The Wooden Throne (30 page)

Pietro did nothing to persuade Flora to stay even though he may have thought her dashing about in the world was a kind of innocuous madness. But I had the notion he thought the same thing about Lia’s tranquil refusal to budge, as if their two attitudes were simply the opposite sides of a single illusion, like the two faces of a coin. Yes, now after so many years I think this was Pietro’s true opinion, but I wasn’t able to grasp it then. At that time everything was nebulous to me; my psyche wavered back and forth as though constantly running over a keyboard, which always played different notes, notes that were sometimes shrill and sometimes hauntingly unreal.

Flora’s acceleration of life in our house had created an ambiance that echoed with the fantastic, in which everything seemed to shimmer, flutter and change. I myself felt transformed and unrecognizable. I made no more plans for the future. I was content with a present that was brief, uncentered and changeable, forming and reforming itself moment by moment. I forgot all the rest. It sufficed to entrust myself to the force that was driving us on, to let myself be carried along, even hiding my head in a sack so as not to know exactly where we were heading. That force was once again dragging me into Flora’s arms. I had stopped asking myself whether it was good or bad, whether it was possible to choose or not.

The oddest thing was that I was in no hurry to arrive in Flora’s arms since I was so sure they’d be waiting for me at the end of the voyage I had already begun. Deferring that moment was a way of increasing its delight. Nor was I troubled by the thought of Lia because I had entered a system in which I no longer made comparisons but merely considered things one at a time as the wave of the present laid them before me and offered them to my gaze. I was now starting to see what the Dane had meant when he told the astonished peasants of Ontàns, who couldn’t understand, that to live in the present was to live like the gods. But my calculations were wrong.

One evening, the minute I set foot in the house I sensed a change in the atmosphere. In the rooms and hallways there was a notable disorder, an air of emptiness and abandonment. An unhinged suitcase with a broken catch and a few of Flora’s dresses inside had been thrown into a corner. I rushed to her room (Lia’s fitting room) and found the closets gaping open and half empty, dresser drawers pulled halfway out; string, heavy wrapping paper, dresses and discarded objects were scattered everywhere.

Flora had left.

My conviction that she had been patiently waiting for me until something ended (I didn’t know what it was nor how long it was supposed to take) had been the foolish illusion of someone spoiled by fate. I saw at once that without Flora I was a stranger to myself; I was no longer self sufficient because she had taken away some part of me, perhaps the most important part. I was like a place full of ruins from which all who loved life could only flee in haste. There was nothing for me to do but follow her.

I was already in the wagon belonging to the young man who came every now and then to get our wood carvings and Lia’s baskets (he had happened by that very evening) before I even remembered that I had left Cretis without saying good-bye to anyone, without taking any leave, like an irresponsible boor or a madman who lives in a world where everything is out of proportion or upside down. I had left Ontàns the same way. But there had been a reason then, because I had no particular ties with anyone, at the most to Luca, and I was fleeing a village which reminded me above all of a death. Now on the contrary....

I saw things plainly. I was still sufficiently lucid to see myself clearly reflected on a screen where my folly appeared in all its sharpest details. All I had left was the hope that Pietro, the gentle Lia, Namu and Red might manage to understand the reasons for my flight and forgive me so that I would remain in their memory without too many bitter and unpleasant associations.

As the wagon bumped over the stones of the road or the wheels sank into the mud (it was May; the snow was almost gone), even though I was entirely projected toward Flora, the desire to be remembered in Cretis accompanied me with a consuming intensity. I hoped I would remain in all of their hearts even if they didn’t talk about me at first. In fact, Pietro and Lia would carefully avoid mentioning me. But some day, after her grandfather’s death, Lia and Red and others in the village would surely speak of the time when Giuliano lived among them. They’d recall my carnival and the balloon. The children would even talk about the most ordinary and insignificant details because they judged the importance of things by standards quite different from ours, and they had terrific memories.

I even flattered myself by thinking I might become for Cretis what the Dane had been for Ontàns. I was a long way from having those magnetic and grandiose qualities that he had had and yet as I raced toward Flora I saw myself as belonging already to the future of Cretis. I already felt like a subject of stories. I went so far as to think that the character I would become in Cretis would be truer than the one I was in reality, the one who was always vacillating, undecided, consumed by time and continually changing. But to become that true character I had to leave the village, renounce it, lose it. Perhaps the principal law of life was just that: to acquire something definitively one had to lose it and give it up.

I thought about this for the whole trip, also because the wagoner didn’t talk, or else talked only in banalities, about money, wine, women or trucks. The emptiness of his mind allowed me to think exclusively about my affairs. I had left in haste and therefore had permanently renounced my rights as Pietro’s successor, as when a king abandons his people to go off in search of nonsensical adventures. This idea filled me with almost the same melancholy as that I felt at leaving Lia. At certain moments it became so intense I almost asked the wagoner to let me off so I could go back to the village on foot and tell the others I had simply gone for a longer walk than usual. But no. It was a mistake to follow Flora, but it would also be a mistake to return to Cretis.
Perhaps I was one of those men who, no matter what they do, can only make mistakes.

Once more I had entrusted myself to the unknown, entered into a strange game whose rules I did not know. Again I was the man without a country, the Gypsy, the vagabond to whom anything might happen and for whom all places were possible.

But among those possibilities was one privileged place, the one containing Flora. It took me almost no time to find her in a tiny hotel, in a village at the bottom of a valley. As soon as she saw me she understood what I had decided to do. She realized how hard it had been for me to leave Lia (she knew how much I also loved her sister) and that only a greater love on her own part would be able to compensate for what I had lost and the remorse I felt for my behavior. We talked about Lia all evening just as recently with Lia I had talked only of Flora.

Flora asked me endless questions about Lia, convinced that the only way she could hope to have me entirely to herself was to make no attempt to avoid that subject but instead to pursue it in depth until it was exhausted. “Isn’t she an extraordinary girl? Don’t deny it, you’ll be sorry: you’ll have to answer to me. She has something virginal about her, something innocent, profound. I don’t know how to explain what I mean and maybe I don’t really understand. But I think she has more than anything else a sense of the sacred. For her everything that exists is sacred, and she tries very hard to live within it and not profane it in any way. Isn’t that right? Did you notice it too?”

“Of course. But she’s also many other things.... She’s a child and yet she’s ancient, or better, ageless....”

“Right, that’s it. Exactly.... I wish I’d said it. I tried to get her to leave Cretis but now I know it’s better she stayed. It’s only there that she can really be herself....”

Talking about Lia I realized how much I loved her and what she meant to me. I loved two women with almost the same intensity if not in the same way, because they were too different from each other. I asked myself if it was possible, and the answer was yes, obviously yes; it was dramatically true: it had happened to me. Nonetheless I derived a certain ambiguous murky satisfaction from the idea that Lia too, perhaps even more than I, would be able to love two men. If another youth like me were to show up in Cretis she’d have no trouble falling in love with him because anything that was part of the natural order was innocent to her and therefore permissible. At times the thought crossed my mind that if only Flora had been willing to stay in Cretis I might have loved both of them. But that thought lasted only until I noticed its grotesque implications.

No, Lia was really lost to me, and so was Cretis; from now on I would have to reinvent my life day by day....

At first we were both dominated by one thing: passion, an element stronger than either one of us and which we didn’t even try to resist. Flora released in me all the pent-up emotion that had accumulated from the time when she had so abruptly abandoned me. I held her constantly, as if I wanted to reassure myself that she was really there. Sometimes I would think: “I’m with Flora, really with Flora...” and it was as if I couldn’t understand what that meant, couldn’t grasp it, because between the Flora I had sought for so long and the real girl there was an imbalance, a gap I couldn’t close. I would call her suddenly sometimes just to hear her say: “What is it Giuliano?” to compare the timbre of her voice with the sound I had kept so long in my memory. This time Flora was unreservedly in love with me. She seemed to think of nothing or no one else, so completely did I fill her horizon. We were only vaguely aware of what went on around us. Although we were just a few kilometers from Cretis I felt immensely far away, as if we had put an ocean behind us, and our voyage had lasted for days upon end by land and by sea. The fact that the mountains around Cretis weren’t visible from here and the landscape was rather different also helped give us the sensation that we were in another part of the world.

But that impression grew also out of other things. Being with Flora again created a kind of stage curtain in my life, a barrier isolating me from the recent past. It was above all Flora who elicited, even willfully, the feeling of solitude, as if we were on a desert island. Since I had her I thought I should need nothing else and the presence of others was superfluous. We slept outrageously late, until two or three in the afternoon. We had our dinner brought to our room, and often we didn’t even see the chambermaid but simply called to her to put the tray down outside the door.

Once we got up at eight in the evening when the sun had already set. Flora decided she wanted to go fishing and in fact displayed a modest ability to manage the fish pole stolen from a fellow hotel guest who had carelessly left it propped outside his door. She caught two trout and cooked them over a camp fire of damp wood, which I finally succeeded in lighting on the gravel of the streambed with the north wind blowing, although it took me a whole box of matches. We were half numb and had to stamp our feet on the stones and hold our hands in our armpits because we had come out in clothes that were too thin. In the distance a little further up we could see the lights of the village where people were preparing supper and getting ready to go to bed. We had lost count of the days. Flora maintained that it was Thursday and I said Friday but whereas I was disoriented by the discrepancy Flora simply found it amusing and burst out laughing every time she thought of it.

About a week later we left, taking the train in the middle of the night, because Flora had noticed she was tired of the village and indeed wondered with disgust how she could have stayed there so long. The same thing happened with many other places.

There were times when we would move on with indifference, almost as an experiment, because Flora wanted to make sure I didn’t become too fond of a place. She would watch me carefully as I tossed our things into suitcases. I told her it was time to think seriously about our situation and look for work; my money would soon run out if we went on living in hotels and boarding houses. She shrugged her shoulders: “Oh well...I’ve got a little money too, don’t worry. Things will work out. We’ll decide when we really have to. For now we’ve still got lots of time, weeks and weeks to do what we want to....”

So we went on wandering like vagabonds from one city to another with no destination. Before we ran completely out of money Flora put on her prettiest dress and went to a casino in Venice, even though I begged her not to and refused categorically to go with her. When she came back she said she had won a lot of money — she didn’t know how much — and also an automobile from a rich and obstinate American. It turned out to be more money than I had ever seen; I was stunned. However she acted as if it were nothing, almost as though she were used to that sort of thing or else had made a bet with herself to betray no emotion in order to impress me with her self control.

But it was only an act and didn’t last very long. All at once she cast aside all restraint and began spreading bills of large denominations all over the bed; then she tossed them over her head and blew on them furiously to try to keep them in the air. We looked at each other incredulously as if the money didn’t belong to us, as if we had stolen it or it had flown into our room by magic and would fly out again in the same way.

I was also seized by moral scruples. I wondered if we should track down the American and give everything back to him, but Flora told me I was insane, out of my mind, that the man owned cotton plantations and oil wells and in a few weeks he’d have made up his loss. “Why give it a thought? Everything goes by like the wind, like telegraph poles speeding away behind you when you’re riding on a train....”

The automobile soon became a problem for me. I suggested to Flora that we either sell it or give it back, but she wouldn’t hear of such a thing: “Are you serious? It’s mine, I won it.” She learned to drive in very little time, applying herself with ferocious determination.