The Nonexistent Knight Read Online Free Page B

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