As the wagon bumped over the stones of the road or the wheels sank into the mud (it was May; the snow was almost gone), even though I was entirely projected toward Flora, the desire to be remembered in Cretis accompanied me with a consuming intensity. I hoped I would remain in all of their hearts even if they didn’t talk about me at first. In fact, Pietro and Lia would carefully avoid mentioning me. But some day, after her grandfather’s death, Lia and Red and others in the village would surely speak of the time when Giuliano lived among them. They’d recall my carnival and the balloon. The children would even talk about the most ordinary and insignificant details because they judged the importance of things by standards quite different from ours, and they had terrific memories.
I even flattered myself by thinking I might become for Cretis what the Dane had been for Ontàns. I was a long way from having those magnetic and grandiose qualities that he had had and yet as I raced toward Flora I saw myself as belonging already to the future of Cretis. I already felt like a subject of stories. I went so far as to think that the character I would become in Cretis would be truer than the one I was in reality, the one who was always vacillating, undecided, consumed by time and continually changing. But to become that true character I had to leave the village, renounce it, lose it. Perhaps the principal law of life was just that: to acquire something definitively one had to lose it and give it up.
I thought about this for the whole trip, also because the wagoner didn’t talk, or else talked only in banalities, about money, wine, women or trucks. The emptiness of his mind allowed me to think exclusively about my affairs. I had left in haste and therefore had permanently renounced my rights as Pietro’s successor, as when a king abandons his people to go off in search of nonsensical adventures. This idea filled me with almost the same melancholy as that I felt at leaving Lia. At certain moments it became so intense I almost asked the wagoner to let me off so I could go back to the village on foot and tell the others I had simply gone for a longer walk than usual. But no. It was a mistake to follow Flora, but it would also be a mistake to return to Cretis. Perhaps I was one of those men who, no matter what they do, can only make mistakes.
Once more I had entrusted myself to the unknown, entered into a strange game whose rules I did not know. Again I was the man without a country, the Gypsy, the vagabond to whom anything might happen and for whom all places were possible.
But among those possibilities was one privileged place, the one containing Flora. It took me almost no time to find her in a tiny hotel, in a village at the bottom of a valley. As soon as she saw me she understood what I had decided to do. She realized how hard it had been for me to leave Lia (she knew how much I also loved her sister) and that only a greater love on her own part would be able to compensate for what I had lost and the remorse I felt for my behavior. We talked about Lia all evening just as recently with Lia I had talked only of Flora.
Flora asked me endless questions about Lia, convinced that the only way she could hope to have me entirely to herself was to make no attempt to avoid that subject but instead to pursue it in depth until it was exhausted. “Isn’t she an extraordinary girl? Don’t deny it, you’ll be sorry: you’ll have to answer to me. She has something virginal about her, something innocent, profound. I don’t know how to explain what I mean and maybe I don’t really understand. But I think she has more than anything else a sense of the sacred. For her everything that exists is sacred, and she tries very hard to live within it and not profane it in any way. Isn’t that right? Did you notice it too?”
“Of course. But she’s also many other things.... She’s a child and yet she’s ancient, or better, ageless....”
“Right, that’s it. Exactly.... I wish I’d said it. I tried to get her to leave Cretis but now I know it’s better she stayed. It’s only there that she can really be herself....”
Talking about Lia I realized how much I loved her and what she meant to me. I loved two women with almost the same intensity if not in the same way, because they were too different from each other. I asked myself if it was possible, and the answer was yes, obviously yes; it was dramatically true: it had happened to me. Nonetheless I derived a certain ambiguous murky satisfaction from the idea that Lia too, perhaps even more than I, would be able to love two men. If another youth like me were to show up in Cretis she’d have no trouble falling in love with him because anything that was part of the natural order was innocent to her and therefore permissible. At times the thought crossed my mind that if only Flora had been willing to stay in Cretis I might have loved both of them. But that thought lasted only until I noticed its grotesque implications.
No, Lia was really lost to me, and so was Cretis; from now on I would have to reinvent my life day by day....
At first we were both dominated by one thing: passion, an element stronger than either one of us and which we didn’t even try to resist. Flora released in me all the pent-up emotion that had accumulated from the time when she had so abruptly abandoned me. I held her constantly, as if I wanted to reassure myself that she was really there. Sometimes I would think: “I’m with Flora, really with Flora...” and it was as if I couldn’t understand what that meant, couldn’t grasp it, because between the Flora I had sought for so long and the real girl there was an imbalance, a gap I couldn’t close. I would call her suddenly sometimes just to hear her say: “What is it Giuliano?” to compare the timbre of her voice with the sound I had kept so long in my memory. This time Flora was unreservedly in love with me. She seemed to think of nothing or no one else, so completely did I fill her horizon. We were only vaguely aware of what went on around us. Although we were just a few kilometers from Cretis I felt immensely far away, as if we had put an ocean behind us, and our voyage had lasted for days upon end by land and by sea. The fact that the mountains around Cretis weren’t visible from here and the landscape was rather different also helped give us the sensation that we were in another part of the world.
But that impression grew also out of other things. Being with Flora again created a kind of stage curtain in my life, a barrier isolating me from the recent past. It was above all Flora who elicited, even willfully, the feeling of solitude, as if we were on a desert island. Since I had her I thought I should need nothing else and the presence of others was superfluous. We slept outrageously late, until two or three in the afternoon. We had our dinner brought to our room, and often we didn’t even see the chambermaid but simply called to her to put the tray down outside the door.
Once we got up at eight in the evening when the sun had already set. Flora decided she wanted to go fishing and in fact displayed a modest ability to manage the fish pole stolen from a fellow hotel guest who had carelessly left it propped outside his door. She caught two trout and cooked them over a camp fire of damp wood, which I finally succeeded in lighting on the gravel of the streambed with the north wind blowing, although it took me a whole box of matches. We were half numb and had to stamp our feet on the stones and hold our hands in our armpits because we had come out in clothes that were too thin. In the distance a little further up we could see the lights of the village where people were preparing supper and getting ready to go to bed. We had lost count of the days. Flora maintained that it was Thursday and I said Friday but whereas I was disoriented by the discrepancy Flora simply found it amusing and burst out laughing every time she thought of it.
* * *
VI
The Vagabonds
About a week later we left, taking the train in the middle of the night, because Flora had noticed she was tired of the village and indeed wondered with disgust how she could have stayed there so long. The same thing happened with many other places.
There were times when we would move on with indifference, almost as an experiment, because Flora wanted to make sure I didn’t become too fond of a place. She would watch me carefully as I tossed our things into suitcases. I told her it was time to think seriously about our situation and look for work; my money would soon run out if w
e went on living in hotels and boarding houses. She shrugged her shoulders: “Oh well...I’ve got a little money too, don’t worry. Things will work out. We’ll decide when we really have to. For now we’ve still got lots of time, weeks and weeks to do what we want to....”
So we went on wandering like vagabonds from one city to another with no destination. Before we ran completely out of money Flora put on her prettiest dress and went to a casino in Venice, even though I begged her not to and refused categorically to go with her. When she came back she said she had won a lot of money — she didn’t know how much — and also an automobile from a rich and obstinate American. It turned out to be more money than I had ever seen; I was stunned. However she acted as if it were nothing, almost as though she were used to that sort of thing or else had made a bet with herself to betray no emotion in order to impress me with her self control.
But it was only an act and didn’t last very long. All at once she cast aside all restraint and began spreading bills of large denominations all over the bed; then she tossed them over her head and blew on them furiously to try to keep them in the air. We looked at each other incredulously as if the money didn’t belong to us, as if we had stolen it or it had flown into our room by magic and would fly out again in the same way.
I was also seized by moral scruples. I wondered if we should track down the American and give everything back to him, but Flora told me I was insane, out of my mind, that the man owned cotton plantations and oil wells and in a few weeks he’d have made up his loss. “Why give it a thought? Everything goes by like the wind, like telegraph poles speeding away behind you when you’re riding on a train....”
The automobile soon became a problem for me. I suggested to Flora that we either sell it or give it back, but she wouldn’t hear of such a thing: “Are you serious? It’s mine, I won it.” She learned to drive in very little time, applying herself with ferocious determination.
She pretended to be a fine lady, but underneath she really belonged to the common people. It showed in her hearty laugh, her healthy appetite, her way of slapping people on the back and her readiness to take up with other similar people. She made friends with incredible ease; she was constantly introducing me to girls and young men whom I would finally get all mixed up, there were so many of them. She made all sorts of reckless promises to them, some of which she couldn’t keep and others that committed us to various wild-goose chases. One of these took us all the way to Cologne.
Coming back from Germany along the Rhine Flora wanted to stop at the rock of the Lorelei, but she could barely see anything because of the fog on the river. Huge motorized freight barges, as long as ships, were moving slowly downstream and intermittently blowing their horns because of the danger of collision. Flora, who had expected God-knows-what (I had told her the legend a couple of times), was so disappointed she couldn’t even eat but went straight to bed and curled up against me, trembling and frightened. Before she went to sleep (and it was daytime) she told me about one of her fellow ballerinas who had married a Lithuanian dancer. Then suddenly he had disappeared. The ballerina had gone to Russia and spent three months traveling from one place to another without being able to find him, even though a Russian countess who was a friend of the czarina had been moved by her case and promised to help her any way she could. “Maybe she’s still looking for him, who knows. Russia is so big she could spend her whole life looking and never run into him....”
I remembered Pietro and Lisaveta, and one story seemed to be the echo or the recall of the other. For the most part Flora told me very strange stories, perhaps invented, and always full of characters who got lost in vast places, as if they had vanished into nothingness never to be found again. It was as though she herself had lost her way in a fairy tale as wide as the world with no beginning and no end, and she couldn’t get out of it. Every once in a while she proposed, “And what if we went to Russia too? Around the Aral Sea, for instance, where my grandfather once worked.... Or we could go to Iceland?”
Sometimes she suggested the very places I had once wanted to visit, where I had located the figures and the models of my fantasies. Then I saw myself confronted with a dramatic dilemma: not to go when there was a chance to would mean renunciation and abandonment; going would mean being somehow disappointed and wondering how I had been able to construct so many daydreams about such insignificant places.... I felt I had to be forever undoing, taking things apart and putting them back into the melancholy closets where impossible things or things that had never happened were stored. Yet at the same time I felt myself spurred onward by an impulse to make haste and grab everything that fell within range. The great moment had come. At last it was life’s turn to make good its promise to open the treasure chests kept hidden for so long. I was seized by an anxiety that it either might not happen or would happen somehow in an incomplete way and I would suffer the continued shame of disappointment. Flora too was often uneasy and melancholy, and the fact that she clung to me for support only increased my own anxiety. My greatest fear was that I would indeed plunge my hands into those treasure chests only to draw them out empty or else full of meaningless objects, gaudy knick-knacks worth nothing at all.
We traveled the roads of Italy and Europe in the automobile (which often broke down and cost various mechanics much effort to repair). We raced with carriages and stagecoaches. Flora was delighted but I wasn’t. All my sympathy went to our rivals. I loved wagons and horses but I had a real antipathy for things that were mechanical or motorized. My heart constricted when I saw an automobile or a truck, and my conviction grew stronger that one civilization was ending and another, which had nothing to say to me and about which I felt not the slightest curiosity, was beginning.
Sometimes I had an urge to play my trump card and say to Flora: “Let’s drop everything and go to Denmark and look for my grandfather.” But I didn’t. I wanted to keep that card in reserve, thinking the right moment hadn’t arrived, that I had to wait awhile yet, even though I didn’t know why. Perhaps I thought that after Flora, if I attained the other mirage of my youth as well, I would feel I had exhausted all major possibilities and would then have to enter the descending arc of the parabola....
* * *
VII
The Flying Carpets
All these ideas came to mind in the brief respites that Flora conceded to me or I to her, when the fury of our uninterrupted madness calmed down a bit and gave us a moment to catch our breath. I felt I was living in the midst of a multitude of things that eluded my grasp, always moving just out of reach. Or else if I caught hold of them they turned out to have no substance, like a cloud, which appears to be solid and real from a distance but dissolves into nothing but whitish fog when approached. They whirled toward me, these things, growing steadily larger before my eyes until they came within reach, but at that instant I was always drowsy or distracted and they passed so quickly they were already behind me before I could perceive their real dimensions. I was repeating for the hundredth time the experience I’d had in Cretis when the carnival was over and I noticed how time drove events relentlessly behind me and none of them could be held back and savored to their depths.
I felt the flow of events as if they were riding on a flock of flying carpets, which were passing above or beside me, barely missing me, showing all the splendor of their oriental colors and followed by an enigmatic wake of regret, like the sound of the foghorn of a ship leaving port. Since the carpets wouldn’t stop, driven as they were by an implacable wind, and since they couldn’t be reached, I wanted at least to lie down on the grass and watch them go by. But with Flora I couldn’t even do that. She was incapable of coming to rest anywhere. She was in perennial flight from one place to another, like someone afflicted with a morbid sense of satiety who barely tastes something before getting sick of it and casting it aside. Flora too was intensifying the effect of the wind I felt blowing toward me.
After visiting Provence I mentally named my wind “Mistral.” In a theater in Pied
mont we had seen a performance of “L’Arlesienne,” the story of the mysterious woman who never appears on stage but who determines destinies and produces death. Flora quickly identified with her and began to cry, as if she too had caused such things and her passage brought misfortune and bad luck. It was thus that we decided to go to Provence. But Provence was not at all as we had imagined it. We found ourselves among hills whose summits were almost all parched and dry. Only broom and lavender and a few tufts of dry grass clung to the dune-like slopes. We saw palisade fences, which seemed to have sprung up everywhere with no logic, as though at the whim of a mad set designer. We tried in vain to understand their purpose as we drove around in the automobile (by now little more than a piece of junk) through half-deserted villages where sand had piled up at the doors of houses. Until the mistral came up one evening. It blew relentlessly for days on end, evaporating what little water a recent rain had left in the wells, desiccating trees and whipping clothes hung out to dry. Then we understood the reason behind the palisade fences and the deserted houses. Nonetheless we stayed there for a while, even exploring the countryside, fascinated by the mistral, which took our breath away and against which the peasants were engaged in a desperate battle, propping up everything and building innumerable windbreaks. We finally left one evening when the mistral was still blowing. Flora couldn’t stand it anymore, this wind that never ceased, but kept blowing as if for all eternity. “If I stay another minute I’ll go crazy. Let’s go! Let’s get out of here! Now!”
Later I came to think that we all live in a mistral, which steals and dries out things and for which no windbreak exists. At least I didn’t know of any, unless maybe the distant dreamlike life led by Lia and Pietro inside a house with iron shutters....
The Wooden Throne Page 24
