The Secret Supper (35 page)

To contemplate it once again.

Dear Lord!

It was like a flash of lightning in the night.

As if suddenly, one of the tongues of fire that illuminated the disciples on Pentecost had descended on me.

Dear Lord! There was no riddle here. Leonardo had not concealed anything in his Cenacolo. Nothing at all.

A singular emotion, such as I had never felt in all my years in Bethany, overcame me all at once.

“Do you remember what you told me one day about Leonardo’s peculiar writing habits?”

Oliverio looked at me, wondering what my question had to do with the revelation he had just made.

“Do you mean his custom of writing everything in reverse? That’s another of his eccentricities. His disciples require a looking glass to read what their master writes. He does that with everything: his notes, his inventories, his receipts, his personal letters. Even his shopping lists! He’s a madman.”

“Perhaps.”

Oliverio’s artlessness made me smile. Neither he nor Annio de Viterbo had realized anything, in spite of having held the answer in their hands.

“Tell me, Oliverio. From where did you begin to read your Egyptian phrase?”

“From the left, of course. M for Bartholomew, U for James the Less, T—”

Suddenly he stopped.

He turned his head to the far right of the mural and saw Simon who, with his arms stretched out, seemed to be inviting him to enter the scene. There also was the knot in the cloth, marking the side of the table from which one was supposed to begin to read.

“Good God! It is meant to be read the other way around!”

Indeed it was. Instead of depicting the inauguration of the Eucharist, which the Cathars had rejected, Leonardo had painted in code the only sacrament their faith accepted. One that needed neither bread nor wine, that was administered by the imposition of hands, and whose name, if one were familiar with the Ars Memoriae, could be read in the figures of the thirteen protagonists of the Cenacolo. His was a brilliant gibe against Rome. Against the world of materialism. Against those incapable of believing in religious freedom.

“And what do you read then, Oliverio?” I asked.

The Spaniard, doubting his eyes and without understanding, pronounced for the first time the true secret that Leonardo hid in The Last Supper. He read out the syllables of the phrase, the mysterious Mut, Nem, A, Los, Noc—but in reverse, the way that Master Leonardo had been composing it for the past three years:

Con-sol-a-men-tum.

Afterword Father Agostino Leyre’s Final Note

The revelation changed my life.

It was not sudden, but rather a gradual, unstoppable alteration, like that of a forest as spring approaches. At first, I barely noticed it, and when I tried to react, it was too late. I imagine that my peaceful discussions in Concorezzo and the confusion of my first days back in Milan were what had produced the miracle.

I waited for the open-door days at Santa Maria delle Grazie to be over, and then I returned to the Cenacolo and placed myself under the hands of Christ. I wanted to receive the benediction of that living, breathing work, which I had seen grow almost imperceptibly. I still do not know quite well why I did it. Nor why I decided not to present myself before the Father Prior and tell him where I had been and what I had discovered during my absence. But, as I have said, something changed within me. Something that would put an end forever to the Agostino Leyre that I had been, preacher and brother at the Secretariat of Keys of the Papal States, theologian and official of the Holy Office.

Illumination? Divine flame? Madness, perhaps? It is probable that I will die among the rocks of Yabal al-Tarif without knowing what name to give to my transformation.

It matters not.

The truth is that the discovery of the Cathar sacrament exposed to the contemplation and veneration of all, in the very heart of the House of the Dominicans, those patrons of the Inquisition and guardians of orthodoxy, had a cleansing effect on my soul. I discovered that evangelical truth had cleaved its way through the darkness of our Order, streaming from the refectory like the beam of a lighthouse in the night. It was a much different truth from the one I had believed in for forty-five years: Jesus had never instituted the Eucharist as the only means of reaching Him. Rather the contrary was true. His teachings to John and to Mary Magdalene were aimed at showing us how to find God within ourselves, without having recourse to exterior artifices. Jesus was a Jew. He saw how the priests exercised their control over God by shutting Him up in the Tabernacle. And he fought against it. Fifteen centuries later, Leonardo became the secret carrier of the revelation, which he entrusted to his Cenacolo.

Perhaps it was then that I lost my mind. I admit it. But everything took place exactly in the way I have related.

Three decades have elapsed since those events and Abdul, who has now brought my food up to my cave as usual, has also brought me strange news. A group of hermits, followers of Saint Anthony, have arrived in his village with the intention of staying in the vicinity. I have searched the banks of the Nile trying to find them, but my weak eyes have not been able to discover their location. I am aware that they might be my last chance. If someone were worthy of receiving my confidences in this last stretch of my life, I would deposit these pages in his hands and I would explain the importance of keeping them in a safe place until the time comes to reveal them. But my strength ebbs and I am not certain of being able to climb down these cliffs to reach them.

Also, even if I managed to do it, it would not be easy to make myself understood.

Oliverio Jacaranda, for example, never understood the secret of the Cenacolo, even though it was before his eyes. The fact that the thirteen protagonists carried the thirteen letters of Consolamentum, the only sacrament admitted by the parfaits of Concorezzo (a spiritual, invisible, intimate sacrament), meant nothing to him. He ignored how linked this symbol was to the “blue book” that he was destined never to hold in his hands. And of course, he never suspected that his servant, Mario Forzetta, had betrayed him for the sake of that volume. A volume that, for generations, had been used in Cathar ceremonies to receive the neophytes into the Church of the Spirit, the Church of John, and initiate them on their individual quest for the Father.

I know that Oliverio returned to Spain and settled near the ruins of Tarraco, and that he went on doing business with Pope Alexander. Around that time, Leonardo entrusted his book, his precious Secret Supper, to his disciple Bernardino Luini, who in turn gave it to an artist of the Languedoc who took it with him to Carcassonne. There it was intercepted by the French Holy Office, which never succeeded in interpreting it correctly. Luini never painted the Eucharist, nor did Marco d’Oggiono. Neither did any of Leonardo’s beloved disciples.

Elena’s destiny was a curious one. I never met her in person. After sitting for the Master, the little countess realized that perhaps John’s Church would never be instituted. She left Leonardo’s bottega, stopped pursuing poor Luini, and entered a convent of Clares near the French border. Leonardo, having discovered her sharp intelligence, revealed to her the great secret of her line: that her remote ancestor was Mary Magdalene, who had seen Christ resurrected outside the tomb that Joseph of Arimathea had prepared for Him. For centuries, the Church had refused to hear her full story. Leonardo, on the other hand, had listened carefully, learning how, fifteen hundred years ago, Mary Magdalene saw the living Christ not as a mortal body but as pure light. His cold, dead body lay still in the tomb when she was met by His “body of light.” Moved by the experience, she decided to steal His physical remains and hide them in her house, where she carefully embalmed them and took them with her to France when the persecutions began.

That was the secret and no other. Christ did not resurrect as a mortal body. He resurrected as light, showing us the path of our own transmutation when the final hour comes.

I learned that Elena stayed with the Clares for only five years. One day, she simply disappeared from her cell, and no one saw her again. It is told that she accompanied Leonardo during his exile in France and settled at the court of François I as one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting, and that, on occasion, she still sat for the Master. It seems that Leonardo called her on his deathbed and asked her to lend him her face and hands so that he could retouch the unfinished portrait of a woman known as the Mona Lisa. Those who have seen it say that the similarities between the John of the Cenacolo and the woman in the portrait speaks for itself. I, unfortunately, cannot judge.

If Elena was in fact granted further access to secrets of the Church of John and Mary Magdalene that Leonardo had planned to set up, she took them with her to the grave. Shortly before I decided to travel to Egypt to spend my last years here, Elena died of the fever.

All that is left now is for me to explain why I came here, to Egypt, to write these pages, and why I never denounced the existence of a community of parfaits in Concorezzo, linked to Master Leonardo.

The fault, once again, is his, the blue-eyed giant in white garments.

After the opening of the Cenacolo, I did not see him again. After discovering its secret meaning, I returned to Rome and knocked on the doors of the House of Truth in Bethany. I resumed my work there without anybody asking too many questions. The following year, however, I learned that Leonardo had fled Milan as soon as the French troops breached the duke’s defenses and captured the city. He took refuge in Mantua, then in Venice, and finally he arrived in Rome. There he was given employment by Cesare Borgia, son of Pope Alexander. He became architecto e in-gegnere generale, architect and principal engineer, wasting his other talents. But while this new occupation did not last long, it was long enough for him to meet the official responsible for the Palazzo Sacro, Father Annio de Viterbo.

Annio was much affected by their meeting. His secretary, Fabio Ponte, informed Bethany of the encounter in the spring of 1502. They spoke of the supreme function of art, of its uses to preserve memory and of its all-powerful influence on the minds of the people. According to Fabio, there were two of Leonardo’s opinions that greatly affected Father Annio.

“All I have found out regarding Jesus’ true message is nothing compared to that which is still to be revealed,” he answered to one of the Weasel’s questions. “And just as, for the sake of my art, I’ve drunk at the Egyptian sources and studied the secrets of their geometry translated by Ficino and Pacioli, I tell you that the Church has still much to drink from the Gospels that lie buried under the sands of the Nile.”

Annio de Viterbo died five days later, probably poisoned by Cesare Borgia.

A month after that, fearing that I would soon suffer reprisals from those who feared the return of the Church of John, I left Bethany forever in search of those ancient lost Gospels.

I know they are somewhere near yet still I have not found them. But I have sworn that I will continue to search for them until the end of my days.

In 1945, in a region close to the Egyptian village of Nag Hammadi, in the Upper Nile, thirteen volumes of lost gospels were unearthed, bound in leather. They were written in Coptic and contained teachings of Christ unknown to the Western world. Their discovery, of far greater importance than that of the famous Dead Sea Scrolls of Qumran, proves the existence of a considerable community of primitive Christians who believed in the coming of a new Church based on spiritual values and a direct communication with God. These are known today as the Gnostic Gospels, and it is certain that copies arrived in Europe toward the end of the Middle Ages, greatly influencing certain intellectual circles.

The cave in Yabal el-Tarif where Father Agostino Leyre died in August of 1526 was less than one hundred feet away from the niche where these books were found.

Author’s Notes

In 1208, Pope Innocent III ordered the eradication of the Cathar heresy, creating a military force to exterminate the heterodox rebels from the French Languedoc. Even though it is generally accepted that by 1244 the last heretics had died out in Montségur, many historians point out that entire families of “good men,” or bonshommes, had sought refuge in Lombardy, close to the Milan of today, where they lived for many years safe from the persecution of Rome, keeping their original faith.

Luini refers to the famous “conspiracy of the Pazzi” that made an attempt against the life of Lorenzo the Magnificent in the Cathedral of Florence. Lorenzo managed to escape unharmed, but his brother Giuliano was stabbed twenty-seven times. The resulting repression was one of the most bloody of the fifteenth century.

Until the nineteenth century, the Catholic Church identified Mary of Bethany, sister of Lazarus and of Martha, with Mary Magdalene.

The most recent and complete study relating the signs of the zodiac to the Twelve Apostles is by Nicola Sementovsky-Kurilo. According to him, the disciples in the Cenacolo are distributed in four groups of three to represent the four elements of Nature: earth, fire, air and water. Sementovsky assigns to each disciple a specific astrological sign. To Simon, at one end of the table, corresponds Aries; to Thaddeus, Taurus; Matthew, Gemini; Philip, Cancer; James the Elder, Leo; Thomas, Virgo; John, Libra (an important symbolic reading since, according to Sementovsky, the young John lends equilibrium to the future Church); Judas, Scorpio; Peter, Sagittarius; Andrew, Capricorn; James the Less, Aquarius; Bartholomew, Pisces.

Regarding Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings mentioned in the novel:

Cenacolo is the colloquial term by which The Last Supper was known in Milan. Maestà, or “Majesty,” was the name given to The Virgin of the Rocks. The portrait of Lucrezia Crivelli became celebrated under the title La Belle Ferronnière. Both these paintings now hang in the Louvre.

Regarding the bust that Leonardo supposedly used to portray the Apostle Simon, it can be seen today in the Uffizi, in Florence. It is a bust of Plato attributed to the Greek sculptor Silanion who was, as far as we know, the only artist to portray the philosopher during his lifetime, by order of King Mithridates, in 325 B.C.