The Wooden Throne (23 page)

Once in a while I’d be irritated at the way she oversimplified life, and I would have liked to make her understand so many things. But then I would look at her face, so like the face of a dreamy child and renounce all discussion, postponing things and hoping they’d all work out eventually. It was useless to worry ahead of time, for no good reason.

I managed to complete my carnival preparations with lots of help from the children and also the women, who sewed together the sackcloth costumes I had designed on old yellowed pieces of paper.

I spent much of my free time with the ever-more-faithful village children, who obeyed every order without question, even if it involved extended dedication and lively ingenuity; they were quite ready to hike long distances and set up traps or ambushes if need be. As a matter of fact I had to be careful to hedge my requests with scores of conditions because they were capable of wreaking havoc in their own houses to carry out my orders: their first commandment was to obey Giuliano.

Many adults also helped, and I saw that they understood I was creating memorable events for the village (they had first realized this when they saw my sled with the lion of Saint Mark on its sail), and were more-than-ready to play my game. Still I noticed that I couldn’t exercise the same attraction on everyone. For example, when I consulted Namu to make my paints (which she mixed up herself using earth, powders, berries and decoctions), she acceded to my requests with distracted gestures and sphinx-like smiles, apparently to let me know that for her my carnival was more illusory than the Indian legends she had told to Lia’s dead child. Even Pietro and Red seemed to regard me with benevolent and condescending superiority, making no comment and letting me do as I wished, as though I were lost in a cloud of gentle madness, and it was completely useless and superfluous to try to bring me out of it.

Their attitude didn’t paralyze my will to act but rather cast an attenuating veil over it, leaving me once more essentially detached from what I was doing.

I knew this feeling well, this sense of being separated from events, of experiencing them with an ironic awareness that while I performed one action I was fully available to do something else altogether. But this time my detachment was different. I didn’t ask myself as I worked on the carnival whether I had been born to do other things and might be wasting my time; instead the carnival became a play of colored shadows projected on a distant screen. Perhaps I was influenced by the other members of my household to see things a little as they did, although they believed the contrary and were sure I was having the time of my life.

Of course it all depended upon the particular moment; I was forever uncertain and changeable. Often, seeing things progress according to my instructions, noting the children’s fervid enthusiasm, I felt I was living in a magic dimension where everything happened according to one’s wishes and simply wanting something sufficed to make it materialize. I would sketch a costume, indicate the colors and two days later a woman or a girl would bring it to me and silently spread it out on table, turning her face aside to await my word of approval. “It’s beautiful. Thank you. You’ve done a wonderful job,” I would say. It was as if the costume had appeared out of nothing, had come to me through the greenish snow-laden air, entering by the window on its own accord and alighting on the table. I didn’t see the work that had gone into it; I only saw the result. This created the sensation that unknown forces of the universe were collaborating with me in docile obedience.

The carnival costumes were multiplying, piling up and filling rooms, but what pleased me most was the carefree nonchalance that always accompanied me. Even when I sweated and struggled to build backdrops and fake architecture I felt I was moving in a fluid that annulled my terrestrial weight, as if Cretis were a planet smaller than earth, its gravity greatly reduced. I managed to run so fast from one end of the village to the other, to be so constantly present when needed that I felt I was wearing the seven league boots. I had always wanted, although unconsciously, to become a magician, an enchanter or at least an illusionist.
Well I had become one, but only with the women’s and children’s help.
The confidence that buoyed up the people of Cretis was having the same effect on me.

The carnival was coming about at a signal from me as if I had rubbed Aladdin’s lamp; everything was falling into place as I decreed. The festival of my boyhood fantasies was at hand, with me in its midst, even though it was a bit vague and dispersed and I had to make an effort to experience it and feel its density.

I felt euphoric because of this phase of fertile inventiveness. I was able to resolve every difficulty that came up, quickly and with fluid ease, hardly stopping to think. I was visited by constant illuminations, my imagination revived and strengthened by unknown stimuli.

I even succeeded in fabricating a balloon out of oilcloth, sealing the seams with a glue of my own invention so that it held air perfectly. I kindled a fire under it to fill it with lighter gases and floated it over the village. Anchored by numerous ropes radiating from it and tied down to roofs and gutters, its huge brightly colored form hovered over Cretis at the height of the bell tower, the wind whipping the pennants glued to its cords. It was visible even at night because the supply of alcohol burned constantly in the receptacle under its open bottom. Seeing it up there swaying and hovering over the houses in an ironically protective attitude increased the children’s enthusiasm and delighted the adults. At least every once in a while people would stop working and glance upward. There had never been a hot air balloon in Cretis, nor a dirigible, or a glider, or an airplane, and perhaps the inhabitants were still privately convinced that flight was a matter for birds alone.

Carnival Thursday was rapidly approaching — the day when people would finally put on their costumes. Its nearness provoked in me a double and contradictory anxiety. On the one hand I wanted it to come as quickly as possible, but on the other I was sorry because once it arrived it would soon be nothing but a memory. I was even a bit afraid of being disappointed, or rather, that living within the event I would fail to perceive its real substance. Indeed the carnival approached, arrived and passed all too quickly with the speed of the wind or of a wave in the sea. There was nothing I could do to hold it back; time took it away and annihilated it. It was then that I really sensed for the first time the enchanted ambiguity of time itself, which appeared to bring things into being and make them last but in reality only created illusions for us and then relentlessly broke them up. All events fled continually from the future into the past and tumbled into non-being, giving us the feeling that they had happened only because they endured more or less reproduced in our memory, like the persistence of images on the retina.

When Carnival Thursday had come and gone I thought with a certain melancholy that Tuesday, Mardi Gras, was still to come, that all wasn’t over yet and everything would begin again. But Tuesday came anyway and was even sadder because now there was nothing left of the carnival; it was like an object carried off in a millrace after it managed to get past all the gratings and barriers.

And yet my helpers had done all they could to make sure the festival wasn’t disappointing. Even Pietro and Namu had put on their costumes and come to the parade and the ball. In fact for the two of them it seemed especially important to live up to my expectations, and they did their utmost to play their roles to the end. The boys and girls and even the elderly had scrupulously followed my instructions, had danced, thrown confetti, paraded, performed pantomimes, all with crude but carefree skill. Lia had been extraordinary in her oriental Scheherazade costume, moving through the whole afternoon in such a halo of intense grace that I caught myself wishing the hours would pass quickly so I could hold her in my arms.

No, it certainly wasn’t the festival itself that had disappointed me, but the fact that it was so soon over, that it vanished into nothingness. Thus during the next day and those that followed I felt empty, off center, no longer the magician who made things happen with a wave of his hand, who moved through events with the agility of a fish swimming in an aquarium. I was once again the boy who doesn’t want to grow up and realizes he is going to in spite of himself because growing up is beyond his control. I decided to leave the balloon in place hovering over the village, in order to hold onto at least a residue of the carnival so people could see even from a distance that something out of the ordinary had occurred in Cretis, an event that would enter into the memories and the folklore of the mountaineers....

The void I felt was partly filled by the serenity of the others, who showed no awareness that something had irrevocably vanished. Lia, however, noticed my sadness. In fact just before going to bed she disappeared for five minutes and returned wearing one of Flora’s dresses, twirled around so I could admire her, then undressed with studied slowness; the revelation of the curves of her body provoked in me such instinctive joy that at least for a little while it filled the void and stifled all regret.

Perhaps Pietro also wanted to do something for me, because the story he told me one evening was somehow clearly related to the idea that I had experienced a loss. He told me about a woman whom he had been in love with during the period when he was working on the Kzyl-Orda Railroad, not far from the Aral Sea. Her name was Lisaveta. She was shapely, blond and melancholy. A real Russian woman. He had left to organize a rescue expedition to a snowbound village in the mountains of Kirghistan. It had turned out to be a longer trip than anticipated and when he returned Lisaveta was nowhere to be found. His fellow workers told him she had become concerned about his long absence and decided to go looking for him. But they had missed each other and she never came back. What had happened to her, this woman so afraid of everything, especially of losing her way in the snow? What had become of her?

Trying to forget her, Pietro had once again set about studying Russian so as to be able to read Count Tolstoy’s works. Something he’d always dreamed of doing. He managed with great effort to read a few pages, feeling his spirit expand and his vitality increase. Sometimes he even dreamed of traveling to Jàsnaja Poljàna where the count was living and writing, sure that he would have taken any kind of job just to be near him, even that of a coachman or a domestic servant, despite his love for working outdoors in those places where civilization ended and the unrestricted freedom of wilderness and desert began. Once in a Crimean city he had even seen Tolstoy, although from a distance.

Many of Pietro’s experiences were like this. His entire life he had been wandering back and forth, getting lost in the remotest places at the edges of the world. He talked about steppes, deserts, storms on lakes, mountains buried in snow and endless forests. His adventures took shape in my imagination like sharply etched drawings but at the same time they were so remote and labyrinthian that I could hardly believe Pietro had found his way back home, even much much later, and brought his grandchildren with him. He loved to describe things slowly, stopping to emphasize the details that would evoke them most clearly and leave a lasting impression on the memory. He provided a specific and unforgettable image of every place and every event: a field of sunflowers, a pack of wolves, an eagle nailed to the roof of an
isba,
Gypsies castrating a horse, a rainbow resting on the waves of the Aral, a barge with a huge red sail moving slowly across that same sea with the wind blowing hard enough to drive a man mad....

He had a predilection for describing the strange and miraculous things he had witnessed or heard about. His existence was filled with presentiments, startling coincidences and arcane events, all of which he reported in a matter-of-fact way as though discussing ordinary occurrences, or as though there really was no way that life could surprise him.

I had the impression that what he recounted was a confused melange of fact with legend, fantasy and folktale, as if he didn’t really distinguish between reality and invention. This aroused my enthusiasm because I myself had always tended to blot out that distinction and Pietro, without realizing it, was attaining an objective I had always held dear. In his company it apparently wasn’t necessary to travel great distances to realize that purpose, although I had always believed that such a thing could happen only on the polar ice, in the arctic seas, in the Dane’s territory or on the deck of the
Pequod
.... Just as he did not clearly distinguish between present and past, between being alive or dead, between one’s own individual identity and that of others, so he saw no difference between invention and reality: for him anything was possible.

Pietro believed that reality was magic.
But the most magical thing of all was words, which could evoke all possible sentiments.
Pietro’s experiences existed for me only as he translated them into words. When he did so those words became mine, lived also in me, were no longer his alone. When I thought about it I was thoroughly shaken; I literally trembled as though I had made a great discovery. I even glimpsed the possibility of giving up searching elsewhere for my dreams and contenting myself with Pietro’s stories, since hearing a tale of adventures was also a way of living them. In any case I had often had the impulse to realize my own fantasies through words.

I wasn’t always able to follow Pietro’s discourse. In addition he didn’t seem to care about convincing anyone. He seemed to be talking only to himself or to be murmuring things for the benefit of spirits who had disappeared into the past, or who had not yet come into being. I continued to ponder his adventures and to wonder if anything similar would ever happen to me. I often doubted that it would. Perhaps despite what I had always believed I wasn’t the darling of fate after all....