The Wooden Throne Read online

  I felt as if I already knew all these things, hearing her talk about them. However, somehow the worrisome areas of this conversation, Flora’s inconstancy and the names of so many men, fell quickly away from my memory, and I imagined only her exuberant vitality, which galvanized me even at a distance. Now I also knew that Flora was out of reach, that she wasn’t in Montalto or in any known place, and all I could do was to wait for her here, where she had her roots and where perhaps sooner or later she would finally return. This meant that my anxiety to search, my desire for discovery and all kindred sentiments would begin to stagnate, and the outlook would have to be reversed because it was no longer a matter of searching but of waiting. Still, if I hadn’t found Flora, I had nonetheless discovered her sister and her home and this in some way brought me closer to her. My hope of finding her was reinforced by these tokens that chance had placed in my hands.

  Lia had taken off her white high-button shoes but was still wearing the short and colorful dress and felt no embarrassment that I should see her that way. “Flora left this for me the last time she came.” She would always ask Lia why she dressed like an old woman. She was young, she ought to dress accordingly, to please others as well as herself. Thus she had given her many dresses, and Lia tried them on now and then in secret. “Now go on out please, Giuliano. I want to change....”

  I obeyed. I hadn’t the courage to ask her who the man was who had been hanging about the house calling her.

  After days of uncertainty and tormenting indecision I resolved to remain and wait for Flora. I renounced the rest. I was waiting for life and its strange offerings to come to me instead of pursuing them in odd places of the world. Once I decided, I forgot all hesitation and doubt, and everything seemed natural, as if I had always lived in that house. At times, at least in certain things, I was still the primitive and wild being who quickly adapted to his surroundings.

  I even experienced a sentiment that made me judge myself a hypocrite: the wait for Flora, all things considered, wouldn’t be too tiresome because Lia was a beautiful girl, even if the continuous discoveries I was making cast a rather enigmatic shadow over her. I felt the sudden urge to redeem myself with an honest gesture. I told Lia in a few words how I had met Flora and what had happened between us. I decided in addition that I ought to begin to help Pietro and Red with their work.

  * * *

  VII

  Concertino

  Pietro and Red did their wood carving in a big room on the ground floor; they had a quantity of knives and chisels with which they turned out moldings and ornaments for furniture made in a factory down on the plain. It was the lathe that produced the sound I had heard from my bed. “Of course, if you’d like, there’s work for you too...,” the old man invited me. I considered the phrase to imply that I could stay with them. I recalled, rather amused, that until that point I had made my own plans without consulting my hosts. But both Pietro and Lia, not to mention Red, were such unusual people that they probably wouldn’t wonder at all if I continued to live with them after my recovery without asking anyone’s permission. If I had left they would have bid me good-bye with affection, perhaps with a touch of melancholy, but without asking for an explanation.

  Given my quickness to learn new things, after just a few hours I was carving and turning with notable skill. All I needed was to do scrolls, leaves and spirals that were less stiff, to try to give them more grace and movement. This I could see for myself when I compared my work with Pietro’s, because he said I was already becoming an expert.

  I found I liked the work. In fact, it actually seemed as if I had always done it, or at least that I had begun a long time ago and then stopped for some reason I myself didn’t know. Once I confided this feeling to Pietro, who was working quietly beside me. “Nothing is really strange,” he said. “Maybe living is simply recalling....”

  I didn’t dare ask what exactly he meant by that because his silences were somehow inviolable, and I hesitated to break them; it would be like disturbing an unfamiliar liturgy. Often when I looked at him I thought of all the experiences he had been through, which had accumulated like geological strata. He had almost reached the North Pole, had hunted bear and prospected for gold, had fished in the Aral Sea and in Lake Baikal, and now he lived in Cretis and plied the same trade I did. I couldn’t reconcile these things. It would take a rabid imagination to put them together, or so it seemed. Above all I couldn’t rid myself of the notion that he was substantially different from me, that he belonged to another mysterious race, soon to become extinct.

  One evening I went out for a walk after putting in long hours of carving. I often felt the necessity to get up and move; in fact the only problem with this kind of work was that it was so excessively sedentary. The old man had let me have his long jacket lined with the fur of some unspecified American animal (alpaca or vicuna, who could tell), and I could hardly feel the cold, so that wandering around in the snow was pleasant and invigorating. I had walked the length and breadth of Cretis, stopping to look at the iced-over fountain. The air was crisp and still and the moon was about to come out from behind the mountains toward the border. There were very few lighted windows.

  I likened the village to a person who resists the temptation to fall asleep and the few houses to constructions patiently built out of black cardboard by some industrious boy given to dreaming. It seemed impossible that I lived in one of them and would remain there for an undetermined time. How long would it be? Perhaps destiny had decreed that my youth, my life even, should run its course in Cretis, but this seemed somehow not true but imaginary, a mere drawing, a simulation. If I looked closely at my situation it appeared quite natural. But if I considered it at a distance in its complexity I was afflicted by an insidious anxiety like a gnawing in the dark. How could I have decided to live, or accepted living, here in this nonentity of a village buried in snow and silence — I, who had always counted on one day writing the story of my adventures?

  I returned to the house, almost at a run, as if to reestablish contact with reality. I heard singing as I came in. A kind of lament, a primitive chant, at any rate certainly nothing indigenous. I found them all, even Namu, in an interior room with no windows, just a door that opened into a larger area. Pietro liked it there, perhaps because it was one of the smallest rooms and an armful of dry branches would serve to warm it. They were all singing. Red was playing the guitar, seated in a big armchair which looked like a crude wooden throne. I remained standing by the door.

  The language wasn’t among those which, even though I couldn’t speak them, I could still recognize. Thus it was perhaps an Indian language?

  None of the four took any particular note of my presence, merely looked at me with indifferent eyes as if I didn’t exist. Their voices were quite different yet they blended perfectly, melting into each other like a malleable substance; thus I discerned that the strange quartet had sung together for some time. They were seated, almost motionless. Only Red’s hands moved on the guitar with steady rhythmic gestures. The light was dim. I closed my eyes. It took very little to change the scene from a mountain village to the high plains of the Dakotas or Montana, in the midst of the prairie, among buffalo herds and horsehide tepees. I had always had a great capacity for abstraction, and it was extremely easy to imagine myself in a reality different from my actual surroundings.

  I tried with maximum attention to follow the chant, to learn the music and the words, hoping to join them soon with my piccolo. Yet at the same time I was afraid that this might really come about, that the song contained a force like that of the Pied Piper of Hamelin and once I had learned it and joined the quartet I would never be able to leave because I’d be caught in a tenacious and permanent enchantment. No, no, that wouldn’t happen. I had stayed in this house until now of my own free will, and I enjoyed the prospect of finding out all about it, but I didn’t want to shut myself in. I wanted to be able to leave when I wished. To go where and why? What was I really supposed to do in this world? W
hat plans did destiny have for me? Perhaps I had already begun to carry them out without knowing; indeed I was convinced that this was usually exactly what happened, that is, that only afterwards did one vaguely recognize such things. Maybe some people never did, for instance Maddalena, dying of pneumonia, and talking in her delirium of having to go somewhere, of running through the magredi with her suitcase, afraid of missing some train or other.... Pietro and Namu, whatever destiny’s plan was for them, must have carried it out sometime ago, whereas Lia and Red seemed never to have thought about such things, or to have renounced them forever. There was something about these people that suggested decline, remoteness, something crepuscular. But then who could really say? Only a few days before I had come upon Lia trying out Flora’s dresses. Did she too dream of going away, as her sister had, because the presence of the man who called her from the woods had set off a storm of feelings that she thought she had suppressed for good? Hard to say. I had already seen Lia transformed more than once in front of my eyes. First she was only Ninfa, then the Etruscan. Now I knew she wore Flora’s clothes and that she must have had an obscure relationship with a man who didn’t even dare approach her house....

  When the chant ceased and the four came out of their sacred rigidity it seemed to me again that there was something about them that I ought to grasp, but it escaped me. Red stood up and hung the guitar on the wall, then sat down again in the armchair as if waiting for something. Namu went to put a few dry twigs on the fire. Then Red took out a harmonica and began to play Slavic tunes while Lia placed her elbow on her lap, leaned her chin on her open palm and prepared to listen, a softly dreamy expression on her face.

  * * *

  VIII

  The Rustic Court

  It wasn’t just his sharply-pointed profile that made Red resemble a rodent; his enormous incisors, which flashed even at the hint of a smile, intensified this impression. He was very touchy and shy. It seemed to take great effort on his part to live in Pietro’s house, as if he hadn’t really entered it but had paused half inside and half outside, ready to flee again and take refuge in some mountain hut should anyone in any way provoke his untamed and restive nature, always on the alert.

  Under his nose he had a bristly red, unevenly trimmed mustache like a clump of wild grass dried out by the sun. It always made me laugh when I saw him, and I didn’t know why.

  Now that he was playing the harmonica he looked like a scrawny frightened jester performing against his will before his lord in some rustic court of long ago. It was indeed Red’s appearance that suddenly made clear to me what I had been searching for. Pietro’s circle was a little peasant court. Red was the clown, Namu the wizard, Lia the sad princess and Pietro a king in exile driven out by a stupid multitude who hadn’t been capable of understanding him or simply had thought him too old.

  The idea pleased me. I held onto it, worked at it. It was one of those thoughts that, once they came into being, wouldn’t leave me alone, creating the urge to develop them into a story, but this story like all the others would remain as it was, an idea. I decided that Pietro didn’t mind having been driven into exile. He was one of those men who carry everything with them and from whom an evil fate can steal nothing.

  When Red stopped playing, Namu got up laboriously from the hearthstone. I had the feeling that all her bones creaked in that simple movement. “Are you going already Namu? It’s still early,” said Pietro.

  “No, it’s late. Namu has to go. Namu has so many things to do....”

  “We don’t have anything to do Namu. I used to think so, once. But then the years piled up and I understood. You’ve gotten old for nothing, Namu.” The woman grumbled a little but then sat down again. “Lia, why don’t you bring us a drop of grappa?” he went on. “You sit down too Giuliano.”

  I did so at once. I thought that now he would perhaps set about recounting one of his experiences. Instead Pietro, after Lia brought the grappa, raised his glass and turned toward me as if he intended to drink a toast to my health. Then he began to talk about Cohelet, the son of David and the author of Ecclesiastes, who wrote of having undertaken great works, built houses, planted vineyards, created gardens and then at the end wondered what might remain of all his labor and all his anguish. “I think Cohelet was right, Giuliano,” he said and drank again, passing his fingers through his white hair, which was still thick despite his advanced age.

  Maybe it was simply old age that made his every move so regal, but I felt it was something more. I thought that in him were miraculously preserved the same gestures that had belonged to others who had lived centuries or millennia before him, for example the Shepherd Kings who existed in Greece in Homer’s time.

  I neither said nor did anything to reciprocate his attention to me, but my heart overflowed with gratitude. Thus for Pietro I was not just a vagabond who had joined his court by chance and whom no one noticed. I imagined that he was considering bestowing upon me some mysterious investiture. If I didn’t know what his kingdom was I was nonetheless sure that I was dealing with a king and a dispenser of benefits. Perhaps he had returned just for this from Asia and America and he too, without knowing it, was carrying out a capricious design of fate. And yet little by little, as I learned new things about him, the figure of Pietro, instead of becoming clearer and assuming ordinary dimensions, grew somehow darker and more impenetrable. I had the impression that even if I were to live in his house for a long time, even if he were to tell me all about himself, he would continue to be as closed and enigmatic to me as an iron safe.

  Once in a while Lia would tell me something about her relatives, about aunts and uncles and great aunts and great uncles scattered throughout the world, most of whom she had lost track of. She talked about one of her grandfather’s brothers, Enore, whose last letter had come from Patagonia, and another, Arturo, who had been a miner in Antofagasta. Her father was the son of Pietro and a girl of Eskimo descent whom he had met in Good Hope on the Mackenzie River and then lost touch with as the result of a complex series of events. Lia didn’t even really know the whole story. She remembered that she and Flora, still very small, had been continually moved around from one place to another, always seeing different surroundings and new faces, even though there was one face (their father’s) that often reappeared and provided a kind of steady reference point in their vagabond childhood. There came a time, however, when that face no longer reappeared. Instead it was their grandfather Pietro, whom they had never seen, who arrived and loaded them on and off wagons and boats, until they reached New York, and there they departed together with Namu for Europe.

  I realized that Pietro, Flora, and Lia herself were located at the center of a diaspora that extended over the entire world. Thinking about it set off a mechanism in me, which brought me much closer to Lia; in her family there had been an even more violent and senseless disorder than the one that had overwhelmed my own. Our fathers, mothers, and grandparents had appeared and disappeared like phantoms and then gotten lost who knows where in the dark twisted recesses of the world as if in a labyrinth. Yet I also felt intensely envious of Flora and Lia for the fact that one day they had been awakened by Pietro, who had wrapped them in his cloak and taken them with him, whereas I had never even seen the Dane. The fragmented family histories, the relatives swallowed up by distance or by the past, these people whom nobody knew anything about, stimulated my imagination and plunged me once more into my own family stories, which washed over me and carried me back, like a wave returning to the sea.

  I was an adult over twenty and so many things had happened to me; and yet old feelings were coming to life within me and it was as if everything was returning to the way it used to be. What had ceased to organize itself around the house in Ontàns was now taking shape again here in Pietro’s house. I rediscovered an energy and a desire to do things that had disappeared during recent times and for which my wood-carving work wasn’t a sufficient outlet.

  It was a desire that, strangely enough, increasingly parallele
d another, the desire to have a woman who was really mine. This was a rather sad and humiliating affair. In the whole village I had managed to find only one girl willing to take Lucina’s place. But she was different from Lucina, I didn’t even like her. She was slovenly, dirty and, in addition, furiously eccentric, so that sometimes she pelted me with stones to chase me away or would begin to scream at me, her abrupt and raucous vulgarity disturbing the tranquillity of Cretis where it seemed that nothing ever happened or that the snow softened and enveloped every event.

  * * *

  IX

  The Sail

  I felt even more intensely than usual the persistence of something childlike in my nature, which time hadn’t changed and couldn’t change, and which was watching my body mature with ironic indifference, as if I were made of the same stuff as Peter Pan or Till Eulenspiegel. I always wanted to plunge headfirst into things without the slightest thought as to where events might take me. All the world’s eccentric extravagances seemed legitimate to me. During my free time I began to wander about the village with no particular goal in mind, as if to take possession of it and find out what possibilities it might offer. I rummaged through the attics of abandoned houses whose owners were in Germany or Canada or even through some belonging to old men who, after trying to stem my enthusiasm by whatever fragile objections they could muster, stood dumbfounded on the doorsill passing a milk pail or a pitchfork back and forth from one hand to the other.

  I quickly noted whatever might serve the vague purposes taking shape in my mind, which I would clarify later. I was like a sculptor who doesn’t quite know what he wants to do and allows his subject to be determined by the form of the marble block that he has just had brought into his studio. I found a lot of exciting things, like antique weapons, costumes from the previous century, Venetian carnival capes, old banners, Turkish flags, and military uniforms from the time of Maria Theresa, all because the inhabitants of Cretis never threw anything away and saved everything as long as possible.