The Name of the Rose

MATINS

We went down to matins. That last part of the night, virtually the first part of the imminent new day, was still foggy. As I crossed the cloister the dampness penetrated to my bones, aching after my uneasy sleep. Although the church was cold, I knelt under those vaults with a sigh of relief, sheltered from the elements, comforted by the warmth of other bodies, and by prayer.

The chanting of the psalms had just begun when William pointed to the stalls opposite us: there was an empty place in between Jorge and Pacificus of Tivoli. It was the place of Malachi, who always sat beside the blind man. Nor were we the only ones who had noticed the absence. On one side I caught a worried glance from the abbot, all too well aware, surely, that those vacancies always heralded grim news. And on the other I noticed that old Jorge was unusually agitated. His face, as a rule so inscrutable because of those white, blank eyes, was plunged almost entirely in darkness; but his hands were nervous and restless. In fact, more than once he groped at the seat beside him, as if to see whether it was occupied. He repeated that gesture again and again, at regular intervals, as if hoping that the absent man would appear at any moment but fearing not to find him.

“Where can the librarian be?” I whispered to William.

“Malachi,” William answered, “is by now the sole possessor of the book. If he is not guilty of the crimes, then he may not know the dangers that book involves…”

There was nothing further to be said. We could only wait. And we waited: William and I, the abbot, who continued to stare at the empty place, and Jorge, who never stopped questioning the darkness with his hands.

When we reached the end of the office, the abbot reminded monks and novices that it was necessary to prepare for the Christmas High Mass; therefore, as was the custom, the time before lauds would be spent assaying the accord of the whole community in the performance of some chants prescribed for the occasion. That assembly of devout men was in effect trained as a single body, a single harmonious voice; through a process that had gone on for years, they acknowledged their unification, into a single soul, in their singing.

The abbot invited them to chant the “Sederunt”:

I asked myself whether the abbot had not chosen deliberately that gradual to be chanted on that particular night, the cry to God of the persecuted, imploring help against wicked princes. And there, the princes’ envoys were still present at the service, to be reminded of how for centuries our order had been prompt to resist the persecution of the powerful, thanks to its special bond with the Lord, God of hosts. And indeed the beginning of the chant created an impression of great power.

On the first syllable, a slow and solemn chorus began, dozens and dozens of voices, whose bass sound filled the naves and floated over our heads and yet seemed to rise from the heart of the earth. Nor did it break off, because as other voices began to weave, over that deep and continuing line, a series of vocalises and melismas, it — telluric — continued to dominate and did not cease for the whole time that it took a speaker to repeat twelve “Ave Maria”s in a slow and cadenced voice. And as if released from every fear by the confidence that the prolonged syllable, allegory of the duration of eternity, gave to those praying, the other voices (and especially the novices’) on that rock-solid base raised cusps; columns, pinnacles of liquescent and underscored neumae. And as my heart was dazed with sweetness at the vibration of a climacus or a porrectus, a torculus or a salicus, those voices seemed to say to me that the soul (of those praying, and my own as I listened to them), unable to bear the exuberance of feeling, was lacerated through them to express joy, grief, praise, love, in an impetus of sweet sounds. Meanwhile, the obstinate insistence of the chthonian voices did not let up, as if the threatening presence of enemies, of the powerful who persecuted the people of the Lord, remained unresolved. Until that Neptunian roiling of a single note seemed overcome, or at least convinced and enfolded, by the rejoicing hallelujahs of those who opposed it, and all dissolved on a majestic and perfect chord and on a resupine neuma.

Once the “sederunt” had been uttered with a kind of stubborn difficulty, the “principes” rose in the air with grand and seraphic calm. I no longer asked myself who were the mighty who spoke against me (against us); the shadow of that seated, menacing ghost had dissolved, had disappeared.

And other ghosts, I also believed, dissolved at that point, because on looking again at Malachi’s stall, after my attention had been absorbed by the chant, I saw the figure of the librarian among the others in prayer, as if he had never been missing. I looked at William and saw a hint of relief in his eyes, the same relief that I noted from the distance in the eyes of the abbot. As for Jorge, he had once more extended his hands and, encountering his neighbor’s body, had withdrawn them promptly. But I could not say what feelings stirred him.

Now the choir was festively chanting the “Adiuva me,” whose bright a swelled happily through the church, and even the u did not seem grim as that to “sederunt,” but full of holy vigor. The monks and the novices sang, as the rule of chant requires, with body erect, throat free, head looking up, the book almost at shoulder height so they could read without having to lower their heads and thus causing the breath to come from the chest with less force. But it was still night, and though the trumpets of rejoicing blared, the haze of sleep trapped many of the singers, who, lost perhaps in the production of a long note, trusting the very wave of the chant, nodded at times, drawn by sleepiness. Then the wakers, even in that situation, explored the faces with a light, one by one, to bring them back to wakefulness of body and of soul.

So it was a waker who first noticed Malachi sway in a curious fashion, as if he had suddenly plunged back into the Cimmerian fog of a sleep that he had probably not enjoyed during the night. The waker went over to him with the lamp, illuminating his face and so attracting my attention. The librarian had no reaction. The man touched him, and Malachi slumped forward heavily. The waker barely had time to catch him before he fell.

The chanting slowed down, the voices died, there was brief bewilderment. William had jumped immediately from his seat and rushed to the place where Pacificus of Tivoli and the waker were now laying Malachi on the ground, unconscious.

We reached them almost at the same time as the abbot, and in the light of the lamp we saw the poor man’s face. I have already described Malachi’s countenance, but that night, in that glow, it was the very image of death: the sharp nose, the hollow eyes, the sunken temples, the white, wrinkled ears with lobes turned outward, the skin of the face now rigid, taut, and dry; the color of the cheeks yellowish and suffused with a dark shadow. The eyes were still open and a labored breathing escaped those parched lips. He opened his mouth, and as I stooped behind William, who had bent over him, I saw a now blackish tongue stir within the cloister of his teeth. William, his arm around Malachi’s shoulders, raised him, wiping away with his free hand a film of sweat that blanche his brow. Malachi felt a touch, a presence; he stared straight ahead, surely not seeing, certainly not recognizing who was before him. He raised a trembling hand, grasped William by the chest, drawing his face down until they almost touched, then faintly and hoarsely he uttered some words: “He told me … truly… It had the power of a thousand scorpions…”

“Who told you?” William asked him. “Who?”

Malachi tried again to speak. But he was seized by a great trembling and his head fell backward. His face lost all color, all semblance of life. He was dead.

William stood up. He noticed the abbot beside him, but did not say a word to him. Then, behind the abbot, he saw Bernard Gui.

“My lord Bernard,” William asked, “who killed this man, after you so cleverly found and confined the murderers?”

“Do not ask me,” Bernard said. “I have never said I had consigned to the law all the criminals loose in this abbey. I would have done so gladly, had I been able.” He looked at William. “But the others I now leave to the severity-or the excessive indulgence of my lord abbot.” The abbot blanched and remained silent. Then Bernard left.

At that moment we heard a kind of whimpering, a choked sob. It was Jorge, on his kneeling bench, supported by a monk who must have described to him what had happened.

“It will never end …” he said in a broken voice. “O Lord, forgive us all!”

William bent over the corpse for another moment. He grasped the wrists, turned the palms of the hands toward the light. The pads of the first three fingers of the right hand were darkened.

LAUDS

Was it time for lauds already? Was it earlier or later? From that point on I lost all temporal sense. Perhaps hours went by, perhaps less, in which Malachi’s body was laid out in church on a catafalque, while the brothers formed a semicircle around it. The abbot issued instructions for a prompt funeral. I heard him summon Benno and Nicholas of Morimondo. In less than a day, he said, the abbey had been deprived of its librarian and its cellarer. “You,” he said to Nicholas, “will take over the duties of Remigio. You know the jobs of many, here in the abbey. Name someone to take your place in charge of the forges, and provide for today’s immediate necessities in the kitchen, the refectory. You are excused from offices. Go.” Then to Benno he said, “Only yesterday evening you were named Malachi’s assistant. Provide for the opening of the scriptorium and make sure no one goes up into the library alone.” Shyly, Benno pointed out that he had not yet been initiated into the secrets of that place. The abbot glared at him sternly. “No one has said you will be. You see that work goes on and is offered as a prayer for our dead brothers … and for those who will yet die. Each monk will work only on the books already given him. Those who wish may consult the catalogue. Nothing else. You are excused from vespers, because at that hour you will lock up everything.”

“But how will I come out?” Benno asked.

“Good question. I will lock the lower doors after supper. Go.”

He went out with them, avoiding William, who wanted to talk to him. In the choir, a little group remained: Alinardo, Pacificus of Tivoli, Aymaro of Alessandria, and Peter of Sant’Albano. Aymaro was sneering.

“Let us thank the Lord,” he said. “With the German dead, there was the risk of having a new librarian even more barbarous.”

“Who do you think will be named in his place?” William asked.

Peter of Sant’Albano smiled enigmatically. “After everything that has happened these past few days, the problem is no longer the librarian, but the abbot…”

“Hush,” Pacificus said to him. And Alinardo, with his usual pensive look, said, “They will commit another injustice … as in my day. They must be stopped”

“Who?” William asked. Pacificus took him confidentially by the arm and led him a distance from the old man, toward the door.

“Alinardo … as you know … we love him very much. For us he represents the old tradition and the finest days of the abbey… But sometimes he speaks without knowing what he says. We are all worried about the new librarian. The man must be worthy, and mature, and wise… That is all there is to it.”

“Must he know Greek?” William asked.

“And Arabic, as tradition has it: his office requires it. But there are many among us with these gifts. I, if I may say so, and Peter, and Aymaro …”

“Benno knows Greek.”

“Benno is too young. I do not know why Malachi chose him as his assistant yesterday, but …”

“Did Adelmo know Greek?”

“I believe not. No, surely not.”

“But Venantius knew it. And Berengar. Very well, I thank you.”

We left, to go and get something in the kitchen.

“Why did you want to find out who knew Greek?” I asked.

“Because all those who die with blackened fingers know Greek. Therefore it would be well to expect the next corpse among those who know Greek. Including me. You are safe.”

“And what do you think of Malachi’s last words?”

“You heard them. Scorpions. The fifth trumpet announces, among other thins, the coming of locusts that will torment men with a sting like a scorpion’s. And Malachi informed us that someone had forewarned him.”

“The sixth trumpet,” I said, “announces horses with lions’ heads from whose mouths come smoke and fire and brimstone, ridden by men covered with breastplates the color of fire, jacinth, and brimstone.”

“Too many things. But the next crime might take place near the horse barn. We must keep an eye on it. And we must prepare ourselves for the seventh blast. Two more victims still. Who are the most likely candidates? If the objective is the secret of the finis Africae, those who know it. And as far as I can tell, that means only the abbot. Unless the plot is something else. You heard them just now, scheming to depose the abbot, but Alinardo spoke in the plural…”

“The abbot must be warned,” I said.

“Of what? That they will kill him? I have no convincing evidence. I proceed as if the murderer and I think alike. But if he were pursuing another design? And if, especially, there were not a murderer?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know exactly. But as I said to you, we must imagine all possible orders, and all disorders.”

PRIME

Nicholas of Morimondo, in his new position as cellarer, was giving orders to the cooks, and they were supplying him with information about the operation of the kitchen. William wanted to speak with him, but Nicholas asked us to wait a few moments, until he had to go down into the crypt of the treasure to supervise the polishing of the glass cases, which was still his responsibility; there he would have more time for conversation.

A little later, he did in fact ask us to follow him. He entered the church, went behind the main altar (while the monks were setting up a catafalque in the nave, to keep vigil over Malachi’s corpse), and led us down a little ladder. At its foot we found ourselves in a room with a very low vaulted ceiling supported by thick rough-stone columns. We were in the crypt where the riches of the abbey were stored, a place of which the abbot was very jealous and which he allowed to be opened only under exceptional circumstances and for very important visitors.

On every side were cases of different dimensions; in them, objects of wondrous beauty shone in the glow of the torches (lighted by two of Nicholas’s trusted assistants). Gold vestments, golden crowns studded with gems, coffers of various metals engraved with figures, works in niello and ivory. In ecstasy, Nicholas showed us an evangeliarium whose binding displayed amazing enamel plaques composing a variegated unity of graduated compartments, outlined in gold filigree and fixed by precious stones in the guise of nails. He showed us a delicate aedicula with two columns of lapis lazuli and gold which framed an Entombment of Christ in fine silver bas-relief surmounted by a golden cross set with thirteen diamonds against a background of grainy onyx, while the little pediment was scalloped with agate and rubies. Then I saw a chryselephantine diptych divided into five sections, with five scenes from the life of Christ, and in the center a mystical lamp composed of cells of gilded silver with glass paste, a single polychrome image on a ground of waxen whiteness.

Nicholas’s face and gestures, as he illustrated these things for us, were radiant with pride. William praised the objects he had seen, then asked Nicholas what sort of man Malachi had been.

Nicholas moistened one finger and rubbed it over a crystal surface imperfectly polished, then answered with a half smile, not looking William in the face: “As many said, Malachi seemed quite thoughtful, but on the contrary he was a very simple man. According to Alinardo, he was a fool.”

“Alinardo bears a grudge against someone for a remote event, when he was denied the honor of being librarian.”

“I, too, have heard talk of that, but it is an old story, dating back at least fifty years. When I arrived here the librarian was Robert of Bobbio, and the old monks muttered about an injustice committed against Alinardo. Robert had an assistant, who later died, and Malachi, still very young, was appointed in his place. Many said that Malachi was without merit, that though he claimed to know Greek and Arabic it was not true, he was only good at aping, copying manuscripts in those languages in fine calligraphy, without understanding what he was copying. Alinardo insinuated that Malachi had been put in that position to favor the schemes of his, Alinardo’s, enemy. But I did not understand whom he meant. That is the whole story. There have always been whispers that Malachi protected the library like a guard dog, but with no knowledge of what he was guarding. For that matter, there was also whispering against Berengar, when Malachi chose him as assistant. They said that the young man was no cleverer than his master, that he was only an intriguer. They also said — but you must have heard these rumors yourself by now — that there was a strange relationship between him and Malachi… Old gossip. Then, as you know, there was talk about Berengar and Adelmo, and the young scribes said that Malachi silently suffered horrible jealousy… And then there was also murmuring about the ties between Malachi and Jorge. No, not m the sense you might believe — no one has ever murmured against Jorge’s virtue! — but Malachi, as librarian, by tradition should have chosen the abbot as his confessor, whereas all the other monks go to Jorge for confession (or to Alinardo, but the old man is by now almost mindless)… Well, they said that in spite of this, the librarian conferred too often with Jorge, as if the abbot directed Malachi’s soul but Jorge ruled his body, his actions, his work. Indeed, as you know yourself and have probably seen, if anyone wanted to know the location of an ancient, forgotten book, he did not ask Malachi, but Jorge. Malachi kept the catalogue and went up into the library, but Jorge knew what each title meant…”

“Why did Jorge know so many things about the library?”

“He is the oldest, after Alinardo; he has been here since his youth. Jorge must be over eighty, and they say he has been blind at least forty years, perhaps longer…”

“How did he become so learned, before his blindness?”

“Oh, there are legends about him. It seems that when he was only a boy he was already blessed by divine grace, and in his native Castile he read the books of the Arabs and the Greek doctors while still a child. And then even after his blindness, even now, he sits for long hours in the library, he has others recite the catalogue to him and bring him books, and a novice reads aloud to him for hours and hours.”

“Now that Malachi and Berengar are dead, who is left who possesses the secrets of the library?”

“The abbot, and the abbot must now hand them on to Benno … if he chooses…”

“Why do you say. ‘if he chooses’?”

“Because Benno is young, and he was named assistant while Malachi was still alive; being assistant librarian is different from being librarian. By tradition, the librarian later becomes abbot…”

“Ah, so that is it… That is why the post of librarian is so coveted. But then Abo was once librarian?”

“No, not Abo. His appointment took place before I arrived here; it must be thirty years ago now. Before that, Paul of Rimini was abbot, a curious man about whom they tell strange stories. It seems he was a most voracious reader, he knew by heart all the books in the library, but he had a strange infirmity: he was unable to write. They called him Abbas agraphicus… He became abbot when very young; it was said he had the support of Algirdas of Cluny… But this is old monkish gossip. Anyway, Paul became abbot, and Robert of Bobbio took his place in the library, but he wasted away as an illness consumed him; they knew he would never be able to govern the abbey, and when Paul of Rimini disappeared …”

“He died?”

“No, he disappeared, I do not know how. One day he went off on a journey and never came back; perhaps he was killed by thieves in the course of his travels… Anyway, when Paul disappeared, Robert could not take his place, and there were obscure plots. Abo — it is said — was the natural son of the lord of this district. He grew up in the abbey of Fossanova; it was said that as a youth he had tended Saint Thomas when he died there and had been in charge of carrying that great body down the stairs of a tower where the corpse could not pass… That was his moment of glory, the malicious here murmured… The fact is, he was elected abbot, even though he had not been librarian, and he was instructed by someone, Robert I believe, in the mysteries of the library. Now you understand why I do not know whether the abbot will want to instruct Benno: it would be like naming him his successor, a heedless youth, a half-barbarian grammarian from the Far North, what could he know about this country, the abbey, its relations with the lords of the area?”

“But Malachi was not Italian, either, or Berengar, and yet both of them were appointed to the library.”

“There is a mysterious thing for you. The monks grumble that for the past half century or more the abbey has been forsaking its traditions… This is why, over fifty years ago, perhaps earlier, Alinardo aspired to the position of librarian. The librarian had always been Italian — there is no scarcity of great minds in this land. And besides, you see …” Here Nicholas hesitated, as if reluctant to say what he was about to say. “… you see, Malachi and Berengar died, perhaps so that they would not become abbot.”

He stirred, waved his hand before his face as if to dispel thoughts less than honest, then made the sign of the cross. “Whatever am I saying? You see, in this country shameful things have been happening for many years, even in the monasteries, in the papal court, in the churches… Conflicts to gain power, accusations of heresy to take a prebend from someone … How ugly! I am losing faith in the human race; I see plots and palace conspiracies on every side. That our abbey should come to this, a nest of vipers risen through occult magic in what had been a triumph of sainted members. Look: the past of this monastery!”

He pointed to the treasures scattered all around, and, leaving the crosses and other vessels, he took us to see the reliquaries, which represented the glory of this place.

“Look,” he said, “this is the tip of the spear that pierced the side of the Saviour!” We saw a golden box with a crystal lid, containing a purple cushion on which lay a piece of iron, triangular in shape, once corroded by rust but now restored to vivid splendor by long application of oils and waxes. But this was still nothing. For in another box, of silver studded with amethysts, its front panel transparent, I saw a piece of the venerated wood of the holy cross, brought to this abbey by Queen Helena herself, mother of the Emperor Constantine, after she had gone as a pilgrim to the holy places, excavated the hill of Golgotha and the holy sepulcher, and constructed a cathedral over it.

Then Nicholas showed us other things, and I could not describe them all, in their number and their rarity. There was, in a case of aquamarine, a nail of the cross. In an ampoule, lying on a cushion of little withered roses, there was a portion of the crown of thorns; and in another box, again on a blanket of dried flowers, a yellowed shred of the tablecloth from the last supper. And then there was the purse of Saint Matthew, of silver links; and in a cylinder, bound by a violet ribbon eaten by time and sealed with gold, a bone from Saint Anne’s arm. I saw, wonder of wonders, under a glass bell, on a red cushion embroidered with pearls, a piece of the manger of Bethlehem, and a hand’s length of the purple tunic of Saint John the Evangelist, two links of the chains that bound the ankles of the apostle Peter in Rome, the skull of Saint Adalbert, the sword of Saint Stephen, a tibia of Saint Margaret, a finger of Saint Vitalis, a rib of Saint Sophia, the chin of Saint Eobanus, the upper part of Saint Chrysostom’s shoulder blade, the engagement ring of Saint Joseph, a tooth of the Baptist, Moses’s rod, a tattered scrap of very fine lace from the Virgin Mary’s wedding dress.

And then other things that were not relics but still bore perennial witness to wonders and wondrous beings from distant lands, brought to the abbey by monks who had traveled to the farthest ends of the world: a stuffed basilisk and hydra, a unicorn’s horn, an egg that a hermit had found inside another egg, a piece of the manna that had fed the Hebrews to the desert, a whale’s tooth, a coconut, the scapula of an animal from before the Flood, an elephant’s ivory tusk, the rib of a dolphin. And then more relics that I did not identify, whose reliquaries were perhaps more precious than they, and some (judging by the craftsmanship of their containers, of blackened silver) very ancient: an endless series of fragments, bone, cloth, wood, metal, glass. And phials with dark powders, one of which, I learned, contained the charred remains of the city of Sodom, and another some mortar from the walls of Jericho. All things, even the humblest, for which an emperor would have given more than a castle, and which represented a hoard not only of immense prestige but also of actual material wealth for the abbey that preserved them.

I continued wandering about, dumbfounded, for Nicholas had now stopped explaining the objects, each of which was described by a scroll anyway; and now I was free to roam virtually at random amid that display of priceless wonders, at times admiring things in full light, at times glimpsing them in semidarkness, as Nicholas’s helpers moved to another part of the crypt with their torches. I was fascinated by those yellowed bits of cartilage, mystical and revolting at the same time, transparent and mysterious; by those shreds of clothing from some immemorial age, faded, threadbare, sometimes rolled up in a phial like a faded manuscript; by those crumbled materials mingling with the fabric that was their bed, holy jetsam of a life once animal (and rational) and now, imprisoned in constructions of crystal or of metal that in their minuscule size mimed the boldness of stone cathedrals with towers and turrets, all seemed transformed into mineral substance as well. Is this, then, how the bodies of the saints, buried, await the resurrection of the flesh? From these shards would there be reconstructed those organisms that in the splendor of the beatific vision, regaining their every natural sensitivity, would sense, as Pipernus wrote, even the minimas differentias odorum?

William stirred me from my meditations as he touched my shoulder. “I am going,” he said. “I’m going up to the scriptorium. I have yet something to consult…”

“But it will be impossible to have any books,” I said. “Benno was given orders…”

“I have to re-examine only the books I was reading the other day; all are still in the scriptorium, on Venantius’s desk. You stay here, if you like. This crypt is a beautiful epitome of the debates on poverty you have been following these past few days. And now you know why your brothers make mincemeat of one another as they aspire to the position of abbot.”

“But do you believe what Nicholas implied? Are the crimes connected with a conflict over the investiture?”

“I’ve already told you that for the present I don’t want to put hypotheses into words. Nicholas said many things. And some interested me. But now I am going to follow yet another trail. Or perhaps the same, but from a different direction. And don’t succumb too much to the spell of these cases. I have seen many other fragments of the cross, in other churches. If all were genuine, our Lord’s torment could not have been on a couple of planks nailed together, but on an entire forest.”

“Master!” I said, shocked.

“So it is, Adso. And there are even richer treasuries. Some time ago, in the cathedral of Cologne, I saw the skull of John the Baptist at the age of twelve.”

“Really?” I exclaimed, amazed. Then, seized by doubt, I added, “But the Baptist was executed at a more advanced age!”

“The other skull must be in another treasury,” William said, with a grave face. I never understood when he was jesting. In my country, when you joke you say something and then you laugh very noisily, so everyone shares in the joke. But William laughed only when he said serious things, and remained very serious when he was presumably joking.

TERCE

William took his leave of Nicholas and went up to the scriptorium. By now I had seen my fill of the treasure and decided to go into the church and pray for Malachi’s soul. I had never loved that man, who frightened me; and I will not deny that for a long time I believed him guilty of all the crimes. But now I had learned that he was perhaps a poor wretch, oppressed by unfulfilled passions, an earthenware vessel among vessels of iron, surly because bewildered, silent and evasive because conscious he had nothing to say. I felt a certain remorse toward him, and I thought that praying for his supernatural destiny might allay my feelings of guilt.

The church was now illuminated by a faint and livid glow, dominated by the poor man’s corpse, and inhabited by the monotone murmur of the monks reciting the office of the dead.

In the monastery of Melk I had several times witnessed a brother’s decease. It was not what I could call a happy occasion, but still it seemed to me serene, governed by calm and by a sense of rightness. The monks took turns in the dying man’s cell, comforting him with good words, and each in his heart considered how the dying man was fortunate, because he was about to conclude a virtuous life and would soon join the choir of angels in that bliss without end. And a part of this serenity, the odor of that pious envy, was conveyed to the dying man, who in the end died serenely. How different the deaths of the past few days! Finally I had seen at close hand how a victim of the diabolical scorpions of the finis Africae died, and certainly Venantius and Berengar had also died like that, seeking relief in water, their faces already wasted as Malachi’s had been.

I sat at the back of the church, huddled down to combat the chill. As I felt a bit of warmth, I moved my lips to join the chorus of the praying brothers. I followed them almost without being aware of what my lips were saying, while my head nodded and my eyes wanted to close. Long minutes went by; I believe I fell asleep and woke up at least three or four times. Then the choir began to chant the “Dies irae.” … The chanting affected me like a narcotic. I went completely to sleep. Or perhaps, rather than slumber, I fell into an exhausted, agitated doze, bent double, like an infant still in its’ mother’s womb. And in that fog of the soul, finding myself as if in a region not of this world, I had a vision, or dream, if you prefer to call it that.

I was descending some narrow steps into a low passage, as if I were entering the treasure crypt, but, continuing to descend, I arrived in a broader crypt, which was the kitchen of the Aedificium. It was certainly the kitchen, but there was a bustle among not only ovens and pots, but also bellows and hammers, as if Nicholas’s smiths had assembled there as well. Everything glowed red from the stoves and cauldrons, and boiling pots gave off steam while huge bubbles rose to their surfaces and popped suddenly with a dull, repeated sound. The cooks turned spits in the air, as the novices, who had all gathered, leaped up to snatch the chickens and the other fowl impaled on those red-hot irons. But nearby the smiths hammered so powerfully that the whole air was deafened, and clouds of sparks rose from the anvils, mingling with those belching from the two ovens.

I could not understand whether I was in hell or in such a paradise as Salvatore might have conceived, dripping with juices and throbbing with sausages. But I had no time to wonder where I was, because in rushed a swarm of little men, dwarfs with huge pot-shaped heads; sweeping me away, they thrust me to the threshold of the refectory, forcing me to enter.

The hall was bedecked for a feast. Great tapestries and banners hung on the walls, but the images adorning them were not those usually displayed for the edification of the faithful or the celebration of the glories of kings. They seemed inspired, on the contrary, by Adelmo’s marginalia, and they reproduced his less awful and more comical images: hares dancing around the tree of plenty, rivers filled with fish that flung themselves spontaneously into frying pans held out by monkeys dressed as cook-bishops, monsters with fat bellies skipping around steaming kettles.

In the center of the table was the abbot, in feast-day dress, with a great vestment of embroidered purple, holding his fork like a scepter. Beside him, Jorge drank from a great mug of wine, and Remigio, dressed like Bernard Gui, held a book shaped like a scorpion, virtuously reading the lives of the saints and passages from the Gospels, but they were stories about Jesus joking with the apostle, reminding him that he was a stone and on that shameless stone that rolled over the plain he would build his church, or the story of Saint Jerome commenting on the Bible and saying that God wanted to bare Jerusalem’s behind. And at every sentence the cellarer read, Jorge laughed, pounded his fist on the table, and shouted, “You shall be the next abbot, by God’s belly!” Those were his very words, may the Lord forgive me.

At a merry signal from the abbot, the procession of virgins entered. It was a radiant line of richly dressed females, in whose midst I thought at first I could discern my mother; then I realized my error, because it was certainly the maiden terrible as an army with banners. Except that she wore a crown of white pearls on her head, a double strand, and two cascades of pearls fell on either side of her face, mingling with two other rows which hung on her bosom, and from each pearl hung a diamond as big as a plum. Further, from both ears descended rows of blue pearls, which joined to become a choker at the base of her neck, white and erect as a tower of Lebanon. The cloak was murex-colored, and in her hand she had a diamond-studded golden goblet in which I knew, I cannot say how, was contained the lethal unguent one day stolen from Severinus. This woman, fair as the dawn, was followed by other female forms. One was clothed in a white embroidered mantle over a dark dress adorned with a double stole of gold embroidered in wild flowers; the second wore a cloak of yellow damask on a pale-pink dress dotted with green leaves, and with two great spun squares in the form of a dark labyrinth; and the third had an emerald dress interwoven with little red animals, and she bore in her hands a white embroidered stole; I did not observe the clothing of the others, because I was trying to understand who they were, to be accompanying the maiden, who now resembled the Virgin Mary; and as if each bore in her hand a scroll, or as if a scroll came from each woman’s mouth, I knew they were Ruth, Sarah, Susanna, and other women of Scripture.

At this point the abbot cried, “Come on in, you whoresons!” and into the refectory came another array of sacred personages, in austere and splendid dress, whom I recognized clearly; and in the center of the group was one seated on a throne who was our Lord but at the same time He was Adam, dressed in a purple cloak with a great diadem, red and white with rubies and pearls, holding the cloak on His shoulders, and on His head a crown similar to the maiden’s, in His hand a larger goblet, brimming with pig’s blood. Other most holy personages of whom I will speak, all familiar to me, surrounded him, along with a host of the King of France’s archers, dressed either in green or in red, with a pale-emerald shield on which the monogram of Christ stood out. The chief of this band went to pay homage to the abbot, extending the goblet to him. At which point the abbot said, “Age primum et septimum de quatuor,” and all chanted, “In finibus Africae, amen.” Then all sederunt.

When the two facing hosts had thus dispersed, at an order from Abbot Solomon the tables began to be laid, James and Andrew brought a bale of hay, Adam settled himself in the center, Eve lay down on a leaf, Cain entered dragging a plow, Abel came with a pail to milk Brunellus, Noah made a triumphal entry rowing the ark, Abraham sat under a tree, Isaac lay on the gold altar of the church, Moses crouched on a stone, Daniel appeared on a catafalque in Malachi’s arms, Tobias stretched out on a bed, Joseph threw himself on a bushel, Benjamin reclined on a sack, and there were others still, but here the vision grew confused. David stood on a mound, John on the floor, Pharaoh on the sand (naturally, I said to myself, but why?), Lazarus on the table, Jesus on the edge of the well, Zaccheus on the boughs of a tree, Matthew on a stool, Raab on stubble, Ruth on straw, Thecla on the window sill (from outside, Adelmo’s pale face appeared, as he warned her it was possible to fall down, down the cliff), Susanna in the garden, Judas among the graves, Peter on the throne, James on a net, Elias on a saddle, Rachel on a bundle. And Paul the apostle, putting down his sword, listened to Esau complain, while job moaned on the dungheap and Rebecca rushed to his aid with a garment and Judith with a blanket, Hagar with a shroud, and some novices carried a large steaming pot from which leaped Venantius of Salvemec, all red, as he began to distribute pig’s-blood puddings.

The refectory was now becoming more and more crowded, and all were eating at full tilt; Jonas brought some gourds to the table, Isaiah some vegetables, Ezekiel blackberries, Zaccheus sycamore flowers, Adam lemons, Daniel lupins, Pharaoh peppers, Cain cardoons, Eve figs, Rachel apples, Anamas some plums as big as diamonds, Leah onions, Aaron olives, Joseph an egg, Noah grapes, Simeon peach pits, while Jesus was singing the “Dies irae” and gaily poured over all the dishes some vinegar that he squeezed from a little sponge he had taken from the spear of one of the King of France’s archers.

At this point Jorge, having removed his vitra ad legendum, lighted a burning bush; Sarah had provided kindling for it, Jephtha had brought it, Isaac had unloaded it, Joseph had carved it, and while Jacob opened the well and Daniel sat down beside the lake, the servants brought water, Noah wine, Hagar a wineskin, Abraham a calf that Raab tied to a stake while Jesus held out the rope and Elijah bound its feet. Then Absalom hung. him by his hair, Peter held out his sword, Cain killed him, Herod shed his blood, Shem threw away his giblets and dung, Jacob added the oil, Molessadon the salt; Antiochus put him on the fire, Rebecca cooked him, and Eve first tasted him and was taken sick, but Adam said not to give it a thought and slapped Severinus on the back as he suggested adding aromatic herbs. Then Jesus broke the bread and passed around some fishes, Jacob shouted because Esau had eaten all the pottage, Isaac was devouring a roast kid, and Jonah a boiled whale, and Jesus fasted for forty days and forty nights.

Meanwhile, all came in and out bringing choice game of every shape and color, of which Benjamin always kept the biggest share and Mary the choicest morsel, while Martha complained of always having to wash the dishes. Then they divided up the calf, which had meanwhile grown very big, and John was given the head, Abessalom the brain, Aaron the tongue, Sampson the jaw, Peter the ear, Holofernes the head, Leah the rump, Saul the neck, Jonah the belly, Tobias the gall, Eve the rib, Mary the breast, Elizabeth the vulva, Moses the tail, Lot the legs, and Ezekiel the bones. All the while, Jesus was devouring a donkey, Saint Francis a wolf, Abel a lamb, Eve a moray, the Baptist a locust, Pharaoh an octopus (naturally, I said to myself, but why?), and David was eating Spanish fly, flinging himself on the maiden nigra sed formosa while Sampson bit into a lion’s behind and Thecla fled screaming, pursued by a hairy black spider.

All were obviously drunk by now, and some slipped on the wine, some fell into the jars with only their legs sticking out, crossed like two stakes, and all of Jesus’s fingers were black as he handed out pages of books saying’: Take this and eat, these are the riddles of Synphosius, including the one about the fish that is the son of God and your Saviour.

Sprawled on his back, Adam gulped, and the wine came from ‘his rib, Noah cursed Ham in his sleep, Holofernes snored, all unsuspecting, Jonah slept soundly, Peter kept watch till cockcrow, and Jesus woke with a start, hearing Bernard Gui and Bertrand del Poggetto plotting to burn the maiden; and he shouted: Father, if it be thy will, let this chalice pass from me! And some poured badly and some drank well, some died laughing and some laughed dying, some bore vases and some drank from another’s cup. Susanna shouted that she would never grant her beautiful white body to the cellarer and to Salvatore for a miserable beef heart, Pilate wandered around the refectory like a lost soul asking for water to wash his hands, and Fra Dolcino, with his plumed hat, brought the water, then opened his garment, snickering, and displayed his pudenda red with blood, while Cain taunted him and embraced the beautiful Margaret of Trent: and Dolcino fell to weeping and went to rest his head on’ the shoulder of Bernard Gui, calling him Angelic Pope, Ubertino consoled him with a tree of life, Michael of Cesena with a gold purse, the Marys sprinkled him with unguents, and Adam convinced him to bite into a freshly plucked apple.

And then the vaults of the Aedificium opened and from the heavens descended Roger Bacon on a flying machine, unico homine regente. Then David played his lyre, Salome danced with her seven veils, and at the fall of each veil she blew one of the seven trumpets and showed one of the seven seals, until only the amicta sole remained. Everyone said there had never been such a jolly abbey, and Berengar pulled up everyone’s habit, man and woman, kissing them all on the anus.

Then it was that the abbot flew into a rage, because, he said, he had organized such a lovely feast and nobody was giving him anything; so they all outdid one another in bringing him gifts and treasures, a bull, a lamb, a lion, a camel, a stag, a calf, a mare, a chariot of the sun, the chin of Saint Eubanus, the tail of Saint Ubertina, the uterus of Saint Venantia, the neck of Saint Burgosina engraved like a goblet at the age of twelve, and a copy of the Pentagonum Salomonis. But the abbot started yelling that they were trying to distract his attention with their behavior, and in fact they were looting the treasure crypt, where we all were, and a most precious book had been stolen which spoke of scorpions and the seven trumpets, and he called the King of France’s archers to search all the suspects. And, to everyone’s shame, the archers found a multicolored cloth on Hagar, a gold seal on Rachel, a silver mirror in Thecla’s bosom, a siphon under Benjamin’s arm, a silk coverlet among Judith’s clothes, a spear in Longinus’s hand, and a neighbor’s wife in the arms of Abimelech. But the worst was when they found a black rooster on the girl, black and beautiful she was, like a cat of the same color, and they called her a witch and a Pseudo Apostle, so all flung themselves on her, to punish her. The Baptist decapitated her, Abel cut her open, Adam drove her out, Nebuchadnezzar wrote zodiacal signs on her breast with a fiery hand, Elijah carried her off in a fiery chariot, Noah plunged her in water, Lot changed her into a pillar of salt, Susanna accused her of lust, Joseph betrayed her with another woman, Ananias stuck her into a furnace, Sampson chained her up, Paul flagellated her, Peter crucified her head down, Stephen stoned her, Lawrence burned her on a grate, Bartholomew skinned her, Judas denounced her, the cellarer burned her, and Peter denied everything. Then they all were on that body, flinging excrement on her, farting in her face, urinating on her head, vomiting on her bosom, tearing out her hair, whipping her buttocks with glowing torches. The girl’s body, once so beautiful and sweet, was now lacerated, torn into fragments that were scattered among the glass cases and gold-and-crystal reliquaries of the crypt. Or, rather, it was not the body of the girl that went to fill the crypt, it was the fragments of the crypt that, whirling, gradually composed to form the girl’s body, now something mineral, and then again decomposed and scattered, sacred dust of segments accumulated by insane blasphemy. It was now as if a single immense body had, in the course of millennia, dissolved into its parts, and these parts had been arranged to occupy the whole crypt, more splendid than the ossarium of the dead monks but not unlike it, and as if the substantial form of man’s very body, the masterpiece of creation, had shattered into plural and separate accidental forms, thus becoming the image of its own opposite, form no longer ideal but earthly, of dust and stinking fragments, capable of signifying only death and destruction…

Now I could no longer find the banqueters or the gifts they had brought, it was as if all the guests of the symposium were now in the crypt, each mummified in its own residue, each the diaphanous synecdoche of itself, Rachel as a bone, Daniel as a tooth, Sampson as a jaw, Jesus as a shred of purple garment. As if, at the end of the banquet, the feast transformed into the girl’s slaughter, it had become the universal slaughter, and here I was seeing its final result, the bodies (no, the whole terrestrial and sublunar body of those ravenous and thirsting feasters) transformed into a single dead body, lacerated and tormented like Dolcino’s body after his torture, transformed into a loathsome and resplendent treasure, stretched out to its full extent like the hide of a skinned and hung animal, which still contained, however, petrified, the leather sinews, the viscera, and all the organs, and even the features of the face. The skin with each of its folds, wrinkles, and scars, with its velvety plains, its forest of hairs, the dermis, the bosom, the pudenda, having become a sumptuous damask, and the breasts, the nails, the horny formations under the heel, the threads of the lashes, the watery substance of the eyes, the flesh of the lips, the thin spine of the back, the architecture of the bones, everything reduced to sandy powder, though nothing had lost its own form or respective placement, the legs emptied and limp as a boot, their flesh lying flat like a chasuble with all the scarlet embroidery of the veins, the engraved pile of the viscera, the intense and mucous ruby of the heart, the pearly file of even teeth arranged like a necklace, with the tongue as a pink-and-blue pendant, the fingers in a row like tapers, the seal of the navel reknotting the threads of the unrolled carpet of the belly … From every corner of the crypt, now I was grinned at, whispered to, bidden to death by this macrobody divided among glass cases and reliquaries and yet reconstructed in its vast and irrational whole, and it was the same body that at the supper had eaten and tumbled obscenely but here, instead, appeared to me fixed in the intangibility of its deaf and blind ruin. And Ubertino, seizing me by the arm, digging his nails into my flesh, whispered to me: “You see, it is the same thing, what first triumphed in its folly and took delight in its jesting now is here, punished and rewarded, liberated from the seduction of the passions, rigidified by eternity, consigned to the eternal frost that is to preserve and purify it, saved from corruption through the triumph of corruption, because nothing more can reduce to dust that which is already dust and mineral substance, mors est quies viatoris, finis est omnis laboris…”

But suddenly Salvatore entered the crypt, glowing like a devil, and cried, “Fool! Can’t you see this is the great Lyotard? What are you afraid of, my little master? Here is the cheese in batter!” And suddenly the crypt was bright with reddish flashes and it was again the kitchen, but not so much a kitchen as the inside of a great womb, mucous and viscid, and in the center an animal black as a raven and with a thousand hands was chained to a huge grate, and it extended those limbs to snatch everybody around it, and as the peasant when thirsty squeezes a bunch of grapes, so that great beast squeezed those it had snatched so that its hands broke them all, the legs of some, the heads of others, and then it sated itself, belching a fire that seemed to stink more than sulphur. But, wondrous mystery, that scene no longer instilled fear in me, and I was surprised to see that I could watch easily that “good devil” (so I thought) who after all was none other than Salvatore, because now I knew all about the mortal human body, its sufferings and its corruption, and I feared nothing any more. In fact, in the light of that flame, which now seemed mild and convivial, I saw again all the guests of the supper, now restored to their original forms, singing and declaring, that everything was beginning again, and among them was the maiden, whole and most beautiful, who said to me, “it is nothing, it is nothing, you will see: I shall be even more beautiful than before; just let me go for a moment and burn on the pyre, then we shall meet again here!” And she displayed to me, God have mercy on me, her vulva, into which I entered, and I found myself in a beautiful cave, which seemed the happy valley of the golden age, dewy with waters and fruits and trees that bore cheeses in batter. And all were thanking the abbot for the lovely feast, and they showed him their affection and good humor by pushing him, kicking him, tearing his clothes, laying him on the ground, striking his rod with rods, as he laughed and begged them to stop tickling him. And, riding mounts whose nostrils emitted clouds of brimstone, the Friars of the Poor Life entered, carrying at their belts purses full of gold with which they transformed wolves into lambs and lambs into wolves and crowned them emperor with the approval of the assembly, of the people, who sang praises of God’s infinite omnipotence. “Ut cachinnis dissolvatur, torqueatur rictibus!” Jesus shouted, waving his crown of thorns. Pope John came in, cursing the confusion and saying, “At this rate I don’t know where it all will end!” But everyone mocked him and, led by the abbot, went out with the pigs to hunt truffles in the forest. i was about to follow them when in a corner I saw William, emerging from the labyrinth and carrying in his hand the magnet, which pulled him rapidly northward. “Do not leave me, master!” I shouted. “I, too, want to see what is in the finis Africae!”

“You have already seen it!” William answered, far away by now. And I woke up as the last words of the funeral chant were ending in the church:

A sign that my vision, rapid like all visions, if it had not lasted the space of an “amen,” as the saying goes, had lasted almost the length of a “Dies irae.”

AFTER TERCE

Dazed, I came out through the main door and discovered a little crowd there. The Franciscans were leaving, and William had come down to say good-bye to them.

I joined in the farewells, the fraternal embraces. Then I asked William when the others would be leaving, with the prisoners. He told me they had already left, half an hour before, while we were in the treasure crypt, or perhaps, I thought, when I was dreaming.

For a moment I was aghast, then I recovered myself. Better so. I would not have been able to bear the sight of the condemned (I meant the poor wretched cellarer and Salvatore … and, of course, I also meant the girl) being dragged off, far away and forever. And besides, I was still so upset by my dream that my feelings seemed numb.

As the caravan of Minorites headed for the gate, to leave the abbey, William and I remained in front of the church, both melancholy, though for different reasons. Then I decided to tell my master my dream. Though the vision had been multiform and illogical, I remembered it with. amazing clarity, image by image, action by action, word by word. And so I narrated it, omitting nothing, because I knew that dreams are often mysterious messages in which learned people can read distinct prophecies.

William listened to me in silence, then asked me, “Do you know what you have dreamed?”

“Exactly what I told you …” I replied, at a loss.

“Of course, I realize that. But do you know that to a great extent what you tell me has already been written? You have added people and events of these past few days to a picture already familiar to you, because you have read the story of your dream somewhere, or it was told you as a boy, in school, in the convent. It is the Coena Cypriani.”

I remained puzzled briefly. Then I remembered. He was right! Perhaps I had forgotten the title, but what adult monk or unruly young novice has not smiled or laughed over the various visions, in prose or rhyme, of this story, which belongs to the tradition of the paschal season and the ioca monachorum? Though the work is banned or execrated by the more austere among novice masters, there is still not a convent in which the monks have not whispered it to one another, variously condensed and revised, while some piously copied it, declaring that behind a veil of mirth it concealed secret moral lessons, and others encouraged its circulation because, they said, through its jesting, the young could more easily commit to memory certain episodes of sacred history. A verse version had been written for Pope John VIII, with the inscription “I loved to jest; accept me, dear Pope John, in my jesting. And, if you wish, you can also laugh.” And it was said that Charles the Bald himself had staged it, in the guise of a comic sacred mystery, in a rhymed version to entertain his dignitaries at supper.

And how many scoldings had I received from my masters when, with my companions, I recited passages from it! I remembered an old friar at Melk who used to say that a, virtuous man like Cyprian could not have written such an indecent thing, such a sacrilegious parody of Scripture, worthier of an infidel and a buffoon than of a holy martyr… For years I had forgotten those childish jokes. Why on this day had the Coena reappeared so vividly in my dream? I had always thought that dreams were divine messages, or at worst absurd stammerings of the sleeping memory about things that had happened during the clay. I was now realizing that one can also dream books, and therefore dream of dreams.

“I should like to be Artemidorus to interpret your dream correctly,” William said. “But it seems to me that even without Artemidorus’s learning it is easy to understand what happened. In these past days, my poor boy, you have experienced a series of events in which every upright rule seems to have been destroyed. And this morning, in your sleeping mind, there returned the memory of a kind of comedy in which, albeit with other intentions, the world is described upside down. You inserted into that work your most recent memories, your anxieties, your fears. From the marginalia of Adelmo you went on to relive a great carnival where everything seems to proceed in the wrong direction, and yet, as in the Coena, each does what he really did in life. And finally you asked yourself, in the dream, which world is the false one, and what it means to walk head down. Your dream no longer distinguished what is down and what is up, where life is and where death. Your dream cast doubt on the teachings you have received.”

“My dream,” I said virtuously, “not I. But dreams are not divine messages, then; they are diabolical ravings, and they contain no truth!”

“I don’t know, Adso,” William said. “We already have so many truths in our possession that if the day came when someone insisted on deriving a truth even from our dreams, then the day of the Antichrist would truly be at hand. And yet, the more I think of your dream, the more revealing it seems to me. Perhaps not to you, but to me. Forgive me if I use your dream in order to work out my hypotheses; I know, it is a base action, it should not be done… But I believe that your sleeping soul understood more things than I have in six days, and awake…”

“Truly?”

“Truly. Or perhaps not. I find your dream revealing because it coincides with one of my hypotheses. But you have given me great help. Thank you.”

“But what was there in my dream that interests you so much? It made no sense, like all dreams!”

“It had another sense like all dreams, and visions. It must be read as an allegory, or an analogy…”

“Like Scripture?”

“A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams.”

SEXT

William decided to go back up to the scriptorium, from which he had just come. He asked Benno’s leave to consult the catalogue, and he leafed through it rapidly. “It must be around here,” he said, “I saw it just an hour ago…” He stopped at one page. “Here,” he said, “read this title.”

As a single entry there was a group of four titles, indicating that one volume contained several texts. I read:

“What is it?” I asked.

“It is our book,” William whispered to me. “This is why your dream reminded me of something. Now I am sure this is it. And in fact” — he glanced quickly at the pages immediately preceding and following — “in fact, here are the books I was thinking about, all together. But this isn’t what I wanted to check. See here. Do you have your tablet? Good. We must make a calculation, and try to remember clearly what Alinardo told us the other day as well as what we heard this morning from Nicholas. Now, Nicholas told us he arrived here about thirty years ago, and Abo had already been named abbot. The abbot before him was Paul of Rimini. Is that right? Let’s say this succession took place around 1290, more or less, it doesn’t matter. Nicholas also told us that, when he arrived, Robert of Bobbio was already librarian. Correct? Then Robert died, and the post was given to Malachi, let’s say at the beginning of this century. Write this down. There is a period, however, before Nicholas came, when Paul of Rimini was librarian. How long was he in that post? We weren’t told. We could examine the abbey ledgers, but I imagine the abbot has them, and for the moment I would prefer not to ask him for them. Let’s suppose Paul was appointed librarian sixty years ago. Write that. Why does Alinardo complain of the fact that, about fifty years ago, he should have been given the post of librarian and instead it went to another? Was he referring to Paul of Rimini?”

“Or to Robert of Bobbio!” I said.

“So it would seem. But now look at this catalogue. As you know, the titles are recorded in the order of acquisition. And who writes them in this ledger? The librarian. Therefore, by the changes of handwriting in these pages we can establish the succession of librarians. Now we will look at the catalogue from the end; the last handwriting is Malachi’s, you see. And it fills only a few pages. The abbey has not acquired many books in these last thirty years. Then, as we work backward, a series of pages begins in a shaky hand. I clearly read the presence of Robert of Bobbio, who was ill. Robert probably did not occupy the position long. And then what do we find? Pages and pages in another hand, straight and confident, a whole series of acquisitions (including the group of books I was examining a moment ago), truly impressive. Paul of Rimini must have worked hard! Too hard, if you recall that Nicholas told us he became abbot while still a young man. But let’s assume that in a few years this voracious reader enriched the abbey with so many books. Weren’t we told he was called Abbas agraphicus because of that strange defect, or illness, which made him unable to write? Then who wrote these pages? His assistant librarian, I would say. But if by chance this assistant librarian were then named librarian, he would then have continued writing, and we would have figured out why there are so many pages here in the same hand. So, then, between Paul and Robert we would have another librarian, chosen about fifty years ago, who was the mysterious rival of Alinardo, who was hoping, as an older man, to succeed Paul. Then this man died, and somehow, contrary to Alinardo’s expectations and the expectations of others, Robert was named in his place.”

“But why are you so sure this is the right scansion? Even granting that this handwriting is the nameless librarian’s, why couldn’t Paul also have written the titles of the still earlier pages?”

“Because among the acquisitions they recorded all bulls and decretals, and these are precisely dated. I mean, if you find here, as you do, the Firma cautela of Boniface the Seventh, dated 1296, you know that text did not arrive before that year, and you can assume it didn’t arrive much later. I have these milestones, so to speak, placed along the years, so if I grant that Paul of Rimini became librarian in 1265 and abbot in 1275, and I find that his hand, or the hand of someone else who is not Robert of Bobbio, lasts from 1265 to 1285, then I discover a discrepancy of ten years.”

My master was truly very sharp. “But what conclusions do you draw from this discrepancy?” I asked.

“None,” he answered. “Only some premises.”

Then he got up and went to talk with Benno, who was staunchly at his post, but with a very unsure air. He was still behind his old desk and had not dared take over Malachi’s, by the catalogue. William addressed him with some coolness. We had not forgotten the unpleasant scene of the previous evening.

“Even in your new and powerful position, Brother Librarian, I trust you will answer a question. That morning when Adelmo and the others were talking here about witty riddles, and Berengar made the first reference to the finis Africae, did anybody mention the Coena Cypriani?”

“Yes,” Benno said, “didn’t I tell you? Before they talked about the riddles of Symphosius, Venantius himself mentioned the Coena, and Malachi became furious, saying it was an ignoble work and reminding us that the abbot had forbidden anyone to read it…”

“The abbot?” William said. “Very interesting. Thank you, Benno.”

“Wait,” Benno said, “I want to talk with you.” He motioned us to follow him out of the scriptorium, onto the stairs going down to the kitchen, so the others could not hear him. His lips were trembling.

“I’m frightened, William,” he said. “They’ve killed Malachi. Now I am the one who knows too many things. Besides, the group of Italians hate me… They do not want another foreign librarian… I believe the others were murdered for this very reason… I’ve never told you about Alinardo’s hatred for Malachi, his bitterness.”

“Who was it who took the post from him, years ago?”

“That I don’t know: he always talks about it vaguely, and anyway it’s ancient history. They must all be dead now. But the group of Italians around Alinardo speaks often … spoke often of Malachi as a straw man … put here by someone else, with the complicity of the abbot… Not realizing it, I … I have become involved in the conflict of the two hostile factions… I became aware of it only this morning… Italy is a land of conspiracies: they poison popes here, so just imagine a poor boy like me… Yesterday I hadn’t understood, I believed that book was responsible for everything, but now I’m no longer sure. That was the pretext: you’ve seen that the book was found but Malachi died all the same… I must … I want to … I would like to run away. What do you advise me to do?”

“Stay calm. Now you ask advice, do you? Yesterday evening you seemed ruler of the world. Silly youth, if you had helped me yesterday we would have prevented this last crime. You are the one who gave Malachi the book that brought him to his death. But tell me one thing at least. Did you have that book in your hands, did you touch it, read it? Then why are you not dead?”

“I don’t know. I swear I didn’t touch it; or, rather, I touched it when I took it in the laboratory but without opening it; I hid it inside my habit, then went and put it under the pallet in my cell. I knew Malachi was watching me, so I came back at once to the scriptorium. And afterward, when Malachi offered to make me his assistant, I gave him the book. That’s the whole story.”

“Don’t tell me you didn’t even open it.”

“Yes, I did open it before hiding it, to make sure it really was the one you were also looking for. It began with an Arabic manuscript, then I believe one in Syriac, then there was a Latin text, and finally one in Greek…”

I remembered the abbreviations we had seen in the catalogue. The first two titles were listed as “ar.” and “syr” It was the book! But William persisted: “You touched it and you are not dead. So touching it does not kill. And what can you tell me about the Greek text? Did you look at it?”

“Very briefly. Just long enough to realize it had no title; it began as if a part were missing…”

“Liber acephalus …” William murmured.

“I tried to read the first page, but the truth is that my Greek is very poor. And then my curiosity was aroused by another detail, connected with those same pages in Greek. I did not leaf through all of them, because I was unable to. The pages were — how can I explain? — damp, stuck together. It was hard to separate one from the other. Because the parchment was odd … softer than other parchments, and the first page was rotten, and almost crumbling. It was … well, strange.”

“ ‘Strange’: the very word Severinus used,” William said.

“The parchment did not seem like parchment… It seemed like cloth, but very fine …” Benno went on.

“Charta lintea, or linen paper,” William said. “Had you never seen it?”

“I had heard of it, but I don’t believe I ever saw it before. It is said to be very costly, and delicate. That’s why it is rarely used. The Arabs make it, don’t they?”

“They were the first. But it is also made here in Italy, at Fabriano. And also … Why, of course, naturally!” William’s eyes shone. “What a beautiful and interesting revelation! Good for you, Benno! I thank you! Yes, I imagine that here in the library charta lintea must be rare, because no very recent manuscripts have arrived. And besides, many are afraid linen paper will not survive through the centuries like parchment, and perhaps that is true. Let us imagine, if they wanted something here that was not more perennial than bronze … Charta lintea, then? Very well. Good-bye. And don’t worry. You’re in no danger.”

We went away from the scriptorium, leaving Benno calmer, if not totally reassured.

The abbot was in the refectory. William went to him and asked to speak with him. Abo, unable to temporize, agreed to meet us in a short while at his house.

NONES

The abbot’s apartments were over the chapter hall, and from the window of the large and sumptuous main room, where he received us, you could see, on that clear and windy day, beyond the roof of the abbatial church, the massive Aedificium.

The abbot, standing at the window, was in fact contemplating it, and he pointed it out to us with a solemn gesture.

“An admirable fortress,” he said, “whose proportions sum up the golden rule that governed the construction of the ark. Divided into three stories, because three is the number of the Trinity, three were the angels who visited Abraham, the days Jonah spent in the belly of the great fish, and the days Jesus and Lazarus passed in the sepulcher; three times Christ asked the Father to let the bitter chalice pass from him, and three times he hid himself to pray with the apostles. Three times Peter denied him, and three times Christ appeared to his disciples after the Resurrection. The theological virtues are three, and three are the holy languages, the parts of the soul, the classes of intellectual creatures, angels, men, and devils; there are three kinds of sound — vox, flatus, pulsus — and three epochs of human history, before, during, and after the law.”

“A wondrous harmony of mystical relations,” William agreed.

“But the square shape also,” the abbot continued, “is rich in spiritual lessons. The cardinal points are four, and the seasons, the elements, and heat, cold, wet, and dry; birth, growth, maturity, and old age; the species of animals, celestial, terrestrial, aerial, and aquatic; the colors forming the rainbow; and the number of years required to make a leap year.”

“Oh, to be sure,” William said, and three plus four is seven, a superlatively mystical number, whereas three multiplied by four makes twelve, like the apostles, and twelve by twelve makes one hundred forty-four, which is the number of the elect.” And to this last display of mystical knowledge of the ideal world of numbers, the abbot had nothing further to add. Thus William could come to the point.

“We must talk about the latest events, on which I have reflected at length,” he said.

The abbot turned his back to the window and looked straight at William with a stern face. “At too-great length, perhaps. I must confess, Brother William, that I expected more of you. Almost six days have passed since you arrived here; four monks have died besides Adelmo, two have been arrested by the Inquisition — it was justice, to be sure, but we could have avoided this shame if the inquisitor had not been obliged to concern himself with the previous crimes — and finally the meeting over which I presided has — precisely because of all these wicked deeds — had a pitiful outcome…”

William remained silent, embarrassed. Without question, the abbot was right.

“That is true,” he admitted. “I have not lived up to your expectations, but I will explain why, Your Sublimity. These crimes do not stem from a brawl or from some vendetta among the monks, but from deeds that, in their turn, originate in the remote history of the abbey…”

The abbot looked at him uneasily. “What do you mean? I myself realize that the key is not that miserable affair of the cellarer, which has intersected another story. But the other, that other which I may know but cannot discuss … I hoped it was clear, and that you would speak to me about it…”

“Your Sublimity is thinking of some deed he learned about in confession… The abbot looked away, and William continued: “If Your Magnificence wants to know whether I know, without having learned it from Your Magnificence, that there were illicit relations between Berengar and Adelmo, and between Berengar and Malachi, well, yes, everyone in the abbey, knows this…”

The abbot blushed violently. “I do not believe it useful to speak of such things in the presence of this novice. And I do not believe, now that the. meeting is over, that you need him any longer as scribe. Go, boy,” he said to me imperiously. Humiliated, I went. But in my curiosity I crouched outside the door of the hall, which I left ajar, so that I could follow the dialogue.

William resumed speaking: “So, then, these illicit relations, if they did take place, had scant influence on the painful events. The key is elsewhere, as I thought you imagined. Everything turns on the theft and possession of a book, which was concealed in the finis Africae, and which is now there again thanks to Malachi’s intervention, though, as you have seen, the sequence of crimes was not thereby arrested.”

A long silence followed; then the abbot resumed speaking, in a broken, hesitant voice, like someone taken aback by unexpected revelations. “This is impossible … you … How do you know about the finis Africae? Have you violated my ban and entered the library?”

William ought to have told the truth, but the abbot’s rage would have known no bounds. Yet, obviously my master did not want to lie. He chose to answer the question with another question: “Did Your Magnificence not say to me, at our first meeting, that a man like me, who had described Brunellus so well without ever having seen him, would have no difficulty picturing places to which he did not have access?”

So that is it,” Abo said. “But why do you think what you think?”

“How I arrived at my conclusion is too long a story. But a series of crimes was committed to prevent many from discovering something that it was considered undesirable for them to discover. Now all those who knew something of the library’s secrets, whether rightly, or through trickery, are dead. Only one person remains: yourself.”

“Do you wish to insinuate … you wish to insinuate …” the abbot said.

“Do not misunderstand me,” said William, who probably had indeed wished to insinuate. “I say there is someone who knows and wants no one else to know. As the last to know, you could be the next victim. Unless you tell me what you know about that forbidden book, and, especially, who in the abbey might know what you know, and perhaps more, about the library.”

“It is cold in here,” the abbot said. “Let us go out.”

I moved rapidly away from the door and waited for them at the head of the stairs. The abbot saw me and smiled at me.

“How many upsetting things this young monk must have heard in the past few days! Come, boy, do not allow yourself to be too distressed. It seems to me that more plots have been imagined than really exist…”

He raised one hand and allowed the daylight to illuminate a splendid ring he wore on his fourth finger, the emblem of his power. The ring sparkled with all the brilliance of its stones.

“You recognize it, do you not?” he said to me. “The symbol of my authority, but also of my burden. It is not an ornament: it is a splendid syllogy of the divine word whose guardian I am.” With his fingers he touched the stone — or, rather, the arrangement of variegated stones composing that admirable masterpiece of human art and nature. “This is amethyst,” he said, “which is the mirror of humility and reminds us of the ingenuousness and sweetness of Saint Matthew; this is chalcedony, mark of charity, symbol of the piety of Joseph and Saint James the Greater; this is jasper, which bespeaks faith and is associated with Saint Peter; and sardonyx, sign of martyrdom, which recalls Saint Bartholomew; this is sapphire, hope and contemplation, the stone of Saint Andrew and Saint Paul; and beryl, sound doctrine, learning, and longanimity, the virtues of Saint Thomas… How splendid the language of gems is,” he went on, lost in his mystical vision, “which the lapidaries of tradition have translated from the reasoning of Aaron and the description of the heavenly Jerusalem in the book of the apostle. For that matter, the walls of Zion were decked with the same jewels that decorated the pectoral of Moses’s brother, except for carbuncle, agate, and onyx, which, mentioned in Exodus, are replaced in the Apocalypse by chalcedony, sardonyx, chrysoprase, and jacinth.”

He moved the ring and dazzled my eyes with its sparkling, as if he wanted to stun me. “Marvelous language, is it not? For other fathers stones signify still other things. For Pope Innocent the Third the ruby announced calm and patience; the garnet, charity. For Saint Bruno aquamarine concentrates theological learning in the virtue of its purest rays. Turquoise signifies joy; sardonyx suggests the seraphim; topaz, the cherubim; jasper, thrones; chrysolite, dominions; sapphire, the virtues; onyx, the powers; beryl, principalities; ruby, archangels; and emerald, angels. The language of gems is multiform; each expresses several truths, according to the sense of the selected interpretation, according to the context in which they appear. And who decides what is the level of interpretation and what is the proper context? You know, my boy, for they have taught you: it is authority, the most reliable commentator of all and the most invested with prestige, and therefore with sanctity. Otherwise how to interpret the multiple signs that the world sets before our sinner’s eyes, how to avoid the misunderstandings into which the Devil lures us? Mind you: it is extraordinary how the Devil hates the language of gems, as Saint Hildegard testifies. The foul beast sees in it a message illuminated by different meanings or levels of knowledge, and he would like to destroy it because he, the Enemy, senses in the splendor of stones the echo of the marvels in his possession before his fall, and he understands that this radiance is produced by fire, which is his torment.” He held out the ring for me to kiss, and I knelt. He stroked my head. “And so, boy, you must forget the things, no doubt erroneous, that you have heard these days. You have entered the noblest, the greatest order of all; of this order I am an abbot, and you are under my jurisdiction. Hear my command: forget, and may your lips be sealed forever. Swear.”

Moved, subjugated, I would certainly have sworn. And you, my good reader, would not be able now to read this faithful chronicle of mine. But at this point William intervened, not perhaps to prevent me from swearing, but in an instinctive reaction, out of irritation, to interrupt the abbot, to break that spell he had surely cast.

“What does the boy have to do with it? I asked you a question, I warned you of a danger, I asked you to tell me a name… Do you now wish me, too, to kiss the ring and swear to forget what I have learned or what I suspect?”

“Ah, you …” the abbot said sadly, “I do not expect a mendicant friar to understand the beauty of our traditions, or respect the reticence, the secrets, the mysteries of charity… yes, charity, and the sense of honor, and the vow of silence on which our greatness is based… You have spoken to me of a strange story, an incredible story. About a banned book that has caused a chain of murders, about someone who knows what only I should know … Tales, meaningless accusations. Speak of it, if you wish: no one will believe you. And even if some element of your fanciful reconstruction were true … well, now everything is once more under my control, my jurisdiction. I will look into this, I have the means, I have the authority. At the very beginning I made a mistake, asking an outsider, however wise, however worthy of trust, to investigate things that are my responsibility alone. But you understood, as you have told me; I believed at the outset that it involved a violation of the vow of chastity, and (imprudent as I was) I wanted someone else to tell me what I had heard in confession. Well, now you have told me. I am very grateful to you for what you have done or have tried to do. The meeting of the legations has taken place, your mission here is over. I imagine you are anxiously awaited at the imperial court; one does not deprive oneself at length of a man like you. I give you permission to leave the abbey. Today it is perhaps late: I do not want you to travel after sunset, for the roads are not safe. You will leave tomorrow morning, early. Oh, do not thank me, it has been a joy to have you here, a brother among brothers, honoring you with our hospitality. You may withdraw now with your novice to prepare your baggage. I will say good-bye to you again tomorrow at dawn. I thank you, with all my heart. Naturally, it is not necessary for you to continue your investigations. Do not disturb the monks further. You may go.”

It was more than a dismissal, it was an expulsion. William said good-bye and we went down the stairs.

“What does this mean?” I asked. I no longer understood anything.

“Try to formulate a hypothesis. You must have learned how it is done.”

“Actually, I have learned I must formulate at least two, one in opposition to the other, and both incredible. Very well, then …” I gulped: formulating hypotheses made me nervous. “First hypothesis: the abbot knew everything already and imagined you would discover nothing. Second hypothesis: the abbot never suspected anything (about what I don’t know, because I don’t know what’s in your mind). But, anyhow, he went on thinking it was all because of a quarrel between … between sodomite monks… Now, however, you have opened his eyes, he has suddenly understood something terrible, has thought of a name, has a precise idea about who is responsible for the crimes. But at this point he wants to resolve the matter by himself and wants to be rid of you, in order to save the honor of the abbey.”

“Good work. You are beginning to reason well. But you see already that in both cases our abbot is concerned for the good name of his monastery. Murderer or next victim as he may be, he does not want defamatory news about this holy community to travel beyond these mountains. Kill his monks, but do not touch the honor of his abbey. Ah, by …” William was now becoming infuriated. “That bastard of a feudal lord, that peacock who gained fame for having been the Aquinas’s gravedigger, that inflated wineskin who exists only because he wears a ring as big as the bottom of a glass! Proud, proud, all of you Cluniacs, worse than princes, more baronial than barons!”

“Master …” I ventured, hurt, in a reproachful tone.

“You be quiet, you are made of the same stuff. Your band are not simple men, or sons of the simple. If a peasant comes along you may receive him, but as I saw yesterday, you do not hesitate to hand him over to the secular arm. But not one of your own, no; he must be shielded. Abo is capable of identifying the wretch, stabbing him in the treasure crypt, and passing out his kidneys among the reliquaries, provided the honor of the abbey is saved… Have a Franciscan, a plebeian Minorite, discover the rat’s nest of this holy house? Ah, no, this is something Abo cannot allow at any price. Thank you, Brother William, the Emperor needs you, you see what a beautiful ring I have, good-bye. But now the challenge is not just a matter between me and Abo, it is between me and the whole business: I am not leaving these walls until I have found out. He wants me to leave tomorrow morning, does he? Very well, it’s his house; but by tomorrow morning I must know. I must.”

“You must? Who obliges you now?”

“No one ever obliges us to know, Adso. We must, that is all, even if we comprehend imperfectly.”

I was still confused and humiliated by William’s words against my order and its abbots. And I tried to justify Abo in part, formulating a third hypothesis, exercising a skill at which, it seemed to me, I was becoming very dextrous. “You have not considered a third possibility, master,” I said. “We had noticed these past days, and this morning it seemed quite clear to us after Nicholas’s confidences and the rumors we heard in church, that there is a group of Italian monks reluctant to tolerate the succession of foreign librarians; they accuse the abbot of not respecting tradition, and, as I understand it, they hide behind old Alinardo, thrusting him forward like a standard, to ask for a different government of the abbey. So perhaps the abbot fears our revelations could give his enemies a weapon, and he wants to settle the question with great prudence…”

“That is possible. But he is still an inflated wineskin, and he will get himself killed.”

We were in the cloister. The wind was growing angrier all the time, the light dimmer, even if it was just past nones. The day was approaching its sunset, and we had very little time left.

“It is late,” William said, “and when a man has little time, he must take care to maintain his calm. We must act as if we had eternity before us. I have a problem to solve: how to penetrate the finis Africae, because the final answer must be there. Then we must save some person, I have not yet determined which. Finally, we should expect something from the direction of the stables, which you will keep an eye on… Look at all the bustle…”

In fact, the space between the Aedificium and the cloister was unusually animated. A moment before, a novice, coming from the abbot’s house, had run toward the Aedificium. Now Nicholas was coming out of it, heading for the dormitories. In one corner, that mornings group, Pacificus, Aymaro, and Peter, were deep in discussion with Alinardo, as if trying to convince him of something.

Then they seemed to reach a decision. Aymaro supported the still-reluctant Alinardo, and went with him toward the abbatial residence. They were just entering as Nicholas came out of the dormitory, leading Jorge in the same direction. Seeing the two Italians enter, he whispered something into Jorge’s ear, and the old man shook his head. They continued, however, toward the chapter house.

“The abbot is taking the situation in hand …” William murmured skeptically. From the Aedificium were emerging more monks, who belonged in the scriptorium, and they were immediately followed by Benno, who came toward us, more worried than ever.

“There is unrest in the scriptorium,” he told us. “Nobody is working, they are all talking among themselves… What is happening?”

“What’s happening is that the people who until this morning seemed the most suspect are all dead. Until yesterday everyone was on guard against Berengar, foolish and treacherous and lascivious, then the cellarer, a suspect heretic, and finally Malachi, so generally disliked… Now they don’t know whom to be on guard against, and they urgently need to find an enemy, or a scapegoat. And each suspects the others; some are afraid, like you; others have decided to frighten someone else. You are all too agitated. Adso, take a look at the stables every now and then. I am going to get some rest.”

I should have been amazed: to go and rest when he had only a few hours left did not seem the wisest decision. But by now I knew my master. The more relaxed his body, the more ebullient his mind.

BETWEEN VESPERS AND COMPLINE

It is difficult for me to narrate what happened in the hours that followed, between vespers and compline.

William was absent. I roamed around the stables but noticed nothing abnormal. The grooms were bringing in the animals, made nervous by the wind; otherwise all was calm.

I entered the church. Everyone was already in his place among the stalls, but the abbot noticed Jorge was absent. With a gesture he delayed the beginning of the office. He called for Benno, to dispatch him to look for the old man, but Benno was not there. Someone pointed out that he was probably making the scriptorium ready for its evening closing. The abbot, annoyed, said it had been decided that Benno would close nothing because he did not know the rules. Aymaro of Alessandria rose from his stall: “If Your Paternity agrees, I will go and summon him…”

“No one asked anything of you,” the abbot said curtly, and Aymaro sat back down in his place, not without casting an inscrutable glance at Pacificus of Tivoli. The abbot called for Nicholas, who was not present. Someone reminded him that Nicholas was preparing supper, and the abbot made a gesture of annoyance, as if he were displeased to reveal to all that he was upset.

“I want Jorge here,” he cried. “Find him! You go!” he ordered the master of novices.

Another pointed out to him that Alinardo was also missing. “I know,” the abbot said, “he is not well.” I was near Peter of Sant’Albano and heard him say to his neighbor, Gunzo of Nola, in a vulgar dialect from central Italy which I partly understood, “I should think so. Today, when he came out after the colloquy, the poor old man was distraught. Abo behaves like the whore of Avignon!”

The novices were bewildered; with their innocent, boyish sensitivity they felt the tension reigning in choir, as I felt it. Long moments of silence and embarrassment ensued. The abbot ordered some psalms to be recited and he picked at random three that were not prescribed for vespers by the Rule. All looked at one another, then began praying in low voices. The novice master came back, followed by Benno, who took his seat, his head bowed. Jorge was not in the scriptorium or in his cell. The abbot commanded that the office begin.

When it was over, before everyone headed for supper, I went to call William. He was stretched out on his pallet, dressed, motionless. He said he had not realized it was so late. I told him briefly what had happened. He shook his head.

At the door of the refectory we saw Nicholas, who a few hours earlier had been accompanying Jorge. William asked him whether the old man had gone in immediately to see the abbot. Nicholas said Jorge had had to wait a long time outside the door, because Alinardo and Aymaro of Alessandria were in the hall. After Jorge was received, he remained inside for some time, while Nicholas waited for him. Then he came out and asked Nicholas to accompany him to the church, still deserted an hour before vespers.

The abbot saw us talking with the cellarer. “Brother William,” he admonished, “are you still investigating?” He bade William sit at his table, as usual. For Benedictines hospitality is sacred.

The supper was more silent than usual, and sad. The abbot ate listlessly, oppressed by grim thoughts. At the end he told the monks to hurry to compline.

Alinardo and Jorge were still absent. The monks pointed to the blind man’s empty place and whispered. When the office was finished, the abbot asked all to say a special prayer for the health of Jorge of Burgos. It was not clear whether he meant physical health or eternal health. All understood that a new calamity was about to befall the community. Then the abbot ordered each monk to hurry, with greater alacrity than usual, to his own pallet. He commanded that no one, and he emphasized the words “no one,” should remain in circulation outside the dormitory. The frightened novices were the first to leave, cowls over their faces, heads bowed, without exchanging the remarks, the nudges, the flashing smiles, the sly and concealed trippings with which they usually provoked one another (for novices, though young monks, are still boys, and the reproaches of their master are of little avail in preventing them all from behaving like boys, as their tender age demands).

When the adults filed out, I fell into line, unobtrusively, behind the group that by now had been characterized to me as “the Italians.” Pacificus was murmuring to Aymaro, “Do you really believe Abo doesn’t know where Jorge is?” And Aymaro answered, “He might know, and know that from where Jorge is he will never return. Perhaps the old man wanted too much, and Abo no longer wants him…”

As William and I pretended to retire to the pilgrims’ hospice, we glimpsed the abbot re-entering the Aedificium through the still-open door of the refectory. William advised waiting a while; once the grounds were empty of every presence, he told me to follow him. We rapidly crossed the empty area and entered the church.

AFTER COMPLINE

Like a pair of assassins, we lurked near the entrance, behind a column, whence we could observe the chapel with the skulls.

“Abo has gone to close the Aedificium,” William said. “When he has barred the doors from the inside, he can only come out through the ossarium.”

“And then?”

“And then we will see what he does.”

We did not discover what he did. An hour went by and he still had not reappeared. He’s gone into the finis Africae, I said. Perhaps, William answered. Eager to formulate more hypotheses, I added: Perhaps he came out again through the refectory and has gone to look for Jorge. And William answered: That is also possible. Perhaps Jorge is already dead, I imagined further. Perhaps he is to the Aedificium and is killing the abbot. Perhaps they are both in some other place and some other person is lying in wait for them. What did “the Italians” want? And why was Benno so frightened? Was it perhaps only a mask he had assumed, to mislead us? Why had he lingered in the scriptorium during vespers, if he didn’t know how to close the scriptorium or how to get out? Did he want to essay the passages of the labyrinth?

“All is possible,” William said. “But only one thing is happening, or has happened, or is about to happen. And at last divine Providence is endowing us with a radiant certitude.”

“What is that?” I asked, full of hope.

“That Brother William of Baskerville, who now has the impression of having understood everything, does not know how to enter the finis Africae. To the stables, Adso, to the stables.”

“And what if the abbot finds us?”

“We will pretend to be a pair of ghosts.”

To me this did not seem a practical solution, but I kept silent. William was growing uneasy. We came out of the north door and crossed the cemetery, while the wind was whistling loudly and I begged the Lord not to make us encounter two ghosts, for the abbey, on that night, did not lack for souls in torment. We reached the stables and heard the horses, more nervous than ever because of the fury of the elements. The main door of the building had, at the level of a man’s chest, a broad metal grating, through which the interior could be seen. In the darkness we discerned the forms of the horses. I recognized Brunellus, the first on the left. To his right, the third animal in line raised his head, sensing our presence, and whinnied. I smiled. “Tertius equi,” I said.

“What?” William asked.

“Nothing. I was remembering poor Salvatore. He wanted to perform God knows what magic with that horse, and with his Latin he called him “tertius equi: Which would be the u.”

“The u?” asked William, who had heard my prattle without paying much attention to it.

“Yes, because ‘tertius equi’ does not mean the third horse, but the third of the horse, and the third letter of the word ‘equus’ is u. But this is all nonsense…”

William looked at me, and in the darkness I seemed to see his face transformed. “God bless you, Adso!” he said to me. “Why, of course, suppositio materialis, the discourse is presumed de dicto and not de re… What a fool I am!” He gave himself such a great blow on the forehead that I heard a clap, and I believe he hurt himself. “My boy, this is the second time today that wisdom has spoken through your mouth, first in dream and now waking! Run, run to your cell and fetch the lamp, or, rather, both the lamps we hid. Let no one see you, and join me in church at once! Ask no questions! Go!”

I asked no questions and went. The lamps were under my bed, already filled with oil, and I had taken care to trim them in advance. I had the flint in my habit. With the two precious instruments clutched to my chest, I ran into the church.

William was under the tripod and was rereading the parchment with Venantius’s notes.

“Adso,” he said to me, “ ‘primum et septimum de quatuor’ does not mean the first and seventh of four, but of the four, the word ‘four’!” For a moment I still did not understand, but then I was enlightened: “Super thronos viginti quatuor! The writing! The verse! The words are carved over the mirror!”

“Come,” William said, “perhaps we are still in time to save a life!”

“Whose?” I asked, as he was manipulating the skulls and opening the passage to the ossarium.

“The life of someone who does not deserve it,” he said. We were already in the underground passage, our lamps alight, moving toward the door that led to the kitchen.

I said before that at this point you pushed a wooden door and found yourself in the kitchen, behind the fireplace, at the foot of the circular staircase that led to the scriptorium. And just as we were pushing that door, we heard to our left some muffled sounds within the wall. They came from the wall beside the door, where the row of niches with skulls and bones ended. Instead of a last niche, there was a stretch of blank wall of large squared blocks of stone, with an old plaque in the center that had some worn monograms carved on it. The sounds came, it seemed, from behind the plaque, or else from above the plaque, partly beyond the wall, and partly almost over our heads.

If something of the sort had happened the first night, I would immediately have thought of dead monks. But by now I tended to expect worse from living monks. “Who can that be?” I asked.

William opened the door and emerged behind the fireplace. The blows were heard also along the wall that flanked the stairs, as if someone were prisoner inside the wall, or else in that thickness (truly vast) that presumably existed between the inner wall of the kitchen and the outer wall of the south tower.

“Someone is shut up inside there,” William said. “I have wondered all along whether there were not another access to the finis Africae, in this Aedificium so full of passages. Obviously there is. From the ossarium, before you come up into the kitchen, a stretch of wall opens, and you climb up a staircase parallel to this, concealed in the wall, which leads right to the blind room.”

“But who is in there?”

“The second person. One is in the finis Africae, another has tried to reach him, but the one above must have blocked the mechanism that controls the entrances. So the visitor is trapped. And he is making a great stir because, I imagine, there cannot be much air in that narrow space.”

“Who is it? We must save him!”

“We shall soon know who it is. And as for saving him, that can only be done by releasing the mechanism from above: we don’t know the secret at this end. Let’s hurry upstairs.”

So we went up to the scriptorium, and from there to the labyrinth, and we quickly reached the south tower. Twice I had to curb my haste, because the wind that came through the slits that night created currents that, penetrating those passages, blew moaning through the rooms, rustling the scattered pages on the desks, so that I had to shield the flame with my hand.

Soon we were in the mirror room, this time prepared for the game of distortion awaiting us. We raised the lamps to illuminate the verse that surmounted the frame. Super thronos viginti quatuor … At this point the secret was quite clear: the word “quatuor” has seven letters, and we had to press on the q and the r. I thought, in my excitement, to do it myself: I rapidly set the lamp down on the table in the center of the room. But I did this nervously, and the flame began to lick the binding of a book also set there.

“Watch out, idiot!” William cried, and with a puff blew out the flame. “You want to set fire to the library?”

I apologized and started to light the lamp again. “It doesn’t matter,” William said, “mine is enough. Take it and give me light, because the legend is too high and you couldn’t reach it. We must hurry.”

“And what if there is somebody armed in there?” I asked, as William, almost groping, sought the fatal letters, standing on tiptoe, tall as he was, to touch the apocalyptic verse.

“Give me light, by the Devil, and never fear: God is with us!” he answered me, somewhat incoherently. His fingers were touching the q of “quatuor,” and, standing a few paces back, I saw better than he what he was doing. I have already said that the letters of the verses seemed carved or incised in the wall: apparently those of the word “quatuor” were metal outlines, behind which a wondrous mechanism had been placed and walled up. When it was pushed forward, the q made a kind of sharp click, and the same thing happened when William pressed on the r. The whole frame of the mirror seemed to shudder, and the glass surface snapped back. The mirror was a door, hinged on its left side. William slipped his hand into the opening now created between the right edge and the wall, and pulled toward himself. Creaking, the door opened out, in our direction. William slipped through the opening and I scuttled behind him, the lamp high over my head.

Two hours after compline, at the end of the sixth day, in the heart of the night that was giving birth to the seventh day, we entered the finis Africae.