The search filled me with overflowing enthusiasm as if going through those attics and storerooms was making me lighter in a material sense, almost ready to take flight.
The villagers watched me with a certain suspicion. The speed and vivacity of my manner clashed with their static and dreamy way of letting existence carry them along. Perhaps for them my rousing all those objects and clothes from their age-old sleep bound to the past under inches of dust, resembled a kind of witchcraft even more suspect than that contained in Namu’s little clay pots. But I went ahead unperturbed, expecting recognition to combine ultimately with my rummaging and congeal out of it a few of my crazy ideas.
I ended up by acquiring a following of small boys. Not that there were many of them in the village, but there were a few. They emerged from their houses only after the sun was already high in the sky, all bundled up in scarves, ski caps, wool gloves and coats which, to judge from the color, were probably made over military uniforms. They played all day in the snow, like clumsy miniature men, if the wind wasn’t too strong or it wasn’t snowing too hard. Their wooden clogs resounded on the cobbles kept free of snow under the overhanging eaves. But when the sun disappeared behind the rocks and the light diminished a sort of vague fear came over them and they took refuge in their houses again.
The school was too far away to attend and thus with all day on their hands they took up the habit of trailing after me despite the fact that I had never lifted a finger to encourage them. Thus I found myself at the head of a tiny army of faithful followers, even a bit too determined to help me, and I didn’t know what commands to issue.
Among my ideas, which fluttered about like disembodied souls, was the notion of doing something to cheer up Lia. In fact I thought of her as the sorrowful princess waiting for someone who would be able to make her smile. The others too, almost all of them, seemed melancholy and abstracted, as for some forgotten reason lost in the depths of memory. I got the impression that they did everything (milked cows and goats, cut wood, shoveled snow) as though performing alien and distant tasks, which served merely to fill the time until their death. Not one of them, as far as I could tell, was at all attracted by the seductive and unpredictable things that, I sensed, were hidden away in the folds of reality. Red, Pietro, Namu and Lia were characters reduced to a muted form of life, as if they had fallen asleep and some sort of faded stand-in had taken each one’s place to imitate him or her in a distracted and not very convincing way.
Thus I had arrived in the village to wake it up.
In my free moments I built a huge sled shaped like a carriage, which I began to use on the nearby slopes, loading it with squealing children. Then, annoyed that we always came to a stop in the same place, I added a mast and a sail — an authentic sail, strong but light, with the lion of Saint Mark painted in the middle; who knows where it came from. The attics of Cretis really were richer than I ever would have supposed.
In the trial descent the sled took off like a shot, driven by a vigorous wind. The latest snow had been cleared from the streets but what remained had been quickly packed into ice so that the iron runners of the sled flew over it at a dangerous speed. The children laughed with frightened enthusiasm, scared that the sled might end up smashed against a wall. People appeared at doors and windows, saw the sail with its red and gilded lion and knew that this was a new kind of game. From then on, instead of being an ordinary stranger, I became the village’s own Giuliano, always at the center of attention.
After the sled came the night of the colored balloons, released with tiny cardboard gondolas attached, each containing a minuscule lantern. Everyone was still talking about this display and still seeing it in imagination but I was already thinking up something new. All I had done and my surroundings themselves I saw as only a step in a process; I was always anticipating something better, more intense, which was sleeping inside the future like a baby in its mother’s womb. I was still eagerly awaiting something, which instead of fading with the years was growing ever more attractive and luminous. Whatever I invented was related to my more or less constant purpose of entertaining Lia, but it served also to open the necessary safety valve for my tumultuous need to act. I boiled with undefined energy, an effervescent and amorphous drive that might land me anywhere, might assume any form because it demanded above all that I do something. The direction didn’t matter. I felt not the slightest worry at my extravagant availability, but rather a private satisfaction.
* * *
X
The Carnival
I still experienced a vague feeling of unintended hypocrisy connected with my awareness that I was never really identified with what I was doing, that whether I was raising a sail over a sled or putting on a light display, I was far from being really contained in those things — most of me remained intact, ready and willing for something else. Those who had judged me on the basis of those exploits would have formed an image that was quite far from the truth and consequently I should feel like a hypocrite. Hadn’t I supplied them with the elements of their mistaken judgment? But if I were required to correct the mistake I had provoked, to supply more authentic data, I wouldn’t know where to turn. All this created no moral problem for me but rather wrapped my life in a kind of jollity like a constant tickling, which brought an urge to burst into exuberant laughter. Indeed there was something profoundly funny about it all.
An idea took hold of me: to bring to life in Cretis the festival I had always imagined from afar from the time I used to see Maddalena leave the house all dressed up like a fine lady.
It was carnival. I could attempt to organize a costume celebration like those they once held in Venice more than a century ago. The children helped me find all I would need. They didn’t always understand what I was asking for but they would set off at once to search, as eager to please as puppies, and I tried hard not to let them down when they sometimes came back with an object very different from what I wanted. I knew they were putting their whole selves into the effort and the carnival we were preparing was such a serious affair for them that it almost became so for me.
Now and then my vivid notion of things yet in store would falter and lose focus, its outlines would waver and mist over. Or else that impression would simply move off into the distance like a carriage following its own course along out of the way roads leaving nothing behind but the faint sound of harness bells. At those moments I would quickly remind myself that I couldn’t disappoint the children and so must finish the project at any cost. For them this carnival would be the same thing that the Dane’s wild parties would have been for me, had I been able to take part in them. I couldn’t deprive them of an experience like that.
Other times it was the feeling of responsibility that almost paralyzed me, the thought that everything depended on me, that the others acted only on my direction. If I should happen to lose my initiative everything would run aground and the children, Lia and Red would regard me with discouraged and questioning eyes, trying to figure out my intentions.
Besides, these moments were counterbalanced by other more numerous occasions when by contrast I was filled with satisfaction: I was on the point of creating something that Cretis probably hadn’t seen since the beginning of its history. Even when it was under Venetian domination (but I wasn’t altogether sure about this, it might have been ruled by the Hapsburgs or the Counts of Gorizia), the carnivals would have arrived up here as mere echoes of something very far away. I was sure that the carnival capes and the few costumes I had found in attics and storage rooms had never been used here, that they had been brought from the capital by some mountaineer turned sailor, in order to dazzle his fellow villagers, who had probably never even seen the sea. At present I was principally engaged in preparing costumes to represent all the historic periods to which my favorite characters belonged. I decided, for instance, that I would be Caesar. I was certain, given my capacity for identification, that for an hour or so I would experience the emotion of going to meet my destiny on an Ides
of March that had already passed more than nineteen centuries ago and about which I knew all there was to know.
I asked the women to help me with the sewing. None refused, not even Lia. But she gave me a quizzical look, as if I hadn’t stopped playing with toys yet; maybe when Flora, after returning to Cretis for a day or two, would decide to run off again Lia had looked at her the same way. Or better, thinking it over, I decided that Lia’s smile meant she had understood me, I belonged to the same race as Flora. I couldn’t blame her because I thought she was right.
It was just that I was a bit annoyed because she didn’t seem to understand that what I was doing was directed primarily at her. I felt more than ever that I was at the center of a story for which Lia’s smile was the fated epilogue. Thus I paid more and more attention to her, not so much because of any immediate interest as for what grew out of my situation. In fact an actor who plays Romeo, let’s say, has to be interested in Juliet, at least on stage, even if in private life she can’t even get him to look at her.
I noticed that underneath Lia’s appearance of sadness, there was a fundamental serenity. I was almost disappointed when I made this discovery. If she could be happy by herself then what I was doing was useless and I was left with neither a task nor a function. If I had imposed a fairy-tale situation upon reality I had done so because I had stupidly confused the two. The fairy tale was schematic and wooden whereas reality was always fluid and unpredictable; in reality it might even occur that the princess smiled although she continued to be sad, or that she was serene even when she didn’t smile at all.
* * *
XI
The Basilisk
However things might stand, I had to go on. I discovered that Lia had a secret life. Often when she disappeared for a while she went to the room where I had seen her taking off the high-button shoes, the place where she kept all the dresses her sister brought home by the armful when she returned to Cretis, as if to liquidate a part of her life now concluded and turned disagreeable and start over again.
Perhaps Lia liked knowing that the closets in Flora’s room held the possibility of a life very different from the one she was living and this was enough to give her a sense of freedom, a feeling she could change her life if she wanted to. Was that what she thought? Who knows? Even now, after so many years, Lia seems all the more mysterious simply because she was transparent and devoid of enigma, just as clear water is sometimes for me the most arcane substance in the world. She even kept a collection of jewelry in a cardboard box: earrings, pendants, gold rings, all of them delicate and so light they might even have floated in water. They were antiques, the work of artisans. Lia would contemplate them at length, as she did the dresses. Sometimes she would pick up a piece or two and hold it up to her ears or breast or hair and after looking at herself in the mirror in various poses put it carefully back in the box.
I began to think that with me she had at least started to dismantle her defenses and the reserve she surrounded herself with, simply because she willingly showed me her things — for example, the laces and edgings she made with her spindles and lace cushions when she would be caught up with her work and the house was quiet and peaceful. They consisted of borders for sheets, tablecloths and nightgowns, which she accumulated but never sewed to the linens they were intended for, as if she were content merely to look at them lying there starched and ironed in their boxes and, satisfied that they were pretty, remained indifferent to their real purpose.
Once she took me into the “fitting room” and after a moment’s hesitation opened a drawer and showed me an embroidered handkerchief, a pair of silk slippers and a garnet bracelet. I asked her if they were hers. “But don’t you see? The handkerchief is all yellowed from age. These things belonged to an ancestor who was named Lia like me, and who came here as a bride from the Aupa Valley. Her father brought her down on horseback already wearing her wedding dress and covered with jewelry like a statue of the Madonna. During the ceremony lightning struck the top of the bell tower of the church. The groom died very young only three years after the wedding....”
She regarded those objects as talismans; I got the idea that for her the other Lia was not a distant shadow but a real living creature who refrained from showing up and knocking at our doors only because of her discretion and extreme reserve. Although she had begun to confide in me, every once in a while Lia would suddenly interrupt herself and begin to stare into space as though she had forgotten my presence or even my existence and could take herself as far away from earth as the moon. Those were the times when she seemed more than ever to reveal her secret Etruscan nature. She still gave me the impression that she was jealous of her interior self, an elusive corner of her nature to which no one was admitted. Maybe it wasn’t a matter of jealousy or exclusiveness but rather the fact that it was impossible for her to reveal herself to others or for them to reach her.
One time I caught a glimpse of her in the usual room wearing a costume (perhaps Slavic, perhaps Peruvian or Central American) which she had embellished with all her medallions, earrings and rings. She looked like an oriental basilisk as she gazed at herself in the mirror, as motionless as an idol. Perhaps in the complicated tangle of her inheritance there was an ancient barbaric strain, which sometimes translated into that primitive solemnity.
I avoided this thought only when I realized I was attributing to her a spirit like Namu’s, which had the effect of making her seem old and placing her in a sphere of cryptic unattainability. So I tried instead to think about those specific traits of hers that were capable of producing the opposite effect. I had noticed, for instance, how she was remarkably afraid of hurting herself. If she bumped an elbow or a knee she would examine it carefully with a worried look as if it might be some kind of disastrous fracture. If she got a thorn or a splinter of glass in her finger she would begin to imagine it could enter a vein, make its way to her heart and pierce it with dreadful or even mortal results. Then her fantasies and fears would vanish, and she would begin instead to study the bruise or cut and incessantly rub it or disinfect it with alcohol or Namu’s ointments. Like Flora, Lia was narcissistic. She loved her own hands, her arms, her legs and thus took care of them tenderly and liked to adorn them with jewelry and unusual clothes. Although she was very discreet, perhaps it didn’t entirely displease her that other eyes besides the mirror’s and her own should see her in those moments when she had reason to believe she was attractive.
For the same reason she kept her clothes most carefully clean and pressed; she washed her hair frequently and curled the ends with an iron heated in the embers, taking a thousand precautions not to damage them (trying out the iron ten times on a piece of paper to get the heat just right), or else she would waste a lot of time polishing the ankle boots she wore in the snow. I felt like saying to her: “Aha, I’ve found you out!” with a superior smile, as if now I had her in the palm of my hand and knew everything about her. But she, not realizing it, with as little as a single gesture would escape from the frame I had mentally placed around her, and her image would blur again into something remote and undefined.
There was a quality about her that both attracted and repelled me. I was repelled or at least perplexed by her air of having given up the idea of living her own life as an individual with even a minimum of participation. In fact, despite her ingenuous narcissism, Lia always withdrew into a ritual of stunned and precise gestures, which didn’t seem at all like living to me but rather the confirmation that she had renounced life, fled into a detached and impersonal dimension and left it to others (Flora for instance) to live her life for her. But there were also times when these same traits attracted me to Lia and the duty towards her, which I had invented for myself, seemed fraught with fabulous implications as though perceived through a veil, which enhanced its scintillating appeal — an appeal always reinforced from a distance by the tranquil sensuality emanating from Lia herself.
I would have liked to be a conjurer, a great magician, Cagliostro brought ba
ck to life, or at the very least I wished I could take full advantage of my experience as an adventurer and smuggler to awaken Lia from her drowsy state. When I could I helped her with her work, followed her into the courtyard to split wood, if Red was busy with the cows or off in the mountains hunting foxes or squirrels, or I would carry the brimming pails to the house as soon as the cows were milked — things like that. In short I did the heavier work, which according to her fears, might harm a body she believed more fragile than it really was. I could read the gratitude on her face for dangers avoided to hands or legs. When she confronted certain tasks (not necessarily the hardest ones, sometimes merely disagreeable ones) Lia, for all that she was as hardworking as a bee, would become oddly apathetic, take her time and never make up her mind to get started. Once in a while I’d purposely not offer to help just to see how long she’d continue to procrastinate.
* * *
XII
Hermes’ Place
One day we were in the woods gathering kindling in a desolated strip where a couple of years before an avalanche had knocked down the trees. Lia was putting together a small bundle, breaking sticks that were too long against her heel and passing the thicker ones to me to break, then bringing the bundle to the sled and waiting for me to tie it on with a rope. We sank into the snow up to our ankles and sometimes even further. Now and then Lia stopped and stood still as if listening for a distant sound, unconsciously inviting me to do the same. Even the slightest crack of a broken twig or the muted thud of a handful of snow shaken from a tree by a frigid gust of the north wind sounded extraordinarily loud in the silence. During one such pause I heard a hoarse cry. “It’s a crow,” I said sotto voce.
The Wooden Throne Page 16
