by Umberto Eco
I saw a throne set in the sky and One seated on the throne. The face of the Seated One was stern and impassive, the eyes wide and glaring over a terrestrial humankind that had reached the end of its story; majestic hair and beard flowed over the chest like the waters of a river, in streams all equal, symmetrically divided in two. The crown on his head was rich in enamels and jewels, the purple imperial tunic was arranged in broad folds over the knees, woven with embroideries and laces of gold and silver thread. The left hand, resting on one knee, held a sealed book, the right was uplifted in an attitude of blessing or—I could not tell—of admonition. The face was illuminated by the tremendous beauty of a halo, containing a cross and bedecked with flowers, while around the throne and above the face of the Seated One I saw an emerald rainbow glittering. Before the throne, beneath the feet of the Seated One, a sea of crystal flowed, and around the Seated One, beside and above the throne, I saw four awful creatures—awful for me, as I looked at them, transported, but docile and dear for the Seated One, whose praises they sang without cease.
Or, rather, not all could be called awful, because one seemed to me handsome and kindly, the man to my left (and to the right of the Seated One), who held out a book. But on the other side there was an eagle I found horrifying, its beak agape, its thick feathers arranged like a cuirass, powerful talons, great wings outstretched. And at the feet of the Seated One, under the first two figures, there were the other two, a bull and a lion, each monster clutching a book between talons or hoofs, the body turned away from the throne, but the head toward the throne, as if shoulders and neck twisted in a fierce impulse, flanks tensed, the limbs those of a dying animal, maw open, serpentlike tails coiled and writhing, culminating, at the top, in tongues of flame. Both monsters were winged, both crowned by haloes; despite their formidable appearance, they were creatures not of hell, but of heaven, and if they seemed fearsome it was because they were roaring in adoration of One Who Is to Come and who would judge the quick and the dead.
Around the throne, beside the four creatures and under the feet of the Seated One, as if seen through the transparent waters of the crystal sea, as if to fill the whole space of the vision, arranged according to the triangular frame of the tympanum, rising from a base of seven plus seven, then to three plus three and then to two plus two, at either side of the great throne, on twenty-four little thrones, there were twenty-four ancients, wearing white garments and crowned in gold. Some held lutes in their hands, one a vase of perfumes, and only one was playing an instrument, all the others were in ecstasy, facing the Seated One, whose praises they were singing, their limbs also twisted like the creatures’, so that all could see the Seated One, not in wild fashion, however, but with movements of ecstatic dance—as David must have danced before the Ark—so that wherever their pupils were, against the law governing the stature of bodies, they converged on the same radiant spot. Oh, what a harmony of abandonment and impulse, of unnatural and yet graceful postures, in that mystical language of limbs miraculously freed from the weight of corporeal matter, marked quantity infused with new substantial form, as if the holy band were struck by an impetuous wind, breath of life, frenzy of delight, rejoicing song of praise miraculously transformed, from the sound that it was, into image.
Bodies inhabited in every part by the Spirit, illuminated by revelation, faces overcome with amazement, eyes shining with enthusiasm, cheeks flushed with love, pupils dilated with joy: this one thunderstruck by a pleasurable consternation, that one pierced by a consternated pleasure, some transfigured by wonder, some rejuvenated by bliss, there they all were, singing with the expression of their faces, the drapery of their tunics, the position and tension of their limbs, singing a new song, lips parted in a smile of perennial praise. And beneath the feet of the ancients, and arched over them and over the throne and over the tetramorphic group, arranged in symmetrical bands, barely distinguishable one from another because the artist’s skill had made them all so mutually proportionate, united in their variety and varied in their unity, unique in their diversity and diverse in apta coadunatio, in wondrous congruency of the parts with the delightful sweetness of hues, miracle of consonance and concord of voices among themselves dissimilar, a company arrayed like the strings of the zither, consentient and conspiring continued cognition through deep and interior force suited to perform univocally in the same alternating play of the equivocal, decoration and collage of creatures beyond reduction to vicissitudes and to vicissitudes reduced, work of amorous connecting sustained by a law at once heavenly and worldly (bond and stable nexus of peace, love, virtue, regimen, power, order, origin, life, light, splendor, species, and figure), numerous and resplendent equality through the shining of the form over the proportionate parts of the material—there, all the flowers and leaves and vines and bushes and corymbs were entwined, of all the grasses that adorn the gardens of earth and heaven, violet, cystus, thyme, lily, privet, narcissus, taro, acanthus, mallow, myrrh, and Mecca balsam.
But as my soul was carried away by that concert of terrestrial beauty and majestic supernatural signals, and was about to burst forth in a psalm of joy, my eye, accompanying the proportioned rhythm of the rose windows that bloomed at the ancients’ feet, lighted on the interwoven figures of the central pillar, which supported the tympanum. What were they and what symbolic message did they communicate, those three crisscrossed pairs of lions rampant, like arches, each with hind paws planted on the ground, forepaws on the back of his companion, mane in serpentine curls, mouth taut in a threatening snarl, bound to the very body of the pillar by a paste, or a nest, of tendrils? To calm my spirit, as they had perhaps been meant also to tame the diabolical nature of the lion and to transform it into a symbolic allusion to higher things, on the sides of the pillar there were two human figures, unnaturally tall as the column itself and twins to two others facing them on either side from the decorated imposts, where each of the oak doors had its jamb. These figures, then, were four old men, from whose paraphernalia I recognized Peter and Paul, Jeremiah and Isaiah, also twisted as if in a dance step, their long bony hands raised, the fingers splayed like wings, and like wings were their beards and hair stirred by a prophetic wind, the folds of the very long garments stirred by the long legs giving life to waves and scrolls, opposed to the lions but of the same stuff as the lions. And as I withdrew my fascinated eye from that enigmatic polyphony of sainted limbs and infernal sinews, I saw beside the door, under the deep arches, sometimes depicted on the embrasures in the space between the slender columns that supported and adorned them, and again on the thick foliage of the capital of each column, and from there ramifying toward the sylvan vault of the multiple arches, other visions horrible to contemplate, and justified in that place only by their parabolic and allegorical power or by the moral lesson that they conveyed. I saw a voluptuous woman, naked and fleshless, gnawed by foul toads, sucked by serpents, coupled with a fat-bellied satyr whose gryphon legs were covered with wiry hairs, howling its own damnation from an obscene throat; and I saw a miser, stiff in the stiffness of death on his sumptuously columned bed, now helpless prey of a cohort of demons, one of whom tore from the dying man’s mouth his soul in the form of an infant (alas, never to be again born to eternal life); and I saw a proud man with a devil clinging to his shoulders and thrusting his claws into the man’s eyes, while two gluttons tore each other apart in a repulsive hand-to-hand struggle, and other creatures as well, goat head and lion fur, panther’s jaws, all prisoners in a forest of flames whose searing breath I could almost feel. And around them, mingled with them, above their heads and below their feet, more faces and more limbs: a man and a woman clutching each other by the hair, two asps sucking the eyes of one of the damned, a grinning man whose hooked hands parted the maw of a hydra, and all the animals of Satan’s bestiary, assembled in a consistory and set as guard and crown of the throne that faced them, singing its glory in their defeat, fauns, beings of double sex, brutes with six-fingered hands, sirens, hippocentaurs, gorgons, harpies, incubi,
dragopods, minotaurs, lynxes, pards, chimeras, cynophales who darted fire from their nostrils, crocodiles, polycaudate, hairy serpents, salamanders, horned vipers, tortoises, snakes, two-headed creatures whose backs were armed with teeth, hyenas, otters, crows, hydrophora with sawtooth horns, frogs, gryphons, monkeys, dog-heads, leucrota, manticores, vultures, paranders, weasels, dragons, hoopoes, owls, basilisks, hypnales, presters, spectafici, scorpions, saurians, whales, scitales, amphisbenae, iaculi, dipsases, green lizards, pilot fish, octopi, morays, and sea turtles. The whole population of the nether world seemed to have gathered to act as vestibule, dark forest, desperate wasteland of exclusion, at the apparition of the Seated One in the tympanum, at his face promising and threatening, they, the defeated of Armageddon, facing Him who will come at last to separate the quick from the dead. And stunned (almost) by that sight, uncertain at this point whether I was in a friendly place or in the valley of the last judgment, I was terrified and could hardly restrain my tears, and I seemed to hear (or did I really hear?) that voice and I saw those visions that had accompanied my youth as a novice, my first reading of the sacred books, and my nights of meditation in the choir of Melk, and in the delirium of my weak and weakened senses I heard a voice mighty as a trumpet that said, “Write in a book what you now see” (and this is what I am doing), and I saw seven golden candlesticks and in the midst of the candlesticks One like unto the son of man, his breast girt with a golden girdle, his head and hair white as purest wool, his eyes as a flame of fire, his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace, his voice as the sound of many waters, and he had in his right hand seven stars and out of his mouth went a two-edged sword. And I saw a door open in heaven and He who was seated appeared to me like a jasper and a sardonyx, and there was a rainbow round about the throne and out of the throne proceeded thunder and lightning. And the Seated One took in His hands a sharp sickle and cried: “Thrust in thy sickle and reap, for the time is come for thee to reap; for the harvest of the earth is ripe”; and He that sat on the cloud thrust His sickle on the earth; and the earth was reaped.
It was at this point that I realized the vision was speaking precisely of what was happening in the abbey, of what we had learned from the abbot’s reticent lips—and how many times in the following days did I return to contemplate the doorway, convinced I was experiencing the very events that it narrated. And I knew we had made our way up there in order to witness a great and celestial massacre.
I trembled, as if I were drenched by the icy winter rain. And I heard yet another voice, but this time it came from behind me and was a different voice, because it came from the earth and not from the blinding core of my vision; and indeed it shattered the vision, because William (I became aware again of his presence), also lost until then in contemplation, turned as I did.
The creature behind us was apparently a monk, though his torn and dirty habit made him look like a vagabond. Unlike many of my brothers, I have never in my whole life been visited by the Devil; but I believe that if he were to appear to me one day, he would have the very features of our interlocutor. His head was hairless, not shaved in penance but as the result of the past action of some viscid eczema; the brow was so low that if he had had hair on his head it would have mingled with his eyebrows (which were thick and shaggy); the eyes were round, with tiny mobile pupils, and whether the gaze was innocent or malign I could not tell: perhaps it was both, in different moods, in flashes. The nose could not be called a nose, for it was only a bone that began between the eyes, but as it jutted from his forehead it immediately sank back, transforming itself only into two dark holes, broad nostrils thick with hair. The mouth, joined to the nose by a scar, was wide and ill-made, stretching more to the right than to the left, and between the upper lip, nonexistent, and the lower, prominent and fleshy, there protruded, in an irregular pattern, black teeth sharp as a dog’s.
The man smiled (or at least so I believed) and, holding up one finger as if in admonition, he said:
“Penitenziagite! Watch out for the draco who cometh in futurum to gnaw your anima! Death is super nos! Pray the Santo Pater come to liberar nos a malo and all our sin! Ha ha, you like this negromanzia de Domini Nostri Jesu Christi! Et anco jois m’es dols e plazer m’es dolors. . . . Cave el diabolo! Semper lying in wait for me in some angulum to snap at my heels. But Salvatore is not stupidus! Bonum monasterium, and aquí refectorium and pray to dominum nostrum. And the resto is not worth merda. Amen. No?”
As this story continues, I shall have to speak again, and at length, of this creature and record his speech. I confess I find it very difficult to do so because I could not say now, as I could never understand then, what language he spoke. It was not Latin, in which the lettered men of the monastery expressed themselves, it was not the vulgar tongue of those parts, or any other I had ever heard. I believe I have given a faint idea of his manner of speech, reporting just now (as I remember them) the first words of his I heard. When I learned later about his adventurous life and about the various places where he had lived, putting down roots in none of them, I realized Salvatore spoke all languages, and no language. Or, rather, he had invented for himself a language which used the sinews of the languages to which he had been exposed—and once I thought that his was, not the Adamic language that a happy mankind had spoken, all united by a single tongue from the origin of the world to the Tower of Babel, or one of the languages that arose after the dire event of their division, but precisely the Babelish language of the first day after the divine chastisement, the language of primeval confusion. Nor, for that matter, could I call Salvatore’s speech a language, because in every human language there are rules and every term signifies ad placitum a thing, according to a law that does not change, for man cannot call the dog once dog and once cat, or utter sounds to which a consensus of people has not assigned a definite meaning, as would happen if someone said the word “blitiri.” And yet, one way or another, I did understand what Salvatore meant, and so did the others. Proof that he spoke not one, but all languages, none correctly, taking words sometimes from one and sometimes from another. I also noticed afterward that he might refer to something first in Latin and later in Provençal, and I realized that he was not so much inventing his own sentences as using the disiecta membra of other sentences, heard some time in the past, according to the present situation and the things he wanted to say, as if he could speak of a food, for instance, only with the words of the people among whom he had eaten that food, and express his joy only with sentences that he had heard uttered by joyful people the day when he had similarly experienced joy. His speech was somehow like his face, put together with pieces from other people’s faces, or like some precious reliquaries I have seen (si licet magnis componere parva, if I may link diabolical things with the divine), fabricated from the shards of other holy objects. At that moment, when I met him for the first time, Salvatore seemed to me, because of both his face and his way of speaking, a creature not unlike the hairy and hoofed hybrids I had just seen under the portal. Later I realized that the man was probably good-hearted and humorous. Later still . . . But we must not get ahead of our story. Particularly since, the moment he had spoken, my master questioned him with great curiosity.
“Why did you say Penitenziagite?” he asked.
“Domine frate magnificentissimo,” Salvatore answered, with a kind of bow, “Jesus venturus est and les hommes must do penitenzia. No?”
William gave him a hard look. “Did you come here from a convent of Minorites?”
“Non comprends.”
“I am asking if you have lived among the friars of Saint Francis; I ask if you have known the so-called apostles. . . .”
Salvatore blanched, or, rather, his tanned and savage face turned gray. He made a deep bow, muttered through half-closed lips a “vade retro,” devoutly blessed himself, and fled, looking back at us every now and then.
“What did you ask him?” I said to William.
He was thoughtful for a moment. “It is of no
matter; I will tell you later. Let us go inside now. I want to find Ubertino.”
It was just after the sixth hour. The pale sun entered from the west, and therefore through only a few, narrow windows, into the interior of the church. A fine strip of light still touched the main altar, whose frontal seemed to glow with a golden radiance. The side naves were immersed in gloom.
Near the last chapel before the altar, in the left nave, stood a slender column on which a stone Virgin was set, carved in the modern fashion, with an ineffable smile and prominent abdomen, wearing a pretty dress with a small bodice, the child on her arm. At the foot of the Virgin, in prayer, almost prostrate, there was a man in the habit of the Cluniac order.
We approached. The man, hearing the sound of our footsteps, raised his head. He was old, bald, with a glabrous face, large pale-blue eyes, a thin red mouth, white complexion, a bony skull to which the skin clung like that of a mummy preserved in milk. The hands were white, with long tapering fingers. He resembled a maiden withered by premature death. He cast on us a gaze at first bewildered, as if we had disturbed him during an ecstatic vision; then his face brightened with joy.