Inquisition (13 page)

Hugues de Narbonne burst into a cheerful laugh. ‘Forgive me for pulling your leg,’ he said. ‘Right now your face is priceless.’

Gerardo breathed a sigh of relief. ‘I knew that you couldn’t be serious, but for a second I believed you.’

‘But I’ve never been more serious. I wasn’t apologising for what I said, but the manner in which I said it. I could have introduced the subject a little at a time, sounding you out, preparing you ... Instead I wanted to do what my master did to me, a long time ago. Now I understand why he laughed so much.’

Gerardo couldn’t make sense of his own reactions. He knew that he should get up and leave, and yet he just sat there, paralysed by the mass of questions that filled his mind. If not for the mother of Christ, for whom did the Commander reserve the title of Holy mary? Why did he speak of a master, as if those heresies were a recognised practice within the order? During his training and the preparation of his vows, Gerardo had never heard of such things. Was this secret knowledge? And if so, why had Hugues de Narbonne decided to communicate it to him, without even knowing him properly? But one issue tormented him above all the rest: did listening to this without opposing him constitute a mortal sin?

‘Listening isn’t a sin,’ said Hugues, showing once again that he could read the young man like an open book. ‘If what I’m telling you seems a heresy, incompatible with the truths of the Christian faith, you can leave and not come back. I shall still stand surety for you, and I consider you released from the obligation of obedience that you owe me in so far as I am your superior. Which do you choose?’

Gerardo had already chosen and Hugues’ words only acted as the spur that he needed to give voice to his burning desire to understand.

‘Go on,’ he finally managed to say.

‘I imagine you will have heard of Baphomet, the demoniacal idol that we are accused of worshipping,’ began the Frenchman.

‘You don’t mean to tell me that is true too?’ murmured Gerardo in a reed-like voice. All his convictions were shaken to their foundations.

Hugues made a slight movement with his hand, as if calming a nervous filly. ‘It is true that some of us, the better part, I would presume to say, venerate something that we call Baphomet. But it is false to call him an idol, much less demoniacal. Everything lies in the meaning of the words.’

He got to his feet, went into the kitchen and returned with a pitcher of white wine, without tankards. He took a long draught and then offered it to Gerardo. ‘Drink, you look as though you need it.’

The young man obeyed mechanically and then he put the pitcher down on the table between them, without saying anything.

‘Do you know the Language of the Jews?’ Hugues asked him.

‘Certainly not!’ responded Gerardo, indignantly. The mere idea of having anything in common with Christ’s murderers horrified him.

‘Neither do I. But I know its alphabet. The Jews, like the saracens, reject Christ’s message and for this reason they are damned for eternity. But that doesn’t mean that they are stupid or ignorant. The knowledge of the infidels can be profound.’

‘And what has this got to do with the Hebrew alphabet?’

Hugues smiled at his impatience. ‘I’m getting there.’ He stretched out an arm to open the piece of furniture behind him, and took a piece of notepaper and something to write with. After which he started drawing two rows of mysterious signs on the page, one above the other, while Gerardo watched him in silence. When he had finished, he turned the page towards Gerardo, showing him the two sequences of letters:

ת ש ר ק צ פ ע ס נ מ ל כ י ט ח ז ו ה ד ג ב א א ב ג ד ה ו ז ח ט י כ ל מ נ ס ע פ צ ק ר ש ת

‘They are the opposite of each other,’ said Gerardo, having examined them.

‘Exactly. It’s a Hebrew code, called the Atbash, from the name of the first and last two letters of their alphabet. The letters are written from right to left, then from left to right. Then you take a word and substitute each letter with the corresponding letter in the row beneath.’

‘The result is a completely different word,’ interjected Gerardo. ‘Comprehensible only to those who know the code.’ ‘What intellectual promptitude,’ said Hugues, smiling with approval. ‘As you say, it’s easy to decipher but you have to know the original Language. And this is a secret that none of us will ever reveal to the Inquisitors, even under the worst torture.’

‘Why?’

‘Let’s take the word Baphomet,’ said Hugues, indicating some symbols on the top row. ‘In Hebrew it is made up of five letters: Tav, Mem, Vav, Pei and Beit.’ He pointed to the letters and copied them below.

ב פ ו מ ת

‘Reading from right to left, as the Jews do, we have BA.PH.O.ME.T. Now, let’s take these letters and substitute them with the corresponding letters on the row below. He joined the letters with little dashes of the pen, and then copied them down beneath the first five.

ש ו פ י א

He looked at them a moment with a strange respect and read, ‘Alef, Yud, Pei, Vav and Shin. Or rather, from right to left, S.O.PH.I.A.’

‘The goddess of wisdom!’ exclaimed Gerardo, surprised.

‘Exactly. Now tell me, in what way could honouring wisdom be a heresy?’

‘But why didn’t you say!’ demanded Gerardo. He was angry and his face burned as though he had a fever. ‘We should reveal the code to the Inquisitors and show them that there is nothing wrong in it.’

Hugues shook his head, with a sad look in his grey eyes. ‘Our order is condemned, make no mistake about it. We have become too powerful for our own good. We cannot say or do anything to change our fate, but we can safeguard the knowledge that has been handed down to us.’

On an impulse Gerardo seized the pitcher and took a long draught of wine. Hugues did the same and then he started a complex discourse, punctuating it with intense looks and quick drinks. He spoke of the Greek goddess sophia, derived from the World soul of the Gnostics, the Great mother who gave life to the world and who is higher than the Redeemer himself, because without her there would be no world to redeem, and therefore no Redeemer. And he concluded by saying that the female divine principle was incarnated in the Christian religion in the figure of mary magdalene, the wife of Christ.

‘But Christ was celibate!’ shouted Gerardo, thumping the table with his fist and leaping to his feet, quite beside himself. ‘And mary magdalene was a—’

‘Do not say that word!’ In a sudden bound Hugues had jumped round the table and grabbed hold of him by the neck. ‘Do not take her name in vain.’

Gerardo was struck dumb, not so much because of the strength or the speed of the Frenchman’s reaction, as for the passion in his words, unexpected after the cynicism with which he had expressed himself until then.

At that moment someone knocked at the door. Hugues let go of Gerardo’s throat and went to go and open it. Voices and laughing were heard coming from the kitchen, then the Commander returned to the room in the company of a woman in her thirties. She was dressed in a grey sleeveless surcoat on top of a décolleté linen tunic. Her auburn hair was gathered into a white cap. In one hand she carried an earthenware pot, with two thick slices of bread balanced on top, from which came a good smell of stew. She leaned over to put it on the table, showing her breasts and giving Gerardo a lascivious smile.

‘Gianna doesn’t have much time, or her husband will begin to suspect something and come looking for her,’ said Hugues. ‘I told her that I have a guest and she is disposed to satisfy both of us for a bit more, but together, not one at a time.’

Hugues was obviously quite able to make himself understood even by those who spoke no Latin, when he wanted to. Gerardo merely shook his head. They both laughed at his blushing face and went off to the bedroom. On the threshold the woman turned to look at him with an expression of nostalgia, and then blew him a kiss from the tips of her fingers.

‘If you change your mind, come and find me later,’ she said. Hugues murmured something in her ear and she laughed in a coarse manner, then they closed the door.

Gerardo sat at the table, immobile, as though he had been touched by paralysis, asking himself why he didn’t get up and leave. A part of him, that he tried to silence, told him that he was so obviously excited that he had already sinned, so he might as well join them in the room and have the woman.

In an effort to distract himself from those thoughts, he went back to looking at the Hebrew alphabet lying on the table. The avalanche of revelations that he had received in such a short time came back to occupy his mind. Christ was married. And to mary magdalene, a prostitute, although redeemed and sanctified. It couldn’t be true. Perhaps the accusations of heresy formulated against his order, that he had always thought false and made up intentionally, had the basis of truth.

However much he tried to think clearly, he couldn’t manage to do anything other than repeat mangled phrases devoid of a logical connection. First, he thought that he knew too little to judge. Then it occurred to him that it was a sin to hide behind the pretence of ignorance. But what was his duty? to come out of hiding and turn himself over to the Inquisition, proclaiming his own good faith? no, it was too dangerous. He risked being interrogated under torture, and even if he were believed and freed in the end, he would be crippled for the rest of his life. After examining his conscience, Gerardo decided that he did not possess the vocation of martyr.

Besides, there was always the possibility that Hugues had in fact been telling the truth. Perhaps the templars, as the rumours would have it, had discovered secrets in the Holy land that contradicted the Church’s official story. He looked at the word Baphomet, and underneath its transformation into sophia, goddess of wisdom. Who knew how many mysteries he might uncover, following Hugues de Narbonne.

He fought off that sacrilegious thought, but before he had managed to control his agitation enough to make a decision, be it only that of leaving, Gianna came out of the bedroom, hurriedly rearranging her bonnet.

‘I’ll come back another day,’ she whispered as she passed him. ‘And I’ll make sure I have more time for you.’

The street door closed with a soft click and immediately afterwards Hugues de Narbonne came back into the room. He had a serious expression that Gerardo did not make the mistake of thinking might be due to the knowledge that he had committed a grave sin. The Commander evidently considered himself above the laws of the Church, so the reason for such seriousness had to be something else. Perhaps the revelations were not over yet. Gerardo ceased struggling with himself and prepared to listen, putting off every decision until he finally left the house.

‘When I entered the order,’ said the Frenchman, sitting down to the pot of stew, ‘I took my vows, just like you, even though from the beginning I considered them unnecessary restrictions. Then someone decided I was ready to share a higher wisdom and my vows were overridden. What you saw is not a banal violation of the vote of chastity. In the sense that it is not a sin and does not need to be confessed to be forgiven.’

Gerardo understood the concept, even if it seemed blasphemous to him. In practice the Commander was saying that for those initiated in the secret knowledge of the templars, the laws of common behaviour did not hold. And that only the non-initiated had to respect the Rule. The thing that he still could not understand was why Hugues had chosen to make him party to the secrets, given that, as he had just stated, they were things that he would not have revealed even under torture.

‘Commander,’ he said when he had managed to calm the jumble of thoughts that were dancing in his head. ‘Why me?’ Hugues laughed and slammed a hand down on the tabletop. ‘Finally the right question!’ he said, nodding with his large white-blond head. ‘Haven’t you asked yourself why I agreed to stand surety for a person I didn’t even know?’ ‘Remigio told me—’

‘You can forget the banker, he knows nothing. The truth is that since the evening when I found out about your involvement with Angelo da Piczano, I have wanted to meet you.’

‘You knew about that before I told you!’ exclaimed Gerardo. ‘But how is that possible?’

‘It is simpler than you think. I knew Angelo and when he arrived in Bologna we met up.’

Hugues lifted the lid of the pot and peered inside with a critical eye. Then he put in a hand and pulled out a piece of meat, well covered with the greasy sauce, and put it on one of the two slices of bread.

‘You were the person that Angelo was supposed to meet on the night that he was killed!’ cried Gerardo.

Hugues shook his head and dipped his fingers into the sauce again, wiping them on the bread to soak it well. ‘No. He led me to believe that the meeting was on the next day. If he hadn’t done so he would still be alive now.’ Hugues paused and his grey eyes darkened. ‘However, as soon as I heard about the fire, I ran to the house. The Inquisition had turned up straight away but had found nothing. Asking around, I discovered that the student who had vanished and that everyone was talking about was probably a Knight of the temple too. And his was a difficult and risky undertaking, to get away without abandoning Angelo’s corpse to the Dominicans.’

‘So you went to see Remigio and told him that if I turned up, he was to put me in contact with you,’ said Gerardo. ‘That’s why he was so interested, when I told him I had been in an accident.’

‘That’s more or less it. Well done. Quickness of mind is an important quality for a future initiate.’