The Wooden Throne Read online

  His calm manner of speaking gave his discourse an enigmatic consistency, a masterful density that harmonized completely with his existence.

  Pietro would now stop to talk to me much more frequently than he had in the days when I first arrived. Perhaps he knew by intuition that this was the best way to keep me here, the antidote to neutralize my thirst for novelty. He told me about strange people he had met in all the corners of the earth: in the tundras of Russia, the high plains of Mexico, the desert of Arizona, the steppes of Turkestan; he talked about theosophists, adventurers, hunters, Central and South American Indians, Mormons, cattlemen, woodcutters, vagabonds, Gypsies, sorcerers, visionaries, snake charmers. He narrated in a simple concrete way and yet, I’m not sure how, he placed each event and each character in an attenuated atmosphere, as if nothing belonged to actual chronological reality but rather to the world of legend and story.

  The more details he added, the more his narrative seemed to become a myth. Putting his stories together, I began to derive from them the idea that he had always been a man of the frontier. In all the countries he had lived in he had been at the boundary of civilization, where the houses ended and the cactus, the desert, the moss, the lichen, or the ice began. He had lived in the places where ordinary people went only when they were forced to, where all comforts disappeared, and a man had to rely upon himself alone. He had almost always lived among primitive people, with Indian, Eskimo or Asiatic women, and he often recalled them with muted affection. He pronounced their names sotto voce as if to bestow a last caress. He spoke of the children he had had with them (like the father of Lia and Flora) with happiness, because life had used him as a means to continue itself. But the stories about the women were always a little sad because he had almost always had to leave them behind. Or else they had left him to follow their own tribes, or because they belonged to another man who had come to reclaim them, or for other more elusive reasons associated with a mentality I couldn’t comprehend.

  Sometimes he spoke of relatives who lived all over the world. Only very rarely did he receive cards or letters from them. The few letters they had exchanged had to be forwarded as they or he moved from place to place, and all this was very slow (at that time it took more than a month just for a ship to cross the Atlantic, and the mail was delivered by stagecoach, but only when there was a need, after a certain amount piled up). Often by the time a letter arrived at his address Pietro had already moved on and recommenced his wanderings. His brothers and sisters had stopped sending letters altogether, perhaps simply because when they thought about doing so they felt defeated before they started. Knowing there was scant hope a letter would reach its destination and being illiterate besides, they lost the courage to bother an intermediary to write one.

  Therefore Pietro didn’t even know whether his siblings were alive or dead. And yet to hear him talk one would say that for him there was absolutely no difference between those two states, just as there was no definite boundary between the time before he was born and the times he had lived in. And yet it was neither a matter of indifference nor of lack of affection. In fact if I really thought about it there was no real difference because all the proof Pietro had that his brothers and sisters ever existed rested in the images he remembered of the family before it was dispersed. Their lives and deaths couldn’t be real objective facts to him because they were not connected to specific sensations; they were merely the fruit of his thoughts or feelings, since he could imagine them as either dead or alive according to his state of mind.

  Besides, when Maddalena died hadn’t I myself experienced the same difficulty in believing she was dead because she went on living in me? And wasn’t her passing still somehow incomprehensible and unreal even though it had happened right there in my own house?

  When Lia listened to her grandfather’s stories her face was full of wonder. Sometimes she would stroke her own arm or knee, other times she would hold my hand, glancing at me now and then, flushed with emotion. If she thought the others were watching she’d quickly let go of me, for being observed triggered her shyness, and she felt that even the most innocent effusion between us should not occur before witnesses. It didn’t matter at all that the others knew about and approved of our relationship.

  But if Pietro’s stories went on for too long Lia, although against her will, began to yawn, only realizing it after the fact. “I’m sleepy. It must be late. But I honestly don’t want to go to bed, I want to listen,” she’d say in a low voice.

  But Pietro would stop because he too was sleepy. Anyhow by this time the night was no longer young and not only did it seem like bedtime but almost time to get up and wait for dawn. The warmth of the fire and the glass of grappa we had been slowly sipping increased our drowsiness and our thoughts of bed. We would let the fire die on the hearth and each one would go off to his or her own room.

  Sometimes Lia would already begin kissing me in the dark hallway. Finally she could give free rein to the affectionate nature, which she had restrained because of the presence of others. Then as soon as we entered our room she’d undress and look in the mirror at her full breasts or her hips and say,”I think I’m beginning to get fat.”

  “You aren’t the least bit fat. You’re just fishing for compliments....”

  “No, no. Don’t you know? I understand men even if I do live up here. Men watch their women carefully, and if a woman lets herself go they run off looking for someone else....”

  I believed, however, that rather than potential jealousy (a feeling that was too individualistic and aggressive for her) she was expressing her infantile narcissism and ingenuously repeating what she had heard people say in order to give herself airs as a mature woman.

  Then she would lie down beside me, hugging me for warmth and offering herself with tranquil docility, as though she weren’t a woman at all but a fabulous animal for whom making love involved only instinct and nature and never rose to the level of intellectual complications. Everything was extremely simple for her. I was her man, she was my woman and that was all. But I, on the contrary, knew that in reality things were quite a bit more complicated than that....

  Once in a while I’d be irritated at the way she oversimplified life, and I would have liked to make her understand so many things. But then I would look at her face, so like the face of a dreamy child and renounce all discussion, postponing things and hoping they’d all work out eventually. It was useless to worry ahead of time, for no good reason.

  * * *

  XV

  The Hot Air Balloon

  I managed to complete my carnival preparations with lots of help from the children and also the women, who sewed together the sackcloth costumes I had designed on old yellowed pieces of paper.

  I spent much of my free time with the ever-more-faithful village children, who obeyed every order without question, even if it involved extended dedication and lively ingenuity; they were quite ready to hike long distances and set up traps or ambushes if need be. As a matter of fact I had to be careful to hedge my requests with scores of conditions because they were capable of wreaking havoc in their own houses to carry out my orders: their first commandment was to obey Giuliano.

  Many adults also helped, and I saw that they understood I was creating memorable events for the village (they had first realized this when they saw my sled with the lion of Saint Mark on its sail), and were more-than-ready to play my game. Still I noticed that I couldn’t exercise the same attraction on everyone. For example, when I consulted Namu to make my paints (which she mixed up herself using earth, powders, berries and decoctions), she acceded to my requests with distracted gestures and sphinx-like smiles, apparently to let me know that for her my carnival was more illusory than the Indian legends she had told to Lia’s dead child. Even Pietro and Red seemed to regard me with benevolent and condescending superiority, making no comment and letting me do as I wished, as though I were lost in a cloud of gentle madness, and it was completely useless and superfluous to try to bring me o
ut of it.

  Their attitude didn’t paralyze my will to act but rather cast an attenuating veil over it, leaving me once more essentially detached from what I was doing.

  I knew this feeling well, this sense of being separated from events, of experiencing them with an ironic awareness that while I performed one action I was fully available to do something else altogether. But this time my detachment was different. I didn’t ask myself as I worked on the carnival whether I had been born to do other things and might be wasting my time; instead the carnival became a play of colored shadows projected on a distant screen. Perhaps I was influenced by the other members of my household to see things a little as they did, although they believed the contrary and were sure I was having the time of my life.

  Of course it all depended upon the particular moment; I was forever uncertain and changeable. Often, seeing things progress according to my instructions, noting the children’s fervid enthusiasm, I felt I was living in a magic dimension where everything happened according to one’s wishes and simply wanting something sufficed to make it materialize. I would sketch a costume, indicate the colors and two days later a woman or a girl would bring it to me and silently spread it out on table, turning her face aside to await my word of approval. “It’s beautiful. Thank you. You’ve done a wonderful job,” I would say. It was as if the costume had appeared out of nothing, had come to me through the greenish snow-laden air, entering by the window on its own accord and alighting on the table. I didn’t see the work that had gone into it; I only saw the result. This created the sensation that unknown forces of the universe were collaborating with me in docile obedience.

  The carnival costumes were multiplying, piling up and filling rooms, but what pleased me most was the carefree nonchalance that always accompanied me. Even when I sweated and struggled to build backdrops and fake architecture I felt I was moving in a fluid that annulled my terrestrial weight, as if Cretis were a planet smaller than earth, its gravity greatly reduced. I managed to run so fast from one end of the village to the other, to be so constantly present when needed that I felt I was wearing the seven league boots. I had always wanted, although unconsciously, to become a magician, an enchanter or at least an illusionist. Well I had become one, but only with the women’s and children’s help. The confidence that buoyed up the people of Cretis was having the same effect on me.

  The carnival was coming about at a signal from me as if I had rubbed Aladdin’s lamp; everything was falling into place as I decreed. The festival of my boyhood fantasies was at hand, with me in its midst, even though it was a bit vague and dispersed and I had to make an effort to experience it and feel its density.

  I felt euphoric because of this phase of fertile inventiveness. I was able to resolve every difficulty that came up, quickly and with fluid ease, hardly stopping to think. I was visited by constant illuminations, my imagination revived and strengthened by unknown stimuli.

  I even succeeded in fabricating a balloon out of oilcloth, sealing the seams with a glue of my own invention so that it held air perfectly. I kindled a fire under it to fill it with lighter gases and floated it over the village. Anchored by numerous ropes radiating from it and tied down to roofs and gutters, its huge brightly colored form hovered over Cretis at the height of the bell tower, the wind whipping the pennants glued to its cords. It was visible even at night because the supply of alcohol burned constantly in the receptacle under its open bottom. Seeing it up there swaying and hovering over the houses in an ironically protective attitude increased the children’s enthusiasm and delighted the adults. At least every once in a while people would stop working and glance upward. There had never been a hot air balloon in Cretis, nor a dirigible, or a glider, or an airplane, and perhaps the inhabitants were still privately convinced that flight was a matter for birds alone.

  Carnival Thursday was rapidly approaching — the day when people would finally put on their costumes. Its nearness provoked in me a double and contradictory anxiety. On the one hand I wanted it to come as quickly as possible, but on the other I was sorry because once it arrived it would soon be nothing but a memory. I was even a bit afraid of being disappointed, or rather, that living within the event I would fail to perceive its real substance. Indeed the carnival approached, arrived and passed all too quickly with the speed of the wind or of a wave in the sea. There was nothing I could do to hold it back; time took it away and annihilated it. It was then that I really sensed for the first time the enchanted ambiguity of time itself, which appeared to bring things into being and make them last but in reality only created illusions for us and then relentlessly broke them up. All events fled continually from the future into the past and tumbled into non-being, giving us the feeling that they had happened only because they endured more or less reproduced in our memory, like the persistence of images on the retina.

  When Carnival Thursday had come and gone I thought with a certain melancholy that Tuesday, Mardi Gras, was still to come, that all wasn’t over yet and everything would begin again. But Tuesday came anyway and was even sadder because now there was nothing left of the carnival; it was like an object carried off in a millrace after it managed to get past all the gratings and barriers.

  And yet my helpers had done all they could to make sure the festival wasn’t disappointing. Even Pietro and Namu had put on their costumes and come to the parade and the ball. In fact for the two of them it seemed especially important to live up to my expectations, and they did their utmost to play their roles to the end. The boys and girls and even the elderly had scrupulously followed my instructions, had danced, thrown confetti, paraded, performed pantomimes, all with crude but carefree skill. Lia had been extraordinary in her oriental Scheherazade costume, moving through the whole afternoon in such a halo of intense grace that I caught myself wishing the hours would pass quickly so I could hold her in my arms.

  No, it certainly wasn’t the festival itself that had disappointed me, but the fact that it was so soon over, that it vanished into nothingness. Thus during the next day and those that followed I felt empty, off center, no longer the magician who made things happen with a wave of his hand, who moved through events with the agility of a fish swimming in an aquarium. I was once again the boy who doesn’t want to grow up and realizes he is going to in spite of himself because growing up is beyond his control. I decided to leave the balloon in place hovering over the village, in order to hold onto at least a residue of the carnival so people could see even from a distance that something out of the ordinary had occurred in Cretis, an event that would enter into the memories and the folklore of the mountaineers....

  The void I felt was partly filled by the serenity of the others, who showed no awareness that something had irrevocably vanished. Lia, however, noticed my sadness. In fact just before going to bed she disappeared for five minutes and returned wearing one of Flora’s dresses, twirled around so I could admire her, then undressed with studied slowness; the revelation of the curves of her body provoked in me such instinctive joy that at least for a little while it filled the void and stifled all regret.

  * * *

  XVI

  The Great Gambler

  Perhaps Pietro also wanted to do something for me, because the story he told me one evening was somehow clearly related to the idea that I had experienced a loss. He told me about a woman whom he had been in love with during the period when he was working on the Kzyl-Orda Railroad, not far from the Aral Sea. Her name was Lisaveta. She was shapely, blond and melancholy. A real Russian woman. He had left to organize a rescue expedition to a snowbound village in the mountains of Kirghistan. It had turned out to be a longer trip than anticipated and when he returned Lisaveta was nowhere to be found. His fellow workers told him she had become concerned about his long absence and decided to go looking for him. But they had missed each other and she never came back. What had happened to her, this woman so afraid of everything, especially of losing her way in the snow? What had become of her?

  Trying to fo
rget her, Pietro had once again set about studying Russian so as to be able to read Count Tolstoy’s works. Something he’d always dreamed of doing. He managed with great effort to read a few pages, feeling his spirit expand and his vitality increase. Sometimes he even dreamed of traveling to Jàsnaja Poljàna where the count was living and writing, sure that he would have taken any kind of job just to be near him, even that of a coachman or a domestic servant, despite his love for working outdoors in those places where civilization ended and the unrestricted freedom of wilderness and desert began. Once in a Crimean city he had even seen Tolstoy, although from a distance.

  Many of Pietro’s experiences were like this. His entire life he had been wandering back and forth, getting lost in the remotest places at the edges of the world. He talked about steppes, deserts, storms on lakes, mountains buried in snow and endless forests. His adventures took shape in my imagination like sharply etched drawings but at the same time they were so remote and labyrinthian that I could hardly believe Pietro had found his way back home, even much much later, and brought his grandchildren with him. He loved to describe things slowly, stopping to emphasize the details that would evoke them most clearly and leave a lasting impression on the memory. He provided a specific and unforgettable image of every place and every event: a field of sunflowers, a pack of wolves, an eagle nailed to the roof of an isba, Gypsies castrating a horse, a rainbow resting on the waves of the Aral, a barge with a huge red sail moving slowly across that same sea with the wind blowing hard enough to drive a man mad....

  He had a predilection for describing the strange and miraculous things he had witnessed or heard about. His existence was filled with presentiments, startling coincidences and arcane events, all of which he reported in a matter-of-fact way as though discussing ordinary occurrences, or as though there really was no way that life could surprise him.