The Name of the Rose

by Umberto Eco

  Later William descended from the scriptorium in good humor. While we were waiting for suppertime, we came upon Alinardo in the cloister. Remembering his request, I had procured some chickpeas the day before in the kitchen, and I offered them to him. He thanked me, stuffing them into his toothless, drooling mouth. “You see, boy?” he said. “The other corpse also lay where the book announced it would be. . . . Now wait for the fourth trumpet!”

  I asked him why he thought the key to the sequence of crimes lay in the book of Revelation. He looked at me, amazed: “The book of John offers the key to everything!” And he added, with a grimace of bitterness, “I knew it, I’ve been saying as much for a long time. . . . I was the one, you know, to suggest to the abbot . . . the one we had then . . . to collect as many commentaries on the Apocalypse as possible. I was to have become librarian. . . . But then the other one managed to have himself sent to Silos, where he found the finest manuscripts, and he came back with splendid booty. . . . Oh, he knew where to look; he also spoke the language of the infidels. . . . And so the library was given into his keeping, and not mine. But God punished him, and sent him into the realm of darkness before his time. Ha ha . . .” He laughed in a nasty way, that old man who until then, lost in the serenity of his old age, had seemed to me like an innocent child.

  “Who was the monk you were speaking of?” William asked.

  He looked at us, stunned. “Whom was I speaking of? I cannot remember . . . it was such a long time ago. But God punishes, God nullifies, God dims even memories. Many acts of pride were committed in the library. Especially after it fell into the hands of foreigners. God punishes still. . . .”

  We could get no more out of him, and we left him to his calm, embittered delirium. William declared himself very interested in that exchange: “Alinardo is a man to listen to; each time he speaks he says something interesting.”

  “What did he say this time?”

  “Adso,” William said, “solving a mystery is not the same as deducing from first principles. Nor does it amount simply to collecting a number of particular data from which to infer a general law. It means, rather, facing one or two or three particular data apparently with nothing in common, and trying to imagine whether they could represent so many instances of a general law you don’t yet know, and which perhaps has never been pronounced. To be sure, if you know, as the philosopher says, that man, the horse, and the mule are all without bile and are all long-lived, you can venture the principle that animals without bile live a long time. But take the case of animals with horns. Why do they have horns? Suddenly you realize that all animals with horns are without teeth in the upper jaw. This would be a fine discovery, if you did not also realize that, alas, there are animals without teeth in the upper jaw who, however, do not have horns: the camel, to name one. And finally you realize that all animals without teeth in the upper jaw have four stomachs. Well, then, you can suppose that one who cannot chew well must need four stomachs to digest food better. But what about the horns? You then try to imagine a material cause for horns—say, the lack of teeth provides the animal with an excess of osseous matter that must emerge somewhere else. But is that sufficient explanation? No, because the camel has no upper teeth, has four stomachs, but does not have horns. And you must also imagine a final cause. The osseous matter emerges in horns only in animals without other means of defense. But the camel has a very tough hide and doesn’t need horns. So the law could be . . .”

  “But what have horns to do with anything?” I asked impatiently. “And why are you concerned with animals having horns?”

  “I have never concerned myself with them, but the Bishop of Lincoln was greatly interested in them, pursuing an idea of Aristotle. Honestly, I don’t know whether his conclusions are the right ones, nor have I ever checked to see where the camel’s teeth are or how many stomachs he has. I was trying to tell you that the search for explicative laws in natural facts proceeds in a tortuous fashion. In the face of some inexplicable facts you must try to imagine many general laws, whose connection with your facts escapes you. Then suddenly, in the unexpected connection of a result, a specific situation, and one of those laws, you perceive a line of reasoning that seems more convincing than the others. You try applying it to all similar cases, to use it for making predictions, and you discover that your intuition was right. But until you reach the end you will never know which predicates to introduce into your reasoning and which to omit. And this is what I am doing now. I line up so many disjointed elements and I venture some hypotheses. I have to venture many, and many of them are so absurd that I would be ashamed to tell them to you. You see, in the case of the horse Brunellus, when I saw the clues I guessed many complementary and contradictory hypotheses: it could be a runaway horse, it could be that the abbot had ridden down the slope on that fine horse, it could be that one horse, Brunellus, had left the tracks in the snow and another horse, Favellus, the day before, the traces of mane in the bush, and the branches could have been broken by some men. I didn’t know which hypothesis was right until I saw the cellarer and the servants anxiously searching. Then I understood that the Brunellus hypothesis was the only right one, and I tried to prove it true, addressing the monks as I did. I won, but I might also have lost. The others believed me wise because I won, but they didn’t know the many instances in which I have been foolish because I lost, and they didn’t know that a few seconds before winning I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t lose. Now, for the events of the abbey I have many fine hypotheses, but there is no evident fact that allows me to say which is best. So, rather than appear foolish afterward, I renounce seeming clever now. Let me think no more, until tomorrow at least.”

  I understood at that moment my master’s method of reasoning, and it seemed to me quite alien to that of the philosopher, who reasons by first principles, so that his intellect almost assumes the ways of the divine intellect. I understood that, when he didn’t have an answer, William proposed many to himself, very different one from another. I remained puzzled.

  “But then . . .” I ventured to remark, “you are still far from the solution. . . .”

  “I am very close to one,” William said, “but I don’t know which.”

  “Therefore you don’t have a single answer to your questions?”

  “Adso, if I did I would teach theology in Paris.”

  “In Paris do they always have the true answer?”

  “Never,” William said, “but they are very sure of their errors.”

  “And you,” I said with childish impertinence, “never commit errors?”

  “Often,” he answered. “But instead of conceiving only one, I imagine many, so I become the slave of none.”

  I had the impression that William was not at all interested in the truth, which is nothing but the adjustment between the thing and the intellect. On the contrary, he amused himself by imagining how many possibilities were possible.

  At that moment, I confess, I despaired of my master and caught myself thinking, “Good thing the inquisitor has come.” I was on the side of that thirst for truth that inspired Bernard Gui.

  And in this culpable mood, more torn than Judas on the night of Holy Thursday, I went with William into the refectory to eat my supper.

  Compline

  In which Salvatore tells of a prodigious spell.

  The supper for the legation was superb. The abbot must have known well both human weaknesses and the customs of the papal court (which, I must say, did not displease Brother Michael’s Minorites, either). With pigs freshly slaughtered, we should have had blood pudding according to the Monte Cassino recipe, the cook had told us. But Venantius’s wretched end had obliged them to throw away all the pigs’ blood, though they would eventually slaughter some more pigs. Nevertheless, we had a ragout of pigeon, marinaded in the wine of those lands, and roast rabbit, Saint Clare’s pasties, rice with the almonds of those hills—the blancmange of fast days, that is—and borage tarts, stuffed olives, fried cheese, mutton, white broad beans, an
d exquisite sweets, Saint Bernard’s cake, Saint Nicholas’s pies, Saint Lucy’s dumplings, and wines, and herb liqueurs that put everyone in a good humor, even Bernard Gui, usually so austere: an elixir of lemon verbena, walnut wine, wine against the gout, and gentian wine. It seemed an assembly of gluttons, except that every sip or every morsel was accompanied by devotional readings.

  In the end, all rose very happy, some mentioning vague ailments as an excuse not to go down to compline. But the abbot did not take offense. Not all have the privilege and the obligations we assume on being consecrated in our order.

  As the monks departed, my curiosity made me linger in the kitchen, where they were preparing to lock up for the night. I saw Salvatore slip off toward the garden with a bundle under his arm. My curiosity still further aroused, I followed and called him. He tried to evade me, but when I questioned him he replied that in the bundle (which moved as if inhabited by something alive) he was carrying a basilisk.

  “Cave basilischium! The rex of serpenti, tant pleno of poison that it all shines dehors! Che dicam, il veleno, even the stink comes dehors and kills you! Poisons you . . . And it has black spots on his back, and a head like a coq, and half goes erect over the terra, and half on the terra like the other serpents. And it kills the bellula. . . .”

  “The bellula?”

  “Oc! Parvissimum animal, just a bit plus longue than the rat, and also called the musk-rat. And so the serpe and the botta. And when they bite it, the bellula runs to the fenicula or to the cicerbita and chews it, and comes back to the battaglia. And they say it generates through the oculi, but most say they are wrong.”

  I asked him what he was doing with a basilisk and he said that was his business. Now completely overwhelmed by curiosity, I said that these days, with all the deaths, there could be no more secret matters, and I would tell William. Then Salvatore ardently begged me to remain silent, opened the bundle, and showed me a black cat. He drew me closer and, with an obscene smile, said that he didn’t want the cellarer, who was powerful, or me, young and handsome, to enjoy the love of the village girls any more, when he couldn’t because he was ugly and a poor wretch. But he knew a prodigious spell that would make every woman succumb to love. You had to kill a black cat and dig out its eyes, then put them in two eggs of a black hen, one eye in one egg, one eye in the other (and he showed me two eggs that he swore he had taken from appropriate hens). Then you had to let the eggs rot in a pile of horse dung (and he had one ready in a corner of the vegetable garden where nobody ever went), and there a little devil would be born from each egg, and would then be at your service, procuring for you all the delights of this world. But, alas, he told me, for the magic spell to work, the woman whose love he wanted had to spit on the eggs before they were buried in the dung, and that problem tormented him, because he would have to have the woman in question at hand that night, and make her perform the ritual without knowing its purpose.

  A sudden heat seized me, in the face, or the viscera, or in my whole body, and I asked in a faint voice whether that night he would bring the same girl within the walls. He laughed, mocking me, and said I was truly gripped by a great lust (I said not, that I was asking out of pure curiosity), and then he said there were plenty of women in the village, and he would bring up another, even more beautiful than the one I liked. I supposed he was lying to me to make me go away. And in any case what could I have done? Follow him all night, when William was awaiting me for quite different enterprises? And again see her (if it was she) toward whom my appetites drove me while my reason drove me away—and whom I should never see again even though I did desire to see her further? Surely not. So I persuaded myself that Salvatore was telling the truth, as far as the woman was concerned. Or perhaps he was lying about everything, and the spell he described was a fantasy of his superstitious mind, and he would not do anything.

  I became irritated with him, treated him roughly, told him that for that night he would do better to go to bed, because archers were patrolling the abbey. He answered that he knew the abbey better than the archers did, and with this fog nobody would see anybody. Indeed, he said to me, I’m going to run off now, and you won’t see me any more, even if I were two feet away having my pleasure with the girl you desire. He expressed himself with different words, but this was the meaning of what he said. I left, indignant, because it was unworthy of me, nobleman and novice, to dispute with such rabble.

  I joined William and we did what was to be done. That is, we prepared to follow compline at the rear of the nave, so that when the office ended we would be ready to undertake our second (for me, third) journey into the bowels of the labyrinth.

  After Compline

  In which they visit the labyrinth again, reach the threshold of the finis Africae, but cannot enter because they do not know what the first and seventh of the four are, and, finally, Adso has a recurrence, though a very erudite one, of his love malady.

  The visit to the library cost us long hours of work. Described in words, the verification we aimed to carry out was simple, but our progress by lamplight as we read the legends, marked the passages and the blank walls on the map, recorded the initials, followed the various routes that the play of openings and obstacles allowed us, was very long. And tedious.

  It was bitter cold. The night was not windy and we did not hear those faint whistlings that had upset us the first evening, but a damp, icy air entered from the arrow slits. We had put on woolen gloves so as to be able to touch the volumes without having our hands become numb. But they were the kind used for writing in winter, the fingertips left bare, and sometimes we had to hold our hands to the flame or put them against our chests or clap them as we hopped about, half frozen.

  For this reason we didn’t perform the whole task consecutively. We stopped to browse in the cases, and now that William—with his new glasses on his nose—could linger and read the books, at every title he discovered he let out exclamations of happiness, either because he knew the work, or because he had been seeking it for a long time, or finally because he had never heard it mentioned and was highly excited and titillated. In short, for him every book was like a fabulous animal that he was meeting in a strange land. And as he leafed through one manuscript, he ordered me to look for others.

  “See what’s in that case!”

  And I, deciphering and shifting volumes, said, “Historia anglorum of Bede . . . And also by Bede, De aedificatione templi, De tabernaculo, De temporibus et computo et chronica et circuli Dionysi, Ortographia, De ratione metrorum, Vita Sancti Cuthberti, Ars metrica . . .”

  “Naturally, the complete works of the Venerable . . . And look at these! De rhetorica cognatione, Locorum rhetoricorum distinctio, and here many grammarians, Priscian, Honoratus, Donatus, Maximus, Victorinus, Eutiches, Phocas, Asper . . . Odd, I thought at first that here there were authors from Anglia. . . . Let us look below. . . .”

  “Hisperica . . . famina. What is that?”

  “A Hibernian poem. Listen:

  Hoc spumans mundanas obvallat Pelagus oras

  terrestres amniosis fluctibus cudit margines.

  Saxeas undosis molibus irruit avionias.

  Infima bomboso vertice miscet glareas

  asprifero spergit spumas sulco,

  sonoreis frequenter quatitur flabris. . . .”

  I didn’t understand the meaning, but as William read he rolled the words in his mouth so that you seemed to hear the sound of the waves and the sea foam.

  “And this? Aldhelm of Malmesbury. Listen to this page: ‘Primitus pantorum procerum poematorum pio potissimum paternoque presertim privilegio panegiricum poemataque passim prosatori sub polo promulgatas.’ . . . The words all begin with the same letter!”

  “The men of my islands are all a bit mad,” William said proudly. “Let us look in the other case.”

  “Virgil.”

  “What is he doing here? What Virgil? The Georgics?”

  “No. Epitomae. I’ve never heard of it.”

  “But it’s Vir
gil of Toulouse, the rhetorician, six centuries after the birth of our Lord. He was considered a great sage. . . .”

  “Here it says that the arts are poema, rethoria, grama, leporia, dialecta, geometria. . . . But what language was he writing?”

  “Latin. A Latin of his own invention, however, which he considered far more beautiful. Read this; he says that astronomy studies the signs of the zodiac, which are mon, man, tonte, piron, dameth, perfellea, belgalic, margaleth, lutamiron, taminon, and raphalut.”

  “Was he crazy?”

  “I don’t know: he didn’t come from my islands. And listen to this; he says there are twelve ways of designating fire: ignis, coquihabin (quia incocta coquendi habet dictionem), ardo, calax ex calore, fragon ex fragore flammae, rusin de rubore, fumaton, ustrax de urendo, vitius quia pene mortua membra suo vivificat, siluleus, quod de silice siliat, unde et silex non recte dicitur, nisi ex qua scintilla silit. And aeneon, de Aenea deo, qui in eo habitat, sive a quo elementis flatus fertur.”

  “But there’s no one who speaks like that!”

  “Happily. But those were times when, to forget an evil world, grammarians took pleasure in abstruse questions. I was told that in that period, for fifteen days and fifteen nights, the rhetoricians Gabundus and Terentius argued on the vocative of ‘ego,’ and in the end they attacked each other, with weapons.”

  “But this, too. Listen. . . .” I had grasped a book marvelously illuminated with vegetable labyrinths from which monkeys and serpents peered out. “Listen to these words: cantamen, collamen, gongelamen, stemiamen, plasmamem, sonerus, alboreus, gaudifluus, glaucicomus. . . .”

  “My islands,” William said again, with tenderness. “Don’t be too harsh with those monks of far-off Hibernia. Perhaps, if this abbey exists and if we still speak of the Holy Roman Empire, we owe it to them. At that time, the rest of Europe was reduced to a heap of ruins; one day they declared invalid all baptisms imparted by certain priests in Gaul because they baptized ‘in nomine patris et filiae’—and not because they practiced a new heresy and considered Jesus a woman, but because they no longer knew any Latin.”