Italo Calvino - [Our Ancestors 02]

by The Baron in the Trees (epub)

  "That's a pact! And now, away!"

  At this new dialogue, Cosimo began gnawing his thumb with rage for having tried to prevent his own revenge. "Let it be, then!" he said to himself, and drew back into the leaves. The two officers leaped into their saddles. Now they'll yell, thought Cosimo, and stopped his ears. Double shrieks rang out. The two flag officers had sat on two porcupines hidden under the trappings of their saddles.

  "Betrayed!" They flew to the ground in an explosion of screams and hops and writhing and they looked as if they were going to put the blame on the Marchesa.

  But Donna Viola, more indignant than they, shouted up: "You malicious, monstrous monkey!" She rushed toward the trunk of the horse chestnut and rapidly vanished from the sight of the two officers, who thought she had been swallowed up by the earth.

  Up in the branches Viola was facing Cosimo. They looked at each other with flaming eyes, and their rage gave them a kind of purity, like archangels. They seemed just about to tear each other to pieces, when, "Oh, my darling!" exclaimed the woman. "That's, yes, that's how I like you. Jealous, implacable! . . ." Already she had flung an arm around his neck and they were embracing and now Cosimo could remember nothing more.

  She was in his arms, then took her face from his, as if some thought had struck her, and said: "But that pair, too, how much they love me. Did you see? They're even ready to share me between them . . ."

  Cosimo felt for a second like flinging himself at her, then he pulled himself up on the branches, tore the leaves with his teeth, and banged his head against the trunk. "They're vermin . . ."

  Viola had moved away, her face immobile like a statue's. "You've a lot to learn from them!" She turned and climbed quickly down the tree.

  The two suitors had quite forgotten their past differences, and were now absorbed in patiently helping to pick out each other's quills. They were interrupted by Donna Viola. "Quick! Into my carriage!" They all vanished behind the pavilion. The carriage moved off. Cosimo was left on the horse chestnut, hiding his face in his hands.

  Now began a time of torment for Cosimo, and also for the two ex-rivals. And for Viola, could it be called a time of joy? I believe the Marchesa tormented others because she wanted to torment herself. The two noble officers were always underfoot; inseparable, under her windows, or in her salon, or on long bouts in the local tavern. She would flatter them both and ask them to compete in constant new proofs of love, which every time they declared themselves ready to do; and by now they were even ready to halve her with each other, not only that, but to share her with anyone else, and once they had begun rolling down the slippery slopes of concessions, they could no longer halt, each urged by the wish to succeed thus in moving her and obtaining the fulfillment of her promises, and each at the same time tied in a pact of solidarity with his rival, and devoured too by jealousy and by the hope of supplanting him, and, I fear, by the pull of die obscure degradation into which they felt themselves sinking.

  At every new concession torn from the naval officers, Viola would mount her horse and go to tell Cosimo about it.

  "Say, d'you know the Englishman is ready to do this and this . . . And the Neapolitan too . . ." She would shout as soon as she saw him gloomily perching on a tree.

  Cosimo would not reply.

  "This is absolute love," she would insist.

  "Absolute shit, that's what you all are!" screamed Cosimo, and vanished.

  This was now their cruel way of loving each other, and from it they could find no way out.

  The English flagship was about to weigh anchor. "You're staying, aren't you?" said Viola to Sir Osbert. Sir Osbert did not report on board and was declared a deserter. In a spirit of solidarity and emulation, Don Salvatore did the same.

  "They've deserted!" announced Viola triumphantly to Cosimo. "For me! And you . . ."

  "And I?" screamed Cosimo with such a ferocious look that Viola did not dare say another word.

  Sir Osbert and Salvatore di San Cataldo, deserters from the navies of their respective Majesties, now spent their days at the tavern, playing dice, pale, restless, trying to encourage each other, while Viola was at the peak of her discontent with herself and with all around her.

  She took her horse, went toward the wood. Cosimo was on an oak. She stopped underneath, in a field.

  "I'm tired."

  "Of those?"

  "Of you all."

  "Ah!"

  "They've given me the greatest proofs of love. . ."

  Cosimo spat.

  ". . . But that's not enough for me."

  Cosimo lowered his eyes to meet hers.

  And she: "Don't you think that love should be an absolute dedication, a renunciation of self?"

  There she was in the field, lovely as ever, and the coldness just touching her features and the haughtiness of her bearing would have dissolved at a touch, and he would have had her in his arms again . . . Anything would have been all right for Cosimo to say, anything to show he was ready to give in: "Tell me what you want me to do, I'm ready"—and once more there would have been happiness for him, happiness without a cloud. But he said: "There can be no love if one does not remain oneself with all one's strength."

  Viola shrugged in irritation, which was also a shrug of weariness. And yet she could have understood him still, as in fact she did understand him then and had on the tip of her tongue the words, "You are as I want you," and she would be back with him again . . . She bit her lip. And said: "Be yourself by yourself, then."

  "But being myself then has no sense." That is what Cosimo wanted to say. Instead of which he said: "If you prefer those vermin . . ."

  "I will not allow you to despise my friends!" she shouted, still thinking: All that matters to me is you, and it is only for you that I do all I do!

  "So, I'm the only one to be despised."

  "What a way you think!"

  "It's part of me."

  "Then good-by. I leave tonight. You won't see me again."

  She hurried to the house, packed her bags, and left without even a word to the officers. And she kept her word, never returned to Ombrosa. She went to France, and there a succession of historical events stood in her way when she was longing for nothing but to return. The Revolution broke out, then the war; first the Marchesa took an interest in the new course of events (she was in the entourage of Lafayette), then emigrated to Belgium and from there to England. In the London mists, during the long years of wars against Napoleon, she would dream of the trees of Ombrosa. Then she remarried—an English peer connected with the East India Company—and settled at Calcutta. From her terrace she would look out over the forests, the trees even stranger than those of the gardens of her childhood; every moment it seemed that she could see Cosimo appearing through the leaves. But it would be the shadow of a monkey, or a jaguar.

  Sir Osbert Castlefight and Salvatore di San Cataldo remained linked in life and death, and launched into a career of adventure. They were seen in the gambling houses of Venice, in the Faculty of Theology at Göttingen, in Petersburg at the Court of Catherine II. Then trace was lost.

  Cosimo remained for a long time wandering aimlessly around the woods, weeping, ragged, refusing food. He would sob out loud, as do newborn babes. The birds which had once fled at the approach of this infallible marksman would now come near him, on the tops of nearby trees or flying over his head, and the sparrow called, the goldfinch trilled, the turtle dove cooed, the thrush whistled, the chaffinch chirped and so did the wren; and from their lairs on high issued the squirrels, the tree mice, the field mice, to add their squeals to the chorus, so that my brother moved amidst this cloud of lamentation.

  Then a destructive violence came over him; every tree, beginning from the top, leaf by leaf, he quickly stripped till it was bare as in winter, even if it usually shed no leaves at all. Then climbing back to the peaks he would break off all the smaller branches and twigs till he left nothing but the main wood, would go farther up and with a penknife begin to strip off the bark, and
the stricken trees could be seen showing the whites of ghastly wounds.

  In all this frenzy of his there was no resentment against Viola, only remorse at having lost her, at not having known how to keep her tied to him, at having wounded her with a pride unjust and stupid. For, he understood now, she had always been faithful to him, and if she took a pair of other men about with her it merely meant that it was Cosimo alone she considered worthy of being her only lover, and all her whims and dissatisfactions were but an insatiable urge for the increase of their love and the refusal to admit it could reach a limit, and it was he, he, he, who had understood nothing of this and had goaded her till he lost her.

  For some weeks he kept to the woods, alone as never before; he had not even Ottimo Massimo, for Viola had taken the dog with her. When my brother showed himself at Ombrosa again, he had changed. Not even I could delude myself any longer; this time Cosimo really had gone mad.

  } 24 {

  IT HAD always been said at Ombrosa that Cosimo was mad, ever since he had jumped onto the trees at the age of twelve and refused to come down. But later, as happens, this madness of his had been accepted by all, and I am not talking only of his determination to live up there, but of the various oddities of his character; and no one considered him other than an original. Then in the full spate of his love for Viola there were those burblings in incomprehensible languages, particularly the ones during the Feast of the Patron Saint, which some considered as sacrilege, interpreting his words as heretical cries, perhaps in Punic, the tongue of the Pelasgians, or as a profession of Socinianism, in Polish. Since then began the rumor—"The Baron's gone mad"—and the conventional added, "How can someone go mad who's always been mad?"

  In the midst of these different pronouncements, Cosimo really had gone mad. If before he went about dressed in furs from head to foot, now he began to adorn his head with feathers, like the American aborigines, bright-colored feathers of hoopoes or greenfinch, and apart from those on his head he scattered feathers all over his clothes. He ended by making himself jackets all covered with feathers, and imitating the habits of the various birds, such as the woodpecker, drawing worms and insects from the tree trunks and boasting of what riches he had found.

  He would also make speeches in defense of birds, to the people who gathered to listen and banter under the trees; and from marksman he became barrister to the feathered tribe, and declared himself now a tomtit, now an owl, now a redbreast, and would wear suitable camouflaging and make long prosecution speeches against human beings, who did not know how to recognize birds as their real friends, speeches which were accusations in the form of parables against all human society. The birds also realized this change in his ideas, and came close to him, even if there were people listening beneath. Thus he was able to illustrate his speeches with living examples, which he pointed out on the branches around.

  Because of this particular quality of his, there was much talk among the hunters of Ombrosa of using him as a decoy, but no one ever dared fire on the birds perching near him. For even now when he was more or less out of his senses the Baron still impressed them: they quizzed him, yes, and often under his trees he had a retinue of urchins and idlers jesting at his expense; yet he was also respected, and always heard with attention.

  His trees were now hung all over with scrawled pieces of paper and bits of cardboard with maxims from Seneca and Shaftesbury, and with various objects: clusters of feathers, church candles, crowns of leaves, women's corsets, pistols, scales, tied to each other in a certain order. The Ombrosians used to spend hours trying to guess what those symbols meant: nobles, Pope, virtue, war? I think some of them had no meaning at all but just served to jog his memory and make him realize that even the most uncommon ideas could be right.

  Cosimo also began to write certain things himself, such as The Song of the Blackbird, The Knock of the Woodpecker, The Dialogue of the Owls, and to distribute them publicly. In fact, it was at this very period of dementia that he learned the art of printing and began to print some pamphlets or gazettes (among them The Magpie's Gazette), later all collected under the title, The Bipeds' Monitor. He had brought into a nut tree a typographer's table and chase, a press, a case of type, and a crock of ink, and he spent his days composing his pages and pulling his copies. Sometimes spiders and butterflies would get caught between type and paper, and their marks would be printed on the page; sometimes a lizard would jump on the sheet while the ink was fresh and smear everything with its tail; sometimes the squirrels would take a letter of the alphabet and carry it off to their lair thinking it was something to eat, as happened with the letter Q, which because of its round shape and stalk they mistook for a fruit, so that Cosimo had to begin some of his articles with Cueer and end them with C.E.D.

  All this was very fine, of course, but I had the impression that at the time my brother had not only gone mad, but was getting imbecilic too, which was more serious and sadder, for madness is a force of nature, for good or evil, while imbecility is a weakness of nature, without any counterpart.

  In winter, though, he seemed able to reduce himself to a kind of lethargy. He would hang on a bough in his lined sleeping bag, with only his head out, as if from a huge nest, and it was rare if, in the warmest hours of the day, he made more than a few hops to reach the alder tree over the Merdanzo torrent, for his daily duties. He would stay in the bag desultorily reading (lighting a little oil lamp in the dark), or muttering to himself, or humming. But most of the time he spent sleeping.

  For eating he had certain mysterious arrangements of his own, but he would accept offerings of minestrone or ravioli when some kind soul brought these up to him on a ladder. In fact, a kind of superstition had grown up among the local peasants that an offering to the Baron brought luck—a sign that he aroused either fear or good will, and I think it was the latter. That the reigning Baron of Rondò should live on public charity seemed improper to me; and above all I thought of what our dead father would have said if he had known. As for myself, till then I had nothing to reproach myself with, for my brother had always despised family comforts and had signed that power of attorney by which, after giving him a small allowance (which he spent almost entirely on books) I had no more duties toward him. But now, seeing him incapable of getting himself food, I tried making one of our lackeys in livery and white wig go up a ladder to him with a quarter of turkey and a glass of Bordeaux on a salver. I thought he would refuse from one of those mysterious principles of his, instead of which he accepted at once and most willingly; and from then on, every time it crossed my mind, we would send a portion of our viands up to him on the branches.

  Yes, it was a sad decline. Then luckily there was an invasion of wolves, and that gave Cosimo a chance to show his best qualities again. It was an icy winter, snow had even fallen in our woods. Packs of wolves, pushed out of the Alps by famine, fell on to our coasts. Some woodman ran into them and rushed back in terror with the news. The people of Ombrosa, who from the days of the guardians against fires had learned to unite in moments of danger, began to take turns as sentries around the town, to prevent the famished beasts from getting nearer. But no one dared go beyond the houses, particularly at night.

  "What bad luck the Baron isn't what he used to be!" they were saying at Ombrosa.

  That hard winter had not been without effect on Cosimo's health. He was dangling there crouched in his pelt like a chrysalis in its cocoon, his nose dribbling, looking muzzy and vague. The alarm went up about the wolves and people passing beneath called up: "Ah, Baron, once it would have been you keeping guard from your trees, and now it's we who are guarding you."

  He remained with his eyes half closed, as if he did not understand or did not care about anything. Then, suddenly he raised his head, blew his nose and said, hoarsely: "Sheep. For the wolves. Put some on the trees. Tied."

  People were crowding about beneath to hear what nonsense he would bring out and to jeer. Instead he rose from the sack, puffing and coughing, and said: "I'll show you whe
re," and moved off among the branches.

  Onto some walnuts or oaks, between woods and cultivated land, in positions chosen with great care, Cosimo told them to bring sheep or lambs, which he himself tied to branches, alive, bleating, but in such a way that they could not fall down. On each of these trees he hid a musketful of grapeshot. He then dressed himself up like a sheep: hood, jacket, breeches—all of curly sheepskin. And he began to wait out the night on the open trees. Everyone thought this was the maddest thing he had ever done.

  That very night, though, down came the wolves. Sniffing the scent of sheep, hearing the bleating and then seeing them up there, the whole pack stopped at the foot of the trees and howled with famished fangs bared and clawed against the trunk. And now, bounding over the branches, along came Cosimo, and the wolves, seeing that cross between sheep and man hopping up there like a bird, were transfixed. Until "Bum! Bum!" and they got a couple of bullets in the throat. A couple—for Cosimo carried one gun with him (and recharged every time) and had another on every tree ready with a bullet in the barrel; so every time he fired, two wolves were stretched on the frozen ground. He exterminated a great number like that and at every shot the pack tacked to and fro in confused flight, while the other men with guns ran to where they heard the cries, and their shots did the rest.

  Cosimo had many a tale in many a version to tell afterward about this wolf hunt, and I could not say which was the right one. For example: "The battle was going quite well when, as I was moving toward the tree with the last sheep on it, I found three wolves which had managed to climb up on to the branches and were just killing it off. Half blinded and stunned by fever as I was, I nearly got up to the wolves' snouts before they noticed me. Then, seeing this other sheep walking on two feet along the branches, they turned on it, baring fangs still red with blood. My gun was unloaded, as after all that firing I had run out of powder, and I could not reach the gun on that tree as the wolves were there. I was on a smaller, rather weak branch, but above me was a stronger one within arm's reach. I began walking backward on my branch, retreating slowly away from the main trunk. And slowly, following me, came a wolf. But I was hanging on to the branch above by my hands, and moving my feet on that other one; really I was hanging from above. The wolf, deceived, moved forward and the branch bent beneath it while with a jump I yanked myself on to the branch above. Down the wolf went with a little bark like a dog's, broke its back on the ground and killed itself."