I believed the boy was the child of some village woman who had entrusted him to Namu for a few hours or days because she was overburdened or sick or had to go somewhere. Instead he continued to stay with us and I sensed a veil of mystery around him as well as around Lia’s absence, a mystery that was more sad than happy. Namu and Red reinforced that sensation: they never smiled and they paid such constant attention to the child that he seemed to have become the center of the household. When I mentioned Lia they bowed their heads, evaded my glance and stared at something far away. Thus I ended up intuiting the truth without anyone telling me directly. The boy was Lia’s child and thus mine, and it was unthinkable that she would have abandoned him to go off with Hermes. If she didn’t come back it was because she couldn’t, because she was gone forever.
I didn’t want to torment Namu and Red with more questions since every word spoken seemed to cause them pain. I preferred to ask the villagers what had happened. They said that, once I was gone, Hermes had begun coming back to Cretis more and more often. He kept calling and calling for Lia, at length, sometimes for hours at a time, and even went as far as to throw stones against her windows, so frequently that Red started turning the dog loose at night. One morning a few months after the baby’s birth (why hadn’t she told me about the baby?) they found the dog dead. His throat slashed. Shortly afterwards Hermes took up his siege again. The voice stubbornly calling Lia’s name was as persistent and monotonous as the cry of an owl: a screech owl, a barn owl, a horned owl....
Thus one evening Lia had thrown a cloak over her shoulders and run out the door. Perhaps she had wanted to attempt to persuade him to leave her in peace for good. Then when she didn’t come back they had all begun to worry.
Red had shouldered his gun and given the alarm. Many people took up makeshift torches and went to search the vicinity of the village, as they had done before, when Lia had lost her first child and fled the house. Only at dawn had they found her body, lying on its side at the bottom of a ravine about a kilometer from the village. She didn’t even look injured. Except for a dried trickle of blood which issued from her small shapely ear. Of course everyone wondered if she had fallen or been pushed. They looked at her with extreme care to see if they could find some detail that would give an indication and were still there discussing the question when the body was carried home. Pietro, even before he examined the body, said softly but with emphasis: “She fell.” Everyone realized he wasn’t expressing an objective reasoned opinion but merely saying what needed to be said to whoever might eventually come up to the village to investigate Lia’s death. And, in fact, none of those who arrived for that reason found any grounds for not believing the version that she had fallen, and Lia had thus been buried with no difficulty. Hermes had not reappeared again.
* * *
X
Myths
The villagers’ story upset me less than I would have thought. This was one more confirmation that I was changing. I desired one thing above all else: to find my way back to the fixed immutable forms within which my life might unfold like an archaic ritual. I wanted to continue my migration into the past toward ancient myths and legends. It sufficed to think of Lia as a nymph, as Echo (I had already seen her that way so many times!) for the pain of her death to lose all its stinging intensity and subside into gentle melancholy. It sufficed to believe that my grief for her death was a grief already worn out, a well-practiced sorrow, which I had known, for example, from the time when I had first read the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice and had felt the mythic poet’s torment as my own. There were many differences between the two stories but also a good many parallels. At least I thought so. Maybe I, like Orpheus, had rescued Lia-Eurydice from the dark of her bewilderment over the loss of her child, and as a result of my proximity and affection she had anchored herself firmly in the world of the living, of the sane and the sensible. But as Orpheus could not long resist the temptation to look at his wife, I couldn’t manage to stay in Cretis (the gods had asked a different price of me to keep Lia), and I too had lost my Eurydice. Hermes had played the part of Aristaeus, and the ravine that of the serpent. Thus, without any really forced interpretation, the whole story could be connected to the myth.
My strong interest in myths or stories of any kind was coming to life once more. I went through Pietro’s books again, tried to procure others on similar subjects, and even pressed Namu and Red to tell me more stories. As I had expected, I found out they knew a great many. Both, precisely because they were primitives, had such amazing memories that I was able to fill up whole notebooks with their tales. I felt as if I had discovered an abandoned mine, which earlier prospectors had disdained because of silly prejudice. A mine for which any storyteller, perhaps even Count Tolstoy himself, would have envied me. Ultimately these myths and legends became like an immense dome of shadows rising above me, shadows of exemplary situations among which every action of my life found its place. This notion continually distanced me from the present and transported me backward in time.
The present didn’t interest me. Every now and then some young man would show up in the village and tell us the political or historical news. His face flushed with emotion, he would report that this or that had happened, that there had been challenges and bellicose speeches exchanged between heads of state, that there would probably be a war because a nation couldn’t be expected to stand for certain offenses without retaliating. The newspapers I occasionally saw were full of similar news.
I couldn’t feel real emotion at these things. I didn’t experience the anger, the indignation, the passion that others felt; to me it was as if it had all happened a long time ago and now had faded with the passing of years and centuries. All events appeared as a sequence already foretold and even written down in some ancient book of prophecies or stories or myths, just as Pietro had said. I knew very well that great nations wouldn’t stand for certain offenses, nor would small ones for that matter (even less), because I remembered, for example, that the Greeks had not stood for the carrying off of Helen and thus there had been ten years of trouble and grief without end. It was possible that war might come; and since we now had automobiles, trucks and even airplanes, which could stay in flight for several kilometers, since motors and rapid movement were now a fact, that war would have these things available and would therefore be all the more terrifying and deadly.
I knew these things but told no one because I was perfectly sure it would be useless. Again myth had been my teacher. I didn’t have to believe that Cassandra possessed the gift of prophecy. It was enough to suppose that she had understood the cycles of history, the perennial return and replay of events. That had been sufficient to enable her to predict what was going to happen on the basis of what had happened a hundred times in the past. Cassandra had failed to understand only one thing: that it was useless to tell the others because men, almost all of them, lived exclusively in the present, thinking they themselves had invented their passions, not knowing they were merely the infinite repetition of an eternal archetype.
Thus I said nothing. Namu and Red already seemed to know what I now knew. Someday I would tell my son (whom they had named Ettore) but without insisting, without trying to influence his thinking, just as Pietro had done with me. Or maybe I wouldn’t say anything. Who knows.... Myths were not only good stories but also fascinating cryptograms. A minimum of distance from things sufficed to reveal their profound human significance, the permanent meaning of ordinary everyday life. Events were diminished, made strangely lighter at the thought that the ancients had already had like experiences and used them as models in legend and story.
I felt I was traveling on one of Ulysses’ or Aeneas’ ships, searching for the archetypal mother, but I, like them, had no direct experience of her and knew about her only through Pietro’s odd laconic tales. When Pietro spoke of Ecclesiastes or the eternal repetition of events he had seemed to me to be transmitting the words of an oracle, and when he said things that made me think he belonged
not just to our time, but to all times then he was really manifesting that same archetypal mother. And Lia, Lia had been an affectionate nymph, a sibyl full of revelations.... What I had learned from her I had learned not from her words but rather from her love, from her compassion for my desires.
Little by little, as time passed, I became more aware of the void she had left behind her. Everyone seemed to be looking for her, waiting for her. Not just Pietro (lost by now in the mists of age), who thought she had gone away, but also Namu and Red and even little Ettore, who would sometimes wander through the house with a bewildered look on his face, as though he missed something but didn’t know what. Every now and then Namu went over Lia’s dresses, brushed the dust off them, straightened out and pressed the pleats in the skirts and got out her jewels, then sat gazing at them, lost in thought. The jewels had now begun to interest me as well because some of them might have been made during the time when the Turks or the imperial troops had come to our area, and more than any other reason, because I had seen them on Lia’s breast or in her ears; she had been very fond of them.
“If I hadn’t left, if I’d stayed with her,” I would think. But then I would reflect that my going away was inevitable, as was her misfortune, because everything happened according to its own necessary rhythm. No one was to blame. Lia and Pietro certainly knew by instinct that it was absurd to talk about blame and had always refrained from doing so. I must also learn this from them, even when it applied to myself.
I must think of Lia as if she were only away. But of course. Pietro was right again, even though he wasn’t able to think anymore. Or better, in the dark sleep of his thought the right idea had come to him: Lia had gone away. I discovered the truth of the fable I had invented long ago that death did not exist and realized the soundness of Pietro’s reasoning when he made no distinction between the living and the dead. He didn’t know whether his brothers and sisters were one or the other, but for him it was all the same because death was only appearance. Lia could be alive for me if I thought of her that way.
I had to manage to overcome the limitations of my senses and my mind, which believed her dead. Indeed it wasn’t even necessary to think of her as gone away. Lia was always in another room, she moved through the house still looking after her jewels and her dresses. What did it matter if others judged my reaction as madness or thought our whole household was insane? In the confused dream of existence even madness was only a word, a signboard barely visible through the fog, whose blurred letters had no real meaning.
I had now lost my sense of the real and the concrete. I couldn’t believe that because I could see and touch it a stone or a chair was more real than Lia, or that I should perceive her as unreal because she was dead. It wasn’t possible; I didn’t believe it. Lia was more real than Flora because I thought of her as in the house, as with us, while I thought of Flora as far away, and she was. Lia was beyond the reach of time, of aging, of illness and of death because she existed only in the lightness of thought. Actually all that she lacked was a body, the most transient and inessential element, whereas her eternal form was and always would be within me, within us. Lia resting her chin in the palm of her hand as she listened to Pietro’s stories, Lia putting on Flora’s high-button shoes or weaving baskets: these were permanent images. And I could produce others, not just by drawing upon memory but by letting my imagination choose: Lia dressing the child, or mending his clothes with a needle and thread, or watching over his sleep; or other similar ones....
The time I had spent with Flora had taught me that life and reality are merely a mirage, which remains unattainable; that only in memory can they be possessed, only in fantasy, in words, in stories. Life was just an illusion, a long wait for something that never came, and we ourselves were no more than shadows, blurred and empty but shaken by absurd passions.
I went back to my old employment as a woodcarver. I liked it even better than before, and I wouldn’t have exchanged it for anything else. I knew very well that it was an occupation in decline; that now almost everywhere furniture was made exclusively by machine. But I didn’t care. I didn’t belong to the future, but rather to the past, to a peasant artisan civilization; all I knew how to do was carve wood, till the soil, work iron into shapes or tell stories to primitive beings like Namu, Red and my son. I assumed it would be difficult to find other listeners, or readers, should I ever write my stories down or have them printed. The others, the wagon-driver for example, or Flora’s friends, didn’t have time and were losing their interest in stories because the old civilization, which had created them, was dissolving. Or maybe they only thought they were losing it since from what I knew about men I was convinced that interest in stories was eternal; perhaps this was only the beginning of its temporary eclipse. Indeed I had thought of Pietro as a king in exile who might yet some day be called back in triumph by his subjects. For him it was probably too late but perhaps it would happen to me, his dauphin, his successor. Yes. Entering into the scheme of an ancient structure, of ancient forms meant above all filling the vacancy left by the eclipse of the old man. What he had once been for me I might now be for others as well as for myself.
My memory had suggested so many archetypes from which I might take my inspiration: Linus, Orpheus, Jopa the cantor, Homer, the bards and epic poets of antiquity who roamed the world like Gypsies, with no wealth beyond their stories and their visions, whose function had always been to introduce the charm of storytelling into the harsh tormented lives of men.
But I didn’t have to look that far. My truest model could only be Pietro, the man who had lived through a thousand vicissitudes, a thousand adventures, who had been everywhere and had transformed it all into fable and legend.
I was sure that my goal was the same as it had always been from when I learned to read and write with dried peas or had taken exams in my hapless way or dreamed of seeing dirigibles or sailing the seas around Iceland in pursuit of whales....
* * *
XI
Stories
I had always had a penchant for stories. Many times I had found myself thinking that the storyteller’s words were the most solid things in the world. All else inevitably passed away (like the carnival) because time, the Great Illusionist, while making things seem solid and concrete was really breaking them up: they were only simulations, phantoms rushing from the future into the past, while words were eternal and would continue forever to bring out and preserve the fascination of passing events. Therefore the adventure I had been looking for, the distant festival, was nowhere else but in the world of words.
Now I was certain I was one of those men singled out and predestined for one particular task. One of those who believe themselves headed in one direction and who inevitably end up going somewhere else because destiny cannot be wrong. I had thought I was available to do anything and that my detachment from events was due only to my failure to understand my true function. Instead my distance from all the rest was simply the confirmation that I couldn’t be otherwise. I wasn’t better than other men; on the contrary I might well be worse. I was able to abandon the women I loved, to love two of them at once, to live by my wits, to pay hotel bills with gambling winnings — in other words, to do all the things people disapprove of. And yet, in my way, I was singled out because I had something particular to do and to communicate.
I had arrived at this awareness with effort, during the course of many vicissitudes, extravagances, disappointments, trouble, losses, pains and deaths. Now I knew I was only an instrument in the hands of something above me. And yet I also felt a certain pride: pride at being chosen and pride at what I was destined to do and now sensed as an inner imperative.
It was time to begin. I had made a few attempts to write stories but always left them half done. I never managed to give them the importance they deserved because I was always distracted by something else, because the cycle of my experiences wasn’t complete and thus the time was not yet ripe. I was convinced that all things have to mature slowl
y and attain completion before they can reveal their full potential. I had told the story of my dream about my mother and had started so many others without finishing them because it was not yet time. But now it was time. I took up the tale about the youth who was unable to reach the North Pole and completed it. Then I started others and completed them too but threw them away almost at once because I wasn’t totally satisfied with them. But I had finished them anyhow even though I knew I would burn them, because I knew I needed the practice.
I not only liked to write stories but to tell them. My audience was not limited to Red and Namu but included Ettore and the children of Cretis, to whom I recounted fairy tales and adventure stories. They listened with rapt attention, so oblivious they didn’t even notice their noses were running until the very last minute, when they hastily remedied the situation with the sleeve of a smock, still not missing a word I said. Sometimes it almost took my breath away to watch them, and I wondered if at some point the spell would break, and I wouldn’t know how to go on. But that didn’t happen. Something continuously poured fresh material into my mind, and I kept right on going like a ship in calm waters.
Frequently the children interrupted me, excited and enthusiastic, to pose questions or ask for peculiar details: “How tall was the bear? What color was he? Was he a man-eater?” I immediately improvised answers. As soon as their curiosity was satisfied they would subside into silence again, falling back into their ranks, so to speak, to begin once more quietly living the adventure through the medium of my words. They were no longer in the fortress house in Cretis but on the polar ice pack, in Alaska, on a whaling ship, in the jungles of India or in many other places throughout the world. They lost themselves entirely in their imagined exploits, holding nothing back, just as I had done at their age when I read so avidly and filled my head with a thousand fantasies.
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