“Yes, if all the rooms opened into all the other rooms …”
“In fact. And for this reason well need your map, to mark the blank walls on it, so we’ll know what detours were making. But it won’t be difficult.”
“But are we sure it will work?” I asked, puzzled; it all seemed too simple to me.
It will work, William replied. “But unfortunately we don’t know everything yet. We have learned how to avoid being lost. Now we must know whether there is a rule governing the distribution of the books among the rooms. And the verses from the Apocalypse tell us very little, not least because many are repeated identically in different rooms…”
“And yet in the book of the apostle they could have found far more than fifty-six verses!”
“Undoubtedly. Therefore only certain verses are good. Strange. As if they had had fewer than fifty: thirty or twenty … Oh, by the beard of Merlin!”
“Of whom?”
“Pay no attention. A magician of my country … They used as many verses as there are letters in the alphabet! Of course, that’s it! The text of the verse doesn’t count, it’s the initial letters that count. Each room is marked by a letter of the alphabet, and all together they make up some text that we must discover!”
“Like a figured poem, in the form of a cross or a fish!”
“More or less, and probably in the period when the library was built, that kind of poem was much in vogue.”
“But where does the text begin?”
“With a scroll larger than the others, in the heptagonal room of the entrance tower … or else … Why, of course, with the sentences in red!”
“But there are so many of them!”
“And therefore there must be many texts, or many words. Now make a better and larger copy of your map; while we visit the library, you will mark down with your stylus the rooms we pass through, the positions of the doors and walls (as well as the windows), and also the first letters of the verses that appear there. And like a good illuminator, you will make the letters in red larger.”
“But how does it happen,” I said with admiration, “that you were able to solve the mystery of the library looking at it from the outside, and you were unable to solve it when you were inside?”
“Thus God knows the world, because He conceived it in His mind, as if from the outside, before it was created, and we do not know its rule, because we live inside it, having found it already made.”
“So one can know things by looking at them from the outside!”
“The creations of art, because we retrace in our minds the operations of the artificer. Not the creations of nature, because they are not the work of our minds.”
“But for the library this suffices, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” William said. “But only for the library. Now let’s go and rest. I can do nothing until tomorrow morning, when I will have, I hope, my lenses. We might as well sleep, and rise early. I will try to reflect.”
“And supper?”
“Ah, of course, supper. The hour has passed by now. The monks are already at compline. But perhaps the kitchen is still open. Go look for something.”
“And steal it?”
“Ask. Ask Salvatore, who is now your friend.”
“But he will steal!”
“Are you perhaps your brother’s keeper?” William asked, with the words of Cain. But I saw he was joking and meant to say that God is great and merciful. And so I went looking for Salvatore and found him near the horses’ stalls.
“A fine animal,” I said, nodding at Brunellus, as a way of starting a conversation. “I would like to ride him.”
“No se puede. Abbonis est. But you do not need a pulcher horse to ride hard…” He pointed out a sturdy but ill-favored horse. “That one also suficit… Vide illuc, tertius equi…”
He wanted to point out to me the third horse. I laughed at his comical Latin. “And what will you do with that one?” I asked him.
And he told me a strange story. He said that any horse, even the oldest and weakest animal, could be made as swift as Brunellus. You had only to mix into his oats an herb called satirion, chopped fine, and then grease. his thighs with stag fat. Then you mount the horse, and before spurring him you turn his face eastward and you whisper into his ear, three times, the words: “Nicander, Melchior, and Merchizard,” And the horse will dash off and will go as far in one hour as Brunellus would in eight. And if you hang around his neck the teeth of a wolf that the horse himself has trampled and killed, the animal will not even feel the effort.
I asked him whether he had ever tried this. He said to me, coming closer circumspectly and whispering into my ear with his really foul breath, that it was very difficult, because satirion was now cultivated only by bishops and by their lordly friends, who used it to increase their power. Then I put an end to his talk and told him that this evening my master wanted’ to read certain books in his cell and wished to eat up there.
“I will do,” he said, “I will do cheese in batter.”
“How is that made?”
“Facilis. You take the cheese before it is too antiquum, without too much salis, and cut in cubes or sicut you like. And postea you put a bit of butierro or lardo to rechauffer over the embers. And in it you put two pieces of cheese, and when it becomes tenero, zucharum et cinnamon supra positurum du bis. And immediately take to table, because it must be ate caldo caldo.”
“Cheese in batter it is, then,” I said to him. And he vanished toward the kitchen, telling me to wait for him. He arrived half an hour later with a dish covered by a cloth. The aroma was good.
“Here,” he said to me, and he also held out a great lamp filled with oil.
“What for?” I asked.
“Sais pas, moi,” he said, slyly. “Peut-être your magister wants to go in dark place esta noche.”
Salvatore apparently knew more things than I had suspected. I inquired no further, but took the food to William. We ate, and I withdrew to my cell. Or at least, so I implied. I wanted to find Ubertino again, and stealthily I returned to the church.
AFTER COMPLINE
I found Ubertino at the statue of the Virgin. Silently I joined him and for a while pretended (I confess) to pray. Then I made bold to speak to him.
“Holy Father,” I said to him, “may I ask enlightenment and counsel of you?”
Ubertino looked at me and, taking me by the hand, rose and led me to a bench, where we both sat. He embraced me tightly, and I could feel his breath on my face.
“Dearest son,” he said, “anything this poor sinner can do for your soul will be done joyfully. What is distressing you? Yearnings?” he asked, almost with yearning himself. “The yearnings of the flesh?”
“No,” I replied, blushing, “if anything the yearnings of the mind, which wants to know too many things …”
“And that is bad. The Lord knows all things, and we must only adore His knowledge.”
“But we must also distinguish good from evil and understand human passions. I am a novice, but I will be monk and priest, and I must learn where evil lies, and what it looks like, in order to recognize it one day and teach others to recognize it.”