The Last Cato

by Matilde Asensi

  “That was when I tripped over something and bumped into the corner of one of the cabinets,” interjected the professor.

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “I said to Father Sergio that if they wanted the foreign guest to give them money for the restoration of the library”—he cleared his throat forcefully and again pushed his glasses in place—“the least they could do was show him around in the light of day and hold nothing back. Father Sergio said that they had to protect the manuscripts because they’d been robbed before, and that we should be grateful that he was even showing us the most valuable things in the monastery. But since I kept protesting, the monk finally walked over to one corner of the room and flipped a light switch.”

  “The library has a glaring electric light, but it’s never used,” the captain explained. “The monks of Saint Catherine of Sinai protected their manuscripts by only showing them to those who get previous authorization from the archbishop himself. Furthermore, they always show them in the dark so no one can get a clear idea of what’s there. When some researcher shows up with permission, they take him to the library at night and keep him in the shadows while he consults the manuscript that interests him. That way, he never suspects what’s around him. I imagine that the robbery of the Codex Sinaiticus by Tischendorff in 1844 left a painful and indelible mark on them.”

  “Our robbery will leave the same mark, Captain,” murmured Boswell.

  “You stole a manuscript from the monastery?” I asked alarmed, waking abruptly from the sweet stupor I’d been lulled into by the story.

  The most profound silence answered my question. I looked at them, one by one, confused, but the four faces around me were blank, wax masks.

  “Captain…,” I insisted, “answer me, please. Did you steal a manuscript from Saint Catherine of Sinai?”

  “Judge for yourself,” he said coldly, pushing toward me the linenwrapped package. “Then tell me you wouldn’t have done the same in my place.”

  Unable to react, I looked at the wrapper as if were a rat or a cockroach, not daring to put my hands on it.

  “Open it,” ordered Monsignor Tournier abruptly.

  I turned to Cardinal Colli for protection, but he was staring at the floor. As for Professor Boswell, he was cleaning his glasses with the hem of his jacket.

  “Sister Salina,” demanded Monsignor Tournier’s impatient voice again, “I just told you to open that package. Did you not hear me?”

  I had no choice but to do what he asked of me. It wasn’t the time to get cold feet or have an attack of conscience. The white linen cloth turned out to be a bag, and as soon as I managed to loosen the ribbons that sealed it, I began to make out the corner of an ancient codex. I couldn’t believe my eyes. My confusion grew as I extracted the heavy volume from its package. Finally, I held in my hands a thick, bulky primitive square-shaped Byzantine manuscript. Its wood binding was covered in leather and embossed with the seven crosses of Saint Catherine—two columns of three on each side and one below, aligned with the crosses on the lower ends. The monogram of Constantine was on the upper central part and below it was the seven-letter Greek word that seemed to be the key: ΣTAYPOΣ (STAUROS), or cross. Looking at the codex, my hands trembled so badly I nearly sent it tumbling to the floor. I tried to get ahold of myself but couldn’t. I suppose that was largely due to how exhausted I was, but Monsignor Tournier had to snatch the volume from me to safeguard its integrity.

  I remember that at that very moment I heard something that took me completely by surprise: Captain Glauser-Röist was laughing for the very first time.

  It seems obvious that it’s not in our hands to revive the dead; that thaumaturgical ability belongs to God only. We cannot make blood circulate through dry veins again nor thoughts return to a lifeless brain. We can, however, recover the pigments on parchments that time has erased and, thus, the ideas and thoughts that someone had shaped and once articulated onto the vellum. It is a marvel of science to breathe life into the sleeping, lethargic spirit of a medieval codex.

  As a paleographer, I could read, decipher, and interpret any written ancient text. What I couldn’t do was guess what had been written on those stiff, translucent, yellowed parchments whose letters, worn away over the centuries, were practically illegible.

  The Iyasus Codex, named in honor of our Ethiopian man, was in a truly lamentable state. According to the captain, after they explored the monastery’s library for two days, in a corner next to piles of wood the monks used to heat the monastery during the winter they discovered a pile of baskets filled with cast-off parchment and papyruses used as kindling. To distract Father Sergio while Glauser-Röist examined the contents of the baskets, Professor Boswell took out a bottle of superb Omar Khayam Egyptian wine, a luxury reserved only for non-Muslims and tourists. (The professor had brought several bottles from Alexandria to give Archbishop Damianos as a farewell gift.) Delighted, Father Sergio returned the favor with a bottle of the wine made there at the monastery. One thing led to another, and both men ended up tipsy and lost, happily singing old Egyptian songs. (It turned out that Father Sergio had been a sailor before becoming a monk.) They whooped for joy when they saw the missing Glauser-Röist reappear. By then, he had the Iyasus Codex hidden under his shirt.

  The codex was in a straw basket, under a jumble of loose parchment and torn sheets, along with other codices rejected by the monks because they were in bad shape or because they had no value. When the captain brushed a thick layer of dust and dirt off the cover and saw the engravings on the cover of the codex, he let out a yelp of surprise that he thought would awaken the entire community of Saint Catherine. Luckily, not even Father Sergio and Professor Boswell noticed.

  The next day, at first light, they left the monastery. The monks must have figured something was up when they saw Father Sergio with a hangover, because a few kilometers from Cairo, as it was just beginning to get dark, Professor Boswell’s cell phone rang. It was the secretary to His Beatitude Stephano II Ghattas, warning them not to enter Cairo—or any Egyptian city. They needed to head east toward Israel along back roads and try to cross the border as quickly as possible. The police had been alerted and were pursuing them.

  They went to Bilbays, crossed the Suez Canal at Al Quantara, and drove all night to Al’Arish, near the Israeli border. There, a representative of the apostolic delegation of Jerusalem was waiting for them with diplomatic passports from the Holy See. They crossed the border at Rafah, and in less than two hours they were resting at the delegation’s office. At exactly the same time that I was flying to Ireland, they were taking off from Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv. Three and a half hours later they were arriving at the Roma Ciampino Military Airport, just as I was boarding my return flight from Dublin.

  If we then thought those hurdles large, we were in for a shock—for we had no clue of what was to come.

  Leafing through the codex that night, I realized its deterioration was so advanced that we would have great difficulty extracting a couple of paragraphs in acceptable condition. You could barely make out a few spots and shadows. The codex resembled a watercolor on which several glasses of water had been spilled. Parchment, like the smooth skin of a drum, is less permeable to ink than paper. With time, it gets worn down and can be erased completely depending on the ink used. If that manuscript had once contained useful information on why Abi-Ruj Iyasus and others like him were stealing fragments of the True Cross, it no longer did… Or so I thought. After all, I was just a paleographer in the Vatican Classified Archives, not an archeologist from the famous Greco- Roman Museum of Alexandria. My knowledge of the techniques used to recover old words from papyruses and parchments left a lot to be desired, as Professor Farag Boswell had kindly pointed out.

  Friday morning, while I was still a sleep in a room at the Domus Sanctae Martae, Reverend Father Ramondino went to the Hypogeum and told the directors of Information Services, Document Restoration, Paleography, Codicolography, and Reproduction Photography that, for now,
they and their staff should forget about returning to their respective convents, seminaries, and communities. Martial law had been declared and nobody would leave until the task was completed. As soon as he had described the nature of the project, they protested that that would take a minimum of a month of hard, focused work—to which Prefect Ramondino replied that they had just one week. In one week, if they had not finished they could pack their bags and forget about their careers at the Vatican. Later on, it became clear that such urgency wasn’t necessary; but at that moment, nothing seemed to be enough.

  Under Professor Boswell’s directions, the Department of Document Restoration started by unbinding the codex, separating the infolio sheets and uncovering its small square boards that turned out to be cedar, customary in Byzantine manuscripts. The type of binding clearly placed it around the fourth or fifth century. Once the parchment folios were separated (182 pieces altogether—that is, 364 pages), you could see that it was made from the skin of an unborn gazelle that must have been perfectly white when new. The photographic reproduction lab then made proofs to determine which of two techniques—infrared or high resolution digital with refrigerated telecamara CCD—would allow us, in the end, to recover the most text. We adopted a combination of both, since once the manuscript was passed through a stereomicroscope and scanner, the images obtained could be easily superimposed onto a computer screen. Thus the fragile, yellowed vellum began to reveal its dazzling secrets. An empty space or at most one covered in shadows, slowly became a magnificent sketch of Greek uncial letters,* without accents or breaks between words, in two wide columns of thirty-eight lines each. The margins were wide and evenly spaced, and the letters at the beginning of the paragraph were clearly distinguishable. They stretched toward the left border of the page and were written in purple, in contrast to the rest of the text, which was written in smoke black ink.

  When we finished the first folio, it was still impossible to make out its text completely. It had a multitude of words and phrases that were truncated and nonrecoverable at first glance. There were long fragments where the infrared light, the stereomicroscope, and the high quality digitalization we used were unable to pick anything up. Then the Department of Computer Analysis took its turn. With the aid of a sophisticated graphic design program, the technicians selected a set of characters from the recovered material. Since the writing was done by hand and therefore was variable, they extracted five different representations of each letter. They patiently measured the vertical and horizontal outlines, the curves, diagonals, and spaces in the center of each character; the width and height of the body, the depth under the base lines, the descending outlines, and the elevation of the ascending outlines. When this was done they called me to take a look at one of the most curious sights I’d ever had the chance to study. With the complete image of the folio on screen, the program automatically showed us, at a dizzying speed, all the possible characters that fit in the empty spaces. When the system completed the chain, it verified that a word existed in the dictionary of the magnificent Ibycus program that contained all well-known Greek literature—biblical, patristic, and classical. If a word had appeared previously in the text, the system also collated it to verify its exactness.

  The process was very fast but labor intensive. After only one day of work, we could provide a complete image of the first folio in almost perfect condition, with 95 percent of the text recovered. The lethargic sleeping spirit inside the Iyasus Codex had come back to life. The moment would come when I would read its message and interpret its content.

  I was deeply moved to be back at work at the Hypogeum. After Mass on the fourth Sunday of Lent at Saint Peter’s, I sat down at my work table, put my glasses on my nose, and was ready to begin. My staff also got ready to start the paleographic analysis, based on the study of the different elements in the writing: morphology, angles and inclination, ductus,* ties, nexuses, rhythm, style, and other elements. Luckily, Byzantine Greek used very few of the abbreviations and contractions that are so common in Latin and in medieval transcriptions made by classical authors. However, the peculiarities of a language as evolved as Byzantine Greek could cause significant confusions, for neither the writing nor the meaning of words were the same as in the days of Aeschylus, Plato, or Aristotle.

  Reading the first folios of the Iyasus Codex was an utter thrill for me. The scribe was named Mirogenes of Neapolis, but in the text he repeatedly referred to himself as Cato. He explained that, by the will of God the Father and his son Jesus Christ, a few brothers of good will, deacons † of the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and devoted worshippers of the True Cross, had designed a brotherhood under the name of ΣTAYPOΦΛAKEΣ (STAUROFILAKES), or guardians of the Cross. He, Mirogenes, had been chosen archimandrite of the brotherhood, and given the title of Cato, the first day of the first month of 5850.

  “5850?” Glauser-Röist said, surprised. The captain and the professor were seated across from me, listening to my transcription of the folio.

  “That year corresponds to the year 341 of our era,” I explained, raising my glasses and holding them in the folds of my forehead. “The Byzantines’ calendar began on September 1 of the year 5509, the day when they believed God created the world.”

  “So on the first day of September of the year 341”—the professor laced his fingers together tightly as he spoke—“this Mirogenes was a Byzantine and deacon of the basilica of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem. If I remember correctly, that’s fifteen years after Saint Helen discovered the True Cross.”

  “Yes,” I added, “and on this date, he was rebaptized as Cato and began to write this chronicle.”

  “We need to look for more information on that brotherhood,” proposed the captain, springing from his seat. Despite being the coordinator of the operation, he had less work than anyone and wanted to feel useful. “I’m on it.”

  “Good idea,” I agreed. “We need to demonstrate the historical existence of the Staurofilakes other than in the codex.”

  We heard a few discreet little taps on my lab door. It was Prefect Ramondino, smiling from ear to ear.

  “I came to invite to you to dinner at the Domus’s restaurant, if you like. To celebrate the good work.”

  But things weren’t going as well as we thought. That same afternoon, while I was returning with my head held high, to the tiny apartment at the Piazza delle Vaschette, the important Lignum Crucis of the Convent of Sainte-Gudule, in Brussels, disappeared from its silver reliquary.

  Captain Glauser-Röist was gone all day Monday. As soon as he received the news of the robbery, he left for Brussels on the first plane, and didn’t return until noon on Tuesday. Meanwhile, Professor Boswell and I continued working in the Hypogeum lab. The restored folios began to land on my desk at greater and greater speed. The technicians had perfected a way to accelerate the process, to the point that sometimes I barely had two or three hours to complete the reading and transcription of the manuscript before the next batch of data arrived.

  I believe it was that early April night, that Monday, when Professor Boswell and I had supper all alone in the employees’ cafeteria of the Classified Archives. In the beginning I feared it would be particularly hard to keep up a conversation with somebody so bashful and quiet, but the professor proved to be very pleasant company. We talked a lot and about many things. After telling me, once again, the complete story of the robbery of the codex, he asked about my family. He wanted to know if I had brothers and sisters and if my parents were still living. At first surprised by that personal turn in the conversation, I gave him a brief description, but when he heard the number of members of the Salina tribe, he wanted to know more. I even drew a family tree on a napkin so he could follow who I was talking about. It’s always strange to find someone who knows how to listen. Professor Boswell did not ask directly; he didn’t even show much curiosity. He just watched me attentively, nodding or smiling at just the right moment. Of course I fell into his trap. By the time I realized what had happe
ned, I’d already told him my life story. He laughed, very amused, and I thought the moment had come for a counterattack, because suddenly I felt very vulnerable and even guilty, as if I’d said too much. I asked him if he was worried about losing his job at the Greco-Roman Museum in Alexandria. He frowned and took off his glasses, pinching the bridge of the nose, looking tired.

  “My work…,” he murmured and retreated into his thoughts for several seconds. “You don’t know what’s happening in Egypt, do you, Doctor?”

  “No, I don’t know,” I answered, disorientated.

  “I am Coptic, and being Coptic in Egypt means being a pariah.”

  “That surprises me, Professor Boswell. You Coptics are the true descendants of the ancient Egyptians. The Arabs arrived much later. In fact, your language, Coptic, comes directly from demotic Egyptian, spoken in the time of the pharaohs.”

  “Yes, but things aren’t as rosy as you paint them. It would be great if the world saw things the way you do. We Coptics are a small minority in Egypt, divided into Catholic Christians and Orthodox Christians. Ever since the fundamentalist revolution began, the irhebin… I mean the terrorists from the Islamic guerrilla group Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya have murdered members of our small communities. In 1992 they shot and killed fourteen Coptics from the province of Asyut for refusing to pay ‘protection services.’ In 1994 a group of armed terrorists attacked the Coptic monastery of Deir ul-Muharraq, near Asyut, killing the priests and the faithful,” he sighed. “There are assaults, robberies, death threats, beatings… They’ve started setting off bombs in the entrances to churches in Alexandria and Cairo.”

  I silently deduced that the Egyptian government must not be doing anything to stop the violence.

  “I’m fortunate, I realize,” he said, laughing suddenly. “I’m a bad Catholic-Coptic. It’s been years since I’ve been to church, and that has saved my life.” He kept smiling and put his glasses back on, adjusting them carefully around his ears. “Last year, in June, Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya put a bomb in the doorway of Saint Anthony Church in Alexandria. Fifteen people died—among them, my younger brother, Juhanna; his wife, Zoë; and their five-month-old son.”