Flora experienced periods of fatigue when she would stay in bed all day and didn’t want to have anything to do with me or the automobile, didn’t even want any light in the room, saying she had a headache, a dreadful headache, and everything caused her pain. But most of the time she was vivacious and outgoing, always directed toward objectives she never named, giving me only an occasional fleeting notion of what they were.
When we came back to Italy for good, we began to spend considerable time in the larger cities where Flora had many acquaintances, young men and girls who had worked with her in theaters, actors and actresses, impresarios, or marginal people who seemed to be living as we were, perpetually on vacation, always on the move and with no frame of reference. Sometimes for me they were just voices on the telephone of the boarding house where we were camped.
If Flora went back to work in the theater it wasn’t because she had to (we still had quite a bit of money) but rather because she again felt its irresistible attraction. Perhaps in the past she had not only been dazzled but also burned by the footlights. Now, however, she had forgotten the pain of the burn, and she was drawn once more to that world most congenial to her. She even managed to find odd jobs for me since I followed her and her companions from one place to another like an appendage, a modest and silent collaborator. It seemed my proper role was as the remote presence, the hidden unnoticed assistant. Indeed Flora began to notice me more and more rarely; she had too many friends and too many distractions. Often she didn’t come back to our room at all, leaving me to spend long nights tossing and turning under the covers, fearing she had disappeared God-knows-where with God-knows-whom. At first I was jealous. Then I got used to it.
She invented fanciful excuses for her absences and repeated them without affectation, believing them herself because of her immense talent for identification, which enabled her to recount someone else’s experiences as if they were her own. She had such an ability to dramatize her fabrications that I almost forgot the actual situation and enjoyed listening, as if the whole affair had nothing to do with me. At times she would vanish for three or four days or even a whole week.
Often I tried to trace her, but in the end I gave up such attempts. Flora was just as elusive as the things that passed over my head aboard flying carpets. It wasn’t her fault. It was part of her nature. She couldn’t help being unfaithful; she had to follow her wagtail’s instinct, which led her to trill her song now here, now there, and to hop continually from one hedge to another.
And yet she maintained she was faithful in her heart, perhaps because when she gave herself to someone she did so without reserve, with complete enthusiasm. And every time she thought the relationship would last forever. “Hold me tight, Giuliano; don’t let me go away again. Beat me if you must, bolt the door, keep it locked. Do you want me to stay home for good? Do you want me to cook for you? I swear I’ll do it but only if you want me to. Giuliano you’re the best of all of them. You’re different, you’re the only one....”
But then she’d return to me less and less frequently. She moved in an orbit that grew steadily larger and farther away. I sensed a void in her, which nothing would ever fill completely, a bottomless abyss; always, even when she was applying mascara or wrapping a boa about her neck, she gave the impression of a nebulous and nervous incompleteness.... Therefore I summoned all my strength and left. It meant (I knew it) tearing away a part of my youth, a tissue of dreams, of fantasies and exalted illuminations; I had been a quiet visionary and in a way I still was. But it was better that I leave her before her crazy gyrations took her so far away from me that I no longer felt anything for her. Only in memory could I hold her back and keep her totally with me. Only when her changeable and fleeing figure became fixed in immutable mental images would she be totally mine. This time my conviction that to really possess things you have to lose them did not derive from a fleeting experience but rather from a profound and bleeding wound of the spirit.
* * *
VIII
The Pier at Aarhus
Once I had put a few hundred kilometers between myself and Flora, her image took on a luminous clarity: she was showing me the noblewoman’s jewel, or recounting the Contessa’s ambiguous love affair, or showing me how to count white horses, or curling up next to me during cold nights in the house at Ontàns.... Would her horses ever cause her to find the amulet that would dissolve her mutability? Would she ever become a normal adult?
In my purposeless drifting I had formulated one plan, which was more like a non-plan, a negative verification, a last spin in the void before the momentum died and my dirigible, my broken-down flying machine, came to a permanent stop in the midst of a vast steppe. I had decided to spend the last of my money in Denmark, in Aarhus. Not so much to light a final fire as to use up all the remaining fuel and put the matter to rest for my own peace of mind.
It was an unusually restful trip, which almost entirely failed to rekindle my fantasies despite my destination and the newness of the landscape. Once I reached the city I spent several hours walking along the pier, or leaning against mooring posts or iron railings. I watched a few ships dock and others cast off to be quickly swallowed up in the fog of the Kattegat, while the January wind transformed the spray thrown up by their keels into icy arabesques, or I gazed at the grayish low-lying snow-laden clouds. Then I searched for traces of my Danish grandfather, starting with the address given in the letter I had found in Maddalena’s drawer, which had come to me like an ancient manuscript in a bottle. The house was still there but the new tenants didn’t know anything, had never heard of a sailor adventurer and world-traveler named Daniel Wivallius. They knew a few people by that name, but all of them were quiet serious folks: one was a druggist, another sold paint for ships, another was a rope maker....
Because of some quirk of memory the few hundred words I had learned as a boy from the Dane’s books popped up in my head again like flowers after the rain. My pronunciation left much to be desired but I managed to make myself understood. I also visited the Aarhus cemetery, hoping to find a grave marked Daniel Wivallius. But the whole time I was there (others around me had things to do and hastened about their business; I alone wandered in arid unhurried idleness, eating sausage and mustard bought on street corners) all my actions, all my words, my encounters with people, the salty smell of the sea, the spray, the boat-whistles — everything seemed familiar, like things that had already happened, because I had too often thought about and imagined them. I had no more desire to board the ships that were casting off or to sail the routes of the Baltic or the North Sea, or the seas that touch Iceland and Greenland, no more desire to peer through the fog in fearful anticipation of an iceberg, nor to see whales spouting as Ishmael had. I had grown up at last. Perhaps no matter what I undertook from that moment on I would have the sensation that it had already happened, and I was merely the means to relive it, the point of the steel gramophone needle replaying the ancient symphony for the umpteenth time. But of course. We were only ephemeral music recorded on a disc from a score, music that can be played over and over eternally; whereas we think we are the score itself and that with our death the pages will be torn up so the notes can never be repeated. But things do repeat themselves, come back always the same, reverberate like echoes, all resembling what happened in earliest times. It wasn’t absolutely necessary that I board those ships. A thousand men before me had done it (among others Daniel Wivallius) and a thousand would do so after me. I didn’t need to do it precisely because I knew it had already happened and above all because I felt as if I had already done it.
It was useless for me to go whale hunting because I had gone whale hunting when I read Moby Dick in the chilly rooms of the house in Ontàns. What were the thousands and thousands of whalers who had existed before and since Ishmael compared to Ishmael himself? Shadows, only shadows who had peopled the decks of ships in tropical or frigid seas, who had known fog and storms, who had felt the uncontrollable thrill when the lookout on the masthead s
houted “Thar she blows,” who had risked their lives, thrown harpoons into hearts of sperm whales, forever performing the same gestures and experiencing the same feelings, in an unconscious eternal repetition, which appeared novel to each of them because they weren’t thinking of what had happened to others before them. There was but a single exception, simply because he had told the story. Dipping his pen in the inkwell of an incredible vitality he had created out of himself an eternal character with whom sooner or later all sailors on whaling ships could or would have to reckon accounts. This was Ishmael, this was Melville.
I seemed to be on the road to a great discovery. I was completely certain that Ishmael was truer and more real than all other sailors of all times; they were only insignificant phantoms who had done nothing but reproduce an ancient pattern. Even I, I myself, was a mere shadow fascinated by myths and adventures. Through my imagination I would be able to live and recount all the adventures in the world, whereas to actually live them now would only generate a feeling of boredom and repetition. What an error to have come looking for the Dane! What a disappointment had I found him! He would only have been an old man full of rheumatism who dragged himself from one tavern to another or who lived in some miserable hospice and spent his time complaining about his troubles. Perhaps Maddalena had answered his letter so many years ago but her answer hadn’t brought him out of his gloomy shop in Aarhus, because in his bizarre senile delusions rusted sextants and old nautical maps were now the most important things in the world. No. I ought not to look for the real Dane up here in the houses or bars of Aarhus, but rather in Ontàns in the discourse and the memories of those who had created his legend, and more than anywhere, in my own imagination; my duty was to derive from those sources the eternal form, as Melville had done with Ishmael, by writing a story about him. This was my one true adventure. I realized that stories were the only thing that really interested me, and all the rest was only an extravagant dream without beginning or end. I no longer wanted to travel the world and involve myself in muddled adventures one after another, exposed to the caprices of destiny, because nothing new could come of all that.
I made an effort to recall the stories Pietro had told me and it seemed as if every one of them contained an overwhelming truth. I realized I too was meant to live outside of time like Pietro and Lia, and the only reasonable thing for me to do was to return to Cretis.
Years had gone by since I had left the village to follow Flora. Everything that had happened in the meantime was mixed together in a confused amalgamation concentrated at a single point inside a fortune-teller’s crystal ball and only with effort would I be able to distinguish one event from another in any kind of orderly and meaningful sequence. A long dream, a series of memories, which I wasn’t altogether sure I had really lived through....
I had to return to Cretis. I saw the necessity for that return so sharply and clearly that there wasn’t even any need to hasten things. Impulse and sudden decision were foreign to me now. More than anything else those habits had resulted from the period spent with Flora. They were no longer natural to me, and I liked instead to do things deliberately, after calm consideration. I stayed another couple of days in Denmark, watched ships come in and go out, stood on the piers breathing the salt air where the spray splashed up from the waves and old bearded men wearing sailor’s caps walked slowly back and forth or stood watching, leaning on the iron benches. I still wondered, but with diminished emotions, whether one of them might be Daniel Wivallius, but I asked none of them, not even just as an excuse to exchange a few words.
At last I boarded a train, one day when the sky was leaden with the promise of heavy snow. But maybe it wouldn’t snow after all. In the several days of my stay in Aarhus not a flake of snow had fallen. But I felt an acute desire for snow and snowy landscapes; images linked with snow were awakening in my memory because winter had returned and I, like a tree or a migratory bird, had been caught up somehow in the change of the seasons. I felt the seasonal cycle as an inner desire. It was struggling to free itself, still half-numbed and slow, linked as it was to my first arrival in Cretis, or perhaps it had existed even before that.
That desire accompanied me for the entire trip and began to be satisfied only when we crossed the Alps and it started to snow heavily, so heavily that the snow muted the sound of the train. Perhaps for me this was a trip backwards in time and when I reached Cretis I would realize that not even an instant had passed, that nothing had happened since I had left....
No, on the contrary. I had a premonition that changes had occurred. Of course Pietro no longer climbed the stairs or walked through the wide cobbled entrance to the fortress-house on his aged trembling legs. Death would have finally remembered him, would have noticed that he was a man from another age, born in the time of Napoleon and the Carbonari rebellions and would have retraced its steps to make up for that curious oversight.
* * *
IX
Lia’s Voyage
My return to Cretis was far less adventurous than my first arrival. I now knew the way perfectly well. I got off at the station and simply walked straight up to the village. I headed for Pietro’s house at once, trying not to think about what kind of welcome I would get, what they might say about my being gone for so long and leaving without even saying good-bye. What would I say to someone who had behaved like that? I didn’t know. Maybe nothing, because I was never sure how to act and always saw multiple possibilities.
The door wasn’t locked. I entered without any noise. In the first room a surprise awaited me: there in the big wooden chair, his arms extended on the armrests, sat Pietro, as motionless as an archaic idol. I sought to contain my joy, to restrain myself physically. I didn’t even try to take his hand. “Pietro, I’m glad to see you, you’re looking well...and how are the others? And Lia, where is she?” I thought I heard a child’s shrieks. Pietro looked at me with absent eyes, as if he hadn’t understood my words, or as if they had dropped into his mind like stones in a pond, to sink soundlessly to the bottom without eliciting any response. Finally his lips moved, and I had to concentrate my attention on them to make sense of what he was whispering:
“Lia? You’re asking about Lia? Lia isn’t here.... She went away, she left a long time ago. Nobody’s seen her since....”
“Lia’s gone? No, no, that’s not possible. You must be mistaken, Pietro. You’re thinking of Flora. Flora’s the one who went away, a little before I did....”
But the old man shook his head and repeated the same thing again. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get anything more out of him. He was no longer capable of understanding. There had to be someone else in the house because Pietro couldn’t be living here by himself. Someone certainly was looking after him.... Indeed, on the third floor in a well heated room I found Namu and Red busy trying to dress a little boy about three years old, who was energetically squirming and kicking and seemed to consider this attempt to stuff him into a tiny pair of knitted overalls as the ultimate insult, calling for the most strenuous possible objection.
He was a pretty child with curly black hair and a proud determined look in his eye. I was instantly and instinctively on his side, even though I didn’t dare say anything to his two well-meaning captors, and I felt a resurgence of the old independent spirit that had sustained me during my own childhood. But that flash of light-heartedness lasted only an instant before I plunged once more into sadness over Pietro’s condition.
As soon as they noticed me Namu and Red stopped and stared, mute and stunned, as if they had seen a ghost come back from the world of the dead. “Why are you looking at me like that? Don’t you recognize me? Have I changed that much? I’m back to stay. I’m sick of traveling. But tell me, how are things here? I saw Pietro downstairs. He’s changed a lot.”
“Yes, he’s not the way he used to be,” said Namu slowly.
“And Lia, where is she? Pietro said she’d left. Did she go away with Hermes? Well, what about it? Say something!”
Namu gave
up trying to dress the child and fixed me with her steady gaze of a woman from another time and another civilization. “He said she had left? Left with Hermes?....” She could only repeat my questions, as if a real answer, which had been habitual with us, with our perennial thirst for precise knowledge of the reality around us, was out of place and to ask for it was foolish senseless curiosity.
I had already repented my aggressive way of questioning her. Perhaps there had been no point in returning if I was still prey to such ugly impatience. In that case my reactions to the world were still the same. The atmosphere in the house appeared even more rarefied and shadowy than before. No one seemed to want to tell me what had happened to Lia, as though it wasn’t really all that important for me to know. I tried to accept their point of view. Lia was gone. Wasn’t that enough? I had lost her, just as the old man had lost the Russian woman when he left her to go and help the snowbound village. History repeated itself. All stories turned up again, an infinite number of times (I knew that now), and we were nothing but empty forms used by destiny and God to perform the same eternal drama over and over again. And yet all this was not merely boring, as a predictable repetition is, but even grandiose, mysterious and liberating, because it gave us the impression of occupying a particular place in an immense complex and of being freed from the anxiety of having to think constantly of ourselves, since the individual self became so ephemeral and unimportant in such a scheme.
I was happier about my decision to return, since far from Cretis, knowing what I now knew, I wouldn’t have been able to accept things, to participate in the life of others, immersed as they were in a whirl of busyness, traveling, producing, rushing about in cars and trucks, working in factories or boarding trains. All this, I was certain now, was not for me.
The Wooden Throne Page 25
