The Name of the Rose (11 page)

The brightest places were reserved for the antiquarians, the most expert illuminators, the rubricators, and the copyists. Each desk had everything required for illuminating and copying: inkhorns, fine quills which some monks were sharpening with a thin knife, pumice stone for smoothing the parchment, rulers for drawing the lines that the writing would follow. Next to each scribe, or at the top of the sloping desk, there was a lectern, on which the codex to be copied was placed, the page covered by a sheet with a cut-out window which framed the line being copied at that moment. And some had inks of gold and various colors. Other monks were simply reading books, and they wrote down their annotations in their personal notebooks or on tablets.

I did not have time, however, to observe their work, because the librarian came to us. We already knew he was Malachi of Hildesheim. His face was trying to assume an expression of welcome, but I could not help shuddering at the sight of his singular countenance. It was pale, and though he must have been barely halfway through his earthly sojourn, a fine web of wrinkles made him resemble not so much an old man but, as it seemed to me on first appearance (and may God forgive me), that of an old woman, due to a certain feminine quality in his deep and melancholy eyes. His mouth was almost incapable of managing a smile, and altogether he gave the impression of dealing with the pain of existence out of some sort of distasteful duty.

He greeted us politely, however, and introduced us to many of the monks who were working at that moment. Of each, he also told us what task he was performing, and I admired the deep devotion of all to knowledge and to the study of the divine word. Thus I met Venantius of Salvemec, translator from the Greek and the Arabic, devoted to that Aristotle who surely was the wisest of all men. Benno of Uppsala, a young Scandinavian monk who was studying rhetoric. Aymaro of Alessandria, who had been copying works on loan to the library for a few months only, and then a group of illuminators from various countries, Patrick of Clonmacnois, Rabano of Toledo, Magnus of Iona, Waldo of Hereford.

The list could surely go on, and there is nothing more wonderful than the catalogue, an instrument of wondrous hypotyposis. But I must come to the subject of our discussion, from which emerged many useful indications as to the nature of the subtle uneasiness among the monks, and some concerns, not expressed, that still weighed on all our conversations.

My master began speaking with Malachi, praising the beauty and the industry of the scriptorium and asking him for information about the procedure for the work done there, because, he said very acutely, he had heard this library spoken of everywhere and would like to examine many of the books. Malachi explained to him what the abbot had already said: the monk asked the librarian for the work he wished to consult and the librarian then went to fetch it from the library above, if the request was justified and devout. William asked how he could find out the names of the books kept in the cases upstairs, and Malachi showed him, fixed by a little gold chain to his own desk, a voluminous codex covered with very thickly written lists.

William slipped his hands inside his habit, at the point where it billowed over his chest to make a kind of sack, and he drew from it an object that I had already seen in his hands, and on his face, in the course of our journey. It was a forked pin, so constructed that it could stay on a man's nose (or at least on his, so prominent and aquiline) as a rider remains astride his horse or as a bird clings to its perch. And, one on either side of the fork, before the eyes, there were two ovals of metal, which held two almonds of glass, thick as the bottom of a tumbler. William preferred to read with these before his eyes, and he said they made his vision better than what nature had endowed him with or than his advanced age, especially as the daylight failed, would permit. They did not serve him to see from a distance, for then his eyes were, on the contrary, quite sharp, but to see close up. With these lenses he could read manuscripts penned in very faint letters, which even I had some trouble deciphering. He explained to me that, when a man had passed the middle point of his life, even if his sight had always been excellent, the eye hardened and the pupil became recalcitrant, so that many learned men had virtually died, as far as reading and writing were concerned, after their fiftieth summer. A grave misfortune for men who could have given the best fruits of their intellect for many more years. So the Lord was to be praised since someone had devised and constructed this instrument. And he told me this in support of the ideas of his Roger Bacon, who had said that the aim of learning was also to prolong human life.

The other monks looked at William with great curiosity but did not dare ask him questions. And I noticed that, even in a place so zealously and proudly dedicated to reading and writing, that wondrous instrument had not yet arrived. I felt proud to be at the side of a man who had something with which to dumbfound other men famous in the world for their wisdom.

With those objects on his eyes William bent over the lists inscribed in the codex. I looked, too, and we found titles of books we had never before heard of, and others most famous, that the library possessed.

“De pentagono Salomonis, Ars loquendi et intelligendi in lingua hebraica, De rebus metallicis
by Roger of Hereford,
Algebra
by Al-Kuwarizmi, translated into Latin by Robertus Anglicus, the
Punica
of Silius Italicus, the
Gesta francorum, De laudibus sanctae crucis
by Rabanus Maurus, and
Flavii Claudii Giordani de aetate mundi et hominis reservatis singulis litteris per singulos libros ab A usque ad
Z
,
” my master read. “Splendid works. But in what order are they listed?” He quoted from a text I did not know but which was certainly familiar to Malachi: “‘The librarian must have a list of all books, carefully ordered by subjects and authors, and they must be classified on the shelves with numerical indications.' How do you know the collocation of each book?”

Malachi showed him some annotations beside each title. I read: “iii, IV gradus, V in prima graecorum”; “ii, V gradus, VII in tertia anglorum,” and so on. I understood that the first number indicated the position of the book on the shelf or gradus, which was in turn indicated by the second number, while the case was indicated by the third number; and I understood also that the other phrases designated a room or a corridor of the library, and I made bold to ask further information about these last distinctions. Malachi looked at me sternly: “Perhaps you do not know, or have forgotten, that only the librarian is allowed access to the library. It is therefore right and sufficient that only the librarian know how to decipher these things.”

“But in what order are the books recorded in this list?” William asked. “Not by subject, it seems to me.” He did not suggest an order by author, following the same sequence as the letters of the alphabet, for this is a system I have seen adopted only in recent years, and at that time it was rarely used.

“The library dates back to the earliest times,” Malachi said, “and the books are registered in order of their acquisition, donation, or entrance within our walls.”

“They are difficult to find, then,” William observed.

“It is enough for the librarian to know them by heart and know when each book came here. As for the other monks, they can rely on his memory.” He spoke as if discussing someone other than himself, and I realized he was speaking of the office that at that moment he unworthily held, but which had been held by a hundred others, now deceased, who had handed down their knowledge from one to the other.

“I understand,” William said. “If I were then to seek something, not knowing what, on the pentagon of Solomon, you would be able to tell me that there exists the book whose title I have just read, and you could identify its location on the floor above.”

“If you really had to learn something about the pentagon of Solomon,” Malachi said. “But before giving you that book, I would prefer to ask the abbot's advice.”

“I have been told that one of your best illuminators died recently,” William said then. “The abbot has spoken to me a great deal of his art. Could I see the codices he was illuminating?”

“Because of his youth, Adelmo of Otranto,” Malachi said, looking at William suspiciously, “worked only on marginalia. He had a very lively imagination and from known things he was able to compose unknown and surprising things, as one might join a human body to an equine neck. His books are over there. Nobody has yet touched his desk.”

We approached what had been Adelmo's working place, where the pages of a richly illuminated psalter still lay. They were folios of the finest vellum—that queen among parchments—and the last was still fixed to the desk. Just scraped with pumice stone and softened with chalk, it had been smoothed with the plane, and, from the tiny holes made on the sides with a fine stylus, all the lines that were to have guided the artist's hand had been traced. The first half had already been covered with writing, and the monk had begun to sketch the illustrations along the sides of the text. The other pages, on the contrary, were already finished, and as we looked at them, neither I nor William could suppress a cry of wonder. This was a psalter in whose margins was delineated a world reversed with respect to the one to which our senses have accustomed us. As if at the border of a discourse that is by definition the discourse of truth, there proceeded, closely linked to it, through wondrous allusions in aenigmate, a discourse of falsehood on a topsy-turvy universe, in which dogs flee before the hare, and deer hunt the lion. Little bird-feet heads, animals with human hands on their back, hirsute pates from which feet sprout, zebra-striped dragons, quadrupeds with serpentine necks twisted in a thousand inextricable knots, monkeys with stags' horns, sirens in the form of fowl with membranous wings, armless men with other human bodies emerging from their backs like humps, and figures with tooth-filled mouths on the belly, humans with horses' heads, and horses with human legs, fish with birds' wings and birds with fishtails, monsters with single bodies and double heads or single heads and double bodies, cows with cocks' tails and butterfly wings, women with heads scaly as a fish's back, two-headed chimeras interlaced with dragonflies with lizard snouts, centaurs, dragons, elephants, manticores stretched out on tree branches, gryphons whose tails turned into an archer in battle array, diabolical creatures with endless necks, sequences of anthropomorphic animals and zoomorphic dwarfs joined, sometimes on the same page, with scenes of rustic life in which you saw, depicted with such impressive vivacity that the figures seemed alive, all the life of the fields, plowmen, fruit gatherers, harvesters, spinning-women, sowers alongside foxes, and martens armed with crossbows who were scaling the walls of a towered city defended by monkeys. Here an initial letter, bent into an
L,
in the lower part generated a dragon; there a great
V,
which began the word “verba,” produced as a natural shoot from its trunk a serpent with a thousand coils, which in turn begot other serpents as leaves and clusters.

Next to the psalter there was, apparently finished only a short time before, an exquisite book of hours, so incredibly small that it would fit into the palm of the hand. The writing was tiny; the marginal illuminations, barely visible at first sight, demanded that the eye examine them closely to reveal all their beauty (and you asked yourself with what superhuman instrument the artist had drawn them to achieve such vivid effects in a space so reduced). The entire margins of the book were invaded by minuscule forms that generated one another, as if by natural expansion, from the terminal scrolls of the splendidly drawn letters: sea sirens, stags in flight, chimeras, armless human torsos that emerged like slugs from the very body of the verses. At one point, as if to continue the triple “Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus” repeated on three different lines, you saw three ferocious figures with human heads, two of which were bent, one downward and one upward, to join in a kiss you would not have hesitated to call immodest if you were not persuaded that a profound, even if not evident, spiritual meaning must surely have justified that illustration at that point.

As I followed those pages I was torn between silent admiration and laughter, because the illustrations naturally inspired merriment, though they were commenting on holy pages. And Brother William examined them smiling and remarked, “Babewyn: so they are called in my islands.”

“Babouins: that is what they call them in Gaul,” Malachi said. “Adelmo learned his art in your country, although he studied also in France. Baboons, that is to say: monkeys from Africa. Figures of an inverted world, where houses stand on the tip of a steeple and the earth is above the sky.”

I recalled some verses I had heard in the vernacular of my country, and I could not refrain from repeating them:

 

Aller wunder si geswigen,

das erde himel hât überstigen,

daz sult ir vür ein wunder wigen.

 

And Malachi continued, quoting from the same text:

 

Erd ob un himel unter,

das sult ir hân besunder

vür aller wunder ein wunder.

 

“Good for you, Adso,” the librarian continued. “In fact, these images tell of that country where you arrive mounted on a blue goose, where hawks are found that catch fish in a stream, bears that pursue falcons in the sky, lobsters that fly with the doves, and three giants are caught in a trap and bitten by a cock.”

And a pale smile brightened his lips. Then the other monks, who had followed the conversation a bit shyly, laughed heartily, as if they had been awaiting the librarian's consent. He frowned as the others continued laughing, praising the skill of poor Adelmo and pointing out to one another the more fantastic figures. And it was while all were still laughing that we heard, at our backs, a solemn and stern voice.