The Nonexistent Knight by Calvino Italo

Author:Calvino, Italo [Calvino, Italo]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Harvest Books
Published: 2012-10-26T06:00:00+00:00

8

BOOK, evening is here, and I have begun to write more rapidly. No sound now rises from the river but the rumble of the cascade; bats fly mutely by the window, a dog bays, voices ring from the haystacks. Maybe this penance of mine has not been so ill chosen by the Mother Abbess. Every now and again I notice my pen beginning to hurry over the paper as if by itself, with my hurrying along after it. 'Tis towards the truth we hurry, my pen and I, the truth which I am constantly expecting to meet deep in a white page, and which I can reach only when my pen strokes have succeeded in burying all the disgust and dissatisfaction and rancor which I am forced here in seclusion to expiate.

Then at a mere scamper of a mouse (the convent attics are full of them), or a sudden gust of wind banging the shutter (always apt to distract me, and I hurry to reopen it), or at the end of some episode in this tale and the start of another, or maybe just at the repetition of a line, my pen is heavy as a cross once again and my race towards truth wavers in its course.

Now I must show the lands crossed by Agilulf and his squire on their journey. I must set it all down on this page, a dusty main road, a river, a bridge, and Agilulf passing on his light-hooved horse, toc-toc toc-toc, for this knight without a body weighs little, and the horse can do many a mile without tiring and its master is quite untirable. Next a heavy gallop passes over the bridge: tututum! It’s Gurduloo clutching the neck of his horse, their two heads so close it’s impossible to tell if the horse is thinking with the squire’s head or the squire with the horse’s. On my paper I trace a straight line with occasional curves, and this is Agilulf's route. This other line all twirls and zigzags is Gurduloo’s. When he sees a butterfly flutter by, Gurduloo at once urges his horse after it, thinking himself astride not the horse but the butterfly, and so wanders off the road and into the fields. Meanwhile Agilulf goes straight ahead, following his course. Every now and again Gurduloo’s route off the road coincides with invisible short cuts (or maybe the horse is following a path of its own choice, with no guidance from its rider) and after many a twist and turn the vagabond finds himself again beside his master on the main road.

Here on the river’s bank I will set a mill. Agilulf stops to ask the way. The miller woman replies courteously and offers wine and bread, which he refuses. He accepts only fodder for the horse. The road is dusty and sun-swept. The good millers are amazed at the knight’s not being thirsty.

When he has just left, up gallops Gurduloo, with the sound of a regiment at full tilt. “Have you seen my master?”

“And who may your master be?”

“A knight .

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