The Wooden Throne (8 page)

Right away I was both attracted and repelled by them as I had been by the Gypsies, and I didn’t know whether to seek out or avoid those little girls who acted as if they had been bitten by the tarantula. Even if I had chosen not to associate with them I wouldn’t have succeeded. The ones closest to my age pounced on me at once. They would call me and follow me through the house if Maddalena wasn’t home, furtively pocketing a piece of bread or cheese left out in sight. Searching for food was for them a kind of noisy game that provoked endless laughter mixed with continual shoves, slaps, hair pulling, bites and yanks on pinafores or skirts already much mended and patched. They pushed each other down, rolled in the grass, thistles or water-hemlock of the
magredi,
fighting over a frog or a snail.

I might at any moment catch sight of their slender legs the color of earth, flashing and kicking in the air before they got up and ran off at top speed. Sometimes they scuffled, or pretended to, right next to me as if to invite me to take part in their squabbles. I acted contemptuous. For me they were too noisy and vulgar. Although I too had grown up more or less wild I was considerably calmer; I liked moderation and silence.

Yet at the same time those little girls possessed something that constrained me to pursue them, something I couldn’t resist. Every now and then one of them would suddenly come up to me and give me a push or trip me, then run away like a deer, shouting boisterously, “Catch me if you can!” Impossible not to accept the challenge. Thus we engaged in furious chases that lasted for half an hour at a time, even when we were dead tired and panting heavily. Sometimes one of them would pretend to be tired, to have decided to let me catch her and would throw herself down in the grass. I would approach to grab her but she would give me another treacherous push that might even send me sprawling and would get up and run swiftly away, her hair flying in the wind.

From the time they came I hardly touched my books, nor thought any more about preparing for exams or writing stories; neither did I waste further time puzzling over what I might need for a polar expedition. Even Maddalena, who always left me free to do what I wanted, even she now and again would say to me, “Don’t be always following those crazy ponies around. It’s not the thing to do....” Because of some sort of hesitation she didn’t explain the reason, as if there were something important to add but it was too complicated and embarrassing to say right out. I knew Maddalena was right. Yet when she was away I rushed down to the cortile as soon as I heard the squeals and laughter of the sisters.

Once they surprised me in the meadow, where I was lying in the grass reading. They had crept up silently, like polecats, and I realized it only when the shadow of one of them fell across my face. Before I had time to get up two jumped on top of me and immobilized my legs and arms while the third began to undo the straps of my pants. Their impudence provoked an outburst of masculine rage, as well as an indistinct uneasiness, and with a few desperate jerks I succeeded in shaking them off. Their violence had aroused in me a confused urge to pummel them, to squeeze them hard enough to hurt them. As soon as they saw my face distorted in anger they fled in three different directions, howling with pretended terror.

I chased one of them, whose name was Lucina, and when I was about to grab her she managed to leap inside the door to my house and tried to close it by force. If I had inserted my fingers she would have cut them clean off. I was in time to stick my clog in the way and the door wouldn’t shut. Lucina screamed, burst out laughing, then ran away inside the house. I was furious at the fact that she wasn’t the least bit scared, that she was faking fear by her screams and that, quite the reverse, she was expressing her satisfaction at my exasperation by her constant laughter.

She stamped harder than I could on the wooden steps leading to the attic, as though instead of attempting to get away she was trying on purpose to let me know which way she was going, to defy me and to show she wasn’t afraid of me. I pursued her furiously but with a sense of not believing any more in my rage, of faking it to myself just to have an excuse to seize her in the darkness of the attic and find out what would happen next. Further than that my imagination wouldn’t go; the image of what might occur didn’t take definite shape, though it remained filled with trembling anticipation.

I thought of the Dane, who had spent several stormy months in that house, and who had probably on occasion followed a girl as she climbed swaying up the creaky stairs of the attic. Certainly not my grandmother, who was much too dignified to behave that way, according to what I had heard, but some other among those who had been attracted by the music and dancing that filled the house at all hours.

Lucina fled for a little longer, then suddenly seemed to resign herself and curled up on the floor on top of a pile of sacks. I took hold of her long hair and held her still, thinking about what I could do to her, choosing among various possibilities and studying her reactions. She tried to escape from me with a sudden jerk, passing under my legs; not succeeding she started to bite my calf, like a mad dog. I yelled, picked her up bodily and threw her back down on the pile of sacks, as if she were some animal caught devastating the garden. Then I leaped on top of her, holding her arms fast and keeping her legs closed with mine. We were both breathing hard and not just from the effort.

We had now reached the end of what I had foreseen, the dark and mysterious part was beginning. Lucina was laughing, a nervous and strident laugh and I began to do the same, as if I wanted to play down what was happening.

When she stopped struggling I freed one of her hands and with my own began to caress her slender legs, the bronzed eels I had so often seen flashing in the sun and air. She let me, seemed to invite me to continue. I felt shudders all over; hot and cold alternating in my limbs, as if they didn’t belong to me any more and were following unknown laws on their own, laws over which I had no control. Still it seemed impossible that the sequence of dark and secret, but powerfully attractive, events that happened between men and women was there within easy reach, ready for me to experience. There had to be a mistake, something that wouldn’t work or a hidden trick that would soon snap shut like a trap; I was sure that my right to go further would be contested.

In fact something did happen once I thought that now it wouldn’t, since Lucina seemed to want what I wanted. At a certain point she drew herself up, lunged at me, head down, and tore herself out of my hands violently enough to succeed even against an enraged will to hold on to her. But I didn’t even think of it. If she wanted to escape she was absolutely free to do so; motionless and inert, I watched her run away, as though I had emerged from an exalted reverie.

Lucina was laughing and in her laugh there appeared to be mockery toward me, while actually (I understood it) there was only nervous tension about that limit she had brushed against with avid curiosity but lacked the courage to cross.

Subsequently the memory of what had happened in the attic sharpened my sense of a reality that escaped me, which revealed itself nebulously on the other side of a veil just to arouse my desire and then withdrew and disappeared. These feelings were linked to my desire to see what was beyond the mountains or to discover the secrets hidden behind the figure of the Dane and my family history, or even what I felt was contained in the situation of the Gypsies, who also possessed a secret I couldn’t even scratch, hopelessly concealed as it was behind the songs and the crafty hypocrisy.

There were other episodes like this one, with Lucina or one of her sisters. All the girls had about them something harsh and untamed. My wrestles with them were like biting into an unripe fruit that sets your teeth on edge so you don’t know whether to chew it up or spit it out in disgust.

One day I saw the sisters with another girl who from a distance I mistook for one of them because she had the same long hair of an unusual chestnut color that took on greenish reflections against the light, like bronze. No one told me her name or why she had arrived in our neighborhood along with the others or where she had come from. She simply entered at once into our games.

I noticed immediately that she was more shapely than those mad ponies: a sign for me that she had turned up in their group by chance and wouldn’t stay with them; rather she would have frowned at the way our games often ended up. Or been downright outraged if I had made the same attempts with her. I thought she was slightly older than I was and before long I began to harbor a vague grudge against her, believing she had some bigger boy keeping an eye on her.

I soon had to change my opinions. The new arrival was even more reckless than the others. She ran as fast and had an astounding ability to climb trees, as if her arms and legs were tentacles equipped with suction cups. Her skill almost offended me. I sensed a challenge. I began to compete with her, scaling the tallest poplars, whose trunks in some spots were smooth as leather. Up there, however, I was subject to vertigo and had to come down hurriedly, while she laughed and started to sing.

I decided cheerfully that she had a screw loose, becoming all the more convinced when she risked breaking her neck to climb on the roof of a sawmill where a kitten was mewing desperately, perhaps starving to death. “Come back down, please — come on now.... What’s your name?”

“Flora,” she shouted boldly.

I was invaded by a sensation like a musical buzz; I felt the stirring of something dormant and far off that was coming to life again, stretching gracefully like a nymph waking up in a river or a fountain. Was this the same Flora I had played doctor with some nine or ten years before? When I asked her she shrugged her shoulders and said she didn’t remember. How could she with all the places she’d been? For her the question was closed and liquidated, while I obstinately kept looking for any trace that might throw a bridge between her and my far distant memory. I almost doubted now that the Flora I recalled had ever really existed.

When she was climbing somewhere (even into my room once, hoisting herself up on the gutters) I couldn’t take my eyes off her legs, which were much more attractive than Lucina’s or those of the other sisters. She noticed and found it amusing. One time, coming down from a tree she got a tear in her white embroidered blouse. I felt sorry at once, distressed. My clothes were all torn and mended, so they weren’t worth worrying about whatever happened to them. But a blouse as pretty as that....

Flora instead shrugged her shoulders and spread the two edges of the tear to better assess the damage. There I was, one step away, and I glimpsed the pink roundness of her completely uncovered breasts. They disappeared immediately and I thought it had been an improbable vision. When she noticed my embarrassment she opened her mouth in a laugh so wide that I got a full view of her gleaming teeth. But who was she, where did she come from? I had never seen her in Ontàns although by now I knew almost everybody. More than that, she didn’t even seem to be a country girl. She had something unusual about her, something refined, exotic, like a city dweller....

Every time she heard hoofbeats she looked up at once, as if someone had called her, and wouldn’t have a moment’s peace until she’d seen the horse. She would run like a hare to the path, to the
magredi,
or into the village and I would see her appear and disappear in the green while I tried to keep up with her. If the horse was white she would be taken with an impetuous joy that turned her cheeks pink. “A white one, a white one!” she’d begin to shout and quickly she’d trace a cross in her hand, spit on it, then hit it with the other hand, closed into a fist. “When I get to a hundred, I’ll find something very beautiful....”

If she believed in that nonsense I was even more certain she was mad, yet at the same time I caught myself wondering what the object she would find might turn out to be. Besides didn’t I still think sometimes that a dirigible might land in the middle of the
magredi
?

She understood my incredulity. Quickly she put her hand inside the torn blouse and drew out a gold chain with a locket. “Look, look what I found last year. And I hadn’t even gotten to a hundred horses. I had only counted eighty-three....” In the locket there was still a miniature, the bust of a young noblewoman. With equal rapidity Flora hid the locket again. She had found it in the park behind the Contessa’s Villa. “What? You were really in there?”

“Of course. I’ve been everywhere. If you want I’ll take you there....”

I accepted without hesitation. It had to be almost noon and I was getting hungry and yet I didn’t give it an instant’s thought. Lucina and her sisters were momentarily out of sight. “Let’s go! Let’s go right now!” I whispered for fear that those three might follow us. We ran all the way to the wagon path that paralleled the stream at a distance. Once in a while, slowing down, we heard branches moving not far away and Flora glanced around anxiously. What was the matter? “Nothing, nothing — don’t worry about it,” she smiled and went on telling me about the mysteries of the Villa, pretending to know all the details as if she had seen and heard everything first hand.

Underneath it all there was a story of forbidden love. The Contessa had fallen in love with a youth who wasn’t even twenty whereas she was almost thirty. Her husband, much older than she was, was insanely jealous. But the Contessa didn’t care, the risk didn’t frighten her: love conquers all.

Then one night her husband had discovered the youth climbing the wall. And there it was, the cause of the mysterious shooting, even though the Count later insisted he had thought the boy was a thief and had fired to scare him off.

Flora said these things very seriously and with an undercurrent of astonishment. She was fascinated by love intrigues and secrets of that sort; she liked to weave fantasies about them.

We had sat down on a felled trunk and Flora was taking stones out of her shoe. August crickets were singing, as were the cicadas and an occasional blackbird who from time to time fluttered among the leaves. I thought about the Contessa, by now decrepit, or so they said, her face all wrinkled as if she were a hundred years old; from that long-ago day of the shooting she had never gone out again and lived in her shadowy rooms like a night bird or like a priestess of some obscure religion who stayed to guard the secret and defend it from the curiosity of others. For her life had come to a stop that tragic night. From then on she had entered into a limbo outside of time, where nothing more happened that seemed to merit her attention. Or she might even have imagined that the shooting hadn’t occurred, that the young man hadn’t been killed and was traveling in far off parts of the world — in Siberia or Tierra del Fuego. Couldn’t it be that her reaction to death was like mine? All these possibilities appealed to me, attracted me.