The Wooden Throne (4 page)

The blood, the acute pain and the fact that I had endured it without grimacing made me feel proud of myself and seemed to be the price paid to obtain the exceptional experience I was having. “Were you the one sending out the signals?” I asked the man. He opened his eyes wide and nodded yes. His blond hair stuck out in all directions as if he were scared to death or had just had an electric shock. In a few spots it was pasted down by sweat. “Listen Giuliano...is Maddalena home?” I divined that he had some inexplicable interest in Maddalena that he didn’t want to admit openly, and I hoped by lying to force him to do so. “If you want to see Maddalena, come with me. We can see her right away.” Worried, he began to shake his head; no, no, he couldn’t come now, even though he had some really important things to ask her. He would come some other day, on a more suitable occasion.

He was breathing heavily; when he said her name he lowered his voice and bent forward over his knees as if Maddalena could see him from the house and maybe even call him in her raucous and dramatic voice.

He kept taking my hand and jerking me along as if he wanted to get farther away from my house; yet at the same time, I guessed that he was held back by a magical force surrounding Maddalena. Probably he spent half his time day and night hanging about her at a safe distance. He talked in spurts, placing his hands on his chest as though to indicate a heavy weight that rested there and couldn’t be dislodged. “Maddalena, eh, yes, quite a woman, hard worker and a fine lady too when she gets dressed up. Doesn’t even look like she’s from the country. Acts like a real lady.... You like honey?” he digressed unexpectedly. He continually went from one subject to another by complicated and not always visible paths, even though it was clear that everything was connected with everything else.

Then he said something that astounded me, and I wasn’t sure I had heard right: “You know, Giuliano, I remember Maddalena was really a good friend to your poor mother.... I knew her too...so many, many years ago.... They used to go by my house singing and I used to see them like that a lot, from behind the windows....”

“Come on, what are you saying?” I laughed in his face. “Maddalena my mother’s friend? Maddalena
is
my mother!”

He began to look at me suspiciously, to scrutinize my injury, thinking that the blow had knocked me out of my senses. When he was convinced that I had really meant what I said he stepped backward precipitously, huddled up inside himself as in a fortress and wouldn’t add another word, for all the attempts I made, for all that I pressed him from every angle. There was no trauma for me; only the opening of a new and unforeseen perspective, even though the strange discovery, to really think about it, wasn’t entirely strange, all things considered, because before this I had already had a subtle hint that Maddalena wasn’t my mother. While I continued to protest, to repeat to myself that the man was insane, something inside was telling me that he had spoken the truth.

Hence, my eager searching, my haste to cross no-man’s-land and approach the hidden treasure chests destined for me, should not be directed exclusively forward into the future, but also backward into the past. I felt as if I had emerged from a dream in which I had been slumbering forever, or as if a veil I had never been aware of had been gently whisked from my eyes. I remembered that Maddalena had occasionally mentioned a certain Luca, always with disdain, as a rather crazy character without a job or trade, who raised bees, poached and lived all by himself, a dog’s life. Yes, this could only be Luca.... That’s why he knew my name.

I realized, somewhat nebulously, that what Luca had said was a revelation of great importance; therefore I should not let him get away — I had to find a way to make him tell me more. Besides if I considered him a valuable catch, he judged me the same way: I was the child who lived in the same house as Maddalena, the house where he didn’t dare set foot even in her absence. I was curious to investigate these things, which until then I had believed to be peacefully normal, completely devoid of enigmas or underlying elements.

Luca took me to his house. Although it was clean, it was saturated with odors: smoke, soot, wet Fustian, sweaty clothes. The walls were full of hunting trophies, and from time to time I would forget the reason why I had followed Luca, lost as I was in gazing at the heads of roebuck and wild boars. It was the first time I had found myself in the company of a real hunter, and I almost wondered why I didn’t feel all the emotion I imagined I would feel if I had been told ahead of time about such an encounter. I felt as if I weren’t taking full advantage of the opportunity. Then I returned to thinking about Luca’s revelation, and my awareness of all it meant continued to increase. My mother had died many years ago; her death was an event outside my experience. Since Maddalena wasn’t what I had believed her to be, it was as if I were losing my mother for the second time and both times in a peculiar manner — without feeling any grief. I was caught up in an extremely strange turn of events, like the characters in certain stories I had read, for instance, Romulus and Remus or even Moses; and this brought me a feeling akin to satisfaction. I decided that it was something to think about calmly, that it was too unpredictable and important to consider at once, there in the poacher’s house.

My head still resonated from the blow received and in the depths of my consciousness flickered the idea that it was late, that I ought to go home. Luca didn’t know what more to do with me to make me think well of him. “You’d like to go hunting, wouldn’t you? You’d like that? Want to go after roebucks or wood grouse, up there on the mountain .... If you want to I’ll take you. Let’s see if you say yes....” “Sure I’d like to. But you’re joking; I don’t believe you....” “What? Me joke? I don’t even know what it means to joke. For me every word spoken is like a shiny stone, like a precious coin....”

All excited, he set about readying his gun and his cartridge belt. Then it was really true, we were going up the mountain, like this, at night? I knew I shouldn’t accept. I felt a vague unease, a faint perplexity, all the more because it seemed I hadn’t locked the house and put the key behind the usual flower pot. Shouldn’t I at least let Maddalena know.... But basically I found it natural to go off like this, capriciously, without being accountable to anyone. If Maddalena wasn’t my mother the house was no longer my home, and I had neither a roof nor a family anymore; I was merely a vagabond who could go where he wanted to, up and down the world like a Gypsy. Maybe I wouldn’t even come back: a trick to punish Maddalena for not being my mother and for having hidden the truth from me for so long. But this thought quickly created an unexpected ramification; for a moment it appeared that my house was a place full of wonderful things I had never been aware of even though I lived there, just as I had never realized that Maddalena wasn’t my mother. I shook myself. It wasn’t this I should be thinking about. It was the mountain, hunting roebuck.

Luca was moving about the house, going in and out of doors, euphoric and out of breath, until he had prepared a quantity of things in a corner of the kitchen: knapsack, hatchet, binoculars, cartridge belt, blankets, heavy sweaters, and various cardboard and metal boxes. He was breathing almost with difficulty. Then, in the midst of these preparations he suddenly stopped, brought up short by a disturbing thought. “You must be hungry, boy. So am I. Never mind, I’ll take care of that right away!”

We ate a piece of cold rabbit and some bread and slightly sour apples with a glass of wine. Luca laughed from time to time and talked about the roebuck, more with gestures of hand and head than with words. “They run along on the gravel. Sometimes you hear the stones roll down and you don’t see anybody. It’s them, the roebuck. If you look closely at the snow you see their hoof-tracks. Roebuck look dark from far away. Like wolves....”

He loaded everything into the caleche and we left. The oil lantern barely lighted the path which crossed the lonely
magredi.
The vehicle bounced violently over holes and stones and at every bump Luca whipped the mule and then turned his cheerful face toward me. He stopped suddenly when we encountered a wagon driver who was returning late with a load of hay: “Listen, tell Maddalena that Giuliano is with me. We’re going to the mountains, we’ll be gone three days....”

And if on the contrary I never came back? I might become a hunter or even play the flute at festivals. These seemed like promising possibilities especially because they were remote, while in all probability they would have been disturbing if they were imminent and I had to decide at once. But I still had so much time before me. I regretted not having brought the flute. It looked as if everything that was happening belonged to a chain of things that were unwinding one after another in the simplest and most natural way.

I fell asleep at intervals, abandoning myself to the caleche with confidence, even though I didn’t know where it was taking me. Indeed I felt I had been born to climb on board the first vehicle in reach and set off wherever it happened to be going. In my more conscious moments I felt a thrill of happiness because I was going to the mountains, those very mountains I could see from home and which looked like gigantic stage settings, put there to conceal villages forever immersed in an atmosphere of festive ritual. On the summits, on the striated rocks that I could see from my terraces and which no one or almost no one could attain, there were hawks’ and eagles’ nests, and on the taluses (what were the taluses? huge piles of gravel?) bounded the roebuck. Now I was going up there with Luca and all the mysteries of the mountains would be unveiled.

Once I woke up completely and found to my surprise that I was wrapped in a blanket and lying on top of a pile of hay. What had happened? Had we already arrived in the mountains? What time was it? And Luca? I got up, rubbing my eyes. I managed to find the door to the hayloft and to lift up the wooden bolt. Outside Luca was doing something or other around the caleche. The oil lantern illuminated the vehicle with a wavering and greasy flame while the mule calmly went on eating a mouthful of hay. Not far away was a group of houses barely touched by a bright reflection coming from behind the horizon and in the other direction an immense and profoundly dark form loomed over us. Thus we had arrived in the mountains.... It seemed like an extravagant dream.... It wasn’t possible the mountains would allow themselves to be reached so easily and moreover while I was asleep and hadn’t even taken note of the roads leading me to them. Luca, his hair every which way, his eyes round and startled, looked like a rumpled night bird generated by the mountain and its secret gorges. “It’s no go, no go, this state of affairs. We’ll have to turn back. I don’t trust this wheel on the roads here,” he muttered in an even voice. We loaded the blankets again and started rapidly back. I tried to hide my disappointment, but I could have sworn it would have ended this way, that the mountain would rebuff me. It was like when the heron escaped while I slept and dreamed of great flocks of birds as white as he was. It seemed natural that the mountain had succeeded in maintaining its mysteries inviolate. I had been there but almost all of the time asleep. Still, along with the disappointment, there was something like a feeling of relief, of a risk avoided. The enigma was still there, intact, and my fantasies would be able to go on hovering about it, anxious to resolve it.

Luca left me in sight of my house and for nothing in the world did I want to approach it. Once I was alone I sat down, a little disoriented, and all at once I felt all the fatigue of the trip, of the sleep lost, of a night in the open. It was dawn.

Only when I crossed the threshold did I begin to consider seriously what Maddalena’s reaction to my nocturnal flight might be. Usually I would begin to worry about something only when it was upon me, because at a distance it would seem unreal and even unlikely ever actually to happen. I slipped into bed right away, not feeling like confronting Maddalena, preferring to wait out events. I forced myself to listen for potential sounds from other rooms. Nothing. Maddalena was out, thus the confrontation had been postponed.

I slept profoundly for many hours and upon awakening began to listen carefully. Total silence. I went to the kitchen to look for something to eat, then sat down to read, waiting for her to return. But hours passed and the house remained silent, as if it had fallen into a strange catalepsy. Maybe Maddalena had gone out to look for me, to seek help (it was possible the wagon driver hadn’t found her), and at that hour who could tell where she was. Or she could even have decided not to come back, to stay there in those places where she went so often, because after all she wasn’t my mother and she could have unexpectedly realized that I didn’t mean a thing to her. In this way I recalled the business about my mother, which came and went with a curious intermittence and created in me a disorientation that I didn’t know how to deal with. I couldn’t manage to feel like an orphan because I had Maddalena; and on the other hand, I felt that she was no longer a true mother, but something very different.

When she returned she acted amazed, not that I had been gone all night, but that I was already home. “I thought you’d be gone much longer, with that crazy Luca,” she scolded and quickly set about mending a petticoat. She was in her underwear, seated on the bed, and I could see the fullness of her breasts. I had an urge to tell her to cover herself, that she shouldn’t let herself be seen dressed like that and thus I realized that for me something in her had changed. I had decided to ask her about my mother and father, to make clear to her that I was old enough to know and had a right to know about my family. But I lacked the courage. She embraced me, plunging my face as usual into her perfumed breast, almost as if she wanted to suffocate me and I felt the same resentment as always. Maybe what Luca had told me was only the raving of a half crazy dreamer....

I didn’t know what to think. I was convinced, yet I wasn’t — like a piece of paper carried by the wind that appears then disappears from sight. Finally I told the story to Maddalena, to see whether it would take on substance or vanish into nothing. This time she got angry. “Ah, so that idiot Luca told you! Hasn’t he got anything better to do, that nitwit?” To my surprise she began to inveigh against him for taking me off at night without even asking her permission, exposing me to bronchitis or pneumonia. She appeared to be venting a delayed rage born of acute worry that should have manifested itself during or soon after my flight and not now when the event was already past and had fortunately concluded with no adverse consequences. I thought her anger was related to what I had asked her, that that subject for her was unpleasant or taboo. But now my question had been asked and I would finally know.