Authors: Carlo Sgorlon
I realized that a mere nothing, an imperceptible change, was enough to render everything around us as arid as a desert.
When I was a boy my love for life and destiny made me feel at home anywhere and all things then wore a familiar and interesting guise as if I was already acquainted with them or knew they were destined for me. I had even felt at ease in Cretis at first, whereas now sometimes the village appeared foreign to me, and I saw the fortress-house as for the first time. I found myself wondering what this house had to do with me, how I could have stayed here so long, and what could have detained me. Was it the snow, the cold, the onset of frostbite or actual freezing? Or the fear of the unknown? Or Pietro’s stories? Could things that insignificant put me off course? Was I such a childish fool that I could be distracted by the most banal images that passed before my eyes?
More and more often it seemed to me that there was an immense space between me and my surroundings, like the distance between the two shores of a wide river. I now saw Pietro rarely. Frequently he didn’t even come downstairs to be with us and the story room and the big wooden chair remained empty. Now and then Lia lighted the fire there and she and Namu would enter and sit talking quietly while I watched their moving lips through the glass of the door without being able to hear what they were saying.
Lia had noticed what was happening to me even though she said nothing about it. I still fancied that she regarded my increasing estrangement from Cretis as a kind of reflex, a repetition of what had occurred with Hermes.
Perhaps, however, her silence was a tactic to prevent me from using anything she might say as an excuse to blame her and justify myself; thus she would bind me to her by her very gentleness, which would make me feel guilty and remorseful if I left her. I remembered an incident in a novel when the Christian king cut off the handle of an axe with one blow of his sword while Saladin cut a cushion in half with his scimitar, and the author took pains to point out that the second feat was much more difficult. Maybe Lia knew that the cushion offered stronger resistance and resorted to this technique to neutralize my rebellion. I had no good reason to be irritated; I should have admired her instead for her subtle and disarming strategy.
It might have been simply my irritation and discontent that prevented me from really understanding Lia, because she very probably was the same as always. She had become even more affectionate, not just to hold on to me but also because she had begun to reflect on the fact that I had neither father nor mother but had lived alone with that crazy Maddalena. Therefore, she thought, I could not have received proper affection as a child.
For quite a while in fact she had been asking me about my family, my childhood and Maddalena, to gain a deeper understanding of a situation she already knew about in a vague way. She seemed to feel a delayed anguish for my long lonely days in Ontàns, for my solitary games and my desire for friends and affection.
She didn’t know how to say very much. Mostly she asked brief questions then listened attentively to my answers, an absorbed and worried look on her face, as when she was afflicted by sudden premonitions that a roped party of mountain climbers had fallen, or an avalanche had buried a forgotten valley. Still, at times I felt I didn’t really know her. She never read a newspaper, never asked for information and was indifferent to the news that the wagon-driver or Red or I or others brought to the village. Now and then it occurred to me that if people told her there were still Pharaohs in Egypt or that Columbus had just set off from Palos in three ships with crossed sails, she wouldn’t have blinked an eye. She was completely outside of time but not for the same reasons as Pietro. While her grandfather appeared to belong to every age Lia instead seemed to belong to none, to be simply the Eternal Woman who loved to dress up to please herself and the man she had decided to take into her bed.
Perhaps the model I had invented for her was the wrong one. She wasn’t the Sad Princess but rather the Eve of the Garden of Eden who had no knowledge of good or evil, of time or death, but only knew joy and sorrow, instinct and grace. She appeared to be ancient but at the same time barely created, as innocent as an animal, happy and absorbed, serene and lost in indecipherable thoughts. To me her body and her spirit had an incredible freshness, like a plant, or an oyster just taken from its shell, full of the tangy odor of the sea. She always smelled clean as if her clothes had just come out of the drawer. She always seemed to have bathed moments before, but I had never seen her do so (apparently she hid to wash herself, as primitives do). At the most I had seen her curl her hair with the iron heated on the coals or dust her cheeks with the powder Flora had left her.
Some days she seemed more absent than usual. Since, when I pressed her on these occasions, she talked about her dreams, I realized that they were important, or better, were determining factors in her life. For her they were not fictitious nocturnal apparitions but rather her waking life was
their
faded appendage, a meaningless exile in which she found herself without knowing why.
But it was even more evident that for her everything that existed (especially living things) was a source of astonished enchantment. She regarded birds or snakes as miracles and became entirely absorbed in watching them, like a show not to be missed or a series of events charged with messages. She would fuss to save the life of even a fly or a mosquito and waste considerable time trying to get one to go out the window and fly away. “They live such a short time. Why shorten it more? Life is the only thing they have...,” she would say, seeing my perplexity.
Everything that happened outdoors in the meadows or the woods seemed to belong to her. For her nature was replete with surprises: a squirrel darting across the snow, a mouse running away, an iridescence at the bottom of a well, a colored streak in a rock, the sparkling threads of a spiderweb, needles of light shining through spruce branches — all were adventures that quickened her heartbeat. At times I noted she was particularly drawn to the most ephemeral of things as long as they partook of light. A rainbow for example would put her into a bubbling cheerfulness; when she saw one from the window she’d run outside as though it were possible to approach it and look at it up close. She was all in a dither if she saw rain and the sun at the same time because “it’s a sign that witches are combing their hair.” Perhaps she read such improbable signs to mean that some part of her belonged to their mysterious race.
Once she told me she believed her son would come back and be reborn to her, this time engendered by me instead of Hermes. It wouldn’t really make any difference because the child would always be the same. He was simply her eternal monad who would be returning to material form and assuming a body.
One evening we were sitting in the windowless room singing, I taking Red’s place as guitarist, when he himself burst in, his face all red and his hair every which way: he had seen Flora in the village.
“Flora?! You really saw her? You aren’t joking?” said Lia.
A wave of emotion swept over us, enveloping even Pietro. As for me, my whole body tingled as though pierced with tiny needles, like my feet when I had begun to recover from frostbite. A fantasy asleep in some hidden center of myself seemed to have awakened.
Before we could even make it to the door Flora was there. She had no baggage except for a huge leather handbag with oriental designs on it. She looked beaten and distressed, a couple of mud splotches on her coat, her smudged eye makeup furrowed with clear streaks as if spoiled by drops of sweat or tears. Still Flora hadn’t lost her old defiance and above all didn’t seem ready to give it up.
Even though she was returning unaccompanied and almost without baggage, she still retained the appearance of a feudal lady.
We tried to find out what had happened, but she gestured vaguely as if it were all foolishness, or else from capricious pride she didn’t want to tell us about a humiliating experience. I imagined she was a victim of someone’s violence provoked by a refusal to defer to him, whoever he was, and a stubborn insistence upon her own rank.
“Well, look who’s here,” she said as if it really wasn’t so strange to find me in her home.
Pietro fully respected her privacy and only asked her how she was. “And you, Grandpa, what about you? You look paler than last time I saw you; your hands are shaky and your knees.... Oh why did I go away, Grandpa? I should have stayed here with Lia and taken care of you night and day.... From now on I won’t leave Cretis ever again. I give my word!”
She kissed his hands and poured him tiny glasses of grappa, which the old man barely tasted and which sometimes made him cough as though he were choking. Flora seemed not to realize the extremity of Pietro’s weakness, attached to life as he was by a mere thread. Or perhaps she hoped to get him back in shape with alcohol or good square meals; or else she thought because he had been all over the world and done everything, even hunted bears, built railroads in Asia and prospected for gold he must be almost immortal. If the thought occurred to her that her grandfather might be taken away any day now she chased it off like a fly and wouldn’t believe it possible.
I was soon pulled into a vortex of tumultuous emotion. It was incredible how Flora’s mere presence was enough to plunge me into the past. A whole sequence of memories came bounding upward like corks released at the bottom of a water tank. I recalled the superstition about the hundred white horses that would foretell the finding of a precious object, and when I saw one one day I laughingly licked my finger, moistened the palm of my other hand, and pounded the spot with my fist; she instantly imitated me.
“Do you still have the locket?”
“Of course, do you want to see it?”
Every detail of our escapade came back to me, and I wondered meanwhile if the countess still lived in the Villa where the crime had taken place and where time had stood still and nothing, not even her death, would be able to set it moving again....
For a while every time I encountered Flora I got the impression that she moved about the house disoriented as if she couldn’t make sense out of the rooms and hallways. Once I met her as she hurried from one bedroom to another with a lantern in her hand, looking pale and anxious, her hair flying, as if she were being followed.
But a few hours later she underwent a complete metamorphosis. She arranged her hair in an elaborate coiffure, put on her gaudiest clothes, and loaded her arms with bracelets. Lia apparently couldn’t believe her eyes. She followed Flora hesitantly to find out how much jewelry she had and where she kept it, peering through the cracks in the door. “But what are you doing there little sister? Come on in, come and see. I’ve brought you a present too. Did you think I’d forgotten you?” She put a pair of earrings on Lia’s ears and pulled her to the mirror. “See? They’re perfect on you. You’re really beautiful. You just need to pay a little more attention to yourself, dress a little better. Look, this is the way women are wearing their hair now....”
But she didn’t finish arranging Lia’s hair; they threw their arms around each other in a long embrace, laughing and crying together. Flora said she had been in a thousand places, had seen half of Italy, had also been in Spain and Egypt with an operetta company, and people everywhere had applauded her and her fellow performers with wild enthusiasm. Now she would tell her everything from beginning to end.... Lia prepared to listen, but Flora suddenly changed the subject and began to talk about the young men she had met, Rolando, Roberto, Fernando, Harold....
She didn’t even give us the chance to imagine them. “Look what I’ve brought you! Look! Giuliano, you look too.” She lifted the leather handbag with the oriental designs onto the table and spread out a quantity of souvenirs from many different places: Venice, Capri, Naples, Burgos, Seville, Istanbul, Cairo.... There were insignificant objects worth a few pennies next to genuine jewels given to her by some Juan or Rolando. She saw no difference between them. In that moment everything was precious and exciting, and she handled these things and held them up to the light or to her throat or ears as if they were all of sensational value. Flora must have had a touch of the magpie or the lark in her soul because she was drawn to anything shiny. Sometimes she’d interrupt a conversation to run where she had seen something sparkle, quickly retrieve it and turn it over and over in her hand saying to me: “No it’s nothing, just a piece of glass....” Her smile would fade for the minor disappointment, but she’d decide to throw such things away only after some effort to accept the idea that they were of no use to her.
After she had hurriedly showed us the jewels, both false and real, she picked them up again in handfuls as if they were so much junk and tossed them back into the bag, heedless of my own and especially Lia’s intense desire to examine them further. To her it seemed we had not kept up with her presentation but were still thinking about things she had already finished with.
Both Lia and I were dumbfounded by her return, and for a while we actually had to struggle to get over it. Flora had brought a burst of vitality such as we hadn’t been accustomed to for quite some time and a quickened pace now foreign to our habits. To her each day was a container to be filled to capacity without overlooking its tiniest corner, whereas Lia had never shown any sign of noticing that a day had passed. Time had no importance for her. When Flora would encounter us she’d begin at once to list a long series of things to be done, counting on her fingers like my village school children struggling with the multiplication table.
Lia grew wide-eyed, while I wondered how on earth so many obligations could have fallen on her shoulders in a tiny village like Cretis. Only Flora’s bounding enthusiasm could manage so much, all the more since she had just returned and still had to renew most of her acquaintances. Nonetheless, despite her commitments, she found time to spend with me and Lia, especially Lia, whose clothes and hair she had begun to supervise on a daily basis.