“On Rebello,” he said, “there were people who throughout their childhood had slept, ten or more of them, in a room of a few cubits—brothers and sisters, fathers and daughters. What do you think this new situation meant to them? They did from choice what they had formerly done from necessity. And then, at night, when you fear the arrival of the enemy troops and you cling tight to your neighbor, on the ground, so as not to feel cold ... The heretics: you pitiful monks who come from a castle and end up in an abbey think that it’s a form of belief, inspired by the Devil. But it’s a way of living, and it is ... it was ... a new experience. ... There were no more masters; and God, we were told, was with us. I’m not saying we were right, William, and, in fact, you find me here because I abandoned them before long. But I never really understood our learned disputes about the poverty of Christ and ownership and rights. ... I told you, it was a great carnival, and in carnival time everything is done backward. As you grow old, you grow not wise but greedy. And here I am, a glutton. ... You can condemn a heretic to death, but would you condemn a glutton?”
“That’s enough, Remigio,” William said. “I’m not questioning you about what happened then, but about what happened recently. Be frank with me, and I will surely not seek your downfall. I cannot and would not judge you. But you must tell me what you know about events in the abbey. You move about too much, night and day, not to know something. Who killed Venantius?”
“I do not know, I give you my solemn oath. I know when he died, and where.”
“When? Where?”
“I’ll tell you. That night, an hour after compline, I went into the kitchen. ...”
“How did you enter, and for what reasons?”
“By the door from the vegetable garden. I have a key I had the smiths make for me long ago. The kitchen door is the only one not barred on the inside. And my reasons ... are not important; you said yourself you don’t want to condemn me for my weaknesses of the flesh. ...” He smiled, embarrassed. “But I wouldn’t want you to believe I spend my days in fornication, either. ... That night I was looking for food to give to the girl Salvatore was to bring into the kitchen. ...”
“Where from?”
“Oh, the outside walls have other entrances besides the gate. The abbot knows them; I know them. ... But that evening the girl didn’t come in; I sent her back precisely because of what I discovered, what I’m about to tell you. This is why I tried to have her return last night. If you’d arrived a bit later you would have found me instead of Salvatore; it was he who warned me there were people in the Aedificium. So I went back to my cell. ...”
“Let’s return to the night between Sunday and Monday.”
“Yes, then. I entered the kitchen, and on the floor I saw Venantius, dead.”
“In the kitchen?”
“Yes, near the sink. Perhaps he had just come down from the scriptorium.”
“No sign of a struggle?”
“None. Though there was a broken cup beside the body, and traces of water on the ground.”
“How do you know it was water?”
“I don’t know. I thought it was water. What else might it have been?”
As William pointed out to me later, that cup could mean two different things. Either someone had given Venantius a poisoned potion to drink right there in the kitchen, or else the poor youth had already taken the poison (but where? and when?) and had come down to drink, to soothe a sudden burning, a spasm, a pain that seared his viscera or his tongue (for certainly his must have been black like Berengar’s).
In any case, we could learn no more for the moment. Having glanced at the corpse, terrified, Remigio asked himself what he should do and decided he would do nothing. If he sought help, he would have to admit he had been wandering around the Aedificium at night, nor would it do his now lost brother any good. Therefore, he resolved to leave things as they were, waiting for someone else to discover the body in the morning, when the doors were opened. He rushed to head off Salvatore, who was already bringing the girl into the abbey, then he and his accomplice went off to sleep, if their agitated vigil till matins could be called that. And at matins, when the swineherds brought the news to the abbot, Remigio believed the body had been discovered where he had left it, and was aghast to find it in the jar. Who had spirited the corpse out of the kitchen? For this Remigio had no explanation.
“The only one who can move freely about the Aedificium is Malachi,” William said.
The cellarer reacted violently: “No, not Malachi. That is, I don’t believe … In any case, I didn’t say anything to you against Malachi. …”
“Rest assured, whatever your debt to Malachi may be. Does he know something about you?”
“Yes.” The cellarer blushed. “And he has behaved like a man of discretion. If I were you, I would keep an eye on Benno. He had strange connections with Berengar and Venantius. … But I swear to you, I’ve seen nothing else. If I learn something, I’ll tell you.”
“For the present this will do. I’ll seek you out again if I need you.” The cellarer, obviously relieved, returned to his dealings, sharply reproaching the peasants, who in the meantime had apparently shifted some sacks of seeds.
At that point Severinus joined us. In his hand he was carrying William’s lenses—the ones stolen two nights before. “I found them inside Berengar’s habit,” he said. “I saw them on your nose the other day in the scriptorium. They are yours, aren’t they?”
“God be praised,” William cried joyously. “We’ve solved two problems! I have my lenses and I finally know for sure that it was Berengar who robbed us the other night in the scriptorium!”
We had barely finished speaking when Nicholas of Morimondo came running up, even more triumphant than William. In his hands he held a finished pair of lenses, mounted on their fork. “William,” he cried, “I did it all by myself. I’ve finished them! I believe they’ll work!” Then he saw that William had other lenses on his nose, and he was stunned. William didn’t want to humiliate him: he took off his old lenses and tried on the new ones. “These are better than the others,” he said. “So. I’ll keep the old ones as a spare pair, and will always use yours.” Then he turned to me. “Adso, now I shall withdraw to my cell to read those papers you know about. At last! Wait for me somewhere. And thank you, thank all of you, dearest brothers.”
Terce was ringing and I went to the choir, to recite with the others the hymn, the psalms, the verses, and the “Kyrie.” The others were praying for the soul of the dead Berengar. I was thanking God for having allowed us to find not one but two pairs of lenses.
In that great peace, forgetting. all the ugly things I had seen and heard, I dozed off, waking only as the office ended. I realized I hadn’t slept that night and I was distressed to think also how I had expended much of my strength. And at this point, coming out into the fresh air, I began to find my thoughts obsessed by the memory of the girl.
Trying to distract myself, I began to stride rapidly over the grounds. I felt a slight dizziness. I clapped my numbed hands together. I stamped my feet on the earth. I was still sleepy, and yet I felt awake and full of life. I could not understand what was happening to me.
TERCE
In which Adso writhes in the torments of love, then William arrives with Venantius’s text, which remains undecipherable even after it has been deciphered.
To tell the truth, the other terrible events following my sinful encounter with the girl had caused me almost to forget that occurrence, and once I had confessed to Brother William, my spirit was relieved of the remorse I had felt on waking after my guilty lapse, so it was as if I had handed over to the monk, with my words, the burden itself of which they were the signifying voice. What is the purpose of the holy cleansing of confession-, if not to unload the weight of sin, and the remorse it involves, into the very bosom of our Lord, obtaining with absolution a new and airy lightness of soul, such as to make us forget the body tormented by wickedness? But I was not freed of everything. Now, as I walk
ed in the cold, pale sun of that winter morning, surrounded by the fervor of men and animals, I began to remember my experiences in a different way. As if, from everything that had happened, my repentance and the consoling words of the penitential cleansing no longer remained, but only visions of bodies and human limbs. Into my feverish mind came abruptly the ghost of Berengar, swollen with water, and I shuddered with revulsion and pity. Then, as if to dispel that lemur, my mind turned to other images of which the memory was a fresh receptacle, and I could not avoid seeing, clear before my eyes (the eyes of the soul, but almost as if it appeared before my fleshly eyes), the image of the girl, beautiful and terrible as an army arrayed for battle.
I have vowed (aged amanuensis of a text till now unwritten, though for long decades it has spoken in my mind) to be a faithful chronicler, not only out of love for the truth, or the desire (worthy though it be) to instruct my future readers, but also out of a need to free my memory, dried up and weary of visions that have troubled it for a whole lifetime. Therefore, I must tell everything, decently but without shame. And I must say. now, and clearly, what I thought then and almost tried to conceal from myself, walking over the grounds, sometimes breaking into a run so that I might attribute to the motion of my body the sudden pounding of my heart, or stopping to admire the work of the villeins, deluding myself that I was being distracted by such contemplation, breathing the cold air deeply into my lungs, as a man drinks wine to forget fear or sorrow.
In vain. I thought of the girl. My flesh had forgotten the intense pleasure, sinful and fleeting (a base thing), that union with her had given me; but my soul had not forgotten her face, and could not manage to feel that this memory was perverse: rather, it throbbed as if in that face shone all the bliss of creation.
I sensed, in a confused way, and almost denying to myself the truth of what I felt, that the poor, filthy, impudent creature who sold herself (who knows with what stubborn constancy) to other sinners, that daughter of Eve, weak like all her sisters, who had so often bartered her own flesh, was yet something splendid and wondrous. My intellect knew her as an occasion of sin, my sensitive appetite perceived her as the vessel of every grace. It is difficult to say what I felt. I could try to write that, still caught in the snares of sin, I desired culpably, for her to appear at every moment, and I spied on the labor of the workers to see whether, around the corner of a but or from the darkness of a barn, that form that had seduced me might emerge. But I would not be writing the truth, or, rather, I would be attempting to draw a veil over the truth to attenuate its force and clarity. Because the truth is that I “saw” the girl, I saw her in the branches of the bare tree that stirred lightly when a benumbed sparrow flew to seek refuge there; I saw her in the eyes of the heifers that came out of the barn, and I heard her in the bleating of the sheep that crossed my erratic path. It was as if all creation spoke to me of her, and I desired to see her again, true, but I was also prepared to accept the idea of never seeing her again, and of never lying again with her, provided that I could savor the joy that filled me that morning, and have her always near even if she were to be, and for eternity, distant. It was, now I am trying to understand, as if—just as the whole universe is surely like a book written by the finger of God, in which everything speaks to us of the immense goodness of its Creator, in which every creature is description and mirror of life and death, in which the humblest rose becomes a gloss of our terrestrial progress—everything, in other words, spoke to me only of the face I had hardly glimpsed in the aromatic shadows of the kitchen. I dwelled on these fantasies because I said to myself (or, rather, did not say: at that moment I did not formulate thoughts translatable into words) that if the whole world is destined to speak to me of the power, goodness, and wisdom of the Creator, and if that morning the whole world spoke to me of the girl, who (sinner though she may have been) was nevertheless a chapter in the great book of creation, a verse of the great psalm chanted by the cosmos—I said to myself (I say now) that if this occurred, it could only be a part of the great theophanic design that sustains the universe, arranged like a lyre, miracle of consonance and harmony. As if intoxicated, I then enjoyed her presence in the things I saw, and, desiring her in them, with the sight of them I was sated.
And yet I felt a kind of sorrow, because at the same time I suffered from an absence, though I was happy with the many ghosts of a presence. It is difficult for me to explain this mystery of contradiction, sign that the human spirit is fragile and never proceeds directly along the paths of divine reason, which has built the world as a perfect syllogism, but instead grasps only isolated and often disjointed propositions of this syllogism, whence derives the ease with which we fall victims to the deceptions of the Evil One. Was it a deception of the Evil One, that morning, that so moved me? I think today that it was, because I was a novice, but I think that the human feeling that stirred me was not bad in itself, but only with regard to my state. Because in itself it was the feeling that moves man toward woman so that the one couples with the other, as the apostle of the Gentiles wants, and that both be flesh of one flesh, and that together they procreate new human beings and succor each other from youth to old age. Only the apostle spoke thus for those who seek a remedy for lust and who do not wish to burn, recalling, however, that the condition of chastity is far preferable, the condition to which as a monk I had consecrated myself. And therefore what I suffered that morning was evil for me, but for others perhaps was good, the sweetest of good things; thus I understand now that my distress was not due to the depravity of my thoughts, in themselves worthy and sweet, but to the depravity of the gap between my thoughts and the vows I had pronounced. And therefore I was doing evil in enjoying something that was good in one situation, bad in another; and my fault lay in trying to reconcile natural appetite and the dictates of the rational soul. Now I know that I was suffering from the conflict between the illicit appetite of the intellect, in which the will’s rule should have been displayed, and the illicit appetite of the senses, subject to human passions. In fact, as Aquinas says, the acts of the sensitive appetite are called passions precisely because they involve a bodily change. And my appetitive act was, as it happened, accompanied by a trembling of the whole body, by a physical impulse to cry out and to writhe. The angelic doctor says that the passions in themselves are not evil, but they must be governed by the will led by the rational soul. But my rational soul that morning was dazed by weariness, which kept in check the irascible appetite, addressed to good and evil as terms of conquest, but not the concupiscent appetite, addressed to good and evil as known entities. To justify my irresponsible recklessness of that time, I will say now that I was unquestionably seized by love; which is passion and is cosmic law, because the weight of bodies is actually natural love. And by this passion I was naturally seduced, and I understood why the angelic doctor said that amor est magis cognitivus quam cognitio, that we know things better through love than through knowledge. In fact, I now saw the girl better than I had seen her the previous night, and I understood her intus et in cute because in her I understood myself and in myself her. I now wonder whether what I felt was the love of friendship, in which like loves like and wants only the other’s good, or love of concupiscence, in which one wants one’s own good and the lacking wants only what completes it. And I believe that the nighttime love had been concupiscent, for I wanted from the girl something I had never had; whereas that morning I wanted nothing from the girl, and I wanted only her good, and I wished her to be saved from the cruel necessity that drove her to barter herself for a bit of food, and I wished her to be happy; nor did I want to ask anything further of her, but only to think of her and see her in sheep, oxen, trees, in the serene light that bathed in happiness the grounds of the abbey.
Now I know that good is cause of love and that which is good is defined by knowledge, and you can only love what you have learned is good, whereas I had, indeed, learned that the girl was the good of the irascible appetite, but the evil of the will. But I was in the gr
ip of so many and such conflicting emotions, because what I felt was like the holiest love just as the doctors describe it: it produced in me that ecstasy in which lover and beloved want the same thing (and by mysterious enlightenment I, in that moment, knew that the girl, wherever she was, wanted the same things I myself wanted), and for her I felt jealousy, but not the evil kind, condemned by Paul in I Corinthians, but that which Dionysius speaks of in The Divine Names whereby God also is called jealous because of the great love He feels for all creation (and I loved the girl precisely because she existed, and I was happy, not envious, that she existed): I was jealous in the way in which, for the angelic doctor, jealousy is motus in amatum, the jealousy of friendship, which inspires us to move against all that harms the beloved (and I dreamed, at that moment; only of freeing the girl from the power of him who was buying her flesh and befouling it with his own infamous passions).
Now I know, as the doctor says, that love can harm the lover when it is excessive. And mine was excessive. I have tried to explain what I felt then, not in the least to justify what I felt. I am speaking of what were my sinful ardors of youth. They were bad, but truth obliges me to say that at the time I felt them to be extremely good. And let this serve to instruct anyone who may fall, as I did, into the nets of temptation. Today, an old man, I would know a thousand ways of evading such seductions. And I wonder how proud of them I should be, since I am free of the temptations of the noontime Devil; but not free from others, so that I ask myself whether what I am now doing is not a sinful succumbing to the terrestrial passion of recollection, a foolish attempt to elude the flow of time, and death.
The name of the rose Page 31
