Authors: Carlo Sgorlon
I too was living a double life. As soon as I came out of the decisive phase, convinced that I had to resolve things, make up my mind, finish something, I would begin living like a bewildered vagabond for days on end. I would be afflicted by a curious impatience, an absolute incapacity to stay put, to do what I was supposed to do. It would seem I hadn’t really lived yet; that I had merely been waiting for something that was going to begin and I didn’t know where or when; that I was stupidly wasting my time while far away, in unidentified places, important things were going on without me, things I would like to participate in.... My restlessness grew so intense that I ended up throwing aside all my schoolbooks and giving up for good the idea of taking the final exam just when I had it within reach.
I found something magnanimous in the idea of giving up, now that I had almost made it. Only individuals like Alexander the Great, or Caesar, or Andrée would have been capable of a similar renunciation. I convinced myself I had something else to do, that my destiny was different, that I couldn’t waste my time on things as insignificant as exams. Sometimes I saw my attitude as stupid foolish pride but I didn’t change it.
Maddalena, seeing me so indecisive, restless and uneasy, didn’t even urge me anymore to study, for fear that I would resent her and on sudden impulse go off somewhere. Her fears were well founded. I sensed that something was calling me ever more clearly and imperiously but I felt a kind of panic because I couldn’t manage to define those demands or determine where they were directing me.
Once in a village piazza I saw a photograph of Flora on display. An itinerant photographer had taken it, a little Jewish man whom she had met in Venice. She had told him that she was an artist’s model, had confided her hopes of joining a theatrical company, seemingly euphoric and very sure of herself despite her refusal to let him ask her more specific questions. Possibly because of an atavistic instinct for reticence the Jew told me nothing about his particular relationship with Flora. But it didn’t take much to figure out that she had rewarded his discretion, his evident sympathy, in her own extravagant way, with a woman’s generosity.
The episode was enough to reawaken my old impetuous feelings. If at that time I began to go around looking for a way to make money, it was basically because if I wanted to track Flora down and live with her money would be indispensable. I started going to bigger towns, spending time in bars, cafes, taverns, disreputable places. I got to know people who lived on the fringes of things and seemed to take no notice of society because they were completely caught up in a chain of shady dealings. They had me transport bottles of illegally distilled grappa, gave me mysterious packages to deliver through windows with heavy iron bars or hide in abandoned hen-houses. Afterwards I pocketed the money without batting an eye.
I was willing to hang around these odd characters only if they had unusual stories to tell, if they had emigrated, if they had dug for gold in Siberia, or crossed the Atlantic as stowaways in rusty freighters or had captured ostriches in Patagonia. Sometimes their stories, although full of incongruities and clumsy invention, interested me as much as the adventures of Ishmael, or maybe even more.
Frequenting those people I felt like a kind of aristocrat who was living like a Gypsy or an outsider to society simply because of a taste for adventure and secrecy, someone who had abandoned a palace to which he could return if he wanted even though recovering it involved the risk of a laborious search, since he had forgotten where it was. But of course going back also meant taking up a royal destiny once again. I didn’t know what I was waiting for, why I wasn’t going out to search instead. Whatever I did I was still accompanied by a sense of the insubstantial, as if all I was living didn’t possess sufficient weight, was not concrete or solid enough to line up in the series of real events.
I ought to set about tracing Flora. The fact that I had met the Jewish photographer was a clear sign from destiny and by ignoring it I became guilty before destiny itself.
Anyway, now that I had tried out my ability to make money and live independently I felt more sure of myself. Indeed in this matter I had much more imagination than those with whom I came in contact. It was just that I couldn’t find the courage to leave Maddalena, who now seemed always to be spying on me, looking for a sign that might reveal my intention to abandon her. She seemed to be in the midst of a mysterious female crisis. She often became melancholy, talked to me in a strange way. She told me that when she got old she would go to a hospice so as not to be a nuisance to me and that even if I didn’t find the time to visit her it wouldn’t matter; she would understand. I pretended to get angry: “Why are you talking to me like this? You’re really being silly!” But she replied that it was natural. The old had to step aside and she didn’t want to be a bother to anyone....
And yet she was only a little past forty and still a very attractive woman. Stewards, livestock dealers, landowners who were getting on in years continued to hang around her, but she defended herself angrily, put all her attention on keeping them at a distance. The few who had tried to come to the house were forced to withdraw in a hurry, pursued by a torrent of sarcastic comments. Everything about Maddalena attracted men: the way she walked, her shapely figure, her low-cut dresses, and above all that air of carnal sympathy that emanated from every trait of her person.
One day, coming home, I found her in a rage over nothing, her face all flushed, her eyes wild. She was wandering through the house all excited, her hair in disorder, and wearing three shawls. I asked what was the matter. “I’m upset at you, if you really want to know. Why don’t you take your exams? You have to finish your studies; otherwise what will you do with your life? You don’t even have any land to farm....”
She seemed all worked up for a quarrel and indeed we had other arguments about totally insignificant things. She reprimanded me for my roaming, for getting mixed up with riff-raff, for filling my head full of foolishness, and at one point she even brought up my having that mad girl, that little whore, that Flora, here in the house at all hours of day and night. “At least leave Flora out of it. Why do you have to have something against everybody and everything?” She stopped yelling and her rage began to find its outlet in a formless disconnected grumbling that was perhaps no longer directed at me but at some other invisible adversary. Something that I couldn’t understand had upset her. I supposed that she had had a fight with the man I assumed she was involved with and that they had broken up in a stormy confrontation. However, this turning to an unspecified adversary only intensified an attitude she had always had. Maddalena was forever in some kind of argument, either explicit or implicit, and not just with me — with Luca, with the Dane, with my parents, but also with unindentified antagonists or maybe simply with destiny.
Toward evening she said she really wasn’t feeling well and went to lie down on her bed. After a half hour, no more, I went to see her. I was shocked. Her face was beaded with sweat, she was almost struggling to breathe. I told her I ought to go at once to get the doctor, but she seemed to be worrying about something else. In fact, after grabbing my hand, panting, in oddly turned phrases she revealed that many years before she had received a letter from the Dane. “What? Are you joking?” Or maybe it was fever, she was delirious....
“No, he really did write, to your father. It’s more than eight years ago now....”
The letter had passed through many hands, since there was no addressee: my mother, my father, my grandparents were already dead. Finally they gave it to Maddalena who, since she was taking care of me, had become the person with the greatest right to it. I seemed to catch in her words a troublesome remorse for having kept quiet all that time, or rather for having repulsed every attempt on my part to find out something about my grandfather. A letter from the Dane.... Concrete evidence of him, a message from him, was reaching me years late. Was it really possible? It was such an extraordinary thing that I couldn’t feel the slightest bitterness toward Maddalena for her silence. Very soon, however, that nearness, that possibility of unexpected revelations, was subdued by my conviction that Maddalena must really be very ill. Her fever was rising apace. I felt a bit lost, almost unreal, as always when I found myself facing serious and important situations, when life showed its most intense and dramatic face. “The letter is there, in the drawer, inside another envelope, an orange one....” She was breathing with effort. She must have put it there recently because in my searches I had never seen it.
Thus the Dane acquired importance again, returned to occupy a central place in my imagination, as had happened for Flora as well, when I had met the photographer. Life appeared to be an improbable stage where actors came forward, or disappeared in the shadows at the back of the stage, according to the unpredictable rhythms of destiny.
I read the letter with trembling attention, as an archaeologist would read a new manuscript of the Gospel, discovered inside an amphora in the sands of the Tebaide desert. The Dane’s name was Daniel Wivallius. To judge from the name he really was a Dane. The letter was very terse. The old sailor said he had given up the sea. He had settled on dry land, in the city of Aarhus, where he had opened an antique and curiosity shop. He asked for information about his son, invited him to join him.
Perhaps just because it was such an impersonal letter it seemed to me all the more enigmatic and intriguing. It permitted reading between the lines.... I pictured the Dane (I couldn’t manage to think of him as Daniel Wivallius) by now very old, in a dim room with a Nordic decor, full of antique globes, rare books, yellowed maps, navigation instruments from past centuries, models of sailboats and similar things. I saw his dark face, heavily lined as if the story of his voyages and his twisted adventures were etched there in occult signs. It seemed he must have infinite things to tell his friends and customers, to console himself in his arrogant unsociable melancholy, now that there were to be no more escapades and travels for him, but only the obstinate and raging memory of those that had been.
I shook myself. Maddalena was looking at me, her eyes very bright. I insisted on taking her temperature, which was very high. “Maddalena, I’m going for the doctor.”
“No, don’t. It’s just a bad case of the flu. It got cold too suddenly this year. You can go tomorrow morning....”
I obeyed. No doctor had ever walked up the steps of our house. Neither I nor Maddalena, for all that I could remember, had ever been sick enough to call a doctor; sore throats or diarrhea we had always taken care of in a haphazard way with some kind of herb or the advice of a neighbor woman. The idea that a doctor might enter our house seemed to me like the end of a happy state, almost the breaking of a spell.
I went to sleep but dreamed I was lying in an abandoned cottage, with cracks in the roof so wide I could see the sky and the stars; I felt a nauseous discomfort at lying in the mud. Mysterious waters were rising rapidly, as when flash floods occur in the immense
grave
of the Meduna.
I woke up at dawn, worried and upset. I put on a couple of heavy sweaters and went to Maddalena’s door to see if she was sleeping. A rattling disordered sound of heavy breathing came from the room. I entered without even knocking. Maddalena was sitting up in bed with three pillows behind her, her face congested, her eyes dilated. Her forehead was burning hot. From the way she was rolling her eyes it looked as if an insane confusion had been unleashed within her. She told me I was crazy for not running to get the doctor the previous evening, as I was wondering if I dared leave her alone now to go after him. Maddalena took hold of my hand when I asked her what she was feeling. She didn’t answer. She talked about my mother, my father, in a hectic rushed way, jumping continually from one subject to another. It seemed she had to run, to hurry to a railroad station (I didn’t understand where), and she didn’t know how to get there because she couldn’t find a caleche, nor anyone willing to take her. She was worried about a dress, her best dress (she had just ironed it), afraid it would get ruined in her suitcase.
I applied a wet cloth to her forehead, then tried to take the edge off the cold in the room by lighting the stove. We had never lighted the bedroom stoves and I had to work quite hard to get the fire started, while Maddalena’s delirium accompanied my anxious efforts. I noticed I was crying only when a drop fell on the wood I was holding in my hand. Nebulous family stories came back to me as though they were waking up from hibernation. Maddalena, who was in no way related to me, had always looked after me from the time I was tiny, whereas my real relatives hadn’t and some, like the Dane, maybe didn’t even know I existed. And yet I knew so little about her really, not even what she lived on.... For years I hadn’t truly taken her seriously, living mostly on my own as if she were off somewhere else where I didn’t have time to go.
Her delirium continued. Now she was running on foot, all alone, carrying her suitcase through the stony
magredi,
on the dry frozen grass, because she hadn’t found a single caleche. “It’s all right... alone, I’ll go by myself...it’s full of stones and stumps.... But how come it’s already night? If I left this morning it’s not possible that it’s already so dark. It’s so heavy.... Maybe there’s going to be a storm. I can’t even see Spilimbergo. I must be lost, and now it’s going to snow. It can’t be, it’s too cold....” I seemed to have entered a new place where I could see clearly so many aspects of Maddalena, which I had never thought much about before, which I had skimmed over as if I were going by in a coach at full speed, hardly looking out.
It was a dark day; the greenish sky promised snow. The closest mountains were a slate gray, all streaked; those farthest away were already white. I imagined the raging winds that might be howling through the gorges, as happened when we would forget to close the windows, creating air currents so strong they appeared to be shaking the house down. It had rained hard the last few days and the Tagliamento would be in flood, its dark waters roaring between the stones and under the bridge. Then I realized with intense anxiety that I was wasting time. I had to run for the doctor and in the meantime get someone to stay with Maddalena. I was lucky. On the path to the village I met Luca, who was wearing a goatskin coat over his fustian jacket. In a word or two I explained things and he took off at a run toward our house just as he was — his gun over his shoulder and carrying the game taken that night in a sack.