The Wooden Throne Read online

  It was an effort to calm down again. That night I lost myself in a muddle of labored dreams in which Maddalena appeared, and the man with the carriage who kept circling the cemetery, and the children in Ontàns who made fun of me because I had neither father, nor brothers and sisters, nor relatives, and Red was there and Luca, who perhaps weren’t two men but only one, wearing a heavy goatskin jacket and carrying a rifle slung over his shoulder. Many, many other things were happening to me, which I don’t remember, except for one, an obscure fact that sustained all the others and gave them a precise and exalted quality: that is, it was all taking place on the banks of Great Bear Lake, above the Arctic Circle.

  * * *

  V

  Namu

  Despite their confused nature, my dreams seemed so solid and specific that when I woke up it took me a while to orient myself and remember who I was, and where I was.

  The valley looked bright and clear. From the bed I could see several old houses with their walls and long balconies lined with neatly stacked firewood, and lofts with decorative windows shaped like hearts or trefoils, from which bunches of hay protruded. Although they were very old, and worn and darkened by time the houses looked strangely vivid as if they belonged to a dimension of reality yet to be discovered.

  Pietro did not return for quite a few days; however, I learned a lot about him from the Etruscan. He had been in many different places, in Canada, Siberia, Chile and still others she didn’t know about. What I heard reinforced my idea that it was all sheer invention. Come now, Pietro had never left that primitive lonely valley. Listening to her, I was thinking obstinately: “You’ve learned your lesson well. But don’t recite it to me. Do you think I don’t know anything about Alaska, Chile or Siberia? Do you think I never heard of the Gold Rush?” And I assigned her a runaway imagination, just as I had earlier endowed her with a fictitious stupidity. I pretended to be distracted as she talked about the old man, or asked instead about other routine things, in order to give an authentic facade to my simulation, but in reality I was listening with rapt attention and noting everything in my memory with constant starts of astonishment.

  I was beginning to take my first steps, sometimes even without a cane. However, perhaps to provide yet another outlet for my histrionic temperament, I pretended for a while that I couldn’t walk by myself and still needed rest and assistance. There was a pair of slippers in the drawer of my bedside table, which I could put on and pad about in without the slightest sound. When I thought no one was home I wandered through the rooms and the hallways, plunged my curiosity into obscure drawers and closets and made some surprising discoveries. For instance, I found an instrument made of an extremely hard stone bound to a wooden handle with leather thongs to form a primitive ax. A strip of paper glued to it read “obsidian.” I had read somewhere that the Aztecs and Mayans used to make clubs out of obsidian and use them to beat the earth to make it workable, never having invented the plow. Was this then an Aztec ax? I found a necklace made of teeth (from a wolf? a bear?), a poncho of buffalo hide, a sealskin moccasin, brightly colored pebbles, a stone knife, gold buckles, clubs with drawings on the handles like miniature totem poles and a large gold nugget gleaming inside a quartz crystal. None of these things had been put on display; they were all hidden inside canvas cases.

  I went from one surprise to another. It seemed to me that the house (certainly very old, with its stone arches and iron shutters) gave off an air of ancient civilizations, which I had always thought of in the same way I thought about fairy tales. But for me ancient civilizations were like fairy tales sumptuously framed in historical fact simply to make them more believable.

  But an attic room held the surprise that perhaps pleased me the most; there I found hundreds of books in many different languages. On the covers of some, although the writing was Cyrillic, I managed to make out the name of the author: Leo Tolstoy. Only then did I realize how much I had missed books while I had been in bed.

  One evening a tiny shriveled old woman came into my room. She must have been exposed all her life to a glaring sun that had dried out in her every humor and thread of fat, reducing her to a wrinkled chestnut with a face that looked both astonished and vague. She had an aquiline nose and slanted eyes. The Etruscan called her Namu, and always walked behind her, as she did with Pietro. Namu and Pietro would exchange knowledgeable glances now and then after examining my feet and moving them in all directions as if they belonged to a disjointed toy.

  I feigned slight indignation at their taking charge of my foot as though they owned it. Actually this was a pretense to hide my surprise at encountering a woman whom I could easily imagine inside a tepee on an Indian reservation. She could only have come from America. She was thus living proof that Pietro had been over there. Both he and Namu continued to look at each other, and their eyes revealed their bewilderment that I wasn’t improving, when according to their experience I ought to be completely well. I was singed by the awareness that now I was really committed to pretending. I felt I had lost my freedom of action and had better find a way of behaving that would let me get it back as soon as possible.

  Namu possessed extraordinary talents. She had seemed rude and awkward when she manipulated my feet; however, she had done this on purpose to find out to what point my feet were still sensitive and how I would react to unnatural and excessive movement. But when she spread a violet colored ointment on them and bandaged them her gestures were as light as dandelion fluff, like faded memories of the past caught somehow in the net of the present. An idea leaped into my mind: Namu must have lived centuries ago in Montezuma’s time and her bandages were destined not for me but for some warrior who had been wounded amid the cornstalks or American agave.

  Her ointments made me feel much better even though I could already walk. Where, how had she learned to make them? “Curious boy, impatient boy,” she smiled, with her wrinkled lips, her skin like that of a withered apple.

  As if to avoid discrediting her judgment I tried to find out more about her. I followed her around, went to visit her room, watched what she did. She slept alone in a tiny room on the third floor, whose windows looked toward the border. She made rounds to attend to the sick, and would try out her violet and blue ointments (kept tightly covered in small clay pots) when the doctor, who came from outside the village, threw up his hands and said there was no more hope. But she would begin her treatments only when those concerned requested them; otherwise she wouldn’t lift a finger, nor would she react in any way when people half mad and delirious with pain would shout at her: “What are you doing, you ugly old witch? Waiting for me to die? Go away, bird of ill omen, dried out stuffed owl!” She limited herself to wiping sweaty brows and then reapplying damp cloths. Only if the invective continued would she hide behind a door or curtain waiting to approach the bed again when the patient’s delirium ceased. She knew the art of midwifery too, although she had little chance to use it. Very few babies were born in the village. Almost all the men had emigrated; only women remained, along with old men and a few individuals too uncivilized to accept the idea of taking up some definite trade and working at it some four to six thousand kilometers away. Besides, whatever babies there were had been born to wild young girls as solitary as goats, who hadn’t been able to bear the loneliness and let a vagabond into the house one night.

  Namu had the courage to approach and take care of things from which others fled in terror. She did everything with the same serenity, unshaken in her imperturbable demeanor befitting an idol or a sleepwalker, as though it were the same to her to help a girl give birth as to lay out the dead for burial.

  Once she had spent an entire night keeping watch over a three-year-old child who had died of pneumonia. The Etruscan said that the mother, unable to bear her grief, had run out of the house and fled. Namu had dressed the tiny body and all night long her voice had been heard repeating unintelligible phrases — Namu, who hardly ever spoke, who limited herself to measured skillful gestures when she took care o
f the sick and the dying. It had been a memorable night. Most of the villagers had gone looking for the mother and all the fields and woods had echoed with her name. Others who had remained gathered together in the house in the next room behind a door with frosted glass windows, not daring to enter the room where Namu was talking to the child as she combed his hair. Behind her back the fire was flickering its last and people outside could see her shadow projected on the wall by the restless flame. Namu went on talking in an absent monotone until one of those present, with an impatient motion, asked Pietro what that crazy old woman was saying. “She’s telling stories. Old Indian legends....”

  The Etruscan’s voice had trembled slightly. “Does the mother still live here in the village?” She nodded, holding her body stiff. “Do you know her? What’s her name?” She didn’t answer, merely stared at me as if studying the effect of her story, and it was only much later that I could fully assess the meaning of that look.

  By now I was completely well. There was no more reason for me to remain in Cretis; I could leave anytime. Yet I couldn’t seem to decide. One morning I woke up acutely aware that I had come to a dead end in that village, that I had wasted time, given up Denmark and even my destiny itself. How was it possible? How could it have happened...? I shuddered from head to foot; I was becoming unrecognizable, a stranger to myself, as if I had boarded an unknown ship headed for some cryptic destination. Even Montalto seemed to be out of reach; I now thought of it the way you perceive places in a dream that you can’t get to for reasons that are clear enough in the dream but make no sense once you wake up. But then the shell around Montalto, which kept it out of reach, dissolved or at least changed character. There was too much snow and I wouldn’t be able to make it by myself. If I tried I’d run into the same problems I had on the road to Cretis: I’d get lost in the snow, get frozen again and maybe even die because no one could defy the ambiguous Gamester twice and get away with it; it was he after all who had tricked Caesar on the Ides of March. No, next time I wouldn’t be so lucky. I had to wait for spring, when the trip would be little more than a pleasant hike. But after a few months would I still want to go to Montalto to search for Flora? Where did I really want to go anyhow?

  I felt as if a crevice was opening inside me, and something was sadly melting away, vanishing as though swallowed in hidden cracks. Perhaps life and the world held no surprising adventures at all, but only meaningless dreams like mirages that always dissolved only to reappear and vanish anew.

  * * *

  VI

  The White High-Button Shoes

  I didn’t get to see the Etruscan for the whole day. I thought she might not be feeling well because she was usually in constant motion, absorbed in some task or other, which she would carry out with easy and geometrical precision. I recalled that during the day there had been a kind of rippling nervousness, almost imperceptible, throughout the house. I had heard Pietro talk about boot tracks in the snow under the windows of the girl’s room. There had been talk about this subject more than once; it seemed in fact to have completely taken up everybody’s thought for the whole day. Then, toward five o’clock (the sun had already disappeared behind the mountains) I had heard a man calling from the direction of the woods: “Lia! Lia! Lia!”

  The voice was far away but nonetheless the old man and Red started a bit on hearing it. The dog had been barking for some time, then his whining had quieted down as if into a yawn, and a shadow had passed back and forth two or three times among the spruces closest to the house on the side toward the border. Who was he? What did he want? Was his the voice calling Lia? Did the people in the house know him? And was Lia the Etruscan’s name?

  I went out to explore. I too saw the fresh snow full of tracks. Someone must have walked up and down, for who could say how long, in the grip of extreme impatience. Coming back inside I almost bumped into Red, who was carrying a bucket of still-warm milk. Then, raising my eyes, I saw a girl framed in the lighted window and the way her hair was combed alarmed me suddenly. She reminded me of someone.... I went in quietly after letting Red go ahead of me so I wouldn’t be noticed.

  I climbed the stairs and approached the lighted room, walking close to the wall, without making any noise. I looked through the keyhole to take her unawares, but the room had returned to darkness. If the woman was still there I couldn’t see her. I was on the point of knocking, so intense was my curiosity, or rather my anxious desire and anticipation. I had never seen the Etruscan with her hair done that way so there must be a stranger in the house. But when had she come, and why hadn’t I seen her before?

  I waited for a while at the door, hoping that the stranger was really in that room and that sooner or later she would come out, and I would see her up close despite the darkness. No sound came from the room; thus I thought first that the girl had become conscious of my presence and was cleverly trying to convince me that there was no one there so I would go away. Then I thought she had in fact already left. After a quarter of an hour of useless waiting I decided to lift the siege and went back down the hallway to return to my room. But at the very moment I lost sight of the door it opened silently and a shadow slipped out, running away along the wall. I succeeded in distinguishing only the whiteness of the high-button shoes the girl was wearing.

  I waited until the figure had disappeared, then followed her, still persisting in the belief that I had not been noticed or that at least the woman did not suspect she was being watched. At the end of the hallway I began to climb the stairs since on that floor (the third) all the doors had always been closed and perhaps concealed the secret. Then I heard a faint creak and a door behind me opened slightly, perhaps from a draft. From inside came a dim glow. I turned back, still without making any noise (something I had perhaps learned by modeling myself unconsciously on the inhabitants of the house). In the room an oil lamp turned down to its lowest flame illuminated the figure of the stranger in the mirror of a wardrobe. Her hair was long and loose, one of her legs was resting on a stool, and she was in the process of unbuttoning her shoes. She was wearing a very short dress of a changeable color like those worn by dancers in operettas or circus riders. “Flora! Flora!” I called sotto voce and entered quickly for fear that the door might close on me. “I’m not Flora. Flora is my sister.... How do you know her? I’m Lia....”

  “And I’m Giuliano,” I whispered. But Lia knew already; they all knew because they had read it on the copy of Moby Dick that I had brought with me from Ontàns, even though — queer people that they were — they had never let on that they knew.

  It was like a dream in which one falls from one cloud to another or plunges into the sea without ever managing to reach the bottom. Now at last I understood why the girl had often reminded me of something. It wasn’t only because of her Etruscan features; it was a hidden resemblance to Flora that had now been unveiled because she had taken down her hair and put on one of those dresses that I could very easily imagine her sister wearing. More than that, I seemed to remember Flora wearing high-button shoes like Lia’s. I felt a quivering pulse through my veins. So this and not the other was Flora’s home village and I, choosing the wrong place, had actually ended up in the right one. Destiny really was an incomparable joker, inexhaustibly inventive....

  We sat down. Lia also was somewhat agitated. Not so much, I felt, because I had surprised her in that dress but more because I had mistaken her for her sister. I tried to profit from her disorientation to make her tell me everything she knew about Flora. Her voice became melancholy, as if Flora represented for her, as for me, a battle lost, an irretrievable love. Where she was, Lia didn’t know. For years now Flora had been living away from home. First she had gone to stay with a relative in a village beyond the Tagliamento, then she had run away from there too, and there was no telling where she had ended up and with whom. Every once in a while they would receive a postcard, always from a different place, and beside her signature there was usually a man’s signature as well — a man who was sometimes name
d Felice, Valeriano, Peter, Simone, or Michel. Once Flora had even shown up at Cretis with a foreign youth who didn’t understand a word of Italian and limited himself to nodding “yes” every time he was asked a question. It was almost midnight, and everyone in the house had been asleep. Flora had made them get up and after a drink of milk (an interminable drink, enough to take her breath away) had introduced Johannes to them, saying that he was a fantastic young man without equal. She had taken him around the village, wanted everyone to meet him....

  I believed I knew the reason for Flora’s fleeting return: she was too happy to keep all her joy to herself; she needed to show it to others, to communicate it, out of exuberance, generosity and excess vitality.... But it might even be that the opposite was true, that she had dragged her Johannes up here because she felt herself growing tired of him and feared another separation and her own inconstancy. She showed him to everyone, talked to whoever would listen about her happiness, expecting that their union would be reinforced in turn by the fact that everyone knew about it and considered it a firm and enduring thing. This time others would prevent her from breaking off with her young man because putting an end to a menage that everyone knew to be so happy would seem too outrageous and strange, even to her. Yes, this too was possible.

  In fact only a few days later (Lia added sorrowfully) they had received another postcard, this time from Florence, with the signature “Vincenzo.”