II
The Heron
Whenever Maddalena went away I fell into a breezy, if somewhat bewildered, exaltation. The house, completely at my disposal, became a kingdom unexpectedly bestowed upon me by fate. Once again, who knows why, the rooms took on the fascination of unexplored places, despite the fact that in reality I knew them perfectly well. I had made several interesting discoveries, such as old maps, books and notebooks full of writing in an unknown language, and instruments whose purpose I couldn’t figure out. “The Dane’s stuff,” I had quickly concluded.
With a slightly quickened heartbeat and a touch of euphoria I would begin again to explore the house. Sometimes, for a change, I would just go through it from top to bottom with no apparent purpose. I would climb up and down the stairs, the stone ones below, the wooden ones leading to the upper floors, pass through half empty rooms, closets, and the odd shaped and useless spaces outside them, and arrive precipitously on the balcony. There I would stop for a moment, looking down through the frightening cracks between the planks at the pavement of the cortile below.
I could hear the creaking of the furniture and the high pitched sound of borers in the wood when I stretched out on the floor or curled up on an old sofa whose worn out springs stuck out stiffly like the bones of an aged man. At times the squeaks of a family of mice in a nest under the floor would reach my ears. Or the call of the screech owl. There was no sound I loved more. That sound was for me the king of all the sounds in existence and conferred upon the house an inexpressible dignity. I often tried to surprise a screech owl. I would climb up to the attic with infinite circumspection, making my way to a large dormer left open in all seasons, but as soon as my foot touched the roof tiles the bird would have stopped calling and all I could manage to catch of him would be a distant rustle of wings I wasn’t even quick enough to locate.
The children of Ontàns used to tell me, with an echo of fear in their voices, that the call of that bird was bad luck, that the screech owl alighted on houses when someone was about to die. I had no arguments to contradict them, but I rejected their opinion instinctively and continued to reserve a privileged place in my thoughts for the screech owl. And every time I heard one call, I was taken by an irrational urge to fly down the stairs and follow a road, any road, and go off — who knows where.
On certain nights other animals must have used our house as a meeting place, and the next day I would notice a sharp musky smell still in the air in closed places: the scent of badgers, hedgehogs, wild rabbits, foxes, polecats. Our house was too open, too solitary, and too neglected not to give wild animals the idea that it could be entered without risk and that it might even be a good place to make a den. During summer storms certain of them would seek shelter in the cellar or in the smoke darkened areas that ran along under the lean-to against the house. I often saw hawks and buzzards in the distance above the fields or the magredi, the scrubby floodplain, turning in slow circles, then falling by their own weight, as if struck by lightning, and disappearing into the poplars and alders. In spring and fall I discerned large birds flying in odd formations and followed them with my eyes until they disappeared.
One evening (the clouds were already thick and dense as gelatin) I heard an unusually loud noise on the roof of the shed. I thought some boy had gone up there to hide. I climbed up too, by holding on to wistaria trunks and grapevines, which grew along the wall like a system of vegetal ropes, arriving just in time to see a huge white fowl flailing about with wings and feet spread out in disorder. As soon as he saw me, or heard me, he tried to fly away and instead tumbled into the cortile in a scattered movement, half flight and half fall. A heron, an injured heron.... I didn’t have the courage to come to his aid, because, seen close up, birds repelled me as much as from afar they attracted me, appearing majestic and dominating, perhaps because they had succeeded in conquering the air, in ascending where I never would be able to, unless on board a balloon or dirigible.
The animal huddled behind some bundles of grape twigs. The next morning (all night I had dreamed about birds flying extremely high, or alighting on inaccessible branches of hornbeams and poplars) I got up at dawn, all excited, to go and look. I had never been up that early and things seemed unreal and weightless to me. The heron was gone. All I found was a few dirty white feathers and a nest-like hollow in a pile of dried grass. Maybe he had only been terribly tired from some long overseas flight, or maybe during the night a polecat with a prodigious sense of smell had caught him. Anyhow I would never know what had happened and this made me restless and uneasy. The hypothesis that he had flown off toward the north, toward immense woods or marshy taiga, and at night besides, without even letting me know, like a thankless and unacknowledged guest, provoked a faint resentment, as if he had stolen something from me. And yet his disappearance (what a splendid prison he’d have had, if I had succeeded in capturing him!) resembled the disappointments that happen in dreams, when we believe we have something at our fingertips and it vanishes. It had about it something inevitable, predetermined, necessary.
At that time it seemed natural to me that the other little boys went to school and equally natural that I stayed home. As I said, I didn’t ask about the why of things. Besides I had learned by myself to read and write and thus the matter was no real problem even for Maddalena. When I had one of the many childhood diseases, measles or mumps, I don’t remember which, Maddalena tossed a spelling book full of drawings onto my bed to help me deal with the boredom of convalescence. I quickly took an interest in it because next to every picture was the name of the thing represented.
I began to copy the letters with dried peas, first on a piece of cardboard and then on the floor. I haven’t the slightest idea why I didn’t use a pen or a pencil, and preferred instead this awkward method demanding endless patience and so much space.
If that convalescence had not been rather long I would certainly have ended up like everyone else, stifling my desire to move around as I sat at a wooden desk all scratched up with writing and drawings. Sooner or later Maddalena would have had to notice that by staying home past school age I was somehow illicit, like a stowaway or a slacker. Instead, by the time I regained full health, I was familiar with all the letters of the alphabet. Maddalena did not at first understand why the bedroom was inundated by a sea of peas, which scattered and crumbled under the wood of her clogs and which she sent flying toward the wall with vigorous kicks. Every now and then, but not often, she would sweep them up into a pile in a corner, from where I obstinately recovered them to go on with my game.
One day she opened the shutters and sat down on the bed to talk and joke with me. At a certain point she began to look steadily at the floor and the light dawned: “Giuliano, you’ve learned to write all by yourself! How in the devil did you do it, child?” She hugged me tight, so that my nose and mouth sank into her plump breast, whose softness, warmth and acrid perfume I had come to know in fervent moments like this one. While I tried to get away from her (not from lack of affection, it was just that Maddalena hugged me too rarely for me to have acquired the habit and a certain experience in reacting to that gesture), I made an effort to put myself somehow in her place, in order to understand what I had done that was so extraordinary — but I didn’t succeed. Now that I know I think that behind her enthusiasm there was also a satisfied self-interest. My tendency to do things by myself spared her a quantity of nuisances: enrolling me in school, taking me there, overseeing my homework....
From that day on she let me cover the floors with peas to my heart’s content. She would skip as she walked over them, so as not to jeopardize the writing. Then she took pains to bring home stubs of colored or indelible pencils, stained with oil or gritty with carpenter’s glue; thus I began to write words on sugar bags or butcher’s paper or in the margins of old newspapers. With her help I also quickly learned to read. There were numerous books in the house, and Maddalena obtained many others even though they were old and dirty: volumes of fables or myths, ancient
poems, travel and adventure novels.
* * *
III
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
The story that impressed me the most in those days was the one about the Pied Piper of Hamelin, which I found in a little book illustrated with sepia drawings that, for me, had a touch of the arcane, perhaps because I myself had learned to play a flute unearthed in the attic.
The Piper, a tall thin man, was dressed in medieval-looking clothes that lent him the slightly sinister air of a court jester or a soothsayer. He had a short bristly beard dided into two points, coarse metallic hair spread out over his shoulders, and long stiff fingers placed over the holes of his wooden instrument. His arms and legs were gangling and skinny, as if he were a carnival acrobat or a contortionist in the midst of some unusual exercise. But with a shudder I read in his crafty look his ferocious determination to carry off all the children of the city, to seduce them with his malignant charm, as he had done with the mice. Maybe he had made his decision long before the inhabitants had refused him payment for having rid their houses of animals; those oriental eyes slanted at the corners, that ambiguous smile could well hide any kind of wickedness.
I felt a violent tug at my heart for the kidnapping of the children (I too, I too might end up in a passing Gypsy caravan, since Maddalena left me alone so often!) But that was not all! It seemed that there was something incomplete about the sequence of events, something left unsaid that imagination had to supply. I was convinced that sooner or later in their peregrinations the children following the Piper would come upon exceptional and fantastic things, like a Never-Never Land, a place of eternal merrymaking where no one ever took off carnival costumes, where toys and lemonade were handed out free. If I thought about that place I would feel a more intense melancholy, a more anxious uncertainty than when Maddalena went out to go to parties in unknown villages.
Notwithstanding the shivers of fear provoked by that story I would still feel toward the children a sentiment that resembled envy.
Every now and then Maddalena would remind me that when I was alone I should close the doors and windows and not open them to anybody for any reason. I would promise but as soon as she was gone, all resolutions would evaporate and I would let myself go with the flow of things. I would run across fields of corn and alfalfa all the way to the stream, or indeed to where the magredi began, and wander about with my heart in tumult, in the prey of an inexplicable panic, as if I were a wild rabbit. Or else I would remain for minutes at a time staring at a single faraway tree in the midst of the grass, watching it disappear into the fog, or at a patch of brambles or a clump of thistles in bloom.
Other children rarely came to our house, partly because they had a superstitious terror of Maddalena. If she happened to be there they would begin to look at each other uneasily, as if they had ended up in a wolf’s den. Hence in my solitude the cycle of experiences was always more or less the same.
I had learned whatever I knew of the world largely from books, which I read with a savage tenacity, diving into them like a sponge fisherman dives into the sea. I never put them down before I finished them, not even to eat or sleep. Hours would pass without my noticing and when I arrived at the last page I would throw the book aside with a sort of satiety, my head still full of a crackling succession of events that had held me by their invincible spell; I would look around surprised, as if I had been caught in the tangled cane-brake of a magic reality. I was usually extremely tired and I had to struggle to once again make contact with the world.
A world that seemed changed. It would have become a stage where anything at all could happen. If all at once the Pied Piper of Hamelin were to appear at the door with his medieval tunic and his eyes full of ambiguous malice, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Any more than I would be if I had suddenly seen the sun obscured by a dirigible that might land in the meadows behind the house or in the magredi.
I had seen one sometime back, as it disappeared beyond the mountains (perhaps it had lost its way) and from that moment I had never ceased imagining the landing scene. Everything would really begin with the darkening of the sun. I would go to the window and see the vast elongated shape of the flying ship, very low, low enough to brush the tops of the trees; I would hear the hum of the propellors and the motors, muted despite their nearness. From the cabin many hands would be waving to greet me and to try to tell me something.
I would begin to run as fast as I could over the soft grass and the blackish stones of the magredi, as the dirigible was coming down. Inside...inside I would see Andrée, wearing sunglasses because of the glare of the snow and ice, Andrée, with his ropes and hatchets. He would tell me in labored and charming Italian, “We need a cabin-boy up here, a quick youngster who knows what he is about, to keep the expedition’s equipment in order — someone to take notes and make us a good cup of coffee. What do you say, boy? Want to come?”
Yes, I had been waiting for a day when something like this would happen. I had read a great deal about Andrée. I would imagine him on the polar ice, tiny and dark in the midst of the frozen sea, with its crevices and its white pinnacled towers; he was always locked in a struggle with the elements. I could even hear the howling of the wind, the shrill cries of the petrels, the sounds of the polar bears and seals. Above him was the North Star, motionless as a lamp in a lighthouse, its cold and bluish light visible through a ragged hole in the clouds.
Andrée’s major preoccupation wasn’t the cold, hunger and storms. It was something else: would he succeed in reaching the Pole? From my reading I had in fact derived the strange conviction that the Pole was as unattainable as a mirage. To get there you had to travel on foot for thousands of miles across an island of ice which was drifting on the whitish waters, driven by winds and currents. Andrée was marching toward the Pole with his sleds and Eskimo dogs, laboriously plotting his route by the position of the stars (I knew that up there a compass became a useless instrument), anxious and fearful that he might miscalculate and not achieve the great purpose of his existence because of a banal error in arithmetic.
But there was more. Perhaps his trek was all in vain because while he was going toward the Pole the island of ice was travelling in the opposite direction at a faster rate than he was moving. This was a very serious matter. I wondered if Andrée had thought of it and at the same time I tried to see if there might be any solution. In fact someday I myself might become a polar explorer.
As for Andrée, I could believe anything about him, except that he was dead. They hadn’t been able to find him because somebody like him could only be devilishly unpredictable: they had been looking for him in the wrong places. He had of course taken shelter inside some crevasse or a cavern carved out by the frost, away from storms; he was living on the flesh of polar bears and petrels and keeping warm by burning fat.
But one day (I was certain of it) Andrée would reappear in some part of the world, his hair white, his beard grown very long, his skin burned by the glare off the snows, as unreal as a ghost. Or else he would fasten a message about his existence to the foot of a bird, one of those migratory species I used to see that passed in autumn and spring, then disappeared toward the mountains.
From my house these mountains were visible at a distance of twelve or, at the most, fifteen kilometers. However, they marked the limit of the world that had been granted to me. Beyond them began the unknown, a mythic territory; who could tell how or when I would be able to reach it. Hamelin, for instance, was a city located beyond the mountains. I would stare at them for a long time from the terraces of my house or from the branches of a tree and it seemed to me that their outline was a drawing that alluded to something. On clear days and right after a rain I could see on two of them the white strip of road that zigzagged upward, sending me a mysterious invitation....
* * *
IV
Call Me Ishmael
I managed, I don’t know how, to pass my elementary school exams. About grammar and arithmetic I knew almost nothing, but p
erhaps the teachers were impressed by the incredible composition I had written before their very eyes (“Describe a trip you took”), and they scrutinized me constantly during the oral not knowing whether to laugh or be serious, thinking of my dramatic account of a passage through Lapland from Tromso to Murmansk. In a wave of euphoria Maddalena hastened to enroll me in the subsequent schools but I refused categorically to attend. I had decided I would run away from home sooner than go to boarding school. She didn’t insist. After all there wasn’t enough money and besides she didn’t want to be separated from me. School, however, continued to be the last of my thoughts. I always had a hundred things to do.
In the attic there was, among other things, a carpenter’s workbench with numerous tools, which I had learned to use with a certain skill. I had already made myself a windmill, a miniature sailboat and a tiny cart. But as I was making toys it clearly crossed my mind that this wasn’t a serious activity — it was a child’s game and there was something temporary and even humiliating about it. I even went as far as to try to make a wooden sextant, based on a drawing I found in one of the Dane’s books. But the undertaking soon proved to be too difficult, replete with too many obscure details and I had to give up. Thus I fell back on a project to make a whaler’s harpoon.
I worked on it for several days. The long polished wooden lance was ready and I was finishing the point, for which I had used a scissor blade dug up in the garden. A few turns of the grindstone had given it a splendid shine. One evening, trying to figure out a way to insert the blade in the wood, I tied it to the lance tightly with the string and picked up the harpoon, a heavy handful, and began to brandish it. I threw it at a wash table and it stuck almost into the center, quivering in sharply audible vibrations. An intense atmosphere formed around me, took hold of me, and carried me off. The attic floor became the deck of a ship caught up in the pursuit of a school of whales off the coast of Greenland. Those weren’t raindrops coming through the tiny attic windows, they were droplets of sea spray; there was no more odor of dust and mildew, only the salt air, the smell of ropes and dried herring, the eternal fare of the common sailor. The red rays reflected off dirty windowpanes were those of a fiery sun going down into the sea off the Labrador coast.
The Wooden Throne Page 2
