Authors: Carlo Sgorlon
Because of some quirk of memory the few hundred words I had learned as a boy from the Dane’s books popped up in my head again like flowers after the rain. My pronunciation left much to be desired but I managed to make myself understood. I also visited the Aarhus cemetery, hoping to find a grave marked Daniel Wivallius. But the whole time I was there (others around me had things to do and hastened about their business; I alone wandered in arid unhurried idleness, eating sausage and mustard bought on street corners) all my actions, all my words, my encounters with people, the salty smell of the sea, the spray, the boat-whistles — everything seemed familiar, like things that had already happened, because I had too often thought about and imagined them. I had no more desire to board the ships that were casting off or to sail the routes of the Baltic or the North Sea, or the seas that touch Iceland and Greenland, no more desire to peer through the fog in fearful anticipation of an iceberg, nor to see whales spouting as Ishmael had. I had grown up at last. Perhaps no matter what I undertook from that moment on I would have the sensation that it had already happened, and I was merely the means to relive it, the point of the steel gramophone needle replaying the ancient symphony for the umpteenth time. But of course. We were only ephemeral music recorded on a disc from a score, music that can be played over and over eternally; whereas we think we are the score itself and that with our death the pages will be torn up so the notes can never be repeated. But things do repeat themselves, come back always the same, reverberate like echoes, all resembling what happened in earliest times. It wasn’t absolutely necessary that I board those ships. A thousand men before me had done it (among others Daniel Wivallius) and a thousand would do so after me. I didn’t need to do it precisely because I knew it had already happened and above all because I felt as if I had already done it.
It was useless for me to go whale hunting because I had gone whale hunting when I read
Moby Dick
in the chilly rooms of the house in Ontàns. What were the thousands and thousands of whalers who had existed before and since Ishmael compared to Ishmael himself? Shadows, only shadows who had peopled the decks of ships in tropical or frigid seas, who had known fog and storms, who had felt the uncontrollable thrill when the lookout on the masthead shouted
“Thar she blows,”
who had risked their lives, thrown harpoons into hearts of sperm whales, forever performing the same gestures and experiencing the same feelings, in an unconscious eternal repetition, which appeared novel to each of them because they weren’t thinking of what had happened to others before them. There was but a single exception, simply because he had told the story. Dipping his pen in the inkwell of an incredible vitality he had created out of himself an eternal character with whom sooner or later all sailors on whaling ships could or would have to reckon accounts.
This was Ishmael, this was Melville.
I seemed to be on the road to a great discovery. I was completely certain that Ishmael was truer and more real than all other sailors of all times; they were only insignificant phantoms who had done nothing but reproduce an ancient pattern. Even I, I myself, was a mere shadow fascinated by myths and adventures. Through my imagination I would be able to live and recount all the adventures in the world, whereas to actually live them now would only generate a feeling of boredom and repetition. What an error to have come looking for the Dane! What a disappointment had I found him! He would only have been an old man full of rheumatism who dragged himself from one tavern to another or who lived in some miserable hospice and spent his time complaining about his troubles. Perhaps Maddalena had answered his letter so many years ago but her answer hadn’t brought him out of his gloomy shop in Aarhus, because in his bizarre senile delusions rusted sextants and old nautical maps were now the most important things in the world. No. I ought not to look for the real Dane up here in the houses or bars of Aarhus, but rather in Ontàns in the discourse and the memories of those who had created his legend, and more than anywhere, in my own imagination; my duty was to derive from those sources the eternal form, as Melville had done with Ishmael, by writing a story about him. This was my one true adventure. I realized that stories were the only thing that really interested me, and all the rest was only an extravagant dream without beginning or end. I no longer wanted to travel the world and involve myself in muddled adventures one after another, exposed to the caprices of destiny, because nothing new could come of all that.
I made an effort to recall the stories Pietro had told me and it seemed as if every one of them contained an overwhelming truth. I realized I too was meant to live outside of time like Pietro and Lia, and the only reasonable thing for me to do was to return to Cretis.
Years had gone by since I had left the village to follow Flora. Everything that had happened in the meantime was mixed together in a confused amalgamation concentrated at a single point inside a fortune-teller’s crystal ball and only with effort would I be able to distinguish one event from another in any kind of orderly and meaningful sequence. A long dream, a series of memories, which I wasn’t altogether sure I had really lived through....
I had to return to Cretis. I saw the necessity for that return so sharply and clearly that there wasn’t even any need to hasten things. Impulse and sudden decision were foreign to me now. More than anything else those habits had resulted from the period spent with Flora. They were no longer natural to me, and I liked instead to do things deliberately, after calm consideration. I stayed another couple of days in Denmark, watched ships come in and go out, stood on the piers breathing the salt air where the spray splashed up from the waves and old bearded men wearing sailor’s caps walked slowly back and forth or stood watching, leaning on the iron benches. I still wondered, but with diminished emotions, whether one of them might be Daniel Wivallius, but I asked none of them, not even just as an excuse to exchange a few words.
At last I boarded a train, one day when the sky was leaden with the promise of heavy snow. But maybe it wouldn’t snow after all. In the several days of my stay in Aarhus not a flake of snow had fallen. But I felt an acute desire for snow and snowy landscapes; images linked with snow were awakening in my memory because winter had returned and I, like a tree or a migratory bird, had been caught up somehow in the change of the seasons. I felt the seasonal cycle as an inner desire. It was struggling to free itself, still half-numbed and slow, linked as it was to my first arrival in Cretis, or perhaps it had existed even before that.
That desire accompanied me for the entire trip and began to be satisfied only when we crossed the Alps and it started to snow heavily, so heavily that the snow muted the sound of the train. Perhaps for me this was a trip backwards in time and when I reached Cretis I would realize that not even an instant had passed, that nothing had happened since I had left....
No, on the contrary. I had a premonition that changes had occurred. Of course Pietro no longer climbed the stairs or walked through the wide cobbled entrance to the fortress-house on his aged trembling legs. Death would have finally remembered him, would have noticed that he was a man from another age, born in the time of Napoleon and the Carbonari rebellions and would have retraced its steps to make up for that curious oversight.
My return to Cretis was far less adventurous than my first arrival. I now knew the way perfectly well. I got off at the station and simply walked straight up to the village. I headed for Pietro’s house at once, trying not to think about what kind of welcome I would get, what they might say about my being gone for so long and leaving without even saying good-bye. What would
I
say to someone who had behaved like that? I didn’t know. Maybe nothing, because I was never sure how to act and always saw multiple possibilities.
The door wasn’t locked. I entered without any noise. In the first room a surprise awaited me: there in the big wooden chair, his arms extended on the armrests, sat Pietro, as motionless as an archaic idol. I sought to contain my joy, to restrain myself physically. I didn’t even try to take his hand. “Pietro, I’m glad to see you, you’re looking well...and how are the others? And Lia, where is she?” I thought I heard a child’s shrieks. Pietro looked at me with absent eyes, as if he hadn’t understood my words, or as if they had dropped into his mind like stones in a pond, to sink soundlessly to the bottom without eliciting any response. Finally his lips moved, and I had to concentrate my attention on them to make sense of what he was whispering:
“Lia? You’re asking about Lia? Lia isn’t here.... She went away, she left a long time ago. Nobody’s seen her since....”
“Lia’s gone? No, no, that’s not possible. You must be mistaken, Pietro. You’re thinking of Flora. Flora’s the one who went away, a little before I did....”
But the old man shook his head and repeated the same thing again. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get anything more out of him. He was no longer capable of understanding. There had to be someone else in the house because Pietro couldn’t be living here by himself. Someone certainly was looking after him.... Indeed, on the third floor in a well heated room I found Namu and Red busy trying to dress a little boy about three years old, who was energetically squirming and kicking and seemed to consider this attempt to stuff him into a tiny pair of knitted overalls as the ultimate insult, calling for the most strenuous possible objection.
He was a pretty child with curly black hair and a proud determined look in his eye. I was instantly and instinctively on his side, even though I didn’t dare say anything to his two well-meaning captors, and I felt a resurgence of the old independent spirit that had sustained me during my own childhood. But that flash of light-heartedness lasted only an instant before I plunged once more into sadness over Pietro’s condition.
As soon as they noticed me Namu and Red stopped and stared, mute and stunned, as if they had seen a ghost come back from the world of the dead. “Why are you looking at me like that? Don’t you recognize me? Have I changed that much? I’m back to stay. I’m sick of traveling. But tell me, how are things here? I saw Pietro downstairs. He’s changed a lot.”
“Yes, he’s not the way he used to be,” said Namu slowly.
“And Lia, where is she? Pietro said she’d left. Did she go away with Hermes? Well, what about it? Say something!”
Namu gave up trying to dress the child and fixed me with her steady gaze of a woman from another time and another civilization. “He said she had left? Left with Hermes?....” She could only repeat my questions, as if a real answer, which had been habitual with us, with our perennial thirst for precise knowledge of the reality around us, was out of place and to ask for it was foolish senseless curiosity.
I had already repented my aggressive way of questioning her. Perhaps there had been no point in returning if I was still prey to such ugly impatience. In that case my reactions to the world were still the same. The atmosphere in the house appeared even more rarefied and shadowy than before. No one seemed to want to tell me what had happened to Lia, as though it wasn’t really all that important for me to know. I tried to accept their point of view. Lia was gone. Wasn’t that enough? I had lost her, just as the old man had lost the Russian woman when he left her to go and help the snowbound village. History repeated itself. All stories turned up again, an infinite number of times (I knew that now), and we were nothing but empty forms used by destiny and God to perform the same eternal drama over and over again. And yet all this was not merely boring, as a predictable repetition is, but even grandiose, mysterious and liberating, because it gave us the impression of occupying a particular place in an immense complex and of being freed from the anxiety of having to think constantly of ourselves, since the individual self became so ephemeral and unimportant in such a scheme.
I was happier about my decision to return, since far from Cretis, knowing what I now knew, I wouldn’t have been able to accept things, to participate in the life of others, immersed as they were in a whirl of busyness, traveling, producing, rushing about in cars and trucks, working in factories or boarding trains. All this, I was certain now, was not for me.
I believed the boy was the child of some village woman who had entrusted him to Namu for a few hours or days because she was overburdened or sick or had to go somewhere. Instead he continued to stay with us and I sensed a veil of mystery around him as well as around Lia’s absence, a mystery that was more sad than happy. Namu and Red reinforced that sensation: they never smiled and they paid such constant attention to the child that he seemed to have become the center of the household. When I mentioned Lia they bowed their heads, evaded my glance and stared at something far away. Thus I ended up intuiting the truth without anyone telling me directly. The boy was Lia’s child and thus mine, and it was unthinkable that she would have abandoned him to go off with Hermes. If she didn’t come back it was because she couldn’t, because she was gone forever.
I didn’t want to torment Namu and Red with more questions since every word spoken seemed to cause them pain. I preferred to ask the villagers what had happened. They said that, once I was gone, Hermes had begun coming back to Cretis more and more often. He kept calling and calling for Lia, at length, sometimes for hours at a time, and even went as far as to throw stones against her windows, so frequently that Red started turning the dog loose at night. One morning a few months after the baby’s birth (why hadn’t she told me about the baby?) they found the dog dead. His throat slashed. Shortly afterwards Hermes took up his siege again. The voice stubbornly calling Lia’s name was as persistent and monotonous as the cry of an owl: a screech owl, a barn owl, a horned owl....
Thus one evening Lia had thrown a cloak over her shoulders and run out the door. Perhaps she had wanted to attempt to persuade him to leave her in peace for good. Then when she didn’t come back they had all begun to worry.