“I believe that fables are true.”

Italo Calvino

Calvino is dead and that's also true, but his “ancestors” live on and we are their heirs. The no-longer cloven viscount, Medardo of Terralba, lives with his Pamela and her goat and duck; Baron Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò, like Icarus before him, lies in the vasty deep (“Those are pearls that were his eyes”); and Agilulf, the nonexistent knight, no longer encumbered by his weighty armor, wanders the earth as pure spirit motivated only by the power of his will. Excellent company for the little boy who, like Matthew Arnold's Sophocles, “saw life steadily and saw it whole” (even though it was only the Emperor in the altogether!), or the ugly duckling, or Kay and the Snow Queen, or any of the hundreds of characters found in Grimm or in Calvino's Italian Fables and Italian Folktales. Even Joyce's Ondt and Gracehoper and Mookse and Gripes can be included in any discussion of stories or fairy tales or fables or folktales or myths or dreams or even fantasies or nightmares for that matter. They are all cut from the same cloth, the mind of man, his imagination: “My father!—methinks I see my father.” / “Where, my lord?” / “In my mind's eye, Horatio.” Didn't Scheherazade, that feisty lady storyteller par excellence, save her head by using it? (1001 times by exact count.) “A mind is a terrible thing to waste” we are told ad infinitum, usually at 2 a.m. (Where would we be / Without TV?)

Calvino's three ironic, cautionary tales about war and chivalry and the problems of modern existence do not prevent him, according to Gore Vidal, from being “a true realist, who believed ‘that only a prosaic solidity can give birth to creativity: fantasy is like jam; you have to spread it on a solid slice of bread. If not, it remains a shapeless thing, like jam, out of which you can't make anything.’” This concern for realism, even in fables, can be seen in Calvino's attention to detail in the three novellas that make up Our Ancestors. Salman Rushdie believes that they “possess a clarity, a simplicity which I'm going to have to compare with One Hundred Years of Solitude, because Calvino shares with Márquez the effortless ability of seeing the miraculous in the quotidian.”

Little wonder that each of the tales is a tour de force, what many critics consider the necessary basis for all memorable fairy tales that, unlike Harlequin Romances, depend on originality for their success:

The three stories which make up I nostri antenati … were published over a period of seven years and provoked the most varied reactions from critics during that period. Nor was the bizarre variety of the reactions entirely surprising, in view of the content of the three stories: a viscount is split in two, by a Turkish cannon, and survives as two distinct halves a baron vows never to set foot on the ground again and lives the rest of his life in the tree-tops an unoccupied suit of armour seems to have all the properties and attributes of a human being.

(J. R. Woodhouse, Italo Calvino, Hull Univ. Press, 1968)

In spite of the obvious originality of the tales, critics continue to give us laundry lists of influences on Calvino's art, including Tasso, Boccaccio, Dante, Ariosto, Voltaire, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lewis Carroll, Kafka, Borges, Beckett, Márquez, Pirandello, de Chirico, Fellini, De Sica, Rossellini and others. But then critics and erstwhile scholars have always played that game. The more well-read an original genius is, the more documented he becomes. Look what they did to Shakespeare and Joyce! Homer (whose Odyssey may have been written by a woman, according to Samuel Butler) is the exception. Called, among other things, escapist, neorealist, surrealist, anarchist, and socialist, Calvino is the supreme storyteller who eschews obfuscation, weaving with confident clarity and simplicity, irony and satire, fables that, like colorful medieval tapestries, can be recalled to mind as completed pictures. Controversial though the tales may be, Our Ancestors makes an important contribution to modern literature and deserves to be studied for the originality and humor of its three members of the lesser nobility, vivid characters who transcend their stories and, like Sir John Falstaff or Don Quixote, walk literature's landscape, larger than life.

A reading of the three tales turns up some interesting features regarding each of these titled characters.¹

THE VISCOUNT

Earliest of the fantastic trio, the Viscount Medardo of Terralba, in addition to experiencing totally what Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde only suggest symptomatically (distortion of physical features), acts out the fabulous sojourn of a fairy-tale protagonist, moving from innocence to division into good and bad to the happily-ever-after stasis or state of mind sought after in and out of the nursery. Arriving in Bohemia to join in the war against the Turks, Medardo rushes to battle, like Crane's Henry Fleming, green as grass. His nephew, the young narrator, tells us that “my uncle was then in his first youth, the age in which confused feelings, not yet sifted, all rush into good and bad, the age in which every new experience, even macabre and inhuman, is palpitating and warm with love of life.”²

He is in Browning country, and, like Childe Roland who came to the dark tower with his illusions about chivalry, what he sees is not what he expects. Storks, supposedly omens of good fortune, eat the dead “nowadays. … Vultures and crows have now given way to storks and flamingos and cranes.” He learns that the living chop off the fingers of the dead “to get at their rings.” He sees the “pavilions of the courtesans. … No other army has such fine women.” But one must be careful for “they're so foul and pox-ridden even the Turks wouldn't want them as booty. They're not only covered with lice, bugs and ticks, but even scorpions and lizards make their nests on them.” And he learns much more about chivalry and camp life just before he is rent so equally asunder. For example, “Battle began punctually at ten in the morning.” Gunpowder is scarce, and artillerymen “cooked their rations of turnips on the bronze parts of swivel guns and cannons burning hot from the day's firing.” But he who had “felt no nostalgia or doubt, or apprehension” the night before now saw “them, saw the Turks.” He realizes that “to see two Turks was to see the lot. They were soldiers, too, all in their own army equipment. Their faces were tanned and tough, like peasants'. Medardo had seen as much as he wanted to of them. He felt he might as well get back to Terralba in time for the quail season. But he had signed on for the whole war.” After killing his first Turk, who was on foot, he faces a cannon: “In his enthusiasm and inexperience he did not know that cannons are to be approached only by the side or the breech. He leapt in front of the muzzle, with sword bared, thinking he would frighten the two [artillerymen]. Instead of which they fired a cannonade right in his chest. Medardo of Terralba jumped into the air.”

Thus we have our cloven viscount, the right half of whom we see returned to his estate to do mischief to the surrounding human, animal and vegetable life, but always with a certain flair: He halves his animal and vegetable victims—bats, birds, squirrels, pears, frogs, mushrooms, jellyfish, octopuses, flowers, tree trunks. He even halves Tasso's Jerusalem Liberated being read by his left half after he had returned from Bohemia somewhat tardily. And he makes his argument, speaking to his nephew:

If only I could halve every whole thing like this … 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 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.

It is different with his human victims. Them he hangs—poachers, brigands, constables, peasants, and Tuscan knights, along with cats. He dabbles in pyromania, setting fire to houses, haystacks, firewood, woods, even the castle itself. He sends the old family nurse, Sebastiana, who “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,” to the Leper colony at Protofungo, though he knows she does not have the disease. He threatens to report the Huguenots to the Inquisition as heretics. And he is given names by them in retaliation—the Bereft One, the Miamed One, the Lame One, the Sideless One, the Half-Dead One, the Buttockless One.

Just before the left half of the Viscount returns, Medardo decides to fall in love with Pamela, a kind of goose girl (“Dear, oh dearie dear! … He wants me, he really does. How will it all end?”). He woos her in his own half-hearted way: “If an emotion so silly is yet so important to them, then whatsoever may correspond in me will surely be very grand and awesome.” The left half of Medardo returns and the double nature of the Good 'Un and the Bad 'Un is revealed. Widows, animals and others are helped, nature is restored even as the Bad 'Un continues his attacks. The left half presents his argument just as the right half had done earlier: “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 his argument goes on. But neither half of the Viscount can exist entirely by itself, and as in all fables there must come a solution and “So Medardo's two halves wandered, tormented by opposing furies, amid the crags of Terralba.”

Pamela arranges to marry both Medardos, speaking to each one separately, and so as she and the Good 'Un are being married, the Bad 'Un shows up and challenges his rival to a duel, “fixed for dawn next day in the Nun's Field. Master Pietrochiodo invented a kind of leg in the shape of a compass which, fixed to the halved men's belts, would allow them to stand upright and move and even bend their bodies backwards and forwards, while the point kept firmly in the ground.” As miraculously as they had survived after being split apart in Bohemia, they come together on the ground and are joined into one body, later wrapped tightly by the good doctor Trelawney. Pamela, ecstatic, says, “At last I'll have a husband with everything complete.” Certainly a tale for adults. And the lesson is also for adults:

So my uncle Medardo became a whole man again, neither good nor bad, but a mixture of goodness and badness, that is, apparently not dissimilar to what he had been before the halving. But having had the experience of both halves each on its own, he was bound to be wise. He had a happy life, many children and a just rule.

THE BARON

Baron Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò, on the other hand, is a very different character, for he is, physically, all there, a mere boy of twelve when he goes into the trees. Woodhouse tells us that “Calvino suggests in fact that this novel should be classed with Alice in Wonderland, and, indeed, it is difficult to see in Il barone rampante the often overt criticism of Il cavaliere insistente or of Il visconte dimezzato.” But that is understandable when the Baron is visualized with two halves of a viscount on one side of him and an empty suit of armor on the other side. It is not the Baron's body (he ages quite naturally from twelve to over sixty-five) that is the fantastic element of The Baron in the Trees. It is the Baron's arboreal world that is fantastic, like the upper world of the giant in “Jack and the Beanstalk.” Cosimo the boy enters the world of trees, thinking he will stay for an hour or so, but a spell falls on him and there is no release until he plummets into the sea. And though his rush to climb into the holm oak is on the spur of the moment (dressed in formal clothes with a tricorn and rapier, “powdered hair with a ribbon around the queue, three-cornered hat, lace stock and ruffles, green tunic with painted tails, purple breeches, rapier, and long white leather gaiters halfway up his legs”), what impels him to leave his father's table shouting “I know where I'm going!” is made very clear by the narrator in the previous nine pages. If any two boys had reasons for wanting to escape their family, it was Cosimo and Biagio, though for Cosimo his “stubbornness hid something much deeper.”

His father the Baron Arminio is a bore, his mother the Baroness is “nicknamed the Generalessa,” and his sister is the “odious” Battista, “a kind of stay-at-home-nun.” It is Battista, whose “evil schemes found expression in cooking,” who causes Cosimo to shout “‘I told you I don't want any, and I don't!’ and pushed away his plateful of snails. Never had we seen such disobedience.”

Once she made some paté toast, really exquisite, of rats' livers; this she never told us until we had eaten them and pronounced them good; and some grasshoppers' claws, crisp and sectioned, laid on an open tart in a mosaic; and pigs' tails baked as if they were little cakes; and once she cooked a complete porcupine with all its quills …

For as Biagio tells us, “It was as a protest against this macabre fantasy of our sister's that my brother and I were incited to show our sympathy with the poor tortured creatures, and our disgust, too, for the flavor of cooked snails—a revolt really against everything and everybody; and from this, not surprisingly, stemmed Cosimo's gesture and all that followed after.” The brothers devise a plan to let the snails in the cellar escape from a barrel—“Quick, snaily-wailies! Hurry up, out!”—but Battista, “wandering around the house in search of mice, holding a candelabra, with a musket under her arm,” discovers the trail and the boys are whipped for their trouble. And this brings us to the opening of the book: “It was on the fifteenth of June, 1767, that Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò, my brother, sat among us for the last time.” Battista, the “kitchen superintendent,” had prepared as a kind of punishment for the boys, “snail soup and snails as a main course!” Biagio yields and eats them, but Cosimo refuses, and is told to leave the table. He climbs into the holm oak and his father tells him, “When you are tired of being up there, you'll change your mind.” He responds, “I'll never change my mind … I'll never come down again!” And he keeps his word.

It is important to remember that what hold this tale together are Cosimo's rationale for staying in the trees, the arboreal setting which allows his free movement over half a century, the characters he meets and corresponds with, and the realistic details surrounding the events of his life. For example, once up the tree, Cosimo has a different perspective, for “everything seen from up there was different, which was fun in itself.” After he meets Viola, the young girl in the next estate, he tells her, “No, I'm not coming down into your garden or into mine either ever again. It's all enemy territory to me.” Much later, in Olivabassa, he responds to His Highness Federico Alonso Sánchez y Tobasco by saying that “I don't because I think it suits me, not because I'm forced to.” And when the Spaniards at Olivabassa, who are forced up into the trees temporarily, are free to return to the ground, Cosimo tells them, “I came up here before you, my lords, and here I will stay afterwards too!” Finally, near the end of his life, he tells a Russian officer, “I too … 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.”

Perhaps it is possible to see Cosimo as enchanted, a kind of Rima in Green Mansions. Certainly Viola, when she first meets Cosimo, gives us her interpretation of what has happened to him: “Just let me explain how things are. You have the lordship of the trees, all right? But if you touch the earth just once with your foot, you lose your whole kingdom and become the humblest slave. D'you understand? Even if a branch breaks under you and you fall, it's the end of you!” He tells her, “I've never fallen from a tree in my life!” and she replies, “No, of course not, but if you do fall, if you do, you change into ashes and the wind'll carry you away.” And Cosimo says, “Fairy tales. I'm not coming down to the ground because I don't want to.” Viola's response is, “Oh, what a bore you are!” And when her aunt asks her, “Who are you talking to?” she answers, “With a young man … who was born on the top of a tree and is under a spell so he can't set foot on the ground.”

The fairy tale that follows cannot hold up unless Calvino creates a world that is plausible, that is circumscribed, that is true to the fairy element. Biagio tells us what we must know in order to accept Cosimo's world:

I don't know if it's true, the story they tell in books, that in ancient days a monkey could have left Rome and skipped from tree to tree till it reached Spain, without ever touching earth. The only place so thick with trees in my day was the whole length, from end to end, of the gulf of Ombrosa and its valley right up to the mountain crests; the area was famous everywhere for this.

But the trees are still there for Cosimo who “realized that as the trees were so thick he could move for several miles by passing from one branch to another, without ever needing to descend to earth. Sometimes a patch of bare ground forced him to make long detours, but he soon got to know all the necessary routes and came to measure distances by quite different estimates than ours, bearing always in mind the twisted trail he had to take over the branches.” And he learned the art of pruning trees.

In fact, his love for this arboreal element made him, as all real loves do, become merciless even to the point of hurting, wounding and amputating so as to help growth and give shape. Certainly he was always careful when pruning and lopping to serve not only the interests of the owner but also his own, as a traveler with a need to make his own routes more practicable; thus he would see that the branches which he used as a bridge between one tree and another were always saved, and reinforced by the suppression of others.

Having accepted Cosimo's world, the reader can more readily accept his activities covering a lifetime. There are the objects and conveniences he manages to create or haul into the trees—water tanks, ovens, game, guns, fur jackets, sleeping bags, books, bookcases, a printing press, women (including Viola), even a confessional for a priest to use! We accept all this because we understand the process of his education based on a respect for books. After he meets a brigand, Gian dei Brughi, he develops “a passion for reading and study which remained with him for the rest of his life.” He corresponds with the major philosophers and scientists of Europe—Voltaire, Diderot, D'Alembert, among others—and meets Napoleon on his return from Milan. He fights pirates and wolves, encourages the Freemasons against the Jesuits when they are under suppression, and promotes socialism in Ombrosa, writing a Project for the Constitution of an Ideal State in the Trees and 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. Like Sweeney among the trees, he goes mad and in his madness writes such works as The Song of the Blackbird, The Knock of the Woodpecker, and The Dialogue of the Owls, but he recovers his wits and publishes a weekly, The Reasonable Vertebrate. But like a Crusoe among the trees, whom he resembles with his hat made from a wild cat he had fought, killed and skinned, he lacks a “Friday.” In Cosimo's case, his companion appears in the body of a dog, a dachshund, whom he names Ottimo Massimo. Later he discovers that Ottimo is Viola's dog, left behind when she went away to school. From the time that he meets her until she tells him, “I leave tonight. You won't see me again,” the Sinforosa Viola Violante of Ondariva, Duchess of Tolemaico, holds him in thrall. “Their world was a world of trees—intricate, gnarled and impervious. ‘There!’ she would exclaim, pointing to a fork high in the branches, and they would launch out together to reach it and start between them a competition in acrobatics, culminating in new embraces. They made love suspended in the void, propping themselves or holding onto branches, she throwing herself upon him, almost flying.” And though she apparently is unfaithful to him (“Gossip has it that in Paris she passes from one lover to another, in such rapid succession that no one can call her his own and consider himself privileged. But every now and again she vanishes for months at a time and they say she retires to a convent, to wallow in penance”), he comes to believe after she has left him forever that she is faithful to him in her own peculiar way, like Nana or Lady Brett Ashley.

His brother tells us that this gentle, though rebellious, young baron was described in an almanac as “ ‘L'homme sauvage d'Ombreuse (Rep. Génoise). Vit seulement sur les arbres.’ They had represented him all covered in leaves, with a long beard and a long tail, eating a locust. This figure was in the Chapter of Monsters, between the Hermaphrodite and the Siren.” Even Caliban would have wept at it! Later Biagio meets Voltaire who questions him about his brother: “But is it to be nearer the sky that your brother stays up there?” Biagio tells the sage that “my brother considers … that anyone who wants to see the earth properly must keep himself at a necessary distance from it.”

Perhaps enchantment requires distancing in one way or another. At any rate, it wouldn't do to bury the old Baron in the earth, and so after a priest goes up to hear his last words, a balloon appears in the sky (like Flaubert's parrot?):

The dying Cosimo, at the second when the anchor rope 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. …

With that the brother-narrator, Biagio, tells us, “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.’”:

Ombrosa no longer exists. Looking at the empty sky, I ask myself if it ever did really exist.

Never fear! It exists for dead Calvino's appreciative readers, if only “in the mind's eye.”

THE KNIGHT

The Nonexistent Knight, the third and last of Calvino's “ancestors,” begs to be compared to Andersen's naked emperor, Wells's invisible man and Hollywood's invisible woman. (Would that those two had married! Only Will Hays could have objected to their nuptials, sans facial bandages, gloves and trousseaux.) But they exist. Agilulf, the knight in shining armor, does not. He is emphatic about this matter in his reply to Charlemagne, who challenges him:

“I'm talking to you, paladin!” insisted Charlemagne. “Why don't you show your face to your king?”

A voice came clearly through the gorge piece. “Sire, because I do not exist!” “This is too much!” exclaimed the emperor. “We've even got a knight who doesn't exist! Let's just have a look now.”

Agilulf seemed to hesitate a moment, then raised his visor with a slow but firm hand. The helmet was empty. No one was inside the white armor with its iridescent crest.

“Well, well! Who'd have thought it!” exclaimed Charlemagne. “And how do you do your job, then, if you don't exist?”

“By will power,” said Agilulf, “and faith in our holy cause!”

“Oh, yes, yes, well said, that is how one does one's duty. Well, for someone who doesn't exist, you seem in fine form!”

This is the purest kind of fairy-tale atmosphere, even to the emperor's casual response, “Oh, yes, yes, well said,” as if Charlemagne were being played by Edward Everett Horton or Frank Morgan. Unlike the viscount, whose appearance suggests the handiwork of a Dr. Frankenstein, or the baron, whose physique is much like Robinson Crusoe's, the knight challenges our ideas about existence itself. Is flesh all that necessary? Who is more palpable, King Arthur, the man who never was, or King Alfred, who is buried at Winchester? Nor is Agilulf a ghost—neither the ghost of a real person (Anne Boleyn—“And every night she walks the bloody tower with 'er 'ead tucked underneath 'er arm!”) nor the ghost of Hamlet's father, “doom'd for a time to walk the earth.” Agilulf Emo Bertrandin of the Guildivern and of the Others of Corbentraz and Sura, Knight of Selimpia Citeriore and Fez, is dimensionless (in spite of the titles), bounded for the time being by his white armor, “light and gleaming,” whose shield suggests his source without revealing it: “On the shield a coat of arms was painted between two draped sides of a wide cloak, within which opened another cloak on a smaller shield, containing yet another even smaller coat of arms. In faint but clear outline were drawn a series of cloaks opening inside each other, with something in the center that could not be made out, so minutely was it drawn.”

Like wheels within wheels, or like Chinese boxes, or like Russian babushka dolls, or even like Churchill's definition of Russia as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” Agilulf is what he wears, not what he eats:

But he who ate nothing needed more attendance by servers than the whole of the rest of the table. … He used a great deal of bread, constantly crushing it into tiny round pellets, all of the same size, which he arranged on the table in neat rows. The crust he pared down into crumbs, and with them made little pyramids. Eventually he would get tired of them and order the lackeys to brush down the table. Then he started all over again.

We know that Big Brother exists only as “a face on the hoardings, a voice on the telescreen,” but when Raimbaut of Roussillon (who eventually inherits the knight's armor), “squire, son of the late Marquis Gerard!” comes to the camp to enlist “so as to avenge my father who died a heroic death beneath the ramparts of Seville!” and is told by two “scribbling bureaucrats” that the knight who has directed him to them is nonexistent, he replies, “What do you mean, nonexistent? I saw him myself! There he was!” “What did you see? Mere ironwork. … He exists without existing, understand, recruit?” As simple as that? Not quite. But like bureaucrats everywhere, whether in Kafka, Dickens, Parliament or Congress, like the “peace of God, which passeth all understanding,” they see, whenever it is convenient, “sermons in stones, and good in everything.” They believe that “two and two make five,” whenever it comes down in the orders of the day. It's a matter of existence/nonexistence/whatever, in the jargon of today. Calvino, on the other hand, dramatizes the problem of existence/non-existence in the details surrounding his paladin's fairy-tale “existence.” He is a model soldier who remembers everything but who is disliked by the other paladins because he is always right. Perhaps he is “the very model of a modern Major-General,” as Gilbert and Sullivan put it. (“He was impatient. He alone among them all had clearly in mind the order of march, halting places, and the staging post to be reached before nightfall.”) He can't sleep:

What it was like to shut one's eyes, lose consciousness, plunge into emptiness for a few hours and then wake up and find oneself the same as before, linked with the threads of one's life again, Agilulf could not know, and his envy for the faculty of sleep possessed by people who existed, was vague, like something he could not conceive of.

He explains this phenomenon to Raimbaut: “I would feel bewildered if I dozed off for even a second … in fact I'd never come round at all but would be lost forever. So I keep wide awake every second of the day and night.” “It must be awful” says Raimbaut. “No!” “And don't you ever take off your armor?” Agilulf presents his argument: “For me there's no problem. Take off or put on has no meaning for me.” He resents bodies, for they “give him a disagreeable feeling resembling envy, but also a stab of pride, of contemptuous superiority.” He is proud of his differences, for “he could not be taken into pieces or dismembered.” He counts “objects, arranging them in geometric patterns, resolving problems of arithmetic.” Earlier Raimbaut “found him under a pine tree, sitting on the ground, arranging fallen pine cones in a regular design: an isosceles triangle.” He thinks about his condition as he helps to bury the dead:

As Agilulf dragged a corpse along he thought, “Oh corpse, you have what I never had or will have: a carcass. Or rather you have, you are this carcass, that which at times, in moments of despondency, I find myself envying in men who exist.”

Challenged to an archery competition by Bradamante, the alter ego of the narrator, Sister Theodora, and lady warrior of Charlemagne's army (she of the “smooth gold-flecked belly, round rosy hips, long straight girl's legs”), “Slowly Agilulf came closer, took the bow, drew back his cloak, put one foot behind the other and moved arms and bow forward. His movements were not those of muscles and nerves concentrating on a good aim. He was ordering his forces by will power, setting the tip of the arrow at the invisible line of the target; he moved the bow very slightly and no more, and let fly. The arrow was bound to hit the target. Bradamante cried, ‘A fine shot!’ Agilulf did not care.” To Raimbaut, he is “a knight who doesn't exist, that does rather frighten me, I must confess. … Yet I admire him, he's so perfect in all he does, he makes one more confident than if he did exist.”

For Sister Theodora, the narrator, who writes of war in most un-Virgilian fashion (“Of battles as I say, I know nothing”), “The only person who can be said definitely to be on the move is Agilulf, by which I do not mean his horse or armor, but that lonely self-preoccupied, impatient something jogging along on horseback inside the armor.” And when he finally discards his armor, to go to some “far, far better place,” or wherever nonexistent beings finally retire to, some pieces are “disposed as if in an attempt at an ordered pyramid, others rolled haphazardly on the ground.” He has a need for order, like the little man who has never walked on a crack in the sidewalk for forty-three years! But in a note left on the hilt of his sword, Agilulf leaves his immaculate white armor, like Cyrano's “white plume,” to Sir Raimbaut of Roussillon. “Beneath was a half squiggle, as of a signature begun and interrupted.”

His epitaph, if it is possible to write an epitaph for someone who never existed, might be what Charlemagne spoke at the hour of battle: “Although Agilulf had a difficult character, he was a fine soldier.” Or as his squire, Gurduloo, who did exist (but who doesn't always know who he is), says when he is looking for him, “My master is a person who doesn't exist, so he can not exist as much in a flask as in a suit of armor.”

What is one to make of all this? The viscount—Jekyll and Hyde—is divided and made whole; the baron elects to live most of his biblical allotment of years between earth and heaven; the knight makes metaphysicians of us all by asking, once more, Thoreau's great question about life, “whether it is of the devil or of God.” Calvino the fabulist uses the fairy tale to teach us about good and evil, about rebellion and freedom, about existence, in and out of season.

Notes

1. It is in the nature of fairy tales and fables that they are entire, like short poems or short short stories, and therefore should be read entirely. I have stressed the characters of the three “ancestors” to the necessary exclusion of other characters, scenes and the overall fairy-tale humor so evident in the master fabulist, Calvino.

2. All references to The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount are from The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount, trans. Archibald Colquhoun (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Harvest, 1977). All references to The Baron in the Trees are from The Baron in the Trees, trans. Archibald Colquhoun (New York: Random House, 1959).