“More or less.”
“But you didn’t want Malachi to die. He had probably never looked at the books of the finis Africae, for he trusted you, respected your prohibitions. He confined himself to arranging the herbs at evening to frighten any intruders. Severinus supplied him with them. This is why Severinus let Malachi enter the infirmary the other day: it was his regular visit to collect the fresh herbs he prepared daily, by the abbot’s order. Have I guessed?”
“You have guessed. I did not want Malachi to die. I told him to find the book again, by whatever means, and bring it back here without opening it. I told him it had the power of a thousand scorpions. But for the first time the madman chose to act on his own initiative. I did not want him to die: he was a faithful agent. But do not repeat to me what you know: I know that you know. I do not want to feed your pride; you already see to that on your own. I heard you this morning in the scriptorium questioning Benno about the Coena Cypriani. You were very close to the truth. I do not know how you discovered the secret of the mirror, but when I learned from the abbot that you had mentioned the finis Africae, I was sure you would come shortly. This is why I was waiting for you. So, now, what do you want?”
“I want,” William said, “to see the last manuscript of the bound volume that contains an Arabic text, a Syriac one, and an interpretation or a transcription of the Coena Cypriani. I want to see that copy in Greek, made perhaps by an Arab, or by a Spaniard, that you found when, as assistant to Paul of Rimini, you arranged to be sent back to your country to collect the finest manuscripts of the Apocalypse in León and Castile, a booty that made you famous and respected here in the abbey and caused you to win the post of librarian, which rightfully belonged to Alinardo, ten years your senior. I want to see that Greek copy written on linen paper, which was then very rare and was manufactured in Silos, near Burgos, your home. I want to see the book you stole there after reading it, to keep others from reading it, and you hid it here, protecting it cleverly, and you did not destroy it because a man like you does not destroy a book, but simply guards it and makes sure no one touches it. I want to see the second book of the Poetics of Aristotle, the book everyone has believed lost or never written, and of which you hold perhaps the only copy”
“What a magnificent librarian you would have been, William,” Jorge said, with a tone at once admiring and regretful. “So you know everything. Come, I believe there is a stool on your side of the table. Sit. Here is your prize.”
William sat and put down the lamp, which I had handed him, illuminating Jorge’s face from below. The old man took a volume that lay before him and passed it to William. I recognized the binding: it was the book I had opened in the infirmary, thinking it an Arabic manuscript.
“Read it, then, leaf through it, William,” Jorge said. “You have won.”
William looked at the volume but did not touch it. From his habit he took a pair of gloves, not his usual mitts with the fingertips exposed, but the ones Severinus was wearing when we found him dead. Slowly he opened the worn and fragile binding. I came closer and bent over his shoulder. Jorge, with his sensitive hearing, caught the noise I made. “Are you here, too, boy?” he said. “I will show it to you, too ... afterward.”
William rapidly glanced over the first pages. “It is an Arabic manuscript on the sayings of some fool, according to the catalogue,” he said. “What is it?”
“Oh, silly legends of the infidels, which hold that fools utter clever remarks that amaze even their priests and delight their caliphs ...”
“The second is a Syriac manuscript, but according to the catalogue it is the translation of a little Egyptian book on alchemy. How does it happen to be in this collection?”
“It is an Egyptian work from the third century of our era. Coherent with the work that follows, but less dangerous. No one would lend an ear to the ravings of an African alchemist. He attributes the creation of the world to divine laughter. ...” He raised his face and recited, with the prodigious memory of a reader who for forty years now had been repeating to himself things read when he still had the gift of sight: “ ‘The moment God laughed seven gods were born who governed the world, the moment he burst out laughing light appeared, at his second laugh appeared water, and on the seventh day of his laughing appeared the soul. ...’ Folly. Likewise the work that comes after, by one of the countless idiots who set themselves to glossing the Coena … But these are not what interest you.”
William, in fact, had rapidly passed over the pages and had come to the Greek text. I saw immediately that the pages were of a different, softer material, the first almost worn away, with a part of the margin consumed, spattered with pale stains, such as time and dampness usually produce on other books. William read the opening lines, first in Greek, then translating into Latin, and then he continued in this language so that I, too, could learn how the fatal book began:
In the first book we dealt with tragedy and saw how, by arousing pity and fear, it produces catharsis, the purification of those feelings. As we promised, we will now deal with comedy (as well as with satire and mime) and see how, in inspiring the pleasure of the ridiculous, it arrives at the purification of that passion. That such passion is most worthy of consideration we have already said in the book on the soul, inasmuch as—alone among the animals—man is capable of laughter. We will then define the type of actions of which comedy is the mimesis, then we will examine the means by which comedy excites laughter, and these means are actions and speech. We will show how the ridiculousness of actions is born from the likening of the best to the worst and vice versa, from arousing surprise through deceit, from the impossible, from violation of the laws of nature, from the irrelevant and the inconsequent, from the debasing of the characters, from the use of comical and vulgar pantomime, from disharmony, from the choice of the least worthy things. We will then show how the ridiculousness of speech is born from the misunderstandings of similar words for different things and different words for similar things, from garrulity and repetition, from play on words, from diminutives, from errors of pronunciation, and from barbarisms.
William translated with some difficulty, seeking the right words, pausing now and then. As he translated he smiled, as if he recognized things he was expecting to find. He read the first page aloud, then stopped, as if he were not interested in knowing more, and rapidly leafed through the following pages. But after a few pages he encountered resistance, because near the upper corner of the side edge, and along the top, some pages had stuck together, as happens when the damp and deteriorating papery substance forms a kind of sticky paste. Jorge realized that the rustle of pages had ceased, and he urged William on.
“Go on, read it, leaf through it. It is yours, you have earned it.”
William laughed, seeming rather amused. “Then it is not true that you consider me so clever, Jorge! You cannot see: I have gloves on. With my fingers made clumsy like this, I cannot detach one page from the next. I should proceed with bare hands, moistening my fingers with my tongue, as I happened to do this morning while reading in the scriptorium, so that suddenly that mystery also became clear to me. And I should go on leafing like that until a good portion of the poison had passed to my mouth. I am speaking of the poison that you, one day long ago, took from the laboratory of Severinus. Perhaps you were already worried then, because you had heard someone in the scriptorium display curiosity, either about the finis Africae or about the lost book of Aristotle, or about both. I believe you kept the ampoule for a long time, planning to use it the moment you sensed danger. And you sensed that days ago, when Venantius came too close to the subject of this book, and at the same time Berengar, heedless, vain, trying to impress Adelmo, showed he was less secretive than you had hoped. So you came and set your trap. Just in time, because a few nights later Venantius got in, stole the book, and avidly leafed through it, with an almost physical voracity. He soon felt ill and ran to seek help in the kitchen. Where he died. Am I mistaken?
“No. Go on.”
<
br /> “The rest is simple. Berengar finds Venantius’s body in the kitchen, fears there will be an inquiry, because, after all, Venantius got into the Aedificium at night thanks to Berengar’s prior revelation to Adelmo. He doesn’t know what to do; he loads the body on his shoulders and flings it into the jar of blood, thinking everyone will be convinced Venantius drowned.”
“And how do you know that was what happened?”
“You know it as well. I saw how you reacted when they found a cloth stained with Berengar’s blood. With that cloth the foolhardy man had wiped his hands after putting Venantius in the jar. But since Berengar had disappeared, he could only have disappeared with the book, which by this point had aroused his curiosity, too. And you were expecting him to be found somewhere, not bloodstained but poisoned. The rest is clear. Severinus finds the book, because Berengar went first to the infirmary to read it, safe from indiscreet eyes. Malachi, at your instigation, kills Severinus, then dies himself when he comes back here to discover what was so forbidden about the object that had made him a murderer. And thus we have an explanation for all the corpses. ... What a fool ...”
“Who?”
“I. Because of a remark of Alinardo’s, I was convinced the series of crimes followed the sequence of the seven trumpets of the Apocalypse. Hail for Adelmo, and his death was a suicide. Blood for Venantius, and there it had been a bizarre notion of Berengar’s; water for Berengar himself, and it had been a random act; the third part of the sky for Severinus, and Malachi had struck him with the armillary sphere because it was the only thing he found handy. And finally scorpions for Malachi ... Why did you tell him that the book had the power of a thousand scorpions?”
“Because of you. Alinardo had told me about his idea, and then I heard from someone that you, too, found it persuasive. ... I became convinced that a divine plan was directing these deaths, for which I was not responsible. And I told Malachi that if he were to become curious he would perish in accordance with the same divine plan; and so he did.”
“So, then ... I conceived a false pattern to interpret the moves of the guilty man, and the guilty man fell in with it. And it was this same false pattern that put me on your trail. Everyone nowadays is obsessed with the book of John, but you seemed to me the one who pondered it most, and not so much because of your speculations about the Antichrist as because you came from the country that has produced the most splendid Apocalypses. One day somebody told me it was you who had brought the most beautiful codices of this book to the library. Then, another day. Alinardo was raving about a mysterious enemy who had been sent to seek books in Silos (my curiosity was piqued when he said this enemy had returned prematurely into the realm of darkness: at first it might have seemed the man he was speaking of had died young, but he was referring to your blindness). Silos is near Burgos, and this morning, in the catalogue, I found a series of acquisitions, all of them Spanish Apocalypses, from the period when you had succeeded or were about to succeed Paul of Rimini. And in that group of acquisitions there was this book also. But I couldn’t be positive of my reconstruction until I learned that the stolen book was on linen paper. Then I remembered Silos, and I was sure. Naturally, as the idea of this book and its venomous power gradually began to take shape, the idea of an apocalyptic pattern began to collapse, though I couldn’t understand how both the book and the sequence of the trumpets pointed to you. But I understood the story of the book better because, directed by the apocalyptic pattern, I was forced more and more to think of you, and your debates about laughter. So that this evening, when I no longer believed in the apocalyptic pattern, I insisted on watching the stables, and in the stables, by pure chance, Adso gave me the key to entering the finis Africae.”
I cannot follow you,” Jorge said. “You are proud to show me how, following the dictates of your reason, you arrived at me, and yet you have shown me you arrived here by following a false reasoning. What do you mean to say to me?”
“To you, nothing. I am disconcerted, that is all. But it is of no matter. I am here.”
“The Lord was sounding the seven trumpets. And you, even in your error, heard a confused echo of that sound.”
“You said this yesterday evening in your sermon. You are trying to convince yourself that this whole story proceeded according to a divine plan, in order to conceal from yourself the fact that you are a murderer.”
“I have killed no one. Each died according to his destiny because of his sins. I was only an instrument.”
“Yesterday you said that Judas also was an instrument. That does not prevent him from being damned.”
“I accept the risk of damnation. The Lord will absolve me, because He knows I acted for His glory. My duty was to protect the library.”
“A few minutes a1o you were ready to kill me, too, and also this boy. ...”
“You are subtler, but no better than the others.”
“And now what will happen, now that I have eluded the trap?”
“We shall see,” Jorge answered. “I do not necessarily want your death; perhaps I will succeed in convincing you. But first tell me: how did you guess it was the second book of Aristotle?”
“Your anathemas against laughter would surely not have been enough for me, or what little I learned about your argument with the others. At first I didn’t understand their significance. But there were references to a shameless stone that rolls over the plain, and to cicadas that will sing from the ground, to venerable fig trees. I had already read something of the sort: I verified it during these past few days. These are examples that Aristotle used in the first book of the Poetics, and in the Rhetoric. Then I remembered that Isidore of Seville defines comedy as something that tells of stupra virginum et amores meretricum—how shall I put it?—of less than virtuous loves. ... Gradually this second book took shape in my mind as it had to be. I could tell you almost all of it, without reading the pages that were meant to poison me. Comedy is born from the komai—that is, from the peasant villages—as a joyous celebration after a meal or a feast. Comedy does not tell of famous and powerful men, but of base and ridiculous creatures, though not wicked; and it does not end with the death of the protagonists. It achieves the effect of the ridiculous by showing the defects and vices of ordinary men. Here Aristotle sees the tendency to laughter as a force for good, which can also have an instructive value: through witty riddles and unexpected metaphors, though it tells us things differently from the way they are, as if it were lying, it actually obliges us to examine them more closely, and it makes us say: Ah, this is just how things are, and I didn’t know it. Truth reached by depicting men and the world as worse than they are or than we believe them to be, worse in any case than the epics, the tragedies, lives of the saints have shown them to us. Is that it?”
“Fairly close. You reconstructed it by reading other books?”
“Many of which Venantius was working on. I believe Venantius had been hunting for this book for some time. He must have read in the catalogue the indications I also read, and must have been convinced this was the book he was seeking. But he didn’t know how to enter the finis Africae. When he heard Berengar speak of it with Adelmo, then he was of like a dog on the track of a hare.”
“That is what happened. I understood at once. I realized the moment had come when I would have to defend the library tooth and nail. ...”
“And you spread the ointment. It must have been a hard task ... in the dark. ...”
“By now my hands see more than your eyes. I had taken a brush from Severinus, and I also used gloves. It was a good idea, was it not? It took you a long time to arrive at it. ...”
“Yes. I was thinking of a more complex device, a poisoned pin or something of the sort. I must say that your solution was exemplary: the victim poisoned himself when he was alone, and only to the extent that he wanted to read. ...”
I realized, with a shudder, that at this moment these two men, arrayed in a mortal conflict, were admiring each other, as if each had acted only to win the o
ther’s applause. The thought crossed my mind that he artifices Berengar used to seduce Adelmo, and the simple and natural acts with which the irl had aroused my passion and my desire, were noting compared with the cleverness and mad skill each used to conquer the other, nothing compared with the act of seduction going on before my eyes at that moment, which had unfolded over seven days, each of the two interlocutors making, as it were, mysterious appointments with the other, each secretly aspiring to the other’s approbation, each fearing and hating the other.
“But now tell me,” William was saying, “why? Why did you want to shield this book more than so many others? Why did you hide—though not at the price of crime—treatises on necromancy, pages that may have blasphemed against the name of God, while for these pages you damned your brothers and have damned yourself? There are many other books that speak of coined y, many others that praise laughter. Why did this one fill you with such fear?”
“Because it was by the Philosopher. Every book by that man has destroyed a part of the learning that Christianity had accumulated over the centuries. The fathers had said everything that needed to be known about the power of the Word, but then Boethius had only to gloss the Philosopher and the divine mystery of the Word was transformed into a human parody of categories and syllogism. The book of Genesis says what has to be known about the composition of the cosmos, but it sufficed to rediscover the Physics of the Philosopher to have the universe reconceived in terms of dull and slimy matter, and the Arab Averroës almost convinced everyone of the eternity of the world. We knew everything about the divine names, and the Dominican buried by Abo—seduced by the Philosopher—renamed them, following the proud paths of natural reason. And so the cosmos, which for the Areopagite revealed itself to those who knew how to look up at the luminous cascade of the exemplary first cause, has become a preserve of terrestrial evidence for which they refer to an abstract agent. Before, we used to look to heaven, deigning only a frowning glance at the mire of matter; now we look at the earth, and we believe in the heavens because of earthly testimony. Every word of the Philosopher, by whom now even saints and prophets swear, has overturned the image of the word. But he had not succeeded in overturning the image of God. If this book were to become ... had become an object for open interpretation, we would have crossed the last boundary.”
The name of the rose Page 52
