Often I came home late and found my dinner kept warm on the stove, my place set at the table with dishes, silverware and a folded white napkin fresh from the drawer. I went to bed when Lia was already asleep, or pretending to be, and I went along with her pretense, not even disturbing her with a greeting or a kiss. All my attention was fixed on scenting out trails leading far afield. Even when she wasn’t there I sensed Flora’s presence, and when she was near me I was addressing her even when I talked to the others.
The village itself seemed full of Flora’s presence. Once, I remember, I heard the ripple of her laughter outside the door of a house that was always closed up, which people had already begun to call haunted. If I got up at night to close a shutter it might happen that I’d see her, wearing a shawl, flying up or down the stairs or through the hallways, or I might glimpse her face for an instant through the lighted windows across the street.
I always saw her laughing and joking with different young men in the village. Sometimes she called out hastily as she left our house, already well beyond the door: “I won’t be back this evening for supper, don’t expect me tonight. I’ll be away for a bit, don’t know how long,” and her words lacerated my heart with the fear she would never come back. Later she would return with a tired look on her face, dark circles around her dulled eyes, her hair undone, her ankle-boots covered with mud and snow. She would throw herself on her bed saying she had a bad headache, a tremendous desire to rest and didn’t want to be disturbed for any reason. Sometimes I understood (but in a veiled almost cryptic way) that Flora was living in an unreal world. Whereas Lia was content to dream of things, Flora plunged herself into her fantasies with total commitment, like the wild lunar creature that she was. The effort tired her out, constantly exhausted her strength. But I still couldn’t get over my burning attraction to her.
Sometimes she would have sudden excesses of interest in one or the other of us, for example Namu or Red. She would begin once again to learn the secrets of herbs or medicines from Namu or want Red to teach her to shoot. But when she hit anything, like for instance a young boar, she would nearly faint and then dash off terrified at the sight of blood, after throwing the gun into the snow and filling the forest with her screams for fully five minutes, as though she had lost her mind. Like a scatterbrained child, she was attracted to things and sometimes felt a runaway desire to dive into them and appropriate them. But when she arrived at a certain point in that plunge she noticed its disorienting or scary aspects and gave way to sudden nausea, murky revulsion or stinging intolerance, and fled in terror.
When I had first noted that her days were always crowded with engagements I had thought that she simply filled her schedule long ahead of time. Not so. She usually got up in the morning with no idea what she was going to do and improvised on the spot, imagining that she had thought things over for who knows how long, before doing them, believing that her activities had developed in an orderly way, one at a time.
Instead she threw herself into them, did everything at once and if she thought at all about her escapades she did so only afterwards when she had burned her fingers. Maybe it was just this that gave her the idea she had planned things thoroughly. Because of her visionary capacity she expanded her reflections after the fact and projected them backwards.
She had something of the wild animal about her, something reminiscent of the marten, the fox and especially the skylark. She seemed to have been born to soar to great heights and burst into song without a thought, until something frightened her away. In fact some days she would sing, starting early in the morning and going on and on as she ironed, washed her clothes or straightened up her room. Whereas Lia only hummed and for moments, Flora sang for hours at the top of her voice yet without sounding raucous or unpleasant. Quite the contrary. Every now and then, however, like a fox or a marten she disappeared from circulation, withdrew into a mysterious den, to reappear much later, her dress wrinkled, her hair uncombed (most probably from having slept in odd positions and in uncomfortable places), her face veiled and sad as if she couldn’t remember something and didn’t know how to fill the sudden void that had opened within her.
I continued to pay attention to her even when she wasn’t around, and I could only imagine what she was doing in her room or wherever she might be. She constantly drew me to her and whether near or far away she was always my magnetic pole. Now I imagined that even when she was far from me her shadow lengthened to touch me. She was always on my mind and everything around me was an eternal allusion to her. For example, I believed I had left Ontàns to search for her and had stayed in Cretis solely for the same reason. Above all I sensed a myriad of latent possibilities in her of adventures, which might happen to me. All these things scintillated and crackled around her wild figure, seemingly mixed with the sparkle of her jewelry, genuine or fake, and the reflections from the sequins of her stage costumes. Sometimes I wondered how I had managed so far to keep from taking her in my arms and literally carrying her off in whatever direction she might want to go.
Lia had understood almost at once what was happening to me, as soon as she recovered a bit from the infatuation, which apparently recurred every time Flora came home. She had begun, though still dazzled, to have eyes for other things. She said nothing to me nor to Flora, with whom she continued to be intensely close. Indeed every time they saw each other they began to make a fuss and exchange endless stories. That is, Flora always had wagon-loads of stories to tell, and Lia listened.
Lia seemed to feel a childlike envy of her sister. At the end she would say: “But now don’t go away again. You’ve had enough now. You’ve seen the world. Stay with us....”
“Stay here? Of course, that’s understood. This time I’m home for good. At least I think so. I hope so, because so many things always happen. But listen sister dear, I would like to stay, I swear I want to stay here with all of you....”
Thus they’d hug each other again and look at one another in amazement as if there was something suspended between them or behind them, something mysterious and uncertain. Perhaps Lia believed Flora would stay, but meanwhile she was apprehensive and thus sought to adorn herself and comb her hair in new ways; she picked out Flora’s most seductive dresses in the hope (I realized this) that she would be able to exercise on me the same attraction as Flora did. I asked myself if Lia was jealous. No, she wasn’t. She acted by imitation, out of her fears, and in essence she was merely sad. She sensed her own ineptitude, understood that I was avoiding her, distancing myself, and that she had remained behind in that disorderly race, which had started with Flora’s return. Thus I too felt a new anguish that I wouldn’t be able to resist Flora’s attraction, and I could hardly bear to think that Lia might be abandoned for the second time.
The image of Lia running through the woods after her child’s death came back to my mind. If I too left Cretis perhaps she would again give way to desperation. Or was it more likely that her entire capacity for despair had been exhausted, and she had become almost imperturbable...? Who could really tell. Lia was, always seemed to be, at the edge of things, in an area storms no longer reached, like a remote sheltered bay. It was as if events never touched her directly but only by reflection, because she was the incarnation of the nymph Echo.
Nonetheless I felt I would be destroyed by shame if something of that sort happened. I renewed my resolution never to leave her for any reason, even if that might mean bidding farewell to my truest life and taking vows of renunciation, to enter her remote bay forever. This time by conscious intent and not by some crazy decree of destiny.
* * *
IV
The Witch
But even as I made this resolution Lia was shrinking and fading like a shape floating away in the sky. Often it was as if I had turned a page and couldn’t see her anymore and then when I came upon her, quietly intent on her basket weaving or busy washing tubs of laundry, I felt she had been retrieved from nothingness.
Flora occupied all space and left no r
oom for others. She wasn’t to blame; it was simply the result of her presence. Her vitality rode roughshod over everything, even when she tried to contain herself and stand aside. In fact, she was sometimes the victim of her own impetuosity, as when she gave away new clothes and jewelry to Lia, then suddenly wished she had them back and tried every way she could to hide her regret.
It seemed that her impulsiveness continually tore her loose from the very hinges of her existence, knocked down the props that might have sustained her from within, swept her off course and stirred up her emotions. Thus she often found herself without direction, abandoned to the caprice of events with no idea of what to do or where to go.
Then, after letting herself drift for a while, she would take control and what I thought was the real Flora would surface. This Flora was full of projects and plans, immersed in her own inexhaustible creativity, doing and undoing things in her imagination, unraveling chimerical skeins without a moment’s rest, accumulating, enveloping, tracing extravagant castles to dizzying heights in the air, dipping her hands again and again into endless reserves. It was clear in such moments that she overflowed with expectations (perhaps the same ones I used to have) that something extraordinary was going to happen, some triumphant event that would resound like the ringing of a giant gong. Or even something that wasn’t solemn but still emotionally satisfying: for instance, finding here in the fortress-house a walled up niche or a secret drawer of a desk or dresser containing a piece of antique gold jewelry left over from the time when the iron shutters were closed against the passage of invading armies. These expectations coincided with mine and revived in me the fervor of an anticipation that had only recently been dying of asphyxiation. The play of Flora’s imagination passed before my eyes like a burst of sparks, a cascade of lights, and I saw it as further proof of the validity of my own imagination or of the impulse that urged me along mysterious roads I saw as leading out of the village into unknown territory.
Suddenly I was the only person Flora trusted, just like so many years before. She sat by me as I worked, flushed and vaporous, her face half hidden by her hair, hugging her knees and making no attempt to hide her legs. She told stories, shared confidences with me, throwing an intricate net about herself in which I was only too happy to get tangled up and lost. I had an urge to compete with her, to show her I was no less inventive than she was, and that, above all, I too could tell stories like Pietro’s, even though I had seen little or nothing of the great world, and my entire life had been spent inside the narrow limits of the two tiny worlds of Ontàns and Cretis. I was dominated by the idea that Flora was my first real listener and my secret ambition to be Pietro’s heir returned.
Then Flora realized what she was doing, saw that I was completely caught in her net, that I lived only for her and she was taking me away from her sister. This brought on a sudden crisis, the idea made her feel ill. Why was she stealing me from Lia? What right did she have to do that? Thus she reverted to an old belief that she possessed occult powers unknown even to herself, which could make others do whatever she wished. She actually felt weird inner witch-like psychic stirrings, and she persuaded herself she was the bearer of evil influences and mysterious misfortunes. If a child got sick she rushed to me, grabbed my shoulders and shook me: “Do you think it’s my fault? Could the sickness have come from an evil thought of mine? Or a fit of temper?” She began to say repeatedly to Lia that she ought to go away, that she couldn’t stay in Cretis because she was causing nothing but trouble. “Don’t you see what I’m doing? Lia, I beg you, let me go. I don’t know how to stay put in one place. I have to have a change. Staying in one place makes me feel like I’m in a trap or in jail and I’m dying to escape....”
“But why? No, you’re only joking. Promise me you won’t leave, tell me right now you aren’t serious. You haven’t caused any trouble at all. It’s just that you’re a little crazy and get funny ideas in your head. No Flora, don’t leave us yet....”
But I knew the situation wasn’t that simple. There was something infantile in Flora’s makeup, a twisted incapacity to give up childish folly, a fear of resigning herself to waiting for things. It wasn’t just her dread of making her sister suffer, there were other reasons. She felt the attraction of those places where she had been: the theaters, the hotels, the ballrooms. Sometimes she said to Lia, “But why don’t you come with me! What are you doing here anyway? Come on, your youth will be over in no time. Don’t tell me you’ve decided to throw it away, to waste it all in Cretis where nothing ever changes.... Doesn’t that scare you, make you feel like you’re dead and buried when you’re still alive? Don’t you feel like a ghost here, an empty meaningless thing? Believe me, not even you can stay in this hole at the end of nowhere. Don’t you have any idea what you’re missing? Haven’t you ever heard of cities like Vienna, Venice, Florence, Istanbul? I’ve been there. If you’d seen them you’d think you’d been living inside a cave or down a well....”
Lia said no. For goodness sake, no, she wouldn’t dream of such a thing. She was staying here with her grandfather. She was born to live here and other places held no attraction for her. Flora gave in and went back to telling her about people she had met and describing luxurious places as she continued to try dresses on her sister and fuss with her hair. But there was a hint of terror in her discourse, a whisper of anxiety, as if she thought she was being followed by shadows, which hovered overhead ready to engulf her and which carried behind them distant allusions to death.
Lia listened wide-eyed, and, lost in the intricacies of the story, seemed to imagine perfectly what Flora was describing, and let herself be enchanted. But that was all. She would never, never follow Flora. I thought it was out of cowardice, for lack of initiative and courage, and I tried to find out if I could manage to despise Lia for my own interested reasons. It didn’t work. Lia was a creature to whom no judgments applied, like Pietro or Namu. All you could do was accept her as she was or else stay away.
Pietro did nothing to persuade Flora to stay even though he may have thought her dashing about in the world was a kind of innocuous madness. But I had the notion he thought the same thing about Lia’s tranquil refusal to budge, as if their two attitudes were simply the opposite sides of a single illusion, like the two faces of a coin. Yes, now after so many years I think this was Pietro’s true opinion, but I wasn’t able to grasp it then. At that time everything was nebulous to me; my psyche wavered back and forth as though constantly running over a keyboard, which always played different notes, notes that were sometimes shrill and sometimes hauntingly unreal.
Flora’s acceleration of life in our house had created an ambiance that echoed with the fantastic, in which everything seemed to shimmer, flutter and change. I myself felt transformed and unrecognizable. I made no more plans for the future. I was content with a present that was brief, uncentered and changeable, forming and reforming itself moment by moment. I forgot all the rest. It sufficed to entrust myself to the force that was driving us on, to let myself be carried along, even hiding my head in a sack so as not to know exactly where we were heading. That force was once again dragging me into Flora’s arms. I had stopped asking myself whether it was good or bad, whether it was possible to choose or not.
* * *
V
The Pursuit
The oddest thing was that I was in no hurry to arrive in Flora’s arms since I was so sure they’d be waiting for me at the end of the voyage I had already begun. Deferring that moment was a way of increasing its delight. Nor was I troubled by the thought of Lia because I had entered a system in which I no longer made comparisons but merely considered things one at a time as the wave of the present laid them before me and offered them to my gaze. I was now starting to see what the Dane had meant when he told the astonished peasants of Ontàns, who couldn’t understand, that to live in the present was to live like the gods. But my calculations were wrong.
One evening, the minute I set foot in the house I sensed a change in the atmosphe
re. In the rooms and hallways there was a notable disorder, an air of emptiness and abandonment. An unhinged suitcase with a broken catch and a few of Flora’s dresses inside had been thrown into a corner. I rushed to her room (Lia’s fitting room) and found the closets gaping open and half empty, dresser drawers pulled halfway out; string, heavy wrapping paper, dresses and discarded objects were scattered everywhere.
Flora had left.
My conviction that she had been patiently waiting for me until something ended (I didn’t know what it was nor how long it was supposed to take) had been the foolish illusion of someone spoiled by fate. I saw at once that without Flora I was a stranger to myself; I was no longer self sufficient because she had taken away some part of me, perhaps the most important part. I was like a place full of ruins from which all who loved life could only flee in haste. There was nothing for me to do but follow her.
I was already in the wagon belonging to the young man who came every now and then to get our wood carvings and Lia’s baskets (he had happened by that very evening) before I even remembered that I had left Cretis without saying good-bye to anyone, without taking any leave, like an irresponsible boor or a madman who lives in a world where everything is out of proportion or upside down. I had left Ontàns the same way. But there had been a reason then, because I had no particular ties with anyone, at the most to Luca, and I was fleeing a village which reminded me above all of a death. Now on the contrary....
I saw things plainly. I was still sufficiently lucid to see myself clearly reflected on a screen where my folly appeared in all its sharpest details. All I had left was the hope that Pietro, the gentle Lia, Namu and Red might manage to understand the reasons for my flight and forgive me so that I would remain in their memory without too many bitter and unpleasant associations.
The Wooden Throne Page 23
