very same lords and soldiers who’ll say let’s clear out, otherwise we’ll still be here for next Easter….”
“I’ve never heard such a stupid idea,” Guasco said, and Trotti agreed with him, tapping his brow with one finger, as if to say the old man was by now weak in the head. “And if there was still a cow alive, we’d have already eaten her, even raw,” Boidi added.
“Not because this man’s my father, but the idea doesn’t seem to me something to be disregarded,” Baudolino said. “Maybe you’ve forgotten it, but there is one cow left, and it’s Gagliaudo’s very own Rosina. The only problem is whether, even if you scrape every corner of the city, you’ll find enough wheat to make the animal burst.”
“The problem is that you’re a dumb animal yourself, you animal!” Gagliaudo leaped to his feet. “Because obviously to understand that she’s full of wheat, the imperials have not only to find her, but also cut her open, and we haven’t slaughtered my Rosina because for me and your mother she’s like the daughter the Lord never granted us, so nobody’s going to touch her: I’d sooner send you to the shambles, after you stay thirty years away from home, while she’s stayed here with us, without any bees in her bonnet.”
Guasco and the others, who until a moment before were thinking this idea worthy of a madman, once Gagliaudo opposed it became instantly convinced that it was the best conceivable plan, and they bent every effort to convince the old man that, when the fate of the city is involved, you sacrifice even your personal cow, and it was useless for him to say he’d rather give up Baudolino, because cutting open Baudolino wouldn’t convince anyone, whereas cutting open the cow might make Barbarossa drop everything.
As for the wheat, they didn’t have any to squander, but by scratching around, a bit here and a bit there, they should collect enough to fatten Rosina, and without being over fussy, because once it was in the stomach, it was hard for anyone to say if it was wheat or chaff, and without bothering to remove the weevils, or roaches, or whatever you call them, for in wartime you found them even in the bread.
“Come now, Baudolino,” Niketas said, “you’re not going to tell me that everyone was seriously considering such a piece of nonsense.”
“Not only did we consider it seriously, but—as you’ll see subsequently —the emperor took it seriously, too.”
In fact, this is how the story went. Towards the third hour of that Holy Saturday all the consuls and the persons of greatest authority in Alessandria were under a shed where a cow was lying, and a more skinny and moribund cow it would be hard to imagine, the hide blotchy, the legs like sticks, the teats seemed ears, the ears seemed nipples, a stunned gaze, even her horns drooping, and the rest more carcass than body, not so much a cow as the ghost of a cow, a Totentanz cow, lovingly tended by Baudolino’s mother, who stroked Rosina’s head, saying that after all this may be for the best, her sufferings would end, and after a hearty meal, and hence she was better off than her master and mistress.
Nearby, sacks of wheat and seeds kept arriving, collected as best anyone could, and Gagliaudo put the food under the muzzle of the poor creature, urging her to eat. But the cow now looked upon the world with moaning detachment, and no longer even recalled what ruminating meant.
So, finally, some hardy souls held her legs fast, others her head, and still others forced her mouth open, and as she was weakly mooing her refusal, they thrust the wheat down her throat, as is done with geese. Then, perhaps out of an instinct for self preservation, or stirred by the memory of better days, the animal began moving with her tongue all that plenty, and a bit through her own will and a bit through the help of the bystanders, she started to swallow.
It was not a joyous meal, and more than once it seemed to all that Rosina was about to give up her animal soul to God, for she ate as if she were giving birth, between one moan and the next. But then the life force took the upper hand, the cow struggled to her four hoofs and went on eating by herself, sticking her muzzle directly into the sacks that were offered her.
In the end what they were all seeing was a quite odd cow, very skinny and melancholy, with her spine protruding and marked as if the bones wanted to escape the hide imprisoning them, while the belly, on the contrary, was opulent, rotund, hydropsical, and taut as if she were heavy with ten calves. “It won’t work, it won’t work.” Boidi shook his head, in the face of this profoundly sad portent. “Even a fool can see that this animal isn’t fat: she’s just a cow hide that’s been stuffed….”
“And even if they do believe she’s fat,” Guasco said, “how could they accept the idea that her master still takes her out to pasture, risking the loss of both his life and his precious animal?”
“My friends,” Baudolino said, “don’t forget that, whoever the men who find her are, they’ll be so hungry that they won’t stop to see if she’s fat here and thin there.”
Baudolino was right. Towards the ninth hour Gagliaudo had barely ventured out the gate, to a meadow half a league from the walls, when from the woods came a band of Bohemians, who were surely out hunting for birds, if there was still a bird alive in those parts. They saw the cow, unable to believe their ravenous eyes, they flung themselves on Gagliaudo.
He promptly held up his hands, and they dragged him and the animal towards the camp. Soon a crowd had gathered around them, warriors with hollow cheeks and bulging eyes, and poor Rosina’s throat was soon slashed by a Como man who seemed to know the art, because he did it with one stroke, and Rosina, in the time it takes to utter an amen, was alive one moment and dead the next. Gagliaudo really did cry, and so the scene appeared convincing to all.
When the animal’s belly was cut open, what was to happen happened:
all that food that had been so hastily forced into her now poured out on the ground as if it were still intact, and to all it seemed indubitable that it was wheat. The amazement was such that it prevailed over appetite, and in any case hunger had not robbed those armed men of an elementary ratiocination: if, in a besieged city, the cows could feast to this degree, it went against every rule, human and divine.
A sergeant, among the bystanders, was able to repress his own instincts, and decided that his commanders should be informed of the wonder. Shortly the news reached the ear of the emperor, with whom Baudolino was lingering, with apparent indolence, while tense and nervously awaiting events.
The carcass of Rosina, a canvas sheet in which the overflowing grain had been gathered, and Gagliaudo in irons were brought before Frederick. Dead and split in two, the cow no longer seemed fat or thin, and the only thing that could be seen was all that stuff inside and outside her belly. A sign that Frederick did not underestimate, as he immediately asked the
peasant: “Who are you? Where are you from? Whose cow is that?”
And Gagliaudo, even without understanding a word, replied in the purest dialect, I don’t know, I wasn’t there, I have nothing to do with this, I was just passing by chance, and this is the first time I’ve ever seen this cow, and if you hadn’t told me yourself, I wouldn’t even have known it’s a cow.
Naturally Frederick did not understand, and he turned to Baudolino; “You know this bestial language, tell me what he’s saying.”
Scene between Baudolino and Gagliaudo (translation): “He says he knows nothing about the cow, that a rich peasant in the city gave her to him to take out to pasture, and that’s all.”
“Ask him how that happened.”
“He says that all cows, after they’ve eaten and before they’ve digested, are full of what they’ve eaten.”
“Tell him not to play dumb, or I’ll tie his neck to that tree! In this town, in this city of bandits, do they always give wheat to their cows?” Gagliaudo: “With lack of hay and lack of straw, we feed the stock on wheat … and arbioni.”
Baudolino: “He says no, only now when there’s a shortage of hay, because of the siege. And anyway it’s not all grain, there are also some dry arbioni.”
“Arbioni?”
“Erbse, pisa, peas.”
“By the devil, I’ll give him to my falcons to peck at, or my dogs to tear limb from limb, what does he mean by saying there’s a shortage of hay but none of wheat and peas?”
“He says that in the city they’ve collected all the cows of the area, and now they can eat beefsteaks till the end of the world, but the cows have eaten all the hay, and that people, if they can eat meat don’t eat bread, or even less dried peas, so a part of the wheat they had stored up they are giving to the cows. He says it’s not like it is here with us, who have everything; there they have to make do the best they can because they are poor citizens under siege.
He says this is why they gave him
