The Cloven Viscount Read online

  He stood looking at us, at the silent circle surrounding him, but maybe he was not looking at us out of that fixed eye at all, perhaps he just was lost in his own thoughts. A gust of wind blew from the sea and a broken branch on top of a fig tree groaned. My uncle's cloak waved, and the wind bellowed it out, stretched it taut like a sail. It almost seemed to be passing through the body as if that body was not there at all, and the cloak empty, like a ghost's. Then on looking closer we saw that it was clinging to him like a standard to its pole, and this pole was a shoulder, an arm, a side, a leg, all leaning on the crutch. The rest was not there at all.

  Goats looked at the Viscount with fixed inexpressive stares, each from a different direction, but all tight against each other, their backs arranged in an odd pattern of right angles. Pigs, more sensitive and quick-witted, screamed and fled, bumping their flanks against each other. Even we could not hide our terror; "Oh my boy," cried old Sebastiana and raised her arms. "You poor little thing!"

  My uncle, annoyed at making such an impression, advanced the point of his crutch on the ground and with a hop began pushing himself towards the castle entrance. But sitting cross-legged on the steps of the great gate were the litter bearers, half-naked men with gold earrings and crests and tufts of hair on shaven heads. They straightened up and one man with plaits who seemed their leader said, "We're waiting for our pay."

  "How much?" asked Medardo, almost laughing.

  The man with the plaits said, "You know the tariff for carrying a man in a litter..."

  My uncle pulled a purse from his belt and threw it, tinkling, at the bearer's feet The man quickly weighed it in a hand, and exclaimed, "But that's much less than we'd agreed on, Signore."

  Medardo, as the wind raised the edges of his cloak, said, "Half."

  He brushed past the litter bearer with little jumps on his single foot and went up the stairs, through the great open gate giving on to the interior of the castle, pushed his crutch at both the heavy doors which shut with a clang, and then as the wicket gate remained open banged that too and so vanished from our eyes. We continued to hear the alternating tap of foot and crutch from inside, moving down passages towards the wing of the castle where his private apartments lay, and also the banging and bolting of doors.

  His father stood waiting behind the grill of the bird cage. Medardo had not even paused to greet him. He shut himself into his rooms alone, and refused to show himself or reply even to Sebastiana who knocked and sympathized for a long time.

  Old Sebastiana was a big woman dressed in black and veils, her red face without a wrinlde except for one almost hiding her eyes. She had given milk to all the males of the Terralba family, gone to bed with all the older ones, and closed the eyes of all the dead ones. Now she went to and fro between the apartments of the two self-imposed prisoners, not knowing what to do to help them.

  Next day, as Medardo gave no more sign of life, we went back to our vintaging, but there was no gaiety, and among the vines we talked of nothing but his fate, not because we were so fond of him but because the subject was fascinating and strange. Only Sebastiana stayed in the castle, listening attentively to every sound.

  But old Aiolfo, as if foreseeing that his son would ietum so glum and fierce, had already trained one of his dearest birds, a shrike, to fly up to the castle wing in which were Medardo's apartments, then empty, and enter through the little window of his rooms. That morning the old man opened the bird-cage door to the shrike, followed its flight to his son's window, then went back to scattering bird seed to magpies and tits, and imitating their chirps.

  A little later he heard the thud of something flung against the windows. He leant out; there on the pediment was the shrike, dead. The old man took it up in the palms of his hands and saw that a wing was broken off as if someone had tried to tear it, a claw wrenched off as if by two fingers, and an eye gouged out. The old man held the shrike tight to his breast and began to sob.

  That same day he took to his bed, and attendants on the other side of the cage saw that he was very ill. But no one could go and take care of him, as he had locked himself inside and hidden the keys. Birds flew around his bed. Since he had taken to it they had all refused to settle or stop fluttering their wings.

  Next morning, when the nurse put her head into the bird cage, she realized that the Viscount Aiolfo was dead. The birds had all perched on his bed, as if it were a floating tree trunk in the midst of sea.

  4

  AFTER his father's death Medardo began leaving the castle. Sebastiana was the first to notice when one morning she found his doors flung open and his rooms deserted. A group of servants was sent out through the countryside to follow the Viscount's path. The servants, hastening along, passed under a pear tree which they had seen the evening before loaded with tardy, still unripe, fruit. "Look up there," said one of the men; they stared at pears hanging against a whitish sky, and the sight filled them with terror. For the pears were not whole, but were cut in half, down the middle, and were still hanging on their own stalks. All there was of every pear was the right side (or left, according to which way one looked, but they were all on the same side) and the other half had vanished, cut or maybe eaten.

  "The Viscount has passed by here!" said the servants.

  Obviously, after being shut up without food for so long, he had felt hungry that night and climbed up the first tree he saw to eat pears.

  As they went the servants met half a frog on a rock, still alive and jumping with the vitality of frogs. "We're on the right track!" and on they went. But they soon lost it, for they missed half a melon among the leaves, and had to turn back until they found it.

  So they passed from fields to woods and saw a mushroom cut in half, an edible one, then another, a poisonous red boletus, and as they went deeper into the wood kept finding every now and again mushrooms sprouting from the ground on half a leg and with only half an umbrella. These seemed divided by a neat cut, and of the other half not even a spore was to be seen. They were fungi of all kinds, puff balls, ovules and toadstools—and as many were poisonous as eatable.

  Following this scattered trail, the servants came to an open space called "The Nun's Field," with a pool in the middle of the grass. It was dawn and on the edge of the pool stood Medardo wrapped in his black cloak looking at his reflection in the water, on which floated white, yellow and dun-colored mushrooms. They were the halves of the mushrooms he had carried off, scattered now on that transparent surface. On the water the mushrooms looked whole, and the Viscount was gazing at them. The servants hid on the other side of the pool and did not dare say a thing, but just stared at the floating mushrooms, until suddenly they realized that those were the edible ones. Where were the poisonous ones? If he had not flung them into the pool, what could he have done with them? Back the servants set off through the woods at a run. They did not have to go far because on the path they met a child carrying a basket, and inside it were all the poisonous halves.

  The child was myself. That night I had been playing alone around the Nun's Field giving myself frights by bursting out of trees, when I met my uncle hopping along by moonlight over the field on his one leg, with a basket on his arm.

  "Hullo, uncle!" I shouted. It was the first time I was able to call him that.

  He seemed vexed at the sight of me. "I'm out for mushrooms," he explained.

  "And have you got any?"

  "Look," said my uncle and we sat down on the edge of the pool. He began choosing among the mushrooms, flinging some in the water, and dropping others in the basket.

  "There you are," said he, giving me the basket with the ones he had chosen. "Have them fried."

  I wanted to ask him why the basket only contained halves of mushrooms, but I realized that the question would have been disrespectful and ran off, after thanking him warmly. I was just going to fry them for myself when I met the group of servants, and heard that all my halves were poisonous.

  Sebastiana the nurse, when I told her the story, said, "The ba
d half of Medardo has returned. Now I wonder about this trial today."

  That day there was to be a trial of a band of brigands arrested the day before by the castle constabulary. The brigands were from our estates and so it was for the Viscount to judge them. The trial was held and Medardo sat sideways on his chair chewing a fingernail. The brigands appeared in chains. The head of the band was the youth called Fiorfiero who had been the first to notice the Viscount's litter while pounding grapes. The injured parties appeared: they were a group of Tuscan knights who were passing through our woods on their way to Provence when they had been attacked and robbed by Fiorfiero and his band. Fiorfiero defended himself saying that those knights had come poaching on our land and he had stopped and disarmed them as poachers, since the constabulary had done nothing about them. It should be said that at the time assaults by brigands were very common, and laws were clement. Also, our parts were particularly suitable for brigandage, so that even some members of our family, especially in these turbulent times, would join brigand bands. As for smuggling, it was about the lightest crime imaginable.

  But Sebastiana's apprehensions were well founded. Medardo condemned Fiorfiero and his whole band to die by hanging, as criminals guilty of armed rapine. But since those robbed were guilty of poaching he condemned them to die on the gibbet too. And to punish the constables who had appeared too late and not prevented either brigands or poachers from misbehaving, he decreed death by hanging for them too. There were about twenty altogether. This cruel sentence produced consternation in us all, not so much for the Tuscan gentry whom no one had seen until then, as for the brigands and constables who were generally well liked. Master Pietrochiodo, packsaddle-maker and carpenter, was given the job of making the gibbet He was a most conscientious worker who took great pains in all he did. With great sorrow, for two of the condemned were his relations, he built a gibbet ramificating like a tree, whose nooses all rose together, and were maneuvered by a single winch. It was such a big and ingenious machine that it could have hanged simultaneously even more people than those now condemned. The Viscount took advantage of this to hang ten cats alternating with every two criminals. The rigid corpses and cats' carcasses hung there for three days, and at first no one had the heart to look at them. But soon people noticed what a really imposing sight they were, and our own judgments and opinions began to vary, so that we were even sorry when it was decided to take them down and dismantle the big machine.

  5

  FOR me those were happy times, wandering through woods with Dr. Trelawney in search of fossil traces. Dr. Trelawney was English; he had reached our coasts after a shipwreck, astride a ship's barrel. All his life he had been a ship's doctor and made long and perilous journeys, some of them with the famous Captain Cook, though he had seen nothing of the world since he was always under hatches playing cards. On being shipwrecked among us he soon acquired a taste for a wine called cancarone, the harshest and heaviest in our parts, and now could not do without it, so that he always had a full water-flask of it slung over his shoulder. He had stayed on at Terralba and become our doctor; but he bothered little about the sick, only about his scientific researches, which kept him on the go—and me with him—through fields and woods by day and night. First came a crickets' disease caught by one cricket in a thousand and doing no particular harm. Dr. Trelawney wanted to examine them all and find the right cure. Next it was specimens of the time when our lands were covered by sea, and we would load up with pebbles and flints which, according to the doctor, had been fish in their time. Finally his last great passion: will-o'-the-wisps. He wanted to find a way of catching and keeping them, and with this aim in view we would spend nights wandering about our cemetery, waiting for one of those vague lights to go up among the mounds of earth and grass, when he would try to draw it towards us, make it follow us and then capture it, without its going out, in various receptacles with which we experimented: sacks, flasks, strawless demijohns, braziers, colanders. Dr. Trelawney had settled near the cemetery in a shack which had once been the gravedigger's in times of pomp and war and plague, when a man was needed on the job full time. There the doctor had set up his laboratory, with test tubes of every shape, to bottle the wisps, and nets like those for fishing to catch them; and retorts and crucibles in which he examined the why and wherefore of those pale little flames coming from the soil of cemeteries and the exhalations of corpses. But he was not a man to remain for long absorbed in studies. He would break off and come out, and then we would go hunting together for new phenomena of nature.

  I was free as air since I had no parents and belonged to the category neither of servants nor masters. I was part of the Terralba family only by tardy recognition, but did not bear their name and no one had bothered to give me any education. My poor mother had been the Viscount Aiolfo's daughter, and Medardo's elder sister, but she had besmirched the family honor by eloping with a poacher who was my father. I was born in a poacher's hut in rough undergrowth by the woods, and shortly afterward my father was killed in some squabble, and pellagra put an end to my mother who had stayed in that wretched hut all alone. Then I was brought into the castle, as my grandfather Aiolfo took pity on me, and grew up under the care of the chief nurse, Sebastiana. I remember that when Medardo was still a boy and I was a small child he would sometimes let me take part in his games as if we were of equal rank. Then distance grew between us and I dropped to the level of a servant. Now in Dr. Trelawney I found a companion such as I had never had.

  The doctor was sixty but about as tall as I. He had a face lined like an old chestnut, under tricorn and wig. His legs, with gaiters halfway up his thighs, looked long and disproportionate as a cricket's, the effect being emphasized by his long strides. He wore a dove-colored tunic with red facings, and slung across it, the bottle of cancarone wine.

  His passion for will-o'-the-wisps made him take long night marches to the cemeteries of nearby villages, where at times flames were to be seen finer in color and size than those in our abandoned cemetery. But it was bad for us if our stalking was found out by locals. Once we were mistaken for sacrilegious thieves and were followed for miles by a group of men armed with forks and tridents.

  Dr. Trelawney and I hopped from rock to rock, but heard the infuriated peasants getting closer behind. At a place called Grimace's Leap was a small bridge of tree trunks straddling a deep abyss. Instead of crossing over the doctor and I hid on a ledge of rock on the abyss's very edge, just in time as the peasants were right on our heels. They did not see us, and yelling, "Where are the swine?" rushed straight at the bridge. A crack, and they were flung screaming into the torrent far below. Trelawney's and my terror for our own skins changed to relief at danger escaped and then to terror again at the awful fate that had befallen our pursuers. We scarcely dared lean over and peer down into the darkness where the peasants had vanished. Then raising our eyes we looked at the remains of the little bridge; the trunks were still firmly in place, but they were broken in half as if sawn through. That could be the only explanation for thick wood giving way with such a clean break.

  "There's the hand of you know who in this," said Dr. Trelawney, and I understood.

  Just then we heard a quick clatter of hooves and on the verge of the precipice appeared a horse and a rider half wrapped in a black cloak. It was the Viscount Medardo, who was contemplating with his frozen triangular smile the tragic success of his trap, unforeseen perhaps by himself. He must certainly have wanted to kill us two off; instead of which, as it turned out, he had saved our lives. Trembling, we saw him gallop off on that thin horse, which went leaping away over the rocks as if born of a goat.

  At that time my uncle always went round on horseback. He had gotten our saddle-maker Pietrochiodo to make him a special saddle with a stirrup to which he could hitch himself, while the other had a counterweight. A sword and crutch were slung by the saddle. And so the Viscount galloped about, wearing a plumed hat with a great brim which half vanished under a wing of the ever-fluttering cloak. Where
ver the sound of his horse's hooves was heard, everyone took to his heels—even more than when Galateo the leper passed—and bore off children and animals. They feared for their plants, as the Viscount's wickedness spared no one and could burst at any moment into the most unforeseen and incomprehensible actions.

  He had never been ill, so never needed Dr. Trelawney's care. I don't know how the doctor would have dealt with such an eventuality as he did his very best to avoid ever hearing my uncle mentioned. When he heard people talking about the Viscount and his cruelty, Dr. Trelawney would shake his head and curl a lip with a mutter of "Oh, oh, oh ... zzt, zzt, zzt!" It seemed that from the medical point of view my uncle's case aroused no interest in him. But I was beginning to think that he had become a doctor only from family pressure or his own convenience, and did not care a rap about the science of it. Perhaps his career as ship's doctor had been due only to his ability at card games, which made the most illustrious navigators, particularly Captain Cook himself, contend for him as partner.

  One night Dr. Trelawney was fishing with a net for will-o'-the-wisps in our ancient cemetery when his eyes fell on Medardo of Terralba pasturing his horse around the tombs. The doctor was much confused and alarmed, but the Viscount came nearer and asked him in the defective pronunciation of his halved mouth, "Are you looking for night butterflies, doctor?"

  "Oh, m'lord," replied the doctor in a faint voice. "Oh, not exactly butterflies, m'lord ... Will-o'-the-wisps, you know, will-o'-the-wisps..."