The Wooden Throne (31 page)

She pretended to be a fine lady, but underneath she really belonged to the common people. It showed in her hearty laugh, her healthy appetite, her way of slapping people on the back and her readiness to take up with other similar people. She made friends with incredible ease; she was constantly introducing me to girls and young men whom I would finally get all mixed up, there were so many of them. She made all sorts of reckless promises to them, some of which she couldn’t keep and others that committed us to various wild-goose chases. One of these took us all the way to Cologne.

Coming back from Germany along the Rhine Flora wanted to stop at the rock of the Lorelei, but she could barely see anything because of the fog on the river. Huge motorized freight barges, as long as ships, were moving slowly downstream and intermittently blowing their horns because of the danger of collision. Flora, who had expected God-knows-what (I had told her the legend a couple of times), was so disappointed she couldn’t even eat but went straight to bed and curled up against me, trembling and frightened. Before she went to sleep (and it was daytime) she told me about one of her fellow ballerinas who had married a Lithuanian dancer. Then suddenly he had disappeared. The ballerina had gone to Russia and spent three months traveling from one place to another without being able to find him, even though a Russian countess who was a friend of the czarina had been moved by her case and promised to help her any way she could. “Maybe she’s still looking for him, who knows. Russia is so big she could spend her whole life looking and never run into him....”

I remembered Pietro and Lisaveta, and one story seemed to be the echo or the recall of the other. For the most part Flora told me very strange stories, perhaps invented, and always full of characters who got lost in vast places, as if they had vanished into nothingness never to be found again. It was as though she herself had lost her way in a fairy tale as wide as the world with no beginning and no end, and she couldn’t get out of it. Every once in a while she proposed, “And what if we went to Russia too? Around the Aral Sea, for instance, where my grandfather once worked.... Or we could go to Iceland?”

Sometimes she suggested the very places I had once wanted to visit, where I had located the figures and the models of my fantasies. Then I saw myself confronted with a dramatic dilemma: not to go when there was a chance to would mean renunciation and abandonment; going would mean being somehow disappointed and wondering how I had been able to construct so many daydreams about such insignificant places.... I felt I had to be forever undoing, taking things apart and putting them back into the melancholy closets where impossible things or things that had never happened were stored. Yet at the same time I felt myself spurred onward by an impulse to make haste and grab everything that fell within range. The great moment had come. At last it was life’s turn to make good its promise to open the treasure chests kept hidden for so long. I was seized by an anxiety that it either might not happen or would happen somehow in an incomplete way and I would suffer the continued shame of disappointment. Flora too was often uneasy and melancholy, and the fact that she clung to me for support only increased my own anxiety. My greatest fear was that I would indeed plunge my hands into those treasure chests only to draw them out empty or else full of meaningless objects, gaudy knick-knacks worth nothing at all.

We traveled the roads of Italy and Europe in the automobile (which often broke down and cost various mechanics much effort to repair). We raced with carriages and stagecoaches. Flora was delighted but I wasn’t. All my sympathy went to our rivals. I loved wagons and horses but I had a real antipathy for things that were mechanical or motorized. My heart constricted when I saw an automobile or a truck, and my conviction grew stronger that one civilization was ending and another, which had nothing to say to me and about which I felt not the slightest curiosity, was beginning.

Sometimes I had an urge to play my trump card and say to Flora: “Let’s drop everything and go to Denmark and look for my grandfather.” But I didn’t. I wanted to keep that card in reserve, thinking the right moment hadn’t arrived, that I had to wait awhile yet, even though I didn’t know why. Perhaps I thought that after Flora, if I attained the other mirage of my youth as well, I would feel I had exhausted all major possibilities and would then have to enter the descending arc of the parabola....

All these ideas came to mind in the brief respites that Flora conceded to me or I to her, when the fury of our uninterrupted madness calmed down a bit and gave us a moment to catch our breath. I felt I was living in the midst of a multitude of things that eluded my grasp, always moving just out of reach. Or else if I caught hold of them they turned out to have no substance, like a cloud, which appears to be solid and real from a distance but dissolves into nothing but whitish fog when approached. They whirled toward me, these things, growing steadily larger before my eyes until they came within reach, but at that instant I was always drowsy or distracted and they passed so quickly they were already behind me before I could perceive their real dimensions. I was repeating for the hundredth time the experience I’d had in Cretis when the carnival was over and I noticed how time drove events relentlessly behind me and none of them could be held back and savored to their depths.

I felt the flow of events as if they were riding on a flock of flying carpets, which were passing above or beside me, barely missing me, showing all the splendor of their oriental colors and followed by an enigmatic wake of regret, like the sound of the foghorn of a ship leaving port. Since the carpets wouldn’t stop, driven as they were by an implacable wind, and since they couldn’t be reached, I wanted at least to lie down on the grass and watch them go by. But with Flora I couldn’t even do that. She was incapable of coming to rest anywhere. She was in perennial flight from one place to another, like someone afflicted with a morbid sense of satiety who barely tastes something before getting sick of it and casting it aside. Flora too was intensifying the effect of the wind I felt blowing toward me.

After visiting Provence I mentally named my wind “Mistral.” In a theater in Piedmont we had seen a performance of “L’Arlesienne,” the story of the mysterious woman who never appears on stage but who determines destinies and produces death. Flora quickly identified with her and began to cry, as if she too had caused such things and her passage brought misfortune and bad luck. It was thus that we decided to go to Provence. But Provence was not at all as we had imagined it. We found ourselves among hills whose summits were almost all parched and dry. Only broom and lavender and a few tufts of dry grass clung to the dune-like slopes. We saw palisade fences, which seemed to have sprung up everywhere with no logic, as though at the whim of a mad set designer. We tried in vain to understand their purpose as we drove around in the automobile (by now little more than a piece of junk) through half-deserted villages where sand had piled up at the doors of houses. Until the mistral came up one evening. It blew relentlessly for days on end, evaporating what little water a recent rain had left in the wells, desiccating trees and whipping clothes hung out to dry. Then we understood the reason behind the palisade fences and the deserted houses. Nonetheless we stayed there for a while, even exploring the countryside, fascinated by the mistral, which took our breath away and against which the peasants were engaged in a desperate battle, propping up everything and building innumerable windbreaks. We finally left one evening when the mistral was still blowing. Flora couldn’t stand it anymore, this wind that never ceased, but kept blowing as if for all eternity. “If I stay another minute I’ll go crazy. Let’s go! Let’s get out of here! Now!”

Later I came to think that we all live in a mistral, which steals and dries out things and for which no windbreak exists. At least I didn’t know of any, unless maybe the distant dreamlike life led by Lia and Pietro inside a house with iron shutters....

Flora experienced periods of fatigue when she would stay in bed all day and didn’t want to have anything to do with me or the automobile, didn’t even want any light in the room, saying she had a headache, a dreadful headache, and everything caused her pain. But most of the time she was vivacious and outgoing, always directed toward objectives she never named, giving me only an occasional fleeting notion of what they were.

When we came back to Italy for good, we began to spend considerable time in the larger cities where Flora had many acquaintances, young men and girls who had worked with her in theaters, actors and actresses, impresarios, or marginal people who seemed to be living as we were, perpetually on vacation, always on the move and with no frame of reference. Sometimes for me they were just voices on the telephone of the boarding house where we were camped.

If Flora went back to work in the theater it wasn’t because she had to (we still had quite a bit of money) but rather because she again felt its irresistible attraction. Perhaps in the past she had not only been dazzled but also burned by the footlights. Now, however, she had forgotten the pain of the burn, and she was drawn once more to that world most congenial to her. She even managed to find odd jobs for me since I followed her and her companions from one place to another like an appendage, a modest and silent collaborator. It seemed my proper role was as the remote presence, the hidden unnoticed assistant. Indeed Flora began to notice me more and more rarely; she had too many friends and too many distractions. Often she didn’t come back to our room at all, leaving me to spend long nights tossing and turning under the covers, fearing she had disappeared God-knows-where with God-knows-whom. At first I was jealous. Then I got used to it.

She invented fanciful excuses for her absences and repeated them without affectation, believing them herself because of her immense talent for identification, which enabled her to recount someone else’s experiences as if they were her own. She had such an ability to dramatize her fabrications that I almost forgot the actual situation and enjoyed listening, as if the whole affair had nothing to do with me. At times she would vanish for three or four days or even a whole week.

Often I tried to trace her, but in the end I gave up such attempts. Flora was just as elusive as the things that passed over my head aboard flying carpets. It wasn’t her fault. It was part of her nature. She couldn’t help being unfaithful; she had to follow her wagtail’s instinct, which led her to trill her song now here, now there, and to hop continually from one hedge to another.

And yet she maintained she was faithful in her heart, perhaps because when she gave herself to someone she did so without reserve, with complete enthusiasm. And every time she thought the relationship would last forever. “Hold me tight, Giuliano; don’t let me go away again. Beat me if you must, bolt the door, keep it locked. Do you want me to stay home for good? Do you want me to cook for you? I swear I’ll do it but only if you want me to. Giuliano you’re the best of all of them. You’re different, you’re the only one....”

But then she’d return to me less and less frequently. She moved in an orbit that grew steadily larger and farther away. I sensed a void in her, which nothing would ever fill completely, a bottomless abyss; always, even when she was applying mascara or wrapping a boa about her neck, she gave the impression of a nebulous and nervous incompleteness.... Therefore I summoned all my strength and left. It meant (I knew it) tearing away a part of my youth, a tissue of dreams, of fantasies and exalted illuminations; I had been a quiet visionary and in a way I still was. But it was better that I leave her before her crazy gyrations took her so far away from me that I no longer felt anything for her. Only in memory could I hold her back and keep her totally with me. Only when her changeable and fleeing figure became fixed in immutable mental images would she be totally mine. This time my conviction that to really possess things you have to lose them did not derive from a fleeting experience but rather from a profound and bleeding wound of the spirit.

Once I had put a few hundred kilometers between myself and Flora, her image took on a luminous clarity: she was showing me the noblewoman’s jewel, or recounting the Contessa’s ambiguous love affair, or showing me how to count white horses, or curling up next to me during cold nights in the house at Ontàns.... Would her horses ever cause her to find the amulet that would dissolve her mutability? Would she ever become a normal adult?

In my purposeless drifting I had formulated one plan, which was more like a non-plan, a negative verification, a last spin in the void before the momentum died and my dirigible, my broken-down flying machine, came to a permanent stop in the midst of a vast steppe. I had decided to spend the last of my money in Denmark, in Aarhus. Not so much to light a final fire as to use up all the remaining fuel and put the matter to rest for my own peace of mind.

It was an unusually restful trip, which almost entirely failed to rekindle my fantasies despite my destination and the newness of the landscape. Once I reached the city I spent several hours walking along the pier, or leaning against mooring posts or iron railings. I watched a few ships dock and others cast off to be quickly swallowed up in the fog of the Kattegat, while the January wind transformed the spray thrown up by their keels into icy arabesques, or I gazed at the grayish low-lying snow-laden clouds. Then I searched for traces of my Danish grandfather, starting with the address given in the letter I had found in Maddalena’s drawer, which had come to me like an ancient manuscript in a bottle. The house was still there but the new tenants didn’t know anything, had never heard of a sailor adventurer and world-traveler named Daniel Wivallius. They knew a few people by that name, but all of them were quiet serious folks: one was a druggist, another sold paint for ships, another was a rope maker....