Authors: Carlo Sgorlon
“O che bel castello, marcondiro ’ndiro ’ndello
o che bel castello, marcondiro ’ndiro ’nda.”
It was the same song I had heard my mother sing in the dream and had later transcribed in my first story.
Cretis and its valley could hardly be the theater of a great event but were more likely the place where such a thing had happened long, long, ago and now the children and Lia were hailing that event and recalling it in muted tones. Maybe my important moment had been when I met Flora or when Lia had invited me to sleep in her room; or it might even be connected to my encounter with Pietro, the most extraordinary man I had ever known.
He left me continually more astonished and disoriented. Sometimes he seemed a little vague or abstracted like Lia. I was convinced that was simply because his persona was sinking into remote ages. Sometimes he would appear silently behind me like someone who has forgotten an important item in a distant part of the world or is vaguely conscious of not having done something he should have, but can’t remember what, and gazes intently at others hoping to recuperate his memory in their eyes. I believed I could intuit so many unfinished things in his life, so many parentheses opened but never closed; I thought he was still subject to the spell of these things, which enveloped him in confused and barely perceptible whispers. Once in a while he would turn around suddenly, for no apparent reason, as though listening to something we couldn’t hear. I fancied he heard the voices of children or women whom the tangled events of his life had forced him to leave behind.
One evening we had gotten together in the windowless room at the center of the house. Pietro, seated in his big armchair, had read some excerpts from a Mayan poem, the only one left, he said, after the senseless destruction of that civilization. At a certain point he seemed to become confused, to founder as in the dark, and while the others looked at him anxiously, fearing the onset of sudden illness, I believed instead that it was just one of those moments when Pietro was most acutely conscious of being lost in the confused and infinite dream that he perceived as life itself.
When he walked and especially when he climbed stairs I noticed how his legs trembled with the effort to support his weight. It was the effect of age, but it also brought another notion to my mind. I always moved quickly; my legs were strong simply because I had lived only a little more than twenty years and therefore the network of my past had caught only insignificant trifles. I had sounded reality with the shortest of measuring sticks and was acquainted only with a thin and insubstantial layer of existence. If I had had the old man’s experience my legs would have trembled too because life made you drunk and whoever had tasted its depths couldn’t help but feel the effects as a kind of drunkenness. Pietro had been buffeted this way and that from one continent to another without any plan. No wonder then that he should end up with the sensation that his life hadn’t been something clear and concrete but rather a lengthy vision, which he recalled as a series of confused images. I couldn’t help but concur with a statement he had once made: “The past is only a long fantasy, which we revise as we wish, and which we dip into like a vast reservoir of dreams.”
His words revealed no desire to impress or amaze. Quite the reverse, he would have tended to say nothing, not even to open his mouth, to go on weaving and tottering along the last stretch of road left for him to travel, lost in the final mists of the grand drunkenness that had begun so many, many years before, even before the death of Napoleon. It was I who provoked him, who besieged him with questions and forced him to talk.
He always talked in a tentative manner, with a touch of melancholy, as if every phrase held an implicit memory of so many sad events, but these were memories devoid of any force, which belonged not to him alone but to everyone.
Besides, everything he said seemed to contain something that went beyond its literal meaning.
He would say: “Would you please pass me the V gouge,” in such a way that I caught in that insignificant utterance an echo of his sorrow for the woman he had loved near the Aral Sea and then lost when he went off to bring aid to the snowbound village.
His simplest words would somehow change into farewell greetings spoken by a man who embarks for Australia or America doubting he will ever return. Perhaps Pietro really was about to set sail himself, and he alone sensed the proximity of his departure, while we continued to think of him as still having a long, long time ahead of him. But now, after all this time I thought it might not seem like a final and definitive departure to him but rather part of a continual interminable one, because every instant meant some kind of separation and incipient farewell. When he passed from one room to another or from the fortress house into the courtyard he seemed to act like someone moving from Arizona to Alaska or from the Caucasus to Turkestan.
But there were moments when that impression diminished: when he was telling his stories. Often he recounted them as he worked, pushing his chisels with the palm of his hand or tapping them with the carver’s mall, showing an energy and steadiness his legs no longer possessed. We too, by imitation, went on working as we listened. On those occasions Lia left off doing housework to make something, usually laces, or perhaps the wicker baskets of various sizes, which she fashioned out of the peeled osier branches Red and I brought up from the plain in huge bunches. I felt that this work we were doing with our hands accorded particularly well with what we were listening to. Working with the knives and chisels seemed in fact to stimulate the old man’s imagination and increase his narrative skill. If he hesitated for a moment, unable to find the right word, the tap of the carver’s mall on the handle of the chisel urged him on and he would soon pick up the thread.
We all liked our work. Lia’s baskets, each with its two rings of colored wicker, were lined up on a table in the storeroom, fresh and creaky and ready to be sold. The same was true of our carvings, in which you could see the clean shiny marks left by every firm stroke of knife or chisel.
Once in a while Pietro would interrupt his work to finish a story with a gesture that fluidly traced the outline of an object or indicated the position of an animal or the despair of a man. He seemed to intuit our secret desires: for Red he talked mainly about animals and hunting, for me he told tales of exploration and the sea, for Lia he recounted love stories. In the summer he sat outside on a bench, or preferably in the big armchair of Slavonian oak now darkened by time, which looked like a crude peasant throne. The children who had spent an hour with me learning to read would often delay their return home, using every excuse they could think of, pretending they had to retie their shoelaces or looking for something among the cobblestones just to be near Pietro. They ended up sitting on the ground beside us to listen. They probably didn’t understand half of what he was saying but what did that matter? What they loved was the narration itself. Anyhow Pietro’s stories always included more than enough to arouse their sense of wonder and put their imaginations to work, perhaps even too much. Their shining eyes made it easy to see that visions were passing through their heads, one after another, and that they were continually transfiguring what they saw and what they had at hand. It was the same as when they played or when they had helped me with the carnival, of which nothing now remained but a few strings hanging from gutters: one night the wind had carried off the balloon, and afterwards nobody had been able to find a single trace of it.
Adults too stopped to listen to Pietro: mowers with their scythes on their shoulders and their whetstones wrapped in grass and stuck into the horns tied to their belts; or women returning, buckets in hand, from the fountain; or woodcutters dragging a trunk by a rope.
In summer, however, with its demands and diversions, there were so many things to do. The children would end up distracted by some game, the adults would remember a pressing task, and thus without speaking they’d raise two fingers in a parting gesture and take their leave. Pietro would stop for a moment to watch them. In the pause we could hear distant noises, the river, wagon wheels slowed by brakes, or the cry of a bird of prey. Lia suddenly squeezed my hand and I now knew that signal very well. She had sensed that a misfortune had befallen someone somewhere: a group of mountain climbers roped together had fallen, a flash flood had occurred, or maybe a village of wooden houses had caught fire.... Then Pietro took up his story again and I thought he had lowered his tone so that his voice suggested even more impassivity. Such moments reinforced my impression that he was a king in exile, abandoned by almost everyone and surrounded only by his most faithful subjects. I recalled great figures from history whose followers had abandoned them: Christ, for instance, left alone to pray in the garden while the disciples slept; or Caesar, who went to meet his destiny on the Ides of March and found himself totally alone, inside a circle of twenty-three raised hands holding daggers; or Columbus on the deck of the
Santa Maria
when his sailors stared at him with menacing eyes and contemplated throwing him into the sea....
I had now discovered beyond any doubt the nature of Pietro’s kingdom. It pleased me to mentally assign people fiefdoms and realms like an ancient emperor, not just because of my taste for such solemn games, but above all because it meant identifying each individual’s most outstanding characteristic.
Pietro was a king of stories, even though he had very few listeners.
Sometimes, however, I thought that his exile was coming to an end. I spun a series of fantasies, which hadn’t the remotest connection with the possible but related only to legend. Since Pietro was a king in exile it might occur that one day his exile would end, that a crowd of dignitaries and courtiers might arrive in Cretis, their arms loaded with damasks and brocades to reclothe Pietro in the symbols of his rank and restore him to his rightful place. I imagined that his rightful place was that of a great and famous writer; he deserved recognition and glory like Count Tolstoy or the author of
Moby Dick.
Journalists, critics, literary scholars, celebrated people of genius should all come to pay homage to such a major talent.
In the end Pietro might even stay in Cretis. It wasn’t necessary for him to move to some big city or capital to end his exile. Indeed his triumph would be more complete if his genius as a narrator were to be recognized right here in his own mountains. Was it possible that Pietro never thought or dreamed of some kind of success, some grandiose achievement like those I pictured for myself? That he was satisfied with three or four listeners like us, almost lost in the vast courtyard or the oversized rooms of the house?
At least he should write them down, these stories, so they wouldn’t be lost as quickly as he recounted them. When I told him that, he replied that nothing in this world was ever lost. I insisted. “Why worry about it Giuliano? I’d swear stories like mine have already been written down somewhere in the world. Or will be sometime....” According to Pietro it was perfectly silly to maintain that what we ourselves do is really ours in any personal sense. That view derived solely from our habit of looking at things from a minuscule platform. It was much more likely that we were following paths already trodden by others more or less in the same manner.
Autumn returned, the first snow fell; to me this was the truest season,
our
season. We began again to spend most of our time inside, as if something bound us to the house, something released from its walls and hearths, especially from the room where I had come home that evening and found the others singing. That room was the center of the house. We went there infrequently but when I thought of Pietro’s house my mind turned always to that room. Often I would stop to look through the windowpanes in its door at the big oaken chair or the smoke-blackened hearth where the fire had gone out, and I mentally hurried the time when we would gather there again.
Pietro was right to want nothing more than what he had. When we were inside that room singing or listening to stories it seemed to me that we had everything, that we represented a perfect musical completeness. The world didn’t matter anymore because we felt we were in a different dimension. The stories expanded the space, multiplied it, managed to include in it all that had happened to the old man, whether in the mountains of Turkestan or those of Alaska. The room became a magic lantern producing an endless sequence of images, or an enchanted crystal ball in which the infinite variety of the universe flowed back and forth. In that room I not only forgot the noisy static of my vaporous projects but even Flora’s very image or Lia’s subtle fears or the thought that time was passing and things were dissolving into an insubstantial cloud of dust. I began to understand in depth the resounding power of words and stories.
It was only when I came out of the room that I had the impression of living in a cocoon, in an embalmed half-sleep.
I realized that Cretis was a dying village, a village of old folks who didn’t dare leave only because of age and who considered it an antechamber of death, and of children who stayed only because they had not yet awakened to the possibility of going away.
But the youth went away. They needed novelty, excitement, life. They dreamed of working in a factory, of putting on caps and goggles to drive the automobiles or trucks they probably knew only from drawings they had seen once or twice in newspapers. Many of them began to busy themselves in the fields or stables or to learn to use woodcarvers’ or blacksmiths’ tools in dark rooms or smoky sheds, but their thoughts were far away, and as soon as they had put aside enough money for the trip they went off to seek their fortunes.