At night our mother could not sleep; Cosimo remained watching over her from the tree with a little lantern hanging on the branch so that she could see him also in the dark.
The morning was the worst time for her asthma. The only remedy was to try and distract her, and Cosimo played little tunes on a flute or imitated the song of the birds, or caught butterflies and then made them fly into the room, or made festoons of wisteria.
It was a day of sunshine. Cosimo with a reed began to blow soap bubbles from the tree and puff them through the window toward the sick woman's bed. Our mother saw those iridescent colors flying and filling the room and said: "Oh, what games you are playing." This made me think of when we were little children and she always disapproved of our games as being too futile and infantile, but now, perhaps for the first time, she was enjoying our games. The soap bubbles even reached her face, and she would burst them with a puff and a smile. A bubble even reached her lips and stayed there intact. We bent down over her. Cosimo let the reed fall. She was dead.
Mourning is followed sooner or later by happy events; it is the law of life. A year after our mother's death I became engaged to a girl from the local nobility. It was very difficult to bring my fiancée around to the idea of coming to live at Ombrosa; she was afraid of my brother. The thought that there was a man moving among the leaves who was watching every move through the windows, who would appear when least expected, filled her with terror. Then too, she had never seen Cosimo and imagined him as some kind of Indian. To get this fear out of her head I arranged a luncheon in the open, under the trees, to which Cosimo was also invited. Cosimo ate above us on an ilex tree, with his dishes on a little tray, and I must say that although he was rather out of practice for social dining, he behaved very well. My fiancée was somewhat calmed, and realized that apart from his being on the trees he was a man just like all the others; but she was still left with an unconquerable feeling of distrust.
Even when, after we had married, we settled down together in the villa at Ombrosa, she avoided as much as possible not only any converse, but even the sight of her brother-in-law, although he, poor man, every now and again would bring her bunches of flowers and rare furs. When children began to be born and grow up, she got it into her head that their uncle's proximity would have a bad influence on their education. She was not happy until we put in order the old castle on our estate at Rondò which had been uninhabited for a long time; and we began staying up there much more than at Ombrosa, so that the children should be away from bad influences.
Cosimo too began to notice the passing of time: a sign of this was the aging of the dachshund Ottimo Massimo, who had lost his desire to join the bitches of the pack to go after the foxes, nor would he try any more absurd love affairs with local mongrels. He was always lying down because his stomach was so near the ground when he was standing that it was not worth while for him to keep upright. And lying there stretched out from muzzle to tail at the foot of the tree on which Cosimo was, he would raise a tired look toward his master and scarcely wag his tail. Cosimo was becoming discontented; the sense of the passing of time made him feel a kind of dissatisfaction with his life, spent forever wandering up and down the same old trees. And nothing any longer gave him full contentment, neither hunting, fleeting affairs nor books. He himself did not know what he wanted; taken by one of these moods, he would clamber quickly over the tenderest and most fragile boughs as if searching for other trees growing still higher, so as to climb those too.
One day Ottimo Massimo was restless. There seemed to be a spring wind. The dog raised his muzzle, sniffed and then flung himself down again. Two or three times he got up, moved around and lay down again. Suddenly he began to run. He trotted along slowly, every now and again stopping to take breath. Cosimo followed on the branches.
Ottimo Massimo made toward the woods. He seemed to have a very precise direction in mind, because even when he stopped every now and again to lift a leg, he would stand there with tongue out looking at his master, then scratch himself and begin moving once more with certainty. He was moving into parts little frequented by Cosimo, in fact almost unknown to him, toward the shooting reserves of the Duke Tolemaico. The Duke Tolemaico was a broken-down old rake and certainly had not been out shooting for a very long time, but no poacher could set foot in his reserve as the gamekeepers were numerous and vigilant, and Cosimo, who had had dealings with them, preferred to keep away. Now Ottimo Massimo and Cosimo were plunging deeper and deeper into the Duke's game reserves, but neither one nor the other thought of chasing the precious game; the dog trotted along following some secret call of his own, and the Baron was gripped by an impatient curiosity to discover where on earth the dog was going.
So the dachshund reached a point in which the forest ended and there was an open field. Two stone lions crouched on pillars were holding up a coat-of-arms. Beyond them should have begun a park, a garden, a more private part of the Tolemaico estate; but there was nothing except for those two stone lions with the field beyond, an immense field of short green grass, whose boundaries faded away in the distance against a background of black oak trees. The sky was filmy with clouds. No bird sang.
This field, for Cosimo, was a sight which filled him with discomfort. Having always lived in the thickness of the vegetation at Ombrosa, certain of being able to reach any place by his own routes, the Baron only had to see in front of him an empty and impassable space, bare under the sky, to feel dizzy.
Ottimo Massimo rushed into the field, and began running along at full tilt as if he had become young again. From the ash tree where he was crouching, Cosimo began to whistle at him and call, "Here, come back here, Ottimo Massimo, come back here, where are you going?" but the dog did not obey, did not even turn; he ran on and on through the field until nothing could be seen but a distant dot like a comma—his tail—and even that vanished.
In the ash tree Cosimo was wringing his hands. He was used to the dog's escapes and absences, but now Ottimo Massimo was vanishing into this field where he could not follow, and the flight linked to the anxiety he had felt a short time ago and filled him with a vague sense of expectation, of waiting for something to appear in that field.
He was brooding over these thoughts when he heard steps under his oak tree, and saw a gamekeeper passing, whistling, hands in pockets. The man had a very careless distracted air for one of those terrible gamekeepers of the preserve, and yet the badge on his uniform was that of the ducal retainers, and Cosimo flattened himself against the trunk. Then the thought of the dog overcame his fear; he called down to the gamekeeper: "Hey, you, Sergeant, have you seen a dog around?"
The gamekeeper looked up. "Ah, it's you! The flying hunter with the sliding dog! No, I've not seen the dog. What have you caught this morning?"
Cosimo recognized one of his keenest adversaries, and said: "Oh, nothing, the dog escaped from me and I had to follow him as far as this . . . my gun's unloaded."
The gamekeeper laughed. "Oh, do load it, and fire it, too, whenever you like; it doesn't matter now!"
"Why not now?"
"Now that the Duke is dead, who cares about trespassing here?"
"Oh, he's dead, is he? I didn't know that."
"He's been dead and buried for three months. And there's a row on between the heirs of his first two marriages and his new widow."
"He'd a third wife, had he?"
"He married when he was eighty, a year before he died; she was a girl of twenty-one or so. It was a mad thing to do, a wife who never even spent a day with him, and is only now beginning to visit his estates, which she doesn't like."
"What, she doesn't like them?"
"Oh, well, she installs herself in a palace, or a castle, and arrives with her whole court, as she always has a group of admirers around her, and after three days she finds everything ugly, everything sad, and sets off again. Then the other heirs come forward, rush into that estate and claim rights over it. She says, 'Oh, yes, take it if you like.' Now she's come here to the
hunting pavilion, but how long will she stay? Not long, I'd say."
"And where's the hunting pavilion?"
"Down over the field beyond the oak trees."
"Then my dog has gone there. . ."
"He must have gone looking for bones. . . Excuse me, but it makes me think your Lordship doesn't feed him well!"—and he burst out laughing.
Cosimo did not reply, he looked at the uncrossable field, waiting for the dachshund to return.
The whole day long he never came. Next day Cosimo was again on the ash tree looking at the field, as if forced by a turmoil within.
The dog reappeared toward evening, a little dot in the field under Cosimo's sharp eye, becoming more and more visible. "Ottimo Massimo! Come here! Where have you been?" The dog stopped, wagging his tail and looking at his master, and seemed to be inviting him to follow; but then he realized the space Cosimo could not get over, turned back, made a few hesitating paces, and turned again. "Ottimo Massimo! Come here! Ottimo Massimo!" But the dog was running off again and vanished in the distance.
Later two gamekeepers passed. "Still waiting for your dog, your Lordship! But I saw him at the pavilion, in good hands. . ."
"What?"
"But yes, the Marchesa, or rather the widowed Duchess. We call her the Marchesa, as she was the Marchesina as a girl. She's treating him as though he's been with her all the time. He's a lap dog, that one, if you'll allow me to say so, your Lordship. Now he's found a soft billet, he's staying there . . ."
And the two keepers went off grinning. Ottimo Massimo did not return any more. Day after day Cosimo spent on the ash, looking at the field as if he could read something in it that had been struggling inside him for a long time: the very idea of distance, of intangibility, of the waiting that can be prolonged beyond life.
} 21 {
ONE day Cosimo was looking down from the ash tree. The sun was shining, a ray crossed the field, which from pea green went emerald. Down in the blackness of the clump of oaks there was a movement in the undergrowth, and a horse leaped out. On its saddle was a horseman dressed in black, in a cloak—no, a skirt; it wasn't a horseman, it was a horsewoman; she was galloping on a loose rein and she was fair! Cosimo's heart gave a leap, and he found himself longing for the horsewoman to come near enough for him to see her face, and for that face to be very beautiful. But apart from this waiting of his for her to approach and to be beautiful, there was a third thing he was waiting for, a third branch of hope entwining with the other two, a longing that this ever more luminous beauty might respond to a need he felt to recapture some memory once known and now almost forgotten, a memory of which only a wispy line, a faint color now remained, and that this would make all the rest emerge once more, or rather be rediscovered in something present and alive.
There he sat, yearning for her to come nearer his end of the field, by the two towering pillars with the lions; but the wait was becoming agonizing, for now he realized that the horsewoman was not cutting through the field directly toward the lions, but across it diagonally, so that she would soon vanish into the wood again.
He was just about to lose sight of her, when she turned her horse sharply and cut across the field in another diagonal, which would certainly bring her a little nearer, but would make her vanish just the same on the opposite side of the field.
And now, at that moment, Cosimo noticed with annoyance two brown horses ridden by cavaliers, who were coming out of the woods into the field, but he quickly tried to overcome his annoyance, and decided that these horsemen did not matter, one only had to see how they were tacking to and fro after her, he really must not let them bother him, and yet, he had to admit, they annoyed him.
And then the horsewoman, just before vanishing from the field, turned her horse around again, but in the other direction, farther away from Cosimo . . . No, now the horse was circling and galloping this way, and the move seemed done on purpose to baffle the two followers, who were now in fact galloping away and had not yet realized that she was rushing in an opposite direction.
Now everything was going just as he wanted; the horsewoman was galloping along in the sun, getting more and more beautiful and corresponding more and more to Cosimo's lost memories; the only alarming thing was her continual zigzagging, which never gave him any idea of her intentions. The two horsemen did not understand where she was going either, and in trying to follow her gyrations, covered a great deal of ground uselessly, though always with good will and dexterity.
Now, in less time than Cosimo expected, the woman on horseback reached the edge of the field near him, passed between the two pillars surmounted by lions which seemed almost to have been put there in her honor, turned toward the field and everything beyond it with a wide gesture of farewell, galloped on, and passed under the ash tree. Cosimo could now see her face and body, clearly. She was sitting erect in the saddle, a haughty woman's and at the same time a child's face, a forehead happy to be above those eyes, eyes happy to be under that forehead, nose, mouth, chin, collar, everything about her happy to be with every other part of her, it all, yes all, reminded him of the little girl he had seen on the swing the first day he had spent on a tree: Sinforosa Viola Violante of Ondariva.
This discovery, or rather having brought it from unconfessed hope to the point of being able to proclaim it to himself, filled Cosimo as if with a fever. He tried to call so that she would raise her eyes to the ash tree and see him, but from his throat came only a hoarse gurgle and she did not turn.
Now the white horse was galloping into the chestnut grove, and the hoofs were beating on the cones scattered about the ground, splitting them open and exposing the shiny kernels of nut. The woman guided her horse first in one direction, then in another, with Cosimo at one moment thinking her away and unreachable, at another, as he jumped from tree to tree, seeing her with surprise reappear amid the perspective of trunks, and her way of moving fanned more and more the memory flaming up in his mind. He tried to reach her with a call, a sign of his presence, but the only sound that came to his lips was the whistle of a pheasant, and she did not even hear.
The two cavaliers following her seemed to understand her intentions even less than her route and continued to take wrong directions, getting entangled in undergrowth and stuck in bog, while she arrowed her way ahead, safe and uncatchable. Every now and again she would give some order or encouragement to the horsemen by raising her crop or tearing off a carob nut and throwing it, as if to tell them to go that way. The horsemen would at once rush off in that direction, galloping over the fields and slopes, but she had turned another way and was no longer looking at them.
"It's she, it's she!" Cosimo was thinking, more and more inflamed with hope and trying to shout her name, but all that came from his lips was a long sad cry, like a plover's.
Now, this tacking to and fro, this deceiving of the cavaliers, and the games all seemed to be tending one way, however irregular and wavering. Guessing this aim, Cosimo abandoned the impossible task of following her, and said to himself, "I'll go in a place she'll go to, if it's her. In fact, she can't be going anywhere else." And leaping along by his own routes, he moved toward the abandoned park of the Ondarivas.
In that shade, in that scented air, in that place where even the leaves and twigs had another color and another substance, he felt so carried away by memories of his childhood that he almost forgot the horsewoman, or if he did not forget, he at least began telling himself it might not be her and that this waiting and hoping for her seemed so real that it was almost as if she were there.
Then he heard a sound. Horse's hoofs on the gravel. It was coming down the garden no longer at a gallop, as if the rider wanted to look at and recognize everything precisely. There was no sign of the silly cavaliers; they must have lost all trace of her.
He saw her; she was wandering around the fountains, urns and garden pavilions, looking at the plants which had now become huge, with hanging vines, the magnolias grown into a copse. But she did not see him who was trying to
call her with the cooing of hoopoes, the trilling of larks, and with sounds that merged into the close twitter of birds in the garden.
She had dismounted, and was leading the horse by the bridle. She reached the villa, left the horse, entered the portico. Then suddenly she broke into shouts of "Ortensia! Gaetano! Tarquinio! This needs whitewashing, the shutters painting, the tapestries hung! And I want the big table here, the side ones there, the spinet in the middle. The pictures must all be rehung."
Cosimo realized then that the house which to his distracted eyes had seemed closed and empty as always, now, in reality, was open and full of people—servants cleaning and polishing and rearranging, opening windows, moving furniture, beating carpets. So it was Viola who was returning, Viola re-establishing herself at Ombrosa, taking possession once again of the villa she had left as a child! And the pulsating joy in Cosimo's heart was not very different from pulsating fear. For her return, the presence of her, unpredictable and proud, under his very eyes, might mean losing her forever, even in his memory, even in that secret place of scented leaves and dappled green light, might mean that he would be forced to flee from her and so flee too from that first memory of her as a girl.
With this alternating heartbeat Cosimo watched her swirling amid the servants, making them move sofas, harpsichords and consoles, then passing hurriedly into the garden and remounting her horse, followed by groups waiting for more orders, then turning to the gardeners, and telling them how to arrange the abandoned flower beds and rescatter on the paths gravel swept away by rain, and put back the wicker chairs, and the swing.
She pointed, with a wave of the arms, at the branch from which this had once been hanging and was now to be hung again, and indicated how long the ropes were to be, and how long its course, and as she was saying all this, her gestures and glance went up to the magnolia tree on which Cosimo had once appeared. And there he was on the magnolia tree, and she saw him again.
The Baron in the Trees Page 16