A Canticle for Leibowitz (19 page)

“Oh?
That
one.”

“You’ve heard of Thon Taddeo? Tell me, how is it you’ve always managed to know everything and everybody without stirring from this hill?”

“One hears, one sees,” the hermit said cryptically.

“Tell me, what do you think of him?,”

“I haven’t see him. But I suppose he will be a pain. A birth-pain, perhaps, but a pain.”

“Birth-pain? You really believe we’re going to have a new Renaissance, as some say?”

“Hmmm-hnnn.”

“Stop smirking mysteriously, Old Jew, and tell me your opinion. You’re bound to have one. You always do. Why is your confidence so hard to get? Aren’t we friends?”

“On some grounds, on some grounds. But we have our differences, you and I.”

“What have our differences got to do with Thon Taddeo and a Renaissance we’d both like to see? Thon Taddeo is a secular scholar, and rather remote from our differences.”

Benjamin shrugged eloquently. “Difference, secular scholars,” he echoed, tossing out the words like discarded apple pits. “I have been called a ‘secular scholar’ at various times by certain people, and sometimes I’ve been staked, stoned, and burned for it.”

“Why, you never-” The priest stopped, frowning sharply. That madness again. Benjamin was peering at him suspiciously, and his smile had gone cold. Now, thought the abbot, he’s looking at me as if I were one of Them-whatever formless “Them” it was that drove him here to solitude. Staked, stoned, and burned? Or did his “I” mean “We” as in “I, my people”?

“Benjamin-I am Paulo. Torquemada is dead. I was born seventy-odd years ago, and pretty soon I’ll die. I have loved you, old man, and when you look at me, I wish you would see Paulo of Pecos and no other.”

Benjamin wavered for a moment. His eyes became moist.

“I sometimes-forget-”

“And sometimes you forget that Benjamin is only Benjamin and not all of Israel.”

“Never!” snapped the hermit, eyes blazing again. “For thirty-two centuries, I-” He stopped and closed his mouth tightly.

“Why?” the abbot whispered almost in awe. “Why do you take the burden of a people and its past upon yourself alone?”

The hermit’s eyes flared a brief warning, but he swallowed a throaty sound and lowered his face into his hands. “You fish in dark waters.”

“Forgive me.”

“The burden-it was pressed upon me by others.” He looked up slowly. “Should I refuse to take it?”

The priest sucked in his breath. For a time there was no sound in the shanty but the sound of the wind. There was a touch of divinity in this madness! Dom Paulo thought. The Jewish community was thinly scattered in these times. Benjamin had perhaps outlived his children, or somehow become an outcast. Such an old Israelite might wander for years without encountering others of his people. Perhaps in his loneliness he had acquired the silent conviction that he was the last, the one, the only. And, being the last, he ceased to be Benjamin, becoming Israel. And upon his heart had settled the history of five thousand years, no longer remote, but become as the history of his own lifetime. His “I” was the converse of the imperial “We.”

But I, too, am a member of a oneness, thought Dom Paulo, a part of a congregation and a continuity. Mine, too, have been despised by the world. Yet for me the distinction between self and nation is clear. For you, old friend, it has somehow become obscure. A burden pressed upon you by others? And you accepted it? What must it weigh? What would it weigh for me? He set his shoulders under it and tried to heave, testing the bulk of it: I am a Christian monk and priest, and I am, therefore, accountable before God for the actions and deeds of every monk and priest who has breathed and walked the earth since Christ, as well as for the acts of my own.

He shuddered and began shaking his head.

No, no. It crushed the spine, this burden. It was too much for any man to bear, save Christ alone. To be cursed for a faith was burden enough. To bear the curses was possible, but then-to accept the illogic behind the curses, the illogic which called one to task not only for himself but also for every member of his race or faith, for their actions as well as one’s own? To accept that too?-as Benjamin was trying to do?

No, no.

And yet, Dom Paulo’s own Faith told him that the burden was there, had been there since Adam’s time-and the burden imposed by a fiend crying in mockery,
“Man!”
at man.

“Man!”-
calling each to account for the deeds of all since the beginning; a burden impressed upon every generation before the opening of the womb, the burden of the guilt of original sin. Let the fool dispute it. The same fool with great delight accepted the
other
inheritance-the inheritance of ancestral glory, virtue, triumph, and dignity which rendered him “courageous and noble by reason of birthright,” without protesting that he personally had done nothing to earn that inheritance beyond being born of the race of Man. The protest was reserved for the inherited burden which rendered him “guilty and outcast by reason of birthright,” and against that verdict he strained to close his ears. The burden, indeed, was hard. His own Faith told him, too, that the burden had been lifted from him by the One whose image hung from a cross above the altars, although the burden’s imprint still was there. The imprint was an easier yoke, compared to the full weight of the original curse. He could not bring himself to say it to the old man, since the old man already knew he believed it. Benjamin was looking for Another. And the last old Hebrew sat alone on a mountain and did penance for Israel and waited for a Messiah, and waited, and waited, and-

“God bless you for a brave fool. Even a wise fool.”

“
Hmmm
-hnnn!
Wise fool!” mimicked the hermit. “But you always did specialize in paradox and mystery, didn’t you, Paulo? If a thing can’t be in contradiction to itself, then it doesn’t oven interest you, does it? You have to find Threeness in Unity, life in death, wisdom in folly. Otherwise it might make too much common sense.”

“To sense the responsibility is wisdom, Benjamin. To think you can carry it alone is folly.”

“Not madness?”

“A little, perhaps. But a brave madness.”

“Then I’ll tell you a small secret. I’ve known all along that I can’t carry it, ever since He called me forth again. But are we talking about the same thing?”

The priest shrugged. “You would call it the burden of being Chosen. I would call it the burden of Original Guilt. In either case, the implied responsibility is the same, although we might tell different versions of it, and disagree violently in words about what we mean
in
words by something that isn’t really meant in words at all-since it’s something that’s meant in the dead silence of a heart.”

Benjamin chuckled. “Well, I’m glad to hear you admit it, finally, even if all you say is that you’ve never really said anything.”

“Stop cackling, you reprobate.”

“But you’ve always used words so wordily in crafty defense of your Trinity, although He never needed such defense before you got Him from me as a Unity. Eh?”

The priest reddened but said nothing.

“There!”
Benjamin yelped, bouncing up and down. “I made you want to argue for once. Ha! But never mind. I use quite a few words myself, but I’m never quite sure He and I mean the same thing either. I suppose you can’t be blamed; it must be more confusing with Three than with One.”

“Blasphemous old cactus! I really wanted your opinion of Thon Taddeo and whatever’s brewing.”

“Why seek the opinion of a poor old anchorite?”

“Because, Benjamin Eleazar bar Joshua, if all these years of waiting for One-Who-Isn’t-Coming haven’t taught you wisdom, at least they’ve made you shrewd.”

The Old Jew closed his eyes, lifted his face ceilingward, and smiled cunningly. “Insult me,” he said in mocking tones, “rail at me, bait me, persecute me-but do you know what I’ll say?”

“You’ll say,
“
Hmmm-
hnnn!’ “

“No! I’ll say He’s already here. I caught a glimpse of Him once.”

“What? Who are you talking about? Thon Taddeo?”

“No!
Moreover, I do not care to prophesy, unless you tell me what’s really bothering you, Paulo.”

“Well, it all started with Brother Kornhoer’s lamp.”

“Lamp? Oh, yes, the Poet mentioned it.
He
prophesied it wouldn’t work.”

“The Poet was wrong, as usual. So they tell me. I didn’t watch the trial.”

“It worked then? Splendid. And that started what?”

“Me wondering. How close are we to the brink of something? Or how close to a shore? Electrical essences in the basement. Do you realize how much things have changed in the past two centuries?”

Soon, the priest spoke at length of his fears, while the hermit, mender of tents, listened patiently until the sun had begun to leak through the chinks in the west wall to paint glowing shafts in the dusty air.

“Since the death of the last civilization, the Memorabilia has been our special province, Benjamin. And we’ve kept it. But now? I sense the predicament of the shoemaker who tries to sell shoes in a village of shoemakers.”

The hermit smiled. “It could be done, if he manufactures a special and superior type of shoe.”

“I’m afraid the secular scholars are already beginning to lay claim to such a method.”

“Then go out of the shoemaking business, before you are ruined.”

“A possibility,” the abbot admitted. “It’s unpleasant to think of it however. For twelve centuries, we’ve been one little island in a very dark ocean. Keeping the Memorabilia has been a thankless task, but a hallowed one, we think. It’s only our
worldly
job, but we’ve always been bookleggers and memorizers, and it’s hard to think that the job’s soon to be finished-soon to become unnecessary. I can’t believe that somehow.”

“So you try to best the other ‘shoemakers’ by building strange contraptions in your basement?”

“I must admit, it looks that way-”

“What will you do next to keep ahead of the seculars? Build a flying machine? Or revive the
Machina analytica?
Or perhaps step over their heads and resort to metaphysics?”

“You shame me, Old Jew. You know we are monks of Christ first, and such things are for others to do.”

“I wasn’t shaming you. I see nothing inconsistent in monks of Christ building a flying machine, although it would be more like them to build a praying machine.”

“Wretch! I do my Order a disservice by sharing a confidence with you!”

Benjamin smirked. “I have no sympathy for you. The books you stored away may be hoary with age, but they were written by children of the world, and they’ll be taken from you by children of the world, and you had no business meddling with them in the first place.”

“Ah,
now
you care to prophesy!”

“Not at all. ‘Soon the sun will set’-is that prophecy? No, it’s merely an assertion of faith in the consistency of events. The children of the world are consistent too-so I say they will soak up everything you can offer, take your job away from you, and then denounce you as a decrepit wreck. Finally, they’ll ignore you entirely. It’s your own fault. The Book I gave you should have been enough for you. Now you’ll just have to take the consequences for your meddling.”

He had spoken flippantly, but his prediction seemed uncomfortably close to Dom Paulo’s fears. The priest’s countenance saddened.

“Pay me no mind,” said the hermit. “I’ll not venture to soothsay before I’ve seen this contraption of yours, or taken a look at this Thon Taddeo-who begins to interest me, by the way. Wait until I’ve examined the entrails of the new era in better detail, if you expect advice from me.”

“Well, you won’t see the lamp because you never come to the abbey.”

“It’s your abominable cooking I object to.”

“And you won’t see Thon Taddeo because he comes from the other direction. If you wait to examine the entrails of an era until after it’s born, it’s too late to prophesy its birth.”

“Nonsense. Probing the womb of the future is bad for the child. I shall wait-and then I shall prophesy that it was born and that it
wasn’t
what I’m waiting for.”

“What a cheerful outlook! So what
are
you looking for?”

“Someone who shouted at me once.”

“Shouted?”

“‘Come forth!’ “

“What rot!”

“
Hmmm
-hnnn!
To tell you the truth, I don’t much expect Him to come, but I was told to wait, and-” he shrugged “-I wait.” After a moment his twinkling eyes narrowed to slits, and he leaned forward with sudden eagerness. “Paulo, bring this Thon Taddeo past the foot of the mesa.”

The abbot recoiled in mock horror. “Accoster of pilgrims! Molester of novices! I shall send you the Poet-sirrah!-and may he descend upon you and rest forever. Bring the thon past your lair! What an outrage.”