Italo Calvino - [Our Ancestors 02]

by The Baron in the Trees (epub)

  The day of execution came before the novel was finished. Gian dei Brughi made his last journey in the land of the living on a cart with a friar. Hangings at Ombrosa were from a high oak in the middle of the square. The whole population was standing around in a circle.

  When his head was in the noose, Gian dei Brughi heard a whistle between the branches. He raised his face. There was Cosimo with a shut book.

  "Tell me how it ends," said the condemned man.

  "I'm sorry to tell you, Gian," answered Cosimo, "that Jonathan ends hanged by the neck."

  "Thank you. Like me! Good-by!" And he himself kicked away the ladder and was strangled.

  When the body ceased to twitch, the crowd went away. Cosimo remained till nightfall, astride the branch from which the hanged man was dangling. Every time a crow came near to peck at the corpse's eyes or nose, Cosimo chased it away with a wave of his cap.

  } 13 {

  FROM this time spent in the brigand's company Cosimo had acquired a passion for reading and study which remained with him for the rest of his life. The attitude in which we now usually found him was astride a comfortable branch with a book open in his hand, or leaning over the fork of a tree as if he were on a school bench, with a sheet of paper on a plank and an inkstand in a hole in the tree, writing with a long quill pen.

  Now it was he who would go and look for the Abbé Fauchelefleur to give him lessons, to explain Tacitus or Ovid and the celestial bodies and the laws of chemistry. But the old priest, apart from a bit of grammar and bit of theology, was floundering in a sea of doubts and lack of knowledge, and at his pupil's questions he would open his arms and raise his eyes to the sky.

  "Mon Abbé, how many wives can one have in Persia?" "Mon Abbé, who is the Savoyard Vicar?" "Mon Abbé, can you explain the system of Linnaeus?"

  "Alors. . . Maintenant . . . Voyons. . ." the Abbé would begin, then hesitate and go no further.

  But Cosimo, who was devouring books of every kind, and spending half his time in reading and half in hunting, in order to pay the bookseller's bills, always had some new story to tell him. Of Rousseau botanizing on his walks through the forests of Switzerland, or Benjamin Franklin trying to capture lightning with a kite, of the Baron de la Hontan living happily among the Indians of America.

  Old Fauchelefleur seemed to listen to all this with surprised attention, whether from real interest or only from relief at not having to teach himself, I don't know; and he would nod and interject a "Non! Dites-moi!" when Cosimo turned to him and asked "Do you know how it is that. . .?" or with a "Tiens! C'est bien epatant!" when Cosimo gave him a reply; and sometimes a "Mon Dieu!" which could be either from exaltation at this new revelation of the greatness of God, or from regret at the omnipresence of Evil still rampant in the world under so many guises.

  I was too much of a boy and Cosimo's only friends were illiterate—hence his need to comment on the discoveries he kept on making in books found an outlet in this spate of questions and rejoinders to the old tutor. The Abbé, of course, had the gentle accommodating outlook that comes from a higher understanding of the vanity of all; and Cosimo profited by it. Thus the relationship of pupil and teacher between the two was reversed. It was Cosimo who became the teacher and Fauchelefleur the pupil. And my brother was acquiring such authority that he even managed to drag the trembling old man behind him up into the trees. He made him spend an entire afternoon with his thin legs dangling from a chestnut tree, in the Ondariva gardens, contemplating the rare plants and the sunset reflected in the basins of the fountains and discussing monarchies and republics, the right and truth in various religions, Chinese rituals, the Lisbon earthquake, the Leyden jar, and Condillac's philosophy called sensationism.

  I was supposed to have my Greek lesson with him and could not find the tutor. The whole family was alerted, the countryside was searched and even the fishing pond dragged for him, lest in a careless moment he had fallen in and got drowned. But back he came that evening, complaining of lumbago after all the hours he had spent sitting so uncomfortably.

  It must not be forgotten, though, that this state of general passive acceptance by the old Jansenist alternated with momentary returns of his old passion for spiritual rigor. And if while in a careless and yielding mood he accepted without resistance any new or libertarian idea, such as the equality of all men before the law, or the honesty of primitive people, or the bad influence of superstitions, he would be assailed a quarter of an hour later by an excess of austerity and absolutism, and attack with all his need for coherence and moral severity the ideas he had accepted so lightly just before. On his lips, then, the duties of free and equal citizens or the virtues of natural religion became hard and fast dogmatic rules, articles of fanatical faith, beyond which he could only see a black picture of corruption; to him, then, all the new philosophers were far too bland and superficial in their denunciation of evil, for the way of perfection was arduous and left no room for compromises or halfway measures.

  To these sudden about-faces of the Abbé, Cosimo did not dare say a word, for fear of being criticized for incoherence and lack of rigor, and the prolific world which he tried to create would die as if in some marble cemetery. Luckily, the Abbé would soon tire of this sustained mental effort and would sit there looking exhausted, as if this whittling away of every concept to its pure essence left him the prey of impalpable shadows; he would blink, give a sigh, turn the sigh to a yawn, and go back into his nirvana.

  But between one and another of these habits of mind, he was now spending his entire days following the studies being pursued by Cosimo, shuttlecocking between the trees where Cosimo was perched and Orbecche's shop, ordering books from Amsterdam or Paris, and taking out those newly arrived. And thus he prepared the way for his own downfall. For the rumor reached the Ecclesiastical Tribunal that there was a priest at Ombrosa who read all the most forbidden books in Europe. One afternoon the police appeared at our house with orders to inspect the Abbé's cell. Among his brevaries they found the works of Bayle, still uncut, but this was enough for them to take him away.

  It was a sad little scene, on that misty afternoon; I remember the dismay with which I watched it from the window of my room, and stopped studying the conjugation of Greek verbs, as there would be no more lessons. Old Abbé Fauchelefleur went off down the alley between the two armed ruffians, raising his eyes toward the trees; and at a certain point he staggered as if he wanted to run to an elm tree and climb up it, but had not the strength. Cosimo was hunting in the woods that day and knew nothing of it all; so they did not even say good-by.

  We could do nothing to help him. Our father shut himself up in his room and refused all food for fear of being poisoned by the Jesuits. The Abbé spent the rest of his days going back and forth between prison and monastery in continual acts of abjuration, until he died, after an entire life dedicated to the faith, without ever knowing what he believed in, but trying to believe firmly until the last.

  Anyway, the Abbé's arrest had no effect on the progress of Cosimo's education. And from that period dates his correspondence with the major philosophers and scientists of Europe, to whom he wrote in the hope that they might resolve his queries and objections, or perhaps just for the pleasure of discussion with superior minds and also the practice of foreign languages. It was a pity that all his papers, which he kept in a hollow tree trunk known only to himself, have never been found and must certainly by now be moldy or nibbled away by squirrels; there would be letters among them in the handwriting of the best known scholars of the century.

  To keep his books Cosimo constructed a kind of hanging bookcase; sheltered as best he could from rain and nibbling mouths. But he would continuously change them around, according to his studies and tastes of the moment, for he considered books as rather like birds and it saddened him to see them caged or still.

  On the strongest of these bookcases were ranged the tomes of Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopaedia as they reached him from a bookseller at Leghorn. And though re
cently all his living with books had put his head rather in the clouds and made him less and less interested in the world around him, now on the other hand reading the Encyclopaedia, and beautiful words like Abeille, Arbre, Bois, Jardin, made him rediscover everything around him as if seeing it for the first time. Among the books he sent for there began also to figure practical handbooks—for example, one on tree culture—and he found himself longing for the moment when he could experiment with his new knowledge.

  Human labor had always interested Cosimo but, just like a bird, up till now his life in the trees, his constant movements and his hunting had been enough to satisfy his sporadic, incongruous urges. Now, on the other hand, he found coming over him a need to do something useful for his neighbor. And this too, if one analyzes it, was something he had learned from his friendship with the brigand—the pleasure of making himself useful, of performing some service necessary to other people.

  He learned the art of pruning trees, and offered his help to the fruitgrowers, in winter, when the trees stuck out an irregular maze of twigs and seemed to long for a change to more ordered forms so as to cover themselves with flowers and leaves and fruit. Cosimo was good at pruning and charged little; so every owner or tenant of an orchard around would ask for his help, and he could be seen, in the crystalline air of those early mornings, standing with legs apart on low bare branches, his neck wrapped in a scarf to his ears, raising his shears and, clip! clip! off flew secondary branches and twigs under his sure touch. He did the same in gardens with trees planted for shade or ornament, which he would attack with a short saw, and in the woods, where instead of the woodsman's ax, whose only use was chopping down some ancient trunk completely, he would lop away with his swift hatchet only on the tops and upper branches.

  In fact, his love for this arboreal element made him, as all real loves do, become merciless even to the point of hurting, wounding and amputating so as to help growth and give shape. Certainly he was always careful when pruning and lopping to serve not only the interests of the owner but also his own, as a traveler with a need to make his own routes more practicable; thus he would see that the branches which he used as a bridge between one tree and another were always saved, and reinforced by the suppression of others. And so, these trees of Ombrosa which he had already found so welcoming, now, with his newly acquired skill, he made more directly helpful, thus being at the same time a friend to his neighbor, to nature and to himself. The advantages of this wise work of his he was to appreciate above all at a much later period, when the shape of the trees made up more and more for his loss of strength. Then, with the advent of more careless generations, of improvident greed, of people who loved nothing, not even themselves, all was to change, and no Cosimo will ever walk the trees again.

  } 14 {

  IF THE number of Cosimo's friends grew, so did the number of his enemies. The vagabonds of the wood, in fact, after Gian dei Brughi's conversion to a love of literature and subsequent fall, had gone against him. One night my brother was sleeping in his leather bag hung on an ash tree in the wood, when he was awakened by the barking of the dachshund. He opened his eyes and saw a light. It came from down below. There was a fire right at the bottom of the tree and the flames were already licking the trunk.

  A fire in the wood! Who could have set it going? Cosimo was quite certain he had never struck his flint that night. So it must have been those ruffians! They wanted to set the wood alight in order to get firewood and at the same time to put the blame on Cosimo and burn him alive.

  At the moment Cosimo did not think of the danger which was threatening him so closely. His only thought was that the vast kingdom of paths and retreats which were his alone might be destroyed, and that was his only terror. Ottimo Massimo was already rushing away to avoid being burnt, turning around every now and again to give a desperate yelp. The fire was spreading in the undergrowth.

  Cosimo did not lose heart. He had taken a variety of objects up in the ash tree which was then his refuge, and among these was a bottle full of barley water, to quench his summer thirst. He climbed to the bottle. Alarmed squirrels and bats were fleeing up the branches of the ash tree, and birds were flying away from their nests. He seized the bottle and was about to unscrew the cork and pour it over the trunk of the ash tree to save it from the flames, when he realized that the fire was already spreading to the grass, the dried leaves and bushes of the undergrowth, and would soon bum all the trees around. He decided to take a risk: "Let the ash bum! If I manage to wet the earth all around where the flames have not got to yet, I'll stop the fire!" And opening the top of the bottle he poured it down with a twisting, circular movement on to the farthest tips of fire, putting them out. And so the fire in the undergrowth found itself in the midst of a circle of damp grass and leaves, and could not spread any more.

  From the top of the ash tree, Cosimo jumped down onto a beech nearby. He was only just in time. The trunk eaten away by fire at the base crashed down in a great funeral pyre amid the vain squeaks of squirrels.

  Would the fire be limited to that point? Already hundreds of sparks and little flames were flying around; certainly the slippery barrier of wet leaves would not prevent its spreading! "Fire! Fire!" Cosimo began to shout at the top of his voice. "Fire!"

  "Who's there? Who's shouting?" replied voices. Not far from the spot was a colliers' site, and a group of men from Bergamo—friends of his—were sleeping in a shack nearby.

  "Fire! Fire!"

  Soon the whole mountainside was resounding with the cry. The colliers scattered over the woods shouted it to each other in their incomprehensible dialect. They came running along from all directions. And the fire was subdued.

  This first attempt at arson and the attack on his life should have warned Cosimo to keep clear of the wood. Instead of that he began going into the whole matter of controlling fires. It was the summer of a hot, dry year. In the coastal woods toward Provence, a huge fire had been burning for a week. At night its gleam reflected on the mountainside like the last of a sunset. The air was dry, trees and bushes like tinder in the drought. The wind seemed to be urging the flames in our direction, where occasional fires, either by chance or on purpose, would break out, joining the rest in a single belt of flame along the whole coast. Ombrosa was stunned by the danger, as if it were a fortress with a straw roof attacked by enemy incendiaries. The sky itself was charged with fire; every night shooting stars would fly all over the firmament and we would wait for them to fall right on us.

  In those days of general dismay, Cosimo bought up a lot of barrels, filled them with water, and hoisted them up to the tops of the highest trees in strategic places. "One never knows, but this sort of thing's been useful once." Not content with this, he studied the courses of the streams crossing the woods, half dried up as they were, and found that their springs sent out only a trickle of water. Then he went to consult the Cavalier.

  "Oh, yes," exclaimed Enea Silvio Carrega, clapping a hand to his forehead. "Reservoirs! Dykes! We must make plans!" and he broke out into little cries and jumps of enthusiasm with the myriad ideas crowding in his mind.

  Cosimo set him to work at calculations and drawings, and meanwhile approached the owners of the private woods, the tenants of the public woods, the woodcutters, the colliers. All together, headed by the Cavalier (though the Cavalier did not come up to their heads, and was forced to direct them and not let his thoughts wander), with Cosimo superintending the work from above, they accumulated reserves of water in such a way that they could get pumps to every point where a fire might break out.

  But this was not enough; squads of men had to be organized to put the fires out, groups who in case of alarm knew how to organize themselves at once into chains to pass buckets of water from hand to hand and halt the fire before it spread. So there appeared a kind of militia which took turns at guard and night inspection. The men were recruited by Cosimo among the peasants and artisans of Ombrosa. And at once, as happens in every association, there grew up a corporate sp
irit, a sense of competition between the groups. All felt capable of great things. Cosimo, too, felt a new strength and content. He had discovered his ability to bring people together and to put himself at their head—an aptitude which, luckily for himself, he was never called on to abuse, and which he used only a very few times in his life, always when there were important results to be carried out, and always with great success.

  This he understood: that association renders men stronger and brings out each person's best gifts, and gives a joy which is rarely to be had by keeping to oneself, the joy of realizing how many honest decent capable people there are for whom it is worth giving one's best (while living just for oneself very often the opposite happens, of seeing people's other side, the side which makes one keep one's hand always on the hilt of one's sword).

  So that was a good summer, the summer of the fires; there was a common problem which everyone, at heart, wanted to resolve, and each put it above every other personal interest, and all were repaid by the pleasure of finding themselves in agreement and mutual esteem with so many others.

  Later Cosimo came to realize that when a problem in common no longer exists, associations are not as good as they were before, and it is better then to be a man alone and not a leader. But being a leader, meanwhile, he spent the nights all alone in the woods on sentry duty, up on a tree as he had always lived.

  He had arranged a bell on the top of a tree which could be heard from a distance and give the alarm at the first glimmer of an incipient fire. By this system they managed to catch three or four fires in time, when they first broke out, and save the woods. The fires were attempts at arson, and the culprits were the two brigands Ugasso and Bel-Lorè, who were banished from the territory of the Commune. Rain set in at the end of August; the danger of fires had passed.