Baudolino (30 page)

"The thought of that worm gnawed at me. But also the fact that Pope Alexander was a worm worse than Zosimos, and worse than the salamanders was discovered in September, when the imperial chancellery received a document that probably had been communicated
also to the other Christian kings and to the Greek emperor. It was the copy of a letter that Alexander III had written to Prester John!"

Surely Alexander had received a copy of the letter to Manuel, perhaps he was aware of the old mission of Hugo of Jabala, perhaps he feared that Frederick would draw some advantage from the news of the existence of the king and priest, and here Alexander was the first, not to receive an appeal, but to send one directly, for his letter said he had immediately dispatched an envoy of his to confer with the Priest.

Alexander bishop servant of the servants of God, to the most beloved Johannes, son in Christ, illustrious and magnificent sovereign of the Indias, wishes him health and sends his apostolic blessing.

After which the pope recalled that only one apostolic see (namely, Rome) had received from Peter the mandate to be
caput et magistra
of all believers. He said that the pope had been told of the faith and the piety of John by his personal physician Magister Philip, and that this wise man, circumspect and prudent, had heard from trustworthy people that John wished finally to convert to the true faith, Roman and Catholic. The pope regretted that for the moment he could not send him
dignitaries of high rank, also because they were ignorant of linguas barbaras et ignotas,
but he was sending Philip, a discreet and most cautious man, to educate John in the true faith. As soon as Philip reached him, John should send the pope a letter of his intentions and—Alexander advised him—the less he indulged in boasting about his power and wealth, the better it would be for him, if he wished to be received as a humble son of the Holy Roman Apostolic Church.

Baudolino was scandalized by the idea that such shameless counterfeiters could exist in the world. Frederick shouted, venomously: "Son of the devil! Nobody has ever written to him, and out of spite he is the first to reply! And he is careful to refrain from calling him Johannes
Presbyter,
denying him all priestly dignity..."

"He knows that John is a Nestorian," Baudolino added, "and he proposes, in so many words, that John renounce his heresy and make an act of submission to him...."

"It is surely a letter of supreme arrogance," the chancellor Christian remarked. "He calls him son, doesn't send him even a mere bishop, but only his personal physician. He treats him like a child to be disciplined."

"This Philip must be stopped," Frederick then said. "Christian, send messengers, assassins, whatever you like, to overtake him along the way, strangle him, tear out his tongue, drown him in a stream! He must not arrive there! Prester John belongs to me!"

"Rest assured, dear Father," Baudolino said. "In my opinion, this Philip has never set out and it may be that he doesn't even exist. First, Alexander knows very well, if you ask me, that the letter to Manuel is bogus. Second, he has no idea where this Johannes is. Third, he wrote the letter precisely to say that Johannes belongs to him rather than to you, and further he is inviting both you and Manuel to forget the matter of the priest king. Fourth, even if Philip existed and were traveling to the Priest and even if he arrived there truly, just think for a moment of what would happen if he returned empty-handed because Prester John wasn't converted. For Alexander it would be like receiving a handful of dung in the face. He can't take such a risk."

In any case, it was by now too late to make the letter to Frederick public, and Baudolino felt dispossessed. He had begun dreaming of the Priest's kingdom after the death of Otto, and since then almost twenty years had passed.... Twenty years gone for nothing.

Then he picked himself up: no, the Priest's letter fades into nothingness, or becomes lost in a host of other letters; at this point anyone who so wishes can invent an amorous correspondence with the Priest, we live in a world of certified liars, but this doesn't mean that we have to give up seeking his kingdom. After all, Cosmas's map still exists. It would suffice to find Zosimos again, tear it away from him, and travel towards the unknown.

But where had Zosimos ended up? Even if we were to learn that he was living, covered with prebends, in the imperial palace of his basileus, how to go and unmask him there, amid the entire Byzantine army? Baudolino began questioning travelers, envoys, merchants, seeking some news of that scoundrel monk. At the same time he never stopped reminding Frederick of the project: "Dear Father," he would say, "now it makes even more sense than before, because in the past you could think that the kingdom was only a fancy of mine, now you know that the basileus of the Greeks believes in it and so does the pope of the Romans, and in Paris they told me that if our mind is able to conceive of a thing that is greater than anything, surely that thing exists. I am on the trail of someone who can give me information about the correct route. Authorize me to spend some money." He succeeded in gaining enough gold to corrupt all the Greeklings who passed through Venice, he had been put in touch with reliable people in Constantinople, and he was awaiting news. When he received it, he would have only to induce Frederick to make a decision.

"More years of waiting, Master Niketas, and meanwhile your Manuel also died. Even if I had not yet visited your country, I knew enough about it to think that, with a new basileus, all the old advisers would be done away with. I prayed to the Blessed Virgin and all the saints that Zosimos had not been killed: even blinded, he would still suit me, he had only to give me the map so I could read it. And at the same time I felt the years flowing from me like blood."

Niketas urged Baudolino not to allow himself to be disheartened now by his former disappointment. He ordered his cook and servant to outdo themselves, and he wanted their last meal prepared under the sun of Constantinople to remind him of all the sweetness of his sea and his land. And so he wanted lobsters and porgies on the table, boiled prawns, fried crabs, lentils with oysters and clams, sea dates, accompanied by a puree of beans and rice with honey, girt with a crown of fish roe, and all served with Cretan wine. But this was only
the first course. Afterwards came a stew that wafted a delicious aroma, and in the pan were steaming four hearts of cabbage, hard and white as snow, a carp and about twenty little mackerel, fillets of salt fish, fourteen eggs, a bit of Wallachian sheep cheese, all bathed in a good quart of oil, sprinkled with pepper, and flavored with twelve heads of garlic. But with that second dish he asked for a wine of Ganos.

From the courtyard of the Genoese came the laments of Niketas's daughters, who were reluctant to have their faces smeared with dirt, accustomed as they were to the vermilion of their cosmetics. "Calm down," Grillo said to them, "beauty alone doesn't make a woman." And he explained that it wasn't even certain that these marks of ringworm and pox they were applying to their faces would suffice to disgust a lusty pilgrim—those men who were satisfying themselves on anyone they found, young or old, healthy or sick, Greeks or Saracens or Jews, because in these matters religion doesn't count. To arouse disgust, he added, they should be covered with bumps, like a grater. Niketas's wife lovingly collaborated in uglifying her daughters, adding a sore on the forehead or some chicken skin on the nose, to make it seem half eaten away.

Baudolino looked sadly at that sweet family group, and said abruptly: "And so, as I was casting about, not knowing what to do, I also took a wife."

He told the story of his marriage in a less merry tone, as if it were a painful memory.

"At that time I was moving back and forth between the court and Alessandria. Frederick still couldn't swallow the fact of that city's existence, and I was trying to patch things up between my fellow-citizens and the emperor. The situation was more favorable than in the past. Alexander III was dead, and Alessandria had lost its protector. The emperor was gradually coming to terms with the Italian cities, and Alessandria could no longer represent itself as the bulwark of the League. Genoa had by now come over to the side of the empire, and Alessandria had everything to gain by going with the Genoese, and nothing to gain by remaining the only city hostile to Frederick. A solution had to be found that would be honorable for all. So, while I was spending my days talking with my fellow-citizens, then returning to court to sound out the emperor's mood, I became aware of Colandrina. She was the daughter of Guasco, and she had grown up more or less before my eyes, though I hadn't realized she had become a woman. She was very sweet, and she moved with a somewhat awkward grace. After the story of the siege, my father and I were considered the saviors of the city, and she looked at me as if I were Saint George. When I spoke with Guasco, she would crouch near me, her eyes shining, as she drank in my words. I could have been her father, because she was barely fifteen and I was thirty-eight. I don't know if I had fallen in love with her, but I liked seeing her around me, and I began telling incredible stories to the others so that she would hear me. Guasco, too, had become aware of this. It's true that he was a
miles,
and therefore something bigger than a ministerial like me (a peasant's son into the bargain), but, as I told you, I was the city's pet, I wore a sword on my hip, I lived at court.... It would not have been a bad match, and it was Guasco himself who said to me: Why don't you marry Colandrina? She's become a burden here, she drops the pans, and when you're away she spends all her time at the window looking out to see if you're coming. It was a fine wedding, in the church of San Pietro, the cathedral we had given to the pope, rest his soul, though the new one didn't even know it existed. It was a strange marriage, because after the first night I had to go off and join Frederick, and so it went for a good year, with a wife I saw once in a
blue moon, and it touched my heart to see her joy every time I came back."

"So you loved her?"

"I think I did, but it was the first time I'd taken a wife, and I didn't really know what to do with her, except those things that husbands do at night, but during the day I didn't know if I should pat her like a child, treat her as a lady, scold her for her clumsiness—because she still needed a father—or forgive her everything, and perhaps spoil her instead. But, at the end of the first year, she told me she was expecting a child, and then I began looking at her as if she were the Virgin Mary. When I came home, I would beg her forgiveness for having been away, I took her to Mass on Sunday to show everybody that Baudolino's fine wife was about to give him a son, and on the few evenings we spent together we told each other what we would do with that Baudolinetto Colandrinino she was carrying in her belly. She sometimes imagined that Frederick would give him a dukedom, and I was almost ready to believe it myself. I told her about the kingdom of Prester John, and she said she wouldn't let me go there alone for all the gold in the world, because there was no telling how many beautiful ladies there were down there, and she wanted to see if any place could be finer and bigger than Alessandria and Solero put together. Then I told her about the Grasal and her eyes widened: Just think, dear Baudolino, you go down there, you come back with the cup from which Our Lord drank, and you become the most famous knight of all Christendom, you build a shrine for this Grasal at Montecastello, and they come to see it all the way from Quargnento.... We daydreamed like children, and I said to myself: poor Abdul, you believe that love is a faraway princess, but mine is so close that I can tickle her behind the ear, and she laughs and tells me I give her goose bumps.... But it was short-lived."

"Why?"

"Because while she was pregnant, the Alessandrians made a pact with Genoa against the people of Silvano d'Orba. They were just a
handful, but still they roamed the area and robbed the peasants. Colandrina that day went out beyond the city walls to gather some flowers because she had heard I was about to arrive. She stopped near a flock of sheep, to joke with the shepherd, who was one of her father's men, and a band of those bastards rushed over to seize the sheep. Perhaps they didn't mean to harm her, but they roughly pushed her about, flung her to the ground, the sheep ran off, trampling her underfoot.... The shepherd had already taken to his heels, and when her family found her, late in the evening, after realizing she hadn't come home, she had a fever. Guasco sent someone to find me, I came home at full speed, but meanwhile two days had gone by. I found her in bed, dying, and, on seeing me, she tried to apologize because, she said, the baby had come out ahead of time, and he was already dead, and she tormented herself because she hadn't even been able to give me a son. She looked like a little wax madonna, and you had to put your ear to her mouth to hear what she was saying. Don't look at me, Baudolino, she said, my face is all splotchy from weeping, and so you find not only a bad mother but also an ugly wife.... She died begging my forgiveness, while I was asking hers, for not having been at her side in her moment of danger. Then I asked to see the little corpse, but they didn't want to show it to me. It was ... it was..."

Baudolino stopped. His held his face up, as if reluctant to let Niketas see his eyes. "It was a little monster," he said, after a moment, "like the ones we imagined in the land of Prester John. The face had tiny eyes, like two slits, a very thin chest, with little arms that looked like a polyp's tentacles. And from its belly to its feet it was covered with fine white hair, as if it were a sheep. I couldn't look at it for long. I ordered it buried, but I didn't know if a priest could be called. I left the city and wandered all night around the marsh, telling myself that until then I had spent my life imagining creatures of other worlds, and in my fancy they seemed wondrous portents, whose diversity bore witness to the infinite power of the Lord, but then, when the Lord asked me to do what all other men do, I had generated not
a portent but a horrible thing. My son was a lie of nature. Otto was right, but more than he had thought; I was a liar and I had lived the life of a liar to such a degree that even my seed had produced a lie. A dead lie. And then I understood...."