Baudolino (10 page)

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The boy's name was Abdul, a Moor's name, in fact, but he was born of a mother who came from Hibernia, and this explained the red hair, because all those who come from that remote island are like that, and according to report, they are bizarre, dreamers. His father was Provençal, of a family that had settled overseas after the conquest of Jerusalem, fifty some years before. As Abdul tried to explain, those Frankish nobles had adopted the customs of the peoples they had conquered. They wore turbans and indulged in other Turkeries, they spoke the language of their enemies, and were within an inch of following the precepts of the Koran. For which reason a half-Hibernian, with red hair, could be called Abdul and could have a face burned by the sun of Syria, where he was born. He thought in Arabic, and in Provençal he told the ancient sagas of the frozen seas of the north, which he had heard from his mother.

Baudolino immediately asked him if he was in Paris to become a good Christian again and speak as one should, namely, in proper Latin. As to his reasons for coming to Paris, Abdul remained fairly reticent. He spoke of a thing that had happened to him, something fairly upsetting apparently, a kind of terrible ordeal to which he had been subjected while still a boy, so that his noble parents had decided to send him to Paris to save him from some unknown vendetta. Speaking of this, Abdul turned grim, blushing as much as a Moor can blush, his hands trembling, and Baudolino decided to change the subject.

The youth was intelligent, and after a few months in Paris he spoke Latin and the local vernacular. He lived with an uncle, canon of the abbey of Saint Victoire, one of the sanctuaries of learning of that city (and perhaps of the whole Christian world), with a library richer than that of Alexandria. And that explains how, in the months that followed, thanks to Abdul, Baudolino and also the Poet gained access to that repository of universal learning.

Baudolino asked Abdul what he was writing during the lesson, and his companion said that the notes in Arabic concerned certain things that the teacher said about dialectics, because Arabic is surely
the language best suited to philosophy. As for the other things, they were in Provencal. He was reluctant to speak of it and evaded the questions for a long time, but with the air of one who with his eyes asks only to be questioned further; and finally he translated. They were some verses, and they said more or less
: O my love, in your distant land—my heart aches for you.... O my flowered curtain, O my unknown, O my companion.

"You write verses?" Baudolino asked.

"I sing songs. I sing what I feel. I love a distant princess."

"A princess? Who is she?"

"I don't know. I saw her—or rather it's as if I saw her—in the Holy Land when I was a prisoner ... in other words, while I was experiencing an adventure I haven't yet told you about. My heart burst into flame, and I vowed eternal love to that lady. I decided to dedicate my life to her. Perhaps one day I will find her, but I fear its happening. It is so beautiful to languish for an impossible love."

Baudolino was about to say to him: some fool you are, as his father used to say, but then he remembered that he too languished for an impossible love (even if he had undoubtedly seen Beatrice, and her image was the obsession of his nights), and he was touched by the fate of his friend Abdul.

This is how a great friendship begins. That same evening Abdul turned up at the room of Baudolino and the Poet, with an instrument that Baudolino had never seen, shaped like an almond, with many taut strings, and letting his fingers stray over those strings, Abdul sang:

When the flow of the fountain
Runs clear and, as always,
The dog rose blossoms,
And the nightingale on the bough
Sings its soft and varied song
And refines its sweet singing,
My song accompanies it.

O, my love in your distant land,
My heart aches for you
Nor will I find medicine
If I do not answer your summons,
In the warmth of your wool,
O my flowered curtain,
O my unknown, O my companion.

I cannot have you near
And in the fire I burn and yearn.
Never have I seen a Christian maid
Who existed, God willing,
Nor Jew, nor Saracen maid,
Superior to your beauty.
Who wins your love?

At evening and at morn,
O my love, I call you;
My mind turns insane,
My yearning clouds the sun.
Already, as if by a thorn, I am stung
By that pain that heals me,
And a tear bathes me.

The melody was sweet, the chords awoke unknown or dormant passions, and Baudolino thought of Beatrice.

"Dear Christ," the Poet said, "why can't I write verses that beautiful?"

"I don't want to become a poet. I sing for myself, nothing else. If you like, I will give them to you," Abdul said, also touched now.

"Oh, yes," the Poet replied, "but if I translate them from Provençal into German, they turn to shit...."

Abdul became the third member of that band, and when Baudolino tried not to think of Beatrice, that damned Moor with the red
hair would take his accursed instrument and sing songs that made Baudolino's heart ache.

If the nightingale amid the leaves
Bestows love and demands it,
And his companion replies,
And already mingles her song
With his, and the rivulet from the brook
With the happiness of the meadow
Feels joy in its heart.

In friendship melts my soul,
And greater benefice does not claim
Than the love that she returns
And that is promptly perceived
In my ailing heart, sick
With aching savor.

Baudolino told himself that one day he too would write songs for his faraway empress, but he did not clearly know how it was done, because neither Otto nor Rahewin had ever mentioned poetry to him, unless it was when they taught him some sacred anthem. For now at least he took advantage of Abdul to gain access to the library of Saint Victoire, where he spent long mornings stolen from his lessons, pondering, his lips parted, over the fabulous texts, not the manuals of grammar, but the stories of Pliny, the romance of Alexander, the geography of Solinus, and the etymologies of Isidore.

He read of distant lands, where crocodiles live, great aquatic serpents that, when they have eaten a man, weep, move their upper jaw and have no tongue; the hippopotami, half man and half horse; the leucochrocan beast, with the body of an ass, the behind of a stag, the breast and thighs of a lion, horse's hoofs, a bifurcated horn, a mouth stretching to the ears from which an almost human voice emerges,
and in the place of teeth, a single bone. He read of lands where there lived men without knee joints, men without tongues, men with huge ears that sheltered their body from the cold, and the skiapods, who run very swiftly on a single foot.

Since he could not send Beatrice songs not of his own composition (and even if he had written some, he would not have dared), he decided that, as one sends his beloved flowers or jewels, he would make her a gift of all the wonders that he was acquiring. So he wrote her of lands where honey trees and flour trees grow, of Mount Ararat, from whose peak, on clear days, you can glimpse the remains of Noah's ark, and those who have scaled it say they touch with their finger the hole through which the devil escaped when Noah recited the Benedicite. He told her of Albania, where men are whiter than elsewhere, and have hair sparse as a cat's whiskers; of a country where if one turns to the east he casts his shadow to his own right; and of another inhabited by people of the greatest ferocity, who go into deepest mourning when children are born, but hold a great festivity when people die; of lands where enormous mountains of gold rise, guarded by ants the size of dogs, and where the Amazons live, warrior women who keep their men in a neighboring region; if they bear a son they send him to his father or else they kill him, if they bear a female they remove her breast with a searing iron; if she is of high rank, they remove the left breast so that she can carry a shield, if of low degree, the right breast so that she can draw a bow. And finally he told her of the Nile, one of the four rivers springing from the Earthly Paradise, which runs through the deserts of India, goes underground, emerges near Mount Atlas, then empties into the sea after crossing Egypt.

But when he came to India, Baudolino almost forgot Beatrice, and his mind turned to other fancies, because he had got it into his head that in those parts there had to be, if there ever had been, the kingdom of that Presbyter Johannes of whom Otto had told him. Baudolino had never ceased to think of Johannes: he thought of him
every time he read about an unknown country, and even more when on the parchment varicolored miniatures appeared of strange beings, like horned men, or pygmies, who spend their lives fighting cranes. He thought of this so much that, to himself, he now spoke of Prester John as if he were a family friend. And hence to discover where he was became for Baudolino a matter of the greatest moment and, if Johannes was nowhere, still an India had to be found where he could be placed, because Baudolino felt bound by an oath (though none had been sworn) to the beloved dying bishop.

Of Prester John he had spoken to his two companions, who were immediately attracted by the game and communicated to Baudolino any vague and curious information they found, leafing through codices, that might waft an aroma of India's incenses. Abdul suddenly had the idea that his distant princess, if she had to be distant, should conceal her splendor in that most distant land of all.

"Yes," Baudolino replied, "but where do you go to reach India? It shouldn't be far from the Earthly Paradise, and thus east of the Orient, just where the land ends and the Ocean begins...."

They had not yet begun the course of lessons in astronomy, and on the question of the earth's shape their ideas were hazy. The Poet was still convinced that it was a long, flat expanse, at the ends of which the waters of the Ocean poured down, God knows where. To Baudolino, on the contrary, Rahewin had said—though with some skepticism—that not only the great philosophers of antiquity, or Ptolemy, father of all astronomers, but also Saint Isidore had asserted that the earth was a sphere; indeed, Isidore had such Christian assurance of this that he had even established the breadth at the equator: eighty thousand stadia. However, Rahewin cautiously added that it was equally true that certain Fathers, like the great Lactantius, had recalled that according to the Bible the earth had the shape of a tabernacle, and therefore land and sky together should be seen as an ark, a temple with its fine dome and its floor, a large box, in other words, not a ball.
Prudent man that he was, Rahewin held to what Saint Augustine had said, that maybe the pagan philosophers were right and the earth was round, and the Bible had mentioned tabernacle in a figurative sense, but the fact of knowing how it was shaped did not help resolve the one serious problem of every good Christian, namely, how to save one's soul, and therefore devoting even just a half hour to ponder the shape of the earth was a total waste of time.

"That seems right to me," said the Poet, who was in a hurry to go to the tavern, "and it's useless to seek the Earthly Paradise, because it must have been a marvel of hanging gardens, and it has remained uninhabited since the time of Adam, nobody has taken the trouble to reinforce the terraces with hedges and palisades, and during the flood it must all have slid down into the Ocean."

Abdul, on the contrary, was absolutely certain that the earth was a sphere. If it were just a flat expanse, he argued with undoubting severity, my gaze—which my love makes very acute, like that of all lovers—would be able to glimpse far, far away, some sign of the presence of my beloved, but instead the curve of the earth conceals her from my desire. And he ransacked the library of Saint Victoire to find maps that he then reconstructed summarily, from memory, for his friends.

"The earth is in the center of the great chain of the Ocean, and it is divided by three great bodies of water: the Hellespont, the Mediterranean, and the Nile."

"Just a moment: where's the Orient?"

"Up here, naturally, where there's Asia, and at the far end of the Orient, just where the sun rises, is the Earthly Paradise. To the left of Paradise there's Mount Caucasus, and nearby the Caspian Sea. Now bear in mind: there are three Indias: an India Major, which is very hot, just to the right of Paradise; a Northern India, beyond the Caspian Sea, another here, in the upper left, where it is so cold that the water turns to crystal, and where there are the peoples of Gog and Magog,
whom Alexander the Great imprisoned inside a wall; and finally a Temperate India, close to Africa. An Africa you see in the lower right-hand corner, where the Nile flows, and where the Arabian Sea opens and the Persian Gulf, just on the Red Sea, beyond which there is desert land, very close to the sun of the equator and so hot that no one can venture there. To the west of Africa, near Mauretania, are the Isles of the Blest or the Lost Isle, which was discovered many centuries ago by a saint from my country. Below, to the north, is the land where we live, with Constantinople on the Hellespont, and Greece, and Rome, and in the extreme north the Germanians and the Hibernian Island."