Baudolino (4 page)

"What happened to you today?" Niketas asked, plowing ahead in the water. He was younger than Baudolino, but his life as a scholar and courtier had made him fat, lazy, and weak.

"I killed a man. It was the man who almost fifteen years ago assassinated my adoptive father, the best of kings, the emperor Frederick."

"But Frederick drowned, in Cilicia!"

"So everyone believed. But he was assassinated. Master Niketas, you saw me wield my sword in anger this evening in Saint Sophia, but I must tell you that in all my life I had never shed anyone's blood. I am a man of peace. This time I had to kill: I was the only one who could render justice."

"You will tell it all to me. But first tell me how you arrived so providentially in Saint Sophia to save my life."

"As the pilgrims were beginning their sack of the city, I was entering a dark place. When I came out, it was nearly nightfall, an hour ago, and I found myself near the Hippodrome. I was almost trampled to death by a crowd of Greeks in flight, screaming. I ducked into the doorway of a half-burned house, to let the crowd pass, and when they had gone by I saw the pilgrims pursuing them. I realized what was happening, and in an instant this great truth flashed into my mind: that I was, true, a Latin and not a Greek, but, before these infuriated Latins could realize that, there would no longer be any difference between me and a dead Greek. No, it cannot be, I said to myself, that these men will want to destroy the great city of Christendom now that they have finally conquered it.... I reflected that when their ancestors entered Jerusalem at the time of Godfrey of Bouillon, and the city became theirs, they killed everybody: women, children, domestic animals, and it was thanks only to a mistake that they did not also burn down the Holy Sepulcher. True, they were Christians entering a city of infidels, and even on my own journey I had seen Christians massacre each other for a word. Everyone knows how for years our priests have been quarreling with your priests over the question of
Filioque.
And finally, it's simple: when a warrior enters a city, all religion is irrelevant."

"What did you do then?"

"I left the doorway and, sticking close to the walls, I reached the Hippodrome. There I saw beauty wither and become dire. You know? After I arrived in the city, I used to go over there to gaze at the statue of that maiden, the one with the shapely feet, arms like snow, and red lips that smile, and those breasts, and the robe and the hair that danced so in the wind that when you saw her from a distance you couldn't believe she was made of bronze: she seemed living flesh...."

"The statue of Helen of Troy. But what happened?"

"In the space of a few seconds I saw the column on which she stood bend like a tree sawed at the root, and fall to the ground in a great cloud of dust, the body shattered, the head a few steps from me,
and only then did I realize how big that statue was. The head—you couldn't have embraced it with both arms, and it was staring at me sideways, like a person lying down, with the nose horizontal and the lips vertical, which, forgive me the expression, looked like those lips women have between their legs; and the pupils had fallen out of the eyes, and she seemed suddenly to have gone blind, Holy God, like this one here!" And he leaped backwards, splashing in all directions, because in the water the torch had suddenly illuminated a stone head, the size of ten human heads, which was propping up a column, and this head was also reclining, the mouth even more vulvular, half-open, with many snakes like curls on the head, and a mortiferous pallor of old ivory.

Niketas smiled: "That has been here for centuries. These are Medusa heads, from I don't know where, and they're used by builders as plinths. It doesn't take much to scare you...."

"I don't scare. The fact is: I've seen this face before. Somewhere else."

Seeing Baudolino upset, Niketas changed the subject: "You were telling me they pulled down the statue of Helen—"

"If only that were all.... Everything, every statue between the Hippodrome and the Forum—all the metal ones anyway. They climbed on top of them, wound a rope or a chain around the neck, and from the ground, pulled them down with two or three pairs of oxen. I saw all the statues of charioteers come down, a sphinx, a hippopotamus and a crocodile from Egypt, a great she-wolf with Romulus and Remus attached to the teats, and the statue of Hercules—that, too, I discovered, was so big that the thumb was like the chest of a normal man.... And also that bronze obelisk with those reliefs, the one topped by the little woman who turns according to the winds...."

"The Companion of the Wind. What a disaster! Some works were by ancient pagan sculptors, older even than the Romans. But why? Why?"

"To melt them down. The first thing you do when you put a city
to the sack is melt down everything you can't carry off. They've set up melting pots everywhere, and you can imagine—with all these fine houses in flames, they're like natural foundries. And you also saw those men in the church; they can't go around showing they've stolen the pyxes and the patens from the tabernacles. Melt everything down: and quickly! A sack," Baudolino explained, like a man who knows a trade well, "is like a grape harvest: you have to divide the tasks. There are those who press the grapes, those who carry off the must in the tuns, those who cook for the others, others who go to fetch the good wine from last year.... A sack is a serious job—at least if you want to make sure that in the city not a stone remains on a stone, as in my Mediolanum days. But for that you'd really want the Pavians; they knew how to make a city disappear. These men here have everything to learn. They pulled down the statue, then sat on it to have a drink, then another man arrived dragging a girl along by the hair and shouting that she was a virgin, and they all had to stick in a finger to see if it was worth it.... In a proper sack you have to clean the place out immediately, house by house, and the fun comes afterwards; otherwise the smartest get all the best stuff. Anyway, my problem was that with people like this I didn't have time to explain that I too was born in the Monferrato region. So there was only one thing to be done. I crouched behind the corner until a knight came into the alley, so drunk he seemed not to know where he was going and was letting his horse carry him. I had only to yank his leg, and he fell down. I took off his helmet, and I dropped a stone on his head...."

"You killed him?"

"No. It was friable stone, barely hard enough to leave him unconscious. I took heart because he began vomiting up some purplish liquid. I took off his coat of mail and his shirt, his helmet, weapons, I took his horse, and rode off through the streets until I arrived at the portal of Saint Sophia. I saw them going in with mules, and a group of soldiers passed me carrying off the silver candelabra with their chains as thick as your arm, and they were talking like Lombards.
When I saw that destruction, that wickedness, that greed, I lost my head, because the ones wreaking that ruin were men from my land, devout sons of the pope of Rome...."

Their torches were sputtering as the two of them talked, but soon they climbed from the cistern into the dead of night and, by way of deserted alleys, they reached the tower of the Genoese.

They knocked at a door, and someone came down; they were welcomed and fed with rough cordiality. Baudolino seemed to be at home among these people, and he promptly recommended Niketas to them. One man said: "That's easy, we'll take care of it. Go and sleep now." He said this with such confidence that not only Baudolino but Niketas himself passed a serene night.

The next morning Baudolino collected the cleverest of the Genoese: Pevere, Boiamondo, Grillo, and Taraburlo. Niketas told them where his family could be found, and the men set off. Niketas then asked for some wine and poured a cup for Baudolino. "See if you like this. It's a resinous wine that many Latins find disgusting; they say it tastes of mold." Assured by Baudolino that this Greek nectar was his favorite drink, Niketas settled down to hear his story.

Baudolino seemed eager to talk, as if to free himself from things he had been keeping inside since God knows when. "Here, Master Niketas," he said, opening a leather bag he carried around his neck and handing him a parchment. "This is the beginning of my story."

Niketas tried to decipher the words, and though he could read Latin letters he could understand nothing.

"What is this?" he asked. "I mean—what language is this written in?"

"I don't know what language. Let's begin this way, Master Niketas. You have an idea of where Ianua is—Genoa, I mean—and Mediolanum, or Mailand, as the Teutonics or Germanics say, the Alamans, as your people call them. Well, halfway between these two cities there are two rivers, the Tanaro and the Bormida, and between
the two there is a plain that, when it isn't hot enough to cook eggs on a stone, there is fog, when there isn't fog, there's snow, when there isn't snow, there's ice, and when there isn't ice, it's cold all the same. That's where I was born, in a place called the Frascheta Marincana, which is also a swamp between the two rivers. It's not exactly like the banks of the Propontis."

"I can imagine."

"But I liked it. The air keeps you company. I have done much traveling, Master Niketas, maybe even as far as Greater India...."

"Are you sure?"

"No, I don't really know where I got to. It was the place where I saw some men with horns and others with their mouth on their belly. I spent weeks in endless deserts, on plains that stretched as far as the eye could see, and I always felt like a prisoner of something that surpassed the powers of my imagination. In my parts, when you walk through the woods in the fog, you feel like you're still inside your mother's belly, you're not afraid of anything, and you feel free. Even when there's no fog, when you're walking along and you're thirsty, you break off an icicle from a tree, and you blow on your fingers because they're covered with
gheloni
—"

"What are these ... these
gheloni?
Something that makes you laugh?"

"No, no, I didn't say
gheloioi!
Here in your country there isn't even a word for it, so I had to use my own. They are like sores that form on your fingers, and on your knuckles, because of the great cold, and they itch, and if you scratch them, they hurt."

"You talk as if you had a pleasant memory of them."

"Cold is beautiful."

"Each of us loves his native land. Go on."

"Well, once upon a time the Romans were there, the ones from Rome, who spoke Latin, not the Romans you claim to be today, you Greek-speakers, that we call Romei or Greculi, excuse the term. Then the empire of those Romans disappeared, and in Rome only the pope
was left, and all through Italy you saw different people who spoke different languages. The people of Frascheta speak one language, but in Terdona, nearby, they speak a different one. Traveling in Italy with Frederick, I heard some very sweet languages, compared to our Frascheta language, which isn't really a language, more like a dog's yawping. But nobody writes in that language, because they still do that in Latin. So when I was scrawling on this parchment, I was maybe the first to try to write the way we talked. Afterwards I became a man of letters and I wrote in Latin."

"But ... what are you saying?"

"As you can see, living among educated people, I knew what year it was. I was writing in Anno Domini 1155. I didn't know my age: my father said twelve; my mother thought it was thirteen, maybe because all she had gone through, trying to bring me up in the fear of God, made the time seem longer to her. When I started writing I was certainly going on fourteen. Between April and December I'd learned how to write. I applied myself ardently, after the emperor had taken me away with him, setting myself to work in every situation: in the camp, under a tent, leaning against the wall of a destroyed house. On slabs of wood mostly, once in a great while on parchment. I was already becoming accustomed to living like Frederick, who never stayed in the same place more than a few months, always and only in winter, and for the rest of the year on the march, sleeping every night in a different place."

"Yes—but what is your story?"

"At the beginning of that year I was still living with my father and mother, a few cows and a vegetable patch. A hermit of those parts had taught me to read. I roamed around the forest and the swamp. I was an imaginative boy, I saw unicorns, and in the fog (I said) Saint Baudolino appeared to me...."

"I've never heard the name of such a saint. Did he really appear to you?"

"He's a saint from our parts; he was bishop of Villa del Foro.
Whether or not I saw him is another question. Master Niketas, the problem of my life is that I've always confused what I saw with what I wanted to see."

"That happens to many people."

"Yes, but with me, whenever I said I saw this, or I found this letter that says thus and so (and maybe I'd written it myself), other people seemed to have been waiting for that very thing. You know, Master Niketas, when you say something you've imagined, and others then say that's exactly how it is, you end up believing it yourself. So I wandered around Frascheta and I saw saints and unicorns in the forest, and when I came upon the emperor, without knowing who he was, I spoke to him in his language. I told him that Saint Baudolino had said he would conquer Terdona. I said that to please him, but it suited him for me to say it to everybody, and especially to the delegates from Terdona, so they would be convinced that even the saints were against them. That's why he bought me from my father. It wasn't so much for the few coins, but because it was one less mouth to feed. And so my life was changed."

"You became his footman?"

"No, his son. At that time Frederick hadn't yet become a father. I believe he took a liking to me, I told him things others didn't say out of respect. He treated me like I was his own, he praised me for my first scrawls, the first sums I could do with my fingers, for the things I was learning about his father, and his father's father.... Sometimes he confided in me things that perhaps I wouldn't understand."