Italo Calvino - [Our Ancestors 02]

by The Baron in the Trees (epub)

  "'I can supply some, citizen officer.'

  "'I don't know if it's sense or a joke you're making. Anyway I will report the matter to Higher Command, and we shall see. Citizen, my thanks for your help to the republican cause! O glory! O Rouen! O fleas! O moon!' and he went off raving.

  "I realized I had to act on my own initiative. So I collected a lot of fleas, and as soon as I saw a French hussar I'd shoot one at him with a catapult, trying to aim accurately enough to get it into his collar. Then I began to sprinkle the whole unit, in handfuls. It was a dangerous mission, for had I been caught in the act, no reputation of mine as a patriot would have saved me. They would have taken me prisoner, dragged me off to France and guillotined me as an emissary of Pitt. Instead of which my intervention was providential. The itching of the fleas quickly kindled in the hussars a human and civilized need to scratch themselves, search themselves, delouse themselves. They flung away their mossy clothes, their packs and knapsacks covered with mushrooms and cobwebs, washed, shaved, combed, in fact reacquired a perception of their individual humanity and regained the sense of civilization, of enfranchisement from the ugly side of nature. They were spurred, too, by a stimulus to activity, a zeal, a combativity long forgotten. The attack, when it came, found them pervaded by this new zest: the Armies of the Republic overcame the enemy resistance, broke through the front; and advanced to the victories of Dego and Millesimo . . ."

  } 28 {

  OUR sister and the emigré D'Estomac escaped from Ombrosa just in time to avoid capture by the Republican Army. The people of Ombrosa seemed to have returned to those days of the vintage. They raised the Tree of Liberty, this time more in conformity to French example, that is, a little like a Tree of Plenty. Cosimo, it goes without saying, climbed onto it, with a Phrygian cap on his head; but he soon got tired and left.

  There was some rioting around the palaces of the nobles, a few cries of "Aristó, aristó, string 'em up. Ça ira!" Me, what with my being my brother's brother and our always having been nobles of little account, they left in peace. Later on, in fact, they came to consider me as a patriot too (so that, at the next change, I was in trouble myself).

  They set up a municipalité, a maire, in the French style; my brother was nominated to the provisional junta, although many did not agree with this, considering him to be out of his wits. Those of the old régime laughed and said that the whole lot were a cageful of lunatics.

  The sittings of the junta were held in the former palace of the Genoese governor. Cosimo would perch on a carob which was the same height as the windows and follow the discussion from there. Sometimes he intervened to protest and give his vote. It is an acknowledged fact that revolutionaries are greater sticklers for formality than conservatives. They found Cosimo objectionable and his system of attendance unworkable, said that it lessened the decorum of the assembly, and so on. When the Ligurian Republic was set up in place of the oligarchic Republic of Genoa, my brother was not elected to the new administration.

  Cosimo, by the way, had at that time written and published a "Constitutional Project for a Republican City with a Declaration of the Rights of Men, Women, Children, Domestic and Wild Animals, Including Birds, Fishes and Insects, and All Vegetation, whether Trees, Vegetables, or Grass." It was a very fine work, which could have been a useful guide to any government; but which no one took any notice of, and it remained a dead letter.

  Most of his time, however, Cosimo still spent in the woods, where the sappers of the French Army were opening a road for the transport of artillery. With their long beards flowing under their busbies and merging into their leather aprons, the sappers were different from all the other troops. Perhaps this was due to the fact that they did not leave behind them all that trail of disaster and destruction (like other troops), but had the satisfaction of doing things that remained and the ambition to carry them out as best they could. Then they had so many stories to tell. They had crossed nations, seen sieges and battles; some of them had even been present at the recent great events in Paris—the storming of the Bastille and the guillotinings—and Cosimo used to spend his evenings listening to them. On putting away their spades and stakes they would sit around a fire, Smoking short pipes and digging up old memories.

  By day, Cosimo used to help the surveyors mark out the track. No one was better fitted to do so than he; he knew all the places where the road could pass with the gentlest gradients and the lowest loss of trees. And he always bore in mind not so much the needs of the French artillery as of the population of those roadless parts. At least one advantage would come from all the passage of brutal and plundering soldiery—a road made at their expense.

  This was no bad thing at the time, either; for by then, the occupation troops, particularly since they had changed their name from republican to imperial, were a pain in the neck to all. And all went to the patriots to complain—"Just see what your friends are doing!" And the patriots would fling up their arms and raise their eyes to the sky, and reply: "Oh, well! Soldiers! Let's hope it all blows over!"

  The Napoleonic troops would requisition pigs, cows, even goats, from the stalls. And as for taxes and tithes, they were worse than before. On top of everything, conscription started. This having to go as a soldier, no one could understand round our way; and the called-up youths would take refuge in the woods.

  Cosimo did what he could to help out. He would watch over cattle in the woods when the peasant owners sent them into the wilds for fear of a roundup; or he would guard clandestine loads of wheat on their way to the mill or olives to the press, so that the Napoleonic troops should not get a part; or show the youths called to the service caves in the woods where they could hide. In fact, he tried to defend people against hectoring, although he never made any attacks against the occupying troops, in spite of the armed bands which were beginning to wander around the woods making life difficult for the French. Cosimo, stubborn as he was, refused ever to retract, and having been a friend of the French before, went on thinking he must be loyal to them, even if so much had changed and all was so different from what he expected. Then one should also remember that he was no longer as young as he used to be, and did not put himself out much now, for either side.

  Napoleon went to Milan to get himself crowned, and then made a few journeys through Italy. In every town he passed people gave him a great welcome and took him to see the local sights. At Ombrosa they also put in the program a visit to the "patriot on the treetops," for, as often happens, none of us bothered much about Cosimo, but he was very famous in the world outside, particularly abroad.

  It was not a chance encounter. Everything was arranged beforehand by the municipal committee for the celebrations, so as to make a good impression. They chose a fine big tree. They wanted an oak, but the one most suitably placed was a walnut, so they tricked this up with a few oak branches, and hung it with ribbons in the French tricolor and the Lombard tricolor, cockades and frills. In the middle of all this they perched my brother, dressed in gala rig but wearing his characteristic cat's-fur cap, with a squirrel on his shoulder.

  Everything was set for ten o'clock and a big crowd was waiting around the tree, but of course Napoleon did not appear till half-past eleven, to the great annoyance of my brother, who as he got older was beginning to suffer from bladder trouble and had to get behind the trunk every now and again to urinate.

  Came the Emperor, with a suite all shimmering epaulettes. It was already midday. Napoleon looked up between the branches toward Cosimo and found the sun in his eyes. And he began to address a few suitable phrases to Cosimo: "Je sais trés bien de vous, citoyen. . ." and he shaded his eyes, "parmi les forêts. . ." and he gave a little skip to one side so that the sun did not come right into his eyes, "parmi les frondaisons de notre luxuriante. . ." and he gave another skip the other way as Cosimo's bow of assent had bared the sun on him again.

  Seeing Bonaparte so restless, Cosimo asked politely: "Is there anything I can do for you, mon Empereur?"

  "Yes, yes,"
said Napoleon, "keep over that side a bit, will you, to shade the sun off me. There, that's right, keep still now. . .." Then he fell silent as if struck by some thought, and turned to the Viceroy Eugène. "All this reminds me of something . . . something I've seen before."

  Cosimo came to his help. "Not you, Majesty; it was Alexander the Great."

  "Ah, of course!" exclaimed Napoleon. "The meeting of Alexander and Diogenes!"

  "You never forget your Plutarch, mon Empereur," said Beauharnais.

  "Only that time," added Cosimo, "it was Alexander who asked Diogenes what he could do and Diogenes asked him to move . . ."

  Napoleon gave a flick of the fingers as if he had finally found the phrase he was looking for. Assuring himself with a glance that the dignitaries of his suite were listening, he said in excellent Italian: "Were I not the Emperor Napoleon, I would like to be the citizen Cosimo Rondò!"

  And he turned and went. The suite followed with a great clinking of spurs.

  That was all. One might have expected that within a week Cosimo would have been sent the cross of the Legion of Honor. My brother did not care a rap about that, but it would have given us pleasure in the family.

  } 29 {

  YOUTH soon passes on earth, so imagine it on the trees, where it is the fate of everything to fall: leaves, fruit. Cosimo was growing old. All the years, all the nights spent in the cold, the wind, the rain, under fragile shelters or nothing at all, surrounded by air, without ever a house, a fire, a warm dish . . . He was getting to be a shriveled old man, with bandy legs and long monkey-like arms, hunchbacked, sunk in a fur cloak topped by a hood, like a hairy friar. His face was baked by the sun, creased as a chestnut; with clear round eyes among the wrinkles.

  The army of Napoleon was put to rout at the Beresina. The British fleet landed at Genoa. We spent the days waiting for news of reverses. Cosimo did not show himself at Ombrosa; he was crouching in a pine tree in the woods overlooking the Sappers' Road, where the guns had passed toward Marengo, and looking toward the east, over the deserted surface on which only shepherds with their goats or mules loaded with wood were to be seen. What was he waiting for? Napoleon he had seen, he knew how the Revolution had ended, there was nothing to expect now but the worst. And yet there he was, eyes fixed, as if at any moment the Imperial Army would appear round the bend, still covered with Russian icicles, and Bonaparte on horseback, his unshaven chin sunk in his chest, feverish, pale. . . He would stop under the pine tree (behind him a confusion of smothered steps, a clattering of packs and rifles on the ground, exhausted soldiers taking off boots by the roadside, unwinding rags round their feet) and he would say: "You were right, Citizen Rondò; give me the constitutions you wrote out, give me your advice to which neither the Directorate nor the Consulate nor the Empire would listen; let us begin again from the beginning, raise the Tree of Liberty once more, save the universal nation!" These were surely the dreams, the aspirations, of Cosimo.

  Instead, one day, three figures came limping along the Sappers' Road from the east. One, lame, was supporting himself on a crutch; another's head was wrapped in a turban of bandages; the third was the halest, as he only had a black patch over one eye. The filthy rags they wore, the tattered braid hanging from their chests, the cocked hats without cockades but with a plume still on one of them, the high boots rent all the way up the leg, seemed to have belonged to uniforms of the Napoleonic Guard. But they had no arms; or, rather, one was brandishing an empty scabbard; the second had a gun barrel on his shoulder, like a stick with a bundle on it. They came on singing: "De mon pays. . . De mon pays . . . De mon pays . . ." like a trio of drunks.

  "Hey, strangers," shouted my brother at them, "who are you?"

  "What an odd bird! What are you doing up there. Eating pine kernels?"

  And the second: "Who wants pine kernels? Famished as we are, d'you expect us to eat pine kernels?"

  "And the thirst! We got that from eating snow!"

  "We are the Third Regiment of Hussars!"

  "To a man!"

  "All that's left!"

  "Three out of three hundred; not bad!"

  "Well, I've made it and that's enough for me!"

  "Ah, it's too early to say that, you're not home yet with a whole skin!"

  "A plague on you!"

  "We are the victors of Austerlitz!"

  "And the botched of Vilna! Hurrah!"

  "Hey, talking bird, tell us where there's a tavern around here!"

  "We've emptied the wine barrels of half of Europe but can't get rid of our thirst!"

  "That's because we're riddled with bullets, and the wine flows straight through us!"

  "You know where you're riddled!"

  "A tavern that would give us credit!"

  "We'll come back and pay another time!"

  "Napoleon will pay!"

  "Prrr. . ."

  "The Czar will pay! He's coming along behind. Hand him the bills!"

  Cosimo said: "There's no wine around here, but farther on there's a stream and you can quench your thirst."

  "May you drown in the stream, you owl!"

  "If I hadn't lost my musket in the Vistula River I'd have shot you down by now and cooked you on the spit like a thrush!"

  "Wait a bit, will you: I'm going to get my feet in that stream, they're burning."

  "You can wash your behind in it, for all I care."

  But all three of them went to the stream, to take off their boots, bathe their feet, wash their faces and clothes. Soap they got from Cosimo, who was one of those people who get cleaner as they get older, as they are seized by a self-disgust which they did not notice in youth; so he always took soap around with him. The cool water cleared the fumes of alcohol a little in the three. And as the drunkenness passed, they were overwhelmed by the gloom of their state and heaved a sigh; but in their dejection the limpid water became a joy, and they splashed about in it, singing: "De mon pays . . . De mon pays. . ."

  Cosimo had returned to his lookout post on the edge of the road. He heard galloping and a squadron of light horse appeared, raising dust. They were in uniforms he had never seen before; and under their heavy busbies could be seen fair-skinned faces, bearded and rather gaunt, with half-closed green eyes. Cosimo doffed his cap to them. "What good wind, sirs?"

  They stopped. "Sdrastvuy! Say, batjuska, how long more before we get there?"

  "Sdrastvujte, soldiers," said Cosimo, who had learned a bit of every language and Russian too. "Kuda vam? to get where?"

  "To get wherever this road goes to . . ."

  "Oh, this road goes to so many places. Where are you going?"

  "V Pariz."

  "Well, there are better routes to Paris."

  "Niet, nie Pariz. Vo Frantsiu, za Napoleonom. Kuda vedjot eta doroga?"

  "Oh, to so many places: Olivabassa, Sassocorto, Trappa . . . "

  "Tchto? Aliviabasse? Niet, niet!"

  "Well, if you want to, you can get to Marseilles . . ."

  "V Marsel . . . da, da, Marsel . . . Frantsia. . ."

  "And what are you going to do in France?"

  "Napoleon came to war on our Czar, and now our Czar is chasing Napoleon."

  "And where do you come from?"

  "Iz Charkova. Iz Kieva. Iz Rostova."

  "What nice places you must have seen! And which d'you like more, here or in Russia?"

  "Nice places, ugly places, all the same to us, we like Russia!"

  A gallop, a cloud of dust, and a horse pulled up, ridden by an officer, who shouted at the Cossacks: "Von! Marsh! Kto vam pozvolil ostanovitsja?"

  "Do svidanja, batjuska!" said the troopers to Cosimo, "Nam pora.. and spurred away.

  The officer had remained there at the foot of the pine tree. He was tall, slim, with a noble and sad air; he was holding his bare head raised toward a sky veined with clouds.

  "Bonjour, monsieur," he said to Cosimo. "So you know our language?"

  "Da, gospodin ofitser," replied my brother, "but not more than you do French, all the same
."

  "Are you an inhabitant of this country? Were you here while Napoleon was about?"

  "Yes, monsieur l'officier."

  "How did that go?"

  "You know, monsieur, armies always loot, whatever the ideas they bring."

  "Yes, we too do a lot of looting . . . but we don't bring ideas. . ."

  He was sad and worried, though a victor. Cosimo liked him and tried to console him. "You have won!"

  "Yes. We fought well. Very well. But perhaps . . ." Suddenly yells broke out, rifle fire, a clash of arms. "Kto tam?" exclaimed the officer. The Cossacks returned, dragging over the ground some half-naked corpses, and holding something in their hands, their left hands (the right were grasping wide curved scimitars, bared and—yes—dripping with blood), and this something was the hairy heads of those three drunken hussars. "Frantsuzy! Napoleon! All dead!"

  The young officer barked out a sharp order, and made them take the things away.

  "You see . . . War. . . For years now I've been dealing as best I can with a thing that in itself is appalling; war. . . and all this for ideals which I shall never, perhaps, be able to explain fully to myself . . ."

  "I too," replied Cosimo, "have lived many years for ideals which I would never be able to explain to myself; but I do something entirely good. I live on trees."

  The officer's mood had suddenly changed from melancholy to nervous. "Well," he said, "I must be moving on." He gave a military salute. "Adieu, monsieur. . . What is your name?"

  "Le Baron Cosime de Rondeau," Cosimo shouted after his departing figure. "Proshtchajte, gospodin . . . And yours?"

  "Je suis le Prince Andrej. . ." and the galloping horse carried off the surname.

  } 30 {

  I HAVE no idea what this nineteenth century of ours will bring, starting so badly and getting so much worse. The shadow of the Restoration hangs over Europe; all the innovators—whether Jacobins or Bonapartists—defeated; once more absolutism and Jesuitry have the field; the ideals of youth, the lights, the hopes of our eighteenth century—all are dust.