The Name of the Rose

by Umberto Eco

  “Is that you, William of Baskerville?” he asked. “I have been waiting for you since this afternoon before vespers, when I came and closed myself in here. I knew you would arrive.”

  “And the abbot?” William asked. “Is he the one making that noise in the secret stairway?”

  Jorge hesitated for a moment. “Is he still alive?” he asked. “I thought he would already have suffocated.”

  “Before we start talking,” William said, “I would like to save him. You can open from this side.”

  “No,” Jorge said wearily, “not any longer. The mechanism is controlled from below, by pressing on the plaque, and up here a lever snaps, which opens a door back there, behind that case.” He nodded over his shoulder. “Next to the case you could see a wheel with some counterweights, which controls the mechanism from up here. But when I heard the wheel turning, a sign that Abo had entered down below, I yanked at the rope that holds the weights, and the rope broke. Now the passage is closed on both sides, and you could never repair that device. The abbot is dead.”

  “Why did you kill him?”

  “Today, when he sent for me, he told me that thanks to you he had discovered everything. He did not yet know what I had been trying to protect—he has never precisely understood the treasures and the ends of the library. He asked me to explain what he did not know. He wanted the finis Africae to be opened. The Italians had asked him to put an end to what they call the mystery kept alive by me and my predecessors. They are driven by the lust for new things. . . .”

  “And you no doubt promised him you would come here and put an end to your life as you had put an end to the lives of the others, in such a way that the abbey’s honor would be saved and no one would know anything. Then you told him the way to come, later, and check. But instead you waited for him, to kill him. Didn’t you think he might enter through the mirror?”

  “No, Abo is too short; he would never have been able to reach the verse by himself. I told him about the other passage, which I alone still knew. It is the one I used for so many years, because it was simpler in the darkness. I had only to reach the chapel, then follow the bones of the dead to the end of the passage.”

  “So you had him come here, knowing you would kill him. . . .”

  “I could no longer trust him. He was frightened. He had become famous because at Fossanova he managed to get a body down some circular stairs. Undeserved glory. Now he is dead because he was unable to climb his own stairway.”

  “You have been using it for forty years. When you realized you were going blind and would no longer be able to control the library, you had a man you could trust elected abbot; and as librarian you first had him name Robert of Bobbio, whom you could direct as you liked, and then Malachi, who never took a step without consulting you. For forty years you have been master of this abbey. This is what the Italian group realized, this is what Alinardo kept repeating, but no one would listen to him because they considered him mad by now. Am I right? But you were still awaiting me, and you couldn’t block the mirror entrance, because the mechanism is set in the wall. Why were you waiting for me? How could you be sure I would arrive?” William asked, but from his tone it was clear he had already guessed the answer and was expecting it as a reward for his own skill.

  “From the first day I realized you would understand. From your voice, from the way you drew me to debate on a subject I did not want mentioned. You were better than the others: you would have arrived at the solution no matter what. You know that it suffices to think and to reconstruct in one’s own mind the thoughts of the other. And then I heard you were asking the other monks questions, all of them the right ones. But you never asked questions about the library, as if you already knew its every secret. One night I came and knocked at your cell, and you were not in. You had to be here. Two lamps had disappeared from the kitchen, I heard a servant say. And finally, when Severinus came to talk to you about a book the other day in the narthex, I was sure you were on my trail.”

  “But you managed to get the book away from me. You went to Malachi, who had had no idea of the situation. In his jealousy, the fool was still obsessed with the idea that Adelmo had stolen his beloved Berengar, who by then craved younger flesh. Malachi didn’t understand what Venantius had to do with this business, and you confused his thinking even further. You probably told him Berengar had been intimate with Severinus, and as a reward Severinus had given him a book from the finis Africae; I don’t know exactly what you told him. Crazed with jealousy, Malachi went to Severinus and killed him. Then he didn’t have time to hunt for the book you had described to him, because the cellarer arrived. Is that what happened?”

  “More or less.”

  “But you didn’t want Malachi to die. He had probably never looked at the books of the finis Africae, for he trusted you, respected your prohibitions. He confined himself to arranging the herbs at evening to frighten any intruders. Severinus supplied him with them. This is why Severinus let Malachi enter the infirmary the other day: it was his regular visit to collect the fresh herbs he prepared daily, by the abbot’s order. Have I guessed?”

  “You have guessed. I did not want Malachi to die. I told him to find the book again, by whatever means, and bring it back here without opening it. I told him it had the power of a thousand scorpions. But for the first time the madman chose to act on his own initiative. I did not want him to die: he was a faithful agent. But do not repeat to me what you know: I know that you know. I do not want to feed your pride; you already see to that on your own. I heard you this morning in the scriptorium questioning Benno about the Coena Cypriani. You were very close to the truth. I do not know how you discovered the secret of the mirror, but when I learned from the abbot that you had mentioned the finis Africae, I was sure you would come shortly. This is why I was waiting for you. So, now, what do you want?”

  “I want,” William said, “to see the last manuscript of the bound volume that contains an Arabic text, a Syriac one, and an interpretation or a transcription of the Coena Cypriani. I want to see that copy in Greek, made perhaps by an Arab, or by a Spaniard, that you found when, as assistant to Paul of Rimini, you arranged to be sent back to your country to collect the finest manuscripts of the Apocalypse in León and Castile, a booty that made you famous and respected here in the abbey and caused you to win the post of librarian, which rightfully belonged to Alinardo, ten years your senior. I want to see that Greek copy written on linen paper, which was then very rare and was manufactured in Silos, near Burgos, your home. I want to see the book you stole there after reading it, to keep others from reading it, and you hid it here, protecting it cleverly, and you did not destroy it because a man like you does not destroy a book, but simply guards it and makes sure no one touches it. I want to see the second book of the Poetics of Aristotle, the book everyone has believed lost or never written, and of which you hold perhaps the only copy.”

  “What a magnificent librarian you would have been, William,” Jorge said, with a tone at once admiring and regretful. “So you know everything. Come, I believe there is a stool on your side of the table. Sit. Here is your prize.”

  William sat and put down the lamp, which I had handed him, illuminating Jorge’s face from below. The old man took a volume that lay before him and passed it to William. I recognized the binding: it was the book I had opened in the infirmary, thinking it an Arabic manuscript.

  “Read it, then, leaf through it, William,” Jorge said. “You have won.”

  William looked at the volume but did not touch it. From his habit he took a pair of gloves, not his usual mitts with the fingertips exposed, but the ones Severinus was wearing when we found him dead. Slowly he opened the worn and fragile binding. I came closer and bent over his shoulder. Jorge, with his sensitive hearing, caught the noise I made. “Are you here, too, boy?” he said. “I will show it to you, too . . . afterward.”

  William rapidly glanced over the first pages. “It is an Arabic manuscript on the sayings of some fool, a
ccording to the catalogue,” he said. “What is it?”

  “Oh, silly legends of the infidels, which hold that fools utter clever remarks that amaze even their priests and delight their caliphs . . .”

  “The second is a Syriac manuscript, but according to the catalogue it is the translation of a little Egyptian book on alchemy. How does it happen to be in this collection?”

  “It is an Egyptian work from the third century of our era. Coherent with the work that follows, but less dangerous. No one would lend an ear to the ravings of an African alchemist. He attributes the creation of the world to divine laughter. . . .” He raised his face and recited, with the prodigious memory of a reader who for forty years now had been repeating to himself things read when he still had the gift of sight: “‘The moment God laughed seven gods were born who governed the world, the moment he burst out laughing light appeared, at his second laugh appeared water, and on the seventh day of his laughing appeared the soul. . . .’ Folly. Likewise the work that comes after, by one of the countless idiots who set themselves to glossing the Coena . . . But these are not what interest you.”

  William, in fact, had rapidly passed over the pages and had come to the Greek text. I saw immediately that the pages were of a different, softer material, the first almost worn away, with a part of the margin consumed, spattered with pale stains, such as time and dampness usually produce on other books. William read the opening lines, first in Greek, then translating into Latin, and then he continued in this language so that I, too, could learn how the fatal book began:

  In the first book we dealt with tragedy and saw how, by arousing pity and fear, it produces catharsis, the purification of those feelings. As we promised, we will now deal with comedy (as well as with satire and mime) and see how, in inspiring the pleasure of the ridiculous, it arrives at the purification of that passion. That such passion is most worthy of consideration we have already said in the book on the soul, inasmuch as—alone among the animals—man is capable of laughter. We will then define the type of actions of which comedy is the mimesis, then we will examine the means by which comedy excites laughter, and these means are actions and speech. We will show how the ridiculousness of actions is born from the likening of the best to the worst and vice versa, from arousing surprise through deceit, from the impossible, from violation of the laws of nature, from the irrelevant and the inconsequent, from the debasing of the characters, from the use of comical and vulgar pantomime, from disharmony, from the choice of the least worthy things. We will then show how the ridiculousness of speech is born from the misunderstandings of similar words for different things and different words for similar things, from garrulity and repetition, from play on words, from diminutives, from errors of pronunciation, and from barbarisms.

  William translated with some difficulty, seeking the right words, pausing now and then. As he translated he smiled, as if he recognized things he was expecting to find. He read the first page aloud, then stopped, as if he were not interested in knowing more, and rapidly leafed through the following pages. But after a few pages he encountered resistance, because near the upper corner of the side edge, and along the top, some pages had stuck together, as happens when the damp and deteriorating papery substance forms a kind of sticky paste. Jorge realized that the rustle of pages had ceased, and he urged William on.

  “Go on, read it, leaf through it. It is yours, you have earned it.”

  William laughed, seeming rather amused. “Then it is not true that you consider me so clever, Jorge! You cannot see: I have gloves on. With my fingers made clumsy like this, I cannot detach one page from the next. I should proceed with bare hands, moistening my fingers with my tongue, as I happened to do this morning while reading in the scriptorium, so that suddenly that mystery also became clear to me. And I should go on leafing like that until a good portion of the poison had passed to my mouth. I am speaking of the poison that you, one day long ago, took from the laboratory of Severinus. Perhaps you were already worried then, because you had heard someone in the scriptorium display curiosity, either about the finis Africae or about the lost book of Aristotle, or about both. I believe you kept the ampoule for a long time, planning to use it the moment you sensed danger. And you sensed that days ago, when Venantius came too close to the subject of this book, and at the same time Berengar, heedless, vain, trying to impress Adelmo, showed he was less secretive than you had hoped. So you came and set your trap. Just in time, because a few nights later Venantius got in, stole the book, and avidly leafed through it, with an almost physical voracity. He soon felt ill and ran to seek help in the kitchen. Where he died. Am I mistaken?”

  “No. Go on.”

  “The rest is simple. Berengar finds Venantius’s body in the kitchen, fears there will be an inquiry, because, after all, Venantius got into the Aedificium at night thanks to Berengar’s prior revelation to Adelmo. He doesn’t know what to do; he loads the body on his shoulders and flings it into the jar of blood, thinking everyone will be convinced Venantius drowned.”

  “And how do you know that was what happened?”

  “You know it as well. I saw how you reacted when they found a cloth stained with Berengar’s blood. With that cloth the foolhardy man had wiped his hands after putting Venantius in the jar. But since Berengar had disappeared, he could only have disappeared with the book, which by this point had aroused his curiosity, too. And you were expecting him to be found somewhere, not bloodstained but poisoned. The rest is clear. Severinus finds the book, because Berengar went first to the infirmary to read it, safe from indiscreet eyes. Malachi, at your instigation, kills Severinus, then dies himself when he comes back here to discover what was so forbidden about the object that had made him a murderer. And thus we have an explanation for all the corpses. . . . What a fool . . .”

  “Who?”

  “I. Because of a remark of Alinardo’s, I was convinced the series of crimes followed the sequence of the seven trumpets of the Apocalypse. Hail for Adelmo, and his death was a suicide. Blood for Venantius, and there it had been a bizarre notion of Berengar’s; water for Berengar himself, and it had been a random act; the third part of the sky for Severinus, and Malachi had struck him with the armillary sphere because it was the only thing he found handy. And finally scorpions for Malachi . . . Why did you tell him that the book had the power of a thousand scorpions?”

  “Because of you. Alinardo had told me about his idea, and then I heard from someone that you, too, found it persuasive. . . . I became convinced that a divine plan was directing these deaths, for which I was not responsible. And I told Malachi that if he were to become curious he would perish in accordance with the same divine plan; and so he did.”

  “So, then . . . I conceived a false pattern to interpret the moves of the guilty man, and the guilty man fell in with it. And it was this same false pattern that put me on your trail. Everyone nowadays is obsessed with the book of John, but you seemed to me the one who pondered it most, and not so much because of your speculations about the Antichrist as because you came from the country that has produced the most splendid Apocalypses. One day somebody told me it was you who had brought the most beautiful codices of this book to the library. Then, another day, Alinardo was raving about a mysterious enemy who had been sent to seek books in Silos (my curiosity was piqued when he said this enemy had returned prematurely into the realm of darkness: at first it might have seemed the man he was speaking of had died young, but he was referring to your blindness). Silos is near Burgos, and this morning, in the catalogue, I found a series of acquisitions, all of them Spanish Apocalypses, from the period when you had succeeded or were about to succeed Paul of Rimini. And in that group of acquisitions there was this book also. But I couldn’t be positive of my reconstruction until I learned that the stolen book was on linen paper. Then I remembered Silos, and I was sure. Naturally, as the idea of this book and its venomous power gradually began to take shape, the idea of an apocalyptic pattern began to collapse, though I couldn’t under
stand how both the book and the sequence of the trumpets pointed to you. But I understood the story of the book better because, directed by the apocalyptic pattern, I was forced more and more to think of you, and your debates about laughter. So that this evening, when I no longer believed in the apocalyptic pattern, I insisted on watching the stables, and in the stables, by pure chance, Adso gave me the key to entering the finis Africae.”

  “I cannot follow you,” Jorge said. “You are proud to show me how, following the dictates of your reason, you arrived at me, and yet you have shown me you arrived here by following a false reasoning. What do you mean to say to me?”

  “To you, nothing. I am disconcerted, that is all. But it is of no matter. I am here.”

  “The Lord was sounding the seven trumpets. And you, even in your error, heard a confused echo of that sound.”

  “You said this yesterday evening in your sermon. You are trying to convince yourself that this whole story proceeded according to a divine plan, in order to conceal from yourself the fact that you are a murderer.”

  “I have killed no one. Each died according to his destiny because of his sins. I was only an instrument.”

  “Yesterday you said that Judas also was an instrument. That does not prevent him from being damned.”

  “I accept the risk of damnation. The Lord will absolve me, because He knows I acted for His glory. My duty was to protect the library.”

  “A few minutes ago you were ready to kill me, too, and also this boy. . . .”

  “You are subtler, but no better than the others.”

  “And now what will happen, now that I have eluded the trap?”

  “We shall see,” Jorge answered. “I do not necessarily want your death; perhaps I will succeed in convincing you. But first tell me: how did you guess it was the second book of Aristotle?”

  “Your anathemas against laughter would surely not have been enough for me, or what little I learned about your argument with the others. At first I didn’t understand their significance. But there were references to a shameless stone that rolls over the plain, and to cicadas that will sing from the ground, to venerable fig trees. I had already read something of the sort: I verified it during these past few days. These are examples that Aristotle used in the first book of the Poetics, and in the Rhetoric. Then I remembered that Isidore of Seville defines comedy as something that tells of stupra virginum et amores meretricum—how shall I put it?—of less than virtuous loves. . . . Gradually this second book took shape in my mind as it had to be. I could tell you almost all of it, without reading the pages that were meant to poison me. Comedy is born from the komai—that is, from the peasant villages—as a joyous celebration after a meal or a feast. Comedy does not tell of famous and powerful men, but of base and ridiculous creatures, though not wicked; and it does not end with the death of the protagonists. It achieves the effect of the ridiculous by showing the defects and vices of ordinary men. Here Aristotle sees the tendency to laughter as a force for good, which can also have an instructive value: through witty riddles and unexpected metaphors, though it tells us things differently from the way they are, as if it were lying, it actually obliges us to examine them more closely, and it makes us say: Ah, this is just how things are, and I didn’t know it. Truth reached by depicting men and the world as worse than they are or than we believe them to be, worse in any case than the epics, the tragedies, lives of the saints have shown them to us. Is that it?”