Italo Calvino - [Our Ancestors 02]

by The Baron in the Trees (epub)

  Italo Calvino

  THE BARON IN THE TREES

  Translated by Archibald Colquhoun

  A Harvest/HBJ Book

  A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

  Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers

  San Diego New York London

  Copyright © 1957 by Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a., Torino English translation copyright © 1959 by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to: Copyrights and Permissions Department, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, Orlando, Florida 32887.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Calvino, Italo.

  The baron in the trees.

  Translation of Il barone rampante.

  "A Helen and Kurt Wolff book"

  I. Title.

  [PZ3.C13956Bar8] [PQ4809.A45]

  853'-9'14 76-39704

  ISBN 0-15-610680-9 (Harvest/HBJ:pbk.)

  Printed in the United States of America

  HIJKLMN

  } About the Author {

  ITALO CALVINO (15 October 1923 – 19 September 1985) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979). Lionized in Britain and America, he was, at the time of his death, the most-translated contemporary Italian writer.

  } 1 {

  It was on the fifteenth of June, 1767, that Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò, my brother, sat among us for the last time. And it might have been today, I remember it so clearly. We were in the dining room of our house at Ombrosa, the windows framing the thick branches of the great holm oak in the park. It was midday, the old traditional dinner hour followed by our family, though by then most nobles had taken to the fashion set by the sluggard Court of France, of dining halfway through the afternoon. A breeze was blowing from the sea, I remember, rustling the leaves. Cosimo said: "I told you I don't want any, and I don't!" and pushed away his plateful of snails. Never had we seen such disobedience.

  At the head of the table was the Baron Arminio Piovasco di Rondò, our father, wearing a long wig over his ears in the style of Louis XIV, unfashionable like so much else about him. Between me and my brother was the Abbé Fauchelefleur, the family almoner and tutor of us two boys. We were facing our mother, the Baroness Corradina di Rondò, nicknamed the Generalessa, and our sister Battista, a kind of stay-at-home-nun. At the other end of the table, opposite our father, sat, dressed in Turkish robes, the Cavalier Avvocato Enea Silvio Carrega, lawyer, administrator and waterworks supervisor of our estates, and our natural uncle, being the illegitimate brother of our father.

  A few months before, Cosimo having reached the age of twelve and I of eight, we had been admitted to the parental board; I had benefited by my brother's promotion and been moved up prematurely, so that I should not be left to eat alone. "Benefited" is perhaps scarcely the word, for really it meant the end of our carefree life, Cosimo's and mine, and we were homesick for the meals in our little room, alone with the Abbé Fauchelefleur. The Abbé was a dry, wrinkled old man, with a reputation as a Jansenist; and he had in fact escaped from his native land, the Dauphin to avoid trial by the Inquisition. But the rigor of character for which he was so often praised, the severe mental discipline that he imposed on himself and others, was apt to yield to a deep-rooted urge toward apathy and indolence, as if his long meditations with eyes staring into space had but brought on him a great weariness and boredom, and in every little difficulty now he had come to see a fate not worth opposing. Our meals in the Abbé's company used to begin, after many a prayer, with ordered ritual, silent movements of spoons, and woe to anyone who raised his eyes from his plate or made the slightest sucking noise with the soup; but by the end of the first dish the Abbé was already tired, bored, looking into space and smacking his lips at every sip of wine, as if only the most fleeting and superficial sensations could get through to him; by the main dish we were using our hands, and by the end of the meal were throwing pear cores at each other, while the Abbé every now and again let out one of his languid ". . . Oooo bien! . . . Oooo alors."

  Now, at table with the family, up surged the intimate grudges that are such a burden of childhood. Having our father and mother always there in front of us, using knives and forks for the chicken, keeping our backs straight and our elbows down—what a strain it all was!—not to mention the presence of that odious sister of ours, Battista. So began a series of scenes, spiteful exchanges, punishments, retaliations, until the day when Cosimo refused the snails and decided to separate his fate from ours.

  These accumulating family resentments I myself only noticed later; then I was eight, everything seemed a game, the battle between us boys and grownups was the same as in all families, and I did not realize that my brother's stubbornness hid something much deeper.

  Our father the Baron was a bore, it's true, though not a bad roan: a bore because his life was dominated by conflicting ideas, as often happens in periods of transition. The turbulence of the times makes some people feel a need to bestir themselves, but in the opposite direction, backwards rather than forwards; so, with things boiling up all around him, our father had set his heart on regaining the lapsed title of Duke of Ombrosa, and thought of nothing but genealogies and successions and family rivalries and alliances with grandees near and far.

  Life at our home was like a constant dress rehearsal for an appearance at court, either the Emperor of Austria's, King Louis', or even the court of those mountaineers from Turin. When, for instance, a turkey was served, our father would watch us like a hawk, to see if we carved and boned it according to royal rules, and the Abbé scarcely dared touch a morsel lest he make some error of etiquette, for, poor man, he had to add his own rebukes to our father's. And we saw now a deceitful side of the Cavalier Carrega; he would smuggle away whole legs under the folds of his Turkish robe, to munch them bit by bit later, at his ease, hidden in the vineyard; and we could have sworn (although we never succeeded in catching him in the act—his movements were so quick) that he came to table with a pocketful of stripped bones, to be left on the table in place of the hunks of turkey he whisked away. Our mother the Generalessa did not worry us, as even when serving herself at table she used brusque military manners, "So! Noch ein wenig! Gut!" and no one found fault with her: she held us not to etiquette, but to discipline, supporting the Baron with parade-ground orders, "Sitz ruhig! And wipe your nose!" The only person really at ease was Battista, the nun of tile house, who would sit shredding her chicken with precise deliberation, fiber by fiber, using some sharp little knives, rather like a surgeon's scalpels, which she alone had. The Baron, who should have held her up to us as an example, did not dare look at her, for, with her staring eyes under the starched coif, her narrow teeth set tight in her yellow rodent's face, she frightened him too. So it can be seen why our family board brought out all the antagonisms, the incompatibilities, between us, and all our follies and hypocrisies too; and why it was there that Cosimo's rebellion came to a head. That is why I have described it at some length—and anyway it is the last set table we shall find in my brother's life, that's sure.

  It was also the only place where we would meet the grownups. The rest of the day our mother spent in her apartments, doing lace and embro
idery and petit point; for in truth it was only in these traditionally womanly occupations that the Generalessa could vent her warrior's urge. The lace and embroidery were usually in the designs of geographical maps; our mother would stretch them over cushions or tapestry and stick in pins and tiny flags, showing the disposition of battles in the Wars of Succession, which she knew by heart. Or she would embroider cannons, with the trajectories from the muzzle and the line of flight and the signs of anglings, for she was highly competent in ballistics, and also had at her disposal the entire library of her father the General, with treatises on military lore and atlases and tables of fire. Our mother was a Von Kurtewitz-Konradine, daughter of General Konrad von Kurtewitz, who, twenty years before, had commanded the Empress Maria Theresa's troops, which had occupied our area. A widower, the General had taken her around with him from camp to camp; there was nothing exciting about that, for they traveled well equipped, put up at the best castles, with a suite of servants, and she had spent her days making lace on a cushion. All the stories people told of her going into battle with him were legends. She had always been an ordinary little woman with a rosy face and a snub nose, in spite of that inherited zest for things military, which was perhaps a way of showing up her husband.

  Our father was one of the few nobles in our parts who had been on the side of the Empire in that war; he had greeted General von Kurtewitz with open arms, put our retainers at his disposal, and even shown his great devotion to the Imperial cause by marrying Konradine—all this with an eye to that duchy; and he was considerably put out when the Imperial troops soon moved on, as usual, and the Genoese came down on him for taxes. But he had gained a good wife, the Generalessa, as she began to be called after the death of her father on the Provence expedition (when Maria Theresa sent her a golden collar on a cushion of brocade), a wife with whom he nearly always got along, even if she, born and bred in camps, thought of nothing but armies and battles and criticized him for being just an ineffectual schemer.

  But at heart they were still living in the times of the Wars of Succession, she with her artillery, he with his genealogical trees; she dreaming of a career for us boys in some army, no matter which; he, on the other hand, seeing us married to a grand duchess and electress of the Empire. . . With all this, they were excellent parents, but so absent-minded that Cosimo and I were usually left to our own devices during our childhood. Who can say if that was a good thing or a bad? Cosimo's life was so uncommon, mine so ordinary and modest, and yet our childhood was spent together, both of us indifferent to the manias of adults, both trying to find paths unbeaten by others.

  We clambered about the trees (those innocent games come back to me now as a first initiation, an omen; but who could even have thought it then?), we followed the mountain streams, jumping from rock to rock, exploring caves on the seashore, and we would slide down the marble banisters in the house. It was one of these slides that caused the first serious rift between Cosimo and our parents, for he was punished—unjustly, he declared—and since then harbored a grudge against the family (or society? or the world in general?) which was to express itself later in his decision of that fifteenth of June.

  As a matter of fact, we had already been warned against sliding down the marble banisters, not out of fear that we might break a leg or an arm, for that never worried our parents—which was, I think, why we never broke anything—but because they feared that since we were growing up and gaining weight, we might knock over the busts of ancestors placed by our father on the banisters at the turn of every flight of stairs. Cosimo had, in fact, once brought down a bishop, a great-great-great-grandfather, miter and all; he was punished, and since then he had learned to brake just before reaching the turn of a flight and jump off within a hair's-breadth of running into a bust. I learned this trick too, for I copied all he did, except that I, ever more careful and timid, jumped off halfway down, or slid the rest bit by bit, with constant little brakes. One day he was flying down the banisters like an arrow when who should be coming up but the Abbé Fauchelefleur, meandering from stair to stair, with his breviary open in front of him, and his gaze fixed on space like a hen's. If only he had been half asleep as usual! But no, he was in one of those sudden moods that occasionally came over him, of extreme attention and awareness. He saw Cosimo, and thought: Banisters, bust, he'll hit it, they'll blame me too (at every escapade of ours he used to be blamed also for not keeping an eye on us), and he flung himself on the banister to catch my brother. Cosimo banged into the Abbé, dragged him down the banister too (the old man was just skin and bones), found he could not brake, and hit with double force the statue of our ancestor Cacciaguerra Piovasco the Crusader; they all landed in a heap at the foot of the stairs—the Crusader in smithereens (he was plaster), the Abbé and Cosimo. There followed endless recriminations, a beating, his being locked in our room on bread and cold minestrone. And Cosimo, who felt innocent because the fault had not been his but the Abbé's, came out furiously with the phrase: "Fie on all your ancestors, Father!"—a portent of his mission as a rebel.

  Our sister felt the same at heart. She, too, though the isolation in which she lived had been forced on her by our father after that affair of the Marchesino della Mela, had always been a rebellious and lonely soul. What happened with the Marchesino, none of us ever really knew. How, as the son of a family hostile to ours, had he ever got into the house? And why? It could only be to seduce, no, rather to rape our sister, said my father in the long quarrel which ensued between the families. We boys, in fact, could never succeed in picturing that freckled simpleton as a seducer, least of all of our sister, who was certainly much stronger than him, and famous for beating the stable hands at competitions of physical strength. And then, why was it he who shouted for help, not her? And how did the servants who rushed to the scene, led by our father, come to find him with his breeches torn to strips as if by the talons of a tiger? The Della Mela family refused even to admit that their son had made an attempt on Battista's virtue or to agree to a marriage between them. So our sister was eventually confined to the house, dressed up as a nun, though without taking any vows even as a tertiary, in view of her rather dubious vocation.

  Her evil schemes found expression in cooking. She was a really excellent cook, for she had the primary gifts in the culinary art: diligence and imagination; but when she put her hand to it, no one ever knew what surprise might appear at table. Once she made some paté toast, really exquisite, of rats' livers; this she never told us until we had eaten them and pronounced them good; and some grasshoppers' claws, crisp and sectioned, laid on an open tart in a mosaic; and pigs' tails baked as if they were little cakes; and once she cooked a complete porcupine with all its quills—who knows why, probably just to give us all a shock at the raising of the dish cover, for even she, who usually ate everything, however odd, that she had prepared herself, refused to taste it, though it was a baby porcupine, rosy and certainly tender. In fact, most of these horrible dishes of hers were thought out just for effect, rather than for any pleasure in making us eat disgusting food with her. These dishes of Battista's were works of the most delicate animal or vegetable jewelry; cauliflower heads with hares' ears set on a collar of fur; or a pig's head from whose mouth stuck a scarlet lobster as if putting out its tongue, and the lobster was holding the pig's tongue in its pincers as if they had torn it out. And finally the snails; she had managed to behead I don't know how many snails, and the heads, those soft little equine heads, she had inserted, I think with a toothpick, each in a wire-mesh; they looked, as they came on the table, like a flight of tiny swans. Even more revolting than the sight of these delicacies was the thought of Battista's zealous determination in preparing them, of those thin hands of hers tearing the little creatures to pieces.

  It was as a protest against this macabre fantasy of our sister's that my brother and I were incited to show our sympathy with the poor tortured creatures, and our disgust, too, for the flavor of cooked snails—a revolt really against everything and everyb
ody; and from this, not surprisingly, stemmed Cosimo's gesture and all that followed after.

  We had devised a plan. When the Cavalier brought home a basket full of eatable snails, these were put into a barrel in the cellar, so they should starve, or eat only bran and so be purged. When we moved the planks covering these barrels an inferno was revealed: snails moving up the staves with a languor which was already a presage of their death agony, amid remnants of bran, streaks of opaque clotted slime and multicolored excrement, mementos of the good old days of open air and grass. Some of them were right outside their shells with heads extended, and waving horns; some all curled up, showing a different pair of antennae. Others were grouped like village gossips, others shut and sleeping, others dead, with their shells upside down. To save them from meeting that sinister cook, and to save us from her ministrations too, we made a hole in the bottom of the barrel, and from there traced as hidden a trail as we could, with bits of chopped grass and honey, behind barrels and various tools in the cellar, to draw the snails toward a little window facing an uncultivated grassy field.

  Next day we went down into the cellar to see the results, and we inspected the walls and passage by candlelight—"One here! . . . And another there!. . . And just see where this one got to!" Already there was an almost continuous line of snails moving from the barrel over the flagstones and walls toward the little window, following our trail. "Quick, snaily-wailies! Hurry up, out!" we could not help shouting at them, seeing the creatures moving along so slowly, now and then going around and around in circles over the rough cellar walls, attracted by occasional fly-droppings and mildew. But the cellar was dark and cluttered; we hoped no one would notice them, and that they would all have time to escape.

  But that restless creature, our sister Battista, used to spend the nights wandering around the house in search of mice, holding a candelabra, with a musket under her arm. That night she went down into the cellar, and the candlelight shone on a lost snail on the ceiling, with its trail of silvery slime. A shot rang out. We all started in our beds, but soon dropped our heads back onto the pillows, used as we were to the night hunts of our resident nun. But Battista, having destroyed the snail and brought down a hunk of plaster with her instinctive shot, now began to shout in that strident voice of hers: "Help! They're all escaping! Help!" Half-dressed servants hurried to her, our father came armed with a saber, the Abbé without his wig; the Cavalier did not even find out what was happening, but ran off into the woods to avoid the fuss and went to sleep in a haystack.