The Forbidden Kingdom Read Online Free PDF

owes me and that’s how I want it settled. A little fresh water won’t do him any harm; he doesn’t see nearly enough of it.”
    The next morning those on board were delighted by a totally unexpected occurrence. A good-natured merchant went up to an unsuspecting priest reading his breviary, grabbed a bucket and emptied it over the priest’s head. The cassock clung to his body, and he stood there as a laughing stock for all and sundry.
    And in the afternoon the ship reached Abrantes, from where it was another six hours’ ride to the castle. I’d left it two years ago.
    Night had almost fallen when I rode into the grounds. The trees and their shadows formed a single black mass, while the swans slept in the pond. Around it stood white silent figures: they were the gods and goddess I used to pelt with stones; I hated them because they represented virtues and commandments. From my earliest youth I had resisted the culture that they tried to teach me and that threatened to permeate me from all sides. I had a presentiment that they would make me ponderous and long-suffering and chain me to the places where it thrives, scattered across the world. Thus my lot, of roaming the earth light and carefree, would be reduced by bitterness to homesickness; after love I feared this power the most. Christianity never had a hold on me;I knew from too early an age the cruelties the Saracens underwent at the hands of these “meek” believers; in this way until I was sixteen I remained a boy who refused to go to church, who laughed in the face of his confessor, threw stones at the altar boys and pulled up flowers in the park. At night I often lowered myself from my window, roamed through the woods and strangled many a startled creature with my bare hands.
    One autumn day it rained in torrents. I couldn’t be stuck indoors and took shelter in a summerhouse on the edge of the grounds. There was a book lying in it. I sat there all through that rainy day, but paid no attention to it. Finally I opened it, mocking myself. The poem swept me along and to my surprise I experienced a rapture that lightened the darkness again. I had acquired an Achilles’ heel, one I kept hidden and from which I hoped I would recover, but I went on reading and finally started writing , in utter secrecy, at night; during the day I refused to believe it myself. I had the same hatred for paintings and sculptures, and my father was deeply saddened by my barbaric attitude.
    One afternoon, when I was again sitting in the summerhouse reading the Odyssey , I felt his hand on my head; I looked into his face: there was a happy expression on it.
    “I’m reading this because it’s about faraway countries, and for no other reason.”
    But his face retained the same expression; he took a few sheets out of his pocket and I recognized my own writing. I pushed him away in fury, jumped up and fled. I stayed in the wood all day like a wild cat, swearing I would never write again. However, a week later I started composing after all. I tried to console myself: a sculptor or a painter can’t travel freely; they have to toil away in a studio, but surely I, despite my weakness, could wander at will; a piece of paper, a scrap of tree bark if need be, can be found anywhere, if one can’t help writing. But I knew that this was just sophistry, that anyone afflicted with this malady always yearns for places where one’s fatherland is an intellectual one: Paris, Rome, Ravenna. Without this affliction I would have found my homeland everywhere, both at sea and in the desert, now I would be an exile everywhere, especially in my own country.
    This fragment of my youth came into my mind as I rode through the grounds, past the silent statues that were now standing unmolested on their lawns and beneath their foliage.

IV
    H IS FATHER WAS SITTING in his armchair in the entrance hall. He got up, not disguising the fact that it was an effort, embraced his son, then held him at arm’s length and