coworker had filled it up down in the valley, seeing that there would be two holidays in a row, the Saturday and the Feast of the Assumption, and there was a chance we’d have to use the chain saw. I put the pack of cigarettes back, after extracting the lighter, and, gas can in hand, I went back to the rock where I’d been sitting before.
“I looked around again: the woods were stupendous but inanimate, it looked like a charming photograph, odiously beautiful, artistic, in short. And I, as you know, hate poetry. I hate it. I wish I could put it to death. We’d be so much better off if beauty just vanished, replaced by something simpler. Right there, before me, reared up that beech tree unlike all the others, with a monstrous array of branches beginning just ten feet off the ground, while all its neighbors simply rose smoothly into the air. It had to be at least two hundred years old. Arrogant, vain. For centuries it had been standing there, pushing upward, elongating its increasingly massive and heavy scaffolding of branches. Muscular branches. I went over to the base and poured at least a quarter of the fuel can onto the dry kindling that surrounded it. The foliage and litter, dry as paper, drank up the gas, the wet stain vanished in an instant. Then I moved two hundred paces farther on and did the same thing, pouring another quarter can at the foot of a second beech, and a hundred paces off to the right, the rest of the can at the base of the only fir that had grown in that stand of trees: that’s why it had caught my eye, bright and smooth among the darker, gnarly trunks.
“I gave the fir tree the honor of going first. Like any conscientious forest ranger, I carried in the breast pocket of my shirt the booklet with the park regulations: I tore out a couple of pages and crumpled them up, then I patted the trunk of the fir and lit the ball of paper.
“The fir tree burst into flame in an instant. The fire enveloped it and started creeping around the trunk. It seemed to lick the bark without touching it, as if it were running upward like a liquid, with some misguided understanding of gravity . . .
“I followed the same procedure with the second beech, which struggled to catch fire, perhaps because I had only sprinkled it with a little gasoline, half a gallon at most. As a gesture of encouragement, I tossed the manual of park regulations into its flames: it fanned out, spreading the remaining pages, and then lifted into the air, charred in an instant. At that point, I turned to go back, climbing up toward the huge beech with the frightening branches. Behind me I began to hear the unmistakable crackling of the dry twigs and leaves scattered across the ground and a truly wonderful, harsh scent began to fill my nostrils, nothing like the stench of plastic from that time I had burned Leda’s dolls: a living, animate perfume, an essence so inebriating that I felt stunned at the thought I’d been able to even call the time I’d existed until then, before filling my lungs with that aroma, ‘life’ . . . you’re welcome not to believe me, but I swear to you that there’s no experience on earth so delicate and intense.
“Having done what I’d set out to do, I sit back down on the rock and look up at the old coppery tree. At its base, the flames leap high . . . twisting . . . the red . . . the red . . .”
IT MUST HAVE just been an effect of the light pouring in through the window, but once again I had the sensation that the gleam on the smudged lenses of Arbus’s eyeglasses was a reflection of flames. His voice quavered.
“. . . THE BRIGHT COLOR OF BLOOD . . . but it’s my blood being spilled . . . and this hemorrhage is perhaps the happiest event of my life.”
“WHEN THE BLAST OF HEAT became unbearable, and the flames on the ground began to draw closer with furtive, serpentine movements, I grabbed the empty fuel can and ran toward the jeep. I drove uphill, as far as possible from the fire, and then abandoned the jeep and continued on foot, clambering up a rock ridge. Having reached the summit, on a barren outcropping, I turned back to observe the panorama.
“My deed had begun to transform it.
“At least a dozen big trees were burning right out to the tips of the highest branches swaying in the air . . . the incredibly long arms seemed to be trying to hail some rescuer, but instead they managed only to transmit the fire to the neighboring trees. Where the trees were close enough that they almost touched, the flames leaped from one to another, and on the tree that had just been set aflame it blazed with an impetuous vigor. Crushed and suffocated under the scaffolding of branches, the plumes of dark smoke from the burning underbrush suddenly burst forth in fearsome pillars, spinning around their center . . . animated internally by reddish glows, struggling to make their way through the foliage, shoving it aside in their furious ascent, as if yearning to breathe . . . and as I watched them rise toward the sky, scattering sparks in all directions, I thought to myself that that was just the beginning. The beginning. I uttered those words over and over again, through compressed lips. Then I sat down on the fuel can to enjoy the show.”
“AFTER A FEW HOURS, the fire had spread in all directions. It was methodical. Toward evening, the wind began to blow, produced by the immense heat. It was blowing toward where I sat, from on high I could see the front of the fire marching along, with the flames leaning forward and suddenly shaking with fury, like waves in an ocean storm, heading straight for me. As they gradually drew nearer, I could make out the windmilling flames that burst out of the gray cloud, whirling around on themselves before vanishing, swallowed up by the smoke, like flashes in a summer tempest. Even though I was high above, I felt a scalding blast dry the evening’s humidity, and it warmed me up. I also noticed, to my amazement, that a number of large long-plumed birds, instead of fleeing the flames, seemed to be attracted by them . . . they floated above the fire like garishly colored kites, and then fluttering in an irregular and awkward manner, they dropped lower still, perhaps lured in by those sudden bursts of light, and at a certain altitude, stunned by the smoke and hit by a blast of unbearable heat, they were instantly burned alive, mummified, and, still beating their charred wings, they plunged headfirst into the fire. One after another. Playfully, I pretended that I was shooting them with a rifle and bringing them down. I’d take aim at one, line it up in my crosshairs, following the zigzag pattern of its suicidal flight, wait for the right moment, when the feathers of the incautious bird were just about to be incinerated by the blazing gust of the flam
es, and then I’d pull the imaginary trigger, making a noise with my mouth, ptew-ssh! and the bird, hit dead center, would stiffen, and then drop in a nosedive into the fire.
“I killed dozens of them like that.
“The night was every bit as surprising: a charade of fire accompanied by a sound I’d never heard before. It was a dull roar formed of tiny sputters, pops, hisses, lacerations, that wound up turning into a wind. I felt no fear, not even when a sharp explosion roughly two hundred yards from where I was sitting signaled that the flames had reached the jeep and taken possession of it. In my soul, the euphoria had been replaced by an absolute sense of serenity, which allowed me to stay up all night without feeling any emotion whatsoever, placid, self-contained, focused.
“The next morning there were no longer pheasants flying over the blaze, but instead helicopters and—with a deplorable delay in their arrival, for which I at the time was grateful, because it allowed me to enjoy the show much longer than I already had—a couple of large firefighting aircraft. They came roaring out from behind the mountain and for the rest of the morning, slow and noisy, they kept passing overhead, roughly once every half hour, dropping boxcar loads of liquid onto the fire, but the minute they dropped it that liquid seemed to vaporize into the air, and to hit only such a small and imprecise part of the blaze that not even a hundred of those airplanes opening their bellies all at the same time would have been capable of dousing it. No, my fire would never be extinguished. My battle was just beginning, I decided . . . it was just beginning. But suddenly I felt tired. Terribly tired. Hollowed out. Something wasn’t adding up anymore. What was that? What battle had I been talking about? Was there a war raging or had I just dreamed it? There’s no such thing as a fire that burns forever: either someone puts it out, or it will burn out on its own. Thinking back on what I had done, from the moment in which I had first laid eyes on the gas can, I didn’t think of it as a mistake, on my part, or a crime, but something worse, far worse: an act of idiocy. I was nothing but a pathetic loon, that’s what I was. My exhaustion and emptiness were transformed into dismay. The chain of events was made up of a series of weak and deformed links. A stupid little maniac . . . a cowardly, solitary cretin . . .
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