I felt confused, afraid of my own thoughts. Perhaps they were not fitting for a novice, who should only follow the Rule scrupulously and humbly through all the years to come—which is what I subsequently did, without asking myself further questions, while around me the world was sinking deeper and deeper into a storm of blood and madness.
It was the hour of our morning meal. I went to the kitchen, where by now I had become a friend of the cooks, and they gave me some of the best morsels.
SEXT
In which Adso receives the confidences of Salvatore, which cannot be summarized in a few words, but which cause him long and concerned meditation.
As I was eating, I saw Salvatore in one corner, obviously having made his peace with the cook, for he was merrily devouring a mutton pie. He ate as if he had never eaten before in his life, not letting even a crumb fall, and he seemed to be giving thanks to God for this extraordinary event.
He winked at me and said, in that bizarre language of his, that he was eating for all the years when he had fasted. I questioned him. He told me of a very painful childhood in a village where the air was bad, the rains frequent, where the fields rotted while the air was polluted by deathly miasmas. There were floods, or so I understood, season after season, when the fields had no furrows and with a bushel of seed you harvested a sextary, and then the sextary was reduced to nothing. Even the overlords had white faces like the poor, although, Salvatore remarked, the poor died in greater numbers than the gentry did, perhaps (he smiled) because there were more of them. ... A sextary cost fifteen pence, a bushel sixty pence, the preachers announced the end of the world, but Salvatore’s parents and grandparents remembered the same story in the past as well, so they came to the conclusion that the world was always about to end. And after they had eaten all the bird carcasses and all the unclean animals they could find, there was a rumor in the village that somebody was beginning to dig up the dead. Salvatore explained with great dramatic ability, as if he were an actor, how those “homeni malissimi” behaved, the wicked men who scrabbled with their fingers in the earth of the cemeteries the day after somebody’s funeral. “Yum!” he said, and bit into his mutton pie, but I could see on his face the grimace of the desperate man eating the corpse. And then, not content with digging in consecrated ground, some, worse than the others, like highwaymen, crouched in the forest and took travelers by surprise. “Thwack!” Salvatore said, holding his knife to his throat, and “Nyum!” And the worst among the worst accosted boys, offering an egg or an apple, and then devoured them, though, as Salvatore explained to me very gravely, always cooking them first. He told of a man who came to the village selling cooked meat for a few pence, and nobody could understand this great stroke of luck, but then the priest said it was human flesh, and the man was torn to pieces by the infuriated crowd. That same night, however, one man from the village went and dug up the grave of the murdered victim and ate the flesh of the cannibal, whereupon, since he was discovered, the village put him to death, too.
But Salvatore did not tell me only this tale. In broken words, obliging me to recall what little I knew of Provençal and of Italian dialects, he told me the story of his flight from his native village and his roaming about the world. And in his story I recognized many men I had already known or encountered along the road, and I now recognize many more that I have met since, so that after all this time I may even attribute to him adventures and crimes that belonged, to others, before him and after him, and which now, to my tired mind, flatten out to form a single image. This, in fact, is the power of the imagination, which, combining the memory of gold with that of the mountain, can compose the idea of a golden mountain.
Often during our journey I heard William mention “the simple,” a term by which some of his brothers denoted not only the populace but, at the same time, the unlearned. This expression always seemed to me generic, because in the Italian cities I had met men of trade and artisans who were not clerics but were not unlearned, even if their knowledge was revealed through the use of the vernacular. And, for that matter, some of the tyrants who governed the peninsula at that time were ignorant of theological learning, and medical, and of logic, and ignorant of Latin, but they were surely not simple or benighted. So I believe that even my master, when he spoke of the simple, was using a rather simple concept. But unquestionably Salvatore was simple. He came from a rural land that for centuries had been subjected to famine and the arrogance of the feudal lords. He was simple, but he was not a fool. He yearned for a different world, which, when he fled from his family’s house, I gathered, assumed the aspect of the land of Cockaigne, where wheels of cheese and aromatic sausages grow on the trees that ooze honey.
Driven by such a hope, as if refusing to recognize this world as a vale of tears where (as they taught me) even injustice is foreordained by Providence to maintain the balance of things, whose design often eludes us, Salvatore journeyed through various lands, from his native Montferrat toward Liguria, then up through Provence into the lands of the King of France.
Salvatore wandered through the world, begging, pilfering, pretending to be ill, entering the temporary service of some lord, then again taking to the forest or the high road. From the story he told me, I pictured him among those bands of vagrants that in the years that followed I saw more and more often roaming about Europe: false monks, charlatans, swindlers, cheats, tramps and tatterdemalions, lepers and cripples, jugglers, invalid mercenaries, wandering Jews escaped from the infidels with their spirit broken, lunatics, fugitives under banishment, malefactors with an ear cut off, sodomites, and along with them ambulant artisans, weavers, tinkers, chair-menders, knife-grinders, basket-weavers, masons, and also rogues of every stripe, forgers, scoundrels, cardsharps, rascals, bullies, reprobates, recreants, frauds, hooligans, simoniacal and embezzling canons and priests, people who lived on the credulity of others, counterfeiters of bulls and papal seals, peddlers of indulgences, false paralytics who lay at church doors, vagrants fleeing from convents, relic-sellers, pardoners, soothsayers and fortunetellers, necromancers, healers, bogus alms-seekers, fornicators of every sort, corruptors of nuns and maidens by deception and violence, simulators of dropsy, epilepsy, hemorrhoids, gout, and sores, as well as melancholy madness. There were those who put plasters on their bodies to imitate incurable ulcerations, others who filled their mouths with a blood-colored substance to feign accesses of consumption, rascals who pretended to be weak in one of their limbs, carrying unnecessary crutches and imitating the falling sickness, scabies, buboes, swellings, while applying bandages, tincture of saffron, carrying irons on their hands, their heads swathed, slipping into the churches stinking, and suddenly fainting in the squares, spitting saliva and popping their eyes, making the nostrils spurt blood concocted of blackberry juice and vermilion, to wrest food or money from the frightened people who recalled the church fathers’ exhortations to give alms: Share your bread with the hungry, take the homeless to your hearth, we visit Christ, we house Christ, we clothe Christ, because as water purges fire so charity purges our sins.
Long after the events I am narrating, along the course of the Danube I saw many, and still see some, of these charlatans who had their names and their subdivisions in legions, like the devils.
It was like a mire that flowed over the paths of our world, and with them mingled preachers in good faith, heretics in search of new victims, agitators of discord. It was Pope John—always fearing movements of the simple who might preach and practice poverty—who inveighed against the mendicant preachers, for, he said, they attracted the curious by raising banners with painted figures, preaching, and extorting money. Was the simoniacal and corrupt Pope right in considering the mendicant monks preaching poverty the equivalent of bands of outcasts and robbers? In those days, having journeyed a bit in the Italian peninsula, I no longer had firm opinions on the subject: I had heard of the monks of Altopascio, who, when they preached, threatened excommunications and promised indulgences, absolved those who committed robberies an
d fratricides, homicides and perjury, for money; they let it be believed that in their hospital every day up to a hundred Masses were said, for which they collected donations, and they said that with their income they supplied dowries for two hundred poor maidens. And I had heard tales of Brother Paolo Zoppo, who in the forest of Rieti lived as a hermit and boasted of having received directly from the Holy Spirit the revelation that the carnal act was not a sin—so he seduced his victims, whom he called sisters, forcing them to submit to the lash on their naked flesh, making five genuflections on the ground in the form of a cross, before he presented them to God and claimed from them what he called the kiss of peace. But was it true? And what link was there between these hermits who were said to be enlightened and the monks of poor life who roamed the roads of the peninsula really doing penance, disliked by the clergy and the bishops, whose vices and thefts they excoriated?
From Salvatore’s tale, as it became mingled with the things I already knew from my own experience, these distinctions did not emerge clearly: everything looked the same as everything else. At times he seemed to me one of those crippled beggars of Touraine who, as the story goes, took light at the approach of the miraculous corpse of Saint Martin, for they feared the saint would heal them and thus deprive them of their source of income, and the saint mercilessly saved them before they reached the border, punishing their wickedness by restoring to them the use of their limbs. At times, however, the monk’s ferocious face brightened with a sweet glow as he told me how, when living among those bands, he listened to the word of the Franciscan preachers, as outcast as he was, and he understood that the poor and vagabond life he led should be taken, not as a grim necessity, but as a joyous act of dedication, and he joined penitential sects and groups whose names he could not pronounce properly and whose doctrine he defined in highly unlikely terms. I deduced that he had encountered Patarines and Waldensians, and perhaps Catharists, Arnoldists, and Umiliati, and that, roaming about the world, he had passed from one group to another, gradually assuming as a mission his vagrant state, and doing for the Lord what he had done till then for his belly.
But how, and for how long? As far as I could tell, about thirty years before, he had joined a convent of Minorites in Tuscany, and there he had assumed the habit of Saint Francis, without taking orders. There, I believe, he learned that smattering of Latin he spoke, mixing it with the speech of all the places where he had been as a poor homeless wanderer, and of all the vagabond companions he had encountered, from the mercenaries of my lands to the Bogomils of Dalmatia. In the convent he had devoted himself to a life of penance, he said (Penitenziagite, he quoted to me, with eyes shining, and I heard again the expression that had aroused William’s curiosity), but apparently also the monks he was staying with had confused ideas, because, enraged by the canon of the neighboring church, who was accused of thefts and other wickedness, they invaded his house one day and sent him flying down the steps, and the sinner died; then they looted his house. For which the bishop sent his armed guards, the monks were dispersed, and Salvatore roamed at length in northern Italy with a band of Fraticelli, or mendicant Minorites, at this point without any law or discipline.
From there he took refuge in the Toulouse region and a strange adventure befell him, for he was inflamed by hearing the story of the crusaders’ great enterprises. A horde of shepherds and humble folk in great numbers gathered one day to cross the sea and fight against the enemies of the faith. They were called the Pastoureaux, the Shepherds. Actually, they wanted to escape their own wretched land. There were two leaders, who filled their heads with false theories: a priest who had been dismissed from his church because of his conduct, and an apostate monk of the order of Saint Benedict. This pair drove ignorant men so mad that they came running after the two in throngs, even boys of sixteen, against their parents’ wishes, carrying only knapsack and stick, all without money, leaving their fields, to follow the leaders like a flock, and they formed a great crowd. At this point they would no longer heed reason or justice, but only power and their own caprice. Gathered together and finally free, with a dim hope of promised lands, they were as if drunk. They stormed through villages and cities, taking everything, and if one of their number was arrested, they would attack the prison and free him. And they killed all the Jews they came upon here and there and stripped them of their possessions.
“Why the Jews?” I asked Salvatore. He answered, “And why not?” He explained to me that all his life preachers had told him the Jews were the enemies of Christianity and accumulated possessions that had been denied the Christian poor. I asked him, however, whether it was not also true that lords and bishops accumulated possessions through tithes, so that the Shepherds were not fighting their true enemies. He replied that when your true enemies are too strong, you have to choose weaker enemies. I reflected that this is why the simple are so called. Only the powerful always know with great clarity who their true enemies are. The lords did not want the Shepherds to jeopardize their possessions, and it was a great good fortune for them that the Shepherds’ leaders spread the notion that the greatest wealth longed to the Jews.
I asked him who had put into the crowd’s head the idea of attacking the Jews. Salvatore could not remember. I believe that when such crowds collect, lured by a promise and immediately demanding something, there is never any knowing who among them speaks. I recalled that their leaders had been educated in convents and cathedral schools, and they spoke the language of the lords, even if they translated it into terms that the Shepherds could understand. The Shepherds did not know where the Pope was, but they knew where the Jews were. Anyway, they laid siege to a high and massive tower of the King of France, where the frightened Jews had run in a body to take refuge. And the Jews sallying forth below the walls of the tower defended themselves courageously and pitilessly, hurling wood and stones. But the Shepherds set fire to the gate of the tower, tormenting the barricaded Jews with smoke and flames. And the Jews, unable to defeat their attackers, preferring to kill themselves rather than die at the hand of the uncircumcised, asked one of their number, who seemed the most courageous, to put them all to the sword. He consented, and killed almost five hundred of them. Then he came out of the tower with the children of the Jews, and asked the Shepherds to baptize him. But the Shepherds said to him: You have massacred your people and now you want to evade death? And they tore him to pieces; but they spared the children, whom they baptized. Then they headed for Carcassonne, carrying out many bloody robberies along the way. Then the King of France warned them that they had gone too far and ordered that they be resisted in every city they passed through, and he proclaimed that even the Jews should be defended as if they were the King’s men. ...
Why did the King become so considerate of the Jews at that point? Perhaps because he was beginning to realize what the Shepherds might do throughout the kingdom, and he was concerned because their number was increasing too rapidly. Further, he was moved to tenderness for the Jews, both because the Jews were useful to the trade of the kingdom, and because now it was necessary to destroy the Shepherds, and all good Christians had to have a good reason to weep over their crimes. But many Christians did not obey the King, thinking it wrong to defend the Jews, who had always been enemies of the Christian faith. And in many cities the humble people, who had had to pay usury to the Jews, were happy to see the Shepherds punish them for their wealth. Then the King commanded, under pain of death, that no aid be given the Shepherds. He gathered a considerable army and attacked them, and many of them were killed, while others saved themselves by taking flight and seeking refuge in the forests, but there they died of hardship. Soon all were annihilated. The King’s general captured them and hanged them, twenty or thirty at a time, from the highest trees, so the sight of their corpses would serve as an eternal example and no one would dare to disturb the peace of the realm again.
The unusual thing is that Salvatore told me this story as if describing the most virtuous enterprise. And in fact he remained
convinced that the home of so-called Shepherds had aimed to conquer the sepulcher of Christ and free it from the infidels, and it was impossible for me to convince him that this fine conquest had already been achieved, in the days of Peter the Hermit and Saint Bernard, and under the reign of Saint Louis of France. In any case, Salvatore did not reach the infidels, because he had to leave French territory in a hurry. He went into the Novara region, he told me, but he was very vague about what happened at this point. And finally he arrived at Casale, where he was received by the convent of Minorites (and here I believe he met Remigio) at the very time when many of them, persecuted by the Pope, were changing habit and them, refuge in monasteries of other orders, to avoid being burned at the stake. As, indeed, Ubertino had told us. Thanks to his long familiarity with many manual tasks (which he had performed both for dishonest purposes, when he was roaming freely, and for holy purposes, when he was roaming for the love of Christ), Salvatore was immediately taken on by the cellarer as his personal assistant. And that was why he had been here for many years, with scant interest in the order’s pomp, but much to the administration of its cellar and larder, where he was free to eat without stealing and to praise the Lord without being burned.
I looked at him with curiosity, not because of the singularity of his experience, but because what had happened to him seemed to me the splendid epitome of so many events and movements that made the Italy of that time fascinating and incomprehensible.
What had emerged from those tales? The picture of a man who had led an adventurous life, capable even of killing a fellow man without realizing his own crime. But although at that time one offense to the divine law seemed to me the same as another, I was already beginning to understand some of the phenomena I was hearing discussed, and I saw that it is one thing for a crowd, in an almost ecstatic frenzy, mistaking the laws of the Devil for those of the Lord, to commit a massacre, but it is another thing for an individual to commit a crime in cold blood, with calculation, in silence. And it did not seem to me that Salvatore could have stained his soul with such a crime.
The name of the rose Page 21
