Flora instead shrugged her shoulders and spread the two edges of the tear to better assess the damage. There I was, one step away, and I glimpsed the pink roundness of her completely uncovered breasts. They disappeared immediately and I thought it had been an improbable vision. When she noticed my embarrassment she opened her mouth in a laugh so wide that I got a full view of her gleaming teeth. But who was she, where did she come from? I had never seen her in Ontàns although by now I knew almost everybody. More than that, she didn’t even seem to be a country girl. She had something unusual about her, something refined, exotic, like a city dweller....
Every time she heard hoofbeats she looked up at once, as if someone had called her, and wouldn’t have a moment’s peace until she’d seen the horse. She would run like a hare to the path, to the magredi, or into the village and I would see her appear and disappear in the green while I tried to keep up with her. If the horse was white she would be taken with an impetuous joy that turned her cheeks pink. “A white one, a white one!” she’d begin to shout and quickly she’d trace a cross in her hand, spit on it, then hit it with the other hand, closed into a fist. “When I get to a hundred, I’ll find something very beautiful....”
If she believed in that nonsense I was even more certain she was mad, yet at the same time I caught myself wondering what the object she would find might turn out to be. Besides didn’t I still think sometimes that a dirigible might land in the middle of the magredi?
She understood my incredulity. Quickly she put her hand inside the torn blouse and drew out a gold chain with a locket. “Look, look what I found last year. And I hadn’t even gotten to a hundred horses. I had only counted eighty-three....” In the locket there was still a miniature, the bust of a young noblewoman. With equal rapidity Flora hid the locket again. She had found it in the park behind the Contessa’s Villa. “What? You were really in there?”
“Of course. I’ve been everywhere. If you want I’ll take you there....”
I accepted without hesitation. It had to be almost noon and I was getting hungry and yet I didn’t give it an instant’s thought. Lucina and her sisters were momentarily out of sight. “Let’s go! Let’s go right now!” I whispered for fear that those three might follow us. We ran all the way to the wagon path that paralleled the stream at a distance. Once in a while, slowing down, we heard branches moving not far away and Flora glanced around anxiously. What was the matter? “Nothing, nothing — don’t worry about it,” she smiled and went on telling me about the mysteries of the Villa, pretending to know all the details as if she had seen and heard everything first hand.
Underneath it all there was a story of forbidden love. The Contessa had fallen in love with a youth who wasn’t even twenty whereas she was almost thirty. Her husband, much older than she was, was insanely jealous. But the Contessa didn’t care, the risk didn’t frighten her: love conquers all.
Then one night her husband had discovered the youth climbing the wall. And there it was, the cause of the mysterious shooting, even though the Count later insisted he had thought the boy was a thief and had fired to scare him off.
Flora said these things very seriously and with an undercurrent of astonishment. She was fascinated by love intrigues and secrets of that sort; she liked to weave fantasies about them.
We had sat down on a felled trunk and Flora was taking stones out of her shoe. August crickets were singing, as were the cicadas and an occasional blackbird who from time to time fluttered among the leaves. I thought about the Contessa, by now decrepit, or so they said, her face all wrinkled as if she were a hundred years old; from that long-ago day of the shooting she had never gone out again and lived in her shadowy rooms like a night bird or like a priestess of some obscure religion who stayed to guard the secret and defend it from the curiosity of others. For her life had come to a stop that tragic night. From then on she had entered into a limbo outside of time, where nothing more happened that seemed to merit her attention. Or she might even have imagined that the shooting hadn’t occurred, that the young man hadn’t been killed and was traveling in far off parts of the world — in Siberia or Tierra del Fuego. Couldn’t it be that her reaction to death was like mine? All these possibilities appealed to me, attracted me.
All of a sudden we heard a twig snap in the bushes close by and this time Flora started and grabbed me by the shoulders. “What’s wrong?” I asked again, a little worried.
“Nothing, nothing, why should anything be wrong? I’m just nervous, I get scared for nothing.” I too had noticed that: she was like a bird, ready to fly away at the slightest noise. But I was also convinced that someone had been following us, spying on our movements from the time we had left my house.
* * *
XIV
The Villa
We began to run again along the wagon path and then cut across the fields. The corn was quite high and every now and then the tassels would wave in a sudden breeze. But the Villa was still distant and now I regretted somewhat having left home at that hour. I was unconcerned and carefree but all the same it seemed absolutely impossible that we would be able to enter the Villa. Among other things we would have a pack of dogs to deal with. “Don’t be silly, there isn’t even one dog. They’re all in the steward’s yard, on the other side of a wall,” said Flora.
We wandered about the park until we reached the rear wings of the building, consisting of old stables, now empty. Not the slightest sign of life. Flora climbed up on my shoulders and in a flash got hold of the top of the wall. When I too was inside she ran quickly off and hid in an ivy-covered stone turret. Then, hesitating and hugging the walls, we ran into the stables.
Everything was in a state of abandonment. An old carriage with its doors half torn off stood rotting in the grass, its wheel rims rusty and a broken shaft haphazardly repaired with nails and tin. This then was the back of the famous Villa, and I was inside, really inside.... The presence of Flora was all that was needed to bring down into the real world things I had always thought impossible and mysteriously forbidden. “And the Contessa, have you ever seen her?”
“Of course I’ve seen her. She’s a distant relative of mine. Maybe we’ll even see her today. But talk lower....”
She hurt her knee, hitting it on a protruding stone, and caught her breath. Then she spit on the cut, spread spider webs over it and tied a handkerchief around her knee, reciting nonsensical doggerel. “So the cut won’t become gangrenous,” she said, anticipating my astonished reaction. She even wanted to teach me how and I had to learn the doggerel to avoid incurring her anger. She went about holding her hair with one hand to keep it away from spiderwebs and I thought she might easily have been the Contessa in her youth, wandering with that slightly enigmatic air through a dwelling that didn’t seem quite real, there in the midst of fields and meadows, far away from the village.
We went up to the top floor and all at once Flora disappeared behind a wall. “Wait here a minute....” Her haste barely gave me a chance to identify a desire to invent a pretext for detaining her. A muted gurgling issued from the park’s fountain, where a thin stream of water was trickling onto a shell-shaped stone. Who could have built this villa, and when? Perhaps a Venetian aristocrat or some queer gentleman from Friuli, or Germany, three or four centuries ago?
I was ferociously hungry. Thirsty too. From a distance came the ringing of noonday bells, and the intense heat shimmered above the blackened tiles of the stables opposite, on the other side of the park. I heard the steward’s dogs barking and my heart began beating faster. Where on earth had she gone? And for what? And why was she always so hasty and imprudent?
She reappeared a moment later with a piece of salami, a few eggs and some nuts, gathered together in her skirt. She drew a hat pin from her bewitching hair and punctured the eggs on both ends, laughing silently. “Let’s hope they didn’t see me....” She really must know the Villa like the palm of her hand — who could tell how many times she’d been there, maybe even with other boys.... We heard
a shot far, far away and Flora started momentarily, looking around. Her anxiety brought forth my own as a reflex. My thoughts naturally rushed to the other shot that had echoed one night in the park, forty or fifty years before. And what had become of the husband? “He ran away, who knows where. Maybe to America.” At first everyone had believed the story about the accident and the presumed thief, but then rumors began again, so before they took on too much substance the Count had fled, fearing a trial.
“And then was there one?”
Flora didn’t know. She was only interested in the love story; all the rest hadn’t the slightest attraction. I looked out at the park, the fountain, the trees, the enclosing wall. The young man who had been killed must have scaled the wall from the same side of the park as we had, and maybe even at the same point. I couldn’t manage to think about that story without it seeming still to be happening here in this place, as if a mysterious mechanism had frozen it in time and it was now eternally present.
The dogs continued to bark for a little while, without conviction, then quieted down. All was silence in the park, in the surrounding fields and even in the steward’s house. At that hour the peasants had stopped working and were resting on the threshing floors or perhaps stretched out in the grass in the shade of a tree with a flask handy. The dogs too seemed to be sleeping in their kennels. Maybe Maddalena also had flung herself down on her bed, if she had come home. For the first time I had the thought that Maddalena went out at all hours and even stayed out all night because an unknown lover was waiting for her. Yes, yes, it couldn’t be anything but that. Maddalena had no work, just a small vegetable garden and an animal or two and I had never known where the money came from that we lived on. There wasn’t much, but money there was. Thus, someone was giving it to her....
I looked at Flora with the feeling that if I were to talk to her my impressions would quickly be confirmed. Men and women always sought each other, wanted to be together. They wanted that more than anything else, now I knew from experience. However, Maddalena didn’t interest me now; she was far away, almost unreal. Looking at the air that shimmered above the roofs, I imagined that it must be that kind of heat and shimmering that provoked mirages.
Flora sat down on the floor and took off the handkerchief to examine her cut. “Throw that dirty stuff away or you’ll really get an infection,” I said.
She was almost offended. With that treatment she had healed wounds rapidly any number of times. She knew what she was doing all right. Once her sister had been bitten by a scorpion and had started to roll around on the ground, to rave and foam at the mouth as if she were an epileptic. They were alone, their grandfather wasn’t home. No use in calling for help, and she had lost no time, not even a minute. She had made a tiny cut at the puncture, had desperately sucked out the blood, then spread boiling pitch on the wound while her sister shrieked like an eagle and pulled Flora’s hair to get her to stop the torture. Yet she was healed in no time at all. Just one feverish night, that was all. She knew tons of remedies. She had learned them from a woman her grandfather had brought back from America who knew more about these things than ten doctors. “Your grandfather? Where does he live?”
“In the mountains.”
“But where exactly?”
“I’m not going to tell you because I ran away from home....”
Ran away? Why? She was crazier than I thought. Much, much crazier. I told her she could even live with us if she wanted to, because my house was so big that she could even live there in hiding, as long as she cared to. Flora started to laugh. “You’re sweet! I’ll think about it and make up my mind later.” It seemed that what was going to happen tomorrow or in a few hours didn’t interest her at all (in this she must resemble the Dane), but I couldn’t help wondering where she lived and how.
I felt as if I had been away from my house for a very very long time. Flora lifted her skirt to inspect her cut; embarrassed I looked the other way. She bubbled with mirth. “The cut bothers you? My legs are full of scars, look!” I bounded forward recklessly, as if it were a question of attacking an enemy trench, and began kissing her in a great confusion. For a moment she let me, but then she got up. “No, no, they can see us. Not here.”
We went down into the park again. I was thinking that here I was again at a point where my imagination hardly dared continue, where the dark and forbidden zone began. It seemed natural, almost necessary, that this should be so. I still lacked something needed to be a real man, to be like that youth who had scaled the wall to keep his appointment with the bullet that had killed him, which destiny had prepared as it had prepared the stabbing of the great Caesar on the Ides of March almost twenty centuries before. What was going to happen in a little while with Flora? It wasn’t just my desire that was driving me, but also and more than anything, the wish to know what fate had in store for me a little further on. “Flora, stop, I have to tell you something,” I whispered to the agile form fleeing before me, her dark hair with its greenish highlights held clutched in her hand.
“Wait till we’re on the outside, let’s get away from here....”
She was panting. What had gotten into her, just from one moment to the next? Why had she taken me to the Villa; and now that I liked being there why was she forcefully tearing me away? She whispered a word or two in reply, but I thought she might have been subject to a sudden fear and become aware of the tragic atmosphere, stale and stagnating there inside the Villa, and been overcome all at once by an urge to flee.
Once we were over the wall we kept running across the fields as if we were being pursued. Flora was holding her shoes in her hand. At one particular point I saw that her face was all tear-stained. I had guessed right. She was crying for the Contessa; she couldn’t endure the Contessa’s grief about the shooting which left her unhappy forever. “But it happened so long ago!” I tried to laugh.
“And what do I care? I’m sad anyway. Isn’t that up to me?”
Instead of going back by the wagon road we went on into the fields and soon lost our bearings. We could no longer see either the magredi or the stream and I didn’t recognize any feature of the landscape. It didn’t matter, rather it was better this way; the farther from home I was, the less familiar the place, the more probable it was that the thing with Flora would happen.
She continued to run at random, with me trailing behind her. There was no sense in running that way, but nonetheless I was happy to follow her. I had the impression that Flora felt no need to quit wandering about and go home because she perhaps had no home. Her house was everywhere, and hence for her “Go home” had no meaning.
Again I proposed that she come to live with us. If Maddalena wouldn’t keep her, then I would, but now we really should go back. “You’re a dear boy,” she said, lying down in the alfalfa, at the highest point in the meadow, and drawing me down beside her. But after a few seconds even as we embraced we heard the sound of breaking twigs followed at once by a kind of howling, not far away, behind a row of bush alders. Flora ordered me to be quiet and not move. A fairly long silence — then a wailing voice, almost cracked from intense emotion, cried: “Flora! Flora! Flora!”
The girl jumped up and began fleeing in the opposite direction, again taking off her shoes to run faster. “Where are you going? Flora, wait!” I shouted, hurling myself into pursuit.
“I have to go now. Wait for me. I’ll be back....”
I heard no more. I tried to catch up with her but she ran like a greyhound. For a little while I saw the rippling of her skirt and her hair, then she vanished in the green as if she had been a grass snake or a hare. I kept running at breakneck speed, as far as the clump of hazelnut bushes that had swallowed her up, but she had disappeared. I went home and found a place to hide. I felt as if splendid windows had been opened wide in front of me but every time I tried to look out the shutters were slammed in my face. Nevertheless this feeling brought with it no desire to rebel. I seemed to be in the center of a series of mirages, and as one disappeared another
took shape....
That evening I asked myself a specific question, that is, whether I was in love with Flora. As often happened, I appeared to be thinking of myself as detached from me, as a being who had all my problems, who resembled me exactly, but who was someone else. It was just that I had been called upon to decide this matter for the someone else.
I had also pursued and desired Lucina, like Flora, but with Flora it was something different: it was love. However, she had run away and now who could tell where she was and with whom. Perhaps that individual who had been following us all day, who had been loitering about in our proximity, and whose presence had cast a shadow between her and me.... Flora too was a mystery to be solved, like the Dane or my parents — she was one of those figures who appeared to be on the other side of a curtain or a veil and who was beginning to signal me from afar. From all my experiences I derived the same conviction: that reality and the truest things in the world were on the other side of the curtain and not here on this side with me.
* * *
XV
The Stone Against the Shutter
That evening I ate supper in my usual unsociable and disorganized way, went to the fountain to wash, then got into bed without thinking about anything in particular, not even what I should do to locate Flora again or to find out more about her.
The Wooden Throne Page 7
