I wondered sometimes if the Dane had been merely an adventurer and a hedonist who, like a capricious god, loved only the present, or whether he too was given to storytelling, like an obscure Tolstoy of ships and the sea. I instinctively preferred the second hypothesis, hoping at the same time that something of him had passed into my veins....
After the evening when I had noticed that Pietro’s voice was strangely tired I became aware that he was dying. He walked more slowly, the trembling of his legs increased, and he didn’t take a single step without his cane. Sometimes he no longer had the strength to turn the lathe and entrusted the work to me. His gestures appeared more and more to belong to an archaic civilization, which had mysteriously surfaced in the present like a relic, to bear witness to a vast ruin.
One evening I found him in the armchair tracing circles with his cane in the cooled ashes of the hearth. I asked him what he was doing. “What do you expect me to be doing? I’m dying,” he smiled.
“Well then so am I and so is Lia and everybody else. Everybody who’s alive is dying,” I replied.
He left off stirring the ashes. “For me it’s different. I always used to move around in the world. Now I’ve put down roots. I’ve come to a complete stop. But for me stopping means dying,” he added mysteriously.
I now also did his share of our work, which a wagon-driver came up from the plain every now and then to pick up. The less Pietro worked the more he seemed to reflect. His stories became ever more halting and fanciful. I asked him when and how he thought them up. “Mostly when I dream,” he said. According to him we ourselves didn’t think or invent but an unknown force thought and invented through us; we were only instruments by which it revealed itself. I almost never asked myself any more if what he recounted belonged to the territory of his experiences or his fantasies. I had known for quite a while that for Pietro life was simply an immense reservoir of appearances into which anyone could dip at will. I knew everything was illusory for him; everything was enchanted appearance like an iridescent bubble, or the tail of a kite drifting in infinity; joy and sorrow, love and death, were nothing but shadows projected on a mysterious screen. But nobody understood the nature of the screen or the magic lantern or the source of the light; nobody knew which was spirit and which material, whether they were one entity or two, or how they flowed into one another. For Pietro material was merely spirit that had dozed off and was waiting to be awakened and spirit was material that had climbed out of sleep and become activity. Life was only a disjointed fable, which someone recounted in our ear and we kept on listening to because we couldn’t resist its attraction; it was an illusory tunnel of marvels, which Pietro had passed through like an enchanted voyager, allowing himself to be drawn to everything but bound to nothing.
* * *
XXI
The Muted Guitars
He felt a great sympathy for men, and apparently understood all their sorrows and all their illusions. He saw them primarily as beings captured in mirages they could find no way out of, as creatures frightened of death and tormented by an obsessive desire to fulfill themselves, by the idea that they had to accomplish some indeterminate task before the story ended.
He looked at me as he said these things, as if he knew full well that I too was like the others. Without lifting a finger he could at any moment recreate the cage from which I was trying to escape, as though it were a matter of a poisoned charm. It was as if he had shut me in a chicken coop and convinced me it was a sumptuous palace. I vacillated continually between those two perceptions as though something was constantly magnetizing and de-magnetizing my capacity to see.
I thought his methods were more underhanded than in the past because he wasn’t trying to persuade me. Besides why would he do that? For him it was merely a matter of exchanging one fairy tale for another. He left me completely free to choose. My cage was a golden one with doors wide open, from which I could escape by a simple act of will. It was entirely up to me. All I had to do was recuperate my old ideas, the ones I had held as a boy, when I believed the world was full of surprises as fresh as huge strawberries hidden under wet leaves, that it was an unknown territory where mysterious appointments and magnificent feasts took place. I would have to go back to thinking of myself as predestined, like one of those youths in ancient legends who had to accomplish some important deed. But the price of all this was an exhausting effort of imagination whose results were very mediocre. I was a Percival who had begun to regard the existence of the Holy Grail as dubious, as a fairy tale whose substance dissipated little by little as time passed.
I knew that feeling very well. I understood precisely how something inside us could be gradually transformed from certainty into legend, appearance and smoke. I continued even to believe I was a privileged individual, but vaguely, as though the matter had lost its present relevance and entered a phase of dull and deadened waiting. Perhaps what I was mainly trying to do was to distance myself from that idea itself, to confine it to the past so that, no longer having anything to do with the present or the future, it would lose all power to cause suffering.
I had gone back to wandering in the mountains and valleys when I had a little free time, although winter had now returned and I was forced to find my way through endless cold and snow. But these excursions were not like my earlier hunting expeditions with Red or by myself because at that time I was always expecting something remarkable, whereas now I was perhaps more than anything else trying to declare my independence from Cretis, to prove I could jump off the stagecoach, or break out of the cage and fly away if I wanted to.
It seemed to me now that Pietro was moving and talking on the other side of a curtain even farther away than before. I saw the weakening of his vital force as a dissolution of what held together the thousand stories of his life. After his death they would fly off and disperse into the air like a cloud of butterflies released from a net. But they would survive him as if they were endowed with a life of their own. In fact many of them would survive in me.
Thus I came back to the belief that I was the old man’s heir and that among the many actions he had performed in my presence there had also been an investiture, a passing-on of his mission.
And yet I couldn’t manage to think of my future as anything but free, and I experienced a profound urge to run away, a reaction to the subtle impression that my idea of the world was falling apart and the earth was turning into desolation like a wild deserted heath. Maybe the full and joyous day existed but I would get to the appointed place when it was already past and forgotten. I returned to the thought that by some cryptic fatality I could only hope to attain finite things. I saw myself again as the quintessential latecomer. Giuliano was the one who was fated to arrive too late, sometimes just a little too late, sometimes forty years too late as in the case of the Dane’s festivities.
In moments of most acute melancholy I went even further and shuddered to think that perhaps those festivities hadn’t even existed. Perhaps the guitars at the Dane’s parties had been wood without strings and the players had moved their arms and hands only to placate Daniel Wivallius’ taste for mystification and had never done more than create the illusion of a music never played. Maybe the parties I had thought Maddalena attended, while I stayed home envying her good fortune and imagining that someday I would go, perhaps they hadn’t existed either. Maddalena had been naive and deluded too. Only the galloping pneumonia, which left her lungs as hard as stone, had been able to force her to stop playing tricks on herself. And Andrée in the midst of his polar ice had been merely a desperate man suffering with cold, his mind filled with visions, which were the prelude to death.
I realized that a mere nothing, an imperceptible change, was enough to render everything around us as arid as a desert.
When I was a boy my love for life and destiny made me feel at home anywhere and all things then wore a familiar and interesting guise as if I was already acquainted with them or knew they were destined for me. I had even felt at ease in Creti
s at first, whereas now sometimes the village appeared foreign to me, and I saw the fortress-house as for the first time. I found myself wondering what this house had to do with me, how I could have stayed here so long, and what could have detained me. Was it the snow, the cold, the onset of frostbite or actual freezing? Or the fear of the unknown? Or Pietro’s stories? Could things that insignificant put me off course? Was I such a childish fool that I could be distracted by the most banal images that passed before my eyes?
* * *
XXII
The Slashed Cushion
More and more often it seemed to me that there was an immense space between me and my surroundings, like the distance between the two shores of a wide river. I now saw Pietro rarely. Frequently he didn’t even come downstairs to be with us and the story room and the big wooden chair remained empty. Now and then Lia lighted the fire there and she and Namu would enter and sit talking quietly while I watched their moving lips through the glass of the door without being able to hear what they were saying.
Lia had noticed what was happening to me even though she said nothing about it. I still fancied that she regarded my increasing estrangement from Cretis as a kind of reflex, a repetition of what had occurred with Hermes.
Perhaps, however, her silence was a tactic to prevent me from using anything she might say as an excuse to blame her and justify myself; thus she would bind me to her by her very gentleness, which would make me feel guilty and remorseful if I left her. I remembered an incident in a novel when the Christian king cut off the handle of an axe with one blow of his sword while Saladin cut a cushion in half with his scimitar, and the author took pains to point out that the second feat was much more difficult. Maybe Lia knew that the cushion offered stronger resistance and resorted to this technique to neutralize my rebellion. I had no good reason to be irritated; I should have admired her instead for her subtle and disarming strategy.
It might have been simply my irritation and discontent that prevented me from really understanding Lia, because she very probably was the same as always. She had become even more affectionate, not just to hold on to me but also because she had begun to reflect on the fact that I had neither father nor mother but had lived alone with that crazy Maddalena. Therefore, she thought, I could not have received proper affection as a child.
For quite a while in fact she had been asking me about my family, my childhood and Maddalena, to gain a deeper understanding of a situation she already knew about in a vague way. She seemed to feel a delayed anguish for my long lonely days in Ontàns, for my solitary games and my desire for friends and affection.
She didn’t know how to say very much. Mostly she asked brief questions then listened attentively to my answers, an absorbed and worried look on her face, as when she was afflicted by sudden premonitions that a roped party of mountain climbers had fallen, or an avalanche had buried a forgotten valley. Still, at times I felt I didn’t really know her. She never read a newspaper, never asked for information and was indifferent to the news that the wagon-driver or Red or I or others brought to the village. Now and then it occurred to me that if people told her there were still Pharaohs in Egypt or that Columbus had just set off from Palos in three ships with crossed sails, she wouldn’t have blinked an eye. She was completely outside of time but not for the same reasons as Pietro. While her grandfather appeared to belong to every age Lia instead seemed to belong to none, to be simply the Eternal Woman who loved to dress up to please herself and the man she had decided to take into her bed.
Perhaps the model I had invented for her was the wrong one. She wasn’t the Sad Princess but rather the Eve of the Garden of Eden who had no knowledge of good or evil, of time or death, but only knew joy and sorrow, instinct and grace. She appeared to be ancient but at the same time barely created, as innocent as an animal, happy and absorbed, serene and lost in indecipherable thoughts. To me her body and her spirit had an incredible freshness, like a plant, or an oyster just taken from its shell, full of the tangy odor of the sea. She always smelled clean as if her clothes had just come out of the drawer. She always seemed to have bathed moments before, but I had never seen her do so (apparently she hid to wash herself, as primitives do). At the most I had seen her curl her hair with the iron heated on the coals or dust her cheeks with the powder Flora had left her.
Some days she seemed more absent than usual. Since, when I pressed her on these occasions, she talked about her dreams, I realized that they were important, or better, were determining factors in her life. For her they were not fictitious nocturnal apparitions but rather her waking life was their faded appendage, a meaningless exile in which she found herself without knowing why.
But it was even more evident that for her everything that existed (especially living things) was a source of astonished enchantment. She regarded birds or snakes as miracles and became entirely absorbed in watching them, like a show not to be missed or a series of events charged with messages. She would fuss to save the life of even a fly or a mosquito and waste considerable time trying to get one to go out the window and fly away. “They live such a short time. Why shorten it more? Life is the only thing they have...,” she would say, seeing my perplexity.
Everything that happened outdoors in the meadows or the woods seemed to belong to her. For her nature was replete with surprises: a squirrel darting across the snow, a mouse running away, an iridescence at the bottom of a well, a colored streak in a rock, the sparkling threads of a spiderweb, needles of light shining through spruce branches — all were adventures that quickened her heartbeat. At times I noted she was particularly drawn to the most ephemeral of things as long as they partook of light. A rainbow for example would put her into a bubbling cheerfulness; when she saw one from the window she’d run outside as though it were possible to approach it and look at it up close. She was all in a dither if she saw rain and the sun at the same time because “it’s a sign that witches are combing their hair.” Perhaps she read such improbable signs to mean that some part of her belonged to their mysterious race.
Once she told me she believed her son would come back and be reborn to her, this time engendered by me instead of Hermes. It wouldn’t really make any difference because the child would always be the same. He was simply her eternal monad who would be returning to material form and assuming a body.
* * *
PART THREE
I
The Feudal Lady
One evening we were sitting in the windowless room singing, I taking Red’s place as guitarist, when he himself burst in, his face all red and his hair every which way: he had seen Flora in the village.
“Flora?! You really saw her? You aren’t joking?” said Lia.
A wave of emotion swept over us, enveloping even Pietro. As for me, my whole body tingled as though pierced with tiny needles, like my feet when I had begun to recover from frostbite. A fantasy asleep in some hidden center of myself seemed to have awakened.
Before we could even make it to the door Flora was there. She had no baggage except for a huge leather handbag with oriental designs on it. She looked beaten and distressed, a couple of mud splotches on her coat, her smudged eye makeup furrowed with clear streaks as if spoiled by drops of sweat or tears. Still Flora hadn’t lost her old defiance and above all didn’t seem ready to give it up. Even though she was returning unaccompanied and almost without baggage, she still retained the appearance of a feudal lady.
We tried to find out what had happened, but she gestured vaguely as if it were all foolishness, or else from capricious pride she didn’t want to tell us about a humiliating experience. I imagined she was a victim of someone’s violence provoked by a refusal to defer to him, whoever he was, and a stubborn insistence upon her own rank.
“Well, look who’s here,” she said as if it really wasn’t so strange to find me in her home.
Pietro fully respected her privacy and only asked her how she was. “And you, Grandpa, what about you? You look paler than last time I saw you; your hand
s are shaky and your knees.... Oh why did I go away, Grandpa? I should have stayed here with Lia and taken care of you night and day.... From now on I won’t leave Cretis ever again. I give my word!”
She kissed his hands and poured him tiny glasses of grappa, which the old man barely tasted and which sometimes made him cough as though he were choking. Flora seemed not to realize the extremity of Pietro’s weakness, attached to life as he was by a mere thread. Or perhaps she hoped to get him back in shape with alcohol or good square meals; or else she thought because he had been all over the world and done everything, even hunted bears, built railroads in Asia and prospected for gold he must be almost immortal. If the thought occurred to her that her grandfather might be taken away any day now she chased it off like a fly and wouldn’t believe it possible.
I was soon pulled into a vortex of tumultuous emotion. It was incredible how Flora’s mere presence was enough to plunge me into the past. A whole sequence of memories came bounding upward like corks released at the bottom of a water tank. I recalled the superstition about the hundred white horses that would foretell the finding of a precious object, and when I saw one one day I laughingly licked my finger, moistened the palm of my other hand, and pounded the spot with my fist; she instantly imitated me.
“Do you still have the locket?”
“Of course, do you want to see it?”
Every detail of our escapade came back to me, and I wondered meanwhile if the countess still lived in the Villa where the crime had taken place and where time had stood still and nothing, not even her death, would be able to set it moving again....
The Wooden Throne Page 21
