Baudolino (11 page)

"But how can you take such a map seriously," the Poet snickered, "when it shows the earth flat, and you claim it's a sphere?"

"What kind of argument is that?" Abdul was indignant. "Could you depict a sphere in such a way that you could see everything on it?
A map must serve to point out the way, and when you walk, you see the earth flat, not round. Besides, even if it's a sphere, all the part underneath is uninhabited, and occupied by the Ocean, for if anybody were to live there he'd be living with his feet up and his head down. So to depict the upper part, a circle like this is enough. But I want to examine better the maps of the abbey, also because in the library I met a cleric who knows everything about the Earthly Paradise."

"Of course. He was there when Eve was giving the apple to Adam," the Poet said.

"You don't have to be in a place in order to know everything about it," Abdul replied. "Otherwise sailors would be more learned than theologians."

This, Baudolino explained to Niketas, showed how, ever since their first years in Paris, when they were still almost beardless, our friends had begun to be gripped by this story, which so many years later would take them to the far ends of the earth.

In the spring, Baudolino discovered that his love was growing greater and greater, as happens to lovers in that season, and it was not allayed by the squalid encounters with maids of no importance, indeed in comparison it grew gigantic, because Beatrice, besides the advantages of grace, intelligence, and royal anointment, had also the advantage of absence. The fascination of absence was a question with which Abdul never ceased tormenting him, spending whole evenings stroking his instrument and singing more songs, until, fully to appreciate them, Baudolino had by now also learned Provençal.

And when the days are long in May
How sweet to hear the distant birdsong,
Because, since this journey first began,
I recall forever that distant love.
In my pain I bow my head
Nor does song ease me more, and the hawthorn...

Baudolino dreamed. Abdul despairs of seeing one day his unknown princess, he said to himself, O happy he! Worse is my suffering, for surely I will have to see my beloved again one of these days,
and I haven't the good fortune never to have seen her, but rather the misfortune of knowing who and what she is. But if Abdul finds consolation in telling his grief to us, why should I not find the same in telling my life to her? In other words, Baudolino sensed that he could discipline the throbbing of his heart by writing down on paper what he felt, and so much the worse if the object of his love would be deprived of these treasures of tenderness. So, late in the night, while the Poet was sleeping, Baudolino wrote.

"
The star illuminates the pole, and the moon colors the night. But my guide is a sole star and if, when the shadows have been dispelled, my star rises from the East, my mind will ignore the shadows of sorrow. You are my radiant star, who will dispel the night, and light itself without you is night, whereas with you night is splendid radiance.
"

And he went on: "
If I feel hunger, only you sate me; if I feel thirst, only you quench it. But what am I saying? You refresh, but do not satiate. Never have I been sated with you, nor shall I ever be
...." And then:

"So
great is your sweetness, so wondrous your constancy, so ineffable the tone of your voice, such the beauty and the grace that crown you, that it would be a great offense to attempt to express them in words. May the fire that consumes us grow always, and with new fuel, and the more it remains hidden, the more it will flare up and deceive the envious and the treacherous, so that the question will ever remain: which of us two loves the more, and so between us there will always be joined a beautiful duel in which both are victorious.
..."

The letters were beautiful, and rereading them, Baudolino trembled, and was ever more enchanted by a creature capable of inspiring such ardor. At a certain point he could no longer accept not knowing how Beatrice would have reacted to such sweet violence, and he decided to impel her to reply. Trying to imitate her hand, he wrote:

"To
the love that rises from the heart of my heart, that is more sweetly fragrant than any perfume, she who is yours body and soul, for the thirsting flowers of your youth, wishes the freshness of an eternal
happiness.... To you, my happy hope, I offer my faith, and with all devotion I offer myself, for as long as I may live.
..."

"
Oh
," he immediately replied to her, "
be well, for in you lies all my health, in you are my hope and my repose. Even before I am fully awake, my soul finds you again, preserved within itself.
..."

And she answered, boldly: "
From that first moment when we saw each other, I have loved you before all others; preferring you, I have wanted you; wanting you, I have sought you; seeking you, I have found you; finding you, I have loved you; loving you, I have desired you; desiring you, I have set you in my heart above all else ... and I have savored your honey ... I greet you, my heart, my body, my only joy.
..."

This correspondence, which lasted for some months, gave, first, refreshment to Baudolino's exacerbated soul, then a replete happiness, and finally a kind of blazing pride, because the lover had not realized how the beloved could love him so much. Like all those in love, Baudolino became vain, like all those in love, he wrote that he wanted to enjoy jealously with his beloved their shared secret, but at the same time he insisted that the whole world be informed of his joy, and be stunned by the immeasurable loving nature of the woman who loved him.

So one day he showed the correspondence to his friends. He was vague and reticent about the manner and identity of this exchange. He did not lie; indeed he said he was showing those letters precisely because they were the fruit of his imagination. But the other two believed that, only and precisely in this instance, he was lying, and they envied his lot all the more. In his heart Abdul attributed the letters to his princess, and he agonized as if he had received them himself. The Poet, who made a show of attaching no importance to this literary game (though it gnawed at his heart that he himself had not written such beautiful letters, provoking replies even more beautiful), and having no one with whom to fall in love, had fallen in love with the letters themselves—which, as Niketas remarked with a smile—was not surprising, since in youth we are prone to fall in love with love.

Perhaps to find new themes for his songs, Abdul jealously copied the letters, to reread them at night in Saint Victoire. Then one day he realized that someone had stolen them from him, and he feared that by now some dissolute canon, after having lubriciously spelled them out at night, had thrown them among the thousand manuscripts of the abbey. Shuddering, Baudolino locked his correspondence in his trunk, and from that day on he wrote no further missives, so as not to compromise his correspondent.

Having, in any case, to release his adolescent fervor, Baudolino then took to writing verses. While in the letters he had spoken of his wholly pure love, in these new writings he practiced that tavern poetry with which the clerics of the period vaunted their dissolute and carefree life, not without some melancholy reference to their wasting of it.

Wishing to give Niketas evidence of his talent, he recited a few hemistichs:

Feror ego veluti—sine nauta navis,
ut per vias aeris—vaga fertur avis ...
Quidquit Venus imperat—labor est suavis,
quae nunquam in cordibus—habitat ignavis.

Realizing that Niketas did not clearly understand the Latin, he made a rough translation: "I am derelict like a ship without a helmsman, like a bird along the pathways of the sky.... But what pleasant toil it is to obey the commands of Venus, unknown to common souls."

Baudolino showed these and other verses to the Poet, who flushed with envy and shame, and wept, confessing the aridity that dried up his imagination, cursing his impotence, shouting that he would have preferred not to know how to penetrate a woman than to find himself so incapable of expressing what he felt inside—and that it was
exactly what Baudolino had expressed so well, making the Poet wonder if his friend had not read his heart. Then he observed how proud his father would be if he were able to compose such beautiful verses, for one day or another he would have to justify to his family and to the world the acquired nickname of Poet, which, while it flattered him, made him feel a
poeta gloriosus,
a braggart, who steals a dignity that is not his.

Seeing him in such despair, Baudolino pressed the parchment between the youth's hands, offering him the poems so he could display them as his own. A precious gift, because it so happened that Baudolino, to have something new to tell Beatrice, had actually sent her the verses, attributing them to his friend. Beatrice had read them to Frederick. Rainald of Dassel, a lover of literature, though always taken up with palace intrigues, heard them and said he would like to have the Poet in his service....

In that same year Rainald was raised to the lofty office of archbishop of Cologne; and to the Poet the notion of becoming official poet to an archbishop and thus, as he put it, half-joking and half-swaggering, the archpoet, did not displease him, not least because he had very little desire to study; the paternal funds in Paris never sufficed, and he had got the idea—not mistaken—that a court poet ate and drank all day long without a thought for anything else.

But to be a court poet you have to write poems. Baudolino promised to write at least a dozen for him, but not all at once. "You see," he said, "great poets are not always diarrhoic, sometimes they're styptic, and those are the greater ones. You must seem tormented by the Muses, able to distill only one couplet every now and then. With the ones I'll give you, you can keep going for quite a few months, but allow me some time, because while I'm not styptic, I'm not diarrhoic either. So postpone your departure and send a few verses to Rainald, to whet his appetite. For the present it's a good idea for you to introduce yourself with a dedication, a eulogy of your benefactor.

He thought about it all one night, then gave the Poet some verses for Rainald:

Presul discretissime—veniam te precor,
morte bona morior—dulci nece necor,
meum pectum sauciat—puellarum decor,
et quas tacto nequeo—saltem chorde mechor.

Which is to say: "Most noble bishop, forgive me, for I face a happy death and am consumed by such a sweet wound: maidens' beauty pierces my heart, and those whom I cannot touch, I possess at least in my thoughts."

Niketas remarked that Latin bishops found pleasure in things that were not very holy, but Baudolino told him that he should first understand what a Latin bishop was: it was not required that he necessarily be a sainted man, especially if he was also chancellor of the empire. And second, who Rainald was: a little bit bishop and very much chancellor, certainly a lover of poetry, but still more inclined to use a poet's talents also for his own political ends, as he would subsequently do.

"And so the Poet became famous thanks to your verses."

"That's right. For almost a year the Poet sent Rainald letters overflowing with devotion, accompanying verses that I wrote for him from time to time. Finally Rainald insisted that this unusual talent should join him at any price. The Poet set off with a good provision of verses, enough to supply him for at least a year, however styptic he might seem. It was a triumph. I've never understood how anyone can be proud of a fame received as alms from another, but the Poet was content."

"Speaking of amazement: I ask myself what pleasure you can have felt, seeing your creations attributed to someone else. Isn't it atrocious that a father should give away, as alms, the fruit of his loins?"

"The fate of a tavern poem is to pass from one mouth to another: it is happiness to hear it sung, and it would be egoism to want to exhibit it only to increase one's own glory."

"I don't believe you're that humble. You are happy to have been once again the Prince of Falsehood, and you flaunt it, just as you hope that one day someone will find your love letters among the jumble of papers in Saint Victoire and attribute them to God knows whom."

"I don't mean to seem humble. I like making things happen, and to be the only one who knows they are my doing."

"The question doesn't change, my friend," Niketas said. "Indulgently, I suggested you wanted to be the Prince of Falsehood, and now you make me realize you would like to be God Almighty."

Baudolino was studying in Paris but he kept abreast of what was happening in Italy and in Germany. Rahewin, obeying the orders of Otto, had continued writing the
Gesta Friderici;
but, having now reached the end of the fourth book, he had decided to stop, because it seemed to him blasphemous to exceed the number of the Gospels. He left the court, satisfied, his duty done, and was dying of boredom in a Bavarian monastery. Baudolino wrote him of his free access to the endless library of Saint Victoire, and Rahewin asked him to indicate a few rare treatises that could enhance his knowledge.

Sharing Otto's opinion of the poor canon's scant imagination, Baudolino considered it useful to nourish it a bit. After sending him a few titles of codices he had seen, he also mentioned others of his own invention, such as
De optimitate triparum
of the Venerable Bede, an
Ars honesti petandi,
a
De modo cacandi,
a
De castramentandis crinibus,
and a
De patria diabolorum
—all works that provoked the amazement and the curiosity of the good canon, who hastened to ask for copies of these unknown treasures of learning. A service that Baudolino would have done him willingly, to heal his remorse for the parchment of Otto that he had scraped, but he simply did not know what to copy, and he had to invent the excuse that those works were,
indeed, in the abbey of Saint Victoire, but were in odor of heresy and the canons would not allow anyone to see them.