Authors: Carlo Sgorlon
Maddalena must have known all these things. She had lived with my father for two years; how could she not know? And yet she stubbornly refused to tell me anything; when I questioned her she unleashed a barrage of angry words at me and went off, slamming the door behind her. “But of course all that stuff they told you is true,” she once admitted. “What the devil else do you want to know? It’s an obsession with you. You’re unhinged just like all the rest of your family!” she went on, red-faced and probably even angrier because she knew I had every right to know. I gave up on her, but the Dane returned ever more frequently to my thoughts. Perhaps he was still alive somewhere, and it wouldn’t therefore be impossible to find him. I imagined it would be a difficult undertaking but not out of the question, since I was always accompanied by the idea that destiny paid particular attention to events concerning me. I felt that the Dane’s shadow had reached me, spread over me, and held a mortgage on my fate. Maybe he had returned to Denmark after Elvira’s death....
In no way did I apply any moral judgment to his conduct. If he had abandoned my grandmother, I was sure there had been a good reason, and besides it could be that he had found it impossible to come back. I was proud that he had been rich and generous, and that right here in the village and in the house where I was born he had given splendid parties, probably the greatest ones this place had ever seen. To me it seemed their echoes could still be heard among the trees in the piazza and in the rooms of the house. The Dane really had been the way I always thought he was. And yet at the same time even for me he continued to be as cryptic as he had been forty years ago for the peasants of Ontàns.
I was all excited about my continuous discoveries. One day I decided to write a story about the Dane, but while I thought about it I lost all desire to talk about him and began instead to recount a dream I had had about my mother.
I had dreamed of an intensely green sea, with waves topped by spray but slow and silent, which seemed suited only to gently rock a ship, certainly not to endanger it. I was watching from a rocky reef as shiny and white as stream pebbles. Toward the west I saw a dark object no bigger than a cricket moving forward slowly, wavering back and forth.
I thought it was a rowboat far, far away but coming toward me, heading right for me. Only after a long time did I see that it was smaller than a ship but much larger than a rowboat. It had big portholes above, a keel painted violet, and it moved ahead slowly, sliding over the waves as though driven by the wind. It had no sails and therefore must have had a motor whose sound was totally absorbed by the sea. I saw the helm astern but no one was steering. No face appeared at any porthole. At first I thought the boat was empty, but then I realized this wasn’t possible because from inside came a muted song hardly audible because of the distance.
“O che bel castello, marco ‘ndiro ‘ndiro ‘ndello,
o che bel castello, marco ‘ndiro ‘ndiro ‘nda....”
The voice was my mother’s voice.
Having approached within a hundred meters of my reef, the boat stopped, the slight hum of the motor ceased completely, and only my mother’s song could be heard. I waited for her to appear, to come out on deck or at least look out of a porthole. Instead nothing. I had to content myself with knowing she was on that boat, but I would never see her face. Once the song ended the boat moved on, sliding over the waves as before, until it became a black speck once again and disappeared over the horizon.
It was the first time I liked something I had written and hence I decided to save it. I hid the sheet of paper in a wooden drawer in the soap- making shed Maddalena never used. But it subsequently got lost simply because I had wanted to find an unusual hiding place. A family of Gypsies set up camp near our house beside the stream and asked Maddalena if they could use the fireplace in that shed. She shrugged her shoulders. They could do whatever they pleased. Thus they used anything they could find as kindling and my story was burned. I didn’t care. I remembered every detail and could rewrite it whenever I might want to. But I didn’t do it. I reflected instead that the dream revealed an anguish that I had had but never noticed until now: the thought that I didn’t possess a photograph of my mother, that perhaps none even existed, and I would never know what she looked like. That was why I hadn’t seen her face but only heard her voice. Maddalena had no photograph of her. My great grandfather’s family had disappeared many years ago, and in his house lived distant relatives who had never cared about me and had allowed me to be brought up by a stranger. The only possibility was that a photo might be hidden in the house among my father’s papers, but I had rummaged through them for years and never found anything. Thus my mother remained a closed door I would never open, or an empty room. Perhaps it was precisely this awareness working within me, beneath my careless serenity, that produced my sensation of not being complete, my desire to search far and wide for who knows what, and this was why my fancy took hold of anything that led me in the strangest possible directions....
I even envied the Gypsies because they roamed the world and when they arrived in our neighborhood I would soon begin to hang around their camp.
At first I didn’t dare approach them, like Luca with Maddalena; then I would pluck up courage and begin to play with the smaller boys until I was ready to try the same thing with the ones my age. But they never really played. They were always looking for things to eat or to wear and as they moved about their eyes glittered as they identified things they might find useful. They seized cats or imprudent hens who had wandered a little too far from the farmyard, and I would say nothing, believing that my
omertà
gave me the right to question them. It didn’t matter a bit to me that they were thieves and that they were always asking me for something in their whining and petulant voices, as long as they told me what I wanted to know, that is, where they came from, where they were going, how they lived and what they were looking for in their constant wanderings.
But I could never get anything out of them. Once they got what they wanted they immediately stopped talking like poor wretches begging to be saved and began laughing, cackling and hissing the shrill sounds of their incomprehensible language. They would answer me distractedly, craftily, with a phrase or two, in no way taking me seriously. “Do you come from Russia? From Hungary? From Slavonia?” I asked, but they replied with the names of nearby villages, totally uninteresting places I had already seen over and over — then they would burst out laughing like maniacs. “Have you ever been in Denmark?” They looked at one another as if they’d never heard the name.
I soon realized it was useless to keep asking; it wouldn’t work and once again my curiosity would remain unsatisfied.
I finally became aware of their coarseness, their greed, and the irreparable hypocrisy that engulfed them from head to foot. I noticed the filth and stench of their caravans and their ragged clothes and fled in disgust. But later it often happened that my attitude would change once more. From my house I would hear their singing, the whinnying of horses, the girls’ laughter, or I would see the flames of their camp fires when night was coming on and suddenly the force that had always drawn me toward them would come to life again and I would go back down to the stream where they were camped. I envied them because in a few days they would hitch up their horses again, put out their fires, and start off who-knows-where. Now and then for an instant I would again fall prey to the old fear-desire that they would kidnap me.
Besides I was forever subject to secret attractions in things: a voice would be enough, a sound, a flight of birds, the scudding of clouds across the sky, a train whistle. For me everything had a double face, the first banally visible, the second enigmatic and discoverable only in fortunate circumstances. At times even what stood behind the face of death appeared charged with attractions.
By complicated negotiation, of which I saw only the final results, Maddalena managed to inform herself about scholastic programs and bring home to me old schoolbooks belonging to students who by now probably even had gray hair and children of their own. She would put them down in front of me with her customary self-satisfaction, but, glancing through their pages, which were often filled with odd-looking marks, she would give me a worried look as though to assess my resourcefulness and find out whether I would continue to study by myself.
It was a problem only to her. I dived into the books and in a short time read and reread all the ones about history, literature, geography, science and astronomy. On the other hand, those about mathematics, chemistry or geometry hadn’t the slightest attraction and I neglected them until a few days before the exams. In this way, reading and studying at my own whim, and by myself, I was able to maintain the totally arbitrary image of existence that I had created for myself, the image, that is, of an immense vacation in which one could always do whatever came to mind while awaiting some event that would open wide the doors of the future.
I particularly liked the history books. The deeds of Caesar, Alexander the Great, Hannibal and Genghis Khan were adventures something like Ishmael’s. I didn’t think for a moment that they had really happened somewhere in the world in remote times, even as my life was unfolding now. For me historical figures were either sympathetic or unsympathetic heroes and I took sides for or against them as if what they did was occurring in the present moment and might still have an uncertain outcome. I felt acute suspense as I read about the succession of events and experienced a twinge of anguish as I came upon epilogues that I would have wished otherwise.
I was torn by painful longings when I learned that Alexander had died at only thirty-three, or that Caesar had been stabbed by his adopted son the day of the Ides of March. And his wife had even had a bad dream and, possessed of a vague foreboding that something tragic would happen, begged him not to go that day to the Senate. But why, why did Caesar go just the same?
I was assaulted by restless anxiety as if I might still stop him at the door, running to him across abysses of space and time. I saw him among the white columns in the atrium of his house, uncertain about what to do as he studied Calpurnia’s face, trying to understand whether there was any substance to her obscure premonition. Yes, there had been many signs of his destiny but he hadn’t known how to interpret them. To me they all seemed clear, now that the event had irreparably occurred. The expression “the Ides of March” sufficed in itself to call up thickening shadows of the gloomiest of fates. But in reality it all became clear only after the blows of the dagger had tumbled him to earth at the feet of the statue of Pompey. He had held the head of his rival in his hand after Pompey had been betrayed and killed by Ptolemy, and at the very feet of a stone Pompey Caesar himself had fallen. There was in all this a singularity of coincidences, a crossroads where the ways of destiny intersected and its mysterious language became clear. I thought I might write something about Caesar, more than anything else to compensate him for what fate had taken so abruptly from him, to help him complete what he had left half finished — his works for peace, the colossal projects he had only had time to conceive. In my memoir Caesar achieved all these things, and derived from them a profound satisfaction because he had feared he wouldn’t get them done in time, had feared that death would interrupt him. But at a certain point everything in his mind got mixed up and darkened and at the end it became clear that all this had been only a fleeting dream unfolding in Caesar’s mind between the instant the murderous dagger struck and the moment his consciousness flickered out forever.
Once in a while Maddalena would ask me if I was succeeding in studying alone, would inquire about what I had learned; I would begin to recount the intrigues of Egyptian or Byzantine courts, or tell her sinister stories from the Renaissance about poisons and conspiracies, maybe unconsciously trying to scare her. She would nod quietly, her face full of awe and admiration, securely convinced that I hadn’t been wasting my time. Narrating these extravagant events, half-invented, I had the impression that part of me was listening too, was considering me ironically as if to ask what the devil I was going on about, as if to apply to me the words “buffoon,” “comedian,” “impostor,” words that others didn’t have the courage to say out loud to my face.
Sometimes I felt the importance of my studying for the “normal” schools (there was no one else in the village doing this), but for the most part my consciousness of being a student disappeared and the period so spent became in the end a farcical interval, remote and improbable. It was as if the whole business of school and studying concerned some other boy who, like me, was named Giuliano Bertoni, who, like me, was a little savage, but who at bottom wasn’t me. I did everything with fabulous levity, committing myself only up to a certain point, sliding over things like a sled on ice. I was always telling stories to myself in a perennial monologue in which there was no question of asking whether what I said was true or if I really believed it.
About that time my solitude came abruptly to an end. A family including girls of various ages moved in not far from us. They settled in an abandoned house after repairing it haphazardly. They had tried to rent a part of our house from Maddalena but she wouldn’t hear of it and in fact sent them away with ill humor because they were as insistent and importunate as the Gypsies. Wretchedly poor, they too were forever in search of something to eat: crabs, fish, frogs, snails — and they knew all the greens that could be put on the table. They raised an infinity of different animals and worked at tasks I had never seen, such as collecting mulberry bark or hunting moles, then tacking the skins up to dry and stretch in the sun.