The Wooden Throne (2 page)

I lived in a big country house. In every room there were spots of dampness, which I tried hard to identify as specific designs or even imagined would sooner or later reveal mysterious writing like that which appeared in Balthazar’s banquet room, as if the walls had been treated with invisible ink. In those days every time I went down into the cellar, dug out as it was in the earth without windows or flooring, I had the feeling that something singular might happen; that half a wall might crumble because of an earthquake and I might be able to hear the muffled sound of an amphora alling to the mud floor, or the voice of the Dane, who would have miraculously reappeared in the house he had lived in so many years before. The inky darkness of the cellar was for me a cavern, the belly of a whale, a magic place where anything might come to pass. Inside that space I would experience a vague anticipation, a state of grace — not, however, devoid of a certain apprehension.

It wasn’t a matter of fear. Perhaps I had never known fear, not even as a child. In the depth of my spirit there was a peculiar unexamined sentiment: nothing bad could happen to me. The unknown and the unpredictable were all around; reality was an immense reservoir of surprises from the depths of which bits of fantastic events and daring exploits kept bubbling up, but fate had extended a dense protective net over me. Just as I trusted strangers at once and felt an impetuous sympathy with them, so I had faith in destiny and abandoned myself to it, sure that it would take me where I wanted to go.

Maddalena was often away from home. In the winter she would put on a long black cloak, leather boots, and a wide felt hat and go out no matter what the weather, in a gust of tempestuous exuberance. In the summer, by contrast, she wore little flowered dresses whose skirts rippled at her quick and unexpected movements. I followed her a couple of times, in careful secrecy. I saw her get into a caleche, which was waiting in a secluded place, behind a clump of acacias or alders outside the village, then suddenly disappear.

I imagined that she was going to a party, or maybe even to the Contessa’s Villa, which at that time I had seen only from a distance, passing by it at full speed in the caleche of an acquaintance. Maddalena would always talk enthusiastically about balls and dancing parties, and thus I would imagine her dancing at events I didn’t know how to picture and which I sensed were linked to something far away and full of joy.

Sometimes when she left I would climb up to the rooftop terrace, hang on the railing, and then try my best to hear the music of distant celebrations. I would hear the shout of a wagon driver, the trill of a skylark, a shot from a hunter’s gun — all isolated and surrounded by a precious frame of silence; it seemed that in these sounds there was something not quite fully revealed. I would very quickly forget Maddalena and let myself be absorbed by whatever surrounded me. I could never succeed in thinking about one thing for very long. Whatever it was would tumble out of my head, to be replaced by other things, all of which filled up my solitary hours like soft cotton wool.

An unspoken pact existed between me and Maddalena, that both of us, fond though we were of each other, should get along as much as possible by ourselves. The time came when she didn’t even bother to say to me, “I won’t be back tonight. Have a bowl of coffee with milk, make yourself a hard-boiled egg and get a couple of bunches of grapes.” They would have been wasted words, since I already knew all about it. I knew where food was kept and would make myself something quickly, without delaying or fussing over details.

To sit down at a table covered by a tablecloth and carefully set, indeed the very act of eating itself, seemed to me to be a waste of time. Hence I would often eat while I was doing some other work — stripping the bark off a branch with a pruning hook, sawing a plank, or reading one of my dog-eared books. Since I did the most diverse kinds of labor and used whatever materials came to hand, I would notice at times that a mouthful of food tasted like coal or saltpeter, carpenter’s glue or iron filings. Once in a while Maddalena would prognosticate terrible diseases brought on by my lack of cleanliness, “You’ll get spotted fever! You’ll get cholera!” and I would feel apprehensive, suddenly anxious, and run to wash my hands meanwhile studying myself for evidence of alarming symptoms, which I thought would appear without warning like a tornado or a tropical storm.

Then, seeing that nothing happened, I would shrug my shoulders. Maddalena herself would forget her prophecies almost immediately. It often happened that she would pass in a moment from intense worry to a cheery lightheartedness. Even more, certain things provoked her to convulsions of laughter, and she would have to throw herself down on the bed or into an old armchair before they stopped.

Whenever Maddalena went away I fell into a breezy, if somewhat bewildered, exaltation. The house, completely at my disposal, became a kingdom unexpectedly bestowed upon me by fate. Once again, who knows why, the rooms took on the fascination of unexplored places, despite the fact that in reality I knew them perfectly well. I had made several interesting discoveries, such as old maps, books and notebooks full of writing in an unknown language, and instruments whose purpose I couldn’t figure out. “The Dane’s stuff,” I had quickly concluded.

With a slightly quickened heartbeat and a touch of euphoria I would begin again to explore the house. Sometimes, for a change, I would just go through it from top to bottom with no apparent purpose. I would climb up and down the stairs, the stone ones below, the wooden ones leading to the upper floors, pass through half empty rooms, closets, and the odd shaped and useless spaces outside them, and arrive precipitously on the balcony. There I would stop for a moment, looking down through the frightening cracks between the planks at the pavement of the cortile below.

I could hear the creaking of the furniture and the high pitched sound of borers in the wood when I stretched out on the floor or curled up on an old sofa whose worn out springs stuck out stiffly like the bones of an aged man. At times the squeaks of a family of mice in a nest under the floor would reach my ears. Or the call of the screech owl. There was no sound I loved more.
That sound was for me the king of all the sounds in existence and conferred upon the house an inexpressible dignity.
I often tried to surprise a screech owl. I would climb up to the attic with infinite circumspection, making my way to a large dormer left open in all seasons, but as soon as my foot touched the roof tiles the bird would have stopped calling and all I could manage to catch of him would be a distant rustle of wings I wasn’t even quick enough to locate.

The children of Ontàns used to tell me, with an echo of fear in their voices, that the call of that bird was bad luck, that the screech owl alighted on houses when someone was about to die. I had no arguments to contradict them, but I rejected their opinion instinctively and continued to reserve a privileged place in my thoughts for the screech owl. And every time I heard one call, I was taken by an irrational urge to fly down the stairs and follow a road, any road, and go off — who knows where.

On certain nights other animals must have used our house as a meeting place, and the next day I would notice a sharp musky smell still in the air in closed places: the scent of badgers, hedgehogs, wild rabbits, foxes, polecats. Our house was too open, too solitary, and too neglected not to give wild animals the idea that it could be entered without risk and that it might even be a good place to make a den. During summer storms certain of them would seek shelter in the cellar or in the smoke darkened areas that ran along under the lean-to against the house. I often saw hawks and buzzards in the distance above the fields or the
magredi,
the scrubby floodplain, turning in slow circles, then falling by their own weight, as if struck by lightning, and disappearing into the poplars and alders. In spring and fall I discerned large birds flying in odd formations and followed them with my eyes until they disappeared.

One evening (the clouds were already thick and dense as gelatin) I heard an unusually loud noise on the roof of the shed. I thought some boy had gone up there to hide. I climbed up too, by holding on to wistaria trunks and grapevines, which grew along the wall like a system of vegetal ropes, arriving just in time to see a huge white fowl flailing about with wings and feet spread out in disorder. As soon as he saw me, or heard me, he tried to fly away and instead tumbled into the cortile in a scattered movement, half flight and half fall. A heron, an injured heron.... I didn’t have the courage to come to his aid, because, seen close up, birds repelled me as much as from afar they attracted me, appearing majestic and dominating, perhaps because they had succeeded in conquering the air, in ascending where I never would be able to, unless on board a balloon or dirigible.

The animal huddled behind some bundles of grape twigs. The next morning (all night I had dreamed about birds flying extremely high, or alighting on inaccessible branches of hornbeams and poplars) I got up at dawn, all excited, to go and look. I had never been up that early and things seemed unreal and weightless to me. The heron was gone. All I found was a few dirty white feathers and a nest-like hollow in a pile of dried grass. Maybe he had only been terribly tired from some long overseas flight, or maybe during the night a polecat with a prodigious sense of smell had caught him. Anyhow I would never know what had happened and this made me restless and uneasy. The hypothesis that he had flown off toward the north, toward immense woods or marshy taiga, and at night besides, without even letting me know, like a thankless and unacknowledged guest, provoked a faint resentment, as if he had stolen something from me. And yet his disappearance (what a splendid prison he’d have had, if I had succeeded in capturing him!) resembled the disappointments that happen in dreams, when we believe we have something at our fingertips and it vanishes. It had about it something inevitable, predetermined, necessary.

At that time it seemed natural to me that the other little boys went to school and equally natural that I stayed home. As I said, I didn’t ask about the why of things. Besides I had learned by myself to read and write and thus the matter was no real problem even for Maddalena. When I had one of the many childhood diseases, measles or mumps, I don’t remember which, Maddalena tossed a spelling book full of drawings onto my bed to help me deal with the boredom of convalescence. I quickly took an interest in it because next to every picture was the name of the thing represented.

I began to copy the letters with dried peas, first on a piece of cardboard and then on the floor. I haven’t the slightest idea why I didn’t use a pen or a pencil, and preferred instead this awkward method demanding endless patience and so much space.

If that convalescence had not been rather long I would certainly have ended up like everyone else, stifling my desire to move around as I sat at a wooden desk all scratched up with writing and drawings. Sooner or later Maddalena would have had to notice that by staying home past school age I was somehow illicit, like a stowaway or a slacker. Instead, by the time I regained full health, I was familiar with all the letters of the alphabet. Maddalena did not at first understand why the bedroom was inundated by a sea of peas, which scattered and crumbled under the wood of her clogs and which she sent flying toward the wall with vigorous kicks. Every now and then, but not often, she would sweep them up into a pile in a corner, from where I obstinately recovered them to go on with my game.

One day she opened the shutters and sat down on the bed to talk and joke with me. At a certain point she began to look steadily at the floor and the light dawned: “Giuliano, you’ve learned to write all by yourself! How in the devil did you do it, child?” She hugged me tight, so that my nose and mouth sank into her plump breast, whose softness, warmth and acrid perfume I had come to know in fervent moments like this one. While I tried to get away from her (not from lack of affection, it was just that Maddalena hugged me too rarely for me to have acquired the habit and a certain experience in reacting to that gesture), I made an effort to put myself somehow in her place, in order to understand what I had done that was so extraordinary — but I didn’t succeed. Now that I know I think that behind her enthusiasm there was also a satisfied self-interest. My tendency to do things by myself spared her a quantity of nuisances: enrolling me in school, taking me there, overseeing my homework....

From that day on she let me cover the floors with peas to my heart’s content. She would skip as she walked over them, so as not to jeopardize the writing. Then she took pains to bring home stubs of colored or indelible pencils, stained with oil or gritty with carpenter’s glue; thus I began to write words on sugar bags or butcher’s paper or in the margins of old newspapers. With her help I also quickly learned to read. There were numerous books in the house, and Maddalena obtained many others even though they were old and dirty: volumes of fables or myths, ancient poems, travel and adventure novels.

The story that impressed me the most in those days was the one about the Pied Piper of Hamelin, which I found in a little book illustrated with sepia drawings that, for me, had a touch of the arcane, perhaps because I myself had learned to play a flute unearthed in the attic.

The Piper, a tall thin man, was dressed in medieval-looking clothes that lent him the slightly sinister air of a court jester or a soothsayer. He had a short bristly beard dided into two points, coarse metallic hair spread out over his shoulders, and long stiff fingers placed over the holes of his wooden instrument. His arms and legs were gangling and skinny, as if he were a carnival acrobat or a contortionist in the midst of some unusual exercise. But with a shudder I read in his crafty look his ferocious determination to carry off all the children of the city, to seduce them with his malignant charm, as he had done with the mice. Maybe he had made his decision long before the inhabitants had refused him payment for having rid their houses of animals; those oriental eyes slanted at the corners, that ambiguous smile could well hide any kind of wickedness.