Authors: Carlo Sgorlon
Since I didn’t know how to pass the time (obviously playing the flute now and then or looking out the window didn’t fill all my waking hours), I had become acutely sensitive to sounds. I attributed the distant hum to some activity of the old man, the blows of the axe to Red, the clinking of crockery and the squeak of the sewing machine to the Etruscan. For long moments the house would return to silence, as if everyone went to sleep at midday, and I would lie there listening, waiting for the sound that would finally break the stillness, as if the house were under a spell. I sensed a sort of anticipation of something about to happen that perhaps not only I myself but also the Etruscan, Pietro and Red were expecting, maybe without even knowing it. What it might be I didn’t know. And yet I felt that destiny was hiding in some corner of the house, waiting to amaze its inhabitants and myself as well by one of its surprise moves, as when it had brought me into contact with the Jewish photographer and the Dutch student, and then driven me toward Flora’s village....
Once I heard a sudden acceleration of sounds. My heart beat faster. I probably thought: “This is it.” The Etruscan entered the house with her clogs on and I heard the echo of her anxious rush up the stairs. Red had dashed in too and I heard his frightened muttering and the noise of his hob-nailed boots stamping about in the entryway. Even Pietro must have hastened up the stairs because I had heard the regular blows of his cane on the steps. Something strange was going on, there was no doubt about it. Probably it had to do with danger; maybe an avalanche or something of that kind was threatening the village. But I thought of other more fantastic or improbable causes too: a dirigible sighted emerging from behind the rocky peaks or a pack or wolves come down from the mountains or the arrival of a celebrity like the emperor from Vienna come back to visit his former possession.
At first I thought I’d get up, grab my canes and dash to the window or toward the stairs. Then I decided to do nothing: let the surprise come to me — that way the anticipation of strange possibilities would last longer. The commotion went on for about a half hour. I also thought I heard a sinister crackling and a noise like wind whistling through a knothole. A shock of recognition set my blood to tingling. A fire? I sniffed intently to see if I could smell smoke. Perhaps the joke of destiny consisted in driving me out of here too; after luring me so far away from home with its mirages, now it wanted to force me to end this unforeseen pause and put me back on the road to Denmark. Maybe before a week went by I’d be on my way again, limping along on my lame foot with my pack on my back, a homeless vagabond once more. Just as the Etruscan, even though she didn’t know it, had been modelled after the stone face of a statue or funeral urn I may have had my model in some mythic protagonist who roamed the earth without rest, like Ulysses or the Wandering Jew. I would have liked to think so anyhow because I had always loved those legendary figures and in that case I wouldn’t be the indefinable man, available for every possibility — I’d have a distinct identity. Maybe I had Gypsy blood in my veins. Or, more likely, it was simply the Dane’s blood rebelling against that of Lilia or my grandmother Elvira, both of whom had loved home and the quiet life.
After a half hour everything quieted down again. The Etruscan came into my room, the dark skin of her cheeks unusually flushed and her arms and hands still smudged with soot. “The kitchen chimney caught fire,” she smiled, “nothing serious. It’s all out now.”
She picked up the dishes from the bedside table and as she reached the door I had an urge to call her back and ask her name. But it seemed like a capitulation, so I resisted. She would have to tell me herself. I had made up my mind and there was no way I was going to change it.
This little episode stirred up the energy that had been dormant during my idleness. I got out of bed and seized the two canes, determined to try my strength, but after ten steps I went down in a heap: my feet were still like wood. Thoroughly discouraged, I stayed sitting there for a while on the immaculately clean floorboards. Then I dragged myself back to bed again (what humiliation if they had found me in that position!)
I had just gotten myself settled when Pietro came in followed at a certain distance by the girl, almost as though she felt some inexplicable reverence where he was concerned. The old man massaged my feet and had me move them several times, nodding his head in approval. He was pleased with himself since my feet were progressing exactly as he had predicted. Everything was fine. “Well, I’m not so sure about that. I tried to get up just now and fell flat on the floor.”
“Don’t worry about it. It won’t be more than a few days now. I’ve seen plenty of cases of frostbite....”
“Really? Where?”
He shrugged, as if to say it didn’t matter. Then he mentioned that he had been in Alaska during the Gold Rush, when prospectors would venture into impossible places without so much as a second thought, and then often find themselves in real trouble.
I kept watching the Etruscan’s eyes but they offered no confirmation of what I was hearing. They remained immobile. The old man paused, then recounted that once he and two others, a Pole and an Irishman, had gotten lost in a snowstorm near Point Barrow, a good bit north of the Colville River and had managed to stay alive by roasting bear flesh, covering themselves with the still-greasy and bloodstained bearskins and taking refuge in dark caves.
He didn’t go on. He passed his big hand over his hair and said it had happened so many years ago, maybe even before my mother was born and now it was all just a vague memory. “Tell me more...,” I begged. He raised his head slowly, then shook it and smiled. Then he approached a wooden chair in the back of the room and sat down, leaning his elbows on the arms. “If I were to tell the truth, I’d say it doesn’t even seem like it was me inside that greasy skin in that arctic cold. It’s like it was a story someone told me....”
“Please, just tell me how it ended....”
“Another time. You think about getting better now.... Think about getting better....”
He was already out of the room, still talking, so his voice faded away in the stairwell. I didn’t yet believe what I had heard. It had been like the pealing of golden bell, a mysterious rippling surge of latent energy, an awakening of sleeping images. Alaska, the prospectors.... This time, however, it wasn’t a case of boyish daydreams, but real events. Who was this man anyway? Where had he been, what had he done? He was surely very old but still strong and healthy. I even suspected he might have told me a made up story not to deceive me but simply because he had somehow (perhaps from the books or old maps in my sack) intuited my thirst for tales of adventure. But even admitting that it might be fiction the story filled me with a bubbling flashing euphoria.
It was an effort to calm down again. That night I lost myself in a muddle of labored dreams in which Maddalena appeared, and the man with the carriage who kept circling the cemetery, and the children in Ontàns who made fun of me because I had neither father, nor brothers and sisters, nor relatives, and Red was there and Luca, who perhaps weren’t two men but only one, wearing a heavy goatskin jacket and carrying a rifle slung over his shoulder. Many, many other things were happening to me, which I don’t remember, except for one, an obscure fact that sustained all the others and gave them a precise and exalted quality: that is, it was all taking place on the banks of Great Bear Lake, above the Arctic Circle.
Despite their confused nature, my dreams seemed so solid and specific that when I woke up it took me a while to orient myself and remember who I was, and where I was.
The valley looked bright and clear. From the bed I could see several old houses with their walls and long balconies lined with neatly stacked firewood, and lofts with decorative windows shaped like hearts or trefoils, from which bunches of hay protruded. Although they were very old, and worn and darkened by time the houses looked strangely vivid as if they belonged to a dimension of reality yet to be discovered.
Pietro did not return for quite a few days; however, I learned a lot about him from the Etruscan. He had been in many different places, in Canada, Siberia, Chile and still others she didn’t know about. What I heard reinforced my idea that it was all sheer invention. Come now, Pietro had never left that primitive lonely valley. Listening to her, I was thinking obstinately: “You’ve learned your lesson well. But don’t recite it to me. Do you think I don’t know anything about Alaska, Chile or Siberia? Do you think I never heard of the Gold Rush?” And I assigned her a runaway imagination, just as I had earlier endowed her with a fictitious stupidity. I pretended to be distracted as she talked about the old man, or asked instead about other routine things, in order to give an authentic facade to my simulation, but in reality I was listening with rapt attention and noting everything in my memory with constant starts of astonishment.
I was beginning to take my first steps, sometimes even without a cane. However, perhaps to provide yet another outlet for my histrionic temperament, I pretended for a while that I couldn’t walk by myself and still needed rest and assistance. There was a pair of slippers in the drawer of my bedside table, which I could put on and pad about in without the slightest sound. When I thought no one was home I wandered through the rooms and the hallways, plunged my curiosity into obscure drawers and closets and made some surprising discoveries. For instance, I found an instrument made of an extremely hard stone bound to a wooden handle with leather thongs to form a primitive ax. A strip of paper glued to it read “obsidian.” I had read somewhere that the Aztecs and Mayans used to make clubs out of obsidian and use them to beat the earth to make it workable, never having invented the plow. Was this then an Aztec ax? I found a necklace made of teeth (from a wolf? a bear?), a poncho of buffalo hide, a sealskin moccasin, brightly colored pebbles, a stone knife, gold buckles, clubs with drawings on the handles like miniature totem poles and a large gold nugget gleaming inside a quartz crystal. None of these things had been put on display; they were all hidden inside canvas cases.
I went from one surprise to another. It seemed to me that the house (certainly very old, with its stone arches and iron shutters) gave off an air of ancient civilizations, which I had always thought of in the same way I thought about fairy tales. But for me ancient civilizations were like fairy tales sumptuously framed in historical fact simply to make them more believable.
But an attic room held the surprise that perhaps pleased me the most; there I found hundreds of books in many different languages. On the covers of some, although the writing was Cyrillic, I managed to make out the name of the author: Leo Tolstoy. Only then did I realize how much I had missed books while I had been in bed.
One evening a tiny shriveled old woman came into my room. She must have been exposed all her life to a glaring sun that had dried out in her every humor and thread of fat, reducing her to a wrinkled chestnut with a face that looked both astonished and vague. She had an aquiline nose and slanted eyes. The Etruscan called her Namu, and always walked behind her, as she did with Pietro. Namu and Pietro would exchange knowledgeable glances now and then after examining my feet and moving them in all directions as if they belonged to a disjointed toy.
I feigned slight indignation at their taking charge of my foot as though they owned it. Actually this was a pretense to hide my surprise at encountering a woman whom I could easily imagine inside a tepee on an Indian reservation. She could only have come from America.
She was thus living proof that Pietro had been over there.
Both he and Namu continued to look at each other, and their eyes revealed their bewilderment that I wasn’t improving, when according to their experience I ought to be completely well. I was singed by the awareness that now I was really committed to pretending. I felt I had lost my freedom of action and had better find a way of behaving that would let me get it back as soon as possible.
Namu possessed extraordinary talents. She had seemed rude and awkward when she manipulated my feet; however, she had done this on purpose to find out to what point my feet were still sensitive and how I would react to unnatural and excessive movement. But when she spread a violet colored ointment on them and bandaged them her gestures were as light as dandelion fluff, like faded memories of the past caught somehow in the net of the present. An idea leaped into my mind: Namu must have lived centuries ago in Montezuma’s time and her bandages were destined not for me but for some warrior who had been wounded amid the cornstalks or American agave.
Her ointments made me feel much better even though I could already walk. Where, how had she learned to make them? “Curious boy, impatient boy,” she smiled, with her wrinkled lips, her skin like that of a withered apple.
As if to avoid discrediting her judgment I tried to find out more about her. I followed her around, went to visit her room, watched what she did. She slept alone in a tiny room on the third floor, whose windows looked toward the border. She made rounds to attend to the sick, and would try out her violet and blue ointments (kept tightly covered in small clay pots) when the doctor, who came from outside the village, threw up his hands and said there was no more hope. But she would begin her treatments only when those concerned requested them; otherwise she wouldn’t lift a finger, nor would she react in any way when people half mad and delirious with pain would shout at her: “What are you doing, you ugly old witch? Waiting for me to die? Go away, bird of ill omen, dried out stuffed owl!” She limited herself to wiping sweaty brows and then reapplying damp cloths. Only if the invective continued would she hide behind a door or curtain waiting to approach the bed again when the patient’s delirium ceased. She knew the art of midwifery too, although she had little chance to use it. Very few babies were born in the village. Almost all the men had emigrated; only women remained, along with old men and a few individuals too uncivilized to accept the idea of taking up some definite trade and working at it some four to six thousand kilometers away. Besides, whatever babies there were had been born to wild young girls as solitary as goats, who hadn’t been able to bear the loneliness and let a vagabond into the house one night.