As the monks departed, my curiosity made me linger in the kitchen, where they were preparing to lock up for the night. I saw Salvatore slip off toward the garden with a bundle under his arm. My curiosity still further aroused, I followed and called him. He tried to evade me, but when I questioned him he replied that in the bundle (which moved as if inhabited by something alive) he was carrying a basilisk.
“Cave basilischium! The rex of serpenti, tant pleno of poison that it all shines dehors! Che dicam, il veleno, even the stink comes dehors and kills you! Poisons you ... And it has black spots on his back, and a head like a coq, and half goes erect over the terra, and half on the terra like the other serpents. And it kills the bellula. ...”
“The bellula?”
“Oc! Parvissimum animal, just a bit plus longue than the rat, and also called the musk-rat. And so the serpe and the botta. And when they bite it, the bellula runs to the fenicula or to the cicerbita and chews it, and comes back to the battaglia. And they say it generates through the oculi, but most say they are wrong.”
I asked him what he was doing with a basilisk and he said that was his business. Now completely overwhelmed by curiosity, I said that these days, with all the deaths, there could be no more secret matters, and I would tell William. Then Salvatore ardently begged me to remain silent, opened the bundle, and showed me a black cat. He drew me closer and, with an obscene smile, said that he didn’t want the cellarer, who was powerful, or me, young and handsome, to enjoy the love of the village girls any more, when he couldn’t because he was ugly and a poor wretch. But he knew a prodigious spell that would make every woman succumb to love. You had to kill a black cat and dig out its eyes, then put them in two eggs of a black hen, one eye in one egg, one eye in the other (and he showed me two eggs that he swore he had taken from appropriate hens). Then you had to let the eggs rot in a pile of horse dung (and he had one ready in a corner of the vegetable garden where nobody ever went), and there a little devil would be born from each egg, and would then be at your service, procuring for you all the delights of this world. But, alas, he told me, for the magic spell to work, the woman whose love he wanted had to spit on the eggs before they were buried in the dung, and that problem tormented him, because he would have to have the woman in question at hand that night, and make her perform the ritual without knowing its purpose.
A sudden heat seized me, in the face, or the viscera, or in my whole body, and I asked in a faint voice whether that night he would bring the same girl within the walls. He laughed, mocking me, and said I was truly gripped by a great lust (I said not, that I was asking out of pure curiosity), and then he said there were plenty of women in the village, and he would bring up another, even more beautiful than the one I liked. I supposed he was lying to me to make me go away. And in any case what could I have done? Follow him all night, when William was awaiting me for quite different enterprises? And again see her (if it was she) toward whom my appetites drove me while my reason drove me away—and whom I should never see again even though I did desire to see her further? Surely not. So I persuaded myself that Salvatore was telling the truth, as far as the woman was concerned. Or perhaps he was lying about everything, and the spell he described was a fantasy of his naïve, superstitious mind, and he would not do anything.
I became irritated with him, treated him roughly, told him that for that night he would do better to go to bed, because archers were patrolling the abbey. He answered that he knew the abbey better than the archers did, and with this fog nobody would see anybody. Indeed, he said to me, I’m going to run off now, and you won’t see me any more, even if I were two feet away having my pleasure with the girl you desire. He expressed himself with different words, but this was the meaning of what he said. I left, indignant, because it was unworthy of me, nobleman and novice, to dispute with such rabble.
I joined William and we did what was to be done. That is, we prepared to follow compline at the rear of the nave, so that when the office ended we would be ready to undertake our second (for me, third) journey into the bowels of the labyrinth.
AFTER COMPLINE
In which they visit the labyrinth again, reach the threshold of the finis Africae, but cannot enter because they do not know what the first and seventh of the four are, and, finally, Adso has a recurrence, though a very erudite one, of his love malady.
The visit to the library cost us long hours of work. Described in words, the verification we aimed to carry out was simple, but our progress by lamplight as we read the legends, marked the passages and the blank walls on the map, recorded the initials, followed the various routes that the play of openings and obstacles allowed us, was very long. And tedious.
It was bitter cold. The night was not windy and we did not hear those faint whistlings that had upset us the first evening, but a damp, icy air entered from the arrow slits. We had put on woolen gloves so as to be able to touch the volumes without having our hands become numb. But they were the kind used for writing in winter, the fingertips left bare, and sometimes we had to hold our hands to the flame or put them against our chests or clap them as we hopped about, half frozen.
For this reason we didn’t perform the whole task consecutively. We stopped to browse in the cases, and now that William—with his new glasses on his nose—could linger and read the books, at every title he discovered he let out exclamations of happiness, either because he knew the work, or because he had been seeking it for a long time, or finally because he had never heard it mentioned and was highly excited and titillated. In short, for him every book was like a fabulous animal that he was meeting in a strange land. And as he leafed through one manuscript, he ordered me to look for others.
“See what’s in that case!”
And I, deciphering and shifting volumes, said, “Histories anglorum of Bede ... And also by Bede, De aedificatione templi, De tabernaculo, De temparibus et computo et chronica et circuli Dionysi, Ortographia, De ratione metrorum, Vita Sancti Cuthberti, Ars metrica …”
“Naturally, the complete works of the Venerable ... And look at these! De rhetorica cognatione, Locorum rhetoricorum distinctio, and here many grammarians, Priscian, Honoratus, Donatus, Maximus, Victorinus, Eutiches, Phocas, Asper … Odd, I thought at first that here there were authors from Anglia. ... Let us look below. …”
“Hisperica ... famines. What is that?”
“A Hibernian poem. Listen:
Hoc spumans mundanas obvallat Pelagus oras
terrestres amniosis fluctibus cudit margines.
Saxeas undosis molibus irruit avionias.
Infama bomboso vertice miscet glareas
asprifero spergit spumas sulco,
sonoreis frequentur quatitur labras. ...”
I didn’t understand the meaning, but as William read he rolled the words in his mouth so that you seemed to hear the sound of the waves and the sea foam.
“And this? Aldhelm of Malmesbury. Listen to this page: ‘Primitus pantorum procerum poematorum pio potissimum paternoque presertim privilegio panegiricum poemataque passim prosatori sub polo promulgates.’ ... The words all begin with the same letter!”
“The men of my islands are all a bit mad,” William said proudly. “Let us look in the other case.”
“Virgil.”
“What is he doing here? What Virgil? The Georgics?”
“No. Epitomae. I’ve never heard of it.”
“But it’s Virgil of Toulouse, the rhetorician, six centuries after the birth of our Lord. He was considered great sage. ...”
“Here it says that the arts are poema, rethoria, grama, leporia, dialecta, geometria. … But what language was he writing?”
“Latin. A Latin of his own invention, however, which he considered far more beautiful. Read this; he says that astronomy studies the signs of the zodiac, which are mon, man, tonte, piron, dameth, perfellea, belgalic, margaleth, lutamiron, taminon, and raphalut.”
“Was he crazy?”
“I don’t know: he didn’t come from my island
s. And listen to this; he says there are twelve ways of designating fire: ignis, coquihabin (quia incocta coquendi habet dictionem), ardo, calax ex calore, fragon ex fragore flammae, rusin de rubore, fumaton, ustrax de urendo, vitius quia pene mortua membra suo vivificat, siluleus, quod de silice siliat, unde et silex non recte dicitur, nisi ex qua scintilla silit. And aeneon, de Aenea deo, qua in eo habitat, sive a quo elementis flatus fertur.”
“But there’s no one who speaks like that!”
“Happily. But those were times when, to forget an evil world, grammarians took pleasure in abstruse questions. I was told that in that period, for fifteen days and fifteen nights, the rhetoricians Gabundus and Terentius argued on the vocative of ‘ego,’ and in the end they attacked each other, with weapons.”
“But this, too. Listen. ...” I had grasped a book marvelously illuminated with vegetable labyrinths from which monkeys and serpents peered out. “Listen to these words: cantamen, collamen, gongelamen, stemiamen, plasmamem, sonerus, alboreus, gaudifluus, glaucicomus. …”
“My islands,” William said again, with tenderness. “Don’t be too harsh with those monks of far-off Hibernia. Perhaps, if this abbey exists and if we still speak of the Holy Roman Empire, we owe it to them. At that time, the rest of Europe was reduced to a heap of ruins; one day they declared invalid all baptisms imparted by certain priests in Gaul because they baptized “in nomine patris et filiae’—and not because they practiced a new heresy and considered Jesus a woman, but because they no longer knew any Latin.”
“Like Salvatore?”
“More or less. Vikings from the Far North came down along the rivers to sack Rome. The pagan temples were falling in ruins, and the Christian ones did not yet exist. It was only the monks of Hibernia in their monasteries who wrote and read, read and wrote, and illuminated, and then jumped into little boats made of animal hide and navigated toward these lands and evangelized them as if you people were infidels, you understand? You have been to Bobbio, which was founded by Saint Columba, one of them. And so never mind if they invented a new Latin, seeing that in Europe no one knew the old Latin any more. They were great men. Saint Brendan reached the Isles of the Blest and sailed along the coasts of hell, where he saw Judas chained to a rock, and one day he landed on an island and went ashore there and found a sea monster. Naturally they were all mad,” he repeated contentedly.
“These images are ... I can hardly believe my eyes! So many colors!” I said, drinking it all in.
“From a land that doesn’t have many colors, a bit of blue and much green. But we mustn’t stand here discussing Hibernian monks. What I want to know is why they are here with the Anglians and with grammarians of other countries. Look at your chart; where should we be?”
“In the rooms of the west tower. I’ve copied down the scrolls, too. So, then, leaving the blind room, we enter the heptagonal room, and there is only one passage to a single room of the tower; the letter in red is H. Then we go from room to room, moving around the tower, and we return to the blind room. The sequence of the letters spells ... you are right! HIBERNI!”
“HIBERNIA, if we come from the blind room back into the heptagonal, which, like all the others, has the letter A for Apocalypsis. So there are the works of the authors of Ultima Thule, and also the grammarians and rhetoricians, because the men who arranged the library thought that a grammarian should remain with the Hibernian grammarians, even if he came from Toulouse. It is a criterion. You see? We are beginning to understand something.”
“But in the rooms of the east tower, where we came in, we read FONS. … What does that mean?”
“Read your map carefully. Keep reading the letters of the rooms that follow, in order of access.”
“FONS ADAEU …”
“No, Fons Adae; the U is the second east blind room, I remember it; perhaps it fits into another sequence. And what did we find in the Fons Adae, that is, in the earthly paradise (remember that the room with the altar acing the rising sun is there)?”
“There were many Bibles there, and commentaries on the Bible, only books of Holy Scripture.”
“And so, you see, the word of God corresponding to the earthly paradise, which as all say is far off to the east. And here, to the west: Hibernia.”
“So the plan of the library reproduces the map of the world?”
“That’s probable. And the books are arranged according to the country of their origin, or the place where their authors were born, or, as in this instance, the place where they should have been born. The librarians told themselves Virgil the grammarian was born in Toulouse by mistake; he should have been born in the western islands. They corrected the errors of nature.”
We resumed our way. We passed through a series of rooms rich in splendid Apocalypses, and one of these was the room where I had had visions. Indeed, we saw the light again from afar. William held his nose and ran to put it out, spitting on the ash. To be on the safe side, we hurried through the room, but I recalled that I had seen there the beautiful, many-colored Apocalypse with the mulier amicta sole and the dragon. We reconstructed the sequence of these rooms, starting from the one we entered last, which had Y as its red initial. Reading backward gave us the word YSPANIA, but its final A was also the one that concluded HIBERNIA. A sign, William said, that there were some rooms in which works of mixed nature were housed.
In any case, the area denominated YSPANIA seemed to us populated with many codices of the Apocalypse, all splendidly made, which William recognized as Hispanic art. We perceived that the library had perhaps the largest collection of copies of the apostle’s book extant in Christendom, and an immense quantity of commentaries on the text. Enormous volumes were devoted to the commentary of the Apocalypse by Beatus of Liébana. The text was more or less always the same, but we found a rich, fantastic variation in the images, and William recognized some of those he considered among the greatest illuminators of the realm of the Asturias: Magius, Facundus, and others.
As we made these and other observations, we arrived at the south tower, which we had already approached the night before. The S room of Yspania—windowless—led into an E room, and after we gradually went around the five rooms of the tower, we came to the last, without other passages, which bore a red L. Again reading backward, we found LEONES.
“Leones: south. On our map we are in Africa, hic sunt leones. And this explains why the have found so many texts by infidel authors.”
“And there are more,” I said, rummaging in the cases. “Canon of Avicenna, and this codex with the beautiful calligraphy I don’t recognize ...”
“From the decorations I would say it is a Koran, but unfortunately I have no Arabic.”
“The Koran, the Bible of the infidels, a perverse book …”
“A book containing a wisdom different from ours. But you understand why they put it here, where the lions, the monsters, are. This is why we saw that book on the monstrous animals, where you also found the unicorn. This area called LEONES contains the books that the creators of the library considered books of falsehood. What’s over there?”
“They’re in Latin, but from the Arabic. Ayyub al-Ruhawi, a treatise on canine hydrophobia. And this is a book of treasures. And this is De aspectibus of Alhazen ...”
“You see, among monsters and falsehoods they have also placed works of science from which Christians have much to learn. That was the way they thought in the times when the library was built. ...”
“But why have they also put a book with the unicorn among the falsehoods?” I asked.
“Obviously the founders of the library had strange ideas. They must have believed that this book which speaks of fantastic animals and beasts living in distant lands was part of the catalogue of falsehoods spread by the infidels. ...”
“But is the unicorn a falsehood? It’s the sweetest of animals and a noble symbol. It stands for Christ, and for chastity; it can be captured only by setting a virgin in the forest, so that the animal, catching her most chaste odor, will go and
lay its head in her lap, offering itself as prey to the hunters’ snares.”
“So it is said, Adso. But many tend to believe that it’s a fable, an invention of the pagans.”
“What a disappointment,” I said. “I would have liked to encounter one, crossing a wood. Otherwise what’s the pleasure of crossing a wood?”
“It’s not certain the animal doesn’t exist. Perhaps it’s different from the way it’s illustrated in these books. A Venetian traveler went to very distant lands, quite close to the fons paradisi of which maps tell, and he saw unicorns. But he found them rough and clumsy, and very ugly and black. I believe he saw a real animal with one horn on its brow. It was probably the same animal the ancient masters first described faithfully. They were never completely mistaken, and had received from God the opportunity to see things we haven’t seen. Then this description, passing from auctoritas to auctoritas, was transformed through successive imaginative exercises, and unicorns became fanciful animals, white and gentle. So if you hear there’s a unicorn in a wood, don’t go there with a virgin: the animal might resemble more closely the Venetian’s account than the description in this book.”
“But did the ancient masters happen to receive from God the revelation of the unicorn’s true nature?”
“Not the revelation: the experience. They were fortunate enough to be born in lands where unicorns live, or in times when unicorns lived in our own lands.”
“But then how can we trust ancient wisdom, whose traces you are always seeking, if it is handed down by lying books that have interpreted it with such license?”
“Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn’t ask ourselves what it says but what it means, a precept that the commentators of the holy books had very clearly in mind. The unicorn, as these books speak of him, embodies a moral truth, or allegorical, or analogical, but one that remains true, as the idea that chastity is a noble virtue remains true. But as for the literal truth that sustains the other three truths, we have yet to see what original experience gave birth to the letter. The literal object must be discussed, even if its higher meaning remains good. In a book it is written that diamond can be cut only with a billy goat’s blood. My great master Roger Bacon said it was not true, simply because he had tried and had failed. But if the relation between a diamond and goat’s blood had had a nobler meaning, that would have remained intact.”
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