The Nonexistent Knight

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The Nonexistent Knight Page 2

by Calvino, Italo


  “No, I do not,” said Agilulf, and turning his back, he walked away.

  The youth wandered into the camp. It was the uncertain hour preceding dawn. Among the pavilions could be seen signs of early movement. Headquarters was already astir before the rising bugle. Torches were being lit in staff and orderly tents, contrasting with the half light filtering in from the sky. Was it really a day of battle, this one beginning, as the rumor went the night before? The new arrival was a prey to excitement, but a different excitement from what he had expected or felt till then. Rather, it was an anxiety to feel ground under his feet again, now that all he touched seemed to ring empty.

  He met paladins already locked into their gleaming armor and plumed round helmets, their faces covered by visors. The youth turned round to look at them and longed to imitate their bearing, the proud way they swung on hips, breastplate, helmet and shoulder plates, as if made all in one piece! Here he was, among the invincible paladins. Here he was, ready to emulate them in battle, arms in hand, to become like them! But the two he was following, instead of mounting their horses, sat down behind a table covered with papers. They were obviously important commanders. The youth rushed forward to introduce himself. “I am Raimbaut of Roussillon, squire, son of the late Marquis Gerard! I've come to enroll so as to avenge my father who died an heroic death beneath the ramparts of Seville!”

  The two raised their hands to their plumed helmets, lifted them by detaching headpiece and basinet, and put them on the table. From under the helmets appeared two bald yellowish heads, two faces with soft pouchy skin and straggly moustaches, the faces of clerks, of scribbling bureaucrats. “Roussillon, Roussillon,” they mumbled, turning over rolls with saliva-damped thumbs. “But we've already matriculated you yesterday! What d’you want? Why aren’t you with your unit?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, last night I couldn’t sleep at the thought of battle. I must avenge my father you know, I must kill the Argalif Isohar and so find ... Oh yes: the Superintendency of Duels, Feuds and Besmirched Honor. Where is that?”

  “He’s just arrived, this fellow, and he already knows everything! How d’you know of the Superintendency, may I ask?”

  “I was told by that knight, I don’t know his name, the one all in white armor...”

  “Oh, not him again! If he doesn’t stick his nose everywhere—that nose he hasn’t got!”

  “What? Hasn’t got a nose?”

  “Since he can’t get the itch,” said the other of the two from behind the table, “he finds nothing better to do than scratch the itches of others.”

  “Why can’t he get the itch?”

  “Where d’you think he could get the itch if he hasn’t got a place to itch? That’s a nonexistent knight, that is...”

  “What do you mean, nonexistent? I saw him myself! There he was!”

  “What did you see? Mere ironwork ... He exists without existing, understand, recruit?”

  Never could young Raimbaut have imagined appearances to be so deceptive. From the moment he reached the camp he had found everything quite different from what it seemed.

  “So in Charlemagne’s army one can be a knight with lots of names and titles and what’s more a bold warrior and zealous officer, without needing to exist!”

  “Take it easy! No one said that in Charlemagne’s army one can etc., etc. All we said was in our regiment there is a knight who’s so and so. That’s all. What can or can't be as a matter of general practice is of no interest to us. D’you understand?”

  Raimbaut moved off towards the pavilion of the Superintendency of Duels, Feuds and Besmirched Honor. Now he did not let casques and plumed helmets deceive him. He knew that the armor behind those tables merely hid dusty wrinkled little old men. He felt thankful there was someone inside.

  “So you wish to avenge your father, the Marquis of Roussillon, by rank a general! Let’s see, now! The best procedure to avenge a general is to kill off three majors. We can assign you three easy ones, then you’re in the clear.”

  “I don’t think I’ve explained things properly. It’s Isohar the Argalif I’ve got to kill. He was the one who felled my glorious father!”

  “Yes yes, we realise that, but to fell an Argalif is not so simple, believe me ... What about four captains? We can guarantee you four Infidel captains in a morning. Four captains, you know, are equal to an army commander, and your father only commanded a brigade!”

  “I’ll search out Isohar and gut him! Him and him alone!”

  “You’ll end in the guardhouse, not in battle, you can be sure of that! Just think a little before speaking. If we make difficulties about Isohar, there are reasons. Suppose our emperor, for instance, is in the middle of negotiations with Isohar?”

  But one of the officials whose head had been buried in papers till then now raised it jubilantly. “All solved! All solved! No need to do a thing! No point in a vendetta here! The other day Oliver thought two of his uncles were killed in battle and avenged them! But they’d stayed behind and got drunk under a table! We have these two extra uncles’ vendettas on our hands, a terrible mess. Now it can all be settled. We count an uncle’s vendetta as half a father’s. It’s as if we had a father’s vendetta clear, already carried out”

  “Oh, dear father!” Raimbaut began to rave.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Reveille had sounded. The camp, in first light, swarmed with armed men. Raimbaut would have liked to mingle with that jostling mob gradually taking shape as squadrons and companies, but the moving armor sounded to him like a vibrating swarm of insects, buzzing like dry crackling husks. Many warriors were shut in their helmets and breastplates to the waist and under their hip and kidney guards appeared their legs, in breeks and stockings, because they were waiting to put on thigh pieces and leg pieces and knee pieces when they were in the saddle. Under those steel crests their legs seemed thin as crickets’. Their way of moving and speaking, their round eyeless heads, arms folded, hugging forearms and wrists, were also like those of crickets or ants. So the whole bustling throng seemed like a senseless clustering of insects. Amid them all, Raimbaut’s eyes searched for something: the white armor of Agilulf, whom he was hoping to meet again, maybe because his appearance could make the rest of the army seem more concrete, or because the most solid presence he had yet met was the nonexistent knight’s.

  He found him under a pine tree, sitting on the ground, arranging fallen pine cones in a regular design: an isosceles triangle. At that hour of dawn Agilulf always needed to apply himself to some precise exercise: counting objects, arranging them in geometric patterns, resolving problems of arithmetic. It was the hour in which objects lose the consistency of shadow that accompanies them during the night and gradually reacquire colors, but seem to cross meanwhile an uncertain limbo, faintly touched, just breathed on by light; the hour in which one is least certain of the world’s existence. He, Agilulf, always needed to feel himself facing things as if they were a massive wall against which he could pit the tension of his will, for only in this way did he manage to keep a sure consciousness of himself. But if the world around was instead melting into the vague and ambiguous, he would feel himself drowning in that morbid half light, incapable of allowing any clear thought or decision to flower in that void. In such moments he felt sick, faint; sometimes only at the cost of extreme effort did he feel himself able to avoid melting away completely. It was then he began to count: trees, leaves, stones, lances, pine cones, anything in front of him. Or he put them in rows and arranged them in squares and pyramids. Applying himself to this exact occupation helped him to overcome his malaise, absorb his discontent and disquiet, reacquire his usual lucidity and composure.

  This is how Raimbaut saw him, as with quick assured movements he arranged the pine cones in a triangle, then in squares on the sides of the triangle, and obstinately compared the pine cones on the shorter sides of the triangle with those of the square of the hypotenuse. Raimbaut realised that all this moved by ritual, convention, formulas, a
nd beneath it there was ... what? He felt a vague sense of discomfort come over him at knowing himself to be outside all these rules of a game. But then his wanting to avenge his father’s death, his ardor to fight, to enroll himself among Charlemagne’s warriors—wasn’t that also a ritual to prevent plunging into the void, like this raising and setting of pine cones by Sir Agilulf? Oppressed by the turmoil of such unexpected questions, young Raimbaut flung himself on the ground and burst into tears.

  He felt something on his head, a hand, an iron hand, but it felt very light. Agilulf was kneeling beside him. “What’s the matter, boy? Why are you crying?”

  States of confusion or despair or fury in other human beings immediately gave perfect calm and security to Agilulf. His immunity from the shocks and agonies to which people who exist are subject made him take on a superior and protective attitude.

  “I’m sorry,” exclaimed Raimbaut. “It’s weariness maybe. I haven’t managed to shut an eye all night, and now I’m bewildered. If I could only doze off a minute ... But now it’s day. And you, who have been awake too, how d’you do it?”

  “I would feel bewildered if I dozed off for even a second,” said Agilulf slowly. “In fact I’d never come round at all but would be lost forever. So I keep wide awake every second of the day and night.”

  “It must be awful...”

  “No!” The voice was sharp and firm again.

  “And don’t you ever take off your armor?”

  The murmuring began again. “For me there’s no problem. Take off or put on has no meaning for me.”

  Raimbaut had raised his head and was looking into the cracks of the visor, as if searching in that darkness for the glimmer of a glance.

  “How come?”

  “How otherwise?”

  The iron gauntlet of white armor had settled on the young man’s hair again. Raimbaut hardly felt it weighing on his head. It was like an object that didn’t communicate human warmth, proximity, consolation or annoyance—and yet, he felt a kind of tense obstinacy spreading over him.

  3

  CHARLEMAGNE trotted along at the head of the Frankish army. It was the approach march. There was no hurry and they were not moving fast. Around the emperor were grouped his paladins, reining impetuous mounts at the bit. In the trotting and jostling their gleaming shields rose and fell like fishes’ gills. Behind them the army looked like a long gleaming fish—an eel.

  Peasants, shepherds and villagers gathered at the comers of the road. “That’s the king; that is our Charles!” And they bowed to the ground at the sight, not so much of his unfamiliar crown, as of his beard. Then they straightened up at once to spot the warriors. “That’s Roland! No, that’s Oliver!” They never guessed right but it didn’t really matter since the paladins were all there, somewhere, so they could always swear to have seen the one they wanted.

  Agilulf trotted with the group, every now and again spurting ahead, then halting and waiting for the others, twisting round to check that the troops were following in compact order, or turning toward the sun as if calculating the time from its height above the horizon. He was impatient. He alone among them all had clearly in mind the order of march, halting places, and the staging post to be reached before nightfall. As for the other paladins, well, an approach march was all right by them. They were approaching anyway; fast or slow, it didn’t matter to them. And with the excuse of the emperor’s age and weariness they were ready to stop for a drink at every tavern. The road seemed lined with tavern signs and tavern maids. Apart from that, they might have been traveling sealed up in a truck.

  Charlemagne was still more curious than anyone else about the things he saw around him. “Oh, ducks, ducks!” he exclaimed. A flock of them was moving through the fields beside the road. In the middle of the flock was a man, but no one could make out what the devil he was doing. He was walking in a crouch, hands behind his back, plopping up and down on flat feet like web-toes, with his neck out, repeating, “Quà ... quà ... quà ...” The ducks were taking no notice of him, as if they considered him one of them. And to tell the truth there wasn’t much of a difference between the man and the ducks, because the rags he wore, of earthen color (they seemed mostly bits of sacking) had big greenish-grey areas the same color as feathers, and in addition, there were patches and rents and marks of various colors like the iridescent streakings of those birds.

  “Hey you, that’s not the way to greet your emperor!” the paladins cried, always ready to make nuisances of themselves.

  The man did not turn, but the ducks, annoyed by the voices, took alarm and all fluttered into flight together. The man waited a moment, watching them rise, beaks outstretched, then splayed out his arms and began skipping. Jumping and skipping and waving splayed arms, with little yelps of laughter and “Quà! ... Quà ...,” full of joy he tried to follow the flock.

  There was a pond. The ducks flew onto the surface of the water and swam lightly off with closed wings. On reaching the pond the man flung himself on his belly into the water, raising huge splashes and thrashing his arms about. Then he tried another “Quà! Quà!” which ended in gurgles because he was sinking to the bottom. He reemerged, tried to swim and sank again.

  “Is that the duck keeper, that man?” the warriors asked a peasant girl wandering along holding a reed.

  “No, I keep the ducks; they’re mine. He has nothing to do with them. He’s Gurduloo,” said the little peasant girl.

  “Then what was he doing with your ducks?”

  “Oh nothing, every now and again he gets taken that way, and mistakes himself for one of them.”

  “Does he think he’s a duck too?”

  “He thinks the ducks are him. Gurduloo’s like that, a bit careless ...”

  “Where’s he gone to now, though?”

  The paladins neared the pond. There was no sign of Gurduloo. The ducks, having crossed the piece of water, now began waddling along the grass on their webbed feet. Around the pool, from among the reeds, rose a croak of frogs. Suddenly the man pulled his head out of the water as if he had, at that moment, remembered he had to breathe. He looked around in a daze, not understanding this fringe of reeds reflected in the water a few inches from his nose. On each reed leaf was sitting a small smooth green creature, looking at him and calling as loud as it could, “Gra! Gra! Gra!”

  “Gra! Gra! Gra!” Gurduloo replied, pleased; and at the sound of his voice frogs began to leap from every reed into the water, and from the water onto the bank. Gurduloo yelled, “Gra!” gave a leap out too and reached the bank, soaking wet, muddy from head to foot, crouching like a frog and yelling such a loud “Gra!” that with a crash of bamboo and reeds he fell back into the pond.

  “Won’t he drown?” the paladins asked a fisherman.

  “Oh, sometimes Omoboo forgets himself, loses himself ... No, not drown ... The trouble is he’s apt to end in our net with the fishes ... One day it came over him when he’d started fishing. He flung the nets in the water, saw a fish just about to enter, and got so much into the part of the fish that he plunged into the water, and then into the net himself. You know what Omoboo's like ...”

  “Omoboo? Isn’t his name Gurduloo?”

  “Omoboo, we call him.”

  “But that girl there ...”

  “She doesn’t come from our parts, maybe she calls him that.”

  “From what part is he?”

  “Oh, he goes around ...”

  The cavalcade was now skirting an orchard of pear trees. The fruit was ripe. The warriors pierced the pears with their lances, making them vanish into the beaks of their helmets, then spitting out the cores. And there in the middle of a pear tree who should they see but Gurduloo—Omoboo! He was sitting with raised arms twisted about like branches, and in his hands and mouth and on his head and in the rents of his clothes were pears.

  “Look, he’s being a pear!” chortled Charlemagne.

  “I’ll give him a shake!” said Roland, and swung him a hit.

  Gurduloo let
all the pears fall down. They rolled down the slope, and on seeing them roll he could not prevent himself from rolling around and around, down the field like a pear. And so he vanished from sight.

  “Forgive him, Majesty!” said an old gardener. “Martinzoo sometimes doesn’t understand that his place is not amid trees or inanimate fruits, but among Your Majesty’s devoted subjects!”

  “What on earth got into this madman you call Martinzoo?” asked the emperor graciously. “He doesn’t seem to me to know what’s going through that pate of his.”

  “Who are we to understand, Majesty?” The old peasant was speaking with the modest wisdom of one who had seen a good deal of life. “Maybe mad’s not quite the right word for him. He’s just a person who exists and doesn’t realise he exists.”

  “That’s a good one! We have a subject who exists but doesn't realise he does and there’s my paladin who thinks he exists but actually doesn’t They’d make a great pair, let me tell you!”

  Charlemagne was tired now from the saddle. Leaning on his grooms, panting into his beard, puffing, “Poor France,” he dismounted. As soon as the emperor set foot to the ground, the whole army stopped and bivouacked. Cooking pots were put onto the fires.

  “Bring me that Gurgur ... What’s his name?” exclaimed the king.

  “It varies according to the place he’s in,” said the wise gardener, “and to the Christian or Infidel armies he attaches himself to. He’s Gurduroo or Gudi-Ussuf or Ben-Va-Ussuf or Ben-Stanbul or Pestanzoo or Bertinzoo or Martinbon or Omobon or Omobestia or even the Wild Man of the Valley or Gian Paciasso or Pier Paciugo. Maybe in out-of-the-way parts they give him quite a different name from the others. I’ve also noticed that his name changes from season to season everywhere. I’d say every name flows over him without sticking. Whatever he’s called it’s the same to him. Call him and he thinks you’re calling a goat. Say “cheese’ or ‘torrent’ and he answers ‘Here I am.’ ”

 

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