The Name of the Rose (24 page)

“Nobody around? I foresaw that. He didn't go out through a door? He didn't take the passage through the ossarium?”

“No, he went out through here, but I don't know where!”

“I told you: there are other passages, and it's useless for us to look for them. Perhaps our man is emerging at some distant spot. And with him my lenses.”

“Your lenses?”

“Yes. Our friend could not take the page away from me, but with great presence of mind, as he rushed past, he snatched my glasses from the desk.”

“Why?”

“Because he is no fool. He heard me speak of these notes, he realized they were important, he assumed that without my lenses I would be unable to decipher them, and he knows for sure that I would not entrust them to anyone else. In fact, now it's as if I didn't have them.”

“But how did he know about your lenses?”

“Come, come. Apart from the fact that we spoke about them yesterday with the master glazier, this morning in the scriptorium I put them on to search among Venantius's papers. So there are many people who could know how valuable those objects are to me. Actually, I could read a normal manuscript, but not this one.” And he was again unrolling the mysterious parchment. “The part in Greek is written too fine and the upper part is too hazy. . . .”

He showed me the mysterious signs that had appeared as if by magic in the heat of the flame. “Venantius wanted to conceal an important secret, and he used one of those inks that leave no trace when written but reappear when warmed. Or else he used lemon juice. But since I don't know what substance he used and the signs could disappear again: quickly, you who have good eyes, copy them at once as faithfully as you can, perhaps enlarging them a bit.” And so I did, without knowing what I was copying. It was a series of four or five lines, really necromantic, and I will reproduce only the very first signs, to give the reader an idea of the puzzle I had before my eyes:

 

 

When I had finished copying, William looked, unfortunately without lenses, holding my tablet at some distance from his nose. “It is unquestionably a secret alphabet that will have to be deciphered,” he said. “The signs are badly drawn, and perhaps you copied them worse, but it is certainly a zodiacal alphabet. You see? In the first line we have”—he held the page away from him again and narrowed his eyes with an effort of concentration—“Sagittarius, Sun, Mercury, Scorpio. . . .”

“And what do they mean?”

“If Venantius had been ingenuous he would have used the most common zodiacal alphabet:
A
equals Sun,
B
equals Jupiter. . . . The first line would then read . . . Try transcribing this:
RAIQASVL
. . . .” He broke off. “No, it means nothing, and Venantius was not ingenuous. He reformulated the alphabet according to another key. I shall have to discover it.”

“Is it possible?” I asked, awed.

“Yes, if you know a bit of the learning of the Arabs. The best treatises on cryptography are the work of infidel scholars, and at Oxford I was able to have some read to me. Bacon was right in saying that the conquest of learning is achieved through the knowledge of languages. Abu Bakr Ahmad ben Ali ben Washiyya an-Nabati wrote centuries ago a
Book of the Frenzied Desire of the Devout to Learn the Riddles of Ancient Writings,
and he expounded many rules for composing and deciphering mysterious alphabets, useful for magic practices but also for the correspondence between armies, or between a king and his envoys. I have seen other Arab books that list a series of quite ingenious devices. For example, you can substitute one letter for another, you can write a word backward, you can put the letters in reverse order, using only every other one; and then starting over again, you can, as in this case, replace letters with zodiacal signs, but attributing to the hidden letters their numerical value, and then, according to another alphabet, convert the numbers into other letters. . . .”

“And which of these systems can Venantius have used?”

“We would have to test them all, and others besides. But the first rule in deciphering a message is to guess what it means.”

“But then it's unnecessary to decipher it!” I laughed.

“Not exactly. Some hypotheses can be formed on the possible first words of the message, and then you see whether the rule you infer from them can apply to the rest of the text. For example, here Venantius has certainly noted down the key for penetrating the finis Africae. If I try thinking that the message is about this, then I am suddenly enlightened by a rhythm. . . . Try looking at the first three words, not considering the letters, but the number of the signs . . . IIIIIIII IIIII IIIIIII. . . . Now try dividing them into syllables of at least two signs each, and recite aloud: ta-ta-ta, ta-ta, ta-ta-ta. . . . Doesn't anything come to your mind?”

“No.”

“To mine, yes. ‘Secretum finis Africae' . . . But if this were correct, then the last word should have the same first and sixth letter, and so it does, in fact: the symbol of the Earth is there twice. And the first letter of the first word, the
S,
should be the same as the last of the second: and, sure enough, the sign of the Virgin is repeated. Perhaps this is the right track. But it could also be just a series of coincidences. A rule of correspondence has to be found. . . .”

“Found where?”

“In our heads. Invent it. And then see whether it is the right one. But with one test and another, the game could cost me a whole day. No more than that because—remember this—there is no secret writing that cannot be deciphered with a bit of patience. But now we risk losing time, and we want to visit the library. Especially since, without lenses, I will never be able to read the second part of the message, and you cannot help me because these signs, to your eyes . . .”

“Graecum est, non legitur,” I finished his sentence, humiliated. “It is Greek to me.”

“Exactly; and you see that Bacon was right. Study! But we must not lose heart. We'll put away the parchment and your notes, and we'll go up to the library. Because tonight not even ten infernal legions will succeed in keeping us out.”

I blessed myself. “But who can he have been, the man who was here ahead of us? Benno?”

“Benno was burning with the desire to know what there was among Venantius's papers, but I can't see him as one with the courage to enter the Aedificium at night.”

“Berengar, then? Or Malachi?”

“Berengar seems to me to have the courage to do such things. And, after all, he shares responsibility for the library. He is consumed by remorse at having betrayed some secret of it; he thought Venantius had taken that book, and perhaps he wanted to return it to the place from which it comes. He wasn't able to go upstairs, and now he is hiding the volume somewhere.”

“But it could also be Malachi, for the same motives.”

“I would say no. Malachi had all the time he wanted to search Venantius's desk when he remained alone to shut up the Aedificium. I knew that very well, but there was no way to avoid it. Now we know he didn't do it. And if you think carefully, we have no reason to think Malachi knows Venantius had entered the library and removed something. Berengar and Benno know this, and you and I know it. After Adelmo's confession, Jorge may know it, but he was surely not the man who was rushing so furiously down the circular staircase. . . .”

“Then either Berengar or Benno . . .”

“And why not Pacificus of Tivoli or another of the monks we saw here today? Or Nicholas the glazier, who knows about my glasses? Or that odd character Salvatore, who they have told us roams around at night on God knows what errands? We must take care not to restrict the field of suspects just because Benno's revelations have oriented us in a single direction; perhaps Benno wanted to mislead us.”

“But he seemed sincere to you.”

“Certainly. But remember that the first duty of a good inquisitor is to suspect especially those who seem sincere to him.”

“A nasty job, being an inquisitor.”

“That's why I gave it up. And as you say, I am forced to resume it. But come now: to the library.”

In which the labyrinth is finally broached, and the intruders have strange visions and, as happens in labyrinths, lose their way.

 

We climbed back up to
the scriptorium, this time by the east staircase, which rose also to the forbidden floor. Holding the light high before us, I thought of Alinardo's words about the labyrinth, and I expected frightful things.

I was surprised, as we emerged into the place we should not have entered, at finding myself in a not very large room with seven sides, windowless, where there reigned—as, for that matter, throughout the whole floor—a strong odor of stagnation or mold. Nothing terrifying.

The room, as I said, had seven walls, but only four of them had an opening, a passage flanked by two little columns set in the wall; the opening was fairly wide, surmounted by a round-headed arch. Against the blind walls stood huge cases, laden with books neatly arranged. Each case bore a scroll with a number, and so did each individual shelf; obviously the same numbers we had seen in the catalogue. In the midst of the room was a table, also covered with books. On all the volumes lay a fairly light coat of dust, sign that the books were cleaned with some frequency. Nor was there dirt of any kind on the floor. Above one of the archways, a big scroll, painted on the wall, bore the words “Apocalypsis Iesu Christi.” It did not seem faded, even though the lettering was ancient. We noticed afterward, also in the other rooms, that these scrolls were actually carved in the stone, cut fairly deeply, and the depressions had subsequently been filled with color.

We passed through one of the openings. We found ourselves in another room, where there was a window that, in place of glass panes, had slabs of alabaster, with two blind walls and one aperture, like the one we had just come through. It opened into another room, which also had two blind walls, another with a window, and another passage that opened opposite us. In these two rooms, the two scrolls were similar in form to the first we had seen, but with different words. The scroll in the first room said “Super thronos viginti quatuor,” and the one in the second room, “Nomen illi mors.” For the rest, even though the two rooms were smaller than the one by which we had entered the library (actually, that one was heptagonal, these two rectangular), the furnishing was the same.

We entered the third room. It was bare of books and had no scroll. Under the window, a stone altar. There were three doors: the one by which we had entered; another, leading to the heptagonal room already visited; and a third, which led to a new room, no different from the others except for the scroll, which said “Obscuratus est sol et aer,” announcing the growing darkness of sun and air. From here you went into a new room, whose scroll said “Facta est grando et ignis,” threatening turmoil and fire. This room was without other apertures: once you reached it, you could proceed no farther and had to turn back.

“Let us think about this,” William said. “Five quadrangular or vaguely trapezoidal rooms, each with one window, arranged around a windowless heptagonal room to which the stairway leads. It seems elementary to me. We are in the east tower. From the outside each tower shows five windows and five sides. It works out. The empty room is the one facing east, the same direction as the choir of the church; the dawn sun illuminates the altar, which I find right and pious. The only clever idea, it seems to me, is the use of alabaster slabs. In the daytime they admit a fine light, and at night not even the moon's rays can penetrate. Now let's see where the other two doors of the heptagonal room lead.”

My master was mistaken, and the builders of the library had been shrewder than we thought. I cannot explain clearly what happened, but as we left the tower room, the order of the rooms became more confused. Some had two doorways, others three. All had one window each, even those we entered from a windowed room, thinking we were heading toward the interior of the Aedificium. Each had always the same kind of cases and tables; the books arrayed in neat order seemed all the same and certainly did not help us to recognize our location at a glance. We tried to orient ourselves by the scrolls. Once we crossed a room in which was written “In diebus illis,” “In those days,” and after some roaming we thought we had come back to it. But we remembered that the door opposite the window led into a room whose scroll said “Primogenitus mortuorum,” “The firstborn of the dead,” whereas now we came upon another that again said “Apocalypsis Iesu Christi,” though it was not the heptagonal room from which we had set out. This fact convinced us that sometimes the scrolls repeated the same words in different rooms. We found two rooms with “Apocalypsis” one after the other, and, immediately following them, one with “Cecidit de coelo stella magna,” “A great star fell from the heavens.”