Italo Calvino - [Our Ancestors 02]

by The Baron in the Trees (epub)

  Many things which would have been important to him before were now no longer. In the spring our sister got engaged. Who would have thought it only a year before? That Count and Countess of Estomac came with the young Count and there were great celebrations. Every room in our house was lit up, all the local nobility were invited, and there was dancing. Why should we think of Cosimo, then? Well, we did think of him, all of us. Every now and then I looked out the window to see if he was coming. Our father was sad, and at that family celebration he must have been thinking of him who had excluded himself from it. The Generalessa, who was ordering the whole party about as if she were on a parade ground, was only doing so as an outlet for her feelings about her absent son. Perhaps even Battista, pirouetting around, unrecognizable now that she was out of her nunnish clothes—wearing a wig which looked like marzipan, and a grand panier decorated with corals, made up for her by some dressmaker or other—even she was thinking of him I could have sworn.

  And he was there, unseen—I heard about it afterwards—in the shadows, on the top of a plane tree, in the cold, watching the brightly lit windows, the rooms he knew so well festooned for the party, the bewigged dancers. What thoughts could have crossed his mind? Did he regret our life a little? Was he thinking how brief was the step which separated him from a return to our world, how brief and how easy? I have no idea what he thought, what he wanted, up there. I only know that he stayed for the whole of the party, and even beyond it, until one by one the chandeliers were put out and not a lit window remained.

  So Cosimo's relations with the family, either good or bad, continued. In fact, they became closer with one member of it—whom he only really now got to know—the Cavalier Enea Silvio Carrega. This vague, elusive little man (nobody ever knew where he was and what he was doing), Cosimo discovered to be the only one of the whole family who had a great number of pursuits and none of them useless.

  He would go out, sometimes in the hottest hour of the afternoon, with his fez stuck on the top of his head, shambling along, his long robe trailing on the ground, and vanish almost as if he had been swallowed up by a crevice in the earth or hedges, or the stones in the walls. Cosimo, too, who passed his time always on the watch (or rather it was not a pastime now, it was his natural state, as if his eye had to embrace a horizon wide enough to understand all), would suddenly lose sight of him. Sometimes he used to start running from branch to branch toward the place where the old man vanished, without ever succeeding in finding where he had gone. But one sign always appeared in the area where he was last seen: flying bees. Eventually Cosimo was convinced that the presence of the Cavalier was linked with the bees, and that in order to find him he would have to follow their flight. But how could he? Around each flowering plant was a scattered buzz of bees; he must not let himself be distracted into isolated and secondary routes, but follow the invisible airy way in which the coming and going of bees was growing thicker and thicker, until he reached a dense cloud rising like smoke from behind a bush. There behind were the beehives, one by one or in rows on a table, and busy about them, with bees buzzing all around him, was the Cavalier.

  Beekeeping was in fact one of our uncle's secret activities; secret to a point only, for he himself every now and again would bring to the table a gleaming honeycomb fresh from the hive; but this activity of his took place outside the boundaries of our property, in places which he evidently did not want us to know about. It must have been a precaution on his part, to prevent the profits of this personal industry of his from passing through the family accounts; or—since the man was certainly not a miser, and anyway could not expect much of a profit from such small quantities of honey and wax—in order to have something in which the Baron, his brother, could not poke his nose, or pretend to be guiding him; or again in order not to mingle the few things which he loved, such as beekeeping, with the many which he did not love, such as administration.

  Anyway, the fact remained that our father had never allowed him to keep bees near the house, as the Baron had an unreasonable fear of being stung; when by chance he happened to come across a bee or a wasp in the garden he would run along the alleys, looking ridiculous, thrusting his hands into his wig as if to protect himself from the pecks of an eagle. Once, as he was doing this, his wig slipped, the bee, disturbed by his sudden movement, turned against him and plunged its sting into his bald pate. For three days he tended his head with compresses soaked in vinegar, for he was that kind of man, very proud and strong in serious matters, but frenzied by a slight scratch or pimple.

  And so Enea Silvio Carrega had scattered his beehives all over the valley of Ombrosa; various landowners had given him permission to keep a beehive or two on a strip of their land in return for a little honey, and he was always going the rounds from one to the other, working at the beehives busily moving his hands, which, in order not to be stung, he had thrust into long black mitts. On his face, beneath his fez, he wore a black veil which clung to him or blew out at every breath. He used to wave about an instrument that scattered smoke, so as to chase the insects away while he was searching in the beehive. The whole scene, the buzz of bees, the veils and clouds of smoke, all seemed to Cosimo a spell which the old man was trying to cast so as to vanish, be obliterated, flown off, and then be reborn elsewhere, in another time or another place. But he was not much of a magician as he always reappeared just the same, though sometimes sucking a bitten thumb.

  It was spring. One morning Cosimo saw the air vibrating with a sound he had never heard, a buzz growing at times almost into a roar, and a curtain of what looked like hail, which instead of falling was moving in a horizontal direction and turning and twisting slowly around, but following a kind of denser column. It was a great mass of bees; and around was greenery and flowers and sun; and Cosimo, he did not understand why, felt himself gripped by a wild and savage excitement. "The bees are escaping! Cavalier! The bees are escaping!" he shouted, running along the trees searching for Carrega.

  "They're not escaping, they're swarming," said the voice of the Cavalier, and Cosimo saw he had sprung up like a mushroom below him and was making signs for him to be quiet. Then suddenly the old man ran off and vanished. Where had he gone to?

  It was swarming time. A group of bees was following a queen bee outside the old hives. Cosimo looked around. Now the Cavalier reappeared from the kitchen door with a saucepan and ladle in his hand. He banged the ladle against the saucepan and raised a very loud dong-dong which resounded in the eardrums and died away in a long vibration so disturbing that it made Cosimo want to stop up his ears. The Cavalier was following the swarm of bees, hitting these copper instruments at every three steps. At each bang the swarm seemed seized by shock, made a rapid dip and turn, and its buzz lowered, its line of flight got more uncertain. Cosimo could not see well, but it seemed to him that the whole swarm was now converging toward a point in the wood and not going beyond it. And Carrega went on banging his pots.

  "What's happening, Cavalier? What are you doing?" my brother asked him, coming up closer.

  "Quick!" hissed the other. "Go to the tree where the swarm has stopped, but be careful not to move it till I arrive!"

  His bees were making for a pomegranate tree. Cosimo reached it and at first saw nothing, then suddenly realized that what looked like a big pine cone hanging from a branch, was in fact bees clinging to each other, with more and more coming along to make the cone bigger.

  Cosimo stood at the top of the pomegranate, holding his breath. Beneath him was the cluster of bees, and the bigger it became the lighter it seemed, as if it were hanging by a thread, or even less, by the claws of an old queen bee; it was all thin tissue, with rustling wings spreading diaphanous grays over the black and yellow stripes on bellies.

  The Cavalier came leaping up, holding a beehive in his hand. He held it upside down under the cluster of bees. "Hey," he whispered to Cosimo. "Give the branch a little shake, will you?"

  Cosimo made the pomegranate just quiver. The swarm of thousands of bees brok
e off like a leaf and fell into the hive, over which the Cavalier put a plank. "There we are."

  So between Cosimo and the Cavalier there arose an understanding, a collaboration which could almost have been called friendship, if friendship did not seem too excessive a term for two people who were both so unsociable.

  My brother and Enea Silvio also got together, eventually, on the subject of hydraulics. That may seem odd, for one living on the trees must find it rather difficult to have anything to do with wells and canals, but I have mentioned the kind of hanging fountain Cosimo had made from a length of scooped-out poplar to bring water from a fall to an oak. Now the Cavalier, though apparently so vague, noticed everything that had to do with moving water over the whole countryside. From above the cascade, hidden behind a privet hedge, he had watched Cosimo pull out this wooden pipe from between the branches of the oak (where he kept it when he did not use it, following the habit of wild animals, which had immediately become his, of hiding everything), prop it on a fork of the tree on one side and on some stones on the other, and drink.

  At this sight something seems to have taken wing in the Cavalier's head; he was swept by a rare moment of euphoria. He jumped out of the bush, clapped his hands, gave two or three skips as if on a rope, splashed the water, and nearly jumped into the cascade and flew down the precipice. And he began to explain to the boy the idea he had had. The idea was confused and the explanation very confused. The Cavalier normally spoke in dialect—from modesty rather than ignorance of the language—but in these sudden moments of excitement he would pass from dialect to Turkish without noticing it, and not another word of his could be understood.

  To make a long story short: his idea was a hanging aqueduct; with a conducting pipe held up by branches of trees, which would reach the bare slope of the valley opposite it and irrigate it. Cosimo supported the project at once, and suggested a refinement: using pierced tree trunks at certain points for the water to sprinkle over the crops like rain; this sent the Cavalier almost into ecstasy.

  He rushed back to his study, and filled pages and pages with plans. Cosimo took to working on this idea too, for everything that could be done on trees pleased him, and gave, he felt, a new importance and authority to his position up there; and in Enea Silvio Carrega he seemed to have found an unexpected companion. They made appointments on certain low trees; the Cavalier would climb up with a triangular ladder, his arms full of rolls of drawings; and they would discuss for hours the ever more complicated developments of their aqueduct.

  But it never reached a practical stage. Enea Silvio grew tired, his discussions with Cosimo became rarer, and after a week he probably forgot all about it. Cosimo did not regret it; he had soon realized it would become just a tiresome complication in his life and nothing else.

  It was clear our uncle could have achieved much in the field of hydraulics. He had a bent for it—a particular turn of mind necessary to that branch of study—but he was incapable of putting his projects into practice; he would waste more and more time, until every plan ended in nothing, like badly channeled water which after whirling around a little is sucked up into the porous earth. The reason perhaps was this, that while he could dedicate himself to beekeeping, on his own, almost in secret, without having to deal with anyone, producing every now and again just a present of a honeycomb which no one had asked him for, this work of irrigation, on the other hand, meant considering the interests of this man or that, following the opinions and the orders of the Baron or of whoever else commissioned the work. Timid and irresolute as he was, he would never oppose the will of others, but would soon dissociate himself from the work and leave it.

  He could be seen at all hours in the middle of a field among men armed with stakes and spades, he with a slide rule and the rolled sheet of a map, giving orders to dig for a canal and pacing the ground out by greatly exaggerating his normal stride. He would get the men to begin digging in one place, then in another, then call a halt, then start taking measurements again. Night fell and the work was suspended. Next day he would rarely resume work where they'd left off. And then for a week he was nowhere to be found. His passion for hydraulics consisted of aspirations, impulses, yearnings. It was a memory he had in his heart of the lovely, well-irrigated lands of the Sultan, of orchards and gardens in which he must have been happy, the only really happy time of his life; and to those gardens of Barbary or Turkey he would be continually comparing our countryside at Ombrosa, and so felt an urge to correct it, to try to identify it with the landscape in his memory, and being a specialist in hydraulics, he concentrated in that his desire for change, continually came up against a different reality, and was disappointed.

  He also practiced water divining, not openly, though, for those were still times when that strange art could be considered witchcraft. Once Cosimo found him in a field twirling and holding a forked stick. That must have been just an experiment too, as nothing came of it.

  Understanding the character of Enea Silvio Carrega was a help to Cosimo; it made him understand a lot about loneliness, which was to be of use to him later in life. I should say that he always carried with him the strange image of the Cavalier, as a warning of what can happen to a man who separates his own fate from others, and he managed never to be like him.

  } 12 {

  SOMETIMES Cosimo used to be awakened in the night by cries of "Help! Brigands! Quick!"

  Off he would hurry through the trees toward the direction from which the cries were coming. This might turn out to be some peasant cottage, with a half-naked family outside tearing their hair.

  "Help, help, Gian dei Brughi has just come and taken our whole earnings from the crop!"

  People crowded together.

  "Gian dei Brughi? Was it him? Did you see him?"

  "Yes, it was! It was! He had a mask on his face and a long pistol, and he had two masked men behind him and was ordering 'em about! It was Gian dei Brughi!"

  "And where is he? Where did he go?"

  "Oh, catch Gian dei Brughi? He might be anywhere, by now!"

  Or the shouts might be coming from a passer-by left in the middle of the road robbed of everything—horse, purse, cloak and baggage. "Help! Thief! Gian dei Brughi!"

  "Which way did he go? Tell me!"

  "He jumped out of there! Black, bearded, musket at the ready, I'm lucky to be alive!"

  "Quick! Let's follow him! Which way did he go?"

  "That way! No, perhaps this! He was running like the wind!" Cosimo was determined to see Gian dei Brughi. He would go through the length and breadth of the wood behind hares or birds, urging on the dachshund: "Go on, to it, Ottimo Massimo!" What he longed for was to track down the bandit in person, not to do or say anything to him, but just to look someone so renowned in the face. But he never succeeded in meeting him, even by prowling all night. "That means he hasn't been out tonight," Cosimo would say to himself; but in the morning, on one side or other of the valley, he would find groups of people standing on their doorsteps or at a turn of the road and commenting on the new robbery. Cosimo would hurry up and listen with bated breath to their stories.

  "But you're always on the trees in the woods," someone said to him. "Surely you must have seen Gian dei Brughi?"

  Cosimo felt very ashamed. "But. . . I don't think so. . ."

  "How could he have seen him?" asked another. "Gian dei Brughi has hiding places no one can find, and uses paths not a soul knows about!"

  "With that reward on his head, whoever gets him can spend the rest of their lives in comfort!"

  "Yes, indeed! But those who do know where he is have as many accounts with justice as he has, and if they say a word they'll go straight to the gibbet themselves!"

  "Gian dei Brughi! Gian dei Brughi! But d'you think he really commits all these crimes himself?"

  "Of course he's got so much to account for that even if he managed to be cleared of ten thefts, he'd still be hanged for the eleventh!"

  "He's been a brigand in all the woods along the coast!" />
  "He's even killed a leader of his, in his youth!"

  "He's been banished by the bandits themselves!"

  "That's why he's taken refuge in our area."

  Cosimo would go and talk over every new incident with the colliers. Among the people camped in the wood, beside the colliers, tinkers and glass cutters, there were men who covered chairs in straw, rag-and-bone merchants, people who went around houses and planned in the morning the theft they would commit that night. In the woods they hid their loot in a secret refuge which was also their workshop.

  "D'you know, Gian dei Brughi attacked a coach last night!"

  "Ah yes? Well, maybe . . ."

  "He stopped the galloping horses by grasping their bits!"

  "Well, either it wasn't him or those horses were grasshoppers . . ."

  "What's that you're saying? Don't you believe it was Gian dei Brughi?"

  "Ha, ha, ha!"

  When he heard them talk of Gian dei Brughi like that, Cosimo did not know if he was on his head or his heels. He moved about the wood and went and asked another encampment of tramps.

  "Tell me, d'you think that job on the carriage last night was Gian dei Brughi's?"

  "Every job is Gian dei Brughi's, when it succeeds. Didn't you know?"

  "Why, when it succeeds?"

  "Because when it doesn't, it means it really is Gian dei Brughi's!"

  "Ha, ha! That bungler'."

  Cosimo could not understand at all. "D'you mean Gian dei Brughi's a bungler?"

  The others then hurriedly changed their tone. "No, no, of course not, he's a brigand who frightens everyone!"