For a while every time I encountered Flora I got the impression that she moved about the house disoriented as if she couldn’t make sense out of the rooms and hallways. Once I met her as she hurried from one bedroom to another with a lantern in her hand, looking pale and anxious, her hair flying, as if she were being followed.
But a few hours later she underwent a complete metamorphosis. She arranged her hair in an elaborate coiffure, put on her gaudiest clothes, and loaded her arms with bracelets. Lia apparently couldn’t believe her eyes. She followed Flora hesitantly to find out how much jewelry she had and where she kept it, peering through the cracks in the door. “But what are you doing there little sister? Come on in, come and see. I’ve brought you a present too. Did you think I’d forgotten you?” She put a pair of earrings on Lia’s ears and pulled her to the mirror. “See? They’re perfect on you. You’re really beautiful. You just need to pay a little more attention to yourself, dress a little better. Look, this is the way women are wearing their hair now....”
But she didn’t finish arranging Lia’s hair; they threw their arms around each other in a long embrace, laughing and crying together. Flora said she had been in a thousand places, had seen half of Italy, had also been in Spain and Egypt with an operetta company, and people everywhere had applauded her and her fellow performers with wild enthusiasm. Now she would tell her everything from beginning to end.... Lia prepared to listen, but Flora suddenly changed the subject and began to talk about the young men she had met, Rolando, Roberto, Fernando, Harold....
She didn’t even give us the chance to imagine them. “Look what I’ve brought you! Look! Giuliano, you look too.” She lifted the leather handbag with the oriental designs onto the table and spread out a quantity of souvenirs from many different places: Venice, Capri, Naples, Burgos, Seville, Istanbul, Cairo.... There were insignificant objects worth a few pennies next to genuine jewels given to her by some Juan or Rolando. She saw no difference between them. In that moment everything was precious and exciting, and she handled these things and held them up to the light or to her throat or ears as if they were all of sensational value. Flora must have had a touch of the magpie or the lark in her soul because she was drawn to anything shiny. Sometimes she’d interrupt a conversation to run where she had seen something sparkle, quickly retrieve it and turn it over and over in her hand saying to me: “No it’s nothing, just a piece of glass....” Her smile would fade for the minor disappointment, but she’d decide to throw such things away only after some effort to accept the idea that they were of no use to her.
After she had hurriedly showed us the jewels, both false and real, she picked them up again in handfuls as if they were so much junk and tossed them back into the bag, heedless of my own and especially Lia’s intense desire to examine them further. To her it seemed we had not kept up with her presentation but were still thinking about things she had already finished with.
Both Lia and I were dumbfounded by her return, and for a while we actually had to struggle to get over it. Flora had brought a burst of vitality such as we hadn’t been accustomed to for quite some time and a quickened pace now foreign to our habits. To her each day was a container to be filled to capacity without overlooking its tiniest corner, whereas Lia had never shown any sign of noticing that a day had passed. Time had no importance for her. When Flora would encounter us she’d begin at once to list a long series of things to be done, counting on her fingers like my village school children struggling with the multiplication table.
Lia grew wide-eyed, while I wondered how on earth so many obligations could have fallen on her shoulders in a tiny village like Cretis. Only Flora’s bounding enthusiasm could manage so much, all the more since she had just returned and still had to renew most of her acquaintances. Nonetheless, despite her commitments, she found time to spend with me and Lia, especially Lia, whose clothes and hair she had begun to supervise on a daily basis.
Only after a week did Flora focus on the astonishing fact that I was here in her grandfather’s house, that Hermes was gone, and I had taken his place.
When she finally thought about it she was totally amazed, stupefied to the point of being unable to finish a sentence: “But how come Lia.... Hermes is.... and Giuliano here instead.... And you and Giuliano.... Wait a minute, let me see, let me get my bearings. And Giuliano, how did he get here? Oh, that’s it, somebody who knew me told him about the village. Who? A Dutchman? But I don’t remember any Dutchman. Anyhow it’s strange. Talk about destiny, coincidence. I’ve had certain indications.... I could tell you a thing or two....”
Soon after, however, my presence became as normal and taken for granted as ever, as if I’d always lived in Cretis. When she bumped into me she shook her finger as if I had committed some peccadillo, and I’d have to answer to her if I didn’t treat Lia right. Lia and I looked at each other in wonder. When we were together we talked only of Flora; she had almost become the tie that bound us together. Lia seemed neither to remember what had been between me and Flora nor to realize that what had been might be again....
Flora took possession of the house and in effect eclipsed all its other inhabitants. Pietro, who already rarely left his room before she arrived, now had become a mere shadow of himself, as if his exile had been multiplied by two and he had been imprisoned in a room in his own house. All this despite the fact that Flora remembered him once in a while, called him at the top of her voice, went to get him, holding him by the arm, and sat down beside him to recount all her wild adventures. Pietro smiled, placed a hand on her shoulder and listened with his eyes closed and a gently ironic expression as if he already knew the story in detail. Even Namu and Red had been reduced to mere appearance, as if Flora had gobbled them up by the rapidity of her movements and her improvisations. It was as if she had awakened the house from its long slumber as a fortress belonging to some other time, and the ghosts who had been sleeping here had moved out to look for peace somewhere else, in vacant houses abandoned by emigrants, or in the surrounding mountains, which were once more buried under meters of snow.
Flora often flung open the iron shutters despite the cold and the drafts, which blew through the whole house. She began to rearrange furniture and reorganize closets, throwing away things she judged useless. We all helped more or less, especially with the heavy work, while she dashed from one place to another in intense impatient activity.
She would step aside to admire an effect, leap impulsively onto window ledges and furniture like a ballerina who had taken flight. I could hardly believe my eyes, she seemed so light and airy, so unencumbered by our earthly weight.
Her return enlivened forgotten corners of the house where nobody had set foot for years, maybe decades. Dormer windows covered with an inch of dust were opened. One evening I saw her walking along the edge of the roof with a lantern in her hand, and from up there she called to me, all excited at having found in the gutter a toy she remembered tossing into the air as a child. “Are you out of your mind? Come down off there; you could slip and break your neck,” I shouted, breathless with emotion.
She put her childhood bedroom to rights with its closets and drawers still full of tiny satin and organza dresses, rag dolls or games of ring toss. Then, her face darkening, she told Lia that she was finally going to be sleeping alone for a while, in peace, without some ill-mannered boor snoring beside her and waking her up rudely to make love. “This I assure you, you know.... From now, like a nun, like a child who doesn’t know certain things exist....”
* * *
II
The Reawakened Sphinxes
But a few days later, not even two weeks, I saw a husky teenage boy sneaking out of her room very early in the morning. I knew him well because he had helped me set up the carnival. My discovery provoked an unexpected attack of jealousy, which came from who knows what depths of my psyche and alarmed me because it did not augur well, like a red moon or the tail of a comet. And yet it was to be expected.... Flora wasn’t capable of living alone. Her n
ature drove her fatally into men’s arms as though this were the only route her life could take.
I had gotten up by mere chance. I quickly went back to bed next to Lia, who awakened, and feeling me toss and turn, thought she would restore my tranquillity by taking me into her arms as if in her sleep she had enigmatically guessed what was going through my mind. I felt evanescent, bodiless, like a mere shadowy projection: the main source of certainty in my life became that unexpected jealousy.
Flora’s nearness had the power to put me into an uproar. Before, I had felt I was spending an enchanted season in an ambiance that could filter life, distance it, so that even the present took on the attributes of memory or echo. Although I realized my condition now and then I couldn’t manage to awaken myself completely, as when you dream you are dreaming and are aware of being asleep, but for all this you can’t bring yourself back to the waking state.
But now that Flora had come back everything had been reversed. In those days I was split in half. At night, in Lia’s arms, I felt I was what I had been from the time I had begun to live in that house, and above all I saw distinctly what Lia was, perhaps because I could now compare her with Flora. I was even more aware of her freshness, as though she were born of the sea and had arrived on the beach standing in a gigantic scallop shell, or rather, as if she were the incarnation of a wood sprite or of the nymph Echo, who lengthened voices in certain mountain places, then gave them back lighter and further away. In daytime, however, I felt a resurgence of my old attraction to Flora, the force that had dominated my adolescence and focused all my desires and dreams during that period. Her appearance not only brought back the teeming excitement of my memories of her but also reawakened my earlier myths. A mechanism, which I didn’t understand but whose effects were familiar, had been triggered in me once again. A crowd of sphinxes had come back to tempt me from all directions. I became restless and impatient again. The flight of a crow, the water of a stream, a white ribbon of road, even the squeak of a weather vane were again enough to make me crudely uneasy, as if I was stupidly wasting my time in Cretis. Again I thought that going off in those directions I would discover latent possibilities to be exploited or unexpected chances organized by destiny. My hopes for bizarre adventures rekindled; I again experienced the urge to plunge my hands into reality and draw out its sparkling riches. Again my existence had become one long impatient wait after another, and all that had held my life in Cretis together had now gone hopelessly to pieces.
Once again I failed to understand Lia’s attitude of self sacrifice. Why had she let Hermes leave? Why couldn’t she have followed him? And now why didn’t she say she’d scratch my eyes out if I as much as dared to look at her sister? Instead she seemed as dazzled by Flora as I was and stood watching her without even shading her eyes with her hand to soften the reflection. She was content just to admire her. At times I wondered if perchance it might be true that Flora was sick of living in such a frenetic disorderly way and had come back to the mountains to settle down in peace; if therefore a queer exchange was about to occur between us, that is, while I abandoned my train to try to find the one she was riding on, she had gotten off her train to look for me in mine. It was possible. Fate was an expert in these kinds of reversals.
But the truth was that even in Cretis Flora had begun to live in total liberty, upsetting the habits of the whole village by the noisy precipitous tenor of her life. When she ran through hallways or up and down stairs with her hair flying, it felt as if a tornado had gone through the house; the atmosphere seemed filled with sudden sparks and crackled with seduction. The signs of her presence were everywhere. Whereas Lia was very orderly, Flora distributed her possessions all over the house: colorful ribbons, silk stockings, silver sandals or gold ones, sequined dresses, purses with sparkling fasteners. Not to speak of jewel cases left open on tables or windowsills, spilling over with jewels and trinkets. Wherever she went Flora left a wide wake behind her, gaudy and showy, so that we always had a lively awareness of her presence in the house or the immediate vicinity, and of her continuous restless vitality. Her things, displayed everywhere, were in strident contrast with the objects Pietro had brought back from America or other parts of the world. Those were still existing evidence of ancient civilizations now completely or nearly vanished, while Flora’s things appeared to be all the more lively and immediate because of their fleeting precarious nature.
Lia was always dazzled by all of Flora’s things, as a lark is mesmerized by an owl; she would keep gazing at Flora, couldn’t stop picking up those objects and looking at them in the light of a lamp or a window, her mouth open in wonder. Often when Flora saw her she’d say hastily: “You like it? Take it, go ahead, it’s yours. Let’s see how it looks,” and she’d pin the piece of jewelry on Lia’s breast or tuck it in her hair.
It was clear that Flora didn’t stay interested in us for very long, that her attention was always ephemeral and quick to shift to something else. Often, for instance, unknown reasons took her away from the house or the village and I was consumed with the desire to know what those reasons were, especially when she took a long time getting ready to go out. It wasn’t hard to understand why she usually left the door of her room half open or at least ajar, even when she was changing her dress or putting on silk stockings with red garters, slowly smoothing them over her legs so that not a single wrinkle remained or merely because she too, like Lia, enjoyed caressing herself. Passing by I couldn’t resist the temptation to look in.
She took her time in front of the mirror, putting on powder, eye shadow, lipstick, combing her hair again and again or trying on one dress after another, putting a ribbon or a boa around her neck and then placing a big feathered hat atop her coiffure. (A few days after her arrival a wagoner had brought up two or three trunks packed full of stuff from the railroad station.)
I was plagued by a fragmented anxiety and a dark and bristling jealousy. I judged the importance of the place where she was going or the person she would be with by the time she took to get ready. When the door to her room was closed, and I knew she was inside, with every moment that passed I wondered ever more insistently what she was doing. A cloud of desire and anxious curiosity thickened around her, destined to remain unsatisfied and reviving all my former feelings about festivities going on somewhere, which always excluded me.
It was as if time had not passed after all, and the situation was the same as when I was a boy watching Maddalena get ready to go out. Except that now it was a woman my own age who had once been mine and might be mine again.
* * *
III
The Magnetic Pole
Whenever Flora left the door ajar I thought she did it on purpose so that I would see her, that her disinterest in me was feigned, and her behavior really directed at arousing my interest by the most devious and catlike strategies. If I could manage without Lia’s knowledge, I would follow Flora for a while from some distance, telling myself that she was perfectly aware of my presence and pretended not to notice just to exasperate me. Then I would suddenly realize all this couldn’t be true. Only my disordered hopes made me think so, because if Flora were really interested in me she would have quickly showed it with no beating about the bush, as she had done when she came to my room at night in Ontàns. If I let myself get lost in these mental meanderings that only meant I had fallen into a muddle in which jealousy deformed my vision; or perhaps, more likely, the tangle of desire rekindled by Flora’s return had distorted my perceptions.
Flora usually walked through the snow to the edge of the village, where a sleigh or a carriage would meet her or would already be waiting in the road to take her away. I remained there in the cold, hidden behind a massive spruce or a shepherd’s hut, feeling the rush of jealousy die down into a slow swirl of visions centered around her, always her, the feudal lady, the Queen of Sheba. Perhaps in a village not too far away, in some aristocratic villa, they still gave carnivals that recalled those of Venetian times or which were the furthest offshoots
of the ones in Vienna. (Cretis and its vicinity were, to the best of my knowledge, right at the edges of the Venetian and Viennese influences, where they both died out or mutually cancelled each other). Beside carnivals like those, mine had been nothing but a naive peasant game.
How had Flora come to know the people who came to get her? Who were they? Where did they come from? There were a hundred things I wanted to know, just as someone newly released after a long stay in the opaque milky atmosphere of a hospital, where everything seems to be wrapped in cotton, is tormented by an urgent sense of time lost and wants to recuperate it.
Perhaps the most likely reason for my uneasiness was precisely that sensation of having wasted time, while all that was destined for me languished in moldy anticipation, infused with dampness and covered with weeds, like the ruins of an abandoned house. It wasn’t so much my usual impression of having unwittingly missed the not-to-be-repeated day filled with memorable events, as it was a feeling I had tarried too long in the antechamber of the world and allowed too much to happen in my absence while I hesitated on the threshold, caught in incredible indecision.
How had it happened? I didn’t understand. It seemed as if some legendary spirit had descended to brush me with dark wings and put me to sleep for a long time. What I found when I finally came to wasn’t an arcane reality waiting to be discovered but things I desperately desired moving away and fleeing before me.
Everything disoriented me. I didn’t know where to go, what to do, what to pursue. I seemed to be surrounded by a multitude of vain deceptive figures who were beyond my reach. My spirit was poised to capture every signal whether it came from without or bubbled up from within.
The Wooden Throne Page 22
