by Umberto Eco
Suddenly some windows shattered as if pressed by an inner force, the sparks flew out into the open air, dotting with fluttering glints the darkness of the night. The strong wind had become lighter: a misfortune, because, strong, it might have blown out the sparks, but light, it carried them, stimulating them, and with them made scraps of parchment swirl in the air, the delicate fragments of an inner torch. At that point an explosion was heard: the floor of the labyrinth had given way at some point and its blazing beams must have plunged to the floor below. Now I saw tongues of flame rise from the scriptorium, which was also tenanted by books and cases, and by loose papers, spread on the desks, ready to provoke the sparks. I heard cries of woe from a group of scribes who tore their hair and still thought of climbing up heroically, to recover their beloved parchments. In vain: the kitchen and refectory were now a crossroads of lost souls, rushing in all directions, each hindering the others. People bumped into one another, fell down; those carrying vessels spilled their redemptive contents; the mules brought into the kitchen had sensed the presence of fire and, with a clatter of hoofs, dashed toward the exits, knocking down the human beings and even their own terrified grooms. It was obvious, in any case, that this horde of villeins and of devout, wise, but unskilled men, with no one in command, was blocking even what aid might still have arrived.
The whole abbey was in the grip of disorder, but this was only the beginning of the tragedy. Pouring from the windows and the roof, the triumphant cloud of sparks, fostered by the wind, was now descending on all sides, touching the roof of the church. Everyone knows how the most splendid cathedrals are vulnerable to the sting of fire: the house of God appears beautiful and well defended as the heavenly Jerusalem itself thanks to the stone it proudly displays, but the walls and ceilings are supported by a fragile, if admirable, architecture of wood, and if the church of stone recalls the most venerable forests with its columns rising high, bold as oaks, to the vaults of the ceilings, these columns often have cores of oak—and many of the trappings are also of wood: the altars, the choirs, the painted panels, the benches, the stalls, the candelabra.
And so it was with the abbatial church, whose beautiful door had so fascinated me on the first day. The church caught fire in no time. The monks and the whole population of the place then understood that the very survival of the abbey was at stake, and all began rushing even more earnestly, and in even greater confusion, to deal with the new danger.
To be sure, the church was more accessible, more easily defended than the library. The library had been doomed by its own impenetrability, by the mystery that protected it, by its few entrances. The church, maternally open to all in the hour of prayer, was open to all in the hour of succor. But there was no more water, or at least very little could be found stored, and the wells supplied it with a parsimony that did not correspond to the urgency of the need. All the monks would have liked to put out the fire of the church, but nobody knew how at this point. Moreover, the fire was spreading from above, and it was difficult to hoist men up to beat on the flames or smother them with dirt or rags. And when the flames arrived from below, it was futile by then to throw earth or sand on them, for the ceiling was crashing down on the firefighters, striking more than a few of them.
And so the cries of regret for the many riches burned were now joined by the cries of pain at seared faces, crushed limbs, bodies buried under a sudden collapse of the high vaults.
The wind had become furious again, and more furiously helped spread the fire. Immediately after the church, the barns and stables caught fire. The terrified animals broke their halters, kicked down the doors, scattered over the grounds, neighing, mooing, bleating, grunting horribly. Sparks caught the manes of many horses, and there were infernal creatures racing across the grass, flaming steeds that trampled everything in their path, without goal or respite. I saw old Alinardo wandering around, not understanding what was happening, knocked down by the magnificent Brunellus, haloed by fire; the old man was dragged in the dust, then abandoned there, a poor shapeless object. But I had neither means nor time to succor him, or to bemoan his end, because similar scenes were taking place everywhere.
The horses in flames had carried the fire to places where the wind had not yet brought it: now the forges were burning, and the novices’ house. Hordes of people were running from one end of the compound to another, for no purpose or for illusory purposes. I saw Nicholas, his head wounded, his habit in shreds, now defeated, kneeling in the path from the gate, cursing the divine curse. I saw Pacificus of Tivoli, who, abandoning all notion of help, was trying to seize a crazed mule as it passed; when he succeeded, he shouted to me to do the same and to flee, to escape that horrid replica of Armageddon.
I wondered where William was, fearing he had been trapped under some collapsing wall. I found him, after a long search, near the cloister. In his hand he had his traveling sack: when the fire was already spreading to the pilgrims’ hospice, he had gone up to his cell to save at least his most precious belongings. He had collected my sack, too, and in it I found something to put on. We paused, breathless, to watch what was happening around us.
By now the abbey was doomed. Almost all its buildings, some more, some less, had been reached by the fire. Those still intact would not remain so for long, because everything, from the natural elements to the confused work of the rescuers, was now contributing to the spread of the fire. Only the parts without buildings remained safe, the vegetable patch, the garden outside the cloister. . . . Nothing more could be done to save the buildings; abandoning the idea of saving them, we were able to observe everything without danger, standing in an open space.
We looked at the church, now burning slowly, for it is characteristic of these great constructions to blaze up quickly in their wooden parts and then to agonize for hours, sometimes for days. The conflagration of the Aedificium was different. Here inflammable material was much more abundant, and the fire, having spread all through the scriptorium, had invaded the kitchen floor. As for the top floor, where once, and for hundreds of years, there had been the labyrinth, it was now virtually destroyed.
“It was the greatest library in Christendom,” William said. “Now,” he added, “the Antichrist is truly at hand, because no learning will hinder him any more. For that matter, we have seen his face tonight.”
“Whose face?” I asked, dazed.
“Jorge, I mean. In that face, deformed by hatred of philosophy, I saw for the first time the portrait of the Antichrist, who does not come from the tribe of Judas, as his heralds have it, or from a far country. The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of the truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possessed from the seer. Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them. Jorge did a diabolical thing because he loved his truth so lewdly that he dared anything in order to destroy falsehood. Jorge feared the second book of Aristotle because it perhaps really did teach how to distort the face of every truth, so that we would not become slaves of our ghosts. Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth.”
“But, master,” I ventured, sorrowfully, “you speak like this now because you are wounded in the depths of your spirit. There is one truth, however, that you discovered tonight, the one you reached by interpreting the clues you read over the past few days. Jorge has won, but you have defeated Jorge because you exposed his plot. . . .”
“There was no plot,” William said, “and I discovered it by mistake.”
The assertion was self-contradictory, and I couldn’t decide whether William really wanted it to be. “But it was true that the tracks in the snow led to Brunellus,” I said, “it was true that Adelmo committed suicide, it was true that Venantius did not drown in the jar, it was true that the labyrinth was laid out the w
ay you imagined it, it was true that one entered the finis Africae by touching the word ‘quatuor,’ it was true that the mysterious book was by Aristotle. . . . I could go on listing all the true things you discovered with the help of your learning. . . .”
“I have never doubted the truth of signs, Adso; they are the only things man has with which to orient himself in the world. What I did not understand was the relation among signs. I arrived at Jorge through an apocalyptic pattern that seemed to underlie all the crimes, and yet it was accidental. I arrived at Jorge seeking one criminal for all the crimes and we discovered that each crime was committed by a different person, or by no one. I arrived at Jorge pursuing the plan of a perverse and rational mind, and there was no plan, or, rather, Jorge himself was overcome by his own initial design and there began a sequence of causes, and concauses, and of causes contradicting one another, which proceeded on their own, creating relations that did not stem from any plan. Where is all my wisdom, then? I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe.”
“But in imagining an erroneous order you still found something. . . .”
“What you say is very fine, Adso, and I thank you. The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless. Er muoz gelîchesame die leiter abewerfen, sô er an ir ufgestigen. . . . Is that how you say it?”
“That is how it is said in my language. Who told you that?”
“A mystic from your land. He wrote it somewhere, I forget where. And it is not necessary for somebody one day to find that manuscript again. The only truths that are useful are instruments to be thrown away.”
“You have no reason to reproach yourself: you did your best.”
“A human best, which is very little. It’s hard to accept the idea that there cannot be an order in the universe because it would offend the free will of God and His omnipotence. So the freedom of God is our condemnation, or at least the condemnation of our pride.”
I dared, for the first and last time in my life, to express a theological conclusion: “But how can a necessary being exist totally polluted with the possible? What difference is there, then, between God and primigenial chaos? Isn’t affirming God’s absolute omnipotence and His absolute freedom with regard to His own choices tantamount to demonstrating that God does not exist?”
William looked at me without betraying any feeling in his features, and he said, “How could a learned man go on communicating his learning if he answered yes to your question?” I did not understand the meaning of his words. “Do you mean,” I asked, “that there would be no possible and communicable learning any more if the very criterion of truth were lacking, or do you mean you could no longer communicate what you know because others would not allow you to?”
At that moment a section of the dormitory roof collapsed with a huge din, blowing a cloud of sparks into the sky. Some of the sheep and the goats wandering through the grounds went past us, bleating horribly. A group of servants also went by us, shouting, nearly knocking us down.
“There is too much confusion here,” William said. “Non in commotione, non in commotione Dominus.”
LAST PAGE
The abbey burned for three days and three nights, and the last efforts were of no avail. As early as that morning of the seventh day of our sojourn in that place, when the survivors were fully aware that no building could be saved, when the finest constructions showed only their ruined outer walls, and the church, as if drawing into itself, swallowed its tower—even at that point everyone’s will to combat the divine chastisement failed. The rush for the last few buckets of water grew more and more listless, while the chapter house and the superb apartments of the abbot were still quietly burning.
By the time the fire reached the far side of the various workshops, the servants had long since saved as many objects as they could, and had chosen to beat the countryside to recapture at least some of the livestock, which had fled beyond the walls in the confusion of the night.
I saw some of the servants venture into what remained of the church: I presumed they were trying to get into the crypt to seize some precious object before running away. I do not know whether they succeeded, whether the crypt had not already collapsed, whether the louts did not sink into the bowels of the earth in their attempt to reach the treasure.
Meanwhile, men were coming up from the village to lend a hand or to try to snatch some further booty. The dead for the most part remained among the ruins, which were still red-hot. On the third day, when the wounded had been treated and the corpses found outside had been buried, the monks and all the others collected their belongings and abandoned the still-smoking abbey, as a place accursed. They scattered, I do not know whereto.
William and I left those parts on two horses we found astray in the wood; we considered them res nullius by now. We headed east. When we reached Bobbio again, we began to receive bad news of the Emperor. On arriving in Rome, he had been crowned by the people. Considering any agreement with John now impossible, he had chosen an antipope, Nicholas V. Marsilius had been named spiritual vicar of Rome, but through his fault, or his weakness, things very sad to report were taking place in that city. Priests loyal to the Pope and unwilling to say Mass were tortured, an Augustinian prior had been thrown into the lions’ pit on the Capitoline. Marsilius and John of Jandun had declared John a heretic, and Louis had had him sentenced to death. But the Emperor’s misrule was antagonizing the local lords and depleting public funds. Gradually, as we heard this news, we delayed our descent to Rome, and I realized that William did not want to find himself witnessing events that would dash his hopes.
When we came to Pomposa, we learned that Rome had rebelled against Louis, who had moved back up toward Pisa, while John’s legates were triumphantly entering the papal city.
Meanwhile, Michael of Cesena had realized that his presence in Avignon was producing no results—indeed, he feared for his life—so he had fled, joining Louis in Pisa.
Soon, foreseeing events and learning that the Bavarian would move on to Munich, we reversed our route and decided to proceed there, also because William sensed that Italy was becoming unsafe for him. In the ensuing months and years, Louis saw the alliance of his supporters, the Ghibelline lords, dissolve; and the following year the Antipope Nicholas was to surrender to John, presenting himself with a rope around his neck.
When we came to Munich, I had to take leave of my good master, amid many tears. His destiny was uncertain, and my family preferred for me to return to Melk. After that tragic night when William revealed to me his dismay before the ruins of the abbey, as if by tacit agreement we had not spoken again of that story. Nor did we mention it in the course of our sorrowful farewell.
My master gave me much good advice about my future studies, and presented me with the glasses Nicholas had made for him, since he had his own back again. I was still young, he said to me, but one day they would come in handy (and, truly, I am wearing them as I write these lines). Then he embraced me with a father’s tenderness and dismissed me.
I never saw him again. I learned much later that he had died during the great plague that raged through Europe toward the middle of this century. I pray always that God received his soul and forgave him the many acts of pride that his intellectual vanity had made him commit.
Years later, as a grown man, I had occasion to make a journey to Italy, sent by my abbot. I could not resist temptation, and on my return I went far out of my way to revisit what remained of the abbey.
The two villages on the slopes of the mountain were deserted, the lands around them uncultivated. When I climbed up to the top, a spectacle of desolation and death appeared before my eyes, which moistened with tears.
Of the great and magnificent constructions that once adorned that place, only scattered ruins remained, as had happened before with t
he monuments of the ancient pagans in the city of Rome. Ivy covered the shreds of walls, columns, the few architraves still intact. Weeds invaded the ground on all sides, and there was no telling where the vegetables and the flowers had once grown. Only the location of the cemetery was recognizable, because of some graves that still rose above the level of the terrain. Sole sign of life, some birds of prey hunted lizards and serpents that, like basilisks, slithered among the stones or crawled over the walls. Of the church door only a few traces remained, eroded by mold. Half of the tympanum survived, and I still glimpsed there, dilated by the elements and dulled by lichens, the left eye of the enthroned Christ, and something of the lion’s face.
The Aedificium, except for the south wall, which was in ruins, seemed yet to stand and defy the course of time. The two outer towers, over the cliff, appeared almost untouched, but all the windows were empty sockets whose slimy tears were rotting vines. Inside, the work of art, destroyed, became confused with the work of nature, and across vast stretches of the kitchen the eye ran to the open heavens through the breach of the upper floors and the roof, fallen like fallen angels. Everything that was not green with moss was still black from the smoke of so many decades ago.
Poking about in the rubble, I found at times scraps of parchment that had drifted down from the scriptorium and the library and had survived like treasures buried in the earth; I began to collect them, as if I were going to piece together the torn pages of a book. Then I noticed that in one of the towers there rose, tottering but still intact, a circular staircase to the scriptorium, and from there, by climbing a sloping bit of the ruin, I could reach the level of the library: which, however, was only a sort of gallery next to the outside walls, looking down into the void at every point.
