The Baron in the Trees

The Baron in the Trees [excerpt]

[opening paragraphs]

It was on the fifteenth o f June, 1767, that Cosimo Piovasco di Rondo, my brother, sat among us for the last time. And it might have been today, I remember it so clearly. We were in the dining room of our house at Ombrosa, the windows framing the thick branches of the great holm oak in the park. It was midday, the old traditional dinner hour followed by our family, though by then most nobles had taken to the fashion set by the sluggard Court of France, of dining halfway through the afternoon. A breeze was blowing from the sea, I remember, rustling the leaves. Cosimo said: "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.

At the head of the table was the Baron Arminio Piovasco di Rondo, our father, wearing a long wig over his ears in the style of Louis XIV, unfashionable like so much else about him. Between me and my brother was the Abbe Fauchelefleur, the family al­moner and tutor of us two boys. We were facing our mother, the Baroness Corradina di Rondo, nicknamed the Generalessa, and our sister Battista, a kind of stay-at-home-nun. At the other end of the table, opposite our father, sat, dressed in Turkish robes, the Cavalier Avvocato Enea Silvio Carrega, lawyer, administrator and waterworks supervisor of our estates, and our natural uncle, being be illegitimate brother of our father.

A few months before, Cosimo having reached the age of twelve and I of eight, we had been admitted to the parental board; I had benefited by my brother's promotion and been moved up pre­maturely, so that I should not be left to eat alone. "Benefited" is perhaps scarcely the word, for really it meant the end of our carefree life, Cosimo's and mine, and we were homesick for the meals in our little room, alone with the Abbe Fauchelefleur. The Abbe was a dry, wrinkled old man, with a reputation as a Jansenist; and he had in fact escaped from his native land, the Dauphine, to avoid trial by the Inquisition. But the rigor of character for which he was so often praised, the severe mental discipline that he imposed on himself and others, was apt to yield to a deep-rooted urge toward apathy and indolence, as if his long meditations with eyes staring into space had but brought on him a great weariness and boredom, and in every little difficulty now he had come to see a fate not worth opposing. Our meals in the Abbe's company used to begin, after many a prayer, with ordered ritual, silent movements of spoons, and woe to anyone who raised his eyes from his plate or made the slightest sucking noise with the soup; but by the end of the first dish the Abbe was already tired, bored, looking into space and smacking his lips at every sip of wine, as if only the most fleeting and superficial sensations could get through to him; by the main dish we were using our hands, and by the end of the meal were throwing pear cores at each other, while the Abbe every now and again let out one of his languid "... Oooo bien! ... Oooo alors."

Now, at table with the family, up surged the intimate grudges that are such a burden of childhood. Having our father and mother always there in front of us, using knives and forks for the chicken, keeping our backs straight and our elbows down-what a strain it all was!-not to mention the presence of that odious sister of ours, Battista. So began a series of scenes, spiteful ex­changes, punishments, retaliations, until the day when Cosimo refused the snails and decided to separate his fate from curs.

. . . . . . . . . .

[closing paragrahs]

In a little while we watched him, from the windows, climbing up the holm oak. He was dressed up in the most formal clothes and headdress, because our father insisted on his appearing at table this way in spite of his twelve years of age-powdered hair with a ribbon around the queue, three-cornered hat, lace stock and ruffles, green tunic with pointed tails, purple breeches, rapier, and long white leather gaiters halfway up his legs, the only con­cession to a mode of dressing more suitable to our country life. (I, being only eight, was exempted from powdered hair except on gala occasions, and from the rapier, which I should have liked to wear.) So he climbed up the knobby old tree, moving his arms and legs along the branches with the sureness and speed which came to him from years of our practicing together.

I have mentioned that we used to spend hours and hours on the trees, and not for ulterior motives as most boys, who go up only in search of fruit or birds' nests, but for the pleasure of get­ting over difficult parts of the trunks and forks, reaching as high as we could, and finding a good perch on which to pause and look down at the world below, to call and joke at those passing by. So I found it quite natural that Cosimo's first thought, at that unjust attack on him, was to climb up the holm oak, to us a familiar tree spreading its-branches to the height of the dining­ room windows through which he could show his proud offended air to the whole family.

"Vorsicht! Vorsicht! Now he'll fall down, poor little thing!" anxiously exclaimed our mother, who would not have turned a hair at seeing us under cannon fire, but was nevertheless in agony over our games.

Cosimo climbed up to the fork of a big branch, where he could settle comfortably, and sat himself down there, his legs dangling, his arms crossed with hands tucked under his elbows, his head buried in his shoulders, his tri-corn hat tilted over his forehead.

Our father leaned out the window. "When you're tired of being up there, you'll change your mind!" he shouted.

"I'll never change my mind," exclaimed my brother from the branch.

"You'll see as soon as you come down!"

"I'll never come down again!" And he kept his word.