by Umberto Eco
“Where have you buried the poor body?” William asked.
“In the cemetery, naturally,” the abbot replied. “Perhaps you noticed it: it lies between the north side of the church, the Aedificium, and the vegetable garden.”
“I see,” William said, “and I see that your problem is the following. If that unhappy youth, God forbid, committed suicide, the next day you would have found one of those windows open, whereas you found them all closed, and with no sign of water at the foot of any of them.”
The abbot, as I have said, was a man of great and diplomatic composure, but this time he made a movement of surprise that robbed him totally of that decorum suited to a grave and magnanimous person, as Aristotle has it. “Who told you?”
“You told me,” William said. “If the window had been open, you would immediately have thought he had thrown himself out of it. From what I could tell from the outside, they are large windows of opaque glass, and windows of that sort are not usually placed, in buildings of this size, at a man’s height. So even if a window had been open, it would have been impossible for the unfortunate man to lean out and lose his balance; thus suicide would have been the only conceivable explanation. In which case you would not have allowed him to be buried in consecrated ground. But since you gave him Christian burial, the windows must have been closed. And if they were closed—for I have never encountered, not even in witchcraft trials, a dead man whom God or the Devil allowed to climb up from the abyss to erase the evidence of his misdeed—then obviously the presumed suicide was, on the contrary, pushed, either by human hand or by diabolical force. And you are wondering who was capable, I will not say of pushing him into the abyss, but of hoisting him to the sill; and you are distressed because an evil force, whether natural or supernatural, is at work in the abbey.”
“That is it . . .” the abbot said, and it was not clear whether he was confirming William’s words or accepting the reasons William had so admirably and reasonably expounded. “But how can you know there was no water at the foot of any window?”
“Because you told me there was a wind blowing from the west, and the water could not be driven against windows that open to the east.”
“They had not told me enough about your talents,” the abbot said. “And you are right, there was no water, and now I know why. It was all as you say. And now you understand my anxiety. It would already be serious enough if one of my monks had stained his soul with the hateful sin of suicide. But I have reason to think that another of them has stained himself with an equally terrible sin. And if that were all . . .”
“In the first place, why one of the monks? In the abbey there are many other persons, grooms, goatherds, servants. . . .”
“To be sure, the abbey is small but rich,” the abbot agreed smugly. “One hundred fifty servants for sixty monks. But everything happened in the Aedificium. There, as perhaps you already know, although on the ground floor are the kitchen and the refectory, on the two upper floors are the scriptorium and the library. After the evening meal the Aedificium is locked, and a very strict rule forbids anyone to enter.” He guessed William’s next question and added at once, though clearly with reluctance, “Including, naturally, the monks, but . . .”
“But?”
“But I reject absolutely—absolutely, you understand—the possibility that a servant would have had the courage to enter there at night.” There was a kind of defiant smile in his eyes, albeit brief as a flash, or a falling star. “Let us say they would have been afraid, you know . . . sometimes orders given to the simple-minded have to be reinforced with a threat, a suggestion that something terrible will happen to the disobedient, perforce something supernatural. A monk, on the contrary . . .”
“I understand.”
“Furthermore, a monk could have other reasons for venturing into a forbidden place. I mean reasons that are . . . reasonable, even if contrary to the rule. . . .”
William noticed the abbot’s uneasiness and asked a question perhaps intended to change the subject, though it produced an even greater uneasiness.
“Speaking of a possible murder, you said, ‘And if that were all.’ What did you mean?”
“Did I say that? Well, no one commits murder without a reason, however perverse. And I tremble to think of the perversity of the reasons that could have driven a monk to kill a brother monk. There. That is it.”
“Nothing else?”
“Nothing else that I can say to you.”
“You mean that there is nothing else you have the power to say?”
“Please, Brother William, Brother William,” and the abbot underlined “Brother” both times.
William blushed violently and remarked, “Eris sacerdos in aeternum.”
“Thank you,” the abbot said.
O Lord God, what a terrible mystery my imprudent superiors were broaching at that moment, the one driven by anxiety and the other by curiosity. Because, a novice approaching the mysteries of the holy priesthood of God, humble youth that I was, I, too, understood that the abbot knew something but had learned it under the seal of confession. He must have heard from someone’s lips a sinful detail that could have a bearing on the tragic end of Adelmo. Perhaps for this reason he was begging Brother William to uncover a secret he himself suspected, though he was unable to reveal to anyone—and he hoped that my master, with the powers of his intellect, would cast light on—what he, the abbot, had to shroud in shadows because of the sublime law of charity.
“Very well,” William said then, “may I question the monks?”
“You may.”
“May I move freely about the abbey?”
“I grant you that power.”
“Will you assign me this mission coram monachis?”
“This very evening.”
“I shall begin, however, today, before the monks know what you have charged me to do. Besides, I already had a great desire—not the least reason for my sojourn here—to visit your library, which is spoken of with admiration in all the abbeys of Christendom.”
The abbot rose, almost starting, with a very tense face. “You can move freely through the whole abbey, as I have said. But not, to be sure, on the top floor of the Aedificium, the library.”
“Why not?”
“I would have explained to you before, but I thought you knew. You see, our library is not like others. . . .”
“I know it has more books than any other Christian library. I know that in comparison with your cases, those of Bobbio or Pomposa, of Cluny or Fleury, seem the room of a boy barely being introduced to the abacus. I know that the six thousand codices that were the boast of Novalesa a hundred or more years ago are few compared to yours, and perhaps many of those are now here. I know your abbey is the only light that Christianity can oppose to the thirty-six libraries of Baghdad, to the ten thousand codices of the Vizir Ibn al-Alkami, that the number of your Bibles equals the two thousand four hundred Korans that are the pride of Cairo, and that the reality of your cases is luminous evidence against the proud legend of the infidels who years ago claimed (intimates as they are of the Prince of Falsehood) the library of Tripoli was rich in six million volumes and inhabited by eighty thousand commentators and two hundred scribes.”
“You are right, heaven be praised.”
“I know that many of the monks living in your midst come from other abbeys scattered all over the world. Some stay here a short time, to copy manuscripts to be found nowhere else and to carry them back then to their own house, not without having brought you in exchange some other manuscript of great rarity that you will copy and add to your treasure; and others stay for a very long time, occasionally remaining here till death, because only here can they find the works that enlighten their research. And so you have among you Germans, Dacians, Spaniards, Frenchmen, Greeks. I know that the Emperor Frederick, many and many years ago, asked you to compile for him a book of the prophecies of Merlin and then to translate it into Arabic, to be sent as a gift to the Sultan of Egypt.
I know, finally, that such a glorious abbey as Murbach in these very sad times no longer has a single scribe, that at St. Gall only a few monks are left who know how to write, that now in the cities corporations and guilds arise, made up of laymen who work for the universities, and only your abbey day after day renews, or—what am I saying?—it exalts to ever greater heights the glories of your order. . . .”
“Monasterium sine libris,” the abbot recited, pensively, “est sicut civitas sine opibus, castrum sine numeris, coquina sine suppellectili, mensa sine cibis, hortus sine herbis, pratum sine floribus, arbor sine foliis. . . . And our order, growing up under the double command of work and prayer, was light to the whole known world, depository of knowledge, salvation of an ancient learning that threatened to disappear in fires, sacks, earthquakes, forge of new writing and increase of the ancient. . . . But we live now in very dark times, the people of God are now inclined to commerce and wars of faction; down below in the great settlements, where the spirit of sanctity can find no lodging, not only do they speak (of laymen, nothing else could be expected) in the vulgar tongue, but they are already writing in it, though none of these volumes will ever come within our walls—fomenter of heresies as those volumes inevitably become! Because of mankind’s sins the world is teetering on the brink of the abyss, permeated by the very abyss that the abyss invokes. And tomorrow, as Honorius would have it, men’s bodies will be smaller than ours, just as ours are smaller than those of the ancients. Mundus senescit. If God has now given our order a mission, it is to oppose this race to the abyss, by preserving, repeating, and defending the treasure of wisdom our fathers entrusted to us. Divine Providence has ordered that the universal government, which at the beginning of the world was in the East, should gradually, as the time was nearing fulfillment, move westward to warn us that the end of the world is approaching, because the course of events has already reached the confines of the universe. But until the millennium occurs definitively, until the triumph, however brief, of the foul beast that is the Antichrist, it is up to us to defend the treasure of the Christian world, and the very word of God, as he dictated it to the prophets and to the apostles, as the fathers repeated it without changing a syllable, as the schools have tried to gloss it, even if today in the schools themselves the serpent of pride, envy, folly is nesting. In this sunset we are still torches and light, high on the horizon. And as long as these walls stand, we shall be the custodians of the divine Word.”
“Amen,” William said in a devout tone. “But what does this have to do with the fact that the library may not be visited?”
“You see, Brother William,” the abbot said, “to achieve the immense and holy task that enriches those walls”—and he nodded toward the bulk of the Aedificium, which could be glimpsed from the cell’s windows, towering above the abbatial church itself—“devout men have toiled for centuries, observing iron rules. The library was laid out on a plan which has remained obscure to all over the centuries, and which none of the monks is called upon to know. Only the librarian has received the secret, from the librarian who preceded him, and he communicates it, while still alive, to the assistant librarian, so that death will not take him by surprise and rob the community of that knowledge. And the secret seals the lips of both men. Only the librarian has, in addition to that knowledge, the right to move through the labyrinth of the books, he alone knows where to find them and where to replace them, he alone is responsible for their safekeeping. The other monks work in the scriptorium and may know the list of the volumes that the library houses. But a list of titles often tells very little; only the librarian knows, from the collocation of the volume, from its degree of inaccessibility, what secrets, what truths or falsehoods, the volume contains. Only he decides how, when, and whether to give it to the monk who requests it; sometimes he first consults me. Because not all truths are for all ears, not all falsehoods can be recognized as such by a pious soul; and the monks, finally, are in the scriptorium to carry out a precise task, which requires them to read certain volumes and not others, and not to pursue every foolish curiosity that seizes them, whether through weakness of intellect or through pride or through diabolical prompting.”
“So in the library there are also books containing falsehoods. . . .”
“Monsters exist because they are part of the divine plan, and in the horrible features of those same monsters the power of the Creator is revealed. And by divine plan, too, there exist also books by wizards, the cabalas of the Jews, the fables of pagan poets, the lies of the infidels. It was the firm and holy conviction of those who founded the abbey and sustained it over the centuries that even in books of falsehood, to the eyes of the sage reader, a pale reflection of the divine wisdom can shine. And therefore the library is a vessel of these, too. But for this very reason, you understand, it cannot be visited by just anyone. And furthermore,” the abbot added, as if to apologize for the weakness of this last argument, “a book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements, clumsy hands. If for a hundred and a hundred years everyone had been able freely to handle our codices, the majority of them would no longer exist. So the librarian protects them not only against mankind but also against nature, and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion, the enemy of truth.”
“And so no one, except for two people, enters the top floor of the Aedificium. . . .”
The abbot smiled. “No one should. No one can. No one, even if he wished, would succeed. The library defends itself, immeasurable as the truth it houses, deceitful as the falsehood it preserves. A spiritual labyrinth, it is also a terrestrial labyrinth. You might enter and you might not emerge. And having said this, I would like you to conform to the rules of the abbey.”
“But you have not dismissed the possibility that Adelmo fell from one of the windows of the library. And how can I study his death if I do not see the place where the story of his death may have begun?”
“Brother William,” the abbot said, in a conciliatory tone, “a man who described my horse Brunellus without seeing him, and the death of Adelmo though knowing virtually nothing of it, will have no difficulty studying places to which he does not have access.”
William bowed. “You are wise also when you are severe. It shall be as you wish.”
“If ever I were wise, it would be because I know how to be severe,” the abbot answered.
“One last thing,” William asked. “Ubertino?”
“He is here. He is expecting you. You will find him in church.”
“When?”
“Always,” the abbot said, and smiled. “You must know that, although very learned, he is not a man to appreciate the library. He considers it a secular lure. . . . For the most part he stays in church, meditating, praying. . . .”
“Is he old?” William asked, hesitating.
“How long has it been since you saw him?”
“Many years.”
“He is weary. Very detached from the things of this world. He is sixty-eight. But I believe he still possesses the spirit of his youth.”
“I will seek him out at once. Thank you.”
The abbot asked him whether he wanted to join the community for the midday refection, after sext. William said he had only just eaten—very well, too—and he would prefer to see Ubertino at once. The abbot took his leave.
He was going out of the cell when from the courtyard a heartrending cry arose, like that of someone mortally wounded, followed by other, equally horrible cries. “What is that?” William asked, disconcerted. “Nothing,” the abbot answered, smiling. “At this time of year they slaughter the pigs. A job for the swineherds. This is not the blood that should concern you.”
He went out, and he did a disservice to his reputation as a clever man. Because the next morning . . . But curb your impatience, garrulous tongue of mine. For on the day of which I am telling, and before its night, many more things happened that it would be best to narrate.
Sext
In which
Adso admires the door of the church, and William meets Ubertino of Casale again.
The church was not majestic like others I saw later at Strasbourg, Chartres, Bamberg, and Paris. It resembled, rather, those I had already seen in Italy, with scant inclination to soar dizzyingly toward the heavens, indeed firmly set on the earth, often broader than they were high; but at the first level this one was surmounted, like a fortress, by a sequence of square battlements, and above this story another construction rose, not so much a tower as a solid, second church, capped by a pitched roof and pierced by severe windows. A robust abbatial church such as our forefathers built in Provence and Languedoc, far from the audacity and the excessive tracery characteristic of the modern style, which only in more recent times has been enriched, I believe, above the choir, with a pinnacle boldly pointed toward the roof of the heavens.
Two straight and unadorned columns stood on either side of the entrance, which opened, at first sight, like a single great arch; but from the columns began two embrasures that, surmounted by other, multiple arches, led the gaze, as if into the heart of an abyss, toward the doorway itself, crowned by a great tympanum, supported on the sides by two imposts and in the center by a carved pillar, which divided the entrance into two apertures protected by oak doors reinforced in metal. At that hour of the day the weak sun was beating almost straight down on the roof and the light fell obliquely on the façade without illuminating the tympanum; so after passing the two columns, we found ourselves abruptly under the almost sylvan vault of the arches that sprang from the series of lesser columns that proportionally reinforced the embrasures. When our eyes had finally grown accustomed to the gloom, the silent speech of the carved stone, accessible as it immediately was to the gaze and the imagination of anyone (for images are the literature of the layman), dazzled my eyes and plunged me into a vision that even today my tongue can hardly describe.
