Authors: Carlo Sgorlon
Instead Maddalena’s response didn’t come. She limited herself to hurling an avalanche of words at the poor hunter as if this were the only possible reaction: “That scarecrow...that empty head with terrified eyes...that crazy Gypsy, that flapping ghost.” Anger had the effect of provoking a fantastic explosion in Maddalena’s language; but her windy improprieties rather than demolishing all consideration for Luca in my eyes, rendered him even more attractive and ignited my desire to track him down and get to know him better.
I tried to understand what there was between Luca and Maddalena, why he hovered about our house imitating animal cries, while she considered him a vagabond. Evidently Luca was attracted to Maddalena, wanted to live with her but knew what the woman thought of him and lacked the courage to approach her. I knew that men and women desired to live together and sleep in the same bed. It even occurred to little boys to want to play certain games with little girls. I remembered the ones I myself had played with a band of children who had come up to my attic one afternoon when Maddalena was out. As I thought about it I blushed a bit, suspecting that these were forbidden acts but at the same time I greatly desired that the same sort of thing would happen again. In particular I had in mind a little girl with a very pretty face whom they called Flora, the most spirited and the boldest, with whom I had played doctor. I hadn’t seen her again since that time, nor were the other children able to give me any precise news about her.
Since Maddalena hadn’t replied, it was a sign that Luca had told the truth. The thing, at first hazy and uncertain, thus acquired substance even though I didn’t yet have proof that it was true. On the other hand at that time (and still less today) there didn’t exist for me a clear separation between something true that had actually happened and something uncertain, probable and possible. I saw everything as fluctuating and cloudy, almost as if reality were vague and subjective, and above all as if there might be different levels of consistency between limits of fantasy and reality.
Behind me, then, there were shadows and shadows, like so many backdrops set up one behind the other to hide an equal number of truths related to my life. What had never worried me before now became a problem full of mysteries and possible surprises. A normal family is made up of a father, a mother and children: therefore mine was decidedly irregular. I had to know why. Who was Maddalena, if not my mother? What did she have to do with my family and why was I living with her? And who was the Dane? My entire aim was to clear up these enigmas.
My search was difficult, almost desperate. Maddalena wouldn’t say anything, nor would Luca. Perhaps I would have to investigate in the village, but I rarely went there and only knew a few children. Still the first thing to do was look for some clues at home. There ought to be letters or photographs that would contain at least in part the key to the mystery. Thus my exploration of the house began anew, but once more it changed character and meaning. Everything looked different now. No matter what object came into my hands or before my eyes I would wonder at once: “Was it my father’s? My mother’s?” My only certainty was that the books in an unknown language had belonged to the Dane.
All I knew about him was that he had lived in our house, that he had been a sailor and a whale hunter. Nothing else. I realized that until now I had been content to center upon him my fantasies and my frenzied desire for travel and exploration. But who was he really? Once Maddalena in a moment of angry exuberance told me I was too noisy and crude and that my laugh sounded like the Dane’s. Another time, as she was combing her long black hair, she heard the comb crackle and her face darkened; she extinguished the lamp and sat down in front of the mirror studying herself attentively, looking for sparks. She even asked me if I saw any. Puzzled, I asked her why. “Why?” she said, a bit breathlessly, her full breasts quivering in her agitation, “because it was the Dane who made the comb crackle when he combed his hair. That’s why. He set off sparks bigger than the ones from horses’ hooves striking stones. An old woman once swore to me that his comb was all scorched.”
“But could you tell me who he was?”
“You already know. You know as well as I do....”
“That’s not true. And there are other things you won’t tell me....”
She made the sign of the cross. “No, and why should I? It’s just that I’ve heard something about him from the old folks in the village....” But then it came out by itself that they used to whisper that he was a defrocked priest who had escaped from a monastery after having stolen and set fires. I was horrified at such crimes and asked her if she knew for sure, if there was proof. “No, not really, it’s what they used to say. But with that face he could have done anything....”
“So you knew him....”
“No. I saw him in a picture done by a painter friend of his. The Contessa’s steward showed it to me. That beard, those teeth.... It gives me the shivers just to think about him.”
Nonetheless I was convinced she knew much more and didn’t want to talk about it because of some silly fixation. I felt them too, those shivers, but at the same time my desire to know more about the Dane grew steadily stronger while I persisted in thinking that Maddalena’s information was questionable. Perhaps the Dane was not at all like she said; it was just that the petty village folk had slandered him outrageously, maybe only because he came from somewhere else and they knew nothing specific about him. A strange face didn’t justify supposing that the owner of that face might have committed every sort of crime. Perhaps the Dane had been merely a sad man whose past held painful secrets. My intense desire was that I too might have the good luck to get a look at that portrait. It would probably tell me something very different from what it had suggested to Maddalena....
The steward’s house by the Contessa’s Villa was very far away and merely to get there was a major problem. Even then, gaining entry would be a forbidden enterprise that I didn’t even dare dream about. It was a huge red building with green windows and a portico with arches in front, from which came constant whinnying of horses and barking of dogs. The cortile and the
braida
were surrounded by a wall. No, the steward’s house was a veritable fortress; never, never, would I be able to get inside. It might even be simpler to penetrate the Villa, whose multitudinous windows were always closed, as if nobody lived there. In general there were never any signs of life. Only once had I caught a glimpse of an old man in the park trying to even out a hedge with huge scissors. At the end of the drive was an enormously heavy and rusted gate that gave the impression no one would ever succeed in opening it even if the chain were taken off.
The Villa attracted me, but at the same time I was a little in awe of it because it too was the subject of scary rumors. I had heard talk about a shooting many, many years ago, in which a young man climbing the wall in the middle of the night had been killed by mistake. Then sometime later, that the victim hadn’t been a burglar but a poor relative whom the proprietors were ashamed of and had therefore kept in the house as a servant. No one knew who had fired the shot and the affair had yielded a plentiful harvest of gossip.
The Contessa lived there alone, inside. They said she had aged with dreadful rapidity after the night of the shooting and that from then on she had never gone out. I imagined her as a restless shadow, her skin like parchment, wandering through the Villa’s empty rooms, and when I heard the stories about that place, told differently every time (the only constants were the shooting, the death of a young man and the solitary old age of the noblewoman), it seemed to me that it wasn’t a question of specific things and specific persons, but simply the stuff of legend.
Once I saw that I couldn’t get any more out of Maddalena I began to question the old people of Ontàns about the Dane. But all of them said they knew nothing about him, or else made vague gestures as if to say it was an old old story, already dead and buried. Thus, in a subtle way, I began to perceive the Dane as a slippery unattainable figure. The things I was looking for were apparently protected by a veil which wouldn’t be torn, or by sorcery which could make them disappear, as if they themselves were but tricks of imagination.
I had a fear that one day someone would say to me: “The Dane? But he never existed.... He’s a fairy tale invented by Luca and Maddalena....” Or even: “Yes, there used to be a Dane in the village, but he was just a poor devil who dragged himself from one tavern to another to beg for a drink that the customers would buy him just so they could see him drunk. He used to tell a bunch of tall tales.” It was a remote fear, a dark possibility I thought about only because it seemed basically too good to be true that I might succeed in finding exactly what I was looking for.
Nonetheless, and despite everything, my hope remained intact. With time, not so much because I deserved it but more because of the natural tendency of things to explain themselves, I managed to find out quite a lot, both about the Dane and about my family, and it was fundamentally a matter of the same thing. Sometimes it was I who asked the questions, other times it was Maddalena who would bring up the subject, especially when her anger was aroused.
Once she let on that my mother had been “a headstrong girl with no sense at all;” another time that “she’d stand there waiting for manna to rain from the heavens and once an idea took root in her head nobody could remove it.” Even though time had passed since she had admitted the main thing, that is that my mother was dead, Maddalena still seemed unwilling to talk about her, because of some undecipherable resistance I still intuited vaguely, at least once in a while.
Nevertheless one evening when I hadn’t asked her anything she launched into an unusually lengthy discussion about my mother: “It’s just that she was naive, more than anything else, just naive. All a man needed to do was pay her a compliment, hang around her for a bit or give her some silly present and right away she’d melt like butter over a fire.” Maddalena thought she hadn’t known how to say no. She couldn’t find in herself the strength it takes to resist someone just a little, to create between herself and him that minimal barrier necessary for survival.
I asked what she looked like. “Like you. She had black hair, a thin nose. She was very tall. To me she seemed to live in this world like a sleepwalker, and nobody was able to wake her up. Nobody....”
Thus my mother began to take shape, to come out of the indistinct world of shadows, dreams and thought where she had lately been for me. Although I had accepted the idea that Maddalena wasn’t my mother this didn’t mean that I had consented to the idea that my mother was really dead. How could somebody I had never known be dead? Somebody who, for me, had the same validity as, what should I say, as the Pied Piper of Hamelin, Andrée or the whale hunter Ishmael?
No one could tell me where she was buried and this too was convincing evidence. In the cemetery of Ontàns there was no stone that read,
“Here lies Lilia Bertoni,”
nor was there one in neighboring villages. I had gone to see for myself in my excursions.
I couldn’t find her grave because there was no grave that contained her, because my mother wasn’t really dead.
It was much easier for me to think that she had been involved in some exciting adventure. She could have been kidnapped by the men of a dirigible while she was alone in the
magredi,
where for miles and miles there were neither houses nor crops but only tufts of grass, prickly thistles and dry and blackish stones, as on the Russian steppes. I knew now very well that women attracted men, especially young and beautiful women; I myself perhaps, if I had had the King of the Air’s flying machine, wouldn’t have had many scruples about carrying off a beautiful woman, whom I would then have placated with presents, caresses and manly behavior both courageous and entertaining, in order to convince her to stay with me. Or else she had joined some group of wanderers because of a bizarre curiosity to see the world. Maybe later on she had even wanted to come back but was kept from doing so by some tangled situation like the ones in novels, or like the thousands of wrong roads and mirages that prevented Andrée from returning to his home.
However, now that Maddalena was talking like this to me I accepted the idea that my mother was really dead, most probably because Maddalena was somehow demonstrating that she believed me to be grown up and able to understand things like a man; thus I in turn should repay her confidence with proof of my maturity. Essentially, though, it didn’t change much in the way I thought about my mother. Accepting the idea that she was dead was only hypocrisy because at the same time I didn’t really believe in death. I was like the clever king in a fairy tale I had made up — a king who in exchange for a secret immunization against snake bites, which a merchant from a neighboring kingdom had sold to him, promised the merchant the sum he asked knowing full well that in his own kingdom money had not yet been invented. I had never seen a dead man, nor one who was dying, nor had I seen anyone grow old because my years were too few for me to notice the profound changes brought about by time. I had no direct experience of death: cemeteries, graves and funerals for me had the air of fictitious stage productions invented by grown-ups and weren’t sufficient to convince. Death therefore was a collective myth, an arbitrary and sinister fantasy much like the one about the call of the screech owl. All that was verifiable in that business was that once in a while someone disappeared, you didn’t see him around anymore, and people said he had died. But this was only a word. You might as well say he was on a trip or that he had been kept away by something stronger than he was.
At times Maddalena gave way to unexpectedly harsh comments about my mother, as if she nursed an ancient grievance toward her, which for the most part she managed to repress only because Lilia was dead. Once, for instance, she told me that she had died in the mountains in a sanitarium. “She could at least have let us know she was very ill, the whore! I would have rushed to her. I would even have forgotten what she did to me!” she concluded angrily.