The Dream of Scipio (10 page)

 
 
AND MANLIUS, penning the
Dream
that encapsulated all of Sophia’s teaching, how can his gift be understood? It was not given in the same spirit as his first offerings, presented in the full flush of his youth, when his exhilaration had rendered him foolish. For in Marseille he offered her two things; both were rejected. On the first occasion he had tried to express his esteem for her by giving her money, enough for her to live in security; he had presented her with a small casket filled with gold—a vulgar, ostentatious gift, full of the coarseness of youth and the arrogance of his position, which he had not yet learned to control.

“Why do you give this to me?” she had asked calmly. He replied that it was because she was the only good and noble person in the world.

“Then let me remain so,” she said, handing it back.

And the second occasion, he offered his entire soul, and declared his love for her. Again, a crude gesture promptly rebutted, for it meant he had failed to learn anything from her at all. So she turned it into a lesson, starting again the long and arduous process of teaching him something so utterly hidden from his sight.

“Come with me,” she had said. And she had led him from the room where they had their conversations—Manlius had nervously paid a call to her alone, outside the hours she normally held for public speech—and took him outside to the midden.

“Look inside,” she said. “Smell. What do you see? What do you smell?”

Manlius did not know what to say. The cubicle smelled, and looked like all such.

“Only I use that,” she continued as she shut the door. “Do you love it as well?”

“Of course not.”

“Yet it is me, part of me. The natural product of my body. And yet you turn from it, wrinkling your nose in disgust. You say you love me, but do not love what is part of me. Or are you lying, and is your love just an adolescent fancy?”

“I love the idea of you.” This from their lessons.

“My beauty is a reflection of the divine beauty?” she said ironically. Manlius hung his head in shame; being mocked was not something he could ever accept.

“No. The love I feel is the reflection. As you say, madam, you are not beautiful, although I find you so. If I were as useless as you imply, I would surely have fallen in love with the pretty young serving girl who draws the water at the end of the street every morning I come here. I would have drowned in her black eyes and her beautiful hair. But I do not. I lie awake thinking of someone much older, who turns no heads when she is not known but fascinates all who have heard her speak. You say that, at its best, the physical craving is a reflection of the desire of the soul to reunite with the ultimate beauty, with God. And can only be justified as such.”

“But I said it was only a reflection. Not a reality. As real as a glass reflected in a pond.”

“But a reflection of water in a mirror can make you thirsty.”

“That is true. And is what you should work towards. You should not bend your mouth to the imaginary glass and try to drink.”

“I know all this. I have learned well. And yet I cannot stop.”

“That is the corruption of the body, its triumph over the soul. The soul is imprisoned, and what you feel is the same as the prisoner in a dark cell who sees nothing but shadows and thinks these are reality. You must study to escape the cell, let your soul contemplate what causes the shadows. That is the purpose of philosophy, and why it is suited to only those few who wish to escape. In the moment of love, when we escape ourselves and become united with the lover, then we have a hint of the joys to come when the soul rejoins the divine; but we think it is a reality of itself. And we lose sight of our aim. That is why it is dangerous.”

Manlius looked at her. “You never feel such things?”

She looked serious. “Often,” she replied. And for the first time her gaze dropped, and would not meet his.

NO DOUBT a psychoanalyst, excited with his new knowledge in Julien’s epoch and convinced that his skills could be applied universally and eternally, would have made much of this. Had he been able to read the letters that the two exchanged over the next fifteen years, some three hundred in all, he would have dissected their souls and their lives, turned over Sophia’s thoughts about her father, analyzed her views on eternity and death, and rested content with a conclusion of extreme neurosis. Celibacy, suppressed desire, the search for the mystical could now only be seen in such terms.

Sophia was spared such analysis because, as with so much else, the letters did not survive; Olivier de Noyen almost discovered them, as the last remaining copy sat for hundreds of years in a church in Aix-en-Provence, which he visited in 1344. But he had, by then, found one version of a poem by Horace and concluded, wrongly, that there was nothing else in the little bookroom except for theological texts of no significance for him. Besides, he was hungry and tired, and wanted to go home; a cold was coming over him and he felt the need to get to bed as quickly as possible. Or perhaps it was because the wind was blowing strongly that day and sapped his patience and dulled his spirit.

No one else passed by to rectify his mistake; in 1407 a baker in the house next to the church overfilled his oven and allowed burning embers to fall onto the floor. Half an hour later his house was ablaze; an hour later the entire street was in flames.

It was a great loss, for they were the finest things Manlius ever produced. Sophia had no use for artifice in speech and was impatient with it in literature. Clever allusions, apposite quotations, delicate metrical structures excited in her only contempt. Manlius consequently dropped all those devices that he considered obligatory for good writing in all other spheres and wrote directly and simply. What they produced together might well have been considered the finest collection of love letters ever written, had the baker been more careful. A mingling of the emotions and the intellect, the desire suppressed but forever bubbling near the surface, barely under control. A complete communication of two people founded on the respect and affection of one, and reverence of the other. What the analyst would have cooed over was the eroticism of the images presented as abstract philosophy, although he would probably have missed the playful, affectionate lilt of the language. He would have assumed both writers were unaware of the feelings that saturated the prose, although each was, in fact, all too aware of them. He would probably not have considered the possibility that this great passion was the more fulfilling for each because of its abstract nature, that for Manlius sex was something all men had with their servants when necessary, that for Sophia it was a reminder of a position in the world that bred resentment rather than release.

 
 
 
 
HAD OLIVIER not been on the church steps that day and fallen in love, he and his family might not have suffered such ignominy; that, at least, is the conventional view, one which all who have heard of him have accepted without demur. The disease of love would not then have infiltrated his mind, and her husband would not have avenged his honor by attacking him in the way he did.

The conventional interpretation is, in fact, entirely incorrect. Had he not seen a particular woman
then,
in those precise circumstances, he might have remained either unaware of her existence or indifferent to her appeal. It is no longer fashionable, or even respectable, to talk of fate or destiny taking a hand. Love is a random matter, no more than that, in a universe governed by chance, which has swept aside all other deities and taken on a power that is all but supreme. But what a dull deity Chance is in comparison to those it has vanquished. Dressed up as cool rationality—how rational it is, after all, to assert that there is no reason for anything—it appeals only to the impoverished of spirit.

This stricture applies even if Olivier did not fall in love with a woman. He fell in love, rather, with an idea as it was mottled with sunlight on that warm morning. Sophia would have said that he was touched with a remembrance of the divine, a faint recollection of the soul’s origins before it fell to earth and inhabited a body. It seemed a breathtaking idea, but was not as unique as he believed. Dante’s Beatrice was scarcely a real person by the time he had reduced her to verse; Petrarch’s Laura might not have existed at all except in his imagination. Both loved their lovers the more after they were dead, and could not disturb their imaginations with the onset of wrinkles or the annoyance of opinions independently expressed.

The result is well enough known, at least to scholars acquainted with the poetry of the period and the language of the time, for Olivier wrote in Provençal, which had come back into vogue in the generation of Julien Barneuve’s father, and the son learned the language as well. For such people, the surviving poems—about twenty of them—fall neatly into two categories, called the juvenile and the mature. In this categorization, the earlier poems are considered
essais,
apprentice works where the young poet has not yet mastered the art of expression he was hewing from the rough stone of language. There is an imprecision about the verse that is redolent of the formality of the Middle Ages, the slightly coarse troubadour style that went before. Olivier in his youth did not have the means of expression or the confidence to cut through the inherited mannerisms and speak straight from the heart.

And then there are the last poems written, it seems, shortly before his downfall, when he finally throws off all artifice and speaks with a vibrancy unheard of in poetry for more than a thousand years. Even in translation and over half a millennium, it is hard not to be touched by the way he talks of his overwhelming joy at love realized and the poignant knowledge that it can lead to nothing. Not that this was the only reaction, of course; for others, the final poems were evidence of a mind disoriented by the Black Death or falling prey to some innate madness.

What was not considered, because it was not even thought of until Julien surmised it, was that this sudden maturity of expression, this shift toward a heightened emotional intensity—accompanied by a new solidity in imagery and sureness of approach—was because Olivier truly fell in love, this time with a reality, not an abstraction that existed only in his imagination. Nor was it known that this love was not for Isabelle de Fréjus, the commonly accepted subject of his poems; Julien established that this particular association began only after he was dead.

Isabelle did come down those church steps that day, but Olivier scarcely noticed her. He was looking in the other direction, staring fixedly at a girl in a dark woollen cloak, neatly but obviously patched, hurrying by alone on the other side of the street. Until he saw her again and discovered her name, Olivier searched for her with an obsession that can be seen in the lines he wrote in that period. Every day he went out he hoped to see her; on many occasions he followed a figure in a dark cloak, only to be horrified when at last he did discover whose face lay under the veil.

 
 
 
JULIEN GLIMPSED Julia on the first day of the cruise, as 
he walked up the gangway carrying the small bag he was unprepared to entrust to the ship’s crew. She was leaning against a rail, high up, staring at the bustle of the port, talking to a man whom Julien correctly assumed to be her father.

She was as beautiful as her father was ugly; in her the darkness, the fullness of the lips, and the slight elongation of the nose produced a result that a painter like Modigliani would turn into a classic image of the age, a hint of unplaceable strangeness. In her father those same features could be stretched, twisted, and caricatured also into another classic image of the age, but with none of the subtlety of a hint.

He met her that same evening at the cocktail party to celebrate the start of the voyage. They were all in first class, which had been taken
en bloc
by the organizers for the learned party of professors and writers and intellectuals who had banded together to take the leisurely cruise around the Mediterranean, some giving lectures or leading tours when the ship came to the part they had studied, others listening. Most were French, although there was a scattering of Europe across the tables, mainly from those countries that had so recently fought together. Julia Bronsen and her father, traveling alone, were of uncertain nationality; France was a flavor in a complex recipe, but an expert concerned to analyze could also detect a touch of Italian and a suggestion of Russian about her. Julien never knew how important this was for his love of her.

Initially it was the father, Claude Bronsen, who struck up an acquaintanceship, and when Julien joined him and his daughter for dinner one evening, he was astonished once more to realize that such an ungainly, un-handsome man could possibly have produced such a beautiful daughter. He responded to the way Bronsen drew him out, asked him questions about himself, congratulated him on his success—which he was vain and young enough to mention before the first course was done—and talked about Paris and Rome and London. They brought a touch of the sophisticated to Julien’s world, for despite the war he had seen little of society. He had long dreamed of such surroundings, of being welcome at soirées and receptions, of counting writers and artists and diplomats and men of power among his circle, or at least to be part of theirs. The Bronsens were his first taste of such things, and he would have found it delightful even had they been less pleasant, less amusing, less friendly than they were.

“And you are going to Rome, is that right?” Julia asked.

“In September,” he replied. “To the École de Rome for two years.”

“I congratulate you on your good fortune,” she said. “I have only been once. And that was when I was fourteen. But who knows? Maybe I can persuade Father to let me go again. It is even possible that he might one day let me go without him watching over me all the time.”

From some mouths such a comment might have been sarcastic and even cruel; Julien at that stage would have talked of his father in this way. But Julia mingled the criticism with a loving acceptance of his weakness that still did not manage to disguise the way his need weighed on her. Her gentle, rich voice had all the resigned, partly amused affection of a daughter for a doting parent, who had separated from his wife when Julia was young, and who had done his best—according to the temper of the times—to bring her up alone. He had never remarried, never even considered it; Julia was his beginning and end, and she accepted this with only a small protest at the cost to herself.