The Wooden Throne (15 page)

A stranger poked his head into our compartment to tell us that the locomotive had broken down. Some chose to get off and wait in the station, others curled up on their seats, trying to sleep. For a bit I didn’t want to get off, as if to do so might weaken my purpose. But as the train emptied out it got colder and colder, and thus I too ended up taking refuge in the station.

There were only men there: a few soldiers wearing coats down to their feet, with small wooden traveling cases, who were probably on their way to the border garrisons; then men wearing visored caps and bundled up clumsily in multilayered clothing, with straw suitcases and canvas bags, who kept yawning and looking at the waiting-room clock. Emigrants of course, who continued to wander the roads of the Empire, going from Hungary to Bohemia, to Galicia, as their fathers and grandfathers had done when they were ruled by Austria.

The air in the room became dense with cigar smoke, the smell of sweat and the breath of so many people. No one moved nor said a word. The breakdown was now an accepted fact, taken for granted; there was nothing else to do but wait for another locomotive. I reflected that we looked like people in a huge painting entitled “The Wait.” Except for outside where the sounds of voices and hammering could be heard. All at once a branch of a walnut tree visible through the windows, cracked (no doubt from the excess snow) and fell, leaving a powdery white cloud in its wake. As if this had been a secret signal a youth with extremely blond hair and a blond beard roused himself, stood up and asked me in a strong foreign accent whether I knew where Montalto was. I had never heard of it. “It must be around here somewhere. I don’t know whether you should get off here or at the next station.”

He was very tense. He was smoking a scented cigar. Among those present he was the only one with a coat with a fur collar, which told me he must be a gentleman. I asked him where he was from, hoping he was Danish. “I’m Dutch...from Delft....” He had deep-set green eyes, faintly bloodshot. He kept looking around, almost as if he couldn’t understand how on earth he had found his way to this place, all buried under the snow as it was. His every gesture was measured and aristocratic, deprived somehow of any suggestion of heaviness. He added some trivial comments but then suddenly broached the subject that seemed to be tormenting him. He had come to Italy, to Florence, to study painting, but had met a girl there, a model and a dancer, and had begun to follow her from one city to another, from hotel to hotel.

I realized that he was telling me these things solely because I was a stranger he had met by chance and would shortly bid good-bye and never see again. He wasn’t telling the story to me but to himself because he had to clarify things and make a decision or else confirm one already made by repeating the arguments aloud. He couldn’t go on living like that, deceiving his teachers, his parents, everyone who had confidence in him. “I have to live a straightforward life, do you see what I mean? I have a horror of things that are muddled or confused or improvised. I can’t live a lie, it’s like not being able to breathe....” The girl had let him follow her around for a while, but then had begun to be less accessible, to complicate things and to make up fanciful stories and avoid him. She would appear and disappear continually until finally she simply vanished. He had wasted a great deal of time looking for her and now he had come all the way up here because she had mentioned that village and spoken of certain relatives who lived in these parts.

On the train, however, he had come to the realization that he was simply pursuing his own obstinacy, that his trip was meaningless. All his feelings were turned inside out and now all he wanted was for the train to leave so he could return to Delft. Every now and then the girl used to mention a sister, her grandfather and a distant relative, an aged countess whose husband had shot and killed her lover fifty years ago in the park of their villa.... “The girl is named Flora, isn’t she?” I didn’t notice any particular surprise in his nod of assent, as though for him it was quite natural that every young man his age knew Flora, who must have crossed his horizon like a shooting star and scratched his eyes with her luminous wake.

First the Jewish photographer and now the Dutch student.... Once more I found myself holding the thread of a destiny that was leading to a completely different path from the one I had believed I was following. Even as the youth had been telling his story I had begun to pick up little clues that made me suspect he was talking about Flora and I had quickly decided to resume my search for her. My primitive nature, galvanized and turned upside down by an earthquake of emotions, had matured that decision with the rapid magnanimity of a Homeric hero. My love for symmetry and the enigmatic tricks of destiny had already combined to reinforce the singularity, almost the necessity, for me to start looking for Flora again precisely at the moment the Dutchman decided to stop. I imagined that Flora might sooner or later take refuge in her mountain village in order to get away from someone or to combat sudden weariness or to heal some spiritual wound rudely inflicted in the course of her hectic dashing from one city to another. Maybe she was indeed up there now, like a bird in its nest, and I should catch her before she flew off again.

I said good-bye to the student and began to try to find out about the village. A couple of travelers had never heard of it, others said that it was really off the beaten track, and still others said it had gone to rack and ruin. Finally a railroad worker took me into a little cubbyhole of an office and I watched his grimy finger, the nail edged in black, trace a line over a map. The finger described many loops over winding valleys until it came to rest on one that lay close to the border. It was quite far away, but I didn’t wait a minute longer. I bought something to eat and drink in the village and set off along the snow-covered roads. This time there was no hope that a wagon or a caleche might pass; I had only my legs to count on. At times, when I thought of Flora, my spirit quickened with a sudden joy as warm as a gust of wind from Africa. All I felt about Denmark was a faint regret; besides it wasn’t really lost, just postponed.

The road was deserted. I was happy that the mountains had prepared such a welcome for me: snow, silence, now and then a flight of crows.... It matched my expectations perfectly.

After hours of walking, at a point just beyond an unmarked crossroads, I had a profound sensation of having taken the wrong path. I went back. There I left the wider road to follow a small lateral valley through which a narrow unruly stream came tumbling down, the weeds and bushes along its banks bent over by the weight of icicles. A shadow of fear touched me as I entered the valley. It was so narrow that the sun had not yet appeared, and the last snowfall had almost effaced the sled trails and the tracks of hooves and boots. My breath froze in a cloud of vapor. The trees began just beyond the stream, and snow outlined their every branch and twig in an arabesque more complicated than that of an oriental carpet. In the few remaining level spaces there were nut trees and apple trees alternating with spruce and larch.

After a few kilometers the valley widened a bit and the mountains, although steeper and rockier, were farther away. Every gorge seemed to be covered by huge snowdrifts suspended in unstable equilibrium, ready to slide down at the tiniest vibration — a gunshot, or a shout, or a particularly violent burst of wind. Now and then I would come upon a hut for the summer’s hay, constructed with a stone foundation and rough wooden slabs above. It was bitter cold, and I felt the full severity of that cold every time a gust of wind slashed at my face. Sometimes I would stop to rub my cheeks and beat my arms. I had the curious conviction that if I didn’t keep moving I might become a statue of ice.

Then the sun laboriously freed itself from the clouds and rested upon the summit of the mountains to the right, like a woman who appears at a window. All at once it didn’t seem so cold and I thought my blood ran warmer in my veins. I took something out of my sack and began to eat, still walking, committing myself to the road with confidence.

There was no other sound but that of the stream; if I stopped once in a while to listen, I heard absolutely nothing and I felt a rustle of dread — but not without a vague satisfaction, as if I were in a privileged position, facing possible surprises whose existence only I was aware of. In the entire valley I was perhaps the only human being, and this made me feel a little like an explorer or a legendary hero in search of a talisman.

The problem was to find out if I was on the right road. There were no signposts, unless they had been knocked down and buried by the snow. I kept walking for hours, my feet sinking in deeper and deeper until it took some small effort to move my legs. I became aware that I had fallen into a benumbed stupor, especially when I realized that the sun was already going down.

After hours of absolute silence I heard a faint rumble on ahead, and a mass of snow broke loose from a gorge and rolled all the way down to the bottom of the valley. Who could say whether the train had left, if it had carried the soldiers to their border garrison or the emigrants to their foreign destination. Instead, when the sun completely disappeared I asked myself with surprise why I had gotten off the train to find my way to this deserted valley. I was supposed to be going to Denmark, but after only a few kilometers I had interrupted my trip and gone off in a completely different direction. Maybe I was a little mad, like Flora, or rather, still childish, for all that I was big and tall, already a man. Probably Flora wasn’t even there in that village, had never been there, and the Dutchman’s story was pure invention. I had been reckless. But now turning back frightened me as much as going on.

For a little while I was paralyzed by indecision. I started walking again only when I saw further up toward the woods the dark figure of a hunter taking aim among the spruces. A moment later I heard one shot, followed by another. Probably roebuck and marmots, and maybe even wolves lived up there beyond the woods between the last pastures and the rock. During the day I had seen huge dark birds circling above the snow, eagles of course, because they were in pairs. Without a doubt the valley was an ideal place for hunting.

I took up walking again, rather fast, all the more because I had noticed that on the other side, going down, the snow wasn’t as deep. I needed, however, to find shelter for the night. The valley was widening again. On both sides there were fairly broad fields, probably cultivated during the summer.

At a certain point I saw two more men, perhaps a hundred meters apart, standing still in the middle of the fields. I began to call to them, but they neither answered nor moved, and then I realized that they were scarecrows, set up with great patience and skill by villagers who would have had plenty of spare time in the winter to do these things. I approached, passing close enough to see them clearly. One was wearing a pointed hat with a long feather and holding a wooden rifle in its hands, while the other was dressed like a mountaineer with wide knickers, a cloak and alpine boots. Even close up they looked like real men.

Night was coming on. I seriously feared I had chosen the wrong route. Perhaps there wasn’t any village at the end of this valley, or if there was one, I might not be able to reach it. I struggled not to give way to wild imaginings. The two scarecrows were a sign that those fields were cultivated, and therefore a village couldn’t be far away. But night was falling, coming down as rapidly as a falcon. I had to find a shelter quickly. Going back all the way to the hut would mean many hours of walking. There was nothing to indicate that the trail I was following was really a road, except for the fact that it was level, regular and ran along not far from the stream.

The cold was finding its way closer and closer to the center of my person. I seemed to be becoming a part of the place, like any other object, for example, the trunk of a spruce tree or a block of stone with cracks filled in with ice and snow. Perhaps the valley was no longer inhabited, being too lonely and remote, and I would find houses, but they would be abandoned, occupied only by weeds and crows.

By now it was an effort to put one foot in front of the other, and I did so mechanically without even knowing why, in a kind of bruised and desiccated stupor. I seemed no longer to be able to fix my thoughts on anything, not even on how tired I was, or on Flora or the Dane, who were growing weaker in my mind, fading into dim figures with no meaning. Sleep was what I wanted, nothing but sleep. I felt a terrible temptation to sit down against a rock or under a spruce and give in to sleep. Once I did, but suddenly in a flash of lucidity I understood that if I stayed there I would become like the scarecrows in the meadow, which looked like travelers but had always been and would always be perfectly still. And yet I didn’t really care. Maybe my searches and my adventures were already finished and all that remained for me was to look for a pencil in my pockets and to write on a piece of yellowed paper: “Call me Giuliano...” and then nothing more — because my story, hardly begun, was coming to this kind of an end.

At a bend in the road I seemed to see in the distance the spires and pinnacles of a gothic castle. There couldn’t be any castle in such a place and that meant that I was already experiencing the hallucinations of freezing victims. I had read about this many times in my books on exploration. I came nearer. It really was a castle, recently built, but tiny, uninhabited and already fallen completely into decay. It could be that some mad misanthrope had built it, and then once he was dead his heirs had let it go to ruin. Inside there were traces of many fires, but I didn’t succeed in lighting my own with matches dampened by snow. I sought out the most sheltered corner and scraped together a bit of pungent and fetid straw to put over myself and in this way get some protection from the cold. I sat down to wait for the night to pass. Every once in a while I would get up, beat my arms and stamp my feet on the floor, or bite my lips to keep from falling asleep. But it didn’t work.