The Nonexistent Knight & the Cloven Viscount, Page 4

  "Famine and plague!" Ezekiel shouted, and banged a fist on the table so hard it put out the light just when his son Esau appeared in the doorway with me.

  My teeth began chattering. Esau shrugged his shoulders. Outside all the thunder and lightning seemed to be unloading on Col Gerbido. As they were rekindling the light the old man with raised fists enumerated his son's sins as the foulest ever committed by any human being, but he only knew a small part of them. The mother nodded mutely, and all the other sons and sons-in-law and daughters-in-law and grandchildren listened, chins on chest and faces hidden in their hands. Esau was chewing away at an apple as if the sermon did not concern him. What with the thunder and Ezekiel's voice I was trembling like a reed.

  The diatribe was interrupted by the return of the men on guard, using sacks for hoods, who were all soaking wet. The Huguenots kept guard all night long in turns, armed with muskets, scythes and pitchforks, to prevent the prowling incursions of the Viscount, now their declared enemy.

  "Father! Ezekiel!" said these Huguenots. " 'Tis a night for wolves. For sure the Lame One won't come. May we return home, Father?"

  "Are there no signs of the Maimed One?" asked Ezekiel.

  "No, Father, except for the smell of burning left by the lightning. 'Tis not a night for the Bereft One."

  "Stay here and change your clothes then. May the storm bring peace to the Sideless One and to us."

  The Lame One, the Maimed One, the Bereft One and the Sideless One were some of the appellations given by the Huguenots to my uncle. Never once did I hear them call him by his real name. These remarks showed a kind of intimacy with the Viscount, as if they knew a great deal about him, almost as if he were an old enemy. They would exchange brief phrases accompanied by winks and laughs. "Ha ha! The Maimed One ... Just like him, ha ha! The Half-Deaf One ..." as if to them all of Medardo's dark follies were clear and foreseeable.

  They were talking thus when a fist was heard knocking at the door in the storm. "Who knocks in this weather?" said Ezekiel. "Quick, open."

  They opened the door and there on the threshold was the Viscount, standing on his one leg, wrapped in a dripping cloak, his plumed hat soaked with rain.

  "I have tied up my horse in your stall," he said. "Will you give me hospitality too? It's a bad night for a traveller."

  Everyone looked at Ezekiel. I had hidden myself beneath the table lest my uncle should discover that I frequented this enemy house.

  "Sit down by the fire," said Ezekiel. "In this house a guest is always welcome."

  Near the threshold was a heap of sheets, the kind used for stretching under trees to gather olives; there Medardo lay down and went to sleep.

  In the dark the Huguenots gathered around Ezekiel. "Father, we have the Lame One in our hands now!" they whispered to each other. "Must we let him go? Must we let him commit other crimes against innocent folk? Ezekiel, has the hour not come for the Buttockless One to pay the price?"

  The old man raised his fists to the ceiling. "Famine and plague!" he shouted, if someone can be said to shout who scarcely emits a sound but does it with all his strength. "No guest has ever been ill-treated in our house. I myself will mount guard to protect his sleep."

  And with his musket ready he took his place by the sleeping Viscount. Medardo's eye opened. "What are you doing there, Master Ezekiel?"

  "I protect your sleep, guest You are hated by many."

  "That I know," said the Viscount. "I do not sleep at the castle as I fear the servants might kill me as I lie."

  "Nor do they love you in my house, Master Medardo. But tonight you will be respected."

  The Viscount was silent for some time, and then said, "Ezekiel, I wish to be converted to your religion."

  The old man said nothing.

  "I am surrounded by men I do not trust," went on Medardo, "I should like to rid myself of the lot and call the Huguenots to the castle. You, Master Ezekiel, will be my minister. I will declare Terralba to be Huguenot territory and we will start a war against the Catholic princes. You and your family shall be the leaders. Are you agreed, Ezekiel? Can you convert me?"

  The old man stood there straight and motionless, his big chest crossed by the bandolier of his gun. "Too many things have we forgotten in our religion," said he, "for me to dare convert anyone. I will remain in my own territory, according to my own conscience, you in yours with yours."

  The Viscount raised himself on his elbow. "You know, Ezekiel, that I have not yet reported to the Inquisition the presence of heretics in my domain, and that your heads sent as a present to our Bishop would at once bring me back to favor with the Curia?"

  "Our heads are still on our necks, sir," said the old man. "But there is something else far more difficult to tear from us."

  Medardo leapt to his foot and opened the door. "Rather would I sleep under that oak tree there than in the house of enemies." And off he hopped into the rain.

  The old man called the others. "Sons, it was written that the Lame One was to come and visit us. Now he's gone; the way to our house is clear. Do not despair, sons; one day perhaps a better traveller will pass."

  All the bearded Huguenots and the coiffed women bowed their heads.

  "And even if no one comes," added Ezekiel's wife, "we will stay at our posts."

  At that moment a streak of lightning rent the sky, and thunder made the tiles and the stones of the wall quiver. Tobias shouted "The lightning has struck the oak tree. It is buming!"

  They ran out with their lanterns and saw the great tree carbonized down through the middle, from top to roots, and the other half intact. Far off under the rain they heard a horse's hooves and by a lightning flash caught a glimpse of the cloaked figure of its thin rider.

  "Father, you have saved us," said the Huguenots. "Thank you, Ezekiel."

  The sky cleared to the east and it was dawn.

  Esau called me aside. "You see what fools they are!" he whispered. "Look what I've done meanwhile," and he showed me a handful of glittering objects. "I took all the gold studs on the saddle while the horse was tied in the stall. You see what fools they are, not to have thought of it."

  I did not like Esau's ways, and those of his relations I found oppressive. So I preferred being on my own and going to the shore to gather limpets and catch crabs. While I was on top of a little rock trying to comer a small crab, in the calm water below me I saw the reflection of a blade above my head, and fell into the sea from fright.

  "Catch hold of this," said my uncle, for it was he who had come up behind me. And he tried to make me grasp his sword by the blade.

  "No, I'll do it by myself," I replied, and clambered up onto a crag separated by a limb of water from the rest of the rocks.

  "Are you out for crabs?" said Medardo, "I'm out for baby octopus," and he showed me his catch. They were fat baby octopuses, brown and white. Although they had been cut in two with a sword, they were still moving their tentacles.

  "If only I could halve every whole thing like this," said my uncle, lying face down on the rocks, stroking the convulsive half of an octopus, "so that everyone could escape from his obtuse and ignorant wholeness. I was whole and all things were natural and confused to me, stupid as the air; I thought I was seeing all and it was only the outside rind. If you ever become a half of yourself, and I hope you do for your own sake, my boy, you'll understand things beyond the common intelligence of brains that are whole. You'll have lost half of yourself and of the world, but the remaining half will be a thousand times deeper and more precious. And you too would find yourself wanting everything to be halved like yourself, because beauty and knowledge and justice only exists in what has been cut to shreds."

  "Uh, uh!" I kept on saying, "What a lot of crabs there are here!" and I pretended to be interested only in my catch, so as to keep as far as possible from my uncle's sword. I did not return to land until he had moved off with his octopuses. But the echo of his words went on disturbing me and I could find no escape from this frenzy of his for halving.
Wherever I turned, Trelawney, Pietrochiodo, the Huguenots, the lepers, we were all under the sign of the halved man, he was the master whom we served and from whom we could not succeed in freeing ourselves.

  6

  HITCHED to the saddle of his high-jumping horse, Medardo of Terralba would be out early, up and down bluffs, leaning over precipices to gaze over a valley with the eye of a bird of prey. That is how he came to see Pamela in the middle of a field with her goats.

  The Viscount said to himself, "With all my acute emotions I have nothing that corresponds to what whole people call love. If an emotion so silly is yet so important to them, then whatever may correspond in me will surely be very grand and awesome." So he decided to fall in love with Pamela, as she lay, plump and barefoot in a simple pink dress, face downwards in the grass, dozing, chatting to the goats and sniffing flowers.

  But thoughts thus coldly formulated should not deceive us. At the sight of Pamela, Medardo had sensed a vague stirring of the blood, something he had not felt for ages, and he rushed into these rationalizations with a kind of alarmed haste.

  On her way home at midday Pamela noticed that all the daisies in the fields had only half their petals and the other half had been stripped off. "Dear me!" she said to herself. "Of all the girls in the valley, that this should happen to me!" For she realized that the Viscount had fallen in love with her. She picked all the halved daisies, took them home and put them among the pages of her Mass book.

  That afternoon she went to the Nun's Field to pasture her ducks and let them swim in the pond. The field was covered with white parsnip blossoms, but these flowers had also suffered the fate of the daisies, as if part of each had been cut away with a snip of scissors. "Dear, oh dear me!" she said to herself. "So it's really me he wants!" And she gathered the halved parsnip blossoms in a bunch, to slip them into the frame of the minor over her chest of drawers.

  Then she put it out of her mind, tied her plaits round her head, took off her dress and had a bathe in the pond with her ducks.

  That evening as she went home the fields were full of dandelion flowers. And Pamela saw that they had lost their fluff on only one side, as if someone had lain on the ground and blown just on one side, or with only half a mouth. Pamela gathered some of those halved white spheres, breathed on them and their soft fluff floated away. "Dear, oh dearie dear!" said she to herself. "He wants me, he really does. How will it all end?"

  Pamela's cottage was so small that once the goats had been let onto the first floor and the ducks onto the ground floor there was no more room. It was surrounded by bees, for the family also kept hives. The subsoil was so full of ants that a hand put down anywhere came up all black and swarming with them. Because of this Pamela's mother slept in the haystack, her father in an empty barrel and Pamela in a hammock slung between a fig and an olive tree.

  On the threshold Pamela stopped. There was a dead butterfly. A wing and half the body had been crushed by a stone. Pamela let out a shriek and called her father and mother.

  "Who's been here?" said Pamela.

  "Our Viscount passed by a short time ago," said her father and mother. "He said he was chasing a butterfly that had stung him."

  "When has a butterfly ever stung anyone?" said Pamela.

  "We've been wondering too."

  "The truth is," said Pamela, "that the Viscount has fallen in love with me and we must be ready for the worst."

  "Uh, uh, don't get a swollen head now, don't exaggerate," answered the old couple, as old folk are apt to answer when the young don't do the same to them.

  Next morning when Pamela got to the stone on which she usually sat when pasturing her goats, she let out a cry. It was all smeared with ghastly remains; half a bat and half a jellyfish, one oozing black blood and the other shiny matter, one with the wing spread and the other with soft gelatinous edges. The goatgirl realized that this was a message. It meant: rendezvous on the seashore tonight. Pamela took her courage in both hands and went.

  By the sea she sat on pebbles and listened to the rustle of white-flecked waves. Then came a clatter on the pebbles and Medardo galloped along the shore. He stopped, unhitched, got off his saddle.

  "Pamela, I have decided to fall in love with you," he said to her.

  "And is that why," she exclaimed, "you're torturing all these creatures of nature?"

  "Pamela," sighed the Viscount, "we have no other language in which to express ourselves but that Every meeting between two creatures in this world is a mutual rending. Come with me, for I have knowledge of such pain, and you'll be safer with me than with anyone else; for I do harm as do all, but the difference between me and others is that I have a steady hand."

  "And will you tear me in two as you have the daisies and the jellyfish?"

  "I don't know what I'll do with you. Certainly my having you will make possible certain things I never imagined. I'll take you to the castle and keep you there and no one else will ever see you and we'll have days and months to realize what we should do and we'll invent new ways of being together."

  Pamela was lying on the sand and Medardo had knelt beside her. As he spoke he waved his hand all around her, but without touching her.

  "Well, first I must know what you'll do to me. You can give me a sample now and then I'll decide whether to come to the castle or not."

  The Viscount slowly drew his thin bony hand near Pamela's cheek. The hand was trembling and it was not clear if it was stretched to caress or to scratch. But it had not yet touched her when he suddenly drew it back and got up.

  "It's at the castle I want you," he said, hitching himself back on to his horse. "I'm going to prepare the tower you will live in. I will leave you another day to think it over, then you must make up your mind."

  So saying he spurred off along the beach.

  Next day Pamela climbed up the mulberry tree as usual to gather fruit, and heard a moaning and fluttering among the branches. She nearly fell off from fright. A cock was tied on a branch by its wings and was being devoured by great hairy blue caterpillars; a nest of evil insects that live on pines had settled right on the top.

  This was another of the Viscount's ghastly messages, of course. Pamela's interpretation was: "Tomorrow at dawn in the wood."

  With the excuse of gathering a sackful of pine cones Pamela went up into the woods, and Medardo appeared from behind a tree trunk leaning on his crutch.

  "Well," he asked Pamela, "have you made up your mind to come to the castle?"

  Pamela was lying stretched out on pine needles. "I've made up my mind not to go," she said, scarcely turning. "If you want me, come and meet me here in the woods."

  "You'll come to the castle. The tower where you're to live is ready and you'll be its only mistress."

  "You want to keep me prisoner there and then get me burnt in a fire or maybe eaten up by rats. No, no. I told you, I'll be yours if you like but here on the pine needles."

  The Viscount had crouched down near her head. In his hand he had a pine needle, which he brought close on her neck and passed all round it. Pamela felt goose flesh come over her, but lay still. She saw the Viscount's face bent over her, that profile which remained a profile even when seen from the front, and that half set of teeth bared in a scissors-like smile. Medardo clutched the pine needle in his fist and broke it. He got up. "I want you shut in the castle, yes, shut in the castle!"

  Pamela realized she could risk it, so she waved her bare feet in the air and said, "Here in the wood I wouldn't say no; I wouldn't do it all shut up—not if I were dead."

  "I'll get you there!" said Medardo, putting his hand on the shoulder of his horse which had come up as if it were passing there by chance. He leapt on the saddle and spurred off down a forest track.

  That night Pamela slept in her hammock swung between olive and fig, and in the morning, honors! she found a little bleeding carcass in her lap. It was a half a squirrel, cut as usual longways, but with its fluffy tail intact.

  "Poor me!" said she to her parents. "This
Viscount just won't leave me alone."

  Her father and mother passed the carcass of the squirrel from hand to hand.

  "But," said her father, "he's left the tail whole. That may be a good sign."

  "Maybe he's beginning to be good..." said her mother.

  "He always cuts everything in two," said her father, "but the loveliest thing on a squirrel, its tail, he respects that..."

  "Maybe that's what the message means," exclaimed her mother. "He'll respect what's good and beautiful about you."

  Pamela put her hands in her hair. "What things to hear from my own father and mother! There's something behind this; the Viscount has spoken to you..."

  "Not spoken," said her father. "But he's let us know that he wants to visit us and will take an interest in our wretched state."

  "Father, if he comes to talk to you, open up the hives and set the bees on him."

  "Daughter, maybe Master Medardo is getting better..." said the old woman.

  "Mother, if he comes to talk to you, tie him to the ant heap and leave him there."

  That night the haystack where the mother slept caught fire and the barrel where the father slept came apart. In the morning the two old folk were staring at the remains when the Viscount appeared.

  "I must apologize for alarming you last night," said he, "but I didn't quite know how to approach the subject. The fact is that I am attracted to your daughter Pamela and want to take her to the castle. So I wish to ask you formally to hand her over to me. Her life will change, and so will yours."

  "You can imagine how pleased we'd be, my lord!" said the old man. "But if you knew what a character my daughter has! Why she told us to set the bees from the hives on you..."

  "Think of it, my lord..." said the mother, "why she told us to tie you to our ant heap..."

  Luckily Pamela came home early that day. She found her father and mother tied up and gagged, one on the beehive, the other on the ant heap. And it was lucky that the bees knew the old man and the ants had other things to do than bite the old woman. So Pamela was able to save them both.