When he walked and especially when he climbed stairs I noticed how his legs trembled with the effort to support his weight. It was the effect of age, but it also brought another notion to my mind. I always moved quickly; my legs were strong simply because I had lived only a little more than twenty years and therefore the network of my past had caught only insignificant trifles. I had sounded reality with the shortest of measuring sticks and was acquainted only with a thin and insubstantial layer of existence. If I had had the old man’s experience my legs would have trembled too because life made you drunk and whoever had tasted its depths couldn’t help but feel the effects as a kind of drunkenness. Pietro had been buffeted this way and that from one continent to another without any plan. No wonder then that he should end up with the sensation that his life hadn’t been something clear and concrete but rather a lengthy vision, which he recalled as a series of confused images. I couldn’t help but concur with a statement he had once made: “The past is only a long fantasy, which we revise as we wish, and which we dip into like a vast reservoir of dreams.”
His words revealed no desire to impress or amaze. Quite the reverse, he would have tended to say nothing, not even to open his mouth, to go on weaving and tottering along the last stretch of road left for him to travel, lost in the final mists of the grand drunkenness that had begun so many, many years before, even before the death of Napoleon. It was I who provoked him, who besieged him with questions and forced him to talk.
* * *
XIX
The Wooden Throne
He always talked in a tentative manner, with a touch of melancholy, as if every phrase held an implicit memory of so many sad events, but these were memories devoid of any force, which belonged not to him alone but to everyone. Besides, everything he said seemed to contain something that went beyond its literal meaning. He would say: “Would you please pass me the V gouge,” in such a way that I caught in that insignificant utterance an echo of his sorrow for the woman he had loved near the Aral Sea and then lost when he went off to bring aid to the snowbound village.
His simplest words would somehow change into farewell greetings spoken by a man who embarks for Australia or America doubting he will ever return. Perhaps Pietro really was about to set sail himself, and he alone sensed the proximity of his departure, while we continued to think of him as still having a long, long time ahead of him. But now, after all this time I thought it might not seem like a final and definitive departure to him but rather part of a continual interminable one, because every instant meant some kind of separation and incipient farewell. When he passed from one room to another or from the fortress house into the courtyard he seemed to act like someone moving from Arizona to Alaska or from the Caucasus to Turkestan.
But there were moments when that impression diminished: when he was telling his stories. Often he recounted them as he worked, pushing his chisels with the palm of his hand or tapping them with the carver’s mall, showing an energy and steadiness his legs no longer possessed. We too, by imitation, went on working as we listened. On those occasions Lia left off doing housework to make something, usually laces, or perhaps the wicker baskets of various sizes, which she fashioned out of the peeled osier branches Red and I brought up from the plain in huge bunches. I felt that this work we were doing with our hands accorded particularly well with what we were listening to. Working with the knives and chisels seemed in fact to stimulate the old man’s imagination and increase his narrative skill. If he hesitated for a moment, unable to find the right word, the tap of the carver’s mall on the handle of the chisel urged him on and he would soon pick up the thread.
We all liked our work. Lia’s baskets, each with its two rings of colored wicker, were lined up on a table in the storeroom, fresh and creaky and ready to be sold. The same was true of our carvings, in which you could see the clean shiny marks left by every firm stroke of knife or chisel.
Once in a while Pietro would interrupt his work to finish a story with a gesture that fluidly traced the outline of an object or indicated the position of an animal or the despair of a man. He seemed to intuit our secret desires: for Red he talked mainly about animals and hunting, for me he told tales of exploration and the sea, for Lia he recounted love stories. In the summer he sat outside on a bench, or preferably in the big armchair of Slavonian oak now darkened by time, which looked like a crude peasant throne. The children who had spent an hour with me learning to read would often delay their return home, using every excuse they could think of, pretending they had to retie their shoelaces or looking for something among the cobblestones just to be near Pietro. They ended up sitting on the ground beside us to listen. They probably didn’t understand half of what he was saying but what did that matter? What they loved was the narration itself. Anyhow Pietro’s stories always included more than enough to arouse their sense of wonder and put their imaginations to work, perhaps even too much. Their shining eyes made it easy to see that visions were passing through their heads, one after another, and that they were continually transfiguring what they saw and what they had at hand. It was the same as when they played or when they had helped me with the carnival, of which nothing now remained but a few strings hanging from gutters: one night the wind had carried off the balloon, and afterwards nobody had been able to find a single trace of it.
Adults too stopped to listen to Pietro: mowers with their scythes on their shoulders and their whetstones wrapped in grass and stuck into the horns tied to their belts; or women returning, buckets in hand, from the fountain; or woodcutters dragging a trunk by a rope.
In summer, however, with its demands and diversions, there were so many things to do. The children would end up distracted by some game, the adults would remember a pressing task, and thus without speaking they’d raise two fingers in a parting gesture and take their leave. Pietro would stop for a moment to watch them. In the pause we could hear distant noises, the river, wagon wheels slowed by brakes, or the cry of a bird of prey. Lia suddenly squeezed my hand and I now knew that signal very well. She had sensed that a misfortune had befallen someone somewhere: a group of mountain climbers roped together had fallen, a flash flood had occurred, or maybe a village of wooden houses had caught fire.... Then Pietro took up his story again and I thought he had lowered his tone so that his voice suggested even more impassivity. Such moments reinforced my impression that he was a king in exile, abandoned by almost everyone and surrounded only by his most faithful subjects. I recalled great figures from history whose followers had abandoned them: Christ, for instance, left alone to pray in the garden while the disciples slept; or Caesar, who went to meet his destiny on the Ides of March and found himself totally alone, inside a circle of twenty-three raised hands holding daggers; or Columbus on the deck of the Santa Maria when his sailors stared at him with menacing eyes and contemplated throwing him into the sea....
I had now discovered beyond any doubt the nature of Pietro’s kingdom. It pleased me to mentally assign people fiefdoms and realms like an ancient emperor, not just because of my taste for such solemn games, but above all because it meant identifying each individual’s most outstanding characteristic. Pietro was a king of stories, even though he had very few listeners.
Sometimes, however, I thought that his exile was coming to an end. I spun a series of fantasies, which hadn’t the remotest connection with the possible but related only to legend. Since Pietro was a king in exile it might occur that one day his exile would end, that a crowd of dignitaries and courtiers might arrive in Cretis, their arms loaded with damasks and brocades to reclothe Pietro in the symbols of his rank and restore him to his rightful place. I imagined that his rightful place was that of a great and famous writer; he deserved recognition and glory like Count Tolstoy or the author of Moby Dick. Journalists, critics, literary scholars, celebrated people of genius should all come to pay homage to such a major talent.
In the end Pietro might even stay in Cretis. It wasn’t necessary for him to move to some big city or capi
tal to end his exile. Indeed his triumph would be more complete if his genius as a narrator were to be recognized right here in his own mountains. Was it possible that Pietro never thought or dreamed of some kind of success, some grandiose achievement like those I pictured for myself? That he was satisfied with three or four listeners like us, almost lost in the vast courtyard or the oversized rooms of the house?
At least he should write them down, these stories, so they wouldn’t be lost as quickly as he recounted them. When I told him that, he replied that nothing in this world was ever lost. I insisted. “Why worry about it Giuliano? I’d swear stories like mine have already been written down somewhere in the world. Or will be sometime....” According to Pietro it was perfectly silly to maintain that what we ourselves do is really ours in any personal sense. That view derived solely from our habit of looking at things from a minuscule platform. It was much more likely that we were following paths already trodden by others more or less in the same manner.
Autumn returned, the first snow fell; to me this was the truest season, our season. We began again to spend most of our time inside, as if something bound us to the house, something released from its walls and hearths, especially from the room where I had come home that evening and found the others singing. That room was the center of the house. We went there infrequently but when I thought of Pietro’s house my mind turned always to that room. Often I would stop to look through the windowpanes in its door at the big oaken chair or the smoke-blackened hearth where the fire had gone out, and I mentally hurried the time when we would gather there again.
Pietro was right to want nothing more than what he had. When we were inside that room singing or listening to stories it seemed to me that we had everything, that we represented a perfect musical completeness. The world didn’t matter anymore because we felt we were in a different dimension. The stories expanded the space, multiplied it, managed to include in it all that had happened to the old man, whether in the mountains of Turkestan or those of Alaska. The room became a magic lantern producing an endless sequence of images, or an enchanted crystal ball in which the infinite variety of the universe flowed back and forth. In that room I not only forgot the noisy static of my vaporous projects but even Flora’s very image or Lia’s subtle fears or the thought that time was passing and things were dissolving into an insubstantial cloud of dust. I began to understand in depth the resounding power of words and stories.
It was only when I came out of the room that I had the impression of living in a cocoon, in an embalmed half-sleep.
* * *
XX
The Enchanted Voyager
I realized that Cretis was a dying village, a village of old folks who didn’t dare leave only because of age and who considered it an antechamber of death, and of children who stayed only because they had not yet awakened to the possibility of going away.
But the youth went away. They needed novelty, excitement, life. They dreamed of working in a factory, of putting on caps and goggles to drive the automobiles or trucks they probably knew only from drawings they had seen once or twice in newspapers. Many of them began to busy themselves in the fields or stables or to learn to use woodcarvers’ or blacksmiths’ tools in dark rooms or smoky sheds, but their thoughts were far away, and as soon as they had put aside enough money for the trip they went off to seek their fortunes.
Even though I wasn’t an attentive observer I still felt that something in the village was weakening, diminishing, dying out. Departures occurred almost surreptitiously; often the one who was leaving didn’t even say good-bye to his friends, as if at the last minute he were inexplicably reticent about letting people know what he was doing or as if there were something shameful about it, like abandoning one’s post on a ship or a firing line.
Still, every departure confirmed my notion of a steady day to day disappearance. A similar thing was also happening in Ontàns and although one village was on the plain and the other in the mountains both appeared to be linked to the same destiny. I derived from my observations a definite and increasing awareness, but since it was for the moment only a personal conviction I began to study Pietro, without asking him directly, to see if he shared my opinion. It might even be that this same feeling formed the basis of his melancholy, of his bewildered slowness. He had a much more profound intuition than I did, and I was only beginning to notice things (since age had matured and sharpened my insight), that he had sensed long ago and already weighed in the balance of his existence.
If the same thing was occurring in Ontàns and Cretis that meant peasant civilization was coming to an end, and Pietro and I belonged to something that was slowly sinking out of sight. I had read about places progressively sinking because of diastrophism, like the islands on which Venice was built, for example. Perhaps it was as if I, the old man, Lia, and the others were living in an area that was slowly settling until one day it would disappear without a trace....
I had always lived either in the country or in the mountains, far from factories, smokestacks or busy streets; therefore I hadn’t had many opportunities to notice that peasant-artisan society was vanishing and being replaced by a civilization based on manufacturing and motors. Nonetheless it was easy even for me to imagine that automobiles would become more and more numerous until they took the place of carriages and that trucks would likewise supplant wagons pulled by horses or cows. The world I loved would vanish and in its place would appear one to which I was indifferent. Who could say whether I might not have been drawn to Cretis by a profound instinct, like the one which guided Pietro or Lia, and while I was ostensibly searching for Flora or the Dane I was really trying to avoid detaching myself from those places where one could yet live in close contact with nature and it was still possible to believe in stories. By now I had intuited the close link between Pietro’s stories and the fact that he worked with knives and chisels carving wood. Artisan or peasant culture and the telling of stories seemed meant for each other.
If I had understood these things, that meant I had acquired Pietro’s mentality. If I were beginning to believe my steps were guided by something powerful and infallible, then I had gone completely over to his side and my youth was over. This thought aroused an annoying and strident anxiety, and I felt I had descended into a shadowy area, into a mysterious eclipse. When the old man ended his narrative, when we came out of the “story room,” I felt a need to open the shutters and the iron gates that centuries before had been kept closed for days and weeks during invasions, to keep off hunger, fear and death. Perhaps as Pietro talked other undefined monsters were put to flight by his words: the fear of death, of time passing, the weary wait for what never came, the thought of what was disappearing; because the word was magic and potent. Or was it life that was exiled, and were Pietro’s words lifting us into an enchanted stagecoach to take us to a place where reality no longer mattered?
In flinging open doors and windows I seemed to be escaping from a powerful fascination as if I were in danger of turning into a statue of salt, of being bewitched into entering a treacherous cloister where the gray monastery walls would close me inside rules as frigid as ice. I felt the risk I was running, from which no one was trying to save me. I knew that Pietro would never urge me and Lia to leave Cretis, even though we were young and had the possibility of beginning life again in a place that had a destiny, because basically he did not believe in the future or the past and maintained that history itself was a sequence of muddled dreams, which acquired form only in the telling.
Everybody and everything led me to pursue these paths to the end. My heart was clogged with opaque fears. My entire environment took on a sphinx-like quality which, like the Pied Piper’s flute, drew me further away from reality toward perdition. Lia’s gentle beauty, ready to satisfy my every desire; old Namu, who looked at the world as an immense amulet in which to search for the face of God; Pietro, who saw no difference between dream and reality — all seemed organized to lull to sleep whatever rebellious or turbulent vi
tality I might still have. So what could be done? If I continued to stay here longer the trap would snap closed and I’d be caught forever. I was a man teetering between two equally attractive versions of reality rendered equally unstable by my suspicion that they might both be mirages. Deciding between them terrified me. And yet I knew I had to choose because Cretis was not the result of any decision I had made but rather of destiny. Perhaps the real game was between me and the Great Gambler who had filled my life with his fascinating appointments. I had to decide quickly because otherwise my hesitation itself would be a decision.
When the balance tipped toward Pietro’s world it seemed to me that Lia’s grandfather continued to be a frontiersman even in Cretis, that he was still carrying out his mission. He had to guard the threatened world of storytelling and bring myth back into a world in which the soot from smokestacks and the noise of automobiles were putting it to flight, and people were beginning to believe only in machines and factories. I was sure that in many of the Jàsnaja Poljànas of this world, in the Russian steppes or the deserts of Arabia, on American plantations or in the Danish lowlands, numerous Tolstoys, be they illustrious or obscure, famous writers or unknown storytellers like Pietro, were in their own particular way defending a dying civilization.
Tolstoy (I happened to read it in a newspaper) had died a few months before and Pietro would die before long. Nonetheless he continued to hang on, to obey an order that no one had given him, an order to behave with unfaltering dignity as the exiled king of stories.
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