by Ian Caldwell
Paul stands beside the man now. He places a hand on Curry’s back, almost cautiously, and whispers something, but the old man shakes his head.
“I am here,” Curry says, loudly enough that people in the front row turn to get a glimpse, “to say something of my own.”
By now Taft has stopped talking. Every face in the hall is fixed on the stranger. He reaches up and runs his hand over his head. Glaring at Taft, he speaks again.
“The language of violence?” he says, in a shrill, unfamiliar voice. “I heard this lecture thirty years ago, Vincent, when you thought I was your audience.” He turns to the crowd and spreads his arms, addressing them all. “Did he tell you about Saint Lawrence? Saint Quentin? Saint Elmo and the windlass? Hasn’t anything changed, Vincent?”
There are murmurs through the audience as people register Curry’s scorn. From one corner there is laughter.
“This, my friends,” Curry continues, pointing at the stage, “is a hack. A fool and a crook.” He turns to focus on Taft. “Even a charlatan can fool the same man twice, Vincent. But you? You prey on the innocent.” He places his fingers to his lips and forms a kiss. “Bravissimo, il Fraudolento!” Lifting his arms, he encourages the audience to stand. “An ovation, my friends. Three cheers for Saint Vincent, patron saint of thieves.”
Taft meets the intrusion grimly. “Why have you come here, Richard?”
“They know each other?” Charlie whispers.
Paul is trying to distract Curry, telling him to stop, but Curry continues.
“Why have you come here, old friend? Is this theater or scholarship? What will you steal this time, now that the portmaster’s book is out of your hands?”
At this, Taft lurches forward and booms, “Stop this. What are you doing?”
But Curry’s voice escapes like a conjured spirit. “Where have you put the piece of leather from the diary, Vincent? Tell me and I’ll leave. You can carry on with this farce of yours.”
The shadows of the lecture hall creep unpleasantly across Curry’s face. Professor Henderson finally shoots to her feet and barks, “Someone get security!”
A proctor is already within arm’s reach of Curry when Taft waves him off. His self-possession has returned.
“No,” the ogre growls. “Let him go. He will leave of his own accord. Won’t you, Richard? Before they have to arrest you?”
Curry is unmoved. “Look at us, Vincent. Twenty-five years, and still waging the same war. Tell me where the blueprint is and you won’t see me again. That’s the only business we have anymore. The rest of this”—Curry sweeps his arms across the lecture hall, encompassing everything—“is worthless.”
“Get out, Richard,” Taft says.
“You and I tried and failed,” Curry continues. “What do the Italians say? There’s no worse thief than a bad book. Let’s be men about it and step aside. Where’s the blueprint?”
There are whispers all around. The proctor edges between Curry and Paul—but to my surprise, Curry suddenly lowers his head and begins to move toward the far aisle. The animation in his face disappears.
“You old fool,” he says, addressing Taft even with his back toward the stage. “Act on.”
Students against the wall push toward the front of the auditorium, keeping their distance. Paul stands rooted to the spot, watching his friend depart.
“Leave, Richard,” Taft instructs from the podium. “Don’t return.”
We all follow Curry’s slow progress toward the exit. The sophomore at the door watches with wide, fearful eyes. In a moment he passes across the threshold, into the anteroom, and is gone from sight.
Intense murmuring seizes the lecture hall as soon as he has vanished.
“What the hell was that?” I ask, looking back at the exit.
In our corner, Gil steps over toward Paul.
“Are you okay?”
Paul is fumbling. “I don’t understand . . .”
Gil places an arm over his shoulder. “What did you say to him?”
“Nothing,” Paul says. “I have to go after him.” His hands are shaking, the diary still tucked between them. “I need to talk to him.”
Charlie begins to protest, but Paul is too upset to argue. Before any of us can insist otherwise, he turns and heads for the door.
“I’ll go with him,” I say to Charlie.
He nods. Taft’s voice has begun to roll again in the background, and when I look up at the stage on the way out, the giant seems to be staring directly at me. From her seat, Katie catches my attention. She mouths a question about Paul, but I can’t understand what she’s saying. Zipping my coat, I head out of the auditorium.
In the courtyard, canopies lurch like skeletons in the dark, dancing on their peg legs. The wind has softened, but the snow continues, thicker than before. Around the corner I hear Paul’s voice.
“Are you okay?”
I turn the corner. Not ten feet away is Richard Curry, jacket fluttering in the wind.
“What’s wrong?” Paul asks.
“Get back inside,” Curry says.
I step forward to hear more, but snow crunches beneath my feet. Curry looks over, and their conversation halts. I expect some spark of recognition in his eyes, but find none. After putting his hand on Paul’s shoulder, Curry slowly backs away.
“Richard! Can’t we talk somewhere?” Paul calls out.
But the old man distances himself quickly, slipping his arms into his suit jacket. He doesn’t answer.
It takes me a second to regain my wits and go to Paul’s side. Together we watch Curry disappear into the shadow of the chapel.
“I need to find out where Bill got the diary,” he says.
“Right now?”
Paul nods.
“Where is he?”
“Taft’s office at the Institute.”
I look out across the courtyard. Paul’s only transportation is an old Datsun he bought with his stipend from Curry. The Institute is a long way from here.
“Why’d you leave the lecture?” he asks.
“I thought you might need some help.”
My bottom lip is shivering. Snow is gathering in Paul’s hair.
“I’ll be okay,” he says.
But he’s the one without a coat.
“Come on. We can drive out there together.”
He looks down at his shoes. “I have to talk to him alone.”
“You’re sure?”
He nods.
“At least take this,” I offer, unzipping the peacoat.
He smiles. “Thanks.”
“Call us if you need anything.”
Paul puts on the coat and slips the diary under his arm. After a second he begins walking off into the snow.
“You’re sure you don’t want help?” I shout before he’s out of earshot.
He turns back, but only to nod.
Good luck, I say, almost to myself.
And as the cold plunges below the neckline of my shirt, I know there’s nothing left to do. When Paul vanishes into the distance, I head back inside.
On my way up to the auditorium I pass by the blonde without a word and find that Charlie and Gil haven’t moved from their spot in the rear of the lecture hall. They pay me no attention; Taft has won their interest. His voice is hypnotic.
“Everything okay?” Gil whispers.
I nod, not wanting to get into the details.
“Certain modern interpreters,” Taft is saying, “have been content to accept that the book conforms to many conventions of an old Renaissance genre, the bucolic romance. But if the Hypnerotomachia is just a conventional love story, then why are only thirty pages devoted to the romance between Poliphilo and Polia? Why do the other three hundred and forty pages form a maze of subplots, strange encounters with mythological figures, dissertations on esoteric subjects? If only one out of every ten words pertains to the romance itself, then how do we explain the other ninety percent of the book?”
Charlie turns to me again. “Do you know all this stuff?
”
“Yeah.” I’ve heard the same lecture a dozen times over the dinner table at home.
“In short, it is no mere love story. Poliphilo’s ‘struggle for love in a dream’—as the Latin title would have it—is much more complex than boy-meets-girl. For five hundred years scholars have exposed the book to the most powerful interpretive tools of their day, and not one of them has found a way out of the labyrinth.
“How difficult is the Hypnerotomachia? Consider how its translators have fared. The first French translator condensed the opening sentence, which was originally more than seventy words long, into less than a dozen. Robert Dallington, a contemporary of Shakespeare’s who attempted a closer translation, simply despaired. He gave up before he was halfway through. No English translation has been attempted since. Western intellectuals have considered the book a byword for obscurity almost since it was published. Rabelais made fun of it. Castiglione warned Renaissance men not to speak like Poliphilo when wooing women.
“Why, then, is it so difficult to understand? Because it contains not only Latin and Italian, but also Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Chaldean, and Egyptian hieroglyphics. The author wrote in several of them at once, sometimes interchangeably. When those languages were not enough, he invented words of his own.
“In addition, there are mysteries surrounding the book. To begin with, until very recently no one knew who wrote it. The secret of the author’s identity was so closely guarded that not even the great Aldus himself, its publisher, knew who’d composed his most famous work. One of the Hypnerotomachia’s editors wrote an introduction to it in which he asks the Muses to reveal the author’s name. The Muses refuse. They explain that ‘it is better to be cautious, to keep divine things from being devoured by vengeful jealousy.’
“My question to you, then, is this: Why would the author have gone to such trouble if he were writing nothing more than a bucolic romance? Why so many languages? Why two hundred pages on architecture? Why eighteen pages on a temple of Venus, or twelve on an underwater labyrinth? Why fifty on a pyramid? Or another hundred and forty on gems and metals, ballet and music, food and table settings, flora and fauna?
“Perhaps more important, what Roman could have learned so much about so many subjects, mastered so many languages, and convinced the greatest printer in Italy to publish his mysterious book without so much as mentioning his name?
“Above all, what were the ‘divine things’ alluded to in the introduction, which the Muses refused to divulge? What was the vengeful jealousy they feared these things might inspire?
“The answer is that this is no romance. The author must have intended something else—something that we scholars have as yet failed to understand. But where do we begin searching for it?
“I do not intend to answer that question for you. Instead, I will leave you with a puzzle of your own to muse over. Solve this, and you are one step closer to understanding what the Hypnerotomachia means.”
With that, Taft triggers the slide machine with a pump of his palm on the remote. Three images appear over the screen, disarming in their stark black and white.
“These are three prints from the Hypnerotomachia, depicting a nightmare that Polia suffers late in the story. As she relates, the first shows a child riding a burning chariot into a forest, drawn by two naked women whom he whips like beasts. Polia looks on from her hiding place in the woods.
“The second print shows the child releasing the women by slicing their red-hot chains with an iron sword. He then thrusts the sword through each of them, and once they are dead, he dismembers them.
“In the final print, the child has torn out the still-beating hearts of the two women from their corpses and fed them to birds of prey. The innards he feeds to eagles. Then, after quartering the bodies, he throws the rest to the dogs, wolves, and lions that have gathered about.
“When Polia awakens from this dream, her nurse explains that the child is Cupid, and that the women were young maidens who offended him by refusing the affections of their suitors. Polia deduces that she has been wrong to rebuff Poliphilo.”
Taft pauses, turning his back to the audience in order to contemplate the enormous images that seem to float in the air at his back.
“But what if we suppose that the explicit meaning is not the real meaning?” he says, his back still to us, in a disembodied voice that resonates through the microphone on his chest. “What if the nurse’s interpretation of the dream is not, in fact, the right one? What if we were to use the punishment inflicted on these women to decipher what their crime truly was?
“Consider a legal punishment for high treason that survived among certain European nations for centuries before and after the Hypnerotomachia was written. A criminal convicted of high treason was first drawn—meaning that he was tied to the tail of a horse and dragged across the ground through the city. He was brought in this way to the gallows, where he was hanged until he was not fully dead, but only half-dead. At this time he was cut down, and the entrails were sliced from his body and burned before him by the executioner. His heart was removed and displayed to the assembled crowd. The executioner then decapitated the carcass, quartered the remains, and displayed the pieces on pikes in public locations, to serve as a deterrent to future traitors.”
Taft returns his focus to the audience as he says this, to see its reaction. Now he circles back toward the slides.
“With this in mind, let us reconsider our pictures. We see that many of the details correspond to the punishment I’ve just described. The victims are drawn to the location of their deaths—or rather, perhaps a bit ironically, they draw the executioner’s chariot themselves. They are dismembered, and their limbs are shown to the assembled crowd, which in this instance consists of wild animals.
“Instead of being hanged, however, the women are slain with a sword. What are we to make of this? One possible explanation is that beheading, either by ax or sword, was a punishment reserved for those of high rank, for whom hanging was deemed too base. Perhaps, then, we may infer that these were ladies of distinction.
“Finally, the animals that appear in the crowd will remind many of you of the three beasts from the opening canto of Dante’s ‘Inferno,’ or the sixth verse of Jeremiah.” Taft looks out across the lecture hall.
“I was just about to say that . . .” Gil whispers with a smile.
To my surprise, Charlie hushes him.
“The lion signifies the sin of pride,” Taft goes on. “And the wolf represents covetousness. These are the vices of a high traitor—a Satan or a Judas—just as the punishment seems to suggest. But here the Hypnerotomachia diverges: Dante’s third beast is a leopard, representing lust. Yet Francesco Colonna includes a dog instead of a leopard, suggesting that lust was not one of the sins for which the two women are being punished.”
Taft pauses, letting the audience chew on this for a moment.
“What we are beginning to read, then,” he begins again, “is the vocabulary of cruelty. Despite what many of you may think, it is not a purely barbaric language. Like all of our rituals, it is rich with meaning. You must simply learn to read it. I will therefore offer one additional piece of information, which you may use in interpreting the image—then I will pose a question, and leave the rest to you.
“Your final clue is a fact that many of you probably know, but have overlooked: namely, that we can tell Polia has misidentified the child, simply by noting the weapon the child is carrying. For if the little boy in the nightmare had truly been Cupid, as Polia claims, then his weapon would not have been the sword. It would have been the bow and arrow.”
There are murmurs of assent in the crowd, hundreds of students seeing Valentine’s Day in an entirely new light.
“Therefore I ask you: who is this child that brandishes a sword, forces women to draw his war chariot through a difficult forest, then slaughters them as if they were guilty of treason?”
He waits, as if preparing to deliver the answer, but instead says, “Solve this, and
you will begin to understand the hidden truth of the Hypnerotomachia. Perhaps you will also begin to understand the significance not only of death, but of the form death takes when it comes. All of us—we of faith and we who lack it—are too accustomed to the sign of the cross to understand the significance of the crucifix. But religion, Christianity in particular, has always been the story of death in the midst of life, of sacrifices and martyrs. Tonight, of all nights, as we commemorate the sacrifice of the most famous of those martyrs, it is a fact we should be loath to forget.”
Removing his glasses, and folding them into his breast pocket, Taft tips his head and says, “I entrust you with this, and place my faith in you.” With a plodding step back, he adds, “Thank you all, and good night.”
Applause erupts from every corner of the hall—at first awkwardly, but soon to a heavy crescendo. Despite the earlier interruption, the audience has been seduced by this strange man, mesmerized by his fusion of intellect and gore.
Taft nods his head and shuffles toward the table by the podium, meaning to sit down, but the applause continues. Some in the audience take to their feet, continuing to clap.
“Thank you,” he says again, still standing, hands pressed atop the back of his chair. Even as he speaks, the old smile returns to his features. It’s as if he has been watching the audience all along, never the other way around.
Professor Henderson rises and strides toward the lectern, silencing the applause.
“By tradition,” she says, “we will be offering refreshments this evening in the courtyard between this auditorium and the chapel. I understand that the maintenance and ground crews have set up a number of space heaters beneath the tables. Please come out to join us.”
Turning to Taft, she adds, “That said, let me thank Dr. Taft for such a memorable lecture. You certainly made quite an impression.” She smiles, but with a certain restraint.
The audience applauds again, then slowly begins to filter through the exit.
Taft watches it do so, and I in turn watch him. This is one of the few times I have ever seen the man, recluse that he is. Now I finally understand why Paul finds him so magnetic. Even when you know he’s making a game of you, it’s almost impossible to take your eyes off him.