“Then higher truths can be expressed while the letter is lying,” I said. “Still, it grieves me to think this unicorn doesn’t exist, or never existed, or cannot exist one day.”
“It is not licit to impose confines on divine omnipotence, and if God so willed, unicorns could also exist. But console yourself, they exist in these books, which, if they do not speak of real existence, speak of possible existence.”
“So must we then read books without faith, which is a theological virtue?”
“There are two other theological virtues as well. The hope that the possible is. And charity, toward those who believed in good faith that the possible was.”
“But what use is the unicorn to you if your intellect doesn’t believe in it?”
“It is of use to me as Venantius’s prints in the snow were of use, after he was dragged to the pigs’ tub. The unicorn of the books is like a print. If the print exists, there must have existed something whose print it is.”
“But different from the print, you say.”
“Of course. The print does not always have the same shape as the body that impressed it, and it doesn’t always derive from the pressure of a body. At times it reproduces the impression a body has left in our mind: it is the print of an idea. The idea is sign of things, and the image is sign of the idea, sign of a sign. But from the image I reconstruct, if not the body, the idea that others had of it.”
“And this is enough for you?”
“No, because true learning must not be content with ideas, which are, in fact, signs, but must discover things in their individual truth. And so I would like to go back from this print of a print to the individual unicorn that stands at the beginning of the chain. As I would like to go back from the vague signs left by Venantius’s murderer (signs that could refer to many) to a sole individual, the murderer himself. But it isn’t always possible in a short time, and without the help of other signs.”
“Then I can always and only speak of something that speaks to me of something else, and so on. But the final something, the true one—does that never exist?”
“Perhaps it does: it is the individual unicorn. And don’t worry: one of these days you will encounter it, however black and ugly it may be.”
“Unicorns, lions, Arab authors, and Moors in general,” I said at that point, “no doubt this is the Africa of which the monks spoke.”
“No doubt this is it. And if it is, we should find the African poets mentioned by Pacificus of Tivoli.”
And, in fact, when we had retraced our steps and were in room L again, we found in a case a collection of books by Floro, Fronto, Apuleius, Martianus Capella, and Fulgentius.
“So this is where Berengar said the explanations of a certain secret should be,” I said.
“Almost here. He used the expression ‘finis Africae,’ and this was the expression that so infuriated Malachi. The finis could be this last room, unless ...” He cried out: “By the seven churches of Clonmacnois! Haven’t you noticed something?”
“What?”
“Let’s go back to room S, where we started!”
We went back to the first blind room, where the verse read “Super thronos viginti quatuor.” It had four openings. One led to room Y, which had a window on the inner octagon. Another led to room P, which continued, along the outside façade, the YSPANIA sequence. The opening toward the tower led into room E, which we had just come through. Then there was a blank wall, and finally an opening that led into a second blind room with the initial U. Room S was the one with the mirror—luckily on the wall immediately to my right, or I would have been seized with fear again.
Looking carefully at my map, I realized the singularity of this room. Like the other blind rooms of the other tree towers, it should have led to the central heptagonal room. If it didn’t, the entrance to the heptagon would have to be in the adjacent blind room, the U. But this room, which through one opening led into a room T with a window on the octagon, and through another was connected to room S, had the other three walls full, occupied with cases. Looking around, we confirmed what was now obvious from the map: for reasons of logic as well as strict symmetry, that tower should have had its heptagonal room, but there was none.
“None,” I said. “There’s no such room.”
“No, that’s not it. If there were no heptagon, the other rooms would be larger, whereas they are more or less the shape of those at the other extremes. The room exists, but cannot be reached.”
“Is it walled up?”
“Probably. And there is the finis Africae, there is the place that lose monks who are now dead were hovering about, in their curiosity. It’s walled up, but that does not mean there is no access. Indeed, there surely is one, and Venantius found it, or was given its description by Adelmo, who had it from Berengar. Let’s read his notes again.”
He took Venantius’s paper from his habit and reread it: “The hand over the idol works on the first and the seventh of the four.” He looked around. “Why, of course! The ‘idolum’ is the image in the mirror! Venantius was thinking in Greek, and in that tongue, even more than in ours, ‘eidolon’ is image as well as ghost, and the mirror reflects our own image, distorted; we ourselves mistook it for a ghost the other night! But what, then, can be the four ‘supra idolum’? Something over the reflecting surface? Then we must place ourselves at a certain angle in order to perceive something reflected in the mirror that corresponds to Venantius’s description. …”
We tried every position, but with no result. Besides our images, the mirror reflected only hazy outlines of the rest of the room, dimly illuminated by the lamp.
“Then,” William meditated, “by ‘supra idolum’ he could mean beyond the mirror ... which would oblige us to go into the next room, for surely this mirror is a door. ...”
The mirror was taller than a normal man, fixed to the wall by a sturdy oak frame. We touched it in every manner, we tried to thrust our fingers into it, our nails between the frame and the wall, but the mirror was as fast as if it were part of the wall, a stone among stones.
“And if not beyond, it could be ‘super idolum,’ ” William murmured, and meanwhile raised his arm, stood on tiptoe, and ran his hand along the upper edge of the frame. He found nothing but dust.
“For that matter,” William reflected gloomily, “even if beyond it there were a room, the book we are seeking and the others sought is no longer in that room, because it was taken away, first by Venantius and then, God knows where, by Berengar.”
“But perhaps Berengar brought it back here.”
No, that evening we were in the library, and everything suggests he died not long after the theft, that same night, in the balneary. Otherwise we would have seen him again the next morning. No matter ... For the present we have established where the finis Africae is and we have almost all the necessary information for perfecting our map of the library. You must admit that many of the labyrinth’s mysteries have now been clarified.”
We went through other rooms, recording all our discoveries on my map. We came upon rooms devoted solely to writings on mathematics and astronomy, others with works in Aramaic characters which neither of us knew, others in even less recognizable characters, perhaps texts from India. We moved between two overlapping sequences that said IUDAEA and AEGYPTUS. In short, not to bore the reader with the chronicle of our deciphering, when we later perfected the map definitively we were convinced that the library was truly laid out and arranged according to the image of the terraqueous orb. To the north we found ANGLIA and GERMANI, which along the west wall were connected by GALLIA, which turned then, at the extreme west, into HIBERNIA, and toward the south wall ROMA (paradise of Latin classics!) and YSPANIA. Then to the south came the LEONES and AEGYPTUS, which to the east became IUDAEA and FONS ADAE. Between east and north, along the wall, ACAIA, a good synecdoche, as William expressed it, to indicate Greece, and in those four rooms there was, finally, a great hoard of poets and philosophers of pagan antiquity.
The system of words was eccentric. At times it proceeded in a single direction, at other times it went backward, at still others in a circle; often, as I said before, the same letter served to compose two different words (and in these instances the room had one case devoted to one subject and one to another). But obviously there was no point looking for a golden rule in this arrangement. It was purely a mnemonic device to allow the librarian to find a given work. To say of a book that it was found in “quarta Acaiae” meant that it was in the fourth room counting from the one in which the initial A appeared, and then, to identify it, presumably the librarian knew by heart the route, circular or straight, that he should follow, as ACAIA was distributed over four rooms arranged in a square. So we promptly learned the game of the blank walls. For example, approaching ACAIA from the east, you found none of the rooms led to the following rooms: the labyrinth at this point ended, and to reach the north tower you had to pass through the other three. But naturally the librarians entered from the FONS, knowing perfectly well that to go, let us say, into ANGLIA, they had to pass through AEGYPTUS, YSPANIA, GALLIA, and GERMANI.
With these and other fine discoveries our fruitful exploration in the library ended. But before saying that we prepared, contentedly, to leave it (only to be involved in other events I will narrate shortly), I must make a confession to my reader. I said that our exploration was undertaken, originally, to seek the key to the mysterious place but that, as we lingered along the way in the rooms we were marking down by subject and arrangement, we leafed through books of various kinds, as if we were exploring a mysterious continent or a terra incognita. And usually this second exploration proceeded by common accord, as William and I browsed through the same books, I pointing out the most curious ones to him, and he explaining to me many things I was unable to understand.
But at a certain point, and just as we were moving around the rooms of the south tower, known as LEONES, my master happened to stop in a room rich in Arabic works with odd optical drawings; and since we were that evening provided not with one but with two lamps, I moved, in my curiosity, into the next room, realizing that the wisdom and the prudence of the library’s planning had assembled along one of its walls books that certainly could not be handed out to anyone to read, because they dealt in various ways with diseases of body and spirit and were almost always written by infidel scholars. And my eye fell on a book, not large but adorned with miniatures far removed (luckily!) from the subject: flowers, vines, animals in pairs, some medicinal herbs. The title was Speculum amoris, by Maximus of Bologna, and it included quotations from many other works, all on the malady of love. As the reader will understand, it did not require much once more to inflame my mind, which had been numb since morning, and to excite it again with the girl’s image.
All that day I had driven myself to dispel my morning thoughts, repeating that they were not those of a sober, balanced novice, and moreover, since the day’s events had been sufficiently rich and intense to distract me, my appetites had been dormant, so that I thought I had freed myself by now from what had been but a passing restlessness. Instead, I had only to see that book and I was forced to say, “De te fabula narratur,” and I discovered I was more sick with love than I had believed. I learned later that, reading books of medicine, you are always convinced you feel the pains of which they speak. So it was that the mere reading of those pages, glanced at hastily in fear that William would enter the room and ask me what I was so diligently investigating, caused me to believe that I was suffering from that very disease, whose symptoms were so splendidly described that if, on the one hand, I was distressed to discover I was sick (and on the infallible evidence of so many auctoritates), on the other I rejoiced to see my own situation depicted so vividly, convincing myself that even if I was ill, my illness was, so to speak, normal, inasmuch as countless others had suffered in the same way, and the quoted authors might have taken me personally as the model for their descriptions.
So I was moved by the pages of Ibn-Hazm, who defines love as a rebel illness whose treatment lies within itself, for the sick person does not want to be healed and he who is ill with it is reluctant to get well (and God knows this was true!). I realized why, that morning, I had been so stirred by everything I saw: it seems that love enters through the eyes, as Basil of Ancira also says, and—unmistakable symptom—he who is seized by such an illness displays an excessive gaiety, while he wishes at the same time to keep to himself and seeks solitude (as I had done that morning), while other phenomena affecting him are a violent restlessness and an awe that makes him speechless. ... I was frightened to read that the sincere lover, when denied the sight of the beloved object, must fall into a wasting state that often reaches the point of confining him to bed, and sometimes the malady overpowers the brain, and the subject loses his mind and raves (obviously I had not yet reached that phase, because I had been quite alert in the exploration of the library). But I read with apprehension that if the illness worsens, death can ensue, and I asked myself whether the joy I derived from thinking of the girl was worth this supreme sacrifice of the body, apart from all due consideration of the soul’s health.
I learned, further, from some words of Saint Hildegard, that the melancholy humor I had felt during the day, which I attributed to a sweet feeling of pain at the girl’s absence, was perilously close to the feeling experienced by one who strays from the harmonious and perfect state man experiences in paradise, and this “nigra et amara” melancholy is produced by the breath of the serpent and the influence of the Devil. An idea shared also by infidels of equal wisdom, for my eyes fell on the lines attributed to Abu-Bakr Muhammad ibn-Zakariyya ar-Razi, who in a Liber continens identifies amorous melancholy with lycanthropy, which drives its victim to behave like a wolf. His description clutched at my throat: first the lovers seem changed in the external appearance, their eyesight weakens, their eyes become hollow and without tears, their tongue slowly dries up and pustules appear on it, the whole body is parched and they suffer constant thirst; at this point they spend the day lying face down, and on the face and the tibias marks like dog bites appear, and finally the victims roam through the cemeteries at night like wolves.
Finally, I had no more doubts as to the gravity of my situation when I read quotations from the great Avicenna, who defined love as an assiduous thought of a melancholy nature, born as a result of one’s thinking again and again of the features, gestures, or behavior of a person of the opposite sex (with what vivid fidelity had Avicenna described my case!): it does not originate as an illness but is transformed into illness when, remaining unsatisfied, it becomes obsessive thought (and why did I feel so obsessed, I who, God forgive me, had been well satisfied? Or was perhaps what had happened the previous night not satisfaction of love? But how is this illness satisfied, then?), and so there is an incessant flutter of the eyelids, irregular respiration; now the victim laughs, now weeps, and the pulse throbs (and indeed mine throbbed, and my breathing stopped as I read those lines!). Avicenna advised an infallible method already proposed by Galen for discovering whether someone is in love: grasp the wrist of the sufferer and utter many names of members of the opposite sex, until you discover which name makes the pulse accelerate. I was afraid my master would enter abruptly, seize my arm, and observe in the throbbing of my veins my secret, of which I would have been greatly ashamed. ... Alas, as remedy Avicenna suggested uniting the two lovers in matrimony, which would cure the illness. Truly he was an infidel, though a shrewd one, because he did not consider the condition of the Benedictine novice, thus condemned never to recover—or, rather, consecrated, through his own choice or the wise choice of his relatives, never to fall ill. Luckily Avicenna, though not thinking of the Cluniac order, did consider the case of lovers who cannot be joined, and advised as radical treatment hot baths. (Was Berengar trying to be healed of his lovesickness for the dead Adelmo? But could one suffer lovesickness for a being of one’s own sex, or was that only bestial lust? And was the night I had spent perhaps not besti
al and lustful? No, of course not, I told myself at once, it was most sweet—and then immediately added: No, you are wrong, Adso, it was an illusion of the Devil, it was most bestial, and if you sinned in being a beast you sin all the more now in refusing to acknowledge it!) But then I read, again in Avicenna, that there were also other remedies: for example, enlisting the help of old and expert women who would spend their time denigrating the beloved—and it seems that old women are more expert than men in this task. Perhaps this was the solution, but I could not find any old women at the abbey (or young ones, actually), and so I would have to ask some monk to speak ill to me of the girl, but who? And besides, could a monk know women as well as an old gossip would know them? The last solution suggested by the Saracen was truly immodest, for it required, the unhappy lover to couple with many slave girls, a remedy quite unsuitable for a monk. And so, I asked myself finally, how can a young monk be healed of love? Is there truly no salvation for him? Should I perhaps turn to Severinus and his herbs? I did find a passage in Arnold of Villanova, an author I had heard William mention with great esteem, who had it that lovesickness was born from an excess of humors and pneuma, when the human organism finds itself in an excess of dampness and heat, because the blood (which produces the generative seed), increasing through excess, produces excess of seed, a “complexio venerea,” and an intense desire for union in man and woman. There is an estimative virtue situated in the dorsal part of the median ventricle of the encephalus (What is that? I wondered) whose purpose is to perceive the insensitive intentions perceived by the senses, and when desire for the object perceived by the senses becomes too strong, the estimative faculty is upset, and it feeds only on the phantom of the beloved person; then there is an inflammation of the whole soul and body, as sadness alternates with joy, because heat (which in moments of despair descends into the deepest parts of the body and chills the skin) in moments of joy rises to the surface, inflaming the face. The treatment suggested by Arnold consisted in trying to lose the assurance and the hope of reaching the beloved object, so that the thought would go away.
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