There’s a lot of painful lessons about love in this passage from Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees. I used to want my daughters to read it, but really this is for the boys. The last conversation between Cosimo and Viola is excruciating.

*

This last story shows that the people of Ombrosa, who before had been teeming with gossip about my brother’s love life, now, faced with this passion exploding as it were above their heads, maintained a dignified reserve, as if toward something bigger than themselves. Not that they did not criticize the Marchesa’s conduct; but more for its exterior aspects, such as that breakneck galloping of hers (“Where can she be going, at such a pace?”) and that continual hoisting of furniture on to treetops. There was already an air among them of considering it all just as one of the nobles’ ways, one of their many idiosyncrasies. (“All up trees, nowadays; women, men. What’ll they think of next?”) In fact, times were coming that were to be more tolerant, but also more hypocritical.

Now the Baron would only show himself at rare intervals on the ilexes in the square, and when he did, it was a sign that she had left. For Viola was sometimes away months seeing to her properties scattered all over Europe, though these departures of hers always corresponded to rifts in their relationship when the Marchesa had been offended with Cosimo’s not understanding what she wanted him to understand about love. Not that Viola left in this state of mind: they always managed to make it up before, though there remained the suspicion in him that she had decided to take this particular journey because she was tired of him, and he could not prevent her going; perhaps she was already breaking away from him, perhaps some incident on the journey or a pause for reflection would decide her not to return. So my brother would live in a state of anxiety. He would try to go back to the life he had been used to before meeting her, to hunt and fish, follow the work in the fields, his studies, the gossip in the square, as if he had never done anything else (there persisted in him the stubborn youthful pride of refusing ever to admit himself under anyone else’s influence); and at the same time he would congratulate himself on how much love was giving him, the alacrity, the pride; but on the other hand, he noticed that so many things no longer mattered to him, that without Viola life had no flavor, that his thoughts were always following her. The more he tried, away from the whirlwind of Viola’s presence, to reacquire command of passions and pleasures in a wise economy of mind, the more he felt the void left by her or the fever for her return. In fact, his love was just what Viola wanted it to be, not as he pretended it was; it was always the woman who triumphed, even from a distance, and Cosimo, in spite of himself, ended by enjoying it.

Then all at once the Marchesa would return. The season of love in the trees would resume, but so too would the season of jealousy. Where had Viola been? What had she done? Cosimo longed to know, but at the same time he was afraid of how she might answer his questions. She would reply with hints, and each hint would further arouse his suspicions, and he realized that though she was purposely answering in such a way as to torment him, it could all be quite true nevertheless. In these uncertainties, he would hide his jealousy one minute, and then the next there would be a violent outburst. Viola would never reply the same way — her answers were always different, always unpredictable. One moment Cosimo would think she was more attached to him than ever, and the next he felt he would never be able to arouse her again.

What the Marchesa really did during her travels we at Ombrosa could not know, far as we were from capitals and their gossip. But I happened at that period to make my second journey to Paris in connection with certain contracts in lemons, for many nobles were already taking to commerce, and I was among the first.

One evening, at one of the most brilliant salons in Paris, I met Donna Viola. Her headdress was so splendid and her gown so sumptuous that if I recognized her at once, in fact gave a start at first seeing her, it was because she was a woman who could never be confused with any other. She greeted me with indifference, but soon found a way of taking me aside and asking me, without waiting for any reply between one question and another: “Have you news of your brother? Will you soon be back at Ombrosa? Here, give him this to remember me by,” and taking a silk handkerchief from her bosom she thrust it into my hand. Then she quickly let herself be caught up in the court of admirers who followed her everywhere.

“Do you know the Marchesa?” I was asked quietly by a Parisian friend.

“Only slightly,” I replied, and it was true; when she stayed at Ombrosa Donna Viola, under the influence of Cosimo’s life in the wilds, never bothered to see anything of the local nobility.

“Rarely has such beauty been allied to such a restless spirit,” said my friend. “Gossip has it that in Paris she passes from one lover to another, in such rapid succession that no one can call her his own and consider himself privileged. But every now and again she vanishes for months at a time and they say she retires to a convent, to wallow in penance.”

I could scarcely avoid laughing at finding the Marchesa’s life on the trees of Ombrosa being thought of by the Parisians as periods of penance; but at the same time this gossip disturbed me, and made me foresee times of sorrow for my brother.

To forestall ugly surprises I decided to warn him, and as soon as I returned to Ombrosa went to search him out. He questioned me at length about my journey and the news from France, but I could not tell him anything of politics and literature about which he was not already informed.

Eventually I drew Donna Viola’s handkerchief from my pocket. “At Paris in a salon I met a lady who knows you, and who gave me this for you, with her greetings.”

Quickly he dropped the basket attached to the rope, pulled up the silk handkerchief and brought it to his face as if to inhale its scent. “Ah, you saw her? And how was she? Tell me, how was she?”

“Very beautiful and very brilliant,” I answered slowly. “But they say this scent is inhaled by many nostrils.”

He held the handkerchief against his chest as if fearing it might be torn away from him; then turned to me red in the face. “And have you no sword to thrust those lies down the throat of the person who told you?”

I had to confess that it had not even crossed my mind.

He was silent a moment. Then he shrugged his shoulders. “All lies. I alone know she’s mine alone,” and he ran off on the branches without a word of farewell. I recognized his usual way of refusing to admit anything which would force him out of his own world.

From then on every time I saw him he was sad and impatient, jumping about here and there, without doing anything. If now and again I heard him whistling in competition with the blackbirds, his note was ever more restless and gloomy.

The Marchesa arrived. As always, his jealousy pleased her; she incited it a little, turned it a little into a joke. So back came the beautiful days of love, and my brother was happy.

But now the Marchesa never let pass a chance to accuse Cosimo of having a narrow idea of love.

“What d’you mean? That I’m jealous?”

“You’re right to be jealous. But you try to make jealousy submit to reason.”

“Of course; so I can do more about it.”

“You reason too much. Why should one ever reason about love?”

“To love you all the more. Everything done with reasoning grows in power.”

“You live on trees and have the mentality of a notary with gout.”

“The most arduous deeds must be undertaken in the simplest states of mind.”

He went on mouthing maxims, till she fled; then he ran after her, desperate, tearing his hair.

In those days a British flagship anchored in our port. The Admiral gave a party for the notables of Ombrosa and the officers of other ships that happened to be in port; the Marchesa went; and from that evening Cosimo felt the pangs of jealousy start anew. Two officers of two different ships fell in love with Donna Viola and were seen continually on shore, courting the lady and trying to outdo each other in attentions. One was a flag officer on the British flagship; the other was also a flag officer, but of the Neapolitan fleet. Hiring two sorrels, the two officers would alternate beneath the Marchesa’s balconies, and when they met, the Neapolitan would roll at the Englishman an eye so fiery that it should have burned him on the spot, while between the half-shut lids of the Englishman glinted a glance like the point of a sword.

And Donna Viola? What should she do, the minx, but remain hour by hour at home, leaning over the window sill in her peignoir, as if she were newly widowed and just out of mourning! Cosimo, not having her on the trees with him any more, not hearing her white horse galloping toward him, was going crazy, and ended by settling (even he) before that window sill, to keep an eye on her and the two flag officers.

He was plotting a way to prepare some dreadful pitfall for his rivals so they would return immediately to their respective ships, when he noticed that Viola showed signs of encouraging both of them. He began hoping that she was only teasing them, and him too. He continued keeping a close watch on her nevertheless, and was ready to intervene the minute she showed any sign of preferring one to the other.

Along, one morning, comes the Englishman. Viola is at the window. They smile at each other. The Marchesa lets fall a note. The officer catches it in the air, reads it, bows, blushes, and spurs away. A rendezvous! The Englishman was the lucky one! Cosimo swore he wouldn’t let him get through that night undisturbed.

At that moment along comes the Neapolitan. Viola throws him a note too. The officer reads it, puts it to his lips and kisses it. So he thought he was the chosen one, did he? What about the other, then? Against which was Cosimo to act? Donna Viola must surely have fixed an appointment with one of them; on the other she must have just played one of her tricks. Or did she want to make fun of them both?

As for the place of the meeting, Cosimo settled his suspicions on a pavilion at the end of the park. This had been done up and furnished by the Marchesa a short time before, and Cosimo was gnawed with jealousy at the thought of the times when she had loaded the treetops with sofas and curtains; now she was concentrating on places he could never enter. “I’ll watch the pavilion,” said Cosimo to himself. “If she’s arranged a meeting with one of the two officers, it can only be there.” And he hid in the foliage of a horse chestnut.

Shortly before dusk, the sound of a galloping horse is heard. It is the Neapolitan. Now I’ll provoke him! thinks Cosimo, takes his catapult and hits him on the neck with a handful of squirrel’s dung. The officer shakes himself, looks around. Cosimo comes out on his branch, and as he appears in the open, sees the English officer dismounting beyond a hedge and tying his horse to a stake. “Then it’s him; perhaps the other was just passing here by chance.” And down comes a load of dung on the Englishman’s nose.

“Who’s there?” says the Englishman, and makes to cross the hedge, but finds himself face to face with his Neapolitan colleague, who has also dismounted and is also saying, “Who’s there?”

“I beg your pardon, sir,” says the Englishman, “but I must ask you to leave here at once!”

“I’m here with full right,” exclaims the Neapolitan. “It’s I who must ask your Lordship to leave!”

“No right can be more than mine,” replies the Englishman. “I’m sorry, but I cannot allow you to stay.”

“‘Tis a question of honor,” says the other, “and I rely upon that of my House: Salvatore di San Cataldo di Santa Maria Capua Vetere, of the Navy of His Majesty of the Two Sicilies!”

“Sir Osbert Castlefight, third of the name!” the Englishman introduced himself. ” ‘Tis on my honor that I demand that you vacate the field.”

“Not before I have put you out with this trusty sword!” and he draws it from its sheath.

“Sir, you wish to fight!” exclaims Sir Osbert, and puts himself on guard.

They fight.

“This is where I wanted you, colleague, and for many a day,” and the Neapolitan makes a thrust.

And Sir Osbert, parrying: “I’ve been following your movements for some time, sir, and was awaiting this!”

Equals in skill, the two officers threw themselves into assaults and feints. They were at the height of their fury when: “Stop in heaven’s name!” exclaimed a voice. On the steps of the pavilion had appeared Donna Viola.

“Marchesa, this man… ” said the two officers in one voice, lowering their swords and pointing to each other.

And Donna Viola: “My dear friends! Sheath your blades, I beg you! Is this the way to alarm a lady? I had chosen this pavilion as the most silent and most secret place in my park, and scarcely have I dozed off than I hear the clash of arms!”

“But, Milady,” said the Englishman, “was I not invited by you?”

“You were here awaiting me, Signora…” said the Neapolitan.

From Donna Viola’s throat came a laugh light as a flutter of wings. “Ah, yes, yes, I had invited you… or you. Oh, I get so confused. Well, sirs, what are you waiting for? Do come in, please…”

“Milady, I thought the invitation was for me alone. I am disappointed. May I offer my respects and request leave to withdraw.”

“I too wish to say the same, Signora, and bid farewell.”

The Marchesa laughed. “My good friends… My good friends… I’m so scatterbrained… I thought I had invited Sir Osbert at one time… and Don Salvatore at another… No, no, excuse me; at the same time, but in different places… Oh, no, how can that be?… Well, anyway, seeing that you are both here, why can we not sit down and hold civilized converse?”

The two lieutenants looked at each other, then looked at her. “Are we to understand, Marchesa, that you are pretending to accept our attentions merely in order to make fun of both of us?”

“Why so, my good friends? On the contrary, quite on the contrary… Your assiduity can scarcely leave me indifferent. . . You are both such dear people… And that is my worry… If I choose the elegance of Sir Osbert I shall lose you, my passionate Don Salvatore… And by choosing the fire of the officer of San Cataldo, I would have to renounce you, sir. Oh, why ever… why ever…”

“Why ever what?” asked the two officers in one voice.

And Donna Viola, lowering her eyes: “Why ever could it not be both at the same time?”

From the horse chestnut above came a crash of branches. It was Cosimo, who could retain his calm no longer.

But the two flag officers were too confused to hear this. They both stepped back a pace. “That never, Madame.”

The Marchesa raised her lovely face with its most radiant smile. “Well, then, I shall give myself to the first of you who, to please me in all things, declares himself ready to share me with his rival!”

“Signora.”

“Milady.”

The two officers bowed coldly to Viola, then turned to face each other, held out their hands and shook.

“I was sure you were a gentleman, Signor Cataldo,” said the Englishman.

“I never doubted your honor, Sir Osberto,” exclaimed the Neapolitan.

They turned their backs on the Marchesa and marched off toward their horses.

“My friends… Why so offended… Silly boys… ” Viola was saying, but the two officers already had their feet in the Stirrups.

It was the moment for which Cosimo had long been waiting, enjoying in anticipation the revenge he had prepared, when the two would get a most painful surprise. Now, however, seeing their virile attitude in bidding farewell to the immodest Marchesa, Cosimo suddenly felt reconciled with them. Too late! Now it was too late to remove his appalling devices for revenge! A second’s thought, and Cosimo had generously decided to warn them. “Stop!” he called from the tree. “Don’t mount!”

The two officers raised startled heads. “What are you doing up there? What d’you mean by this? Come down!”

Behind them was heard Donna Viola’s laugh, one of her bird’s wing laughs.

The two were looking perplexed. So there was a third, who seemed to have been present at the whole scene! The situation was becoming more complicated than ever.

“Anyway,” said they to each other, “we two remain in complete agreement!”

“On our honor!”

“Neither of us two will agree to share Milady with anyone else!”

“Never on our lives!”

“But if one of us two should decide to accept…”

“In that case, still agreed! We would accept together!” “That’s a pact! And now, away!”

At this new dialogue, Cosimo began gnawing his thumb with rage for having tried to prevent his own revenge. “Let it be, then!” he said to himself, and drew back into the leaves. The two officers leaped into their saddles. Now they’ll yell, thought Cosimo, and stopped his ears. Double shrieks rang out. The two flag officers had sat on two porcupines hidden under the trappings of their saddles.

“Betrayed!” They flew to the ground in an explosion of screams and hops and writhing and they looked as if they were going to put the blame on the Marchesa.

But Donna Viola, more indignant than they, shouted up: “You malicious, monstrous monkey!” She rushed toward the trunk of the horse chestnut and rapidly vanished from the sight of the two officers, who thought she had been swallowed up by the earth.

Up in the branches Viola was facing Cosimo. They looked at each other with flaming eyes, and their rage gave them a kind of purity, like archangels. They seemed just about to tear each other to pieces, when, “Oh, my darling!” exclaimed the woman. “That’s, yes, that’s how I like you. Jealous, implacable!… ” Already she had flung an arm around his neck and they were embracing and now Cosimo could remember nothing more.

She was in his arms, then took her face from his, as if some thought had struck her, and said: “But that pair, too, how much they love me. Did you see? They’re even ready to share me between them… ”

Cosimo felt for a second like flinging himself at her, then he pulled himself up on the branches, tore the leaves with his teeth, and banged his head against the trunk. “They’re vermin… ”

Viola had moved away, her face immobile like a statue’s. “You’ve a lot to learn from them!” She turned and climbed quickly down the tree.

The two suitors had quite forgotten their past differences, and were now absorbed in patiently helping to pick out each other’s quills. They were interrupted by Donna Viola. “Quick! Into my carriage!” They all vanished behind the pavilion. The carriage moved off. Cosimo was left on the horse chestnut, hiding his face in his hands.

Now began a time of torment for Cosimo, and also for the two ex-rivals. And for Viola, could it be called a time of joy? I believe the Marchesa tormented others because she wanted to torment herself. The two noble officers were always underfoot, inseparable, under her windows, or in her salon, or on long bouts in the local tavern. She would flatter them both and ask them to compete in constant new proofs of love, which every time they declared themselves ready to do; and by now they were even ready to halve her with each other, not only that, but to share her with anyone else, and once they had begun rolling down the slippery slopes of concessions, they could no longer halt, each urged by the wish to succeed thus in moving her and obtaining the fulfillment of her promises, and each at the same time tied in a pact of solidarity with his rival, and devoured too by jealousy and by the hope of supplanting him, and, I fear, by the pull of the obscure degradation into which they felt themselves sinking.

At every new concession torn from the naval officers, Viola would mount her horse and go to tell Cosimo about it.

“Say, d’you know the Englishman is ready to do this and this… And the Neapolitan too…” She would shout as soon as she saw him gloomily perching on a tree.

Cosimo would not reply.

“This is absolute love,” she would insist.

“Absolute shit, that’s what you all are!” screamed Cosimo, and vanished.

This was now their cruel way of loving each other, and from it they Could find no way out.

The English flagship was about to weigh anchor. “You’re staying, aren’t you?” said Viola to Sir Osbert. Sir Osbert did not report on board and was declared a deserter. In a spirit of solidarity and emulation, Don Salvatore did the same.

“They’ve deserted!” announced Viola triumphantly to Cosimo. “For me! And you… ”

“And I?” screamed Cosimo with such a ferocious look that Viola did not dare say another word.

Sir Osbert and Salvatore di San Cataldo, deserters from the navies of their respective Majesties, now spent their days at the tavern, playing dice, pale, restless, trying to encourage each other, while Viola was at the peak of her discontent with herself and with all around her.

She took her horse, went toward the wood. Cosimo was on an oak. She stopped underneath, in a field.

“I’m tired.”

“Of those?”

“Of you all.”

“Ah!”

“They’ve given me the greatest proofs of love…”

Cosimo spat.

“… But that’s not enough for me.”

Cosimo lowered his eyes to meet hers.

And she: “Don’t you think that love should be an absolute dedication, a renunciation of self?”

There she was in the field, lovely as ever, and the coldness just touching her features and the haughtiness of her bearing would have dissolved at a touch, and he would have had her in his arms again… Anything would have been all right for Cosimo to say, anything to show he was ready to give in: “Tell me what you want me to do, I’m ready” — and once more there would have been happiness for him, happiness without a cloud. But he said: “There can be no love if one does not remain oneself with all one’s strength.”

Viola shrugged in irritation, which was also a shrug of weariness. And yet she could have understood him still, as in fact she did understand him then and had on the tip of her tongue the words, “You are as I want you,” and she would be back with him again… She bit her lip. And said: “Be yourself by yourself, then.”

“But being myself then has no sense.” That is what Cosimo wanted to say. Instead of which he said: “If you prefer those vermin… ”

“I will not allow you to despise my friends!” she shouted, still thinking: All that matters to me is you, and it is only for you that I do all I do!”

“So, I’m the only one to be despised.”

“What a way you think!”

“It’s part of me.”

“Then good-by. I leave tonight. You won’t see me again.”

She hurried to the house, packed her bags, and left without even a word to the officers. And she kept her word, never returned to Ombrosa. She went to France, and there a succession of historical events stood in her way when she was longing for nothing but to return. The Revolution broke out, then the war; first the Marchesa took an interest in the new course of events (she was in the entourage of Lafayette), then emigrated to Belgium and from there to England. In the London mists, during the long years of wars against Napoleon, she would dream of the trees of Ombrosa. Then she remarried — an English peer connected with the East India Company — and settled at Calcutta. From her terrace she would look out over the forests, the trees even stranger than those of the gardens of her childhood; every moment it seemed that she could see Cosimo appearing through the leaves. But it would be the shadow of a monkey, or a jaguar.

Sir Osbert Castlefight and Salvatore di San Cataldo remained linked in life and death, and launched into a career of adventure. They were seen in the gambling houses of Venice, in the Faculty of Theology at Gottingen, in Petersburg at the Court of Catherine II. Then trace was lost.

Cosimo remained for a long time wandering aimlessly around the woods, weeping, ragged, refusing food. He would sob out loud, as do newborn babes. The birds which had once fled at the approach of this infallible marksman would now come near him, on the tops of nearby trees or flying over his head, and the sparrow called, the goldfinch trilled, the turtle dove cooed, the thrush whistled, the chaffinch chirped and so did the wren; and from their lairs on high issued the squirrels, the tree mice, the field mice, to add their squeals to the chorus, so that my brother moved amidst this cloud of lamentation.

Then a destructive violence came over him; every tree, beginning from the top, leaf by leaf, he quickly stripped till it was bare as in winter, even if it usually shed no leaves at all. Then climbing back to the peaks he would break off all the smaller branches and twigs till he left nothing but the main wood, would go farther up and with a penknife begin to strip off the bark, and the stricken trees could be seen showing the whites of ghastly wounds.

In all this frenzy of his there was no resentment against Viola, only remorse at having lost her, at not having known how to keep her tied to him, at having wounded her with a pride unjust and stupid. For, he understood now, she had always been faithful to him, and if she took a pair of other men about with her it merely meant that it was Cosimo alone she considered worthy of being her only lover, and all her whims and dissatisfactions were but an insatiable urge for the increase of their love and the refusal to admit it could reach a limit, and it was he, he, he, who had understood nothing of this and had goaded her till he lost her.

For some weeks he kept to the woods, alone as never before; he had not even Ottimo Massimo, for Viola had taken the dog with her. “When my brother showed himself at Ombrosa again, he had changed. Not even I could delude myself any longer; this time Cosimo really had gone mad.