The Wooden Throne Read online

  “No, a hawk....”

  I raised my eyes. Seeing nothing I decided she was wrong, but a moment later next to the shadows of the nearest trees another dark moving shadow appeared and looking up I saw that it really was a hawk, tracing low circles with the double crescent of its black wings, riding on the wind. The fact that she was right made me aware of my habitual failure to attribute any importance to what she said; because of her charming narcissism I customarily dismissed her words as exclusively fatuous and inconsistent. Instead, I thought, most of the time, strangely enough, Lia spoke the truth, as though she had an intuitive and infallible access to the deeper layers of reality in spite of her apparent distraction and seeming incapacity to note what was happening around her. As we continued to load the sled I heard for the second time the male voice calling her from the wood. She started in fear, exactly as she had before, then took two steps toward me so that I thought she was going to cling to me and ask me to protect her. I had no doubt this was the same man who had left the tracks of his spiked boots in the snow behind the house. “Let’s go back, let’s go back. We’ve got enough wood now,” she said.

  “He’s calling you. Aren’t you going to answer?”

  “I’ve got nothing to tell that man. I’ve already said all there was to say.”

  “But who is he? What does he want of you?”

  She shook her head without replying. It was clear that she was distraught, and I was sorry I had increased her distress, although I was more curious than ever to get to the bottom of this mystery. I asked Pietro about it as we worked together at the lathe. He paused for a moment and looked at me intently as if to study the face of one about to learn Lia’s secret. “He was her husband,” he said. My mouth fell open in surprise. I never would have guessed such a thing by myself. Pietro gave me a moment to get over the first rush of astonishment then took up the story.

  The man (whose name was Hermes) hadn’t been able to stand the loneliness of Cretis, not being a native. He had become restless and morose, like a caged bear, and had tried to persuade Lia to follow him down to the plain, where he had found a job. But Lia didn’t want to go. Only near her grandfather in the big house where her female ancestors had come as brides from far off villages, only here did she feel secure. She tried to convince Hermes to stay. Sooner or later he’d get used to it, seeing other places wasn’t important.... But Hermes couldn’t adapt and one night he had tossed a few clothes into a back pack and run away. Hermes was very different from them, I would have to understand. Still he wasn’t yet resigned to living without Lia, and every once in a while he came back and walked round and round the house like a soul in torment, desperately calling her name for hours. But Lia would have nothing more to do with him. The night he went away Hermes had left the door open to the room where the child slept, the child who had caught pneumonia and died. So, the dead child to whom Namu had told her Indian legends was Lia’s child, and the mother who had wandered so long in the woods half mad with grief was Lia herself.... Once again I was dumbfounded at Lia’s continual capacity to surprise me. Again I felt the way you feel in a dream when you sink into the sea and never succeed in touching the bottom.

  My first reaction was a desire to leave. Lia’s presence and consequently the others’ too were somehow too demanding, too distressing: things were tranquil in appearance only. I had thought that Lia was simply a quiet country girl given to daydreaming, and now I discovered that she had lost both husband and child. These dramatic events were concentrated in a fairly brief period of her life. She was still very young too, she must be about my age.... I couldn’t adjust to the idea of something tragic about her. Every time I looked at her I sought signs of her constant thoughts of the child, of her mad flight to the woods. I couldn’t come to terms with the change; thus I had better leave.

  Then I realized my conviction that Lia always had these sad events on her mind was merely a banal error of perspective. I was the one who was thinking about her misfortunes when I saw her, she wasn’t.

  My impulse to leave disappeared after a few days. Something in me changed. I felt more grown up, charged with a new responsibility, no matter what I was doing, even when I was busy with the carnival or reviewing the whole sequence of my uproarious fantasies. The way Pietro had told me Lia’s story, the look he had given me, made me think that he held me somehow responsible for the girl. Besides, hadn’t I myself more or less deliberately taken on the task of making her smile? Perhaps there were better means to do this than a costume party or sleds with sails. Maybe Pietro was glad to have me in the house because he counted on me to take Hermes’ place.

  When I thought about it, it seemed almost inevitable. This was my position in the story. I couldn’t get out of my assigned role any more than the protagonists in other stories could, like Ishmael or even historical characters like Caesar or Andrée.... If I were to write the chronicle of my adventures one day I would certainly not want to say I had abandoned my post like a coward.

  According to the information I possessed concerning the proper way to go about things, I should first and foremost ask myself whether I loved Lia. The answer would have to be “no,” since I was already in love with Flora and would soon leave in search of her if I had even the faintest notion where to begin. But at the same time I also loved Lia and would enthusiastically accept the role that destiny had handed me. Furthermore, to my knowledge, a man who loved two women at the same time wasn’t completely normal and yet I felt I was. How was that possible?

  However, I soon quit making a problem out of it. My nature wasn’t able to focus on such things for very long. It leaped over them, already past the barrier before the problem was even clearly defined. I was quite prepared to love both of them. The difficulty, rather, lay in Lia herself because she was the only one who didn’t know about her own role and consequently mine either. I began to make it a point to stay as close to her as possible, to seek out the chance to tell her, to make her understand what she ought to know. There was no doubt she would accept me at least in the role of confidant if not in that other role, which she wasn’t yet aware of. But I wasn’t satisfied.

  I watched her often in the courtyard as she pushed the sled or broke off tiny icicles from the terrace railing or smashed the ice that constantly formed on the water in the fountain, seeming not even to notice the temperature. Her hands and face would turn red but she’d continue to work with ease, while I grew ever more numb from the cold until I felt as if my joints were freezing. I decided I was certainly not likely to stand the discomforts of sailing the northern seas and even less likely to reach the Pole. I didn’t have Andrée’s stamina, and one day’s march in the snow would all but make an invalid out of me. Thus the call had been a false one, a mirage like those experienced by explorers on the ice island of the North Pole (which didn’t really exist, it was always somewhere else) after long periods in that desolate landscape, stunned as they were by the cold and solitude. The enigmatic music I had always heard up there died slowly away, or rather I discovered that it had never existed. My only rapport with the polar regions would be limited to Pietro’s stories....

  One evening I climbed the stairs to my room, lighted a fire in the stove, and once the air warmed up a little, began to write a story about a youth who went off in search of the North Pole but got off the train at the first station and stayed where he was, stymied, and for one reason or another couldn’t go any further. But the story also came to a halt as though the theme carried some sort of magic influence. Completely out of humor, I almost forgot the carnival, Lia and the others who began to regard me with faint apprehension. I was puzzled at myself because I couldn’t account for the source of my infatuation with the Pole. Was it inside me? Had I played this trick on myself? Or was it something outside me that had adopted the stupid purpose of tricking me? Both possibilities were worrisome because they reinforced my conviction of being a mystery to myself.

  * * *

  XIII

  The Finger on the Lip
s

  One evening, after trying in vain to get the crazy unruly girl who had taken Lucina’s place to open the door to me, I went home. My bruised feeling of defeat didn’t prevent me from noticing how silent everything was that evening: no gatherings, no singing, no storytelling by Pietro about things that had happened in Alaska or in Siberia. Thus all chance of communication and therefore of joy was spoiled. I was saddened by the thought of this waste, by the fact that so many things might have happened between people, and instead nothing was happening because of sheer neglect.

  I passed Lia’s room, and knocked softly. The fire was crackling in the majolica stove. She was sitting on the bed leafing through an album of old photographs. “Could I see?”

  “But of course, certainly.” I knew she was happy to show them to me because she was in most of them. She pointed them out to me, leaving me plenty of time to look, looking at them herself, pleased and smiling. Lia at three with blond ringlets, at five sitting on Pietro’s horse in a wild landscape along the Yukon, Lia at seven dressed in a sailor suit....

  She remembered perfectly all the dresses she had possessed as a child, all the little shoes, the tiny boots, the toys. She also remembered the circumstances in which the photographs had been taken, the furniture in the studio or the photographer’s beard, and yet sometimes she couldn’t remember when the king had been assassinated and hardly even in what year we were living.

  I felt an intense emotion on seeing a number of images of Flora. There on those sepia-colored cards the two sisters’ features looked strangely similar whereas they were really so different. The impression of difference derived not so much from appearance as from character.

  The album was almost finished and I wouldn’t then have any more excuse to linger in Lia’s room. I tried to think of subjects I could talk about that might possibly interest her to the point of not realizing I had stayed longer than I should have. But nothing at all came to mind, and when the photographs were finished I continued to sit there looking foolish. I decided it was better to show the depths of my embarrassment and at the same time my desire to stay with her. From these things Lia could draw her own conclusions. “Now I have nothing more to show you...,” she said softly.

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s nice to be with you even if there’s nothing to do.”

  “You don’t want to go back to your room, do you?”

  “Not really.”

  She looked at me for a moment, rubbing her earlobe between two fingers. Then she went to the mirror, took out her hairpins and let her long hair slide down over her shoulders. She combed it for a long time, then began to undress slowly with such a natural air that I wondered if she hadn’t by chance fallen into some kind of odd absence-of-mind and believed she was alone. But the smile she directed at me as she turned around banished all doubt. “Lia, listen a minute....” I tried to get her to reflect. But she quickly placed a finger on my lips and prevented me from continuing.

  That was probably the most unusual night of my life. It came naturally to me to compare her to Lucina and Flora. But with her it was very different. It’s difficult to explain. Lia was there with me, doing and saying things that revealed her presence (she confessed that she had been silly not to do it before because she knew I desired her, that it was time wasted for both of us), and yet it seemed as if her mind were elsewhere. Perhaps she had the ability to make present things remote because she paid no more attention to them than to faraway things. And for the same reason she brought faraway things closer and made them as concrete as if they were in the present.

  We stayed awake for a long time. We heard the scarcely perceptible noises of the night: distant howling (“Pietro says that in the mountains near the border there are still wolves”), occasional creaking inside the house, a disordered scampering on the floor above (“I know the attic is full of mice but I hate to put out traps for the poor things no matter what Red says...”). A bit of light seemed to be filtering through the blinds and Lia went to see. It was the full moon, newly risen; it whitened the roofs and brought a sparkle to the icy arabesques on the windowpanes. “Aren’t you cold?” I shivered.

  “Not a bit. I’d almost like to get dressed and go out. Look at the light; it’s almost like day....” She told me that one of her ancestors had been a sleepwalker, that one night she really had gone out in the middle of winter and yet hadn’t even caught the slightest chill. She too often experienced an intense desire to go out when there was a moon, as if her ancestor’s adventure was summoning her in an enigmatic appeal.

  To me, however, it seemed that shadows more important than that of the other Lia hung over us. The shadow of Hermes, whom Lia wouldn’t have anything to do with but who hadn’t yet given her up (what would I do if I came across him some day, come to reclaim what belonged to him?) The shadow of Flora, who also might return unexpectedly.... Lia perhaps would be able to accept my loving two women, since nothing seemed to be capable of disturbing her. But Flora? And yet Lia’s serenity appeared to be communicating itself to me as well, because shadows and thoughts didn’t worry me.

  Meanwhile I reflected that Lia had reversed roles: it wasn’t that I had entered her world. It was she who had drawn me into it and who had guided this affair from beginning to end, despite the fact that I had always believed her to be absent and passive, as if she would never lift a finger to modify the course of events. From that night on I slept in her room. Still she wanted me to bring down the bed from my room and set up Flora’s again in the fitting room; it must always be ready; she could return at any moment. This too apparently was part of the liturgy of the house.

  It seemed that Namu, Pietro and Red were perfectly satisfied that I had decided to live with Lia, as if I had removed a source of worry and thus returned the household to a preestablished order. Now that I had taken Hermes’ place I would have to try to give back to Lia the child she had lost because I too was beginning to be fond of symmetry and ritual. When we were joined together in the silence of the night I would feel like telling her all this but then I didn’t do it, held back by obscure fears.

  Sometimes waking up and seeing her tranquilly asleep with her bare arm resting under her neck and half-covered by her long hair I thought of the mythical women in the Bible or of the gods of Olympus. At other times I would see instead that she was awake, turned toward me, perfectly still and wearing a gentle and enigmatic expression dimly revealed in the faint reflection of the snow. Lia didn’t always close the heavy iron shutters because that way the house took on the gloomy atmosphere of a fortress. The walls were at least a yard thick and the shutters resembled the doors of an antique safe.

  * * *

  XIV

  The Frontiersman

  Pietro would mention once in a while that scores of barbarians and invaders had passed through the valley: Visigoths, Huns, Ostrogoths, Gepidae, Scythians, Lombards, Magyars, Slavs, Turks, Austrians.... Although Cretis was an out-of-the-way place, raiding bands sometimes came all the way up here and people had to defend themselves. Therefore the oldest houses resembled fortresses....

  When he began to talk about such things I’d try my best to get him to go on. His voice so deep it seemed to issue from underground or from a cavern, Pietro would tell how the barbarians stopped to water their horses at the streams, how they pitched their tents along the banks and roasted legs of mutton over open fires in hastily thrown-up camps. He described their extraordinarily pale faces, still undarkened by the southern sun, their long blond hair and flowing beards, which sometimes caught and held bits of weeds and mud, their strong smell of sweat and horses. He included unusual but still realistic details, as if reporting what he had seen with his own eyes, recreating first-hand recollections of some of his infinite adventures. I ended up with the impression that Pietro was an ageless man. I lost my awareness that even despite his great age he did after all belong to a particular epoch and must have been born about the time of the Battle of Waterloo or the first rebellions of the Carbonari. With Pietro it
didn’t seem important to distinguish between what he had actually experienced directly and what he had acquired through the experiences of others or through reading books.

  He himself, as he talked, made no such distinction, acting like a man outside of time and without boundaries, as vast as a continent. I didn’t understand what made him this way, but I realized that this was indeed his nature. Every now and then he would make casual passing comments so singular that afterwards I brooded over them, trying to ferret out their secret meaning: “Everyone thinks he’s free to choose his own existence, but all we do is follow pre-established orbits.” Or: “We believe we live our lives as individuals separated from the rest. But it’s really life itself that’s living through us. We’re nothing but insignificant instants in life’s eternity.”

  He didn’t like to explain these things and almost regretted saying them, as if they were so obvious they weren’t worth talking about. Or else useless because such things are lived and can’t be explained. Truth for him wasn’t something you could arrive at through the use of your mind (“We live in the dark, stumbling along in the dark”), but something you lived without realizing it. It was a matter of an obscure instinct in a night in which everything was dark. When a bit of light began to flicker in the darkness that was precisely when error became possible. Indeed animals never made errors. Only men did.