“This I don’t know, and I didn’t see the man who was with her,” I said.
“Very well, but we can deduce who it was from many and certain clues. First of all, the man was old and ugly, one with whom a girl does not go willingly, especially if she is beautiful, as you say, though it seems to me, my dear wolf cub, that you were prepared to find any food delicious.”
“Why old and ugly?”
“Because the girl didn’t go with him for love, but for a pack of scraps. Certainly she is a girl from the village who, perhaps not for the first time, grants her favors to some lustful monk out of hunger, and receives as recompense something for her and her family to eat.”
“A harlot!” I said, horrified.
“A poor peasant girl, Adso. Probably with smaller brothers to feed. Who, if she were able, would give herself for love and not for lucre. As she did last night. In fact, you tell me she found you young and handsome, and gave you gratis and out of love what to others she would have given for an ox heart and some bits of lung. And she felt so virtuous for the free gift she made of herself, and so uplifted, that she ran off without taking anything in exchange. This is why I think the other one, to whom she compared you, was neither young nor handsome.”
I confess that, profound as my repentance was, that explanation filled me with a sweet pride; but I kept silent and allowed my master to continue.
“This ugly old man must have the opportunity to go down to the village and deal with the peasants, for some purpose connected with his position. He must know how to get people into the abbey and out of it, and know there would be that offal in the kitchen (perhaps tomorrow it would be said that the door had been left open and a dog had come in and eaten the scraps). And, finally, he must have had a certain sense of economy, and a certain interest in seeing that the kitchen was not deprived of more precious victuals: otherwise he would have given her a steak or some choice cut. And so you see that the picture of our stranger is drawn very clearly and that all these properties, or accidents, are suited to a substance that I would have no fear in defining as our cellarer, Remigio of Varagine. Or, if I am mistaken, our mysterious Salvatore — who, for that matter, since he comes from these parts, can speak easily with the local people and would know how to persuade a girl to do what he would have made her do, if you had not arrived.”
“That is certainly all correct,” I said, convinced, “but what is the good of knowing it now?”
“None. Or much,” William said. “The story may or may not have a connection with the crimes that concern us. On the other hand, if the cellarer was a Dolcinian, that would explain this, and vice versa. And we now know, finally, that this abbey is a place of many, bizarre events at night. And who can say that our cellarer, and Salvatore, who move through it in darkness with such ease, do not know, in any event, more things than what they tell?”
“But will they tell them to us?”
“No, not if we behave in a compassionate manner, ignoring their sins. But if we were really to know something, we would possess a way of persuading them to speak. In other words, if there is need, the cellarer and Salvatore are ours, and may God forgive us this deception, since He forgives so many other things,” he said, looking at me slyly; I did not have the heart to make any comment on the licitness of these notions of his.
“And now we should go to bed, because in an hour it is matins. But I see you are still agitated, my poor Adso, still fearful because of your sin… There is nothing like a good spell in church to calm the spirit. I have absolved you, but one never knows. Go and ask the Lord’s confirmation.” And he gave me a rather brisk slap on the head, perhaps as a show of paternal and virile affection, perhaps as an indulgent penance. Or perhaps (as I culpably thought at that moment) in a sort of good-natured envy, since he was a man who so thirsted for new and vital experiences.
We headed for the church, taking our usual path, which I followed in haste, closing my eyes, because all those bones reminded me too obviously, that night, of how I was dust and how foolish had been the pride of my flesh.
When we reached the nave we saw a shadowy figure before the main altar. I thought it was again Ubertino, but it was Alinardo, who did not recognize us at first. He said he was unable to sleep and had decided to spend the night praying for that young monk who had disappeared (he could not even remember the name): He prayed for his soul, if he were dead, and for his body, if he were lying ill and alone somewhere.
“Too many dead,” he said, “too many dead … But it was written in the book of the apostle. With the first trumpet came the hail, with the second a third part of the sea became blood; and you found one body in the hail, the other in blood… The third trumpet warns that a burning star will fall in the third part of rivers and fountains of waters. So I tell you, our third brother, has disappeared. And fear for the fourth, because the third part of the sun will be smitten, and of the moon and the stars, so there will be almost complete darkness …”
As we came out of the transept, William asked himself whether there were not some element of truth in the old man’s words.
“But,” I pointed out to him, “this would mean assuming that a single diabolical mind, using the Apocalypse as guide, had arranged the three disappearances, also assuming that Berengar is dead. But, on the contrary, we know Adelmo died of his own volition…”
“True,” William said, “but the same diabolical or sick mind could have been inspired by Adelmo’s death to arrange the other two in a symbolic way. And if this were so, Berengar should be found in a river or a fountain. And there are no rivers or fountains in the abbey, at least not such as someone could drown or be drowned in…”