Authors: Carlo Sgorlon
I had arrived at this awareness with effort, during the course of many vicissitudes, extravagances, disappointments, trouble, losses, pains and deaths. Now I knew I was only an instrument in the hands of something above me. And yet I also felt a certain pride: pride at being chosen and pride at what I was destined to do and now sensed as an inner imperative.
It was time to begin. I had made a few attempts to write stories but always left them half done. I never managed to give them the importance they deserved because I was always distracted by something else, because the cycle of my experiences wasn’t complete and thus the time was not yet ripe. I was convinced that all things have to mature slowly and attain completion before they can reveal their full potential. I had told the story of my dream about my mother and had started so many others without finishing them because it was not yet time. But now it was time. I took up the tale about the youth who was unable to reach the North Pole and completed it. Then I started others and completed them too but threw them away almost at once because I wasn’t totally satisfied with them. But I had finished them anyhow even though I knew I would burn them, because I knew I needed the practice.
I not only liked to write stories but to tell them. My audience was not limited to Red and Namu but included Ettore and the children of Cretis, to whom I recounted fairy tales and adventure stories. They listened with rapt attention, so oblivious they didn’t even notice their noses were running until the very last minute, when they hastily remedied the situation with the sleeve of a smock, still not missing a word I said. Sometimes it almost took my breath away to watch them, and I wondered if at some point the spell would break, and I wouldn’t know how to go on. But that didn’t happen. Something continuously poured fresh material into my mind, and I kept right on going like a ship in calm waters.
Frequently the children interrupted me, excited and enthusiastic, to pose questions or ask for peculiar details: “How tall was the bear? What color was he? Was he a man-eater?” I immediately improvised answers. As soon as their curiosity was satisfied they would subside into silence again, falling back into their ranks, so to speak, to begin once more quietly living the adventure through the medium of my words. They were no longer in the fortress house in Cretis but on the polar ice pack, in Alaska, on a whaling ship, in the jungles of India or in many other places throughout the world. They lost themselves entirely in their imagined exploits, holding nothing back, just as I had done at their age when I read so avidly and filled my head with a thousand fantasies.
They were exactly the right age to imagine the world as a repository of adventures: a savannah to gallop across on horseback, a jungle to explore with caution, a forest beset with ferocious beasts. In fact, as soon as I finished a story they would begin looking for brooms and sticks to transform into swords and horses, for pasteboard boxes to make into helmets and shields, for sacks and tarpaulins to turn into wigwams. They lighted fires at the edges of meadows to simulate campgrounds and smoke signals. Thus the history of the world repeated itself, and the children without knowing it were imitating an ancient model just as I had. Someday they would discover that none of it was true, that it was all a matter of dreams and appearances forever moving just out of reach. Perhaps if one of them were to go looking for the imaginary places, as I had, he would discover that Cretis was as good as Denmark; that life’s treasure chests can also be found in a snow-covered village, which is cut off from history and has no particular destiny to fulfill.
But it was better to say nothing about all that to any of them. They would have to discover it for themselves. Until that time they would live inside the cloud of illusion, drawn to the sphinx who waves her butterfly wings before us where the horizon cuts off our vision.
I sought to acquire Pietro’s impersonality and indifference, but of course I didn’t succeed. I was too young and too alive. I could superimpose my image on his only at certain moments when I felt most lucid and reflective and my thoughts embraced all that I had lived and what I had learned from others and blended into my own experience. Then I seemed to grow beyond myself and to sense the slow and steady rhythms of life. Pietro’s experiences became mine, as did Flora’s, Lia’s, Maddalena’s, or the experiences of others whom I had not known directly but had read about in books. What I didn’t know I could imagine. To be a storyteller you had to arrive at precisely this point: to be able to feel everyone’s life as if it were your own so that life itself had no more frontiers nor should it have. It was perhaps for this reason that the first written story I had kept, when I felt confident, was the one about Caesar dreaming of bringing about universal peace and realizing all his grand projects in the fleeting instant that began when Brutus stabbed him and ended when eternal night descended on his spirit. The idea fascinated me precisely because it had to do with a dream, and my imagination was another dream superimposed on Caesar’s dream, which brought it to life and gave it substance as a story created out of words.
Every once in a while I thought about Flora, who continued to travel the world with some operetta company; occasionally I even deluded myself that she might come back to Cretis to stay. Or I thought of Lia, whose presence permeated everything in the house, who was “always in another room.” I still experienced desire, nostalgia and gentle regrets and sometimes let myself go in vague dreams. About what I didn’t even know. It wasn’t possible to fall entirely into fixed forms after all; an infinity of things remained outside. But nevertheless my path was now clearly marked.
Pietro slowly faded away. When he died we scarcely noticed; he had become so silent, immobile and withdrawn. We buried him near Lia and her child. Namu spent a lot of time in the cemetery, often hours on end. She brought a chair from the house and sat there talking to the dead in her mysterious Indian language, as if her most natural home was indeed the cemetery and she was getting acquainted with death, which for her was part of life, not something different.
Often she muttered to herself, repeating things I didn’t understand; in fact it appeared to me that this perpetual muttering now expressed her very existence. Only occasionally I would ask her: “What? What did you say?”
“Namu is old, Namu is tired,” she would repeat in the same tone. If I asked her how old she was, she said she couldn’t remember, that she had never known the year of her birth.
“But you’re young; you need a woman to look after your child. I’ll soon be dead you know....”
I would try to change the subject but she’d insist. I finally realized she was right. Thus a young widow from Cretis whose husband, an emigrant, had died in an industrial accident in Canada, entered the fortress house and took Lia’s place.
Time passed and smoothed and polished and consumed us all just as the lathe turned and shaped chessmen and table legs. The house was so quiet that it sometimes seemed uninhabited as though those living there might have been shadows of ancestors come back to have a look at the rooms, especially the windowless one, the center of the house, where Pietro’s big armchair still sat like a throne. It was there that I usually went to play my flute or abandon myself to the magic of storytelling, writing stories down or recounting them aloud while the wind blew among the rocks and trees outside. But none of us could hear it, closed as we were inside and we could imagine it didn’t exist or that it was only a memory or a distant fantasy.
(1972)