The Wooden Throne

by Carlo Sgorlon

  * * *

  XX

  The Race in the Magredi

  Toward evening she said she really wasn’t feeling well and went to lie down on her bed. After a half hour, no more, I went to see her. I was shocked. Her face was beaded with sweat, she was almost struggling to breathe. I told her I ought to go at once to get the doctor, but she seemed to be worrying about something else. In fact, after grabbing my hand, panting, in oddly turned phrases she revealed that many years before she had received a letter from the Dane. “What? Are you joking?” Or maybe it was fever, she was delirious....

  “No, he really did write, to your father. It’s more than eight years ago now....”

  The letter had passed through many hands, since there was no addressee: my mother, my father, my grandparents were already dead. Finally they gave it to Maddalena who, since she was taking care of me, had become the person with the greatest right to it. I seemed to catch in her words a troublesome remorse for having kept quiet all that time, or rather for having repulsed every attempt on my part to find out something about my grandfather. A letter from the Dane.... Concrete evidence of him, a message from him, was reaching me years late. Was it really possible? It was such an extraordinary thing that I couldn’t feel the slightest bitterness toward Maddalena for her silence. Very soon, however, that nearness, that possibility of unexpected revelations, was subdued by my conviction that Maddalena must really be very ill. Her fever was rising apace. I felt a bit lost, almost unreal, as always when I found myself facing serious and important situations, when life showed its most intense and dramatic face. “The letter is there, in the drawer, inside another envelope, an orange one....” She was breathing with effort. She must have put it there recently because in my searches I had never seen it.

  Thus the Dane acquired importance again, returned to occupy a central place in my imagination, as had happened for Flora as well, when I had met the photographer. Life appeared to be an improbable stage where actors came forward, or disappeared in the shadows at the back of the stage, according to the unpredictable rhythms of destiny.

  I read the letter with trembling attention, as an archaeologist would read a new manuscript of the Gospel, discovered inside an amphora in the sands of the Tebaide desert. The Dane’s name was Daniel Wivallius. To judge from the name he really was a Dane. The letter was very terse. The old sailor said he had given up the sea. He had settled on dry land, in the city of Aarhus, where he had opened an antique and curiosity shop. He asked for information about his son, invited him to join him.

  Perhaps just because it was such an impersonal letter it seemed to me all the more enigmatic and intriguing. It permitted reading between the lines.... I pictured the Dane (I couldn’t manage to think of him as Daniel Wivallius) by now very old, in a dim room with a Nordic decor, full of antique globes, rare books, yellowed maps, navigation instruments from past centuries, models of sailboats and similar things. I saw his dark face, heavily lined as if the story of his voyages and his twisted adventures were etched there in occult signs. It seemed he must have infinite things to tell his friends and customers, to console himself in his arrogant unsociable melancholy, now that there were to be no more escapades and travels for him, but only the obstinate and raging memory of those that had been.

  I shook myself. Maddalena was looking at me, her eyes very bright. I insisted on taking her temperature, which was very high. “Maddalena, I’m going for the doctor.”

  “No, don’t. It’s just a bad case of the flu. It got cold too suddenly this year. You can go tomorrow morning....”

  I obeyed. No doctor had ever walked up the steps of our house. Neither I nor Maddalena, for all that I could remember, had ever been sick enough to call a doctor; sore throats or diarrhea we had always taken care of in a haphazard way with some kind of herb or the advice of a neighbor woman. The idea that a doctor might enter our house seemed to me like the end of a happy state, almost the breaking of a spell.

  I went to sleep but dreamed I was lying in an abandoned cottage, with cracks in the roof so wide I could see the sky and the stars; I felt a nauseous discomfort at lying in the mud. Mysterious waters were rising rapidly, as when flash floods occur in the immense grave of the Meduna.

  I woke up at dawn, worried and upset. I put on a couple of heavy sweaters and went to Maddalena’s door to see if she was sleeping. A rattling disordered sound of heavy breathing came from the room. I entered without even knocking. Maddalena was sitting up in bed with three pillows behind her, her face congested, her eyes dilated. Her forehead was burning hot. From the way she was rolling her eyes it looked as if an insane confusion had been unleashed within her. She told me I was crazy for not running to get the doctor the previous evening, as I was wondering if I dared leave her alone now to go after him. Maddalena took hold of my hand when I asked her what she was feeling. She didn’t answer. She talked about my mother, my father, in a hectic rushed way, jumping continually from one subject to another. It seemed she had to run, to hurry to a railroad station (I didn’t understand where), and she didn’t know how to get there because she couldn’t find a caleche, nor anyone willing to take her. She was worried about a dress, her best dress (she had just ironed it), afraid it would get ruined in her suitcase.

  I applied a wet cloth to her forehead, then tried to take the edge off the cold in the room by lighting the stove. We had never lighted the bedroom stoves and I had to work quite hard to get the fire started, while Maddalena’s delirium accompanied my anxious efforts. I noticed I was crying only when a drop fell on the wood I was holding in my hand. Nebulous family stories came back to me as though they were waking up from hibernation. Maddalena, who was in no way related to me, had always looked after me from the time I was tiny, whereas my real relatives hadn’t and some, like the Dane, maybe didn’t even know I existed. And yet I knew so little about her really, not even what she lived on.... For years I hadn’t truly taken her seriously, living mostly on my own as if she were off somewhere else where I didn’t have time to go.

  Her delirium continued. Now she was running on foot, all alone, carrying her suitcase through the stony magredi, on the dry frozen grass, because she hadn’t found a single caleche. “It’s all right... alone, I’ll go by myself...it’s full of stones and stumps.... But how come it’s already night? If I left this morning it’s not possible that it’s already so dark. It’s so heavy.... Maybe there’s going to be a storm. I can’t even see Spilimbergo. I must be lost, and now it’s going to snow. It can’t be, it’s too cold....” I seemed to have entered a new place where I could see clearly so many aspects of Maddalena, which I had never thought much about before, which I had skimmed over as if I were going by in a coach at full speed, hardly looking out.

  It was a dark day; the greenish sky promised snow. The closest mountains were a slate gray, all streaked; those farthest away were already white. I imagined the raging winds that might be howling through the gorges, as happened when we would forget to close the windows, creating air currents so strong they appeared to be shaking the house down. It had rained hard the last few days and the Tagliamento would be in flood, its dark waters roaring between the stones and under the bridge. Then I realized with intense anxiety that I was wasting time. I had to run for the doctor and in the meantime get someone to stay with Maddalena. I was lucky. On the path to the village I met Luca, who was wearing a goatskin coat over his fustian jacket. In a word or two I explained things and he took off at a run toward our house just as he was — his gun over his shoulder and carrying the game taken that night in a sack.

  I was so disoriented that I couldn’t even keep my thoughts on Maddalena as I ran. My mind wandered constantly, imagining the winds in the valleys and the waters of the river. The Meduna and the Cellina might also be in flood, with all the heavy downpours we had had, one after another these last days. It was dawn but the light was struggling to appear, night didn’t want to leave, and the sky was threatening snow with more and more insistence. From the path I sa
w a cart race along a village street, drawn by a white horse. Who could be out at a time like this, in weather fit only for wolves? All of a sudden I remembered Flora, her ritual when she saw a horse that color, and then wondered more than ever how I could think about things like that.

  The doctor wasn’t home. They told me he had been called to the cottages at the edges of the very magredi that Maddalena thought she was crossing in her delirium. Fortunately I was able to borrow a bicycle and from then on I pedaled. Strips of fog were breaking apart around the scattered trees on the steppe, or along the rows of alders or poplars outlining the cultivated land, or were sliding from the hills, which looked very close, almost within arm’s reach. The wind was quite strong, but in my favor, and thus I seemed to be flying. The cold air entered the sleeves of my stiriana or the neck of my sweater, but didn’t succeed in numbing me. On the contrary I felt I had become a strange hybrid creature half man and half bird, carried by the wind. I had at other times tried riding a bicycle (bicycles were a major novelty in the village; only two or three people had one), but not so fast as this, with the wind behind me. Ideas ever more fantastic went through my mind. I imagined that at my return I would not find Maddalena but the Dane, decrepit by now and furiously asking the villagers what they had done with his relatives, accusing them of treachery, of lacking faith. “I promised to come back, and I’ve kept my promise, after fifty years. And I can’t even find one single relative....”

  The doctor wasn’t in the cottages either, and I had to begin the search again, pushing on always further north, toward the mountains. Now I was frozen all over and so I stopped in a tavern to drink a shot of grappa, to warm my blood a bit, but when I went to pay I discovered I had no money. I looked at the tavern keeper, mortified. “Go on, go on kid. Don’t worry about it. You can have another if you want. This is terrible weather....” I thought I could hear in the distance the roar of the river waters, but perhaps it was only a trick of imagination.

  Finally I found the doctor. He made me get into his caleche, covered my legs with the blanket, so frozen did I seem to him. I left the bicycle at a farmhouse, he knew everyone in our locality. “All right, all right, now we’ll go see Maddalena. But meanwhile you’d better be careful not to get sick yourself...,” he repeated. I was terribly sleepy, and to combat it I continued to think of strange things, to mull over incoherent projects, looking at the gray clouds and the desolate magredi that ran along at my right, without end.

  * * *

  XXI

  The Pojana on the Window Ledge

  At the noise of the caleche (we were still fairly far off), a black bird flew away from one of the attic-window ledges. I thought I recognized the harsh and rapacious profile of the hawk-like pojana but perhaps it was only a crow. In winter these birds of prey came down from the mountains all the way to the steppe. Luca rushed out to meet us, gesturing wildly with his arms and talking convulsively. “I...what do I know. I was here, all by myself. It’s so blasted far away from everything, this house — I couldn’t even call for help. I did what I could....”

  We ran upstairs. Maddalena was leaning forward, her long hair falling across the sheets, her face pale, and her breast in peace. The doctor first took her pulse, then bent his ear over her chest. He even tried a mirror to see if it clouded over, looked to see if there was a pulse in her neck. Then he straightened up her head and arranged her as best he could. “Galloping pneumonia. Even if I had gotten here earlier there was probably nothing I could do. Her lungs are as hard as stones. The catarrh suffocated her....”

  Luca continued to walk around the room agitating his hands and his shoulders, shaking his head and repeatedly saying no with gestures, as if he were defending himself from accusations, which no one had made, or as if part of him was convinced that he should have done something else. I remembered that Luca had never set foot in our house and for years had hung around it, not daring to approach. He had entered only to see Maddalena die. The doctor told us things we only half understood, wrote out some papers, and then left, holding out his arms in a gesture of dismay.

  I tried to get Luca out of that room, to bring him downstairs to the kitchen and convince him to drink a glass of hot wine. He would go out for ten minutes, talking in spurts, then repeatedly go back into the room where the dead woman lay. Maddalena was still beautiful: her long hair surrounded her face in a disturbing way and I understood, I could imagine Luca’s distress. The wash hanging on the third floor terrace was flapping in the wind. Maybe there was more hanging on the roof — the last thing that Maddalena had done as a housewife.

  Winter had unleashed its fury; the further north one went the worse it would be. Who could say how many ships were struggling at that moment against fog, waves and wind in frigid seas? Or how many screaming sirens there were or sailors’ gasping shouts or flooded holds or lifeboats being hurriedly lowered onto waves that bucked and plunged like wild horses....

  I scolded myself for letting my mind wander again when there was so much to do, now that death had entered the house. Now I had it before my eyes for the first time. I would no longer be able to tell myself the fairy tale that death didn’t exist and that I could believe myself immortal, like Calypso or Tithonus. Maddalena’s death thus meant the end of an attractive but deceptive fable. But I thought about this without believing in it unduly, as if basically convinced that I had been right before, and not now. As if a fable always had to be true because such was its essential nature....

  Later the village women came, along with Lucina’s mother and her three oldest daughters. It was indeed the four of them who took up all the space, especially the mother, who began at once to wail funereal lamentations at the top of her voice and literally took possession of Maddalena, ordering the others around, rummaging through drawers to look for dresses, acting with the same assurance she would have had in her own house. Whereas I found myself completely unprepared to face the event, she knew everything, every detail, of what had to be done.

  Luca and I were chased out of the room. All we could hear or see was the doors slammed by the women going constantly in and out. One woman told me I could rest easy — Lucina’s mother was always the one to lay out the dead in the village, to visit the dying, to spend the night in houses where someone needed help because of a serious illness. She also treated pneumonia with boiling linseed oil, gave enemas, put on bandages, gave injections. I remembered as in a dream having seen Lucina’s mother somewhere, bandaging a wound, pressing out infected blood, her tongue between her teeth, with cheerful commitment, almost enjoyment. She was a woman with a yellowed complexion and straight hair, who always wore black, and was crippled to the point that when she leaned to her right that leg seemed to retract into itself as if there were a spring at her hip.

  Several times I saw Lucina in different parts of the house, roaming through the rooms like an errant elf, her face reflecting perfunctory grief (she passed with rapid ease from a vaguely amused and pleased expression to one full of compunction and hypocritical sympathy), constantly and with relish devouring an apple or a piece of bread or cracking a nut with the heel of her clog, a nut taken from the pile Maddalena had saved behind the attic door. I thought uneasily that now that Maddalena was gone I would have a lot of trouble getting rid of the girls and also their mother. But for the moment I was grateful that they were doing all those things in my place.

  Luca followed me everywhere, as out of place and lost as ever, until he couldn’t take any more of those people and made his escape, grumbling. I saw his coat show white among the bushes, then disappear. Thus he left me alone with Lucina, her sisters and the mother who laid out the dead, with night already fallen and the funeral vigil begun. The girls continued to wander through the house, all agitated and excited by the presence of death. Other people came for the vigil and from Maddalena’s room came mumbled prayers that never ended, as if being said over and over again. I didn’t go into the candle-lit funeral room. I roamed through the house, but always at a distance, u
p and down stairs and through hallways. Sometimes I too wanted to flee and even took a turn around the cortile, looking at the lighted windows. But I couldn’t escape as Luca had because this was my house.

  An image kept coming back to me, the image of Maddalena walking through the magredi with her clogs in her hand, her feet bleeding from the stones, her hair in disorder. Her delirium was becoming mine, was materializing within me, turning into a chant and a dirge for a flight far far away, without a destination, almost as if the magredi were now as endless as a Siberian steppe.

  Nor did I have any peace that night; perhaps it was my moving around that provoked the women’s indignation, as they turned and watched me from the open door, without ceasing to grumble their prayers.

  The funeral took place the next day. Luca and I stood and watched from a distance, like worried spies, as the procession disappeared inside the walls of the cemetery, a black serpent still not tired of mumbling prayers. Not even in the ensuing days did I want to go inside the cemetery, yet I hung around outside it as if looking for something. Once I saw laborers at work in the little thicket of tombstones and white crosses. A man dressed in black stood among them and appeared to be giving orders and directions.

  Luca and I were mutually attracted to each other in those days. We would meet near my house, he with his goatskin jacket and his gun (he would blow on his hands to warm them or stamp his feet on the ground) and I with my stiriana and woolen gloves. We took long walks together, following the footpaths, picking up dry branches, without saying a word to each other. Once he invited me to his house to drink something hot, but I refused.