Italo Calvino - [Our Ancestors 02]

by The Baron in the Trees (epub)

  He heard a bark. And started with pleasure. The dog, Ottimo Massimo, whom he had lost sight of during the battle, was crouching there at the bottom of the boat, and wagging his tail as if nothing unusual was happening. Oh, well, reflected Cosimo, there was not so very much to worry about; it was a family reunion, what with his uncle and his dog; and he was going on a boating trip, which after so many years of arboreal life, was a pleasant diversion.

  The moon shone on the sea. Now the old man was tiring. He was rowing with difficulty, sobbing and saying again and again: "Ah, Zaira . . . ah, Allah, Allah, Zaira . . . Inshiallah. . . I" then he'd relapse into Turkish, repeating over and over again amid tears this woman's name which Cosimo had never heard.

  "What are you saying, Cavalier? What's the matter with you? Where are we going?" he asked.

  "Zaira . . . Ah, Zaira . . . Allah, Allah . . ." exclaimed the old man.

  "Who is Zaira, Cavalier? Do you think you are going to Zaira this way?" and Enea Silvio Carrega nodded his head, and spoke in Turkish in between sobs, and called that name out to the moon.

  Cosimo at once began to mull over suppositions about this Zaira. Perhaps the deepest mystery of that reserved and mysterious man was about to reveal itself. If the Cavalier, going toward the pirate ship, hoped to join this Zaira, she must then be a woman out there, in those Ottoman lands. Perhaps the whole of his life had been dominated by nostalgia for that woman, perhaps she was the image of the lost happiness which he had expressed by raising bees and tracing irrigation channels. Perhaps she was a mistress, a wife whom he had left over there, in the gardens of those lands beyond the seas, or perhaps she was really his daughter, a daughter whom he had not seen since she was a child, to find whom he had tried for years to establish contact with one of the Turkish or Moorish ships that came to our parts, until finally he had got news of her. Perhaps he had learned that she was a slave, and as a ransom they had suggested his informing on the movements of the Ombrosan tartans. Or perhaps it was a price he had to pay in order to be readmitted among them and embark for the country of Zaira.

  Now, his intrigue discovered, he was forced to flee from Ombrosa, and now the Berbers could not refuse to take him with them and carry him back to her. In his panting snatches of talk were mixed accents of hope, of invocation, and also of fear; fear that this might still not be the right opportunity, or that some mischance might still separate him from the creature for whom he yearned.

  He was just getting to the end of his rope in rowing when a shadow drew near—another Berber boat. Perhaps from the ship they had heard the sounds of battle on the shore, and were sending out scouts.

  Cosimo slipped halfway down the mast, so as to hide behind the sail, but the old man began to shout in Lingua Franca for them to fetch him and take him to the ship, stretching out imploring arms. His petition was granted; two janissaries in turbans, as soon as they were within reach, took him up by the shoulders, light as he was, and pulled him onto their boat. The boat Cosimo was on got pushed away, the wind caught the sail, and so my brother, who had really felt he was done for this time, escaped discovery.

  As the wind bore him away from the pirate boat, Cosimo heard voices raised as if in argument. A word said by the Moors, which sounded like "Marrano!" and the old man's voice repeating faintly, "Ah, Zaira!" left no doubts as to the Cavalier's reception. Certainly they held him responsible for the ambush at the cave; for the loss of their booty and the deaths of their men, and were accusing him of treachery. . .. A last shout, a plop, then silence. And to Cosimo came as clearly as if he heard it, the sound of his father's voice shouting, "Enea Silvio! Enea Silvio!" as he followed his half brother over the countryside; and Cosimo hid his face in the sail.

  He climbed the yard again, to see where the boat was going. Something was floating in the midst of the sea as if carried by a current, an object, a kind of buoy, but a buoy with a tail. . . A ray of moonlight fell on it, and he saw that it was not an object but a head, a head stuck in a fez with a tassel, and he recognized the upturned face of the Cavalier looking up with his usual abstracted air and his mouth open; but below the beard the rest of him was in the water and could not be seen, and Cosimo shouted: "Cavalier! What are you doing? What are you doing? Why don't you get in? Catch hold of the boat! I'll help you in, Cavalier!"

  But his uncle did not answer; he was floating, floating, looking up with that dismayed air as if he could see nothing. And Cosimo said: "Hey! Ottimo Massimo! Throw yourself in the water! Take the Cavalier by the nape of the neck! Save him! Save him!"

  The obedient dog plunged in, tried to get his teeth into the old man's nape, did not succeed, and took him by the beard.

  "By the nape, I said, Ottimo Massimo!" insisted Cosimo, but the dog raised the head by the beard and pushed it to the edge of the boat, and then it could be seen that there was no nape of neck any more; no body or anything, just a head; the head of Enea Silvio Carrega struck off by the stroke of a scimitar.

  } 16 {

  THE first version of the Cavalier's end, as given by Cosimo, was very different. When the wind brought the boat to the shore, with him clinging to the crossbar and Ottimo Massimo dragging the truncated head, he told the people who came hurrying to his call a very simple story (meanwhile he quickly moved into a tree with the help of a rope); that the Cavalier had been kidnapped by the pirates and then killed. Perhaps it was a version prompted by the thought of his father, who would be so struck down with sorrow at the news of his half brother's death and the sight of that pathetic relic that Cosimo lacked the heart to load him with the revelation of the Cavalier's felony too. In fact, afterwards, when he heard of the deep gloom into which the Baron had fallen, he tried to make up an imaginary glory for our natural uncle, inventing a secret and astute intrigue against the pirates to which the Cavalier had dedicated himself for some time and whose discovery had brought him to his death. But this account was contradictory and full of holes, also because there was something else that Cosimo wanted to hide, which was the unloading of the stolen goods by the pirates in the cave and the intervention of the colliers. For, if the whole story had been known, the entire population of Ombrosa would have gone into the woods to take their merchandise back from the Bergamese, and would have treated them as robbers.

  After a week or so, when he was certain that the colliers had disposed of the goods, he told of the assault on the cave, and anyone who went up to try and recover their property came back with empty hands. The colliers had divided it all up into equal parts: the stockfish fillet by fillet, and with the sausages and cheeses, and all the rest they had made a great banquet which lasted all day.

  Our father had aged very much, and sorrow over the loss of Enea Silvio had strange effects on his behavior. He was taken by a mania to prevent any of his brother's work being lost, so he insisted on looking after the beehives himself, and set to work with great ceremony, though he had never before seen a beehive close up. For advice he turned to Cosimo, who had learned something about them; not that he would ask him direct questions, but just draw the conversation on to apiculture, listen to what Cosimo said, and then repeat it as orders to the peasants in an irascible self-sufficient tone, as if it were all quite obvious. To the hives themselves he tried not to get too close for fear of being stung, but he was determined to conquer this phobia, and must have gone through agonies because of it. He also gave orders for certain watercourses to be dug, in order to carry out a project initiated by poor Enea Silvio; and had he succeeded it would have been an excellent thing, as his poor dear brother had never completed a single one.

  This belated passion of the Baron for practical affairs lasted only a short time, alas. One day he was busying himself nervously among the beehives and watercourses when, at some brusque movement of his, a swarm of bees made for him. He took fright, began to wave his hands about, overturned a beehive, and rushed off with a cloud of bees behind him. He ran blindly, fell into the channel which they were trying to fill with water, and was pulled out soaking we
t.

  He was put to bed. What with a fever from the stings, and another from the wetting, he was in bed a week. Then he was more or less cured, but he went into such a decline that he never pulled up again.

  He had lost the will to live and would stay in bed all day long. Nothing in his life had turned out as he hoped. No one mentioned the dukedom any more. His eldest son spent his whole life on trees even now that he was grown up; his half brother had been murdered; his daughter was far away and married into a family even more unpleasant than herself; I was too young to be anything of a companion; his wife too impulsive and hectoring. He began getting hallucinations that the Jesuits had taken over his house and would not allow him to leave his room, and so, bitter and bizarre as he had lived, he came to death.

  Cosimo followed the funeral too, from one tree to another, but he could not enter the cemetery, as the branches of cypresses are too close together to climb. He watched the burial from beyond the cemetery wall and when we all flung a handful of earth on the coffin he threw down a small branch of leaves. We had all, I thought, been as far removed from my father as Cosimo was in the trees.

  So now Cosimo was Baron of Rondò. There was no change in his life. He looked after the family interests, it is true, but always rather haphazardly. When the bailiffs and tenants wanted to find him they did not know where to look; and just when they least wanted him to see them, there he would be on a branch.

  Partly in connection with estate matters, Cosimo was now more often seen in the town, perched on the big nut tree in the square or on the ilexes by the quays. The people treated him with great respect, called him "Lord Baron," and he came to take on certain attitudes of an older man, as young men sometimes do, and would sit there telling stories to groups of Ombrosians, clustered around the foot of the tree.

  He would often describe our uncle's end, though never twice in the same way, and bit by bit he began to disclose the Cavalier's complicity with the pirates. But in order to prevent the immediate upsurge of indignation from all below, he at once added the story of Zaira, almost as if Carrega had confided it to him before dying; and eventually he even moved them to sympathy over the old man's sad end.

  From complete invention, Cosimo, I believe, had arrived, by successive approximations, at an almost entirely truthful account of the facts. He told this two or three times; then finding his audience never tired of listening to the story and new listeners always coming and asking for details, he found himself making new additions, amplifying, exaggerating, and introducing new characters and episodes, so that the tale got quite distorted and became even more of an invention than it had been at first.

  Cosimo now had a following which would listen open-mouthed to everything he said. He began to enjoy telling stories about his life on the trees, and his hunting, and the brigand Gian dei Brughi, and the dog Ottimo Massimo. They all became material for tales that went on and on and on. (Many episodes in this account of his life are taken from what he would narrate at the request of his rustic audience, and I mention this to excuse myself if not all I write seems likely or conforming to a harmonious view of humanity and fact.)

  For example, one of the idlers would ask: "But is it true you have never once set foot off the trees, Lord Baron?"

  And that would start Cosimo off. "Yes, once, but by mistake. I climbed the horns of a stag. I thought I was passing on to a maple tree, and it was a stag escaped from the royal game preserve, standing still at that particular spot. The stag felt my weight on its horns and ran off into the wood. You can imagine the state I was in. Up there I felt things sticking into me all over; what with the sharp points of the horns, the thorns, the branches hitting my face. . . The stag backed, trying to rid itself of me. I held on tight. . ."

  There he would pause, and wait till the others asked: "And how did you get out of that, sir?"

  And every time he would bring out a different ending. "The stag raced on and on, reached the herd, most of which scattered at seeing it with a man on its horns, while some came up from curiosity. I aimed the gun I still had slung over my shoulder and brought down every stag I saw. I killed fifty of 'em . . ."

  "Have there ever been fifty stags round these parts?" asked one of those loiterers.

  "It's extinct now, that breed. For those fifty were all does, d'you see? Every time my stag tried to get close to a doe, I fired and the animal fell dead. The stag simply did not know what to do next. Then. . . then it suddenly decided to kill itself, rushed on to a high rock and flung itself down. But I managed to cling on to a jutting pine tree, and here I am!"

  Or he would tell how a fight had started between two of the stags with horns and at every clash he jumped from the horns of one to the horns of the other, till at a particular sharp butt he found himself tipped on to an oak tree . . .

  In fact he was carried away by that mania of the storyteller, who never knows which stories are more beautiful—the ones that really happened and the evocation of which recalls a whole flow of hours past, of petty emotions, boredom, happiness, insecurity, vanity, and self-disgust, or those which are invented, and in which he cuts out a main pattern, and everything seems easy, then begins to vary it as he realizes more and more that he is describing again things that had happened or been understood in lived reality.

  Cosimo was still at the age when the desire to tell stories makes one want to live more, thinking one has not done enough living to recount, and so off he would go hunting, and be away weeks, then return to the trees in the square, dangling by their tails polecats, badgers and foxes, and tell the folk of Ombrosa new stories, which originally true, became, as he told them, invented, and from invented, true.

  But behind all this restlessness of his there was a deeper dissatisfaction, and in this need for listeners, a different lack. Cosimo did not yet know love, and what is any experience without that? What point is there in risking life, when the real flavor of life is as yet unknown?

  Peasant girls and fishmongers used to pass through the square of Ombrosa, and young ladies in coaches, and Cosimo would look them sharply over from the trees, unable to understand why something that he was looking for was there in all of them, and not there completely in any one of them. At night, when the lights went on in the houses, and Cosimo was alone on the branches with the yellow eyes of the owls, he would begin dreaming of love. The couples who met behind bushes or amidst vines filled him with admiration and envy, and he would follow them with his eyes as they went off into the dark, but if they lay down at the foot of his particular tree, he would rush off in embarrassment.

  Then, to overcome his shyness, he would stop and watch the love-making of animals. In the spring the world on the trees was a world of nuptials; the squirrels made love with squeals and movements that were almost human, the birds coupled with flapping wings; even the lizards slid off united, with their tails tight in knots; and the porcupines seemed to soften their quills to sweeten their embraces. Ottimo Massimo, in no way put off by the fact that he was the only dachshund in Ombrosa, would court big shepherd bitches, or police dogs, with brazen ardor, trusting to the natural sympathy this inspired. Sometimes he would return bitten all oven but a successful love affair was enough to repay for all defeats.

  Cosimo, like Ottimo Massimo, was the only example of a species. In his daydreams, he would see himself courting girls of exquisite beauty; but how could he fall in love up in the trees? In his fantasies, he managed to avoid specifying where it would happen; on earth, or up in the element where he lived now: a place without a place, he would imagine; a world reached by going up, not down. Yes, that was it. Perhaps there was a tree so high that by climbing it, he would touch another world—the moon.

  Meanwhile, as this habit of chattering in the square grew, he began to feel less and less satisfied with himself. And then, one market day, a man who came from the nearby town of Olivabassa exclaimed: "Ah, so you've got your Spaniard too, I see!" When asked what he meant, he replied: "At Olivabassa there's a whole tribe of Spaniards living o
n the trees!" Cosimo could not rest till he made the journey through the woods to Olivabassa.

  } 17 {

  OLIVABASSA was a town in the interior. Cosimo reached it after two days' journey and many a dangerous passage over the less wooded parts of the route. Whenever he passed near any houses, people who had never seen him before gave cries of surprise, and one or two of them even threw stones at him, so that he tried to move as inconspicuously as possible. But as he neared Olivabassa, he noticed that any woodman or ploughman or olive picker who saw him showed no surprise at all, in fact the men even greeted him by doffing their hats as if they knew him, and said words which were certainly not in the local dialect and sounded strange in their mouths, such as "Señor! Buenos días, Señor!"

  It was winter; some of the trees were bare. In Olivabassa a double row of elms and plane trees crossed the town. And my brother, as he came nearer, saw that there were people up on the bare branches, one, two, or even three to each tree, sitting or standing in grave attitudes. In a few jumps he reached them.

  There were men in noble garb, plumed tricorns, big cloaks; and noble-looking women too, with veils on their heads, sitting on the branches in twos and threes, some embroidering, and looking down on to the road now and then with a little sideways jerk of the bosom and a stretch of their arms along the branch, as if at a window sill.

  The men bade him greetings that seemed full of rueful understanding: "Buenos días, Señor." And Cosimo bowed and doffed his hat.

  One who seemed the most authoritative, a heavily built man wedged in the fork of a plane tree from which he appeared unable to extricate himself, with a liverish complexion through which his shaved chin and upper lip showed black shadows in spite of his advanced years, turned to his neighbor, a pale gaunt man dressed in black and also with cheeks blackish in spite of shaving, and seemed to be asking who was this unknown man coming toward them across the trees.