Authors: Carlo Sgorlon
I felt an intense emotion on seeing a number of images of Flora. There on those sepia-colored cards the two sisters’ features looked strangely similar whereas they were really so different. The impression of difference derived not so much from appearance as from character.
The album was almost finished and I wouldn’t then have any more excuse to linger in Lia’s room. I tried to think of subjects I could talk about that might possibly interest her to the point of not realizing I had stayed longer than I should have. But nothing at all came to mind, and when the photographs were finished I continued to sit there looking foolish. I decided it was better to show the depths of my embarrassment and at the same time my desire to stay with her. From these things Lia could draw her own conclusions. “Now I have nothing more to show you...,” she said softly.
“It doesn’t matter. It’s nice to be with you even if there’s nothing to do.”
“You don’t want to go back to your room, do you?”
“Not really.”
She looked at me for a moment, rubbing her earlobe between two fingers. Then she went to the mirror, took out her hairpins and let her long hair slide down over her shoulders. She combed it for a long time, then began to undress slowly with such a natural air that I wondered if she hadn’t by chance fallen into some kind of odd absence-of-mind and believed she was alone. But the smile she directed at me as she turned around banished all doubt. “Lia, listen a minute....” I tried to get her to reflect. But she quickly placed a finger on my lips and prevented me from continuing.
That was probably the most unusual night of my life. It came naturally to me to compare her to Lucina and Flora. But with her it was very different. It’s difficult to explain. Lia was there with me, doing and saying things that revealed her presence (she confessed that she had been silly not to do it before because she knew I desired her, that it was time wasted for both of us), and yet it seemed as if her mind were elsewhere. Perhaps she had the ability to make present things remote because she paid no more attention to them than to faraway things. And for the same reason she brought faraway things closer and made them as concrete as if they were in the present.
We stayed awake for a long time. We heard the scarcely perceptible noises of the night: distant howling (“Pietro says that in the mountains near the border there are still wolves”), occasional creaking inside the house, a disordered scampering on the floor above (“I know the attic is full of mice but I hate to put out traps for the poor things no matter what Red says...”). A bit of light seemed to be filtering through the blinds and Lia went to see. It was the full moon, newly risen; it whitened the roofs and brought a sparkle to the icy arabesques on the windowpanes. “Aren’t you cold?” I shivered.
“Not a bit. I’d almost like to get dressed and go out. Look at the light; it’s almost like day....” She told me that one of her ancestors had been a sleepwalker, that one night she really had gone out in the middle of winter and yet hadn’t even caught the slightest chill. She too often experienced an intense desire to go out when there was a moon, as if her ancestor’s adventure was summoning her in an enigmatic appeal.
To me, however, it seemed that shadows more important than that of the other Lia hung over us. The shadow of Hermes, whom Lia wouldn’t have anything to do with but who hadn’t yet given her up (what would I do if I came across him some day, come to reclaim what belonged to him?) The shadow of Flora, who also might return unexpectedly.... Lia perhaps would be able to accept my loving two women, since nothing seemed to be capable of disturbing her. But Flora? And yet Lia’s serenity appeared to be communicating itself to me as well, because shadows and thoughts didn’t worry me.
Meanwhile I reflected that Lia had reversed roles: it wasn’t that I had entered her world. It was she who had drawn me into it and who had guided this affair from beginning to end, despite the fact that I had always believed her to be absent and passive, as if she would never lift a finger to modify the course of events. From that night on I slept in her room. Still she wanted me to bring down the bed from my room and set up Flora’s again in the fitting room; it must always be ready; she could return at any moment. This too apparently was part of the liturgy of the house.
It seemed that Namu, Pietro and Red were perfectly satisfied that I had decided to live with Lia, as if I had removed a source of worry and thus returned the household to a preestablished order. Now that I had taken Hermes’ place I would have to try to give back to Lia the child she had lost because I too was beginning to be fond of symmetry and ritual. When we were joined together in the silence of the night I would feel like telling her all this but then I didn’t do it, held back by obscure fears.
Sometimes waking up and seeing her tranquilly asleep with her bare arm resting under her neck and half-covered by her long hair I thought of the mythical women in the Bible or of the gods of Olympus. At other times I would see instead that she was awake, turned toward me, perfectly still and wearing a gentle and enigmatic expression dimly revealed in the faint reflection of the snow. Lia didn’t always close the heavy iron shutters because that way the house took on the gloomy atmosphere of a fortress. The walls were at least a yard thick and the shutters resembled the doors of an antique safe.
Pietro would mention once in a while that scores of barbarians and invaders had passed through the valley: Visigoths, Huns, Ostrogoths, Gepidae, Scythians, Lombards, Magyars, Slavs, Turks, Austrians.... Although Cretis was an out-of-the-way place, raiding bands sometimes came all the way up here and people had to defend themselves. Therefore the oldest houses resembled fortresses....
When he began to talk about such things I’d try my best to get him to go on. His voice so deep it seemed to issue from underground or from a cavern, Pietro would tell how the barbarians stopped to water their horses at the streams, how they pitched their tents along the banks and roasted legs of mutton over open fires in hastily thrown-up camps. He described their extraordinarily pale faces, still undarkened by the southern sun, their long blond hair and flowing beards, which sometimes caught and held bits of weeds and mud, their strong smell of sweat and horses. He included unusual but still realistic details, as if reporting what he had seen with his own eyes, recreating first-hand recollections of some of his infinite adventures. I ended up with the impression that Pietro was an ageless man. I lost my awareness that even despite his great age he did after all belong to a particular epoch and must have been born about the time of the Battle of Waterloo or the first rebellions of the Carbonari. With Pietro it didn’t seem important to distinguish between what he had actually experienced directly and what he had acquired through the experiences of others or through reading books.
He himself, as he talked, made no such distinction, acting like a man outside of time and without boundaries, as vast as a continent. I didn’t understand what made him this way, but I realized that this was indeed his nature. Every now and then he would make casual passing comments so singular that afterwards I brooded over them, trying to ferret out their secret meaning: “Everyone thinks he’s free to choose his own existence, but all we do is follow pre-established orbits.” Or: “We believe we live our lives as individuals separated from the rest. But it’s really life itself that’s living through us. We’re nothing but insignificant instants in life’s eternity.”
He didn’t like to explain these things and almost regretted saying them, as if they were so obvious they weren’t worth talking about. Or else useless because such things are lived and can’t be explained. Truth for him wasn’t something you could arrive at through the use of your mind (“We live in the dark, stumbling along in the dark”), but something you lived without realizing it. It was a matter of an obscure instinct in a night in which everything was dark. When a bit of light began to flicker in the darkness that was precisely when error became possible. Indeed animals never made errors. Only men did.
His calm manner of speaking gave his discourse an enigmatic consistency, a masterful density that harmonized completely with his existence.
Pietro would now stop to talk to me much more frequently than he had in the days when I first arrived. Perhaps he knew by intuition that this was the best way to keep me here, the antidote to neutralize my thirst for novelty. He told me about strange people he had met in all the corners of the earth: in the tundras of Russia, the high plains of Mexico, the desert of Arizona, the steppes of Turkestan; he talked about theosophists, adventurers, hunters, Central and South American Indians, Mormons, cattlemen, woodcutters, vagabonds, Gypsies, sorcerers, visionaries, snake charmers. He narrated in a simple concrete way and yet, I’m not sure how, he placed each event and each character in an attenuated atmosphere, as if nothing belonged to actual chronological reality but rather to the world of legend and story.
The more details he added, the more his narrative seemed to become a myth. Putting his stories together, I began to derive from them the idea that he had always been a man of the frontier. In all the countries he had lived in he had been at the boundary of civilization, where the houses ended and the cactus, the desert, the moss, the lichen, or the ice began. He had lived in the places where ordinary people went only when they were forced to, where all comforts disappeared, and a man had to rely upon himself alone. He had almost always lived among primitive people, with Indian, Eskimo or Asiatic women, and he often recalled them with muted affection. He pronounced their names sotto voce as if to bestow a last caress. He spoke of the children he had had with them (like the father of Lia and Flora) with happiness, because life had used him as a means to continue itself. But the stories about the women were always a little sad because he had almost always had to leave them behind. Or else they had left him to follow their own tribes, or because they belonged to another man who had come to reclaim them, or for other more elusive reasons associated with a mentality I couldn’t comprehend.
Sometimes he spoke of relatives who lived all over the world. Only very rarely did he receive cards or letters from them. The few letters they had exchanged had to be forwarded as they or he moved from place to place, and all this was very slow (at that time it took more than a month just for a ship to cross the Atlantic, and the mail was delivered by stagecoach, but only when there was a need, after a certain amount piled up). Often by the time a letter arrived at his address Pietro had already moved on and recommenced his wanderings. His brothers and sisters had stopped sending letters altogether, perhaps simply because when they thought about doing so they felt defeated before they started. Knowing there was scant hope a letter would reach its destination and being illiterate besides, they lost the courage to bother an intermediary to write one.
Therefore Pietro didn’t even know whether his siblings were alive or dead. And yet to hear him talk one would say that for him there was absolutely no difference between those two states, just as there was no definite boundary between the time before he was born and the times he had lived in. And yet it was neither a matter of indifference nor of lack of affection. In fact if I really thought about it there was no real difference because all the proof Pietro had that his brothers and sisters ever existed rested in the images he remembered of the family before it was dispersed. Their lives and deaths couldn’t be real objective facts to him because they were not connected to specific sensations; they were merely the fruit of his thoughts or feelings, since he could imagine them as either dead or alive according to his state of mind.
Besides, when Maddalena died hadn’t I myself experienced the same difficulty in believing she was dead because she went on living in me? And wasn’t her passing still somehow incomprehensible and unreal even though it had happened right there in my own house?
When Lia listened to her grandfather’s stories her face was full of wonder. Sometimes she would stroke her own arm or knee, other times she would hold my hand, glancing at me now and then, flushed with emotion. If she thought the others were watching she’d quickly let go of me, for being observed triggered her shyness, and she felt that even the most innocent effusion between us should not occur before witnesses. It didn’t matter at all that the others knew about and approved of our relationship.
But if Pietro’s stories went on for too long Lia, although against her will, began to yawn, only realizing it after the fact. “I’m sleepy. It must be late. But I honestly don’t want to go to bed, I want to listen,” she’d say in a low voice.
But Pietro would stop because he too was sleepy. Anyhow by this time the night was no longer young and not only did it seem like bedtime but almost time to get up and wait for dawn. The warmth of the fire and the glass of grappa we had been slowly sipping increased our drowsiness and our thoughts of bed. We would let the fire die on the hearth and each one would go off to his or her own room.
Sometimes Lia would already begin kissing me in the dark hallway. Finally she could give free rein to the affectionate nature, which she had restrained because of the presence of others. Then as soon as we entered our room she’d undress and look in the mirror at her full breasts or her hips and say,”I think I’m beginning to get fat.”
“You aren’t the least bit fat. You’re just fishing for compliments....”
“No, no. Don’t you know? I understand men even if I do live up here. Men watch their women carefully, and if a woman lets herself go they run off looking for someone else....”
I believed, however, that rather than potential jealousy (a feeling that was too individualistic and aggressive for her) she was expressing her infantile narcissism and ingenuously repeating what she had heard people say in order to give herself airs as a mature woman.
Then she would lie down beside me, hugging me for warmth and offering herself with tranquil docility, as though she weren’t a woman at all but a fabulous animal for whom making love involved only instinct and nature and never rose to the level of intellectual complications. Everything was extremely simple for her. I was her man, she was my woman and that was all. But I, on the contrary, knew that in reality things were quite a bit more complicated than that....