Ten Tributes to Calvino (2 page)

Within an hour, we were confronted with the evidence of love affairs which had ended before the founding of our university. These hearts had been cut with stone tools, not steel blades. Later, when the ache in my arms was unbearable, there was nothing. The tree was older than the art of writing. Gruber and I decided to rest. Far below we watched our colleagues struggle to make equal sense of these ephemeral desires.

“Fossils of passion,” said Gruber, as he sat on a branch and dangled his legs over the void. I guessed that he wanted to make a contribution of his own, but was frustrated in this design by the lack of a girl to love. Also he had no knife. We reclaimed our breath and resumed our climb. Roosting birds, chiefly owls, studied our progress with alarmed amusement. Then I recalled the subject I specialised in and blinked for all their eyes.

“Trees don’t grow like this,” I muttered.

“What do you mean by that?”

“They don’t grow from the base but from the top. There’s no way those carvings could be rising progressively higher.”

It was a mystery. We sweated and gasped as we pushed ourselves to the limits of our endurance. The sun went down, but when I checked my pocket watch I saw it was nearly midnight. That demonstrates how high we already were. It had been night in the town below for many hours. I wondered if we would reach the top by morning. It seemed unlikely. For a start, mornings would arrive much earlier now.

Gruber and myself were the highest pair, as I’ve already mentioned. Immediately beneath us were Pluck and Becker. When we began this exploit, we frequently shouted at them, and they passed on our shout to the next pair, who I believe were Kane and Rowse, and so we kept in rudimentary touch right down to the final two climbers. But now our calls were not acknowledged. We were ascending too fast. Or they had fallen.

The stars did not grow brighter in the celestial dome but the air remained breathable. This was a surprise. It should have thinned out gradually. Gruber leaned close and fixed his lips to my ear. He was trembling.

“The trunk is getting thicker,” he whispered.

“Yes, it is very strange. And the branches are much wider. What can this mean?”

“That the tree is misshapen and ugly?”

There was no other explanation at that particular time. We climbed reluctantly now, and I distracted myself by attempting some difficult mental calculations. The distance between the most recent inscriptions and the earliest could be reckoned in two ways: miles or centuries. Thus the growth of one year could be reduced to a precise length of trunk. An estimate of the height of the tree might also provide its age.

I had a reasonable idea of our altitude, but there was no way of reckoning its percentage of the total. As we climbed, however, it quickly became apparent that the tree was more ancient than the world itself. This paradox was an extra worry. I did not trouble Gruber with it. But he was a geologist and had already arrived at the same conclusion.

“Wood can’t be older than rocks,” he sighed at last.

I nodded. We now regretted embarking on this adventure, which had promised so much when it began, though I can’t specify what. We decided to make camp on one of the wider branches and wait for the others to catch up. I felt sleepy. My eyes closed as I listened to the soft rustling of the leaves. I must have fallen into a deep slumber. I dreamed that a man was screaming. He was above me and his voice receded upwards. He was being dragged into the sky, carried off by owls.

When I awoke, the sun was shining on my face. Gruber had gone. I lingered on my perch until noon. There was nothing to eat. I was completely sober now. I resumed climbing, surprised at how light I felt. I pulled myself up from branch to branch with remarkable ease. Indeed I found it difficult to stop. When I did, I became aware of an insistent tugging on my body, as if an invisible hand was reaching down and trying to pluck me up. With more height its grip became stronger.

Then I knew. Our assumptions about the tree had been all wrong. I now suspected that I was climbing down it rather than up. It had been planted upside-down. At least that was true from the perspective of my world. In fact, the canopy of the tree
was
that world. As I left its gravitational pull behind, I realised it was I who was inverted. The tug of the real ground, somewhere far above, was taking over. If I let go, I would fall into the solid sky. It was a moment of terrible insight.

I resolved to reverse my progress and climb back down again. And that is what I am doing now. Gruber had no knife, but I always carry one. It is almost a sword. Unlike the others, I am a swashbuckler. I have no buckle, that is true, for I wear braces to hold up my trousers, but I am awash with swash. I started carving this tale on the trunk, one sentence every night while I rested. Tomorrow I shall write this one. Yesterday I wrote it. I waited to meet my companions but they did not appear. I am alone.

I began to suspect I had climbed down much further than I had ascended. This made no sense. Then I realised the tree was growing faster than I could climb it and growing the way it ought to: from the top. Thus the canopy was moving away from me and I would never reach it. Never. I had lost my world. There was no time for weeping. I saved my tears and doubled my efforts.

The carved initials at different elevations were now explained by natural growth. Or perhaps they had been an elaborate deception, a much earlier joke played by the students or professors of my university, to encourage those who came after to believe the climb was real and feasible. I laughed bitterly. I still laugh in that style. A cruel joke: one of the finest. That is our tradition. Every time I rest, I lose valuable miles. The world grows away from me far below, becomes an unreachable horizon, a distant planet. Now it is little more than a tiny disc flecked with threadlike clouds. Soon it will become a star, first bright then faint.

Time is running out. Next year, a new joke must be played. I think I know what it might be. Ale will be drunk, a tavern will be tumbled out of. A feat never before attempted will lose its virginity. I imagine a giant saw worked by many hands. To cut down the tallest tree in the world! Its collapse will be spectacular, or so they conclude. But in reality they will be severing the canopy from the trunk which supports it. The ground will wobble and slide off.

It must be next year already. I have just watched the whole world falling past into the sky.

The planet of perfect happiness is called Inclova and it is important that visitors are aware how to enter it safely. From space it appears exactly like a fictional description of itself, a world of beautiful oceans and delightful islands and continents covered in trees heavy with delicious fruit, but when one actually lands on it one soon learns that written accounts are insufficient to convey the true allure of the place. It is infinitely enticing. For many years visitors simply leapt out of their spacecrafts onto the surface and then they were lost. We are more careful now and take suitable precautions.

A visitor who is unaware of the peculiar hazards of perfect happiness will arrive at Inclova eager to be greeted by the smiling people he has seen strolling the forest glades or swimming the warm surf. The moment he leaves his spacecraft and approaches them it will seem to him that they have vanished. The forests will be deserted, the surf empty, and worse than this, he will vanish himself. In a rush of confusion he will be aware only of intermittent flashes around him, then a sense of reeling, of falling into a runaway future, followed by oblivion, a natural death from old age.

This planet is not a deliberate trap. It just so happens that our moods dictate the velocity of time. A painful or boring event slows time, whereas an exciting or joyful event speeds it up. The happiness in Inclova is perfect. Therefore time reaches its maximum velocity. The inhabitants are barely aware they are alive before those lives are finished. To an outside observer, everything proceeds at a normal pace, the lives under scrutiny are full and measured. The moment this observer steps over the threshold of his spacecraft and becomes part of the planet, suffused with its perfect happiness, he loses his grip on his own existence.

The old methods of entering Inclova safely have been discredited. An assistant with a long pole would stand inside the open airlock of the spacecraft and jab the visitor at frequent intervals to keep him in pain and thus slow down his subjective sense of passing time. But if the visitor ventured beyond the pole’s reach he was doomed. Cords tied around his neck and tightened from afar also failed. These cords became snagged on trees or were entangled around the legs of inhabitants visible from inside the spacecraft but invisible from the planet’s surface, so rapidly did they live their lives, one blink from birth to death.

The only reliable technique is to stuff the visitor’s many pockets with letters. Every ten paces he reaches for a letter and reads it. The first is from his father: he has been disinherited. The second is from his employer: he has no job to return to. The third is from his girlfriend: she no longer loves him. And so on. Whether these letters are true or not is irrelevant. The regular reinforcement of bad news will keep him miserable enough to explore Inclova without plummeting instantly into a vertical future. The more pockets he has, and the more to regret, the longer his possible stay on that blissful, deadly world.

There are other perfectly happy planets — once a planet laughed itself off its own axis — but they will not be discussed here.

When President Arbusto came to power, the storerooms full of war materials were unlocked. Campaign maps were unrolled on tables and stuck with pins. The generals went to the dentist and had their teeth fixed. They wanted to bite cigars more effectively.

The President made a speech from the balcony of his palace while the crowd below waved flags. He said:

“We live in a land of freedom and most of us are grateful for that. As for those who aren’t, it doesn’t matter, that’s the privilege of being free, people here can think and say what they please, even if it means disagreeing with everybody else.”

The crowd cheered and drowned out these cheers with louder cheers and so they didn’t really hear much.

President Jorge Arbusto continued:

“But our freedom is precious and there are other lands that hate the idea of freedom or don’t know the meaning of the concept. In those lands, people aren’t allowed to disagree with anything. They can’t say, ‘Hey, I think that freedom is a good idea’ without getting arrested and beaten and forced to change their minds.”

“In this country of ours,” he added, “we don’t force people to change their minds. They don’t have to use their minds at all, if they don’t care to. It’s entirely up to them.”

The generals on a lower balcony applauded.

“It seems to me,” said the President, “that it’s mighty greedy of us to keep all this freedom to ourselves without even trying to share some of it. Freedom is so important that men die if they don’t get enough. In our land there’s a surplus but in other lands there might be little or none at all. It was always my aim to start exporting freedom when I achieved power and that’s what I intend to do.”

He loosened his collar and moistened his dry lips with his tongue. It was thirsty work, being strong.

“Don’t think that if we give some of our freedom to other lands there will be less for us. Freedom isn’t like oil, it can’t run out. It’s more like beef. We export a vast amount of beef each year but the number of cows in our fields is the same as last year. Count them, if you like. If we give away half our cows, it doesn’t stop the remaining cows breeding more cows. That’s freedom for you.”

The crowd surged back and forth in approval. Removing his sunglasses, the President wiped tears from his eyes.

“The problem with exporting freedom is that it can’t be done through the usual commercial channels. In places it has never existed it has to be imposed. The only way to do that is through war. Sure, it will cost a lot, but it’ll be worth it. A free world is a safe world, and a safe world is a better place to do business, so we’ll recoup our losses eventually. We may even make a profit. I’ve seen the figures and they add up. But that’s not the point. Freedom is a gift.”

“Yes, a gift,” he stressed, “and it’s worthwhile giving freedom away even if it makes bad economic sense, which it doesn’t. I think we should begin with a distant land, somewhere on the far side of the ocean, a test run. If it works there, we’ll keep going and try other countries. I’ve got a little nation in mind to start with, ruled by the worst kind of tyrant. We’ll invade first thing tomorrow.”

The war materials had already been dusted off, the helmets, spears, tanks, pikes, muskets, bayonets, barbed wire, hand grenades, axes, machine guns, rapiers, jeeps, and now they were loaded on ships and those ships set sail to the far side of the ocean.