Italo Calvino - [Our Ancestors 02]

by The Baron in the Trees (epub)

  } 10 {

  THE olives, because of their tortuous shapes, were comfortable and easy passages for Cosimo, patient trees with rough, friendly bark on which he could pass or pause, in spite of the scarcity of thick branches and the monotony of movement which resulted from their shapes. On a fig tree, though, as long as he saw to it that a branch could bear his weight, he could move about forever; Cosimo would stand under the pavilion of leaves, watching the sun appear through the network of twigs and branches, the gradual swell of the green fruit, smelling the scent of flowers budding in the stalks. The fig tree seemed to absorb him, permeate him with its gummy texture and the buzz of hornets; after a little Cosimo would begin to feel he was becoming a fig himself, and move away, uneasy. On the hard sorb apple or the mulberry he was all right; a pity they were so rare. Or the nut. . . sometimes seeing my brother lose himself in the endless spread of an old nut tree, like some palace of many floors and innumerable rooms, I found a longing coming over me to imitate him and go and live up there too; such is the strength and certainty that this tree had in being a tree, its determination to be hard and heavy expressed even in its leaves.

  Cosimo would spend happy hours, too, amid the undulating leaves of the ilex (or holm oak, as I have called them when describing the ones in our park, perhaps influenced by our father's stilted language) and he loved its peeling bark from which, when preoccupied, he would pick off a piece with his fingers, not from any desire to do harm, but to help the tree in its long travail of rebirth. Or he would peel away the white bark of a plane tree, uncovering layers of old yellow mildew. He also loved the knobby trucks like the elm, with the tender shoots and clusters of little jagged leaves and twigs growing out of the whorls; but it wasn't an easy tree to move about on as the branches grew upwards, slender and thickly covered, leaving little foothold. In the woods he preferred beeches and oaks; the pines had very close-knit branches, brittle and thick with cones, leaving him no space or support; and the chestnut, with its prickly leaves, husks and bark, and its high branches, seemed a good tree to avoid.

  These sympathies and antipathies Cosimo came to recognize in time—or to recognize consciously, but already in those first days they had begun to be an instinctive part of him. Now it was a whole different world, made up of narrow curved bridges in the emptiness, of knots or peel or scores roughening the trunks, of lights varying their green according to the veils of thicker or scarcer leaves, trembling at the first quiver of the air on the shoots or moving like sails with the bend of the tree in the wind. While down below our world lay flattened, and our bodies looked quite disproportionate and we certainly understood nothing of what he knew up there—he who spent his nights listening to the sap running through its cells; the circles marking the years inside the trunks; the patches of mold growing ever larger helped by the north wind; the birds sleeping and quivering in their nests, then resettling their heads in the softest down of their wings; and the caterpillar waking, and the chrysalis opening. There is the moment when the silence of the countryside gathers in the ear and breaks into a myriad of sounds: a croaking and squeaking, a swift rustle in the grass, a plop in the water, a pattering on earth and pebbles, and high above all, the call of the cicada. The sounds follow one another, and the ear eventually discerns more and more of them—just as fingers unwinding a ball of wool fed each fiber interwoven with progressively thinner and less palpable threads. The frogs continue croaking in the background without changing the flow of sounds, just as light does not vary from the continuous winking of stars. But at every rise or fall of the wind every sound changes and is renewed. All that remains in the inner recess of the ear is a vague murmur: the sea.

  Winter came. Cosimo made himself a fur jacket. He sewed it from the fur of various animals he had hunted: hares, foxes, martens and ferrets. On his head he still wore that cap of wildcat's fur. He also made himself some goatskin breeches with leather knees. As for shoes, he eventually realized that the best footgear for the trees was slippers, and he made himself a pair of some skin or other—perhaps badger.

  So he defended himself against the cold. It should be said that in those days the winters in our parts were mild, and never had the freezing cold of nowadays which they say was loosed from its lair in Russia by Napoleon and followed him all the way here. But even so, spending the winter nights out in the open could not have been easy.

  At night Cosimo eventually found a fur sleeping bag best; no more tents or shacks; a sleeping bag with fur inside, hung on a branch. He got inside, the outside world vanished and he slept tucked up like a child. If there was an unusual sound in the night, from the mouth of the bag emerged the fur cap, the barrel of the gun, then his round eyes. (They said that his eyes had become luminous in the dark like a cat's or owl's; but I never noticed it myself.)

  In the morning, on the other hand, when the jackdaw croaked, from the bag would come a pair of clenched fists; the fists rose in the air and were followed by two arms slowly widening and stretching, and in the movement drawing out his yawning mouth, his shoulders with a gun slung over one and a powder horn over another, and his slightly bandy legs (they were beginning to lose their straightness from his habit of always moving on all fours or in a crouch). Out jumped these legs. They stretched too, and so, with a shake of the back and a scratch under his fur jacket, Cosimo, wakeful and fresh as a rose, was ready to begin his day.

  He went to the fountain, for he had a hanging fountain of his own, invented by himself, or rather made with the help of nature. There was a stream which at a certain place dropped sheer in a cascade, and nearby grew an oak, with very high branches. Cosimo, with a piece of scooped-out poplar a couple of yards long, had made a kind of gutter which brought the water from the cascade to the branches of the oak tree, where he could drink and wash. That he did wash is sure, for I have seen him doing so a number of times; not much and not even every day, but he did wash; he also had soap. With the soap, when he happened to feel like it, he would also wash his linen; he had taken a tub into the oak tree for this purpose. Then he would hang the things to dry on ropes from one branch to another.

  In fact he did everything in the trees. He had also found a way to roast the game he caught, on a spit, without ever coming down. This is what he did; he would light a pine cone with a flint and throw it to the ground on a spot already arranged for a fire (I had set this up, with some smooth stones); then he would drop twigs and dried branches on it, regulating the flame with a poker tied on a long stick in such a way that it reached the spit, which was hanging from two branches. All this called for great care, as it is easy to start a fire in the woods. And the fireplace was set on purpose under the oak tree, near the cascade from which he could draw all the water he wanted in case of danger.

  Thus, partly by eating what he shot, partly by bartering with the peasants for fruit and vegetables, he managed very well, and we no longer needed to send any food out to him from the house. One day we heard that he was drinking fresh milk every morning; he had made friends with a goat, which would climb up the fork of an olive tree a foot or two from the ground; but it did not really climb up, it just put its two rear hoofs up, so that he could come down onto the fork with a pail and milk it. He had a similar arrangement with a chicken, a red Paduan, a very good layer. He had made it a secret nest in the hole of a trunk, and on alternate days he would find an egg, which he drank after making two holes in it with a pin.

  Another problem: doing his daily duties. At the beginning he did them wherever he happened to be, here or there it didn't matter, the world was big. Then he realized this was not very nice. So he found, on the banks of a stream called the Merdanzo, an alder tree leaning over a most suitable and secluded part of the water, with a fork on which he could seat himself comfortably. The Merdanzo was a dark torrent, hidden among the bamboos, with a quick flow, and the villages nearby threw their slops into it. So the young Piovasco di Rondò lived a civilized life, respecting the decencies of his neighbor and himself.

  But he
lacked a necessary complement to his huntsman's life—a dog. There was I, flinging myself among the thorns and bushes, searching for a thrush, a snipe or a quail, which had fallen after being shot in mid air, or even looking out for foxes when, after a night on the prowl, one of them would stop with its long tail extended just outside the bushes. But only rarely could I escape to join him in the woods; lessons with the Abbé, study, serving Mass, meals with my parents kept me back; the hundred and one duties of family life I submitted to, because, after all, the phrase which was always being repeated around me—"One rebel in a family is enough"—made sense and left a mark on me all my life.

  So Cosimo almost always went hunting alone, and to recover the game (except in rare cases such as when a golden oriole's wings would catch on a branch as it fell) he used a kind of fishing tackle; rods with string and hooks, but he did not always succeed in reaching it, and sometimes a snipe ended black with ants in the bottom of a gully.

  I have spoken up to now only of retrievers. For Cosimo then did only the kind of shooting which meant spending mornings and nights crouched on his branch, waiting for a thrush to pause on some exposed twig, or a hare to appear in the open space of a field. If not, he wandered about at random, following the song of the birds, or guessing the most probable tracks of the animals. And when he heard the baying of hounds behind a hare or a fox, he knew he must avoid them, for these were not animals for him, a solitary casual hunter. Respectful of the rules as he was, when from his observation post he noticed or could aim at some game chased by the hounds of others, he would never raise his gun. He would wait for the huntsman to arrive panting along the path, with ears cocked and eyes bleared, and point out to him the direction the animal had taken.

  One day he saw a fox on the run: a red streak in the middle of the green grass, whiskers erect, snorting fearfully; it crossed the field and vanished into the undergrowth. And behind: "Oohowowah!"—the hounds.

  They arrived at a gallop, their noses to the ground, twice found themselves without the smell of fox in their nostrils and then turned away at a right angle.

  They were already some way off when, with a howl of "Oohee, Oohee!" cleaving through the grass with leaps that were more like a fish's than a dog's, came a kind of dolphin; he was swimming along and mining, with a nose sharper and ears droopier than a bloodhound's. His rear end was just like that of a fish propelled by fins, or web feet, legless and very long. He came out into the open; a dachshund.

  He must have tagged after the hounds and been left behind, young as he was, almost a puppy. The sound of the hounds was now a "Boohahf" of annoyance, because they had lost the scent, and the running pack became scattered all around an open field, too anxious to find the lost scent again and to make a real search for it, and losing their impetus, so that already one or two of them were taking the opportunity of raising their legs against a rock.

  The dachshund, panting hard, trotting along with his nose in the air in unjustified triumph, finally reached the hounds. He was still triumphant and gave a cunning howl: "Ooheeyah! Ooheeyah!"

  The hounds snarled at once—"Owrrrch"—and quit their search for the fox's scent a minute and went toward the dachshund, their mouths open ready to bite—"Ghrrrr!" Then they quickly lost interest again, and ran off.

  Cosimo followed the dachshund, which was now moving about haphazardly, and the dog, wavering with a distracted nose, saw the boy on the tree and wagged his tail. Cosimo felt sure that the fox was still hidden nearby. The hounds were scattered a long way off. They could be heard every now and again from the opposite slope barking in a broken and aimless way, urged on by the muted voices of the hunters. Cosimo said to the dachshund: "Go on! Go on! Look for it!"

  The puppy flung himself about sniffing hard, and every now and again turned his face up to look at the boy.

  "Go on! Go on!" Cosimo urged him.

  Now Cosimo could not see the dog any more. He heard a crashing among the bushes, then, suddenly: "Owowowah! Eeayee! Eeayeeah!" the dachshund had raised the fox!

  Cosimo saw the animal run out into the field. But could he fire at a fox raised by someone else's dog? Cosimo let it pass and did not shoot. The dachshund lifted his snout toward the boy, with the look of dogs when they do not understand and are not sure whether they should understand, and flung his nose down again, behind the fox.

  "Eeayee, eeayee, eeayee!" The fox made a complete round. There, it was coming back. Could he fire or couldn't he? He didn't. The dachshund turned a sad eye up at him. He was not barking any more, his tongue was drooping more than his ears. He was exhausted, but he still went on running.

  The dachshund's raising of the fox had baffled both hounds and hunters. Along the path was running an old man with a heavy arquebus. "Hey," called Cosimo, "is that dachshund yours?"

  "A plague on you and all your family!" shouted the old man, who must have been a bit cracked. "Do we look like people who hunt with a dachshund?"

  "Then whatever he puts up, I can shoot," insisted Cosimo, who really wanted to do the right thing.

  "Shoot at your guardian angel for all I care!" replied the other, as he hurried off.

  The dachshund chased the fox back again to Cosimo's tree. Cosimo shot at it and hit it. The dachshund was his dog; he called him Ottimo Massimo.

  Ottimo Massimo was no one's dog, he had joined the pack of hounds from youthful enthusiasm. But where did he come from? To discover this, Cosimo let him lead him.

  The dachshund, his belly grazing the ground, crossed hedges and ditches; then he turned to see if the boy up there was managing to follow his tracks. So unusual was his route that Cosimo did not realize at once where they had got to. When he understood, his heart gave a leap; it was the garden of the Ondarivas.

  The villa was shut, the shutters pulled to; only one, on an attic window, was in the wind. More than ever the garden had the look of a forest from another world. And along the alleys now overgrown with weeds and the bush-laden flower bed), Ottimo Massimo moved happily, as if at home, chasing butterflies.

  He vanished into a thicket and came back with a ribbon. Cosimo's heart gave another leap. "What is it, Ottimo Massimo? Eh? Whose is it? Tell me?"

  Ottimo Massimo wagged its tail.

  "Bring it here, Ottimo Massimo!"

  Cosimo came down on to a low branch and took from the dog's mouth a faded piece of ribbon which must have been a hair ribbon of Viola's, just as that dog was certainly Viola's dog, forgotten there in the last move of the family. In fact, Cosimo now seemed to remember him from the summer before, as still a puppy, peeping out of a basket in the arms of the fair-haired girl; perhaps they had just that moment brought him to her as a present.

  "Search, Ottimo Massimo!" The dachshund threw himself among the bamboos; and came back with other mementos of her, a skipping rope, a piece of an old kite, a fan.

  At the top of the trunk of the highest tree in the garden, my brother carved with the point of his rapier the names Viola and Cosimo and then, lower down, certain that it would give her pleasure even if he called him by another name, "Ottimo Massimo, Dachshund."

  From that time on, whenever we saw the boy on the trees we could be sure he was looking for the dachshund. Ottimo would trot along belly to ground. Cosimo had taught him how to search, stop, and bring back game, the jobs every hunting dog does, and there was no woodland creature that they did not hunt together. To bring him the game, Ottimo Massimo would clamber with two paws as high up the trunk as he could; Cosimo would lean down, take the hare or the partridge from his mouth and pat him on the head. These were all their intimacies, their celebrations. But between the two on the ground and branches ran a continual dialogue, an understanding, of monosyllabic baying and tongue-clicking and finger-snapping. That necessary presence which man is for a dog and a dog for man, never betrayed either; and though they were different from all other men and dogs in the world, they could still call themselves happy, as man and dog.

  } 11 {

  FOR a long time—one whole per
iod of his adolescence—hunting was Cosimo's world. And fishing too, for he would wait for eels and trout with a line in the ponds and streams. Sometimes he seemed almost to have developed instincts and senses different from ours, as if those skins he had made into clothes corresponded to a total change in his nature. Certainly the continual contact with the barks of trees, his eyes trained to the movement of a feather, a hair, a scale, to the range of colors of his world, and then the various greens circulating through the veins of leaves like blood from another world; all those forms of life so far removed from the human as the stem of a plant, the beak of a thrush, the gill of a fish, those borders of the wild into which he was so deeply urged—all might have molded his mind, made him lose every semblance of man. But, no matter how many new qualities he acquired from his closeness with plants and his struggles with animals, his place—it always seemed to me—was clearly with us.

  But even without meaning to, he found certain habits becoming rarer—and finally abandoned them altogether—such as following High Mass in Ombrosa. For the first months he tried to do so. Every Sunday, as we came out of the house—the whole family dressed up ceremonially—we would find him on the branches, he too rigged in an attempt at ceremonial dress, such as his old tunic, or his tricorn instead of the fur cap. We would set off, and he would follow us over the branches. So we reached the entrance to the church, with all the people of Ombrosa looking at us (soon even my father became used to it and his embarrassment decreased)—we were all walking with great dignity, he jumping in the air. A strange sight, particularly in winter, with the trees bare.

  We would enter the cathedral and sit at our family pew, while he stayed outside, kneeling on an ilex beside one of the naves, just at the height of a big window. From our pew we would see, through the windows, the shadows of the branches and, in the middle, Cosimo's with hat on chest and head bowed. By agreement between my father and one of the sacristans, that window was kept half open every Sunday, so that my brother could attend Mass from his tree. But as time went by we saw him there no more. The window was closed as it made a draught.