Read Online The Nonexistent Knight by Italo Calvino - Free Book Online Page A

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