The Wooden Throne (21 page)

I avoided this thought only when I realized I was attributing to her a spirit like Namu’s, which had the effect of making her seem old and placing her in a sphere of cryptic unattainability. So I tried instead to think about those specific traits of hers that were capable of producing the opposite effect. I had noticed, for instance, how she was remarkably afraid of hurting herself. If she bumped an elbow or a knee she would examine it carefully with a worried look as if it might be some kind of disastrous fracture. If she got a thorn or a splinter of glass in her finger she would begin to imagine it could enter a vein, make its way to her heart and pierce it with dreadful or even mortal results. Then her fantasies and fears would vanish, and she would begin instead to study the bruise or cut and incessantly rub it or disinfect it with alcohol or Namu’s ointments.
Like Flora, Lia was narcissistic.
She loved her own hands, her arms, her legs and thus took care of them tenderly and liked to adorn them with jewelry and unusual clothes. Although she was very discreet, perhaps it didn’t entirely displease her that other eyes besides the mirror’s and her own should see her in those moments when she had reason to believe she was attractive.

For the same reason she kept her clothes most carefully clean and pressed; she washed her hair frequently and curled the ends with an iron heated in the embers, taking a thousand precautions not to damage them (trying out the iron ten times on a piece of paper to get the heat just right), or else she would waste a lot of time polishing the ankle boots she wore in the snow. I felt like saying to her: “Aha, I’ve found you out!” with a superior smile, as if now I had her in the palm of my hand and knew everything about her. But she, not realizing it, with as little as a single gesture would escape from the frame I had mentally placed around her, and her image would blur again into something remote and undefined.

There was a quality about her that both attracted and repelled me. I was repelled or at least perplexed by her air of having given up the idea of living her own life as an individual with even a minimum of participation. In fact, despite her ingenuous narcissism, Lia always withdrew into a ritual of stunned and precise gestures, which didn’t seem at all like living to me but rather the confirmation that she had renounced life, fled into a detached and impersonal dimension and left it to others (Flora for instance) to live her life for her. But there were also times when these same traits attracted me to Lia and the duty towards her, which I had invented for myself, seemed fraught with fabulous implications as though perceived through a veil, which enhanced its scintillating appeal — an appeal always reinforced from a distance by the tranquil sensuality emanating from Lia herself.

I would have liked to be a conjurer, a great magician, Cagliostro brought back to life, or at the very least I wished I could take full advantage of my experience as an adventurer and smuggler to awaken Lia from her drowsy state. When I could I helped her with her work, followed her into the courtyard to split wood, if Red was busy with the cows or off in the mountains hunting foxes or squirrels, or I would carry the brimming pails to the house as soon as the cows were milked — things like that. In short I did the heavier work, which according to her fears, might harm a body she believed more fragile than it really was. I could read the gratitude on her face for dangers avoided to hands or legs. When she confronted certain tasks (not necessarily the hardest ones, sometimes merely disagreeable ones) Lia, for all that she was as hardworking as a bee, would become oddly apathetic, take her time and never make up her mind to get started. Once in a while I’d purposely not offer to help just to see how long she’d continue to procrastinate.

One day we were in the woods gathering kindling in a desolated strip where a couple of years before an avalanche had knocked down the trees. Lia was putting together a small bundle, breaking sticks that were too long against her heel and passing the thicker ones to me to break, then bringing the bundle to the sled and waiting for me to tie it on with a rope. We sank into the snow up to our ankles and sometimes even further. Now and then Lia stopped and stood still as if listening for a distant sound, unconsciously inviting me to do the same. Even the slightest crack of a broken twig or the muted thud of a handful of snow shaken from a tree by a frigid gust of the north wind sounded extraordinarily loud in the silence. During one such pause I heard a hoarse cry. “It’s a crow,” I said sotto voce.

“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.

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.