The Name of the Rose (41 page)

 

I was in this good frame of mind when my master came upon me. Drawn by my feet and without realizing it, I had almost circled the abbey, and found myself back where we had parted two hours before. There was William, and what he told me jolted me from my thoughts and directed my mind again to the obscure mysteries of the abbey.

William seemed well pleased. In his hand he had Venantius's parchment, which he had finally deciphered. We went to his cell, far from indiscreet ears, and he translated for me what he had read. After the sentence in zodiacal alphabet (Secretum finis Africae manus supra idolum primum et septimum de quatuor), this is what the Greek text said:

 

The terrible poison that gives purification . . .

The best weapon for destroying the enemy . . .

Use humble persons, base and ugly, take pleasure from their defect. . . . They must not die. . . . Not in the houses of the noble and the powerful but from the peasants' villages, after abundant meal and libations . . . Squat bodies, deformed faces.

They rape virgins and lie with whores, not evil, without fear.

A different truth, a different image of the truth . . .

The venerable figs.

The shameless stone rolls over the plain. . . . Before the eyes.

Deceit is necessary and to surprise in deceit, to say the opposite of what is believed, to say one thing and mean another.

To them the cicadas will sing from the ground.

 

That was all. In my opinion too little, almost nothing. The words seemed the ravings of a madman, and I said as much to William.

“Perhaps. And it surely seems even madder thanks to my translation. My knowledge of Greek is rather scanty. And yet, even if we assume that Venantius was mad or that the author of the book was mad, this would not tell us why so many people, not all of them mad, went to great trouble, first to hide the book and then to recover it. . . .”

“But do the things written here come from the mysterious book?”

“They are unquestionably things written by Venantius. You can see for yourself: this is not an ancient parchment. And these must be notes taken down while he was reading the book; otherwise Venantius would not have written in Greek. He has certainly copied, condensing them, some sentences he found in the book stolen from the finis Africae. He carried it to the scriptorium and began to read it, noting down what seemed to him noteworthy. Then something happened. Either he felt ill, or he heard someone coming up. So he put the book, with his notes, under his desk, probably planning to pick it up again the next evening. In any case, this page is our only possible starting point in re-creating the nature of the mysterious book, and it's only from the nature of that book that we will be able to infer the nature of the murderer. For in every crime committed to possess an object, the nature of the object should give us an idea, however faint, of the nature of the assassin. If someone kills for a handful of gold, he will be a greedy person; if for a book, he will be anxious to keep for himself the secrets of that book. So we must find out what is said in the book we do not have.”

“And from these few lines will you be able to understand what that book is?”

“Dear Adso, these seem like the words of a holy text, whose meaning goes beyond the letter. Reading them this morning, after we had spoken with the cellarer, I was struck by the fact that here, too, there are references to the humble folk and to peasants as bearers of a truth different from that of the wise. The cellarer hinted that some strange complicity bound him to Malachi. Can Malachi have hidden a dangerous heretical text that Remigio had entrusted to him? Then Venantius would have read and annotated some mysterious instructions concerning a community of rough and base men in revolt against everything and everybody. But . . .”

“But?”

“But two facts work against this hypothesis of mine. The first is that Venantius didn't seem interested in such questions: he was a translator of Greek texts, not a preacher of heresies. The other is that sentences like the ones about the figs and the stone and the cicadas would not be explained by this first hypothesis. . . .”

“Perhaps they are riddles with another meaning,” I ventured. “Or do you have another hypothesis?”

“I have, but it is still vague. It seemed to me, as I read this page, that I had read some of these words before, and some phrases that are almost the same, which I have seen elsewhere, return to my mind. It seems to me, indeed, that this page speaks of something there has been talk about during these past days. . . . But I cannot recall what. I must think it over. Perhaps I'll have to read other books.”

“Why? To know what one book says you must read others?”

“At times this can be so. Often books speak of other books. Often a harmless book is like a seed that will blossom into a dangerous book, or it is the other way around: it is the sweet fruit of a bitter stem. In reading Albert, couldn't I learn what Thomas might have said? Or in reading Thomas, know what Averroës said?”

“True,” I said, amazed. Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.

“But then,” I said, “what is the use of hiding books, if from the books not hidden you can arrive at the concealed ones?”

“Over the centuries it is no use at all. In a space of years or days it has some use. You see, in fact, how bewildered we are.”

“And is a library, then, an instrument not for distributing the truth but for delaying its appearance?” I asked, dumbfounded.

“Not always and not necessarily. In this case it is.”

In which Adso goes hunting for truffles and sees the Minorites arriving, they confer at length with William and Ubertino, and very sad things are learned about John XXII.

 

After these considerations
my master decided to proceed no further. I have already said that he occasionally had moments of total inactivity, as if the ceaseless cycle of the stars had stopped, and he with it and with them. And so it was that morning. He stretched out on his pallet, staring into the void, his hands folded on his chest, barely moving his lips, as if he were reciting a prayer, but irregularly and without devotion.

I thought he was thinking, and I resolved to respect his meditation. I returned to the courtyard and saw that the sun had grown weaker. Beautiful and clear as it had been, the morning (as the day approached the completion of its first half) was becoming damp and misty. Heavy clouds moved from the north and were invading the top of the mountain, covering it with a light brume. It seemed to be fog, and perhaps fog was also rising from the ground, but at that altitude it was difficult to distinguish the mists that rose from below and those that came down from above. It was becoming hard to discern the bulk of the more distant buildings.

I saw Severinus gaily assembling the swineherds and some of their animals. He told me he was going to descend along the mountain slopes, and into the valley, to hunt for truffles. I wasn't familiar with that choice fruit of the underbrush, which was found in the peninsula and seemed typical especially of the Benedictine domains, whether at Norcia—the black ones—or in these lands—the white and more aromatic. Severinus explained to me what a truffle was, and how tasty, when prepared in the most diverse ways. And he told me it was very difficult to find, because it was hidden underground, more secret than a mushroom, and the only animals capable of unearthing it were pigs, following their smell. But on finding it they wanted to devour it themselves, and they had to be chased off at once, so that you could step in and dig up the truffle. I learned later that many lords did not disdain to join this hunt, following the pigs as if they were noblest hounds, and followed, in turn, by servants with hoes. I remember, indeed, that in later years a lord of my country, knowing I was acquainted with Italy, asked me why, as he had seen down there, some lords went out to pasture their pigs; and I laughed, realizing that, on the contrary, they were going in search of truffles. But when I told him that these lords hoped to find the “truffle” underground, to eat it, he thought I had said they were seeking “der Teufel,” the Devil, and he blessed himself devoutly, looking at me in amazement. Then the misunderstanding was cleared up and we both laughed at it. Such is the magic of human languages, that by human accord often the same sounds mean different things.

My curiosity aroused by Severinus's preparations, I decided to follow him, also because I realized he was turning to this hunt in order to forget the sad events that oppressed everyone; and I thought that in helping him to forget his thoughts I would perhaps, if not forget, at least restrain my own. Nor will I deny, since I have determined to write always and only the truth, that I was secretly lured by the idea that, down in the valley, I might perhaps glimpse someone I will not mention. But to myself and almost aloud I declared that, since the two legations were expected to arrive that day, I might perhaps sight one of them.

As we gradually descended the curves of the mountain, the air became clearer. Not that the sun returned, for the upper part of the sky was heavy with clouds, but things stood out sharply, even as the fog remained above our heads. Indeed, when we had gone some distance, I turned to look up at the top of the mountain and could no longer see anything. From the halfway point upward, the summit, the high plain, the Aedificium—everything had disappeared among the clouds.

The morning of our arrival, when we were already among the mountains, at certain bends it was still possible to view the sea, no more than ten miles away, perhaps even less. Our journey had been rich in surprises, because suddenly we would find ourselves on a kind of terrace in the mountain, which fell sharply down to beautiful bays, and then a little later we would enter deep chasms, where mountains rose among mountains, and one blocked from another the sight of the distant shore, while the sun could hardly force its way into the deep valleys. Never before had I seen, as I saw in that part of Italy, such narrow and sudden juttings of sea and mountains, of shores followed by alpine landscapes, and in the wind that whistled among the gorges you could catch the alternate conflict of the marine balms with icy mountain gusts.

That morning, however, all was gray, almost milky white, and there were no horizons even when the gorges opened out toward the distant shores. But I am dwelling on recollections of little interest as far as my story goes. So I will not narrate the ups and downs of our search for “der Teufel,” and I will tell, rather, of the legation of Friars Minor, which I was the first to sight. I ran at once to the monastery to inform William.

My master waited till the newcomers had entered and been greeted by the abbot according to the ritual. Then he went to meet the group, and there was a series of fraternal embraces and salutations.

The meal hour had already passed, but a table had been set for the guests, and the abbot thoughtfully left us among them; alone with William, exempted from the obligations of the Rule, they were free to eat and at the same time exchange their impressions. After all, it was, God forgive me the unpleasant simile, like a council of war, to be held as quickly as possible before the enemy host, namely the Avignon legation, could arrive.

Needless to say, the newcomers also promptly met Ubertino, whom all greeted with surprise, joy, veneration inspired not only by his long absence and by the fears surrounding his disappearance, but also by the qualities of that courageous warrior who for decades had fought their same battle.

Of the friars that made up the group I will speak later, when I tell about the next day's meeting. For that matter, I talked very little with them at first, involved as I was in the three-man conference promptly established between William, Ubertino, and Michael of Cesena.

Michael was most ardent in his Franciscan passion (he had at times the gestures, the accents of Ubertino in his moments of mystical transport) but very jovial in his earthly nature, a man of the Romagna, capable of appreciating a good table and happy to be among his friends. Subtle and evasive, he could abruptly become sly and clever as a fox, elusive as a mole, when problems of relations among the mighty were touched upon; capable of great outbursts of laughter, fervid tensions, eloquent silences, deft in turning his gaze away from his interlocutor if the latter's question required him to conceal, with what seemed absent-mindedness, his refusal to reply.

I have already said something about him, and those were things I had heard said, but now I understood better many of his contradictory attitudes and the sudden changes of political strategy that in recent years had amazed his own friends and followers. Minister general of the order of the Friars Minor, he was in principle the heir of Saint Francis, and actually the heir of his interpreters: he had to compete with the sanctity and wisdom of such a predecessor as Bonaventure of Bagnoregio; he had to assure respect for the Rule and, at the same time, the fortunes of the order, so powerful and vast; he had to keep an eye on the courts and on the city magistrates from whom the order, though in the guise of alms, received gifts and bequests, source of prosperity and wealth; and at the same time he had to make sure that the requirement of penance did not lead the more ardent Spirituals to abandon the order, scattering that splendid community of which he was the head, in a constellation of bands of heretics. He had to please the Pope, the Emperor, the Friars of the Poor Life, and Saint Francis, who was certainly watching over him from heaven, as well as the Christian people, who were watching him from the earth. When John had condemned all Spirituals as heretics, Michael had not hesitated to hand over to him five of the most unruly friars of Provence, allowing the Pontiff to burn them at the stake. But realizing (and Ubertino may have had some share in this) that many in the order sympathized with the followers of evangelical simplicity, Michael had then acted in such a way that the chapter of Perugia, four years later, took up the demands of the burned men, naturally trying to reconcile a need, which could be heretical, with the ways and institutions of the order, and trying to harmonize the desires of the order and those of the Pope. But, as Michael was busy convincing the Pope, without whose consent he would have been unable to proceed, he had been willing also to accept the favors of the Emperor and the imperial theologians. Two years before the day I saw him he had yet enjoined his monks, in the chapter general of Lyons, to speak of the Pope's person only with moderation and respect (and this was just a few months after the Pope, referring to the Minorites, had complained of “their yelping, their errors, their insanities”). But here he was at table, friendly, with persons who spoke of the Pope with less than no respect.