The Cloven Viscount Read online

  "No, I'm not taking any refuge there," said Pamela, "as there's scarcely room for one and you want to squeeze up to me."

  "Don't be alarmed," said the Viscount. "I will stay outside and you take ease in there, with your goat and your duck too."

  "The goat and duck can get wet."

  "They'll take refuge too, you'll see."

  Pamela, who had heard tell of strange impulses of goodness by the Viscount, said to herself, "We'll just see," and crouched down inside the cave, tight against her goat and duck. The Viscount stood up in front and held his cloak there like a tent so that neither she nor goat nor duck got wet. Pamela looked at the hand holding the cloak, remained for a moment deep in thought, began looking at her own hands, compared them to each other, then burst into a roar of laughter.

  "I'm glad to see you so jolly, girl," said the Viscount. "But why are you laughing, if I may ask?"

  "I'm laughing because I've understood what is driving all my fellow villagers quite mad."

  "What is that?"

  "That you are in part good and in part bad. Now it's all obvious."

  "Why's that?"

  "Because I've realized that you are the other half. The Viscount living in the castle, the bad one, is one half. And you're the other, who was thought lost in the war but has now returned. And it's a good half."

  "That's nice of you. Thank you."

  "Oh, it's the truth, not a compliment."

  Now this was Medardo's story, as Pamela heard it that evening. It was not true that the cannon ball had blown part of his body to bits; it had split him in two halves. One was found by the army stretcher bearers, the other remained buried under a pyramid of Christian and Turkish corpses and was not seen. Deep in the night through the battlefield passed two hermits, whether faithful to the true religion or necromancers is not certain. They, as happens to some in wars, had been reduced to living in the no man's land between battlefields, and maybe, according to some nowadays, were trying to embrace at the same time the Christian Trinity and the Allah of Mahomet. In their peculiar piety these hermits, on finding Medardo's halved body, had taken him to their den, and there, with balsams and unguents prepared by themselves, tended and saved him. As soon as his strength was reestablished the wounded man bade farewell to his saviors and, supported on his crutch, moved for months and years throughout all the nations of Christendom in order to return to his castle, amazing people along the way by his acts of goodness.

  After having told Pamela his story, the good half of the Viscount asked the shepherd girl to tell him hers. Pamela explained how the bad Medardo was laying siege to her and how she had fled from home and was now wandering in the woods. At Pamela's account the good Medardo was moved, his pity divided between the goat girl's persecuted virtue, the bad Medardo's hopeless desolation, and the solitude of Pamela's poor parents.

  "As for them," said Pamela, "my parents are just a pair of old rogues. There's no point in your pitying them."

  "Oh, but just think of them, Pamela, how sad they'll be in their old home at this hour, without anyone to look after them and work the fields and do out the stall."

  "It can fall on their heads can the stall, for all I care!" said Pamela. "I'm beginning to realize that you're a bit too soft, and instead of attacking that other half of yours for all the swinish things he does, you seem almost to pity him as well."

  "Of course I do! I know what it means to be half a man, and of course I pity him."

  "But you're different; you're a bit daft too, but good."

  Then the good Medardo said, "Oh, Pamela, that's the good thing about being halved. One understands the sorrow of every person and thing in the world at its own incompleteness. I was whole and did not understand, and moved about deaf and unfeeling amid the pain and sorrow all round us, in places where as a whole person one would least think to find it. It's not only me, Pamela, who am a split being, but you and everyone else too. Now I have a fellowship which I did not understand, did not know before, when whole, a fellowship with all the mutilated and incomplete things in the world. If you come with me, Pamela, you'll leam to suffer with everyone's ills, and tend your own by tending theirs."

  "That all sounds very fine," said Pamela, "but I'm in a great pickle with that other part of you being in love with me and my not knowing what he wants to do with me."

  My uncle let his cloak fall, as the storm was over.

  "I'm in love with you too, Pamela."

  Pamela jumped out of the cave. "What fun! There's the sign of the whale in the sky and I've a new lover! This one's halved too, but has a good heart" They were walking under branches still dripping, through paths all mud. The Viscount's half mouth was curved in a sweet, incomplete smile.

  "Well, what shall we do?" said Pamela.

  "I'd say you ought to go back to your parents, poor things, and help them a bit in their work."

  "You go if you want to," said Pamela.

  "I do indeed want to, my dear," exclaimed the Viscount.

  "I'll stay here," said Pamela, and stopped with her duck and goat.

  "Doing good together is the only way to love."

  "A pity. I thought there were other ways."

  "Good-bye, my dear. I'll bring you some honey cake." And he hopped off on his stick along the path.

  "What d'you say, goatee? What d'you say, duckling dear?" exclaimed Pamela when alone with her pets. "Why must all these oddities happen to me?"

  8

  WHEN the news got around that the Viscount's other half had reappeared, things at Terralba became very different.

  In the morning I accompanied Dr. Trelawney on his round of visits to the sick; for the doctor was gradually returning to the practice of medicine and was realizing how many ills our people suffered, their fibre undermined by the long famines of recent times—ills which he had not bothered about before.

  We would go around the country lanes and find the signs of my uncle having preceded us. My good uncle, I mean, the one who every morning not only went the rounds of the sick, but also of the poor, the old, or whoever needed help.

  In Bacciccia's orchard the ripe pomegranates were each tied round with a piece of rag. From this we understood that Bacciccia had a toothache. My uncle had wrapped up the pomegranates lest they fall off and be squashed, now that their owner's ills were preventing him from coming out and picking them himself; but it was also a signal for Dr. Trelawney to pay the sick man a visit and bring his pincers.

  Prior Cecco had a sunflower on his terrace in starved soil so that it never flowered. One morning we found three chickens tied on the railing there, all pecking grain as fast as they could and unloading their white excrement in the sunflower pot. We realized that the Prior must have diarrhoea. My uncle had tied up the chickens there to manure the sunflower, and also to warn Dr. Trelawney of this urgent case.

  On old Giromina's steps we saw a row of snails moving up towards the door; they were big snails of the kind that are eaten cooked. This was a present from the woods brought by my uncle to Giromina, but also a sign that the old woman's heart disease had got worse and that the doctor should enter quietly lest he give her a fright.

  All these methods of communication were used by the good Medardo so as not to alarm the sick by too brusque a request for the doctor's help, but also so that Trelawney should get some notion of the case to be treated before entering, and thus overcome his reluctance to set foot in the houses of others and to approach sick whose ills he did not know.

  Suddenly throughout the valley ran the alarm, "The Bad 'Un! The Bad 'Un's coming."

  It was my uncle's bad half who had been seen riding in the neighborhood. Then everyone ran to hide, Dr. Trelawney first, with me behind.

  We passed by Giromina's, and on the steps was a streak of cracked snails, all slime and bits of shell.

  "He's passed this way! Quick!"

  On Prior Cecco's terrace the chickens were tied to the pan where tomatoes had been laid out to dry, and were ruining the lot.

 
"Quick!"

  In Bacciccia's orchard the pomegranates had all been squashed on the ground and empty rag ends hung from the branches.

  "Quick!"

  So we spent out lives between doing good and being frightened. The Good 'Un (as my uncle's left half was called in contrast to the Bad 'Un who was the other) was now considered a saint. The maimed, the poor, the women betrayed, all those with troubles went to him. He could have profited by this to become Viscount himself. Instead of which he went on being a vagabond, going round half wrapped in his ragged black cloak, leaning on his crutch, his blue and white stocking full of holes, doing good both to those who asked him and to those who thrust him harshly from their doors. No sheep that broke a leg in a ravine, no drunk drawing a knife in a tavern, no adulterous wife hurrying to her lover by night but found him appearing as if dropped from the sky, black and thin and sweetly smiling, to help and advise, to prevent violence and sin.

  Pamela was still in the woods. She had made herself a swing between two pine trees, then another firmer one for the goat and a lighter one for the duck, and she spent the hours swinging herself to and fro with her pets. But at fixed times the Good 'Un would come hobbling through the pine trees, with a bundle tied to his shoulder. It held clothes to be washed and mended which he had gathered from lonely beggars, orphans and sick; and he got Pamela to wash them, thus giving her a chance to do good too. Pamela, who was getting bored with always being in the woods, washed the clothes in the brook and he helped her. Then she hung them all to dry on the ropes of her swings, while the Good 'Un sat on a stone and read Tasso's "Jerusalem Liberated."

  Pamela took no notice of the reading and lay on the grass taking it easy, delousing herself (for while living in the woods she had got a few on her), scratching herself with a plant whose literal name was "bum scratch," yawning, dangling stones in her bare toes, and looking at her legs, which were pink and plump as ever. The Good 'Un, without ever raising his eyes from the book, would go on declaiming octave after octave, with the aim of civilizing the rustic girl's manners.

  But she, unable to follow the thread, and bored, was quietly inciting the goat to lick the Good 'Un's half face and the duck to perch on the book. The Good 'Un started back and raised the book, which closed. At that very moment the Bad 'Un appeared at a gallop among the trees, brandishing a great scythe against the Good 'Un. The scythe's blade fell on the book and cut it neatly in half lengthways. The back part remained in the Good 'Un's hand, and the rest fluttered through the air in a thousand half pages. The Bad 'Un vanished at a gallop; he had certainly tried to scythe the Good 'Un's half-head off, but the goat and duck had appeared just at the right moment. Pages of Tasso with their white margins and halved verses flew about in the wind and came to rest on pine branches, on grass, on water in the brook. From the top of a hillock Pamela looked at the white flutter and cried, "How lovely!"

  A few leaves reached a path along which Dr. Trelawney and I were passing. The doctor caught one in the air, turned it over and over, tried to decipher those verses with no head or tail to them and shook his head. "But I can't understand a thing ... tst ... tst..."

  The Good 'Un's reputation even reached the Huguenots, and old Ezekiel was often seen standing on the highest terrace of yellow vineyard, gazing at the stony mule path up from the valley.

  "Father," one of his sons said to him, "I see you are looking down into the valley as if awaiting someone's arrival."

  "'Tis man's lot to wait," replied Ezekiel, "and die just man's to wait with trust, the unjust man's with fear."

  "Is it the Lame-One-on-the-other-foot that you are waiting for?"

  "Have you heard him spoken of?"

  "There's nothing else but the Half Man spoken of down in the valley. Do you think he will come up to us here?"

  "If ours is the land of those who live in the right, and he is one who lives in the right, there is no reason why he should not come."

  "The mule path is steep for one who has to do it on a crutch."

  "There was a one-footed man who found himself a horse with which to come up."

  Hearing Ezekiel talk, the other Huguenots had appeared from among the vines and gathered around him. And hearing an allusion to the Viscount they quivered silently.

  "Father Ezekiel," they said, "that night when the Thin One came and the lightning burnt half the oak tree, you said that maybe one day we would be visited by a better traveller."

  Ezekiel nodded and lowered his beard to his chest.

  "Father, the one talked of now is as much a cripple as the other, his opposite in both body and soul, kind as the other was cruel. Could he be the visitor whom your words announced?"

  "It could be every traveller on every road," said Ezekiel, "and so he, too."

  "Then let's all hope that it be he!" said the Huguenots.

  Ezekiel's wife came forward with her eyes fixed before her, pushing a wheelbarrow full of vine twigs. "We always hope for everything good," said she, "but even if he who hobbles over these hills is but some poor soldier mutilated in the war, good or bad in soul, we must continue every day to do right and to cultivate our land."

  "That is understood," replied the Huguenots. "Have we indeed said anything that meant the contrary?"

  "Then, if we are all agreed," said the woman, "we can go back to our hoes and pitchforks."

  "Plague and famine!" burst out Ezekiel. "Who told you to stop work, anyway?"

  The Huguenots scattered among the vine rows to reach their tools left in the furrows, but at that moment Esau, who since his father was not looking had climbed up the fig tree to eat the early fruit, cried, "Down there! Who's arriving on that mule?"

  A mule was in fact coming up the slope with half a man tied to the crupper. It was the Good 'Un, who had bought an old nag when they were just about to drown her in the stream as she was so far gone it was not worth sending her to the slaughterhouse.

  "Anyway I'm only half a man's weight," he said to himself, "and the old mule might still bear me. And with my own mount I can go further and do more good." So his first journey was up to pay a visit to the Huguenots.

  The Huguenots greeted him all lined up, standing stiffly to attention, singing a psalm. Then the old man went up to him and greeted him like a brother. The Good 'Un dismounted and answered these greetings ceremoniously, kissed the hand of Ezekiel's wife as she stood there grim and frowning, asked after everyone's health, put out his hand to stroke the tousled head of Esau, who drew back, interested himself in everyone's trouble, made them tell the story of their persecutions and was touched. They talked, of course, without dwelling on religious controversy, as if it were a sequence of misfortunes imputable to the general wickedness of man. Medardo passed over the fact that the persecutions were by the Church to which he belonged, and the Huguenots on their part did not launch out on any affirmations of faith, partly also for fear of saying things that were theologically mistaken. So they ended up by making vague charitable speeches, disapproving of all violence and excess. All were agreed, but it was a bit chilling on the whole.

  Then the Good 'Un visited the fields, commiserated with them on the bad crops, and was pleased to hear that if nothing else they had a good crop of rye.

  "How much d'you sell it for?" he asked.

  "Three scudi the pound," said Ezekiel.

  "Three scudi the pound? But the poor of Terralba are dying of hunger, my friends, and cannot buy even a handful of rye! Perhaps you don't know that hail has destroyed the rye crop in the valley, and you are the only ones who can preserve many families from famine?"

  "We do know that," said Ezekiel. "And this is just why we can sell our rye well..."

  "But think of the help it would be for those poor people if you lowered the price ... Think of the good you can do..."

  Old Ezekiel stopped in front of the Good 'Un with arms crossed, and all the Huguenots imitated him.

  "To do good, brother," he said, "does not mean lowering our prices."

  The Good 'Un went over the fi
elds and saw aged Huguenots like skeletons working the soil in the sun.

  "You have a bad color," he said to an old man who had such a long beard he was hoeing it into the ground. "Don't you feel well?"

  "Well as someone can feel who hoes for ten hours a day at the age of seventy with only thin soup in his belly."

  "Tis my cousin Adam," said Ezekiel, "an exceptional worker."

  "At your age you must rest and nourish yourself," the Good 'Un was just saying, but Ezekiel dragged him brusquely away.

  "All of us here earn our bread the hard way, brother," said he in a tone that admitted of no reply.

  When he first got off his mule the Good 'Un had insisted on tying it up himself, and asked for a sack of fodder to refresh it after the climb. Ezekiel and his wife had looked at each other, as according to them a mule like that needed only a handful of wild chicory, but it was at the warmest moment of greeting the guest, and they had the fodder brought. Now though, thinking it over, old Ezekiel felt he really could not let that old carcass of a mule eat up the little fodder they had, and out of his guest's earshot he called Esau and said, "Esau, go quietly up to the mule, take the fodder away, and give it something else."

  "A decoction for asthma?"

  "Maize husks, chick-pea covers, what you like."

  Off went Esau, took the sack from the mule and got a kick which made him walk lame for a time. To make up for this he hid the remaining fodder to sell on his own account, and said that the mule had finished the lot.

  It was dusk. The Good 'Un was in the middle of the fields with the Huguenots and they no longer knew what to say to each other.

  "We still have a good hour of work ahead of us, guest," said Ezekiel's wife,

  "Well then, I'll leave you."

  "Good luck to you, guest."

  And back the good Medardo went on his mule.

  "A poor creature, mutilated in the wars," said the woman when he had gone. "What a number there are round here! Poor wretches!"

  "Poor wretches indeed," agreed the whole family.