Authors: Carlo Sgorlon
I was so disoriented that I couldn’t even keep my thoughts on Maddalena as I ran. My mind wandered constantly, imagining the winds in the valleys and the waters of the river. The Meduna and the Cellina might also be in flood, with all the heavy downpours we had had, one after another these last days. It was dawn but the light was struggling to appear, night didn’t want to leave, and the sky was threatening snow with more and more insistence. From the path I saw a cart race along a village street, drawn by a white horse. Who could be out at a time like this, in weather fit only for wolves? All of a sudden I remembered Flora, her ritual when she saw a horse that color, and then wondered more than ever how I could think about things like that.
The doctor wasn’t home. They told me he had been called to the cottages at the edges of the very
magredi
that Maddalena thought she was crossing in her delirium. Fortunately I was able to borrow a bicycle and from then on I pedaled. Strips of fog were breaking apart around the scattered trees on the steppe, or along the rows of alders or poplars outlining the cultivated land, or were sliding from the hills, which looked very close, almost within arm’s reach. The wind was quite strong, but in my favor, and thus I seemed to be flying. The cold air entered the sleeves of my
stiriana
or the neck of my sweater, but didn’t succeed in numbing me. On the contrary I felt I had become a strange hybrid creature half man and half bird, carried by the wind. I had at other times tried riding a bicycle (bicycles were a major novelty in the village; only two or three people had one), but not so fast as this, with the wind behind me. Ideas ever more fantastic went through my mind. I imagined that at my return I would not find Maddalena but the Dane, decrepit by now and furiously asking the villagers what they had done with his relatives, accusing them of treachery, of lacking faith. “I promised to come back, and I’ve kept my promise, after fifty years. And I can’t even find one single relative....”
The doctor wasn’t in the cottages either, and I had to begin the search again, pushing on always further north, toward the mountains. Now I was frozen all over and so I stopped in a tavern to drink a shot of grappa, to warm my blood a bit, but when I went to pay I discovered I had no money. I looked at the tavern keeper, mortified. “Go on, go on kid. Don’t worry about it. You can have another if you want. This is terrible weather....” I thought I could hear in the distance the roar of the river waters, but perhaps it was only a trick of imagination.
Finally I found the doctor. He made me get into his caleche, covered my legs with the blanket, so frozen did I seem to him. I left the bicycle at a farmhouse, he knew everyone in our locality. “All right, all right, now we’ll go see Maddalena. But meanwhile you’d better be careful not to get sick yourself...,” he repeated. I was terribly sleepy, and to combat it I continued to think of strange things, to mull over incoherent projects, looking at the gray clouds and the desolate
magredi
that ran along at my right, without end.
At the noise of the caleche (we were still fairly far off), a black bird flew away from one of the attic-window ledges. I thought I recognized the harsh and rapacious profile of the hawk-like
pojana
but perhaps it was only a crow. In winter these birds of prey came down from the mountains all the way to the steppe. Luca rushed out to meet us, gesturing wildly with his arms and talking convulsively. “I...what do I know. I was here, all by myself. It’s so blasted far away from everything, this house — I couldn’t even call for help. I did what I could....”
We ran upstairs. Maddalena was leaning forward, her long hair falling across the sheets, her face pale, and her breast in peace. The doctor first took her pulse, then bent his ear over her chest. He even tried a mirror to see if it clouded over, looked to see if there was a pulse in her neck. Then he straightened up her head and arranged her as best he could. “Galloping pneumonia. Even if I had gotten here earlier there was probably nothing I could do. Her lungs are as hard as stones. The catarrh suffocated her....”
Luca continued to walk around the room agitating his hands and his shoulders, shaking his head and repeatedly saying no with gestures, as if he were defending himself from accusations, which no one had made, or as if part of him was convinced that he should have done something else. I remembered that Luca had never set foot in our house and for years had hung around it, not daring to approach. He had entered only to see Maddalena die. The doctor told us things we only half understood, wrote out some papers, and then left, holding out his arms in a gesture of dismay.
I tried to get Luca out of that room, to bring him downstairs to the kitchen and convince him to drink a glass of hot wine. He would go out for ten minutes, talking in spurts, then repeatedly go back into the room where the dead woman lay. Maddalena was still beautiful: her long hair surrounded her face in a disturbing way and I understood, I could imagine Luca’s distress. The wash hanging on the third floor terrace was flapping in the wind. Maybe there was more hanging on the roof — the last thing that Maddalena had done as a housewife.
Winter had unleashed its fury; the further north one went the worse it would be. Who could say how many ships were struggling at that moment against fog, waves and wind in frigid seas? Or how many screaming sirens there were or sailors’ gasping shouts or flooded holds or lifeboats being hurriedly lowered onto waves that bucked and plunged like wild horses....
I scolded myself for letting my mind wander again when there was so much to do, now that death had entered the house. Now I had it before my eyes for the first time. I would no longer be able to tell myself the fairy tale that death didn’t exist and that I could believe myself immortal, like Calypso or Tithonus. Maddalena’s death thus meant the end of an attractive but deceptive fable. But I thought about this without believing in it unduly, as if basically convinced that I had been right before, and not now. As if a fable always had to be true because such was its essential nature....
Later the village women came, along with Lucina’s mother and her three oldest daughters. It was indeed the four of them who took up all the space, especially the mother, who began at once to wail funereal lamentations at the top of her voice and literally took possession of Maddalena, ordering the others around, rummaging through drawers to look for dresses, acting with the same assurance she would have had in her own house. Whereas I found myself completely unprepared to face the event, she knew everything, every detail, of what had to be done.
Luca and I were chased out of the room. All we could hear or see was the doors slammed by the women going constantly in and out. One woman told me I could rest easy — Lucina’s mother was always the one to lay out the dead in the village, to visit the dying, to spend the night in houses where someone needed help because of a serious illness. She also treated pneumonia with boiling linseed oil, gave enemas, put on bandages, gave injections. I remembered as in a dream having seen Lucina’s mother somewhere, bandaging a wound, pressing out infected blood, her tongue between her teeth, with cheerful commitment, almost enjoyment. She was a woman with a yellowed complexion and straight hair, who always wore black, and was crippled to the point that when she leaned to her right that leg seemed to retract into itself as if there were a spring at her hip.
Several times I saw Lucina in different parts of the house, roaming through the rooms like an errant elf, her face reflecting perfunctory grief (she passed with rapid ease from a vaguely amused and pleased expression to one full of compunction and hypocritical sympathy), constantly and with relish devouring an apple or a piece of bread or cracking a nut with the heel of her clog, a nut taken from the pile Maddalena had saved behind the attic door. I thought uneasily that now that Maddalena was gone I would have a lot of trouble getting rid of the girls and also their mother. But for the moment I was grateful that they were doing all those things in my place.
Luca followed me everywhere, as out of place and lost as ever, until he couldn’t take any more of those people and made his escape, grumbling. I saw his coat show white among the bushes, then disappear. Thus he left me alone with Lucina, her sisters and the mother who laid out the dead, with night already fallen and the funeral vigil begun. The girls continued to wander through the house, all agitated and excited by the presence of death. Other people came for the vigil and from Maddalena’s room came mumbled prayers that never ended, as if being said over and over again. I didn’t go into the candle-lit funeral room. I roamed through the house, but always at a distance, up and down stairs and through hallways. Sometimes I too wanted to flee and even took a turn around the cortile, looking at the lighted windows. But I couldn’t escape as Luca had because this was my house.
An image kept coming back to me, the image of Maddalena walking through the
magredi
with her clogs in her hand, her feet bleeding from the stones, her hair in disorder. Her delirium was becoming mine, was materializing within me, turning into a chant and a dirge for a flight far far away, without a destination, almost as if the
magredi
were now as endless as a Siberian steppe.
Nor did I have any peace that night; perhaps it was my moving around that provoked the women’s indignation, as they turned and watched me from the open door, without ceasing to grumble their prayers.
The funeral took place the next day. Luca and I stood and watched from a distance, like worried spies, as the procession disappeared inside the walls of the cemetery, a black serpent still not tired of mumbling prayers. Not even in the ensuing days did I want to go inside the cemetery, yet I hung around outside it as if looking for something. Once I saw laborers at work in the little thicket of tombstones and white crosses. A man dressed in black stood among them and appeared to be giving orders and directions.
Luca and I were mutually attracted to each other in those days. We would meet near my house, he with his goatskin jacket and his gun (he would blow on his hands to warm them or stamp his feet on the ground) and I with my
stiriana
and woolen gloves. We took long walks together, following the footpaths, picking up dry branches, without saying a word to each other. Once he invited me to his house to drink something hot, but I refused.
I didn’t feel like lighting fires in the stoves and thus wandered from room to room bundled up in scarves and sweaters, and always wearing my
stiriana.
I ate chestnuts, walnuts, a piece of cheese or salami and often stayed in bed all morning reading books, my beard grown long; I was becoming uncivilized. One day, however, I got up very early because I had heard loud barking near the house and I was taken with the extravagant idea that wolves had come down from the mountains to the steppe, driven by hunger. I took the axe and went out into the cortile. Under the shed, leaning on a roof pole Luca stood motionless, staring at me as if I weren’t a human figure but rather a waving veil or an evanescent smoke.
As I had foreseen, Lucina, her sisters and her mother continued to come to the house. One day the old woman showed me all Maddalena’s dresses spread out on a bed. I couldn’t believe she had so many, even if they were worn out. “Signorino, they’re no use to you, and we’re so poor. Just think, I have seven daughters to clothe and feed....” I told her she could have them. “Thank you, signorino, thank you. Maddalena, God rest her soul, would be pleased....” She sought my hands to press them or perhaps even to kiss them (they were all terrible hypocrites) and I drew back disgusted, almost nauseated. I gave her all she could ask for, hoping she’d leave as soon as possible, and not come back, at least for a while.
Even though I had seen her dead, I couldn’t really make myself accept the idea that Maddalena was gone. She continued to live in a hundred ways, to be present still, because everything in the house at every instant reminded me of her. For a week the pillowcases and sheets flapped in the wind before I made up my mind to take them down; it was she who had hung them there to dry. If I picked up a book it would often remind me that she was the one who had obtained it for me. When I opened drawers I would find pieces of paper on which she had scribbled numbers and calculations in incomprehensible scrawls. One night I got up to close a banging shutter and made an effort to be quiet so as not to awaken her, as if she were sleeping in the other room. Only after I had absorbed the December cold for a moment or two did I remember that she was in the cemetery and nothing could awaken her. Coming home by the footpath with my clogs caked with mud I would take a long time to clean them on the wrought iron boot scraper fixed next to the door as if she could still scold me for getting the floor tiles dirty.
Since I couldn’t rid myself of the impression that she was still alive I began to spend as much time as possible away from the house, hanging around with woodcutters and poachers, attaching myself to vagabonds or vagrants — strange and above all restless people who wandered from one place to another as if the earth scorched their feet. Occasionally I would work and even make a little money, then spend it in a disorderly and disreputable way.
My desire for adventure had shriveled, mummified, or else had fallen victim to galloping senility. Everything around me seemed to be imbued with cold and dampness, to have faded and become unrecognizable. I experienced a sensation I had had before but now it was stronger and harsher, a feeling that in my surroundings there had been a festival full of attractions — ambiguous acrobats who had come from afar, splendid musicians and dancers — but that I had arrived late, after everyone else had already gone and all that was left of the festival now were shabby remains: trampled confetti, pieces of broken bottles, torn masks and a few drunks snoring here and there. Late. I had arrived too late.... Almost fifty years too late. I should have been at the festivities organized by the Dane, when he had carried off my grandmother Elvira, when the walls of the house had threatened to collapse like the walls of Jericho, and when they used to say in the village that everyone involved in these goings on was completely mad. Even with Maddalena I had been too late. I had never asked her to take me with her, not even after I had grown up. I had let her go while I continued to stay home alone like a lighthouse keeper, lost in a jumble of daydreams, and now I was discovering everything enormously late. Even the identity of the mysterious man Maddalena used to go to see.