“But you were his lover, tell the truth now....”
“That scarecrow? No. Not him. No....”
I said nothing but I was certain Flora was meeting other men. There were times when she stayed away for days and days, then reappeared as if nothing had occurred or as if she had seen me one or two hours earlier. After one long absence I went out to look for her and succeeded in catching sight of her from a distance at a festival, in the midst of numerous young men who were buzzing around her like flies. They were much older and more elegant than I was and I felt humiliated, almost annihilated, by comparison. When I thought about Flora’s behavior a gray sadness came over me. Only when she ran to take refuge in my house and embraced me and begged me to save her, only then did it seem that I was once again important to her, even if I didn’t understand how and from whom I was supposed to defend her.
There was always something out of phase about our relationship, at once both anguished and humorous; while my feelings had a fluid continuity, she knew only abrupt turns through which I couldn’t seem to follow her. When, for example, I was angry at her because she hadn’t shown up for two weeks, Flora, on the contrary, was in a phase of runaway passion and saw me as her only refuge. She was always ahead of me and seemed somehow to be looking back over her shoulder as if to say; “But what are you waiting for? Hurry up, run, don’t waste my time!”
I thought about her constantly. She occupied the key point on my horizon and would continue to do so for a long time, even after she definitely disappeared.
* * *
XVIII
The First Snow
I saw her for the last time in the days when the first snow fell. From my house four or five mountains were visible, one behind another, and the first to be covered with snow were always the farthest away. On other occasions Flora had not come around for a good while, so a very long time, almost a month, passed before I began to think she really had left. It was still snowing; the next to last mountain, as well as the second from the last, was covered. Perhaps it was just because of this steady advance that, by a curious trick of thought, I began to connect Flora’s disappearance with the snow. Perhaps she had fled the cold and snow because she was meant to live only where life was easier and could be savored at leisure —in warm Mediterranean places — or to respond with the instincts of a migratory bird to a mysterious summons from nature. And I couldn’t have her near me for more than a summer and an autumn....
I looked for her but with no anguish, just a quiet underlying sadness and a profound conviction that I wouldn’t succeed in finding her. I began by asking Lucina, then those of her sisters in whose company I had first seen Flora. They gave me contradictory information, all talking at once and trying to drown each other out, their faces reflecting a mixture of ingenuity, impertinence and amusement at my disappointed search. Lucina especially seemed to imply: “Wait a minute, why bother with that Flora? Let her go. You have me don’t you?”
I realized how stupid I had been not to have tried to find out more about her when I still had time. Even if she didn’t want to say anything in particular, I might have followed her in order to find out where she lived and with whom. I tried to understand what her running away from home might mean. Certainly not very much. Flora always seemed to be fleeing from, or searching for, something and thus running away from home in her case could be merely an insignificant stage in a chaotic life.
I did find girls and young men who had known her, but none of them had anything more than the vaguest information. One had danced a whole evening with her, another had lent her money, and a third had given her a ride in his caleche on her way to do some errands. There was even one who had taken her to the theater in the city to see an operetta, after she had kept asking him over and over. I seemed to read in all of them something more, a hint, maybe only a look in their eyes, something they weren’t saying because of discretion or chivalry. One tall thin youth who kept pulling his pants up, as though they were falling down, answered only, “Flora? Oh yes, yes — I know Flora. Flora...,” and he stared straight ahead, disoriented, as if that name called up a constellation of feelings that couldn’t be expressed or weren’t worth trying to express because no one would understand them anyway. Another was annoyed: “That crazy girl? For God’s sake let’s not talk about her. She even went so far as to cause a small fire in my house. I won’t say any more.”
I couldn’t even find out whether she lived alone or with some relative. I thought Flora was capable of having a little room hidden away somewhere simply because of her desire to be as independent as a wild animal, to let no one know where she lived, and thus have no one underfoot when she didn’t want him, preferring instead to go herself to see whomever she wanted when she wanted to see him.
As I pieced together the little I could find out, an even better portrait of her elusiveness emerged. All those who had known her retained an image of her that was extremely lively, but brief and without depth because she had disappeared from sight so quickly.
I completely forgot almost everything else, exams, my projects, Maddalena; and my life was reduced to restless wandering in the piazzas and taverns searching for Flora or for information about her. Every time I heard a train whistle I felt a shock, as if she were on it and I hadn’t been able to detain her simply because of a trivial delay. But by this time I was resigned; I understood that my searching was only a singular and prolonged way of saying good-bye to her. I had been little more than a momentary encounter in her life, one among so many. I had no more hope of finding her, but the search itself filled my existence.
Flora again became what she was when I had first seen her running beside the stream and in the magredi, or climbing the poplar trees: a stranger.... She herself had been the first one to remove from my eyes the veil that had for so long (perhaps from the time I had played doctor in the attic) been wrapped around the mystery of woman. And yet this was how things were. The times we had made love, and especially the first time, seemed like a happy dream, an experience that reposed there in the strong box containing my destiny, still waiting to be lived. The past spent with Flora seemed like the future, whereas so many other times it had seemed that the opposite was true.
Flora’s image expanded and metamorphosed into something much vaster than she was, something that contained everything I yearned for: it became the phantom associated with imprecise adventures; and the desire to find her united somehow with very different things, even though she remained the same and I remembered every detail of the hours we had spent together. So intense in fact were those memories that they were followed by a momentary disorientation when I came back to reality and realized that they had been only imaginary.
I discovered in myself a visionary tendency. Certainly I had always had it but I had never noticed it. Now, however, when I would imagine distant or impossible things, I was aware of their nature, aware that I was enlarging reality with fantasy. But if becoming an adult meant renouncing all this, I didn’t want to grow up.
* * *
XIX
Limbo
A certain curious idea used to keep popping up in my head: that the things around me, the villages, the hills, the mountains, the steppe-like magredi, the grave of the streams, the Contessa’s Villa, were the components of an orchestra that was playing music that others couldn’t hear but I could. Now, however, the music was growing fainter; sometimes it ceased altogether. I was subject to frequent spells of acute listlessness. At times I thought I understood perfectly how the Dane, at the end of his sojourn in our house, had not even bothered to get out of bed, and then had gone off suddenly to the North. But these were moments. After a pause due to fatigue things returned to normal. The places where I had been with Flora now held a fascination they hadn’t possessed before; they seemed to express the regret that she had been there with me and then had disappeared. Perhaps it also had to do with my conviction that I would soon abandon them, my places, and the imperceptible and gradually diminishing music w
as really a farewell meant for me.
Those years I lived in Ontàns after Flora’s disappearance seem even now like a limbo of waiting. In its best moments my life then was like a stage where from one moment to the next a magnificent performance was going to be given, which would fulfill my every expectation. But I always saw myself as only a spectator. If I should have had to perform also, I wouldn’t have known what part to play. Maybe I might even have taken on some sort of role without major difficulties because I had a sufficient dose of the theatrical in my makeup to carry it off. But it would have been precisely that, a role detached from myself, which didn’t coincide with what I really was. What was I, really? I didn’t know. I was a mystery filled with so many, too many things. Perhaps the world seemed to me to be a pleasant secret waiting to be unveiled only because I was projecting into it what existed in me.
I began to feel rushed, to think I ought to be coming to a conclusion. Something was pressing me. I took up my studies again with greater persistence, even if I didn’t see what could come of my exams, because I sensed the necessity to hasten things and get them done. I went as far as to finish a number of carpentry projects and some ironwork I had started, even though they were essentially useless things, not much more than toys.
I had to look deeply into myself and assess the reality of my desire to be a sailor or a polar explorer, to set off, therefore, for places where such things could actually come about. The moment of choice had arrived. But what I had thought of in the past as easy and simple now in fact bristled with complications. It wasn’t that such pursuits were completely fanciful and foolish; people did engage in them — they were things that could actually be done. But I had to find out if they attracted me enough to commit myself to face all the difficulties involved. The choice, the necessity for profound introspection disoriented me, exposed and emphasized my feeling of ineptitude. Perhaps I simply had a tendency to flee the concrete and was content only with what satisfied my imagination. Hence the future remained something like a mirage that didn’t evaporate (at most it might change), but couldn’t be reached, displacing itself always further on.
At times, when Maddalena looked at me she seemed to be taken by sudden remorse for never having seriously worried about my future. She would hold her head and stare at me as if to say: “But what have I made of him? What security have I given him?” But these moments, like my spells of listlessness, didn’t last long. Maddalena, now more than in the past, went about as in a trance, jumping from one thing to another as if all her actions were divided up into mutually impenetrable compartments. It seemed there were two people inside her, each one acting with no knowledge of the other. Indeed she herself seemed to be convinced that this was so when the first part of herself would find unexpected evidence of the second part. “When did I shorten this dress? When did I clean that drawer?” she would wonder anxiously and stand there for a bit staring at the ceiling. She was full of expectations, impulses, and projects, but at the same time she never decided to undertake anything because whatever she did she felt defeated before she got started.
I too was living a double life. As soon as I came out of the decisive phase, convinced that I had to resolve things, make up my mind, finish something, I would begin living like a bewildered vagabond for days on end. I would be afflicted by a curious impatience, an absolute incapacity to stay put, to do what I was supposed to do. It would seem I hadn’t really lived yet; that I had merely been waiting for something that was going to begin and I didn’t know where or when; that I was stupidly wasting my time while far away, in unidentified places, important things were going on without me, things I would like to participate in.... My restlessness grew so intense that I ended up throwing aside all my schoolbooks and giving up for good the idea of taking the final exam just when I had it within reach.
I found something magnanimous in the idea of giving up, now that I had almost made it. Only individuals like Alexander the Great, or Caesar, or Andrée would have been capable of a similar renunciation. I convinced myself I had something else to do, that my destiny was different, that I couldn’t waste my time on things as insignificant as exams. Sometimes I saw my attitude as stupid foolish pride but I didn’t change it.
Maddalena, seeing me so indecisive, restless and uneasy, didn’t even urge me anymore to study, for fear that I would resent her and on sudden impulse go off somewhere. Her fears were well founded. I sensed that something was calling me ever more clearly and imperiously but I felt a kind of panic because I couldn’t manage to define those demands or determine where they were directing me.
Once in a village piazza I saw a photograph of Flora on display. An itinerant photographer had taken it, a little Jewish man whom she had met in Venice. She had told him that she was an artist’s model, had confided her hopes of joining a theatrical company, seemingly euphoric and very sure of herself despite her refusal to let him ask her more specific questions. Possibly because of an atavistic instinct for reticence the Jew told me nothing about his particular relationship with Flora. But it didn’t take much to figure out that she had rewarded his discretion, his evident sympathy, in her own extravagant way, with a woman’s generosity.
The episode was enough to reawaken my old impetuous feelings. If at that time I began to go around looking for a way to make money, it was basically because if I wanted to track Flora down and live with her money would be indispensable. I started going to bigger towns, spending time in bars, cafes, taverns, disreputable places. I got to know people who lived on the fringes of things and seemed to take no notice of society because they were completely caught up in a chain of shady dealings. They had me transport bottles of illegally distilled grappa, gave me mysterious packages to deliver through windows with heavy iron bars or hide in abandoned hen-houses. Afterwards I pocketed the money without batting an eye.
I was willing to hang around these odd characters only if they had unusual stories to tell, if they had emigrated, if they had dug for gold in Siberia, or crossed the Atlantic as stowaways in rusty freighters or had captured ostriches in Patagonia. Sometimes their stories, although full of incongruities and clumsy invention, interested me as much as the adventures of Ishmael, or maybe even more.
Frequenting those people I felt like a kind of aristocrat who was living like a Gypsy or an outsider to society simply because of a taste for adventure and secrecy, someone who had abandoned a palace to which he could return if he wanted even though recovering it involved the risk of a laborious search, since he had forgotten where it was. But of course going back also meant taking up a royal destiny once again. I didn’t know what I was waiting for, why I wasn’t going out to search instead. Whatever I did I was still accompanied by a sense of the insubstantial, as if all I was living didn’t possess sufficient weight, was not concrete or solid enough to line up in the series of real events.
I ought to set about tracing Flora. The fact that I had met the Jewish photographer was a clear sign from destiny and by ignoring it I became guilty before destiny itself.
Anyway, now that I had tried out my ability to make money and live independently I felt more sure of myself. Indeed in this matter I had much more imagination than those with whom I came in contact. It was just that I couldn’t find the courage to leave Maddalena, who now seemed always to be spying on me, looking for a sign that might reveal my intention to abandon her. She seemed to be in the midst of a mysterious female crisis. She often became melancholy, talked to me in a strange way. She told me that when she got old she would go to a hospice so as not to be a nuisance to me and that even if I didn’t find the time to visit her it wouldn’t matter; she would understand. I pretended to get angry: “Why are you talking to me like this? You’re really being silly!” But she replied that it was natural. The old had to step aside and she didn’t want to be a bother to anyone....
And yet she was only a little past forty and still a very attractive woman. Stewards, livestock dealers, landowners who were getting on in years continued to ha
ng around her, but she defended herself angrily, put all her attention on keeping them at a distance. The few who had tried to come to the house were forced to withdraw in a hurry, pursued by a torrent of sarcastic comments. Everything about Maddalena attracted men: the way she walked, her shapely figure, her low-cut dresses, and above all that air of carnal sympathy that emanated from every trait of her person.
One day, coming home, I found her in a rage over nothing, her face all flushed, her eyes wild. She was wandering through the house all excited, her hair in disorder, and wearing three shawls. I asked what was the matter. “I’m upset at you, if you really want to know. Why don’t you take your exams? You have to finish your studies; otherwise what will you do with your life? You don’t even have any land to farm....”
She seemed all worked up for a quarrel and indeed we had other arguments about totally insignificant things. She reprimanded me for my roaming, for getting mixed up with riff-raff, for filling my head full of foolishness, and at one point she even brought up my having that mad girl, that little whore, that Flora, here in the house at all hours of day and night. “At least leave Flora out of it. Why do you have to have something against everybody and everything?” She stopped yelling and her rage began to find its outlet in a formless disconnected grumbling that was perhaps no longer directed at me but at some other invisible adversary. Something that I couldn’t understand had upset her. I supposed that she had had a fight with the man I assumed she was involved with and that they had broken up in a stormy confrontation. However, this turning to an unspecified adversary only intensified an attitude she had always had. Maddalena was forever in some kind of argument, either explicit or implicit, and not just with me — with Luca, with the Dane, with my parents, but also with unindentified antagonists or maybe simply with destiny.
The Wooden Throne Page 9
