It was at this point that I realized the vision was speaking precisely of what was happening in the abbey, of what we had learned from the abbot’s reticent lips—and how many times in the following days did I return to contemplate the doorway, convinced I was experiencing the very events that it narrated. And I knew we had made our way up there in order to witness a great and celestial massacre.
I trembled, as if I were drenched by the icy winter rain. And I heard yet another voice, but this time it came from behind me and was a different voice, because it came from the earth and not from the blinding core of my vision; and indeed it shattered the vision, because William (I became aware again of his presence), also lost until then in contemplation, turned as I did.
The creature behind us was apparently a monk, though his torn and dirty habit made him look like a vagabond, and his face bore a resemblance to those of the monsters I had just seen on the capitals. Unlike many of my brothers, I have never in my whole life been visited by the Devil; but I believe that if he were to appear to me one day, prevented by divine decree from concealing completely his nature even though he chose to resemble a man, he would have the very features our interlocutor presented to me at this moment. His head was hairless, not shaved in penance but as the result of the past action of some viscid eczema; the brow was so low that if he had had hair on his head it would have mingled with his eyebrows (which were thick and shaggy); the eyes were round, with tiny mobile pupils, and whether the gaze was innocent or malign I could not tell: perhaps it was both, in different moods, in flashes. The nose could not be called a nose, for it was only a bone that began between the eyes, but as it rose from the face it immediately sank again, transforming itself only into two dark holes, broad nostrils thick with hair. The mouth, joined to the nose by a scar, was wide and ill-made, stretching more to the right than to the left, and between the upper lip, nonexistent, and the lower, prominent and fleshy, there protruded, in an irregular pattern, black teeth sharp as a dog’s.
The man smiled (or at least so I believed) and, holding up one finger as if in admonition, he said:
“Penitenziagite! Watch out for the draco who cometh in futurum to gnaw your anima! Death is super nos! Pray the Santo Pater come to liberar nos a malo and all our sin! Ha ha, you like this negromanzia de Domini Nostri Jesu Christi! Et anco jois m’es dols e plazer m’es dolors. … Cave el diabolo! Semper lying in wait for me in some angulum to snap at my heels. But Salvatore is not stupidus! Bonum monasterium, and aquí refectorium and pray to dominum nostrum. And the resto is not worth merda. Amen. No?”
As this story continues, I shall have to speak again, and at length, of this creature and record his speech. I confess I find it very difficult to do so because I could not say now, as I could never understand then, what language he spoke. It was not Latin, in which the lettered men of the monastery expressed themselves, it was not the vulgar tongue of those parts, or any other I had ever heard. I believe I have given a faint idea of his manner of speech, reporting just now (as I remember them) the first words of his I heard. When I learned later about his adventurous life and about the various places where he had lived, putting down roots in none of them, I realized Salvatore spoke all languages, and no language. Or, rather, he had invented for himself a language which used the sinews of the languages to which he had been exposed—and once I thought that his was, not the Adamic language that a happy mankind had spoken, all united by a single tongue from the origin of the world to the Tower of Babel, or one of the languages that arose after the dire event of their division, but precisely the Babelish language of the first day after the divine chastisement, the language of primeval confusion. Nor, for that matter, could I call Salvatore’s speech a language, because in every human language there are rules and every term signifies ad placitum a thing, according to a law that does not change, for man cannot call the dog once dog and once cat, or utter sounds to which a consensus of people has not assigned a definite meaning, as would happen if someone said the word “blitiri” And yet, one way or another, I did understand what Salvatore meant, and so did the others. Proof that he spoke not one, but all languages, none correctly, taking words sometimes from one and sometimes from another. I also noticed afterward that he might refer to something first in Latin and later in Provençal, and I realized that he was not so much inventing his own sentences as using the disiecta membra of other sentences, heard some time in the past, according to the present situation and the things he wanted to say, as if he could speak of a food, for instance, only with the words of the people among whom he had eaten that food, and express his joy only with sentences that he had heard uttered by joyful people the day when he had similarly experienced joy. His speech was somehow like his face, put together with pieces from other people’s faces, or like some precious reliquaries I have seen (si licet magnis componere parva, if I may link diabolical things with the divine), fabricated from the shards of other holy objects. At that moment, when I met him for the first time, Salvatore seemed to me, because of both his face and his way of speaking, a creature not unlike the hairy and hoofed hybrids I had just seen under the portal. Later I realized that the man was probably good-hearted and humorous. Later still ... But we must not get ahead of our story. Particularly since, the moment he had spoken, my master questioned him with great curiosity.
“Why did you say Penitenziagite?” he asked.
“Domine frate magnificentissimo,” Salvatore answered, with a kind of bow, “Jesus venturus est and les hommes must do penitenzia. No?”
William gave him a hard look. “Did you come here from a convent of Minorites?”
“Non comprends.”
“I am asking if you have lived among the friars of Saint Francis; I ask if you have known the so-called apostles. …”
Salvatore blanched, or, rather, his tanned and savage face turned gray. He made a deep bow, muttered through half-closed lips a “vade retro,” devoutly blessed himself, and fled, looking back at us every now and then.
“What did you ask him?” I said to William.
He was thoughtful for a moment. “It is of no matter; I will tell you later. Let us go inside now. I want to find Ubertino.”
It was just after the sixth hour. The pale sun entered from the west, and therefore through only a few, narrow windows, into the interior of the church. A fine strip of light still touched the main altar, whose frontal seemed to glow with a golden radiance. The side naves were immersed in gloom.
Near the last chapel before the altar, in the left nave, stood a slender column on which a stone Virgin was set, carved in the modern fashion, with an ineffable smile and prominent abdomen, wearing a pretty dress with a small bodice, the child on her arm. At the foot of the Virgin, in prayer, almost prostrate, there was a man in the habit of the Cluniac order.
We approached. The man, hearing the sound of our footsteps, raised his head. He was old, bald, with a glabrous face, large pale-blue eyes, a thin red mouth, white complexion, a bony skull to which the skin clung like that of a mummy preserved in milk. The hands were white, with long tapering fingers. He resembled a maiden withered by premature death. He cast on us a gaze at first bewildered, as if we had disturbed him during an ecstatic vision; then his face brightened with joy.
“William!” he exclaimed. “My dearest brother!” He rose with some effort and came toward my master, embraced him, and kissed him on the mouth. “William!” he repeated, and his eyes became moist with tears. “How long it has been! But I recognize you still! Such a long time, so many things have happened! So many trials sent by the Lord!” He wept. William returned his embrace, clearly moved. We were in the presence of Ubertino of Casale.
I had already heard much talk about him, even before I came to Italy, and more still as I frequented the Franciscans of the imperial court. Someone had told me that the greatest poet of those days, Dante Alighieri of Florence, dead only a few years, had composed a poem (which I could not read, since it was written in vulgar Tuscan) of which many vers
es were nothing but a paraphrase of passages written by Ubertino in his Arbor vitae crucifixae. Nor was this the famous man’s only claim to merit. But to permit my reader better to understand the importance of this meeting, I must try to reconstruct the events of those years, as I understood them both during my brief stay to central Italy and from listening to the many conversations William had had with abbots and monks in the course of our journey.
I will try to tell what I understood of these matters, even if I am not sure I can explain them properly. My masters at Melk had often told me that it is very difficult for a Northerner to form any clear idea of the religious and political vicissitudes of Italy.
The peninsula, where the power of the clergy was more evident than in any other country, and where more than in any other country the clergy made a display of power and wealth, for at least two centuries had generated movements of men bent on a poorer life, in protest against the corrupt priests, from whom they even refused the sacraments. They gathered in independent communities, hated equally by the feudal lords, the empire, and the city magistrates.
Finally Saint Francis had appeared, spreading a love of poverty that did not contradict the precepts of the church; and after his efforts the church had accepted the summons to severe behavior of those older movements and had purified them of the elements of disruption that lurked in them. There should have followed a period of meekness and holiness, but as the Franciscan order grew and attracted the finest men, it became too powerful, too bound to earthly matters, and many Franciscans wanted to restore it to its early purity. A very difficult matter for an order that at the time when I was at the abbey already numbered more than thirty thousand members scattered throughout the whole world. But so it was, and many of those monks of Saint Francis were opposed to the Rule that the order had established, and they said the order had by now assumed the character of those ecclesiastical institutions it had come into the world to reform. And this, they said, had already happened in the days when Saint Francis was alive, and his words and his aims had been betrayed. Many of them rediscovered then a book written at the beginning of the twelfth century of our era, by a Cistercian monk named Joachim, to whom the spirit of prophecy was attributed. He had in fact foreseen the advent of a new age, in which the spirit of Christ, long corrupted through the actions of his false apostles, would again be achieved on earth. And he had announced certain future events in a way that made it seem clear to all that, unawares, he was speaking of the Franciscan order. And therefore many Franciscans had greatly rejoiced, even excessively, it seems, because then, around the middle of the century, the doctors of the Sorbonne condemned the teachings of that abbot Joachim. Apparently they did so because the Franciscans (and the Dominicans) were becoming too powerful, too learned, at the University of Paris; and those Sorbonne doctors wanted to eliminate them as heretics. But this scheme was not carried out, happily for the church, which then allowed the dissemination of the works of Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, certainly not heretics. Whence it is clear that in Paris, too, there was a confusion of ideas or someone who wished to confuse them for his own purposes. And this is the evil that heresy inflicts on the Christian people, obfuscating ideas and inciting all to become inquisitors to their personal benefit. For what I saw at the abbey then (and will now recount) caused me to think that often inquisitors create heretics. And not only in the sense that they imagine heretics-where these do not exist, but also that inquisitors repress the heretical putrefaction so vehemently that many are driven, to share in it, in their hatred for the judges. Truly, a circle conceived by the Devil. God preserve us.
But I was speaking of the heresy (if such it was) of the Joachimites. And in Tuscany there was a Franciscan, Gerard of Borgo San Donnino, who repeated the predictions of Joachim and made a deep impression on the Minorites. Thus there arose among them a band of supporters of the old Rule, against the reorganization of the order attempted by the great Bonaventure, who had become general of the order. In the final thirty years of the last century, the Council of Lyons rescued the Franciscan order from its enemies, who wanted to abolish it, and allowed it ownership of all property in its use (already the law for older orders). But some monks in the Marches rebelled, because they believed that the spirit of the Rule had been forever betrayed, since Franciscans must own nothing, personally or as a convent or as an order. These rebels were put in prison for life. It does not seem to me that they were preaching things contrary to the Gospel, but when the session of earthly things is in question, it is difficult for men to reason justly. I was told that years later, the new general of the order, Raymond Gaufredi, found these prisoners in Ancona and, on freeing them, said: “Would God that all of us and the whole order were stained by such a sin.” A sign that what the heretics say is not true, and there are still men of great virtue living in the church.
Among these freed prisoners there was one, Angelus Clarenus, who then met a monk from Provence, Pierre Olieu, who preached the prophecies of Joachim, and then he met Ubertino of Casale, and in this way the movement of the Spirituals originated. In those years, a most holy hermit rose to the papal throne, Peter of Murrone, who reigned as Celestine V; and he was welcomed with relief by the Spirituals. “A saint will appear,” it had been said, “and he will follow the teachings of Christ, he will live an angelic life: tremble, ye corrupt priests.” Perhaps Celestine’s life was too angelic, or the prelates around him were too corrupt, or he could not bear the strain of the interminable conflict with the Emperor and with the other kings of Europe. The fact is that Celestine renounced his throne and retired to a hermitage. But in the brief period of his reign, less than a year, the hopes of the Spirituals were all fulfilled. They went to Celestine, who founded with them the community known as that of the fratres et pauperes heremitae domini Celestini. On the other hand, while the Pope was to act as mediator among the most powerful cardinals of Rome, there were some, like a Colonna and an Orsini, who secretly supported the new poverty movement, a truly curious choice for powerful men who lived in vast wealth and luxury; and I have never understood whether they simply exploited the Spirituals for their own political ends or whether in some way they felt they justified their carnal life by supporting the Spiritual trend. Perhaps both things were true, to judge by the little I can understand of Italian affairs. But to give an example, Ubertino had been taken on as chaplain by Cardinal Orsini when, having become the most respected among the Spirituals, he risked being accused as a heretic. And the cardinal himself had protected Ubertino in Avignon.
As happens, however, in such cases, on the one hand Angelus and Ubertino preached according to doctrine, on the other, great masses of simple people accepted this preaching of theirs and spread through the country, beyond all control. So Italy was invaded by these Fraticelli or Friars of the Poor Life, whom many considered dangerous. At this point it was difficult to distinguish the spiritual masters, who maintained contact with the ecclesiastical authorities, from their simpler followers, who now lived outside the order, begging for alms and existing from day to day by the labor of their hands, holding no property of any kind. And these the populace now called Fraticelli, not unlike the French Beghards, who drew their inspiration from Pierre Olieu.
The name of the rose Page 61
