I didn’t feel like lighting fires in the stoves and thus wandered from room to room bundled up in scarves and sweaters, and always wearing my stiriana. I ate chestnuts, walnuts, a piece of cheese or salami and often stayed in bed all morning reading books, my beard grown long; I was becoming uncivilized. One day, however, I got up very early because I had heard loud barking near the house and I was taken with the extravagant idea that wolves had come down from the mountains to the steppe, driven by hunger. I took the axe and went out into the cortile. Under the shed, leaning on a roof pole Luca stood motionless, staring at me as if I weren’t a human figure but rather a waving veil or an evanescent smoke.
As I had foreseen, Lucina, her sisters and her mother continued to come to the house. One day the old woman showed me all Maddalena’s dresses spread out on a bed. I couldn’t believe she had so many, even if they were worn out. “Signorino, they’re no use to you, and we’re so poor. Just think, I have seven daughters to clothe and feed....” I told her she could have them. “Thank you, signorino, thank you. Maddalena, God rest her soul, would be pleased....” She sought my hands to press them or perhaps even to kiss them (they were all terrible hypocrites) and I drew back disgusted, almost nauseated. I gave her all she could ask for, hoping she’d leave as soon as possible, and not come back, at least for a while.
* * *
XXII
The Wash on the Terrace
Even though I had seen her dead, I couldn’t really make myself accept the idea that Maddalena was gone. She continued to live in a hundred ways, to be present still, because everything in the house at every instant reminded me of her. For a week the pillowcases and sheets flapped in the wind before I made up my mind to take them down; it was she who had hung them there to dry. If I picked up a book it would often remind me that she was the one who had obtained it for me. When I opened drawers I would find pieces of paper on which she had scribbled numbers and calculations in incomprehensible scrawls. One night I got up to close a banging shutter and made an effort to be quiet so as not to awaken her, as if she were sleeping in the other room. Only after I had absorbed the December cold for a moment or two did I remember that she was in the cemetery and nothing could awaken her. Coming home by the footpath with my clogs caked with mud I would take a long time to clean them on the wrought iron boot scraper fixed next to the door as if she could still scold me for getting the floor tiles dirty.
Since I couldn’t rid myself of the impression that she was still alive I began to spend as much time as possible away from the house, hanging around with woodcutters and poachers, attaching myself to vagabonds or vagrants — strange and above all restless people who wandered from one place to another as if the earth scorched their feet. Occasionally I would work and even make a little money, then spend it in a disorderly and disreputable way.
My desire for adventure had shriveled, mummified, or else had fallen victim to galloping senility. Everything around me seemed to be imbued with cold and dampness, to have faded and become unrecognizable. I experienced a sensation I had had before but now it was stronger and harsher, a feeling that in my surroundings there had been a festival full of attractions — ambiguous acrobats who had come from afar, splendid musicians and dancers — but that I had arrived late, after everyone else had already gone and all that was left of the festival now were shabby remains: trampled confetti, pieces of broken bottles, torn masks and a few drunks snoring here and there. Late. I had arrived too late.... Almost fifty years too late. I should have been at the festivities organized by the Dane, when he had carried off my grandmother Elvira, when the walls of the house had threatened to collapse like the walls of Jericho, and when they used to say in the village that everyone involved in these goings on was completely mad. Even with Maddalena I had been too late. I had never asked her to take me with her, not even after I had grown up. I had let her go while I continued to stay home alone like a lighthouse keeper, lost in a jumble of daydreams, and now I was discovering everything enormously late. Even the identity of the mysterious man Maddalena used to go to see.
One evening Lucina came by and as if reciting a fable with malicious undertones, told me that a landowner from Montebelluno had had a beautiful tomb built for Maddalena — the most beautiful one in the whole cemetery. He still appeared now and then in the village. He would come in a carriage, draw up near her grave, pause for a few minutes, then go off again without stopping or speaking to anyone. “He was her lover, did you know? He used to come for her in a caleche or a carriage. He’d wait behind the trees at the edge of the magredi so as not to be noticed. Lucky Maddalena. Me too, I wouldn’t mind having a rich lover either....”
She was moving back and forth in the rocking chair, pushing herself as if on a swing, until she tipped over and lay on the floor laughing and moaning with her long legs uncovered. I didn’t know what she had in mind, and I didn’t ask myself. She was possessed of a raw capacity to attract, to arouse desire: by the way she laughed, by the way she moved, by her grasshopper habits, always climbing up on chairs and furniture, always in movement, doing who-knew-what. Seeing her dart about the house brought back to me a bitter longing to act, to take hold, to possess, to plunge my hands into life and withdraw them full of something, whatever it might be. I felt like a mongrel dog abandoned by his owner. But I was a ravenous dog and I would bite whatever came within reach, beginning with Lucina, even though she was only the daughter of a cripple who dealt in folk remedies. And Lucina was available, her thin face full of malice, but more that that, amused astonishment....
* * *
XXIII
The Alien Den
I roamed through the empty house like an animal in a cage, deceived by mirages which memory kept preparing like traps, by swarms of thoughts and desires organized as if Maddalena were still alive. A fierce cold and emptiness had taken over my room, filling it with limitless squalor. Sometimes I had an urge to ask Lucina to come and stay with me. Maybe, in her way, she’d be an able housewife and would know how to cook and keep things in order. Somehow or other I would bring home a little money, working as a woodcutter or a smuggler.
I roamed through the village also, at impossible hours, even before dawn so as not to encounter anyone. I liked catching the first light that splintered the dark beyond the Tagliamento, above the hills and mountains of Slavonia, terribly inviting as if it illuminated a happy world. The wind would lift my cloak and the granular sleet would freeze my bristling unshaven face. Every once in a while I was seized by an ashen awareness that I didn’t know where to go, that I was turning in a void, that Maddalena was hopelessly dead, that my house was a frigid den and that in all my surroundings there was no longer anything that interested me.
And yet at the same time, behind my disillusionment, I felt that something remained, something intact, which I might perhaps never discover, but of which I had a cloudy premonition. A number of illusory stage settings around me had given way one after another, but in the desolated ruins, through the dust, others were rising, vaguer, farther away, and indefinable.
I was more and more detached from my real situation. I seemed not to know clearly that to stay alive one had to eat at least a couple of times a day and have a warm house. Sometimes I would decide not even to go inside and would continue to wander about nearby as if I were afraid to return and rediscover the frigidity of the rooms; staying outside looking at a lighted window (I always left a lamp on the kitchen windowsill), I could imagine there was someone in there waiting for me with impatience: Luca, Lucina, or even Flora, unexpectedly come back.... Instead, I never found anyone, not even Lucina, who perhaps entered in my absence, but not finding me, went away again, at most with a handful of nuts or an apron full of withered apples, because she was afraid of the emptiness or the cold, like an animal in a strange den, and couldn’t stand to be there by herself.
I had met Luca many times at night or at dawn, with sleet frozen on his coat or in his gray beard, wandering the paths as if under a spell. He went
poaching at night. He would dazzle and stun hares, hedgehogs and wild rabbits with his carbide lamp but he himself had been stunned, perhaps forever, by a much brighter light. One night we found ourselves face to face and stood a moment looking at each other. Then he put down his lantern, approached me and started to hug me, shaken by a trembling I could feel through his coat, and then touched me hesitantly and repeatedly with his big gloved hands. “What’s the matter Luca? Are you planning to leave? Are you saying good-bye?”
“Eh. Me, leave? Maybe.... I don’t know, I haven’t decided....”
I didn’t expect to see him again in the days that followed. Instead I did see him, wandering uneasily around the cemetery wall. Thus an obscure idea came to me: if Luca had greeted me and hugged me and yet wasn’t leaving, then that was a sign that I was the one who should go away. Now nothing was preventing me. I would be abandoning no one. I might, for instance, go to look for the Dane: that project was no longer a formless dream because now I even had his address. If I didn’t find him, if by chance he was already dead, I could join the crew of a ship no matter where it might be going. What difference would it make that I was a foreigner? Even on the Pequod there were sailors from every corner of the earth, from as far away as India and Indonesia. Sailors didn’t have countries because their real homeland was the sea and the ship made them brothers, no matter where they came from. Every one of them could have been a scoundrel in the past, some might have been thieves or murderers, but the sea wiped out everything, purified everything, redeemed it all.
The moment had really arrived. I could read it in every particular; even the call of the screech owl or a sudden gust of wind whistling on the terraces was transmuted into signals for a departure which should have happened some time ago. What was keeping me? The thought that Flora might return and not find me was a possibility so tenuous that it equalled the possibility that by leaving I might find her. I began to wander the magredi, going back and forth as if I needed to know better what I was leaving behind before I went away. I crossed the grave of the streams, vast expanses of white stones speckled by greenish marks left by shepherds’ crooks and by sticks of wood dragged by the river in flood against the piles of gravel. I saw then for the first time the villages that lay beyond the magredi; from my terrace I could catch a glimpse of maybe only the tops of their belfries or maybe not even these. I seemed to be discovering an arid world out of a fable, apparently made up of poor islands of steppe and thin strips of cultivated land that had fallen into the midst of a limitless torrent, wider than the Amazon, which on the other side reached as far as the Tagliamento. It was an absurd incredible Asian landscape, but full of inviting fascination....
No, this wouldn’t do. I had to burn my bridges, to force myself to go on and prevent myself from retreating. Thus I decided to sell the house.
I began to get things ready, but I realized that one wagon wasn’t going to be enough to transport them. Impossible. So I put them all in a little room in the shed, a sort of hole in the wall with a tiny window, which was dry and free of mildew, and which I reserved as mine. I tried to assemble them as best I could, as if I were readying them for shipment, or as if I were stowing them in a ship’s hold and had made a bet that I would do so using the space in the most efficient way possible.
I held the objects in my hand for a long time, feeling their weight and studying their shape in order to pick out the most suitable niche and in this way I had an excuse to took at them again, to re-examine certain details. I decided to take almost nothing with me. Everything would stay here and wait for me, maybe even for decades, because it wasn’t out of the question that I might return one day. I understood that I couldn’t burn the last bridge, that a small footbridge, maybe only a cord has to continue its existence behind us, to tie us to the past.
From the moment I decided to leave I felt the effects of a primitive force. I was like a polar bear or a migratory bird who was accumulating energy waiting to make that leap of thousands of kilometers. It was a primordial lightheartedness, an energetic impatience, like harpoonists must feel in pursuit of a school of whales.
I was a little sorry to leave Lucina like this, saying nothing. She had given me moments of joy. But I didn’t love her, nor she me. My departure left no empty place in her past and by not telling her I would avoid a stream of shrieking lamentations. Her dream was of a rich lover with a house and carriage, but even if she found him she would forever remain the ragged Gypsy who chased after hedgehogs and moles, who lived on petty thievery and expedients and was always subject to that uncontainable vital swirl that drove her into the arms of anyone and everyone.
I didn’t go to the cemetery. I knew Maddalena’s grave would not lack flowers as long as Luca and the man with the carriage were alive. I took with me only a sack of clothes, the flute, some money, several maps and a few books.
I said good-bye to no one even though I meant to right up until the last minute. My departure this way at night had all the aspects of a flight, as if I had committed some sort of crime in Ontàns. I was afraid I’d repent and turn back. As I walked toward the bridge over the Tagliamento I thought that perhaps I didn’t have the Dane’s temperament and wasn’t suited to face the unknown. I would probably become just an emigrant, like so many others, and as soon as my money was gone I’d go to work in a factory or a shipyard.
* * *
PART TWO
I
The Dutch Student
The night spread out around me, heavy and dark. It had never bothered me to be up at that hour; my life had always been so disorganized and unsociable that I had no fixed times for going to bed or getting up or eating. But tonight I was sleepy. Walking along I broke a bootlace and had to replace it with a piece of string. I sat down beside the path on my coat and reflected that everybody else was asleep while I was setting off toward something not very certain, trusting to luck.
At times I had imagined myself as a wandering vagabond caught in the turn of unknown and foreign events. Now I actually was marching toward the unknown, even though it seemed I couldn’t manage to fully realize it. There was nothing to be done. As usual I didn’t measure up to the situation, couldn’t really enter into it, as if I were still merely a spectator watching myself and what was happening. I was afraid that no matter what might occur in the future I would never be able to coincide with events, I would always be above them or below them. Perhaps I had sold the house as an act of bravado whose only spectator had been myself, that is, someone who was neither very reliable nor enthusiastic.
I heard a train whistle, so far away that I wondered if it could be the Austrian line, the one I would be taking. Until now I had only been on a train four times, in connection with my capricious exploits with thieves and smugglers, but these had all been the briefest of trips, whereas now the train would be my home for a day and a night, maybe even longer.
I was already near the bridge when a wagon came by with the horses at a trot. The wagon driver let me climb on board providing, however, that I stayed in the back on top of the hard sacks of coal. He didn’t want anyone on the seat beside him. He was as anti-social as a cockroach and hated talking to people. We moved along through the night as through an endless tunnel; had it not been for a few tiny gleams of light more or less in the distance we could not have told that we were out in the open. When I left the wagoner, near the railway station, it was almost dawn. I reflected that his refusal to talk and his absolute lack of interest in me had effectively prevented me from assuming any attitude toward him at all, and hence the ride to the station had been a blank space without sense, like sleep. Still, I had been lucky to encounter him.
The train arrived. Only two other people boarded my coach, with its hard wooden seats. I felt a pang of sadness. The compartment was chilly, the other travelers silent or asleep, the air stuffy. There was still time to get off and find some kind of ride back to Ontàns. I forced myself to think about something else. I knew I didn’t have to change cars until we got to the b
order between Austria and Germany and the calm which this knowledge provided, along with extreme tiredness, put me to sleep almost at once.
I was awakened by sudden braking. The train was well into the mountains, stopped near a tiny station with a steep roof. As I waited for it to start again I gazed out the window, still drowsy and quite hungry. The landscape was sleeping under a layer of snow deeper than I had ever seen. At home, especially in the magredi, we usually got grainy transparent sleet that never accumulated. The spruces, huge stands of them, looked like fantastic beasts concentrating on the effort they were about to put forth to shake off all that snow and emerge from an ancient hibernation. I could hear an ax chopping, but the snow diminished sounds almost to the point of making them disappear.
Then, in the space of a moment, I was filled with a blurred muffled emotion, which coursed through me like an invisible wave. I felt the attraction of the snow almost as if it were a matter of destiny, a mysterious instinct, which had lain dormant for many years deep in my blood and was now stirring and filling me with a joyful anxiety. Perhaps it came from the enigmatic Daniel Wivallius, whose grandson I was, after all, even though I often forgot about him. I would surely find snow in Denmark too. If my spirit was troubled by the idea that it was absurd to go so far away with scarcely any money, the snow sufficed to make me feel that it was pleasant to plunge like this into the cryptically intact reality I had always sensed within me.... I was waiting from moment to moment for the train to start, but nothing happened. Perhaps I was unconsciously waiting for the first jolt, the puffing of the steam locomotive and the rhythm of the wheels, to put me back to sleep, and their absence was keeping me touchily half awake. Instead I heard the grating noise of windows being opened and closed, people asking questions from those windows, other people replying. The delay was excessive and might have something to do with the incoherent tangle of voices. Even my traveling companions were beginning to look at each other, their faces veiled with anxiety, as they wondered aloud what we were waiting for, why the train didn’t leave. “I’m going to go have a look,” decided one, but we didn’t see him come back. Maybe he had joined the growing number who were getting off to walk back and forth in the snow beside the track.
The Wooden Throne Page 11
