Italo Calvino - [Our Ancestors 02]

by The Baron in the Trees (epub)

  Such thoughts I confide to this notebook, nor would I know how to express them otherwise; I have always been a balanced man, without great impetus or yearnings, a father, a noble by birth, enlightened in ideas, observant of the laws. The excesses of politics have never shocked me much, and I hope never will. And yet within, how sad I feel!

  It was different before. My brother was there. I used to say to myself, "That's his business," and get on with my life. For me the sign of change has not been the arrival of the Austro Russians or our annexation to Piedmont or the new taxes or anything of that kind, but just the fact of never seeing him, when I open the window, balancing there up above. Now that he is no longer here I should be interested in so many things: philosophy, politics, history. I follow the news, read books, but they befuddle me. What he meant to say is not there, for he understood something else, something that was all-embracing, and he could not say it in words but only by living as he did. Only by being so frankly himself as he was till his death could he give something to all men.

  I remember when he fell ill. We realized it because he brought his sleeping bag on to the great nut tree in the middle of the square. Before, the places where he slept he had always kept hidden, with his wild beast's instinct. Now he felt the need to be always seen by others. It tore at my heart; I had always thought that he would not like to die alone, and perhaps this was a first sign. We sent a doctor up on a ladder; when he came down he made a grimace and raised both arms.

  I went up the ladder myself. "Cosimo," I began, "you're past sixty-five now, can you stay up here any longer? What you wanted to say you've said now. We've understood. It's meant a great effort of will on your part, but you've done it, and now you can come down. For those who have spent all their lives on the sea, too, there comes a time for landing."

  No use. He made a sign of disagreement with one hand. Now he could scarcely speak. Every now and again he would get up, wrapped in a blanket to the top of his head, and sit on a branch to sun himself a little. More than that he did not move. An old peasant woman, an old mistress of his perhaps, went up and did for him, and brought him hot food. We kept the ladder leaning against the trunk, since there was constant need of going up to help him, and also since some still hoped that he might suddenly take it into his head to come down. (It was others who hoped so; I knew what he was like.) On the square below there was always a circle of people who kept him company, chatting among themselves and sometimes making a remark to him too, though they knew that he no longer wanted to talk.

  He got worse. We hoisted a bed onto the tree, and succeeded in fixing it in balance; he got into it quite willingly. We felt a twinge of remorse at not having thought of it before; but In truth he had never rejected comfort; though on trees, he had always tried to live the best he could. So we hurriedly took up other comforts: screens to keep the draught off, a canopy, a brazier. He improved a bit, and we brought him an armchair and lashed it between two branches. He began to spend his days on it, wrapped in his blankets.

  One morning, though, we saw him neither in bed nor in the armchair. Alarmed, we raised our eyes. He had climbed onto the top of the tree and was sitting astride a very high branch, wearing only a shirt.

  "What are you doing up there?"

  No reply. He was half rigid, and seemed to stay up there by a miracle. We got out a big sheet of the kind used to gather olives, and twenty or so of us held it taut beneath, as we were expecting him to fall.

  Meanwhile the doctor went up; it was a difficult climb, and two ladders had to be tied together end to end. When he came down he said: "Let the priest go up."

  We had already agreed to try a certain Don Pericle, a friend of his, a priest of the Constitutional Church at the time of the French, a Freemason before it was forbidden to the clergy, and readmitted to his offices by the Bishop a short time before, after many ups and downs. He went up with his vestments and ciborium, followed by an acolyte. He spent a short time up there. They seemed to discuss something. Then he came down. "Has he taken the Sacraments then, Don Pericle?"

  "No, no, but he says it's all right, for him it's all right." And I never managed to get more out of him.

  The men holding the sheet were tired. Cosimo was still up there, motionless. The wind came up, it was westerly, the tip of the tree quivered, we stood ready. At that moment a balloon appeared in the sky.

  Some English aeronauts were experimenting with balloon flights along the coast. It was a fine big balloon decorated with fringes and flounces and tassels, with a wickerwork basket attached. Inside it were two officers in gilt epaulettes and peaked caps, gazing through telescopes at the landscape beneath, watching the man on the tree, the outstretched sheet, the crowd, strange aspects of the world. Cosimo had raised his head too and was looking fixedly at the balloon.

  And then suddenly the balloon was caught in a gust of westerly wind; it began running before the wind, twisting like a trout and going out to sea. The aeronauts, undaunted, busied themselves reducing—I think—the pressure in the balloon, and at the same time unrolled the anchor to try and grip some support. The anchor flew silvery in the sky attached to a long rope, and following the balloon's course obliquely it began passing right over the square, more or less at the height of the top of the nut tree, so that we were afraid it would hit Cosimo. But little did we guess what we were to see with our own eyes a second later.

  The dying Cosimo, at the second when the anchor tope passed near him, gave one of those leaps he so often used to do in his youth, gripped the rope, with his feet on the anchor and his body in a hunch, and so we saw him fly away, taken by the wind, scarce braking the course of the balloon, and vanish out to sea. . ..

  The balloon, having crossed the gulf, managed to land on the other side. On the rope was nothing but the anchor. The aeronauts, too busy at the time trying to keep a lookout, had noticed nothing. It was presumed that the dying old man had disappeared while the balloon was flying over the bay.

  So vanished Cosimo, without giving us even the satisfaction of seeing him return to earth a corpse. On the family tomb there is a plaque in commemoration of him, with the inscription: "Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò—Lived in trees—Always loved earth—Went into sky."

  Every now and again as I write I interrupt myself and go to the window. The sky is empty, and for us old folk of Ombrosa, used to living under those green domes, it hurts the eyes to look out now. Trees seem almost to have no right here since my brother left them or since men have been swept by this frenzy for the ax. And the species have changed too; no longer are there ilexes, elms, oaks; nowadays Africa, Australia, the Americas, the Indies, reach out roots and branches as far as here. What old trees exist are tucked away on the heights; olives on the hills, pines and chestnuts in the mountain woods; the coast down below is a red Australia of eucalyptus, of swollen India rubber trees, huge and isolated garden growths, and the whole of the rest is palms, with their scraggy tufts, inhospitable trees from the desert.

  Ombrosa no longer exists. Looking at the empty sky, I ask myself if it ever did really exist. That mesh of leaves and twigs of fork and froth, minute and endless, with the sky glimpsed only in sudden specks and splinters, perhaps it was only there so that my brother could pass through it with his tomtit's tread, was embroidered on nothing, like this thread of ink which I have let run on for page after page, swarming with cancellations, corrections, doodles, blots and gaps, bursting at times into clear big berries, coagulating at others into piles of tiny starry seeds, then twisting away, forking off, surrounding buds of phrases with frameworks of leaves and clouds, then interweaving again, and so running on and on and on until it splutters and bursts into a last senseless cluster of words, ideas, dreams, and so ends.

 

 

 
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