The Castle Of Crossed Destinies (Vintage classics) by Italo Calvino

Author:Italo Calvino [Calvino, Italo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House UK
Published: 2010-12-23T06:00:00+00:00

The Surviving Warrior’s Tale

Even if the girl is the sort who knows her own mind, her tale is not necessarily easier to follow than another. For the cards conceal more things than they tell, and as soon as a card says more, other hands immediately try to pull it in their direction, to fit it into a different story. One perhaps begins to tell a tale on his own, with cards that seem to belong solely to him, and all of a sudden the conclusion comes in a rush, overlapping that of other stories in the same catastrophic pictures.

Here, for example, is a man who looks exactly like an officer on active service, and he has begun by recognizing himself in the Knight of Clubs; in fact; he has passed the card around for all to see what a handsomely outfitted mount he was riding when he left the barracks that morning and what a well-fitting uniform he was wearing, garnished with shining plates of armor, with a gardenia in the buckle of a greave. His genuine appearance—he seems to say—was that, and if we see him now dented and lamed, it is all due to the frightful adventure he is preparing to narrate.

But if you look carefully at that portrait, you see it also contains elements that correspond to his present appearance: white hair, raving eye, the lance broken, reduced to a stub. Unless it is not a lance stump (especially since he was holding it in his left hand) but a rolled-up sheet of parchment, a message he had been ordered to deliver, perhaps crossing the enemy lines. Let us suppose that he is a staff officer and has been ordered to reach the headquarters of his sovereign or commander, to hand to him a dispatch on which the battle’s outcome depends.

The fighting rages; the knight ends up in the midst of the fray; with their swords the opposing armies hack a path, one into the other’s midst as in a Ten of Swords. There are two recommended ways of fighting in battle: either plunge into the thick of things, pell-mell, or else choose among the enemies one enemy who suits you and give him a good going-over. Our staff officer sees coming toward him a Knight of Swords distinguished from the others by the elegance of his personal and equine equipment: his armor, unlike the others seen around, pieced together with oddments, is complete down to the most trifling detail and is all one color from helmet to greaves: a periwinkle blue, against which the gilded breastplate and shin guards stand out. On his feet he wears slippers of red damask like the horse’s saddlecloth. His face, though masked with sweat and dust, shows fine features. He holds his great sword in his left hand, a detail not to be overlooked: left-handed adversaries are to be feared. But our narrator also holds his club in his left hand, so both are left-handed and both are to be feared, opponents worthy of each other.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.