It was on 15 June 1767 that Cosimo Piovasco di Rondo, my brother, sat among us for the last time. We were in the dining room of our house at Ombrosa, the windows framing the thick branches of the great holm oak in the park.... Cosimo said: ‘I told you I don’t want any, and I don’t!’ and pushed away his plateful of snails.
Cosimo, the son of the Italian noble man, Baron Arminio Piovasco di Rondo and Baroness Corradina di Rondo (nicknamed Generalessa because her father had commanded the troops of an Empress a long time ago), was growing up in a house in Italy that still lived in the times of Wars of Succession. The parents married because the children will have their shared rights to the throne. And they were three siblings. Cosimo and his younger brother, Biagio, who later tells the story, and their elder sister, Battista, ‘a kind of pseudo-nun’. Although she lives in the isolation forced on her by the father after the ‘affair of the Marchesino della Mella’, son of a family hostile to Arminio’s, she had always been a rebellious and lonely soul. ‘Her gloom only left her in the kitchen,’ remembers Biogio. Once she made some toast, of rats’ livers; and some grasshoppers’ claws, crisp and sectioned and once she cooked a complete porcupine with all its quills. The boys were constantly trying to get round these macabre dishes she cooked.
At that mid-day dinner, when Court of France had arrived as guest, Cosimo pushed his plate of snails away and exclaimed, ‘No, and no again!’ ‘Leave the table’, ordered the Baron. Dressed up in formal clothes and head dress as their father insisted, Cosimo, all of twelve years, climbed up the holm oak tree and settled at the fork of a big branch. ‘When you are tired of being there, you’ll change your ideas,’ the father shouted. ‘I’ll never change my ideas.’ ‘You’ll see as soon as you come down!’ ‘Then I’ll never come down again!’ And Cosimo kept his word.
“The rest of his life, until he dies at the age of 66, Cosimo lives on top of trees. It’s fantasy at its best. But you can read layers of meaning into it,” said Anantha Padmanabhan, adding that even years after reading the novel, the vivid picture of the landscape that Cosimo traverses through, from tree to tree, has stayed fresh. “It is a very subtle but very powerful exhortation on the lines of ‘back to nature’, exemplifying the man-nature relationship in a very beautiful manner.”
The would-be-Baron, who climbed the Oak tree in his elaborate formal décor, powdered hair with a ribbon in the queue, tricorne hat, lace stock and ruffles and green tunic with pointed tail, and a rapier (a slender sword), spends a most eventful arboreal life. “He has umpteen love affairs in the lands he goes to, crossing the borders swinging from branch to branch. Children who resemble him grow up in households as far away from each other as the poles. He catches thieves and gets involved in many adventures. And particularly humorous is the occasion when Napoleon comes visiting him having heard of the strange Baron”, says Anantha Padmanabhan.
The novel has been hailed as a metaphor for freedom. Calvino was born in Cuba before the family came back to settle in Italy. The tyrannous elder sister, named ‘Battista’, maybe read as a reference to the Batista regime in Cuba, invoking a metaphor for dictatorial regimes that breed revolts, like that of Cosimo’s. Although written in a light vein, the hilarious work yields to many a readings on account of its nuances that touch upon romance, ecology, social and cultural systems. Calvino’s early childhood spent in part at San Giovanni Battista where his father had a small farm behind the hills of San Remo, has greatly influenced ‘Baron in the Trees’ as he has acknowledged in his memoir ‘The Road to San Giovanni’.
The novel has many filmic moments and can be brilliantly adapted on screen, thinks Anantha Padmanabhan. But, the eminent filmmaker Padmarajan’s son vows that literature remains his first love and fiction his first choice. “My father was a voracious reader, and built a huge library that I bequeathed. I have inherited his love for books.”
aswathy@expressbuzz.com
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