by Umberto Eco
The youth was intelligent, and after a few months in Paris he spoke Latin and the local vernacular. He lived with an uncle, canon of the abbey of Saint Victoire, one of the sanctuaries of learning of that city (and perhaps of the whole Christian world), with a library richer than that of Alexandria. And that explains how, in the months that followed, thanks to Abdul, Baudolino and also the Poet gained access to that repository of universal learning.
Baudolino asked Abdul what he was writing during the lesson, and his companion said that the notes in Arabic concerned certain things that the teacher said about dialectics, because Arabic is surely the language best suited to philosophy. As for the other things, they were in Provencal. He was reluctant to speak of it and evaded the questions for a long time, but with the air of one who with his eyes asks only to be questioned further; and finally he translated. They were some verses, and they said more or less : O my love, in your distant land—my heart aches for you.... O my flowered curtain, O my unknown, O my companion.
"You write verses?" Baudolino asked.
"I sing songs. I sing what I feel. I love a distant princess."
"A princess? Who is she?"
"I don't know. I saw her—or rather it's as if I saw her—in the Holy Land when I was a prisoner ... in other words, while I was experiencing an adventure I haven't yet told you about. My heart burst into flame, and I vowed eternal love to that lady. I decided to dedicate my life to her. Perhaps one day I will find her, but I fear its happening. It is so beautiful to languish for an impossible love."
Baudolino was about to say to him: some fool you are, as his father used to say, but then he remembered that he too languished for an impossible love (even if he had undoubtedly seen Beatrice, and her image was the obsession of his nights), and he was touched by the fate of his friend Abdul.
This is how a great friendship begins. That same evening Abdul turned up at the room of Baudolino and the Poet, with an instrument that Baudolino had never seen, shaped like an almond, with many taut strings, and letting his fingers stray over those strings, Abdul sang:
When the flow of the fountain
Runs clear and, as always,
The dog rose blossoms,
And the nightingale on the bough
Sings its soft and varied song
And refines its sweet singing,
My song accompanies it.
O, my love in your distant land,
My heart aches for you
Nor will I find medicine
If I do not answer your summons,
In the warmth of your wool,
O my flowered curtain,
O my unknown, O my companion.
I cannot have you near
And in the fire I burn and yearn.
Never have I seen a Christian maid
Who existed, God willing,
Nor Jew, nor Saracen maid,
Superior to your beauty.
Who wins your love?
At evening and at morn,
O my love, I call you;
My mind turns insane,
My yearning clouds the sun.
Already, as if by a thorn, I am stung
By that pain that heals me,
And a tear bathes me.
The melody was sweet, the chords awoke unknown or dormant passions, and Baudolino thought of Beatrice.
"Dear Christ," the Poet said, "why can't I write verses that beautiful?"
"I don't want to become a poet. I sing for myself, nothing else. If you like, I will give them to you," Abdul said, also touched now.
"Oh, yes," the Poet replied, "but if I translate them from Provençal into German, they turn to shit...."
Abdul became the third member of that band, and when Baudolino tried not to think of Beatrice, that damned Moor with the red hair would take his accursed instrument and sing songs that made Baudolino's heart ache.
If the nightingale amid the leaves
Bestows love and demands it,
And his companion replies,
And already mingles her song
With his, and the rivulet from the brook
With the happiness of the meadow
Feels joy in its heart.
In friendship melts my soul,
And greater benefice does not claim
Than the love that she returns
And that is promptly perceived
In my ailing heart, sick
With aching savor.
Baudolino told himself that one day he too would write songs for his faraway empress, but he did not clearly know how it was done, because neither Otto nor Rahewin had ever mentioned poetry to him, unless it was when they taught him some sacred anthem. For now at least he took advantage of Abdul to gain access to the library of Saint Victoire, where he spent long mornings stolen from his lessons, pondering, his lips parted, over the fabulous texts, not the manuals of grammar, but the stories of Pliny, the romance of Alexander, the geography of Solinus, and the etymologies of Isidore.
He read of distant lands, where crocodiles live, great aquatic serpents that, when they have eaten a man, weep, move their upper jaw and have no tongue; the hippopotami, half man and half horse; the leucochrocan beast, with the body of an ass, the behind of a stag, the breast and thighs of a lion, horse's hoofs, a bifurcated horn, a mouth stretching to the ears from which an almost human voice emerges, and in the place of teeth, a single bone. He read of lands where there lived men without knee joints, men without tongues, men with huge ears that sheltered their body from the cold, and the skiapods, who run very swiftly on a single foot.
Since he could not send Beatrice songs not of his own composition (and even if he had written some, he would not have dared), he decided that, as one sends his beloved flowers or jewels, he would make her a gift of all the wonders that he was acquiring. So he wrote her of lands where honey trees and flour trees grow, of Mount Ararat, from whose peak, on clear days, you can glimpse the remains of Noah's ark, and those who have scaled it say they touch with their finger the hole through which the devil escaped when Noah recited the Benedicite. He told her of Albania, where men are whiter than elsewhere, and have hair sparse as a cat's whiskers; of a country where if one turns to the east he casts his shadow to his own right; and of another inhabited by people of the greatest ferocity, who go into deepest mourning when children are born, but hold a great festivity when people die; of lands where enormous mountains of gold rise, guarded by ants the size of dogs, and where the Amazons live, warrior women who keep their men in a neighboring region; if they bear a son they send him to his father or else they kill him, if they bear a female they remove her breast with a searing iron; if she is of high rank, they remove the left breast so that she can carry a shield, if of low degree, the right breast so that she can draw a bow. And finally he told her of the Nile, one of the four rivers springing from the Earthly Paradise, which runs through the deserts of India, goes underground, emerges near Mount Atlas, then empties into the sea after crossing Egypt.
But when he came to India, Baudolino almost forgot Beatrice, and his mind turned to other fancies, because he had got it into his head that in those parts there had to be, if there ever had been, the kingdom of that Presbyter Johannes of whom Otto had told him. Baudolino had never ceased to think of Johannes: he thought of him every time he read about an unknown country, and even more when on the parchment varicolored miniatures appeared of strange beings, like horned men, or pygmies, who spend their lives fighting cranes. He thought of this so much that, to himself, he now spoke of Prester John as if he were a family friend. And hence to discover where he was became for Baudolino a matter of the greatest moment and, if Johannes was nowhere, still an India had to be found where he could be placed, because Baudolino felt bound by an oath (though none had been sworn) to the beloved dying bishop.
Of Prester John he had spoken to his two companions, who were immediately attracted by the game and communicated to Baudolino any vague and curious information they found, leafing through cod
ices, that might waft an aroma of India's incenses. Abdul suddenly had the idea that his distant princess, if she had to be distant, should conceal her splendor in that most distant land of all.
"Yes," Baudolino replied, "but where do you go to reach India? It shouldn't be far from the Earthly Paradise, and thus east of the Orient, just where the land ends and the Ocean begins...."
They had not yet begun the course of lessons in astronomy, and on the question of the earth's shape their ideas were hazy. The Poet was still convinced that it was a long, flat expanse, at the ends of which the waters of the Ocean poured down, God knows where. To Baudolino, on the contrary, Rahewin had said—though with some skepticism—that not only the great philosophers of antiquity, or Ptolemy, father of all astronomers, but also Saint Isidore had asserted that the earth was a sphere; indeed, Isidore had such Christian assurance of this that he had even established the breadth at the equator: eighty thousand stadia. However, Rahewin cautiously added that it was equally true that certain Fathers, like the great Lactantius, had recalled that according to the Bible the earth had the shape of a tabernacle, and therefore land and sky together should be seen as an ark, a temple with its fine dome and its floor, a large box, in other words, not a ball. Prudent man that he was, Rahewin held to what Saint Augustine had said, that maybe the pagan philosophers were right and the earth was round, and the Bible had mentioned tabernacle in a figurative sense, but the fact of knowing how it was shaped did not help resolve the one serious problem of every good Christian, namely, how to save one's soul, and therefore devoting even just a half hour to ponder the shape of the earth was a total waste of time.
"That seems right to me," said the Poet, who was in a hurry to go to the tavern, "and it's useless to seek the Earthly Paradise, because it must have been a marvel of hanging gardens, and it has remained uninhabited since the time of Adam, nobody has taken the trouble to reinforce the terraces with hedges and palisades, and during the flood it must all have slid down into the Ocean."
Abdul, on the contrary, was absolutely certain that the earth was a sphere. If it were just a flat expanse, he argued with undoubting severity, my gaze—which my love makes very acute, like that of all lovers—would be able to glimpse far, far away, some sign of the presence of my beloved, but instead the curve of the earth conceals her from my desire. And he ransacked the library of Saint Victoire to find maps that he then reconstructed summarily, from memory, for his friends.
"The earth is in the center of the great chain of the Ocean, and it is divided by three great bodies of water: the Hellespont, the Mediterranean, and the Nile."
"Just a moment: where's the Orient?"
"Up here, naturally, where there's Asia, and at the far end of the Orient, just where the sun rises, is the Earthly Paradise. To the left of Paradise there's Mount Caucasus, and nearby the Caspian Sea. Now bear in mind: there are three Indias: an India Major, which is very hot, just to the right of Paradise; a Northern India, beyond the Caspian Sea, another here, in the upper left, where it is so cold that the water turns to crystal, and where there are the peoples of Gog and Magog, whom Alexander the Great imprisoned inside a wall; and finally a Temperate India, close to Africa. An Africa you see in the lower right-hand corner, where the Nile flows, and where the Arabian Sea opens and the Persian Gulf, just on the Red Sea, beyond which there is desert land, very close to the sun of the equator and so hot that no one can venture there. To the west of Africa, near Mauretania, are the Isles of the Blest or the Lost Isle, which was discovered many centuries ago by a saint from my country. Below, to the north, is the land where we live, with Constantinople on the Hellespont, and Greece, and Rome, and in the extreme north the Germanians and the Hibernian Island."
"But how can you take such a map seriously," the Poet snickered, "when it shows the earth flat, and you claim it's a sphere?"
"What kind of argument is that?" Abdul was indignant. "Could you depict a sphere in such a way that you could see everything on it? A map must serve to point out the way, and when you walk, you see the earth flat, not round. Besides, even if it's a sphere, all the part underneath is uninhabited, and occupied by the Ocean, for if anybody were to live there he'd be living with his feet up and his head down. So to depict the upper part, a circle like this is enough. But I want to examine better the maps of the abbey, also because in the library I met a cleric who knows everything about the Earthly Paradise."
"Of course. He was there when Eve was giving the apple to Adam," the Poet said.
"You don't have to be in a place in order to know everything about it," Abdul replied. "Otherwise sailors would be more learned than theologians."
This, Baudolino explained to Niketas, showed how, ever since their first years in Paris, when they were still almost beardless, our friends had begun to be gripped by this story, which so many years later would take them to the far ends of the earth.
7. Baudolino makes the Poet write love letters and poems to Beatrice
In the spring, Baudolino discovered that his love was growing greater and greater, as happens to lovers in that season, and it was not allayed by the squalid encounters with maids of no importance, indeed in comparison it grew gigantic, because Beatrice, besides the advantages of grace, intelligence, and royal anointment, had also the advantage of absence. The fascination of absence was a question with which Abdul never ceased tormenting him, spending whole evenings stroking his instrument and singing more songs, until, fully to appreciate them, Baudolino had by now also learned Provençal.
And when the days are long in May
How sweet to hear the distant birdsong,
Because, since this journey first began,
I recall forever that distant love.
In my pain I bow my head
Nor does song ease me more, and the hawthorn...
Baudolino dreamed. Abdul despairs of seeing one day his unknown princess, he said to himself, O happy he! Worse is my suffering, for surely I will have to see my beloved again one of these days, and I haven't the good fortune never to have seen her, but rather the misfortune of knowing who and what she is. But if Abdul finds consolation in telling his grief to us, why should I not find the same in telling my life to her? In other words, Baudolino sensed that he could discipline the throbbing of his heart by writing down on paper what he felt, and so much the worse if the object of his love would be deprived of these treasures of tenderness. So, late in the night, while the Poet was sleeping, Baudolino wrote.
"The star illuminates the pole, and the moon colors the night. But my guide is a sole star and if, when the shadows have been dispelled, my star rises from the East, my mind will ignore the shadows of sorrow. You are my radiant star, who will dispel the night, and light itself without you is night, whereas with you night is splendid radiance."
And he went on: "If I feel hunger, only you sate me; if I feel thirst, only you quench it. But what am I saying? You refresh, but do not satiate. Never have I been sated with you, nor shall I ever be...." And then:
"So great is your sweetness, so wondrous your constancy, so ineffable the tone of your voice, such the beauty and the grace that crown you, that it would be a great offense to attempt to express them in words. May the fire that consumes us grow always, and with new fuel, and the more it remains hidden, the more it will flare up and deceive the envious and the treacherous, so that the question will ever remain: which of us two loves the more, and so between us there will always be joined a beautiful duel in which both are victorious...."
The letters were beautiful, and rereading them, Baudolino trembled, and was ever more enchanted by a creature capable of inspiring such ardor. At a certain point he could no longer accept not knowing how Beatrice would have reacted to such sweet violence, and he decided to impel her to reply. Trying to imitate her hand, he wrote:
"To the love that rises from the heart of my heart, that is more sweetly fragrant than any perfume, she who is yours body and soul, for the thirsting flowers of your youth, wishes the freshness
of an eternal happiness.... To you, my happy hope, I offer my faith, and with all devotion I offer myself, for as long as I may live...."
"Oh," he immediately replied to her, "be well, for in you lies all my health, in you are my hope and my repose. Even before I am fully awake, my soul finds you again, preserved within itself...."
And she answered, boldly: "From that first moment when we saw each other, I have loved you before all others; preferring you, I have wanted you; wanting you, I have sought you; seeking you, I have found you; finding you, I have loved you; loving you, I have desired you; desiring you, I have set you in my heart above all else ... and I have savored your honey ... I greet you, my heart, my body, my only joy...."
This correspondence, which lasted for some months, gave, first, refreshment to Baudolino's exacerbated soul, then a replete happiness, and finally a kind of blazing pride, because the lover had not realized how the beloved could love him so much. Like all those in love, Baudolino became vain, like all those in love, he wrote that he wanted to enjoy jealously with his beloved their shared secret, but at the same time he insisted that the whole world be informed of his joy, and be stunned by the immeasurable loving nature of the woman who loved him.
So one day he showed the correspondence to his friends. He was vague and reticent about the manner and identity of this exchange. He did not lie; indeed he said he was showing those letters precisely because they were the fruit of his imagination. But the other two believed that, only and precisely in this instance, he was lying, and they envied his lot all the more. In his heart Abdul attributed the letters to his princess, and he agonized as if he had received them himself. The Poet, who made a show of attaching no importance to this literary game (though it gnawed at his heart that he himself had not written such beautiful letters, provoking replies even more beautiful), and having no one with whom to fall in love, had fallen in love with the letters themselves—which, as Niketas remarked with a smile—was not surprising, since in youth we are prone to fall in love with love.