The Nonexistent Knight (3 page)

Peasants, shepherds and villagers gathered at the comers of the road. “That’s the king; that is our Charles!” And they bowed to the ground at the sight, not so much of his unfamiliar crown, as of his beard. Then they straightened up at once to spot the warriors. “That’s Roland! No, that’s Oliver!” They never guessed right but it didn’t really matter since the paladins were all there, somewhere, so they could always swear to have seen the one they wanted.

Agilulf trotted with the group, every now and again spurting ahead, then halting and waiting for the others, twisting round to check that the troops were following in compact order, or turning toward the sun as if calculating the time from its height above the horizon. He was impatient. He alone among them all had clearly in mind the order of march, halting places, and the staging post to be reached before nightfall. As for the other paladins, well, an approach march was all right by them. They were approaching anyway; fast or slow, it didn’t matter to them. And with the excuse of the emperor’s age and weariness they were ready to stop for a drink at every tavern. The road seemed lined with tavern signs and tavern maids. Apart from that, they might have been traveling sealed up in a truck.

Charlemagne was still more curious than anyone else about the things he saw around him. “Oh, ducks, ducks!” he exclaimed. A flock of them was moving through the fields beside the road. In the middle of the flock was a man, but no one could make out what the devil he was doing. He was walking in a crouch, hands behind his back, plopping up and down on flat feet like web-toes, with his neck out, repeating, “Quà ... quà ... quà ...” The ducks were taking no notice of him, as if they considered him one of them. And to tell the truth there wasn’t much of a difference between the man and the ducks, because the rags he wore, of earthen color (they seemed mostly bits of sacking) had big greenish-grey areas the same color as feathers, and in addition, there were patches and rents and marks of various colors like the iridescent streakings of those birds.

“Hey you, that’s not the way to greet your emperor!” the paladins cried, always ready to make nuisances of themselves.

The man did not turn, but the ducks, annoyed by the voices, took alarm and all fluttered into flight together. The man waited a moment, watching them rise, beaks outstretched, then splayed out his arms and began skipping. Jumping and skipping and waving splayed arms, with little yelps of laughter and “Quà! ... Quà ...,” full of joy he tried to follow the flock.

There was a pond. The ducks flew onto the surface of the water and swam lightly off with closed wings. On reaching the pond the man flung himself on his belly into the water, raising huge splashes and thrashing his arms about. Then he tried another “Quà! Quà!” which ended in gurgles because he was sinking to the bottom. He reemerged, tried to swim and sank again.

“Is that the duck keeper, that man?” the warriors asked a peasant girl wandering along holding a reed.

“No, I keep the ducks; they’re mine. He has nothing to do with them. He’s Gurduloo,” said the little peasant girl.

“Then what was he doing with your ducks?”

“Oh nothing, every now and again he gets taken that way, and mistakes himself for one of them.”

“Does he think he’s a duck too?”

“He thinks the ducks are him. Gurduloo’s like that, a bit careless ...”

“Where’s he gone to now, though?”

The paladins neared the pond. There was no sign of Gurduloo. The ducks, having crossed the piece of water, now began waddling along the grass on their webbed feet. Around the pool, from among the reeds, rose a croak of frogs. Suddenly the man pulled his head out of the water as if he had, at that moment, remembered he had to breathe. He looked around in a daze, not understanding this fringe of reeds reflected in the water a few inches from his nose. On each reed leaf was sitting a small smooth green creature, looking at him and calling as loud as it could, “Gra! Gra! Gra!”

“Gra! Gra! Gra!” Gurduloo replied, pleased; and at the sound of his voice frogs began to leap from every reed into the water, and from the water onto the bank. Gurduloo yelled, “Gra!” gave a leap out too and reached the bank, soaking wet, muddy from head to foot, crouching like a frog and yelling such a loud “Gra!” that with a crash of bamboo and reeds he fell back into the pond.

“Won’t he drown?” the paladins asked a fisherman.

“Oh, sometimes Omoboo forgets himself, loses himself ... No, not drown ... The trouble is he’s apt to end in our net with the fishes ... One day it came over him when he’d started fishing. He flung the nets in the water, saw a fish just about to enter, and got so much into the part of the fish that he plunged into the water, and then into the net himself. You know what Omoboo's like ...”

“Omoboo? Isn’t his name Gurduloo?”

“Omoboo, we call him.”

“But that girl there ...”

“She doesn’t come from our parts, maybe she calls him that.”

“From what part is he?”

“Oh, he goes around ...”

The cavalcade was now skirting an orchard of pear trees. The fruit was ripe. The warriors pierced the pears with their lances, making them vanish into the beaks of their helmets, then spitting out the cores. And there in the middle of a pear tree who should they see but Gurduloo—Omoboo! He was sitting with raised arms twisted about like branches, and in his hands and mouth and on his head and in the rents of his clothes were pears.

“Look, he’s being a pear!” chortled Charlemagne.

“I’ll give him a shake!” said Roland, and swung him a hit.

Gurduloo let all the pears fall down. They rolled down the slope, and on seeing them roll he could not prevent himself from rolling around and around, down the field like a pear. And so he vanished from sight.

“Forgive him, Majesty!” said an old gardener. “Martinzoo sometimes doesn’t understand that his place is not amid trees or inanimate fruits, but among Your Majesty’s devoted subjects!”

“What on earth got into this madman you call Martinzoo?” asked the emperor graciously. “He doesn’t seem to me to know what’s going through that pate of his.”

“Who are we to understand, Majesty?” The old peasant was speaking with the modest wisdom of one who had seen a good deal of life. “Maybe mad’s not quite the right word for him. He’s just a person who exists and doesn’t realise he exists.”

“That’s a good one! We have a subject who exists but doesn't realise he does and there’s my paladin who thinks he exists but actually doesn’t They’d make a great pair, let me tell you!”

Charlemagne was tired now from the saddle. Leaning on his grooms, panting into his beard, puffing, “Poor France,” he dismounted. As soon as the emperor set foot to the ground, the whole army stopped and bivouacked. Cooking pots were put onto the fires.

“Bring me that Gurgur ... What’s his name?” exclaimed the king.

“It varies according to the place he’s in,” said the wise gardener, “and to the Christian or Infidel armies he attaches himself to. He’s Gurduroo or Gudi-Ussuf or Ben-Va-Ussuf or Ben-Stanbul or Pestanzoo or Bertinzoo or Martinbon or Omobon or Omobestia or even the Wild Man of the Valley or Gian Paciasso or Pier Paciugo. Maybe in out-of-the-way parts they give him quite a different name from the others. I’ve also noticed that his name changes from season to season everywhere. I’d say every name flows over him without sticking. Whatever he’s called it’s the same to him. Call him and he thinks you’re calling a goat. Say “cheese’ or ‘torrent’ and he answers ‘Here I am.’ ”

The paladins Sansonet and Dudon came up, dragging Gurduloo along as if he were a sack. They yanked him to his feet before Charlemagne. “Bare your head, beast! Don’t you see you are before your king?”

Gurduloo’s face lit up. It was a broad and flushed face, mingling Frankish and Moorish characteristics: red freckles scattered on olive skin, liquid blue eyes veined with blood above a snub nose, thick lips, fairish curly hair and a shaggy speckled beard, the hair stuck all over with chestnut and corn husks.

He began doubling into bows and talking very quickly. The noblemen around, who had only heard him produce animal sounds till then, were astounded. He spoke very hurriedly, eating his words and getting all entangled, sometimes passing, it seemed, without interruption, from one dialect to another or even one language to another, Christian or Moorish. Amid incomprehensible words and mistakes, the meaning of what he said was more or less, “I touch my nose with the earth. I fall to my feet at your knees. I declare myself an august servant of your most humble majesty. Order and I will obey myself!” He brandished a spoon tied to his belt “And when your majesty says, ‘I order command and desire,’ and do this with your scepter, as I do, with this, d’you see? And when you shout as I shout, ‘I orderrr commanddd and desirrrre!’ you subjects must all obey me or I’ll have you strung up, you first there with that beard and silly old face.”

“Shall I cut off his head at a stroke, sire?” asked Roland, unsheathing his sword.

“I implore grace for him, Majesty,” said the gardener. “It’s just one of his vagaries. When talking to the king he’s confused and can’t remember who is king, he or the person he’s talking to.”

From smoking vats came the smell of food.

“Give him a mess tin of soup!” said Charlemagne, with clemency.

Amidst grimaces, bows and incomprehensible speeches, Gurduloo retired under a tree to eat.

“What on earth’s he doing now?”

He was thrusting his head into the mess tin which he had put on the ground, as if he were trying to get into it. The good gardener went to shake him by a shoulder. “When will you understand, Martinzoo, that it’s you who must eat the soup, and not the soup you! Don’t you remember? You must put it to your mouth with a spoon.”

Gurduloo began lapping up spoonful after spoonful. So eagerly did he brandish the spoon that sometimes he missed his aim. In the tree under which he was sitting there was a cavity just by his head. Gurduloo now began to fling spoonfuls of soup into the hole in the tree.

“That’s not your mouth! It’s the tree’s!”

From the beginning Agilulf had followed with attention, mingled with distress, the movements of the man’s heavy, fleshly body, which seemed to wallow in existing, as naturally as a chick scratches. And he felt slightly faint.

“Agilulf!” exclaimed Charlemagne. “Know what? I assign you that man there as your squire! Eh? Isn't that a good idea?”

The paladins grinned ironically. But Agilulf, who took everything seriously (particularly any expression of the Imperial will), turned to his new squire in order to impart his first orders, only to find Gurduloo, after gulping down the soup, had fallen asleep in the shadow of that tree. He lay stretched out on the grass, snoring with an open mouth, his chest and belly rising and falling like a blacksmith’s bellows. The dirty mess tin had rolled near one of his big bare feet In the grass a hedgehog, attracted maybe by the smell, went up to the mess tin and began licking the last traces of soup. In doing this its prickles touched up against the bare sole of Gurduloo’s foot, and the more it licked up the last trickles of soup the more its prickles pressed on the bare foot Eventually the vagabond opened his eyes and rolled them around, without realising where that sensation of pain which had awoken him came from. He saw his bare foot standing upright in the grass like an Indian fig tree, and the prickle against his foot.

“Oh foot!” Gurduloo began to say. “Hey foot, I’m talking to you! What are you doing there like an idiot? Don’t you see that creature is tickling you? Oh f-o-o-o-t! Oh fool! Why don’t you pull yourself away? Don’t you feel it hurting? Fool of a foot! You need do so little, you need only move a tiny inch! Look how you're letting yourself be massacred! Foot! Just listen! Can’t you see you’re being taken advantage of? Pull over there, foot! Watch carefully now. See what I’m doing; I’ll show you ...” So saying he bent his knee, pulled his foot toward him and moved it away from the hedgehog. “There, it was quite easy, as soon as I showed you what to do you did it by yourself. Silly foot, why did you stay there so long and get yourself pricked?”

He rubbed the aching part, jumped up, began whistling, broke into a run, flung himself into the bushes, let out a fart, another, then vanished.

Agilulf began moving to try and find him, but where had he gone? The valley was striped with thickly sown fields of oats, clumps of arbutus, privet; and swept by breezes laden with pollen and butterflies, and above, by clusters of white clouds. Gurduloo had vanished in it all, down that slope where the sun was drawing mobile patterns of shadow and light He might be in any part of this or that slope.

From somewhere came a faint discordant song:
“De stir les ponts de Bayonne
...”

The white armor of tall Agilulf stood high on the edge of the valley, its arms crossed on its chest.

“Well, when does the new squire begin his duties?” asked his colleagues.

Mechanically, in a voice without intonation, came Agilulf’s declaration. “A verbal statement by the emperor has the validity of an immediate decree.”

“De sur les ponts de Bayonne
...” came the voice still further away.

4

WORLD conditions were still confused in the era when this took place. It was not rare then to find names and thoughts and forms and institutions that corresponded to nothing in existence. But at the same time the world was polluted with objects and capacities and persons who lacked any name or distinguishing mark. It was a period when the will and determination to exist, to leave a trace, to rub up against all that existed, was not wholly used since there were many who did nothing about it—from poverty or ignorance or simply from finding things bearable as they were—and so a certain amount was lost into the void. Maybe too there came a point when this diluted will and consciousness of self was condensed, turned to sediment, as imperceptible watery particles condense into banks of clouds; and then maybe this sediment merged, by chance or instinct, with some name or family or military rank or duties or regulations, above all in an empty armor, for in times when armor was necessary even for a man who existed, how much more was it for one who didn’t. Thus it was that Agilulf of the Guildivern had begun to act and acquire glory for himself.