Authors: Carlo Sgorlon
Even though I wasn’t an attentive observer I still felt that something in the village was weakening, diminishing, dying out. Departures occurred almost surreptitiously; often the one who was leaving didn’t even say good-bye to his friends, as if at the last minute he were inexplicably reticent about letting people know what he was doing or as if there were something shameful about it, like abandoning one’s post on a ship or a firing line.
Still, every departure confirmed my notion of a steady day to day disappearance. A similar thing was also happening in Ontàns and although one village was on the plain and the other in the mountains both appeared to be linked to the same destiny. I derived from my observations a definite and increasing awareness, but since it was for the moment only a personal conviction I began to study Pietro, without asking him directly, to see if he shared my opinion. It might even be that this same feeling formed the basis of his melancholy, of his bewildered slowness. He had a much more profound intuition than I did, and I was only beginning to notice things (since age had matured and sharpened my insight), that he had sensed long ago and already weighed in the balance of his existence.
If the same thing was occurring in Ontàns and Cretis that meant peasant civilization was coming to an end, and Pietro and I belonged to something that was slowly sinking out of sight. I had read about places progressively sinking because of diastrophism, like the islands on which Venice was built, for example. Perhaps it was as if I, the old man, Lia, and the others were living in an area that was slowly settling until one day it would disappear without a trace....
I had always lived either in the country or in the mountains, far from factories, smokestacks or busy streets; therefore I hadn’t had many opportunities to notice that peasant-artisan society was vanishing and being replaced by a civilization based on manufacturing and motors. Nonetheless it was easy even for me to imagine that automobiles would become more and more numerous until they took the place of carriages and that trucks would likewise supplant wagons pulled by horses or cows. The world I loved would vanish and in its place would appear one to which I was indifferent. Who could say whether I might not have been drawn to Cretis by a profound instinct, like the one which guided Pietro or Lia, and while I was ostensibly searching for Flora or the Dane I was really trying to avoid detaching myself from those places where one could yet live in close contact with nature and it was still possible to believe in stories. By now I had intuited the close link between Pietro’s stories and the fact that he worked with knives and chisels carving wood. Artisan or peasant culture and the telling of stories seemed meant for each other.
If I had understood these things, that meant I had acquired Pietro’s mentality. If I were beginning to believe my steps were guided by something powerful and infallible, then I had gone completely over to his side and my youth was over. This thought aroused an annoying and strident anxiety, and I felt I had descended into a shadowy area, into a mysterious eclipse. When the old man ended his narrative, when we came out of the “story room,” I felt a need to open the shutters and the iron gates that centuries before had been kept closed for days and weeks during invasions, to keep off hunger, fear and death. Perhaps as Pietro talked other undefined monsters were put to flight by his words: the fear of death, of time passing, the weary wait for what never came, the thought of what was disappearing; because the word was magic and potent.
Or was it life that was exiled, and were Pietro’s words lifting us into an enchanted stagecoach to take us to a place where reality no longer mattered?
In flinging open doors and windows I seemed to be escaping from a powerful fascination as if I were in danger of turning into a statue of salt, of being bewitched into entering a treacherous cloister where the gray monastery walls would close me inside rules as frigid as ice. I felt the risk I was running, from which no one was trying to save me. I knew that Pietro would never urge me and Lia to leave Cretis, even though we were young and had the possibility of beginning life again in a place that had a destiny, because basically he did not believe in the future or the past and maintained that history itself was a sequence of muddled dreams, which acquired form only in the telling.
Everybody and everything led me to pursue these paths to the end. My heart was clogged with opaque fears. My entire environment took on a sphinx-like quality which, like the Pied Piper’s flute, drew me further away from reality toward perdition. Lia’s gentle beauty, ready to satisfy my every desire; old Namu, who looked at the world as an immense amulet in which to search for the face of God; Pietro, who saw no difference between dream and reality — all seemed organized to lull to sleep whatever rebellious or turbulent vitality I might still have. So what could be done? If I continued to stay here longer the trap would snap closed and I’d be caught forever. I was a man teetering between two equally attractive versions of reality rendered equally unstable by my suspicion that they might both be mirages. Deciding between them terrified me. And yet I knew I had to choose because Cretis was not the result of any decision I had made but rather of destiny. Perhaps the real game was between me and the Great Gambler who had filled my life with his fascinating appointments. I had to decide quickly because otherwise my hesitation itself would be a decision.
When the balance tipped toward Pietro’s world it seemed to me that Lia’s grandfather continued to be a frontiersman even in Cretis, that he was still carrying out his mission. He had to guard the threatened world of storytelling and bring myth back into a world in which the soot from smokestacks and the noise of automobiles were putting it to flight, and people were beginning to believe only in machines and factories. I was sure that in many of the Jàsnaja Poljànas of this world, in the Russian steppes or the deserts of Arabia, on American plantations or in the Danish lowlands, numerous Tolstoys, be they illustrious or obscure, famous writers or unknown storytellers like Pietro, were in their own particular way defending a dying civilization.
Tolstoy (I happened to read it in a newspaper) had died a few months before and Pietro would die before long. Nonetheless he continued to hang on, to obey an order that no one had given him, an order to behave with unfaltering dignity as the exiled king of stories.
I wondered sometimes if the Dane had been merely an adventurer and a hedonist who, like a capricious god, loved only the present, or whether he too was given to storytelling, like an obscure Tolstoy of ships and the sea. I instinctively preferred the second hypothesis, hoping at the same time that something of him had passed into my veins....
After the evening when I had noticed that Pietro’s voice was strangely tired I became aware that he was dying. He walked more slowly, the trembling of his legs increased, and he didn’t take a single step without his cane. Sometimes he no longer had the strength to turn the lathe and entrusted the work to me. His gestures appeared more and more to belong to an archaic civilization, which had mysteriously surfaced in the present like a relic, to bear witness to a vast ruin.
One evening I found him in the armchair tracing circles with his cane in the cooled ashes of the hearth. I asked him what he was doing. “What do you expect me to be doing? I’m dying,” he smiled.
“Well then so am I and so is Lia and everybody else. Everybody who’s alive is dying,” I replied.
He left off stirring the ashes. “For me it’s different. I always used to move around in the world. Now I’ve put down roots. I’ve come to a complete stop. But for me stopping means dying,” he added mysteriously.
I now also did his share of our work, which a wagon-driver came up from the plain every now and then to pick up. The less Pietro worked the more he seemed to reflect. His stories became ever more halting and fanciful. I asked him when and how he thought them up. “Mostly when I dream,” he said. According to him we ourselves didn’t think or invent but an unknown force thought and invented through us; we were only instruments by which it revealed itself. I almost never asked myself any more if what he recounted belonged to the territory of his experiences or his fantasies. I had known for quite a while that for Pietro life was simply an immense reservoir of appearances into which anyone could dip at will. I knew everything was illusory for him; everything was enchanted appearance like an iridescent bubble, or the tail of a kite drifting in infinity; joy and sorrow, love and death, were nothing but shadows projected on a mysterious screen. But nobody understood the nature of the screen or the magic lantern or the source of the light; nobody knew which was spirit and which material, whether they were one entity or two, or how they flowed into one another. For Pietro material was merely spirit that had dozed off and was waiting to be awakened and spirit was material that had climbed out of sleep and become activity. Life was only a disjointed fable, which someone recounted in our ear and we kept on listening to because we couldn’t resist its attraction; it was an illusory tunnel of marvels, which Pietro had passed through like an enchanted voyager, allowing himself to be drawn to everything but bound to nothing.
He felt a great sympathy for men, and apparently understood all their sorrows and all their illusions. He saw them primarily as beings captured in mirages they could find no way out of, as creatures frightened of death and tormented by an obsessive desire to fulfill themselves, by the idea that they had to accomplish some indeterminate task before the story ended.
He looked at me as he said these things, as if he knew full well that I too was like the others. Without lifting a finger he could at any moment recreate the cage from which I was trying to escape, as though it were a matter of a poisoned charm. It was as if he had shut me in a chicken coop and convinced me it was a sumptuous palace. I vacillated continually between those two perceptions as though something was constantly magnetizing and de-magnetizing my capacity to see.
I thought his methods were more underhanded than in the past because he wasn’t trying to persuade me. Besides why would he do that? For him it was merely a matter of exchanging one fairy tale for another. He left me completely free to choose. My cage was a golden one with doors wide open, from which I could escape by a simple act of will. It was entirely up to me. All I had to do was recuperate my old ideas, the ones I had held as a boy, when I believed the world was full of surprises as fresh as huge strawberries hidden under wet leaves, that it was an unknown territory where mysterious appointments and magnificent feasts took place. I would have to go back to thinking of myself as predestined, like one of those youths in ancient legends who had to accomplish some important deed. But the price of all this was an exhausting effort of imagination whose results were very mediocre. I was a Percival who had begun to regard the existence of the Holy Grail as dubious, as a fairy tale whose substance dissipated little by little as time passed.
I knew that feeling very well. I understood precisely how something inside us could be gradually transformed from certainty into legend, appearance and smoke. I continued even to believe I was a privileged individual, but vaguely, as though the matter had lost its present relevance and entered a phase of dull and deadened waiting. Perhaps what I was mainly trying to do was to distance myself from that idea itself, to confine it to the past so that, no longer having anything to do with the present or the future, it would lose all power to cause suffering.
I had gone back to wandering in the mountains and valleys when I had a little free time, although winter had now returned and I was forced to find my way through endless cold and snow. But these excursions were not like my earlier hunting expeditions with Red or by myself because at that time I was always expecting something remarkable, whereas now I was perhaps more than anything else trying to declare my independence from Cretis, to prove I could jump off the stagecoach, or break out of the cage and fly away if I wanted to.
It seemed to me now that Pietro was moving and talking on the other side of a curtain even farther away than before. I saw the weakening of his vital force as a dissolution of what held together the thousand stories of his life.
After his death they would fly off and disperse into the air like a cloud of butterflies released from a net.
But they would survive him as if they were endowed with a life of their own. In fact many of them would survive in me.
Thus I came back to the belief that I was the old man’s heir and that among the many actions he had performed in my presence there had also been an investiture, a passing-on of his mission.
And yet I couldn’t manage to think of my future as anything but free, and I experienced a profound urge to run away, a reaction to the subtle impression that my idea of the world was falling apart and the earth was turning into desolation like a wild deserted heath. Maybe the full and joyous day existed but I would get to the appointed place when it was already past and forgotten. I returned to the thought that by some cryptic fatality I could only hope to attain finite things.
I saw myself again as the quintessential latecomer.
Giuliano was the one who was fated to arrive too late, sometimes just a little too late, sometimes forty years too late as in the case of the Dane’s festivities.
In moments of most acute melancholy I went even further and shuddered to think that perhaps those festivities hadn’t even existed. Perhaps the guitars at the Dane’s parties had been wood without strings and the players had moved their arms and hands only to placate Daniel Wivallius’ taste for mystification and had never done more than create the illusion of a music never played. Maybe the parties I had thought Maddalena attended, while I stayed home envying her good fortune and imagining that someday I would go, perhaps they hadn’t existed either. Maddalena had been naive and deluded too. Only the galloping pneumonia, which left her lungs as hard as stone, had been able to force her to stop playing tricks on herself. And Andrée in the midst of his polar ice had been merely a desperate man suffering with cold, his mind filled with visions, which were the prelude to death.