The Nonexistent Knight (6 page)

Raimbaut found this so disturbing that it made his head go round, not so much with disgust as doubt at the possibility of that man in front of him being right and the world being nothing but a vast shapeless mass of soup in which all things dissolved and tinged all else with itself. “Help! I don’t want to become soup,” he was about to shout, but Agilulf was standing impassively near him with arms crossed, as if quite remote and untouched by the squalid scene, and Raimbaut felt that he could never understand his own apprehension. The anguish which the sight of the warrior in white armor always made him feel was now counterbalanced by this new anguish caused by Gurduloo. This thought saved his balance and made him calm again.

“Why don’t you make him realise that all
isn’t
soup and put an end to this saraband of his?” he said to Agilulf, managing to speak in a tone without trace of annoyance.

“The only way to cope with him is to give him a clear-cut job to do,” said Agilulf, and to Gurduloo, “You are my squire, by order of Charles King of the Franks and Holy Roman Emperor. From now on you must obey me in all things. And as I am charged by the Superintendency for Inhumation and Compassionate Duties to provide for the burial of those killed in yesterday’s battle, I will provide you with stake and spade and we will proceed to the field to bury the baptized flesh of our brethren whom God now has in glory.”

He also asked Raimbaut to follow him and so take note of this other delicate task of a paladin.

All three walked towards the field; Agilulf with his step which was intended to be loose but was actually like walking on nails, Raimbaut with eyes staring all round, impatient to see again the places he had passed the day before beneath a hail of darts and blows, Gurduloo, with spade and stake on his shoulder, not at all impressed by the solemnity of his duties, singing and whistling.

From a rise could be seen the plain where the crudest fighting had taken place. The soil was covered with corpses. Vultures sat, with talons grappling the shoulders or the faces of the dead, and bent their beaks to peck gutted bellies.

The behavior of these vultures can scarcely be called appealing. Down they swoop as a battle nears its end, when the field is already strewn with dead lying about like Roman soldiers in steel breastplates, which the birds' beaks tap without even scratching. Scarcely has evening fallen when, silently, from opposite camps, crawling on all fours, come the corpse despoilers. The vultures rise and begin wheeling in the sky waiting for them to finish. First light glimmers on a battlefield whitish with naked corpses. Down the vultures come again and begin their great meal. But they have to hurry, as gravediggers are soon coming to deny the birds what they concede to the worms.

Agilulf and Raimbaut with blows of their swords, Gurduloo with his pole, thrashed off the black visitors and made them fly away. Then they set to their sorry task. Each of the three chose a corpse, took it by the feet and dragged it up the hill to a place suitable for scooping a grave.

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. Fine! I can truly call myself privileged, I who can live without it and do all; all, of course, which seems most important to me. Many things I manage to do better than those who exist, since I lack their usual defects of coarseness, carelessness, incoherence, smell. It’s true that someone who exists always has a particular attitude of his own to things, which I never managed to have. But if their secret is merely here, in this bag of guts, then I can do without it. This valley of disintegrating naked corpses disgusts me no more than the flesh of living human beings.”

As Gurduloo dragged a corpse along he thought “Corpsey, your farts stink even more than mine. I don’t know why everyone mourns you so. What’s it you lack? Before you used to move, now your movement is passed on to the worms you nourish. Once you grew nails and hair, now you’ll ooze slime which will make grass in the fields grow higher towards the sun. You will become grass, then milk for cows which will eat the grass, blood of the baby that drinks their milk, and so on. Don’t you see you get more out of life than I do, corpsey?”

As Raimbaut dragged a dead man along he thought, “Oh corpse, I have come rushing here only to be dragged along by the heels like you. What is this frenzy that drives me, this mania for battle and for love, seen from the place where your staring eyes gaze, and your flung-back head that knocks over stones? I think of that, corpse;
you
make me think of that: but does anything change? Nothing. No other days exist but these of ours before the tomb, both for us the living and for you the dead. May it be granted me not to waste them, not to waste anything of what I am, of what I could be: to do deeds helpful to the Frankish cause; to embrace, to be embraced by proud Bradamante. I hope you spent your days no worse, oh corpse. Anyway to you the dice have already shown their numbers. For me they are still swirling in the box. And I love my own anxiety, corpse, not your peace.”

Gurduloo, singing, began arranging to scoop out his corpse’s grave. He stretched it on the ground to take its measurement, marked the edges with his spade, moved it, and began digging at full speed. “Corpsey, maybe you’ll get bored waiting there.” He turned it over on a side, towards the grave, so as to keep it in view as he dug. “Corpsey, you might help with a spadeful or two yourself.” He straightened it up, tried to put in its hand a spade, which fell. “Enough. You’re not capable. I see I’ll have to dig it out myself, then you can fill the grave up.”

The grave was dug, but so messy was Gurduloo’s work that it turned out a strange irregular concave shape. Then Gurduloo decided to try it out. In he got and lay down. “Oh, how cosy it is, how comfy! What soft earth! How nice to turn over! Corpsey, do come and feel this lovely grave I’ve dug for you!” Then he thought a bit. “However, we’ve agreed that you must fill the grave, and it would be best if I stay down there, and you shovel the earth on me!” He waited a little, then, “Come on! Quick! It’s nothing! This is the way!” And from where he was lying down in the grave he began shovelling earth down by raising his spade. And the whole heap of earth fell down on top of him.

Agilulf and Raimbaut heard a muffled cry, whether of alarm or satisfaction at finding himself so well buried they did not know. They were just in time to extract Gurduloo, all covered with earth, before he died of suffocation.

The knight found Gurduloo’s work ill done and Raimbaut’s insufficient. He himself had traced out a whole little cemetery, marking the verges of rectangular graves, parallel to the two sides of an alley.

On their return in the evening they passed a clearing in the woods where carpenters of the Frankish army were cutting tree trunks for war machines and fires.

“Now, Gurduloo, cut wood.”

But Gurduloo swung blows in all directions with his ax and put together kindling twigs and green wood and saplings of maidenhair fern and shrub of arbutus and bits of bark covered with mould.

The knight inspected the carpenters’ ax work, their tools and stacks, and explained to Raimbaut the duties of a paladin for provisioning wood. Raimbaut was not listening. All that time a question had been burning in his throat, and now, when his outing with Agilulf was near its end, he had not put it to him yet. “Sir Agilulf!” he interrupted.

“What d’you want?” asked Agilulf, fingering an ax.

The youth did not know where to begin, did not know how to approach the only subject close to his heart. So, blushing, he said, “D’you know Bradamante?”

At this name, Gurduloo, just coming up clutching one of his composite bundles, gave a start. In the air scattered a flight of twigs, honeysuckle tendrils, juniper bunches, privet branches.

Agilulf was holding a sharp two-edged ax. He brandished it, and buried it in the trunk of an oak tree. The ax passed right through the tree and cut it neatly, but the tree did not move from its trunk, so clean had been the blow.

“What’s the matter, Sir Agilulf?” exclaimed Raimbaut with a start of alarm. “What’s come over you?”

Agilulf with crossed arms was now examining all round the trunk. “D’you see?” he said to the young man. “A clean blow, without the slightest waver. Observe how straight the cut.”

6

THIS tale I have undertaken is even harder to write than I thought. Now it is my duty to describe that greatest of mortal follies, the passion of love, from which my vow, the cloister and my natural shyness have saved me till now. I do not say I have not heard it spoken of. In fact here in the convent, so as to keep on guard against temptations, we sometimes discuss it as best we can with the vague notions we have about it, particularly whenever any of our poor inexperienced girls is made pregnant or raped by some powerful godless man and returns to tell us all that was done to her. So of love as of war I shall give a picture as best I can imagine it. The art of writing tales consists in an ability to draw the rest of life from the nothing one has understood of it, but life begins again at the end of the page when one realises that one knew nothing whatsoever.

Did Bradamante know more? In spite of that Amazon life of hers, a deep disquiet was growing within her. She had taken to the life of chivalry due to her love for all that was strict, exact, severe, conforming to moral rule and—in the management of arms and horses—to exact precision of movement. But what was around her now? Sweating louts who seemed to wage war in a very slack and slovenly manner, and who after duty were always mooning around her like boobies to see which of them she would decide to take back to her tent that night. For although knightly chivalry is a fine thing, knights themselves are crude, accustomed to doing great deeds in a slapdash way, only just keeping within the sancrosanct rules which they have sworn to follow and which, being so firmly fixed, take away any bother of thinking. War anyway is made up of a bit of slaughter and a bit of routine and doesn’t bear being looked into too closely.

Bradamante was no different from them at heart; maybe she had got those ideas about severity and rigor into her head as contrast to her real nature. For instance, if ever there was a slattern in the whole army of France, it was she. To start with, her tent was the untidiest in the whole camp. While poor menfolk had to get down to work they considered womanish, such as washing clothes, mending, sweeping floors, tidying up, she, having been brought up a princess, refused to touch a thing. Had it not been for those old washerwomen and dish washers who always hang round troops—procuresses, the lot of them—her tent would have been worse than a kennel. Anyway, she was never in it. Her day began when she put on her armor and mounted her saddle. In fact, no sooner was she armed than she became another person, gleaming from the tip of her helmet to her greaves, each piece of armor more perfect than the last, with periwinkle tassels all over the robe covering her cuirass, each carefully in place. Her wish to be the most resplendent figure on the battlefield was an expression not so much of feminine vanity as of her constant challenge to the paladins, her superiority over them, her pride. In a warrior, friend or foe, she expected a perfection of turnout and weapon management as a reflection of similar perfection of soul. And if she happened to meet a champion who seemed to respond in some measure to her expectations, then there awoke in her the woman of strong amorous appetites. But there again, so it was said, she gave the lie to her own rigid ideals, for as a lover she was at one and the same time furious and tender. But if a man followed her in utter abandon, lost his self-control, she at once fell out of love or went searching for a temperament more adamantine. Whom could she now find, though? Not one of the Christian or enemy champions had ascendancy over her any more. She knew the weaknesses and fatuity of them all.

She was exercising at archery, in the space before her tent, when Raimbaut, who was wandering anxiously in search of her, saw her for the first time in the face. She was dressed in a short tunic; her bare arms were holding the bow, her face was a little strained with the effort; her hair was tied on the nape of her neck, then spread in a big fantail. But Raimbaut's look did not pause on details. He saw the woman as a whole, her person, her colors, and felt it could only be she, she whom, without having yet seen her, he desperately desired. For him, from now on, she could never be different.

The arrow winged from the bow, and pierced the target in an exact line with the other three which she had already put there. “I challenge you to an archery competition!” said Raimbaut, hurrying towards her.

Thus does a young man always hurry towards his woman. But is he truly urged by love for her, and not by love of himself? Isn’t he looking for a certainty of existing that only a woman can give him? A young man hurries, falls in love, uncertain of himself, happy, desperate, and for him his woman is the person who certainly exists, of which only she can give the proof. But the woman too either exists or not There she is before him, also trembling, and uncertain. How is it the young man does not understand that? What does it matter which of the two is strong and which weak? They are equals. But that the young man does not know, because he does not want to. What he yearns for is a woman who exists, a woman who is definite. She, on the other hand, knows more things, or less, anyway things that are different. What she is in search of is a different way of existing, and together they have a competition in archery. She shouts at him, does not appreciate him. He does not know that is part of her game. Around them are pavilions of the Frankish army, pennants in the wind, rows of horses eating fodder at last. Retainers prepare the paladins’ meals. The latter, waiting for the dinner hour, are grouped around watching Bradamante at archery with the boy. Says Bradamante, “You hit the target all right but it's always by chance!”

“By chance? But I don’t put an arrow wrong!”