The Nonexistent Knight (7 page)

“If you didn’t put a hundred arrows wrong it would still be by chance!”

“What isn’t by chance then? Who can do anything but by chance?”

On the edge of the field Agilulf was slowly passing. On his white armor hung a long black mantle. He was walking along like one who wants to avoid looking but knows he is being looked at himself, and thinks he should show that he does not care, while on the other hand he does, though in a different way than others may think.

“Sir knight, come and show him how ...” Bradamante’s voice had lost its usual contemptuous tone and her bearing its arrogance. She took two paces towards Agilulf and offered him the bow with an arrow already set in it.

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, he held tight in his iron fist the still quivering bow. Then he let it fall and gathered his mantle around him, holding it close in both fists against his breastplate; and so he moved off. He had nothing to say and had said nothing.

Bradamante set her bow again, raised it with taut arms, shook the ends of her hair on her shoulders. “Who or who else could shoot such a neat bow? Whoever else could be so exact and perfect as he in his every act?” So saying she kicked away the grassy tufts and broke her arrows against palisades. Agilulf was already far off and did not turn. His iridescent crest was bent forward as if he were walking bent with arms tight across his steel chest, his black cloak dragging.

Of the warriors gathered around one or two sat on the grass to enjoy the scene of Bradamante’s frenzy. “Since she’s fallen in love with Agilulf like this the poor girl hasn’t had a moment’s peace...”

“What? What’s that you say?” Raimbaut had caught the phrase, and gripped the arm of the man who had spoken.

“Hey you, little chick, puff your chest out for our little paladiness if you like! Now she only likes armor that’s clean inside and out! Don’t you know she is head over heels in love with Agilulf?”

“But how can that be ... Agilulf ... Bradamante ... How?”

“How? Well, if a girl has had enough of every man who exists, her only remaining desire could be for a man who doesn’t exist at all...”

Raimbaut found it was becoming a kind of natural instinct, in every moment of doubt and discouragement, to feel he wanted to consult the knight in the white armor. He felt this now, but did not know if he was to ask his advice again or face him as a rival.

“Hey, blondie, isn’t he a bit of a lightweight for bed?” her fellow warriors called. Now Bradamante must be in a real decline. As if once upon a time anyone would have dared talk to her in that tone!

“Say,” insisted the cheeky voices, “suppose you strip him, what d’you get?” and they roared with laughter.

Raimbaut felt a double anguish at hearing Bradamante and the knight spoken of so and rage at realising that he did not come into the discussion at all and that no one considered him in the least connected with it.

Bradamante had now armed herself with a whip and was swirling it in the air to disperse bystanders, Raimbaut among them. “Don’t you think I’m woman enough to make any man do whatever I want him to?”

Off they ran shouting, “Uh! Uh! If you’d like us to lend him a bit of something, Bradamá, don’t hesitate to ask!”

Raimbaut, urged on by the others, followed the group of jeering warriors until they dispersed. Now he had no desire to return to Bradamante. Even Agilulf’s company would have made him ill at ease. By chance he found himself walking beside another youth called Torrismund, younger son of the Duke of Cornwall, who was slouching along, staring glumly at the ground and whistling. Raimbaut walked on with this youth, who was almost unknown to him, and feeling a need to express himself began talking. “I’m new here. I don’t know, it’s not like I thought, I can’t catch it, one never seems to get anywhere, it all seems quite incomprehensible.”

Torrismund did not raise his eyes, just interrupted his glum whistling for a moment and said, “It’s all quite foul."

“Well, you know,” answered Raimbaut, “I wouldn’t be so pessimistic, there are moments when I feel full of enthusiasm, even of admiration, as if I understand everything at last, and eventually I say to myself, if I’ve now found the right viewpoint from which to see things, if war in the Frankish army is all like this, then this is really what I dreamt of. But one can never be quite sure of things...”

“What d’you expect to be sure of?” interrupted Torrismund. “Insignia, ranks, titles ... All mere show. Those paladins’ shields with armorial bearings and mottoes are not made of iron; they’re just paper, you can put your finger through them.”

They had reached a well. On the stone verge frogs were leaping and croaking. Torrismund turned towards the camp and pointed at the high pennants above the palisades with a gesture as if wanting to blot it all out.

“But the Imperial army,” objected Raimbaut, his outburst of bitterness suffocated by the other’s frenzy of negation, and trying not to lose his sense of proportion and to find a place again for his own sorrows, “the Imperial army, one must admit, is still fighting for a holy cause and defending Christianity against the Infidel."

“There’s no defense or offense about it, or sense in anything at all,” said Torrismund. “The war will last for centuries, and nobody will win or lose; we’ll all sit here face to face forever. Without one or the other there’d be nothing, and yet both we and they have forgotten by now why we’re fighting ... D’you hear those frogs? What we are all doing lias as much sense and order as their croaks, their leaps from water to bank and from bank to water ...”

“To me it’s not like that,” said Raimbaut, “to me, in fact, everything is too pigeonholed, too regulated ... I see the virtue and value, but it’s all so cold ... But 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, and almost”—he blushed—“I can sympathise with Bradamante ... Agilulf is surely the best knight in our army ...”

“Puah!”

“What d’you mean, puah!”

“He’s a made-up job, worse than the others!”

“What d’you mean, a made-up job? All he does he takes seriously.”

“Nonsense! All tales ... Neither he exists nor the things he does nor what he says, nothing, nothing at all...”

“How, then, with the disadvantage he is at compared to others, can he do in the army the job he does? By his name alone?”

Torrismund stood a moment in silence, then said slowly, “Here the names are false too. If I could I’d blow the lot up. There wouldn’t even be earth on which to rest the feet”

“Is there nothing salvageable, then?”

“Maybe. But not here.”

“Who? Where?”

“The knights of the Holy Grail.”

“And where are they?”

“In the forests of Scotland.”

“Have you seen them?”

“No!”

“Then how d’you know about them?”

“I know.”

They were silent. Only the croak of frogs could be heard. Raimbaut began to feel a fear coming over him that this croaking might drown everything else, drown him too in a green slimy blind pulsation of gills. But he remembered Bradamante, how she had appeared in battle with raised sword, and all his unease was forgotten. He longed for a time to fight and do prodigious deeds before her emerald eyes.

7

EACH nun is given her own penance here in the convent, her own way of gaining eternal salvation. Mine is this of writing tales. And a hard penance it is. Outside is high summer; from the valley rises a murmur of voices and a movement of water. My cell is high up and through its slit of a window I can see a bend of the river with naked peasant youths bathing, and further on, beyond a clump of willows, girls too have taken off their dresses and are going down to bathe. Now one of the youths has swum underwater and surfaced to look at them and they are pointing at him with cries. I might be there too, in gay company, with young folk of my own station, and servants and retainers. But our holy vocation leads us to esteem the permanent above the fleeting joys of the world. Which remains ... and if this book, and all our acts of piety carried out with ashen hearts, are not already ashes too ... even more ashes than the sensual frolics down at the river which tremble with life and propagate like circles in water...

One starts off writing with a certain zest, bHt a time comes when the pen merely grates in dusty ink, and not a drop of life Hows, and life is all outside, outside the window, outside oneself, and it seems that never more can one escape into a page one is writing, open out another world, leap the gap. Maybe it’s better so. Maybe the time when one wrote with delight was neither a miracle nor grace but a sin, of idolatry, of pride. Am I rid of such now? No, writing has not changed me for the better at all. I have merely used up part of my restless, conscienceless youth. What value to me will these discontented pages be? The book, the vow, are worth no more than one is worth oneself. One can never be sure of saving one’s soul by writing. One may go on writing with a soul already lost.

Then do you think I ought to go to the Mother Abbess and beg her to change my task, send me to draw water from the well, thread flax, shell chickpeas? There’d be no point in that. I’ll go on with my scribe’s duties as best I can. My next job is to describe the paladins’ banquet.

Against all Imperial rules of etiquette, Charlemagne settled at table before the proper time, when no one else had reached the board. Down he sat and began to pick at bread or cheese or olives or peppers, everything on the tables in fact. Not only that, but he also used his hands. Absolute power often slackens all controls, generates arbitrary actions, even in the most temperate of sovereigns.

One by one the paladins arrived in their grand gala robes which, between lace and brocade, still showed chain mail cuirasses, the kind with a very wide mesh, worn with dress armor, gleaming like a mirror but splintering at a mere rapier’s blow. First came Roland, who sat down on his uncle the emperor’s right, and then Rinaldo of Montalbano, Astolf, Anjouline of Bayonne, Richard of Normandy and all the others.

At the very end of the table sat Agilulf, still in his stainless battle armor. What had he come to do at table, he who had not and never would have any appetite, nor stomach to fill, nor mouth to bring his fork to, nor palate to sprinkle with Bordeaux wine? Yet he never failed to appear at these banquets, which lasted for hours, though the time would surely have been better employed in operations connected with his duties. But no! He had the right like all the others to a place at the Imperial table, and he occupied it. And he carried out the banquet ceremonial with the same meticulous care that he put into every other ceremonial act of the day.

The courses were the usual ones in a military mess: stuffed turkey roasted on the spit, braised oxen, suckling pig, eels, gold fish. Scarcely had the lackeys offered the platters than the paladins flung themselves on them, rummaged about with their hands and tore the food apart, smearing their cuirasses and squirting sauce everywhere. The confusion was worse than battle—soup tureens overturning, roast chickens flying, and lackeys yanking away platters before a greedy paladin emptied them into his porringer.

At the corner of the table where Agilulf sat, on the other hand, all proceeded cleanly, calmly and orderly. But he who ate nothing needed more attendance by servers than the whole of the rest of the table. First of all—while there was such a confusion of dirty plates everywhere that there was no chance of changing them between courses and each ate as best he could, even on the tablecloth—Agilulf went on asking to have put in front of him fresh crockery and cutlery, plates big and small, porringers, glasses of every size and shape, innumerable forks and spoons and knives that had to be well sharpened. So exigent was he about cleanliness that a shadow on a glass or plate was enough for him to send it back. He served himself a little of everything. Not a single dish did he let pass. For example, he peeled off a
slice
of roast boar, put meat on one plate, sauce on another, smaller, plate, then with a very sharp knife chopped the meat into tiny cubes, which one by one he passed on to yet another plate, where he flavored them with sauce, until they were soaked in it. Those with sauce he then put in a new dish and every now and again called a lackey to take away the last plate and bring him a new one. Thus he busied himself for half hours at a time. Not to mention chickens, pheasants, thrushes—at these he worked for whole hours without ever touching them except with the points of little knives, which he asked for specially and which he very often had changed in order to strip the last little bone of its finest and most recalcitrant shred of flesh. He also had wine served, and continuously poured and repoured it among the many beakers and glasses in front of him; and the goblets in which he mingled one wine with the other he every now and again handed to a lackey to take away and change for a new one. He used a great deal of bread, constantly crushing it into tiny round pellets, all of the same size, which he arranged on the tablecloth 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.

With all this he never lost the thread of talk weaving to and fro across the table, and always intervened in time.

What do paladins talk of at dinner? They boast as usual.

Said Roland, “I must tell you that the battle of Aspramonte was going badly before I challenged King Agolante to a duel and bore off Excalibur. So attached to it was he that when I cut off his right arm at a blow, his fist remained tight around its hilt and I had to use pliers to detach ’em.”