The Wooden Throne Read online

  I had the impression that what he recounted was a confused melange of fact with legend, fantasy and folktale, as if he didn’t really distinguish between reality and invention. This aroused my enthusiasm because I myself had always tended to blot out that distinction and Pietro, without realizing it, was attaining an objective I had always held dear. In his company it apparently wasn’t necessary to travel great distances to realize that purpose, although I had always believed that such a thing could happen only on the polar ice, in the arctic seas, in the Dane’s territory or on the deck of the Pequod.... Just as he did not clearly distinguish between present and past, between being alive or dead, between one’s own individual identity and that of others, so he saw no difference between invention and reality: for him anything was possible.

  Pietro believed that reality was magic. But the most magical thing of all was words, which could evoke all possible sentiments. Pietro’s experiences existed for me only as he translated them into words. When he did so those words became mine, lived also in me, were no longer his alone. When I thought about it I was thoroughly shaken; I literally trembled as though I had made a great discovery. I even glimpsed the possibility of giving up searching elsewhere for my dreams and contenting myself with Pietro’s stories, since hearing a tale of adventures was also a way of living them. In any case I had often had the impulse to realize my own fantasies through words.

  I wasn’t always able to follow Pietro’s discourse. In addition he didn’t seem to care about convincing anyone. He seemed to be talking only to himself or to be murmuring things for the benefit of spirits who had disappeared into the past, or who had not yet come into being. I continued to ponder his adventures and to wonder if anything similar would ever happen to me. I often doubted that it would. Perhaps despite what I had always believed I wasn’t the darling of fate after all....

  With some anxiety I searched through the past to see whether my life so far bore at least a faint sign of fate’s partiality. Sometimes I thought there was nothing worth noticing, other times I thought there was. For heavens sake didn’t my life fairly bristle with extraordinary events? At the tender age of eleven I had found out that Maddalena wasn’t my mother and then later that the Dane was my grandfather. My youth had always been full of chimerical entities whose shadows reached out to touch me. And wasn’t it singular that I had set off for Denmark to find Daniel Wivallius and then on the train had run into the Dutch student who was in love with Flora? That I had arrived almost by chance in the village where Flora had spent part of her childhood and then fallen in love with Lia without knowing she was Flora’s sister? That I had encountered a man like Pietro who had once seen Count Tolstoy from afar? All this couldn’t be a matter of chance alone. It must have some profound meaning; it had to be the work of destiny. Destiny certainly was trying to tell me something, was alluding to facts I should understand but which remained isolated from me like scattered figures in a deserted piazza.

  The notion of destiny had always attracted me. I pictured it as a Great Gambler, and to win its esteem and favor I would have to become a gambler too. I mustn’t be afraid to take risks; I would have to face the odds and trust to luck without fear and without reservations. In fact, I had already done so on certain occasions. I had abandoned my home in Ontàns to go off in search of the Dane, who might even be long dead; then I had confronted uncertainty in an unknown mountain valley in the hope of reaching Flora. Therefore I shouldn’t be too hard on myself. But all this now belonged to the past. At present I was at an impasse here in Cretis, spending my nights with Lia and adapting to my role as a guest in a sleepy village. Even the carnival was over, and I found myself wondering in vain what to do next. The children appeared to be asking me the same question when, with their schoolbags full of books and notebooks slung over their shoulders, they came to my house to see if I had any orders. In fact during breaks from my work I often taught them reading and writing, using a jar of beans and peas, since they wouldn’t be able to learn by themselves. I imagined I was acting like Tolstoy who (I had learned this from Pietro) wasn’t content with writing magnificent books; he had also set about teaching the alphabet to the peasants of Jàsnaja Poljàna.

  I also read adventure stories to the children, sometimes carried away with enthusiasm, sometimes wondering whether I weren’t perhaps a hypocrite to open windows for them on what I knew to be false when I didn’t even possess information about what was true.

  Once again I didn’t know who I was, what I wanted and where I should go. Probably the same thing was happening to me as had happened to the Dane when he stopped filling Ontàns with music and merrymaking and no longer even wanted to get out of bed....

  * * *

  XVII

  The Hunt

  I tried to react. I adopted a somewhat different role still essentially related to the one I had been playing: the role of the wanderer, the untamed adventurer who considered his sojourn in Cretis as a momentary pause before reckless new escapades. In fact Lia began to look at me apprehensively as though I were getting ready to abandon her. A kind of evil demon provoked me to try on purpose to make her think this was actually true. Sometimes my restless movements through the house took on a deliberate air of impending departure, although for now it was a matter of intent not actual preparation. I let her watch me from behind doors or windows, half hidden by shutters, silent and sad as she perhaps tried to discern the degree to which my behavior resembled that of Hermes when he had become restless and was planning his flight. Or maybe I was behaving this way with the calculated purpose of delighting in her joy, which would elicit my own, when I stopped putting on this act and she could believe once more that I was going to stay. (But it wasn’t entirely an act: it had an authentic source in that I really was in the prey of restless anxiety.)

  Nonetheless I wouldn’t give up my pose as a smuggler adventurer. I told her exaggerated stories about some of my dealings with Gypsies, thieves and swindlers. It pleased me that at least in the telling these things acquired a brilliance they may have lacked when I was actually living them, a splendor that might have been merely the posthumous reflection of the Dane’s adventures. Lia blindly accepted everything; it never entered her head that I might lie or exaggerate and furthermore what I said didn’t matter to her at all.

  At times I returned to the opinion that she was as stupid as I had thought in those first days when I called her Ninfa or as indifferent as the statue or idol she resembled in her phase as the Etruscan. I sought to distance myself from her and to keep independently busy, taking advantage of everything the place could offer.

  I began to roam the mountains and go hunting in the woods along paths now free of snow. It had melted off the spruces and larches in a long slow dripping like a whisper of gentle rain. Only a few white patches remained, among the bushes or in the moss of the upland meadows.

  Sometimes I went with Red, who knew all there was to know about animals, their habitual trails, every track and every den. He would stop as though to sniff for their scent as a hound does. He would quickly spot a paw print in the mud, a tuft of fur caught in a bark splinter on a tree trunk, or a feather resting in a bush, and in these slightest signs he read a quantity of things I never would have even suspected. He had the same kind of intuition I attributed to Lia, but he applied it only to animals and hunting. He was almost infallibly able to track them down because, it seemed, he thought as they did, identified with them, knew their feelings, their sudden movements, their fears. Every once in a while he would shoot and bring back a partridge or a wood grouse, but that wasn’t the true purpose of the hunt. On the contrary it was the hunt’s melancholy epilogue, because on those occasions he didn’t utter a single word all the way home. The violence of the shot dissolved the tangle of signs and tracks, of twists and turns that had gone before. After that moment Red seemed to wake up from a dream, and his face reflected the anguish of a child who has just destroyed an imaginary world he built himself.

  I often went huntin
g without him. Of course I shot nothing; indeed sometimes I didn’t even see one animal, not even from a distance, but my purpose was simply to wander in the woods. I also liked the idea of getting away from Cretis and from Lia, of being alone and solely responsible for myself, freed from a life to which I had adapted during the winter as to a boring hibernation varied only by the carnival. I flung myself headlong into these excursions without thinking first about what I was going to do. Thus I frequently got into trouble. I wouldn’t know how to get down from a rocky outcrop or a tall spruce, or to find my way home after I had gone too far and lost sight of all familiar landmarks. Then I would feel a little anxious but by dint of scratched hands or skinned knees or a bit of laborious breathing I would overcome my problems.

  Sometimes I had the notion that someone was watching and mocking me in these mildly dangerous moments: “Now we’ll see if he’s scared....” Therefore I had to perform superhuman feats to blunt my hypothetical spectator’s irony and surpass his expectations. He would have to admit, this fellow, that I knew my way around and spared no effort.

  From the time I was a child it had always seemed to me that someone was observing my exploits: an undefined presence whose face could change with time and circumstance — it might be Andrée or Ishmael or Caesar or the Dane. Once I passed the age of mirages, when my illusions partook of the intensity of real events and I almost heard the laughter or the voices of those spectators, my sensation of that presence still didn’t disappear. I even tried to explain it. Since I was basically a ham and fell into my favorite roles from time to time it was quite natural for me to sense a potential audience around me.

  I was no longer a visionary, but since I had known Pietro my imagination had increased. He had taught me to free myself from present sensations in order to pick up remote perceptions, which made their way freely through the world so that once in a while someone could sense them, even though they were linked to nothing immediate or concrete. Taking no account of time, Pietro had revealed its illusory nature to me, and now I moved easily inside it, paying no attention to years or to centuries. In this way, as I wandered through the mountains, I could imagine the Lombard or Slavic invaders as belonging to the present, as if the whinnying of their horses could still be heard or their blond beards glimpsed through the green of the underbrush....

  I returned from my forest excursions tired and muddy, my pants sticky with pitch, my shirt torn, my arms and face streaked with green. I suspected myself sometimes of getting that dirty on purpose so I could go on playing the part of the wild youth and avoid breaking my ties with certain childhood adventures.

  When, as a boy, I used to come home scratched and dirty I had to stay that way because Maddalena kept hands off. Now, on the the contrary, Lia made sure I had clean clothes every morning. I often watched as she tried to take off pitch with lye or soapwort root or some other unknown substance. Why was she so patient with me? Why didn’t she tell me to get lost? I posed the question with veiled anger, irritated by her perennial acceptance. I would get back into that sorry state almost on purpose to provoke her reactions. Nothing. She seemed to find some kind of happiness scrubbing my trousers, as if this were one of her ideals of felicity and for lack of imagination she couldn’t conceive of any other kind. She worked quietly, seated in a chair with her legs close together and bending slightly forward to diminish the opulence of her breasts, as if she were still ashamed of them. Sometimes I thought she didn’t rebel because to her the present had already flowed silently into the past, and there’s no use rebelling against the past.

  But frequently I too believed that what happened to me in the course of a day was already placed in the frame of the past and that only by some bizarre magic did it seem recent and near. I saw myself as only the shadow of a distant figure projected from the depths of the ages, my earthly affairs already entwined in schemes as old as unremembered time. Often when I was with Lia, caressing her hair or her full breasts or kissing her tiny ears, I felt that all this was fixed in time and space like a faded photograph. My existence seemed strangely veiled, without surprise or shock and devoid of novelty; everything had been carefully foretold. Instead of leaving me saddened and anxious, this idea gave me a serene and melancholy security, or better, a pleasant neutral feeling from which sorrow and joy were absent, a pure and simple acceptance of life in all its forms and limitations.

  * * *

  XVIII

  The Aurora Borealis

  But what if this wasn’t a non-life, a state of being outside history, an existence passed in sleep and forgetfulness? If I was adjusting to it then I must have entered the static world of Lia, Pietro, Namu and Red; perhaps my destiny was to live permanently with them, forever lost or forever saved, depending on one’s point of view.

  I vacillated between a boyish zest for action and adventure and a quiet contemplative attitude toward the flow of events.

  I felt I had entered a different magic circle, which was actually the opposite of my childhood dimension; I was held prisoner by Lia’s gentle sensuality and the old man’s stories. Maybe I had ended up in a trap, like certain characters in folktales, a trap all the more dangerous because it didn’t seem so at all, but worked by treachery so that I was caught almost without noticing it.

  I liked to imagine a metaphysical calendar (made up expressly for me, just for me), which scheduled one happy day when I would finally realize the fullness of life. Perhaps my life up to now was simply a matter of waiting, of preparing for that luminous moment as yet buried in the darkness of space, which the turning of earth and sun were already ripening. Perhaps it would contain a revelation, an enormous surprise, an intense joy, an extraordinary love — or perhaps nothing in particular, but simply a deep intimate feeling, imperceptible to others, of total fulfillment. Perhaps on that day I would really know myself and my destiny.

  I still retained my boyhood response to novelty. The smallest event, if it was new, set off a crackling series of desires and expectations, which crisscrossed and intertwined like a network in my head. If Red returned from the woods and reported seeing an eagle on a rock or hearing the squeal of an animal he couldn’t identify, that was all I needed: for me these ordinary facts at once assumed the significance of portents.

  I thought the unusual event that was destined for me would be foretold in mysterious ways, as in the accounts of ancient historians: it would rain blood, or lightning would flash in a clear sky, or a two headed calf would be born, or a comet would appear in the heavens. Sometimes my soul trembled with silly and chimerical anticipation. I went to bed and got up the next morning with that feeling. Part of me foolishly expected from one day to the next that the aurora borealis would appear at dawn over the mountains to the north, that I would see it first and run to awaken the others so they too could watch the festoons of light swarming in the sky like a greenish curtain blown about by the wind. I knew that you had to be a lot further north to see the aurora borealis. But the point was that up there it was a fairly common occurrence, whereas in Cretis it would have that absolutely exceptional quality I attributed to it. Or else after a snowstorm I would notice green Saint Elmo’s fire at the top of a tall spruce or a rocky peak (I wasn’t quite sure where, not being really informed on this phenomenon). The Dane had certainly seen it innumerable times atop the mainmast of his ship.

  But sometimes I thought my big day had already passed and that, worse yet, I hadn’t recognized it. That happened, for example, when I heard Lia, Namu, Pietro and Red chanting an Indian dirge, or the children singing as they returned home after our lessons with their schoolbags over their shoulders:

  “O che bel castello, marcondiro ’ndiro ’ndello

  o che bel castello, marcondiro ’ndiro ’nda.”

  It was the same song I had heard my mother sing in the dream and had later transcribed in my first story.

  Cretis and its valley could hardly be the theater of a great event but were more likely the place where such a thing had happened long, long, ago
and now the children and Lia were hailing that event and recalling it in muted tones. Maybe my important moment had been when I met Flora or when Lia had invited me to sleep in her room; or it might even be connected to my encounter with Pietro, the most extraordinary man I had ever known.

  He left me continually more astonished and disoriented. Sometimes he seemed a little vague or abstracted like Lia. I was convinced that was simply because his persona was sinking into remote ages. Sometimes he would appear silently behind me like someone who has forgotten an important item in a distant part of the world or is vaguely conscious of not having done something he should have, but can’t remember what, and gazes intently at others hoping to recuperate his memory in their eyes. I believed I could intuit so many unfinished things in his life, so many parentheses opened but never closed; I thought he was still subject to the spell of these things, which enveloped him in confused and barely perceptible whispers. Once in a while he would turn around suddenly, for no apparent reason, as though listening to something we couldn’t hear. I fancied he heard the voices of children or women whom the tangled events of his life had forced him to leave behind.

  One evening we had gotten together in the windowless room at the center of the house. Pietro, seated in his big armchair, had read some excerpts from a Mayan poem, the only one left, he said, after the senseless destruction of that civilization. At a certain point he seemed to become confused, to founder as in the dark, and while the others looked at him anxiously, fearing the onset of sudden illness, I believed instead that it was just one of those moments when Pietro was most acutely conscious of being lost in the confused and infinite dream that he perceived as life itself.