A rat scritched faintly behind the shelves, and Tommaso wondered why the librarian had not posted a scullery boy with a stick to watch at nights. Likely the lad was kept away this eve lest he meet with the fearful heretic. Tommaso, who had years’ experience hunting rats in his stygian cells, could wait motionless, sandal in hand, for hours until the creatures crept within range. But now he need not trouble, for at the sound of a rat—the thought was like a rush of brandy fumes to his head—he could simply walk out of the room.
He picked up his candle and the furtive sounds ceased. Tommaso took the memorandum he had made—he could have easily inscribed it in the ledgers of his memory, but enjoyed the act of putting quill to paper—and tucked it into his sleeve. Pausing at the door, he wondered whether Niccolo would set a spy on him, but heard nothing without. Why bother to watch an old man sitting at a table?
He returned to his room, meeting no one in the unlit passageways. Turning the knob, he looked with amusement at the bolt, which no one would throw as the door shut behind him. Knowing the door unlocked made the cramped cell seem larger, and the long candle (he had earlier been granted only stubs) seemed like wealth.
Kneeling to pray, Fra Tommaso—proud before all save his God— thought for a wry moment that he might do well, considering the source of his deliverance, to offer up not the Lord’s Prayer, but one of Ficino’s Orphic hymns. The little blasphemy (though he would have to confess it tomorrow) warmed his coursing spiritus, like the burst of winy steam when Cook dashed moscato into the skillet.
Amy gently freed her arm from Paul’s embrace and slipped out of bed. Rubbing her tingling wrist, she tugged down her T-shirt and stepped quietly out of the bedroom, steering by the red pilot light of the kitchen cof-feemaker. The middle room was dominated by a broad balcony, and Amy, suddenly self-conscious about walking bare-bottomed through the open-windowed apartment, turned back to scoop her panties from the floor. A breathy sigh escaped from the next room—not Paul but the untiring Braun, still warming coffee no one would drink.
Sitting in her wicker chair, Amy flipped open the lid of her laptop, which sat quietly recharging like a night-feeding parasite. Her Notes file came up within seconds of her activating the system, and she had to hop away to the main directory, where her journal sat hidden among the command files. Tax92.Dat it was called, and the first screen of text presented a forbidding column of numbers.
She jumped to the end and typed 8/13. “Paul makes love like an American, though back in France. Is it habituation, or his partnerT She looked at this, then moved the cursor to the right of the first comma and added, “whatever that means.”
Actually, Amy thought, if there was anything truly American in his lovemaking it was his tendency to fall asleep afterward. Drain the vesicles in their loins, it seems, and the drop in pressure makes them lose consciousness.
She wrote: “Many (most?) primitive cultures held vitalist beliefs re semen—expend it and you lose psychic energy, which returns only slowly. Do all men privately believe this?”
She marked this passage and moved it into her Notes file, musing as she worked. It seemed a ridiculous belief, but then it might have something to do with the refractory period, which Amy didn’t quite understand. She once assumed it involved exhausted muscles refusing to perform, but then read a physiology textbook (so to gauge the soundness of various anatomical discoveries of the Renaissance) and learned that it had to do with blood filling chambers, arterioles dilating and contracting. “What does this have to do with age?” she added. “Supposedly recovery time is much shorter when they are young, and at seventeen almost instanteous. (It certainly was with Joel Silverstein.)”
Perhaps that was why lovers lit up cigarettes after sex in French movies: only way the fellow will stay awake. Do men fall asleep after masturbating? She thought, smiling, of asking Paul.
If Paul had an erotic peculiarity (national origin unknown), it was his desire to undress Amy in stages, sometimes leading her from room to room as he did so. The skirt or jeans would come down with voluptuous languor, like a gift being carefully unwrapped, and then the pantyhose (which most men seemed to dislike) would be admired and peeled off, a translucent chrysalis stretched tight by the new form beneath. The effect made Amy feel more naked in her panties than out of them, something of an accomplishment since she didn’t wear especially skimpy ones. When he finally slipped his fingertips into the waistband and pulled it slowly down, Amy felt the touch of air on her skin like impinging reality, the universe of oxidation and gradients awakening a dormant seed. It certainly beat pulling your own clothes off.
Amy hadn’t gotten up to record erotic musings, and jumped to the top of the Notes, from which vantage she searched on Arabic. The first entry was one about the Arabs having created zero, which she had since learned was not true. “Not an Arab invention, but a Hindu one. The Arabs seem to have introduced it to the West, however” She thought for a moment, then remembered the name Paul’s friend had told her. “See: Arabic historian al-Biruni (9th cent)!”
It was nice to have learned something from what was a rather unpleasant dinner. Jean-Claude Messaoud had taught at Georgetown, where Paul had met him, and was now at the Sorbonne, enjoying the cachet (thought Amy uncharitably) of being an Algerian intellectual in Paris. He had treated her questions about the influence of Arabian science on medieval Europe with a patronizing indulgence, once glancing at Paul as though sharing an appreciation of this American’s naivete. Since Messaoud had later made a remark that bracketed Paul with Amy as guileless Westerners in contrast with his own worldliness, Amy thought that Paul’s failure to resist his earlier paradigm was well requited.
“He’s a snob,” she had said on the ride back home. “If I’m American, he gets to be French; if you’re French, he gets to be Algerian. He’s a smooth third-world misogynist in a tweed jacket.”
Paul had stirred uneasily. He was reluctant to speak against a friend, but knew (Amy was sure) that Jean-Claude had been rather arrogant. He had been urbanely ironic about the fact that Albert Camus was currently on the bestseller lists with a posthumous novel about Algeria, in a way that managed to put down Paul for having mentioned it. And though the Islamic fundamentalists in Algiers were threatening to topple Jean-Claude’s ideal of a socialist and superior Algeria, he had shared their disdain for the anglophone Rushdie, presumably in order to break with the Western literary establishment.
“Well,” Paul said, conciliatory, “I think he felt uneasy sitting in that North African restaurant, with all those workers who come here only to be exploited, and there we were with our computers and fellowships.”
“And he was carrying a lunchpail? Come off it, Paul.” She pulled her computer closer under her arm. In her anger she refused to open it and type in the datum the man had given her. Not, she thought, when he hands it over like a tip.
Five hours later, she had no such compunction. After reading for days how the Italian Renaissance took its inspiration from recovered Roman writings, it would be interesting to learn how much of this treasure had been preserved by Arab scholars.
She jumped back to her journal. “7 think I will write about the spiritus—not the theologians’, but the anatomists’. When did it devolve into cerebrospinal fluid? With the advent of dissections?
“When did physicians distinguish between the nervous system and the circulation of the blood? Between the influx and discharge of nervous impulses, and the steady ricorso of the heart?”