Italo Calvino - [Our Ancestors 02]

by The Baron in the Trees (epub)

  Everyone began hunting the snails all over the cellar by the light of torches—no one with any real will, but stubbornly, so as not to admit being disturbed for nothing. They found the hole in the barrel, and at once realized we had made it. Our father came with the coachman's whip and seized us from bed. Then, our backs, buttocks and legs covered with violet weals, we were locked into the squalid little room used as a prison.

  They kept us there three days, on bread, water, lettuce, beef rinds and cold minestrone (which, luckily, we liked). Then, as if nothing had happened, we were brought out for our first family meal at midday on that fifteenth of June; and what should the kitchen superintendent, our sister Battista, have prepared for us but snail soup and snails as a main course! Cosimo refused to touch even a mouthful. "Eat up or we'll shut you in the little room again!" I yielded and began to chew the wretched mollusks (a cowardice on my part which had the effect of making my brother feel more alone than ever, so that his leaving us was also partly a protest against me for letting him down; but I was only eight years old, and then how can I compare my own strength of will, particularly as a child, to the superhuman tenacity which my brother showed throughout his life?).

  "Well?" said our father to Cosimo.

  "No, and no again!" exclaimed Cosimo, and pushed his plate away.

  "Leave the table!"

  But Cosimo had already turned his back on us all and was leaving the room.

  "Where are you going?"

  We saw him through the glass door as he picked up his tricorn and rapier.

  "I know where I'm going!" And he ran out into the garden.

  In a little while we watched him, from the windows, climbing up the holm oak. He was dressed up in the most formal clothes and headdress, because our father insisted on his appearing at table this way in spite of his twelve years of age—powdered hair with a ribbon around the queue, three-cornered hat, lace stock and ruffles, green tunic with pointed tails, purple breeches, rapier, and long white leather gaiters halfway up his legs, the only concession to a mode of dressing more suitable to our country life. (I, being only eight, was exempted from powdered hair except on gala occasions, and from the rapier, which I should have liked to wear.) So he climbed up the knobby old tree, moving his arms and legs along the branches with the sureness and speed which came to him from years of our practicing together.

  I have mentioned that we used to spend hours and hours on the trees, and not for ulterior motives as most boys, who go up only in search of fruit or birds' nests, but for the pleasure of getting over difficult parts of the trunks and forks, reaching as high as we could, and finding a good perch on which to pause and look down at the world below, to call and joke at those passing by. So I found it quite natural that Cosimo's first thought, at that unjust attack on him, was to climb up the holm oak, to us a familiar tree spreading its' branches to the height of the dining room windows through which he could show his proud offended air to the whole family.

  "Vorsicht! Vorsicht! Now he'll fall down, poor little thing!" anxiously exclaimed our mother, who would not have turned a hair at seeing us under cannon fire, but was nevertheless in agony over our games.

  Cosimo climbed up to the fork of a big branch, where he could settle comfortably, and sat himself down there, his legs dangling, his arms crossed with hands tucked under his elbows, his head buried in his shoulders, his tricorn hat tilted over his forehead.

  Our father leaned out the window. "When you're tired of being up there, you'll change your mind!" he shouted.

  "I'll never change my mind," exclaimed my brother from the branch.

  "You'll see as soon as you come down!"

  "I'll never come down again!" And he kept his word.

  } 2 {

  COSIMO was in the holm oak. The branches spread out—high bridges over the earth. A slight breeze blew; the sun shone. It shone through the leaves, so that we had to shade our eyes with our hands to see Cosimo. From the tree Cosimo looked at the world; everything seen from up there was different, which was fun in itself. The alley took on a new aspect, and so did the flower beds, the hortensias, the camellias, the iron table for coffee in the garden. Farther away, the tops of the trees thinned out and the kitchen garden merged into little terraced fields propped by stone walls; the middle ground was dark with olive trees, and beyond that the village of Ombrosa thrust up roofs of slate and faded brick, and down at the port ships' masts. In the distance was the sea where a boat was idly sailing—and beyond, a wide horizon.

  And now out into the garden, after their coffee, came the Baron and the Generalessa. They stood looking at a rosebush, pretending not to take any notice of Cosimo. They were arm-in-arm first, then soon drew apart to talk and gesture. But I moved under the holm oak as if I were playing on my own, though really to try and attract Cosimo's attention; he was still feeling resentful of me, and stayed up there looking away into the distance. I stopped and crouched down under a bench so as to go on watching him without being seen.

  My brother sat there like a sentinel. He looked at everything, but nothing looked like anything to him. A woman with a basket was passing between the rows of lemon trees. Up the path came a muleteer holding on to his mule by the tail. The two never set eyes on each other; at the sound of the metal-shod hoofs the woman turned around and moved toward the path but did not reach it in time. She broke into song then, but the muleteer had already rounded the bend; he listened, cracked his whip and said "Aaah!" to the mule; nothing more. Cosimo saw it all.

  Now along the path passed the Abbé Fauchelefleur with his open breviary. Cosimo took something from the branch and threw it at his head. I was not sure what it was, a little spider perhaps, or a piece of bark; anyway, it did not hit him. Cosimo then began to search about with his rapier in a hole of the trunk. Out came a furious wasp. He chased it away with a wave of his hat and followed its flight with his eyes until it settled on a pumpkin plant. From the house, speedy as ever, came the Cavalier, who hurried down the steps into the gardens and vanished among the rows of vines; Cosimo climbed onto a higher branch to see where he went. There was a flutter of wings among the leaves, and out flew a blackbird. Cosimo was rather sorry it had been up there all that time without his noticing it. He looked into the sunshine for others. No, there were none.

  The holm oak was near an elm: their two crests almost touched. A branch of the elm passed a foot or so above a branch of the other tree; it was easy for my brother to pass and so reach the top of the elm, which we had never explored, as it had a high trunk with no branches reachable from the ground. From the elm, by a branch elbow-to-elbow with the next tree, he passed on to a carob, and then to a mulberry tree. So I saw Cosimo advance from one branch to another, suspended high above the garden.

  Some branches of the big mulberry tree reached and overlapped the boundary wall of our property, beyond which lay the gardens of the Ondarivas. Although we were neighbors, we knew none of the Ondariva family, marquises and nobles of Ombrosa, as for a number of generations they had enjoyed certain feudal rights claimed by our father, and the two families were separated by mutual antipathy, just as our properties were separated by a high fortress-like wall put up by either our father or the Marquis, I am not sure which. To this should be added the jealous care which the Ondarivas took of their garden, full, it was said, of the rarest plants. In fact, the grandfather of the present Marquis had been a pupil of the botanist Linnaeus, and since his time all the family connections at the courts of France and England had been set in motion to send the finest botanical rarities from the colonies. For years boats had unloaded at the port of Ombrosa sacks of seeds, bundles of cuttings, potted shrubs and even entire trees with huge wrappings of sacking around the roots; until the garden—it was said—had become a mixture of the forests of India and the Americas, and even of New Holland.

  All that we were able to see were some dark leaves, growing over the garden wall, of a newly imported tree from the American colonies, the magnolia, from whose black branches spra
ng a pulpy white flower. Cosimo, on our mulberry, reached the comer of the wall, balanced on it for a step or two and then, holding on by his hands, jumped down on to the other side, amid the flowers and leaves of the magnolia. Then he vanished from sight; and what I am about to tell—as also much else in this account of his life—he described to me afterwards, or I have put together from a few scattered hints and guesses.

  Cosimo was on the magnolia. Although the branches were very close together, this was an easy tree to maneuver on for a boy so expert in all trees as my brother; and the branches, although they were slender and of soft wood, held his weight, and the points of his shoes tore white wounds on the black bark; he was enveloped in the fresh scent of leaves, turned this way and that by the wind in pages of contrasting greens, dull one moment and glittering the next.

  But the whole garden was scented, and although Cosimo could not yet see it clearly, because of all the thick trees, he was already exploring it by smell, and trying to discern the source of the various aromas which he already knew from their being wafted over into our garden by the wind. And to us this seemed an integral part of the mystery of the place. Then he looked at the branches and saw new leaves, some big and shining as if running water were constantly flowing over them, some tiny and feathered, and tree trunks either all smooth or all scaly.

  There was a great silence. A flight of little wrens went up, chirping. And now a faint voice could be heard singing: "O la-la . . . O la ba-lan-çoire. . ." Cosimo looked down. From the branch of a big tree nearby was dangling a swing, and on it was sitting a little girl about his age.

  She was a blonde, with hair combed high in an odd style for a girl her age, and a light blue dress which was also too grown up; its skirt, as it rose with the swing, was swirling with lace petticoats. The girl had her eyes half closed and her nose in the air as if used to playing the lady, and she was eating an apple in little bites, bending her head down toward her hand, which had to hold the apple and balance her on the rope of the swing at the same time; and every time the swing reached the lowest point of its flight she would give herself little pushes on the ground with the end of her tiny shoes, blow out bits of apple peel and sing "O la-la-la. . . O la ba-lan-çoire. . ." as if she cared neither for the swing, nor the song, nor (though perhaps a little more) for the apple, and had other things on her mind.

  Cosimo dropped from the top of the magnolia to a lower perch, and now had his feet set on each side of a fork and his elbows leaning on a branch in front as on a window sill. The flight of the swing was bringing the little girl right up under his nose.

  She was not watching and did not notice. Then suddenly she saw him there, standing on the tree, in tricorn and gaiters. "Oh!" she said.

  The apple fell from her hand and rolled away to the foot of the magnolia. Cosimo drew his rapier, leaned down from the lowest branch, skewered the apple and offered it to the girl, who had meanwhile made a complete turn on the swing and was up there again. "Take it, it's not dirty, only a little bruised on one side."

  The fair little girl now seemed to be regretting she had shown so much surprise at the sudden appearance of this strange boy on the magnolia, and put on her disdainful air again with her nose in the air. "Are you a thief?" she said.

  "A thief?" exclaimed Cosimo, offended. Then he thought it over; the idea rather pleased him. "Yes, I am," he said, pulling his tricorn down over one eye. "Any objection?"

  "And what have you come to steal?"

  Cosimo looked at the apple which he had skewered on the point of his rapier, and suddenly realized he was hungry, as he had scarcely touched a thing at table. "This apple," said he, and began to peel it with one side of his rapier, which, in spite of family orders, he kept very sharp.

  "Then you're a fruit thief," said the girl.

  My brother thought of the rabble of poor urchins from Ombrosa who scrambled over walls and hedges sacking orchards, boys he had been taught to despise and avoid; and for the first time he thought how free and enviable their life must be. Well now: he might become like them, and live as they did, from now on. "Yes," he said. He cut the apple into slices and began eating it.

  The girl broke into a laugh which lasted a whole flight of the swing, up and down. "Oh, go on! The boys who steal fruit! I know them all! They're all friends of mine! And they go round barefoot, in shirt sleeves and tousled hair, not with gaiters and powder!"

  My brother turned as red as the apple peel. To be laughed at not only for his powdered hair, which he didn't like at all, but also for his gaiters, which he liked a lot; to be considered inferior in appearance to a fruit thief, to boys he had despised till a moment before; and above all to find that this girl who seemed quite at home in the Ondariva gardens was a friend of all the fruit thieves but not of his, all this made him feel annoyed, jealous and ashamed.

  "O la-la-la. . . In gaiters and powder!" hummed the little girl on the swing.

  For a moment his pride was stung. "I'm not a thief like the boys you know!'' he shouted. "I'm not a thief at all! I only said that so's not to frighten you; if you really knew who I was you'd die of fright! I'm a brigand, a terrible brigand!"

  The little girl went on flying through the air under his nose, almost as if wanting to graze him with the point of her shoes. "Oh, nonsense. Where's your musket? Brigands all have muskets! And catapults! I've seen them! They stopped our coach five times on the way here from the castle!"

  "But not the chief! I'm the chief! The chief of the brigands doesn't carry a musket! Only a sword!" and he held out his little rapier.

  The little girl shrugged her shoulders. "The chief brigand," she said, "is a man called Gian dei Brughi, and he always brings me presents at Christmas and Easter!"

  "Ah!" exclaimed Cosimo di Rondò, seized by a wave of family rancor. "Then my father's right when he says that the Marquis of Ondariva is the protector of all the brigands and smugglers around."

  The girl swept down to the ground and instead of giving herself a push, braked with a quick little stamp of the foot, and jumped off. The empty swing leaped back into the air on its ropes. "Get down from there at once! How dare you come on to our land!" she exclaimed, pointing a furious finger at the boy.

  "I haven't and I won't come on to it," answered Cosimo with equal warmth. "I've never set foot on your land, and I wouldn't for all the gold in the world!"

  Then the girl very calmly took up a fan lying on a wicker chair, and though it was not very hot, began fanning herself and walking up and down. "Now," she said in a steady voice, "I'll call the servants and have you taken and beaten! That'll teach you to trespass on our land!" She was constantly changing tone, this girl, putting my brother out every time.

  "Where I am isn't land and isn't yours!" proclaimed Cosimo, and felt tempted to add: "And I'm Duke of Ombrosa too, and lord of the whole area," but he held himself back, as he did not want to repeat things his father was always saying now that he had quarreled with him and run away from his table; he did not want to and did not think it right; also those claims to the dukedom had always seemed just obsessions to him; why should he, Cosimo, now start boasting of being a duke? But he did not want to contradict himself and so went on saying whatever came into his head. "This isn't yours," he repeated, "because it's the ground that's yours, and if I put a foot on it I would be trespassing. But up here, I can go wherever I like."

  "Oh, so it's all yours, up there. . ."

  "Yes! It's all mine up here"—and he waved vaguely toward the branches, the leaves against the sun, the sky. "On the branches it's all mine. Tell 'em to come and fetch me, and just see if they can!"

  Now, after all that boasting, he half expected her to begin jeering at him in some way. Instead of which she seemed suddenly interested. "Ah yes? And how far does it reach, this property of yours?"

  "As far as I can get on the trees, here, there, beyond the wall, in the olive groves, up the hill, the other side of the hill, the wood, the Bishop's Land. . ."

  "As far as France?"


  "As far as Poland and Saxony," said Cosimo, who knew nothing of geography but the names he had heard from our mother when she talked of the Wars of Succession. "But I'm not selfish like you. I invite you into my property." Now they were calling each other by the familiar "tu"; it was she who had begun.

  "And whose is the swing, then?" said she, sitting down and opening her fan.

  "The swing's yours," pronounced Cosimo, "but as it's tied to this tree, it depends on me. So, when you're touching the earth with your feet you're in your property, when you're in the air you're in mine."

  She gave herself a push and flew off, her hands tight on the ropes. Cosimo jumped from the magnolia on to the thick branch which held the swing, seized the ropes from there and began pushing her himself. The swing went higher and higher.

  "Are you frightened?"

  "No, not me. What's your name?"

  "Mine's Cosimo . . . And yours?"

  "Violante but they call me Viola."

  "They call me Mino, too, as Cosimo's an old man's name."

  "I don't like it."

  "Cosimo?"

  "No, Mino."

  "Ah . . . you can call me Cosimo."

  "Wouldn't think of it! Listen, you, we must get things straight."

  "How do you mean?" exclaimed he, who was put out by everything she said.