The Wooden Throne by Carlo Sgorlon

moment later I felt her shapely body next to mine. So soon did she begin moving impetuously against me, so quickly did her breathing become labored that she extinguished any impression I might have had that she merely wanted to repay me somehow for my kindness. It was as if she were an odd extravagant lady who had gone out incognito to meet a favorite of destiny in the house that had seen the revels of the Dane and so many other events outside any norm.
    During a pause in our madness, in a lucid moment, I thought it wasn’t right, my not asking her anything about herself; it was like a sign of a lack of interest. Thus I tried to find out why she had run away from home, where her family was, who had followed her and what he represented for her. She gave me answers that were vague, fanciful and contradictory. She went from one subject to another as though it was all a game in which you couldn’t do anything else but make jokes. Her jollity provoked the same mood in me. I was falling asleep and so was she, or else she was pretending to, but after a while she woke me up by tickling me and wanted once more to try out her power over me. I embraced her and her body was again shaken by spasms and writhings in an excess of energy that she could neither contain nor control.
    Finally I fell into a deep sleep and awakened only when it was broad daylight. Flora was gone. Something twisted in my chest, I felt the pain of something giving way. I had the impression that she herself was all I had lacked and it was her absence that had made me desire remote and chimerical things. All that was vague, all that refused to be explained or seized, all could be brought together in her little figure: she was a Gypsy lady, a little girl-woman, wild, free and without inhibitions. Perhaps Flora, who went to bed with boys she hardly knew, was one of those young girls whom the women of Ontàns, especially the old women with black kerchiefs on their heads, designated as whores, and talked about with frigid contempt. Well, if that was so, I had been right to believe instead that they were sweet and generous women like certain eccentric aristocrats. But how was it possible that my judgment was so different from everyone else’s? Maybe I was irreparably corrupt and immoral....
    For the whole day I walked around with the same thought: when was she coming back; should I go to the Villa (instinct told me that Flora must wander often in that direction, that she was attracted to the Villa like a moth to the light), if it would be appropriate to ask the three wild sisters about her. My attention wouldn’t stay on what I was trying to read in my books, as I continued to prepare for exams, which, however, for the most part remained alien and improbable to me, like a hypothetical planet not yet observed by astronomers.
    Maddalena didn’t even notice that Flora had been in our house, even though I hadn’t done much to conceal the signs of her passage. I didn’t care if she found out. I was even tempted to tell her and several times I was within a hair of doing so. On those occasions I realized how distracted Maddalena was. She even went as far as to pick up the comb Flora had used and hold it up to the light, wondering at finding it full of hair so different in color from her own.
    While I was still anguishing over whether I would see her again, Flora returned. One evening I saw her reflection in the water of the stream, in a stagnant elbow that would form after the rains and remain for a while. A kind of pond. I was sitting on a stone trying out for the first time a rudimentary fishing pole I had put together. I turned around, incredulous. She was holding her shoes in her hand and wearing a flowered dress. My moment’s hesitation at seeing her was enough for the initiative to pass directly to her. She tore the fishing pole out of my hands and threw it in the bushes; thus my feeling of being piloted was confirmed and intensified to the point that I was brushed