by Ian Caldwell
Forgive me, Holy Father, for I have killed two men. It was my own hand that struck the blow, but the design was never mine. It was Master Francesco Colonna who bid me do it. Judge us both with mercy.
The letter claimed that the murders were part of an intricate plan, one that no man as simple as the author himself could have contrived. The two victims were men Colonna suspected of treachery, and at his direction they were sent on an unusual mission. They were given a letter to deliver to a church outside the walls of Rome, where a third man would be waiting to receive it. Under pain of death the two men were not to look at the letter, not to lose it, not to so much as touch it with an ungloved hand. So began the story of the simple Roman mason who slew the messengers at San Lorenzo.
The discovery my father and I made that summer came to be known, in academic circles, as the Belladonna Document. My father felt sure it would revive his reputation in the scholarly community, and within six months he published a small book under that title suggesting the letter’s connection to the Hypnerotomachia. The book was dedicated to me. In it, he argued that the Francesco Colonna who’d written the Hypnerotomachia was not the Venetian monk, as most professors believed, but instead the Roman aristocrat mentioned in our letter. To bolster this claim, he added an appendix including all known records on the lives of both the Venetian monk, whom he called the Pretender, and of the Roman Colonna, so that readers could compare. The appendix alone made believers of both Paul and me.
The details are straightforward. The monastery in Venice where the false Francesco lived was an unthinkable place for a philosopher-author; most of the time, to hear my father tell it, the place was an unholy cocktail of loud music, hard drinking, and lurid sexual escapades. When Pope Clement VII attempted to force restraint on the brethren there, they replied that they would sooner become Lutherans than accept discipline. Even in such an environment, the Pretender’s biography reads like a rap sheet. In 1477 he was exiled from the monastery for unnamed violations. Four years later he returned, only to commit a separate crime, for which he was almost defrocked. In 1516 he pled no contest to rape and was banished for life. Undeterred, he returned again, and was exiled again, this time for a scandal involving a jeweler. Mercifully, death took him in 1527. The Venetian Francesco Colonna—accused thief, confessed rapist, lifelong Dominican—was ninety-three years old.
The Roman Francesco, on the other hand, appeared to be a model of every scholarly virtue. According to my father, he was the son of a powerful noble family, who raised him in the best of European society and had him educated by the highest-minded Renaissance intellectuals. Francesco’s uncle, Prospero Colonna, was not only a revered patron of the arts and a cardinal of the Church, but such a renowned humanist that he may have been the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Prospero in The Tempest. These were the sorts of connections, my father argued, that made it possible for a single man to write a book as complex as the Hypnerotomachia—and they were certainly the connections that would’ve ensured its publication by a leading press.
What sealed the matter entirely, to me at least, was the fact that this blue-blooded Francesco had been a member of the Roman Academy, a fraternity of men committed to the pagan ideals of the old Roman Republic, the ideals expressed with such admiration in the Hypnerotomachia. That would explain why Colonna identified himself in the secret acrostic as “Fra”: the title Brother, which other scholars took as a sign that Colonna was a monk, was also a common greeting at the Academy.
Yet my father’s argument, which seemed so lucid to Paul and me, clouded the academic waters. My father hardly lived long enough to brave the teapot tempest he stirred up in the little world of Hypnerotomachia scholarship, but it nearly undid him. Almost all of my father’s colleagues rejected the work; Vincent Taft went out of his way to defame it. By then, the arguments in favor of the Venetian Colonna had become so entrenched that, when my father failed to address one or two of them in his brief appendix, the whole work was discredited. The idea of connecting two doubtful murders with one of the world’s most valuable books, Taft wrote, was “nothing but a sad and sensational bit of self-promotion.”
My father, of course, was devastated. To him it was the substance of his career they were rejecting, the fruit of the quest he’d been on since his days with McBee. He never understood the violence of the reaction against his discovery. The only enduring fan of The Belladonna Document, as far as I know, was Paul. He read the book so many times that even the dedication stuck in his memory. When he arrived at Princeton and found a Tom Corelli Sullivan listed in the freshman face-book, he recognized my middle name immediately and decided to track me down.
If he expected to meet a younger version of my father, he must have been disappointed. The freshman Paul found, who walked with a faint limp and seemed embarrassed by his middle name, had done the unthinkable: he had renounced the Hypnerotomachia and become the prodigal son of a family that made a religion out of reading. The shockwaves of the accident were still ringing through my life, but the truth is that even before my father died, I was losing my faith in books. I’d begun to realize that there was an unspoken prejudice among book-learned people, a secret conviction they all seemed to share, that life as we know it is an imperfect vision of reality, and that only art, like a pair of reading glasses, can correct it. The scholars and intellectuals I met at our dinner table always seemed to hold a grudge against the world. They could never quite reconcile themselves to the idea that our lives don’t follow the dramatic arc that a good author gives to a great literary character. Only in accidents of pure perfection does the world actually become a stage. And that, they seemed to think, was a shame.
No one ever said it that way, exactly, but when my father’s friends and colleagues—all but Vincent Taft—came to see me in the hospital, looking sheepish about the reviews they’d written of his book, mumbling little eulogies for him they’d composed in the waiting room, I began to see the writing on the wall. I noticed it the moment they walked to my bedside: every one of them brought handfuls of books.
“This helped me when my father died,” said the chairman of the history department, placing Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain on the food tray beside me.
“I find great comfort in Auden,” said the young graduate student writing her dissertation under my father. She left a paperback edition with one corner clipped off to remove the price.
“What you need is a pick-me-up,” another man whispered when the others left the room. “Not this bloodless stuff.”
I didn’t even recognize him. He left a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo, which I’d already read, and I could only wonder if he really thought revenge was the best emotion to encourage just then.
None of these people, I realized, could cope with reality any better than I could. My father’s death had a nasty finality to it, and it made a mockery of the laws they lived by: that every fact can be reinterpreted, that every ending can be changed. Dickens had rewritten Great Expectations so that Pip could be happy. No one could rewrite this.
When I met Paul, then, I was wary. I’d spent the last two years of high school forcing certain changes on myself: whenever I felt the pain in my leg, I would continue to walk; whenever instinct told me to pass by a door without pausing—the door to the gym, or to a new friend’s car, or to the house of a girl I was beginning to like—I would make myself stop and knock, and sometimes let myself in. But here, in Paul, I saw what I might have been.
He was small and pale beneath his untended hair, and more of a boy than a man. One of his shoelaces was untied, and he carried a book in his hand as if it were a security blanket. The first time he introduced himself, he quoted the Hypnerotomachia. I felt I already knew him better than I wanted to. He’d tracked me down in a coffee shop near campus just as the sun began to set in early September. My first instinct was to ignore him that evening, and avoid him ever after.
What changed all that was something he said just before I begged off for the night.
/> “Somehow,” he said, “I feel like he’s my father too.”
I hadn’t told him about the accident yet, but it was exactly the wrong thing to say.
“You don’t know anything about him.”
“I do. I have copies of all of his work.”
“Listen to me—”
“I even found his dissertation. . . .”
“He’s not a book. You can’t just read him.”
But it was as if he couldn’t hear.
“The Rome of Raphael, 1974. Ficino and the Rebirth of Plato, 1979. The Men of Santa Croce, 1985.”
He began counting them on his fingers.
“ ‘The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and the Hieroglyphics of Horapollo.’ In Renaissance Quarterly, June of ’87. ‘Leonardo’s Doctor.’ In Journal of Medical History, 1989.”
Chronological, without a hitch.
“ ‘The Breeches-Maker.’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1991.”
“You forgot the BARS article,” I said.
The Bulletin of the American Renaissance Society.
“That was in ’92.”
“It was in ’91.”
He frowned. “’Ninety-two was the first year they accepted articles from non-members. It was sophomore year of high school. Remember? That fall.”
There was silence. For a second he seemed worried. Not that he was wrong, but that I was.
“Maybe he wrote it in ’91,” Paul said. “They only published it in ’92. Is that what you meant?”
I nodded.
“Then it was ’91. You were right.” He pulled out the book he’d been carrying with him. “And then there’s this.”
A first edition of The Belladonna Document.
He weighed it deferentially. “His best work so far. You were there when he found it? The letter about Colonna?”
“Yes.”
“I wish I could’ve seen it. It must’ve been amazing.”
I looked over his shoulder, out a window on the far wall. The leaves were red. It had started to rain.
“It was,” I said.
Paul shook his head. “You’re very lucky.”
His fingers fanned the pages of my father’s book, gently.
“He died two years ago,” I said. “We were in a car accident.”
“What?”
“He died right after he wrote that.”
The window behind him was fogging up at the corners. A man walked by with a newspaper over his head, trying to keep dry.
“Someone hit you?”
“No. My father lost control of the car.”
Paul rubbed his finger against the image on the book’s dust jacket. A single emblem, a dolphin with an anchor. The symbol of the Aldine Press in Venice.
“I didn’t know . . .” he said.
“It’s okay.”
The silence at that moment was the longest there has ever been between us.
“My father died when I was four,” he said. “He had a heart attack.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Thanks.”
“What does your mother do?” I asked.
He found a crease in the dust jacket and began to smooth it out between his fingers. “She died a year later.”
I tried to tell him something, but all the words I was used to hearing felt wrong in my mouth.
Paul tried to smile. “I’m like Oliver,” he continued, forming a bowl with his hands. “Please, sir, I want some more.”
I scraped out a laugh, unsure if he wanted one.
“I just wanted you to know what I meant,” he said. “About your dad . . .”
“I understand.”
“I only said it because—”
Umbrellas bobbed past the bottom of the window like horseshoe crabs in the tide. The murmur in the coffee shop was louder now. Paul began talking, trying to mend things. He told me how, after his parents died, he’d been raised at a parochial school that boarded orphans and runaways. How, after spending most of high school in the company of books, he’d come to college determined to make something better of his life. How he was looking for friends who could talk back. Finally he fell quiet, an embarrassed look on his face, sensing that he’d killed the conversation.
“So what dorm do you live in?” I asked him, knowing how he felt.
“Holder. Same as you.”
He pulled out a copy of the freshman face-book and showed me the dog-eared page.
“How long have you been looking for me?” I asked.
“I just found your name.”
I looked out the window. A single red umbrella floated past. It paused at the coffee shop window and seemed to hover there before going on.
I turned back to Paul. “Want another cup?”
“Sure. Thanks.”
And so it began.
What a strange thing, to build a castle in the air. We made a friendship out of nothing, because nothing was the heart of what we shared. After that night it seemed more and more natural, talking to Paul. Before long I even started to feel the way he did about my father: that maybe we shared him too.
“You know what he used to say?” I asked him one night in his bedroom when we talked about the accident.
“What?”
“The strong take from the weak, but the smart take from the strong.”
Paul smiled.
“There was an old Princeton basketball coach who used to say that,” I told him. “Freshman year in high school, I tried out for basketball. My dad would pick me up from practice every day, and when I would complain about how much shorter I was than everybody else, he would say, ‘It doesn’t matter how big they are, Tom. Remember: The strong take from the weak, but the smart take from the strong.’ Always the same thing.” I shook my head. “God, I got sick of that.”
“Do you think it’s true?”
“That the smart take from the strong?”
“Yeah.”
I laughed. “You’ve never seen me play basketball.”
“Well, I believe it,” he said. “I definitely do.”
“You’re kidding . . .”
He’d been stuffed in more lockers and browbeaten by more bullies during high school than anyone I’d ever known.
“No. Not at all.” He lifted his hands. “We’re here, aren’t we?”
He placed the faintest emphasis on we.
In the silence, I looked at the three books on his desk. Strunk and White, the Bible, The Belladonna Document. Princeton was a gift to him. He could forget everything else.
Chapter 5
Paul, Gil, and I continue south from Holder into the belly of campus. To the east, the tall, thin windows of Firestone Library streak the snow with fiery light. At dark the building looks like an ancient furnace, stone walls insulating the outside world from the heat and blush of learning. In a dream once, I visited Firestone in the middle of the night and found it full of insects, thousands of bookworms wearing tiny glasses and sleeping caps, magically feeding themselves by reading stories. They wriggled from page to page, journeying through the words, and as tensions grew and lovers kissed and villains met their ends, the bookworms’ tails began to glow, until finally the whole library was a church of candles swaying gently from left to right.
“Bill’s waiting for me in there,” Paul says, stopping short.
“You want us to come with you?” Gil asks.
Paul shakes his head. “It’s okay.”
But I hear the catch in his voice.
“I’ll come,” I say.
“I’ll meet you guys back at the room,” Gil says. “You’ll be back in time for Taft’s lecture at nine?”
“Yes,” Paul says. “Of course.”
Gil waves and turns. Paul and I continue down the path toward Firestone.
Once we’re alone, I realize that neither of us knows what to say. Days have passed since our last real conversation. Like brothers who disapprove of each other’s wives, we can’t even manage small talk without tripping over our differences: he thi
nks I gave up on the Hypnerotomachia to be with Katie; I think he’s given up more for the Hypnerotomachia than he knows.
“What does Bill want?” I ask as we approach the main entrance.
“I don’t know. He wouldn’t say.”
“Where are we meeting him?”
“In the Rare Books Room.”
Where Princeton keeps its copy of the Hypnerotomachia.
“I think he found something important.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.” Paul hesitates, as if he’s looking for the right words. “But the book is even more than we thought. I’m sure of it. Bill and I both feel like we’re on the cusp of something big.”
It’s been weeks since I’ve caught a glimpse of Bill Stein. Wallowing in the sixth year of a seemingly endless graduate program, Stein has slowly been assembling a dissertation on the technology of Renaissance printing. A jangling skeleton of a man, he aimed at being a professional librarian until larger ambitions got in his way: tenure, professorships, advancement—all the fixations that come with wanting to serve books, then gradually wanting books to serve you. Every time I see him outside Firestone he looks like an escaped ghost, a purse of bones drawn up too tight, with the pale eyes and strange curled-red hair of a half Jew, half Irishman. He smells of library mold, of the books everyone else has forgotten, and after talking to him I sometimes have nightmares that the University of Chicago will be inhabited by armies of Bill Steins, grad students who bring to their work a robotic drive I’ve never had, whose nickel-colored eyes see right through me.
Paul sees it differently. He says that Bill, impressive as he is, has one intellectual flaw: the absence of a living spark. Stein crawls through the library like a spider in an attic, eating up dead books and spinning them into fine thread. What he makes from them is always mechanical and uninspired, driven by a symmetry he can never change.
“This way?” I ask.
Paul leads me down the corridor. The Rare Books Room stands off in a corner of Firestone, easy to pass without noticing. Inside it, where some of the youngest books are centuries old, the scale of age becomes relative. Upperclassmen in literature seminars are brought here like children on field trips, their pens and pencils confiscated, their dirty fingers monitored. Librarians can be heard scolding tenure-track professors to look without touching. Emeritus faculty come here to feel young again.
