Baudolino (52 page)

While Baudolino and the other Christians devoted themselves to these experiences, Solomon was questioning the inhabitants of Pndapetzim one by one, to learn something about the lost tribes. Gavagai's mention of rabbis, the first day, told him he was on the right track. But, whether because the monsters of the various races really knew nothing or because the subject was taboo, Solomon got nowhere. Finally one of the eunuchs told him that, true, tradition had it that through the kingdom of Prester John some communities of Jews had passed, and this many centuries ago, and they had then decided to resume their traveling, perhaps fearing the threatened invasion of the White Huns would oblige them to face a new diaspora, and God only knows where they had gone. Solomon decided that the eunuch was lying, and he continued to await the moment when he and his friends would enter the kingdom, where he would surely find his coreligionists.

Sometimes Gavagai tried to convert them to right thinking. The Father is the most perfect and the most distant from us that can exist in the universe, no? And therefore how could he have generated a Son? Men generate sons in order to prolong themselves through offspring and to live in them also in the time they themselves will never see because they will have been gathered by death. But a God who has to generate a son would not be perfect from the beginning of centuries. And if the Son had existed from the beginning together with the Father, being of his same divine substance or nature, whatever you may call it (here Gavagai became confused, using Greek terms like
ousia,
hyposthasis, physis,
and
hyposopon,
which not even Baudolino managed to decipher), we would have the incredible case of a God, by definition not generated, who has been generated from the beginning of time. Therefore the Word, which the Father generates because he must concern himself with the redemption of the human race, is not of the same substance as the Father, is generated later, surely before the world, and is superior to every other creature, but just as surely inferior to the Father. Christ is not the power of God, Gavagai insisted, and is certainly not a commonplace power like the locust; he is, rather, a great power, but is the primogenitory and not the ingenitory.

"So, for you," Baudolino asked him, "the Son was only adopted by God and is not then God?"

"No, but is very holy all the same, as deacon is very holy and is adoptive son of Priest. If it functions with Priest, why not with God? I knows that Poet asking blemmyae why, if Jesus is ghost, he afraid in Garden of Olives and weeps on cross. Blemmyae, who think wrong, can't answer. Jesus not ghost. Jesus adoptive Son, and adoptive Son not know everything like his Father. You understand? Son not
homoousios,
same substance as Father, but instead
homoiousios,
similar but not same substance. We not heretics like Anomoeans; they believe Word not even similar to Father, all different. But luckily in Pndapetzim no Anomoeans. They think most wrong of all."

Since Baudolino, in repeating this story, also said that they continued to ask what difference there was between
homoousios
and
homoiousios,
and if the Lord God could be reduced to two little words, Niketas smiled and said: "There's a difference, yes, a difference. Perhaps in the Occident you people have forgotten these diatribes, but in the Roman empire they raged for a long time, and there were people who were excommunicated, banished, or even killed, for such nuances. What amazes me is that these arguments, which in our land were repressed long ago, survive still in that land you are telling me about."

And then he thought: I always suspect this Baudolino is telling me tall tales, but a semibarbarian like him, having lived among Alamans and Milanese, who can barely distinguish the Most Holy from Charlemagne, could not know these things if he hadn't heard them down there. Or did he perhaps hear them elsewhere?

From time to time our friends were invited to the disgusting suppers of Praxeas. Towards the end of one of those banquets, under the influence of
burq,
they must have said things highly unsuitable for Magi; and, for that matter, Praxeas by now had become confidential. So one night, when he was drunk and they were too, he said: "Gentlemen, most welcome guests, I have reflected at length on every word you have said since your arrival here, and I realize that you have never declared that you are the Magi we have been awaiting. I continue to believe that you are, but if by chance—and I say by chance—you are not, it would not be your fault that everyone believes you are. In any event, allow me to speak to you as a brother. You have seen what a sink of heresies Pndapetzim is, and how difficult it is to keep this monstrous rabble under control, with terror of the White Huns on the one hand, and on the other by making ourselves the interpreters of the will and the word of that Prester John whom they have never seen. You will have realized the purpose of our young deacon on your own. If we eunuchs can count on the support and the authority of the Magi, our power increases. It is increased and fortified here, but it can extend also ... elsewhere."

"Into the kingdom of the Priest?" the Poet asked.

"If you were to arrive there you should be recognized as legitimate lords. To arrive there you need us; we need you here. We are a strange breed, not like the monsters here who reproduce according to the wretched laws of the flesh. We become a eunuch because the other eunuchs have chosen us and made us so. In what many consider a misfortune, we all feel united in a sole family, I say we, including all the eunuchs who govern elsewhere, and we know that there are some who are very powerful also in the remote Occident, not to mention many other kingdoms in India and Africa. It would suffice if, from a very powerful center, we could be bound in a secret alliance with our brethren all over the earth, and we would have established the most vast of all empires. An empire that no one could conquer or destroy, because it would not be made of armies and territories, but of a network of reciprocal understanding. You would be the symbol and the guaranty of our power."

Seeing Baudolino the next day, Praxeas confided that he had the impression that, the previous night, he had said bad and absurd things, things he had never thought. He apologized, begging Baudolino to forget those words. He left him, saying, "Please, remember to forget them."

"Priest or no priest," the Poet remarked that same day, "Praxeas is offering us a kingdom."

"You're crazy," Baudolino replied, "we have a mission, and we swore an oath before Frederick."

"Frederick is dead," the Poet replied sharply.

With the eunuchs' permission, Baudolino went often to visit the deacon. They had become friends. Baudolino told him of the destruction of Milan, the foundation of Alessandria, of how walls are scaled or what is needed to set fire to the besieger's mangonels and rams. At these tales Baudolino would have said that the young deacon's eyes were shining, even though his face remained veiled.

Then Baudolino asked the deacon about the theological controversies rampant in his province, and it seemed that, in answering him, the deacon had a melancholy smile. "The kingdom of the Priest," he said, "is very ancient, and it has been the refuge over the centuries for all the sects excluded from the Christian world of the Occident," and it was clear that for him even Byzantium, of which he knew little, was Extreme Occident. "The Priest was unwilling to take from any of these exiles their own faith, and the preaching of many of them has seduced the various races that inhabit the kingdom. But then, what does it matter to know what the Most Holy Trinity really is? It is enough that these people follow the precepts of the Gospel, and they will not go to Hell just because they think that the Spirit proceeds only from the Father. These are good people, as you will have realized, and it pains me to know that one day perhaps they must all perish, defending us against the White Huns. You see, as long as my father lives, I will govern a kingdom of the moribund. But perhaps I will die first myself."

"What are you saying, my lord? From your voice, and from your position itself as hereditary priest, I know you are not old." The deacon shook his head. Baudolino then, to cheer him, tried to make him laugh by telling him his own and his friends' feats as students in Paris, but he realized that he was stirring in that man's heart furious desires, and rage at not being able to satisfy them. In so doing, Baudolino revealed himself for what he was and had been, forgetting that he was one of the Magi. But the deacon, too, no longer paid any attention to this, and made it clear that he had never believed in those eleven Magi, and had only recited the lesson prompted by the eunuchs.

One day Baudolino, confronted by his obvious dejection in feeling himself excluded from the joys that youth grants all, tried to tell the deacon that one may also have a heart filled with love even for an unattainable beloved, and he told about his passion for a most noble lady and the letters he wrote her. The deacon questioned him in an excited voice, then burst into a moan like that of a wounded animal: "Everything is forbidden me, Baudolino, even a love only dreamed of. If you only knew how I would like to ride at the head of an army, smelling the wind and the blood. A thousand times better to die in battle murmuring the name of one's beloved than to stay in this cave awaiting ... what? Perhaps nothing..."

"But you, my lord," Baudolino said to him, "you are destined to become the chief of a great empire, you—may God long preserve your father—will one day leave this cave, and Pndapetzim will be only the last and most remote of your provinces."

"One day I will do, one day I will be..." the deacon murmured. "Who can assure me of that? You see, Baudolino, my deep torment—God forgive me this gnawing suspicion—is that the kingdom may not exist. Who has told me of it? The eunuchs, ever since I was a child. To whom do the messengers return that they—they, mind you—send to my father? To them, to the eunuchs. Did these messengers really go forth? Did they really return? Have they ever really existed? All I know comes only from the eunuchs. And what if everything, this province, were the whole universe, if it were the fruit of a plot of the eunuchs, who make sport of me as if I were the lowest nubian or skiapod? What if not even the White Huns exist? Of all men a profound faith is required, if they are to believe in the creator of heaven and earth and in the most unfathomable mysteries of our holy religion, even when they revolt our intellect. But the necessity to believe in this incomprehensible God is infinitely less demanding than what is asked of me, to believe only in the eunuchs."

"No, my lord, my friend," Baudolino consoled him, "the kingdom of your father exists, because I have heard it spoken of not by the eunuchs but by people who believe in it. Faith makes things become true; my compatriots believed in a new city, one to inspire fear in a great emperor, and the city rose because they wanted to believe in it. The kingdom of the Priest is real because I and my companions have devoted two-thirds of our life to seeking it."

"Who knows?" the deacon said. "But even if it does exist, I will not see it."

"Now that's enough," Baudolino said to him one day. "You fear that the kingdom does not exist, and in waiting to see it, you decline in an endless boredom that will kill you. After all, you owe nothing to the eunuchs or to the Priest. They chose you, you were an infant and could not choose them. Do you want a life of adventure and glory? Leave, mount one of our horses, go to the lands of Palestine, where valiant Christians are fighting the Moors. Become the hero you would like to be, the castles of the Holy Land are full of princesses who would give their life for one smile from you."

"Have you ever seen my smile?" the deacon then asked. With one movement he tore the veil from his face, and to Baudolino there appeared a spectral mask: eroded lips revealing rotten gums and foul teeth. The skin of the face was wrinkled, and patches of it had contracted baring the flesh, a repulsive pink. The eyes shone beneath bleary and gnawed lids. The brow was a single sore. He had long hair, and a wispy, forked beard covered what remained of his chin. The deacon removed his gloves, and scrawny hands appeared, marked by dark knots.

"This is leprosy, Baudolino. Leprosy, which spares neither kings nor the other powers of the earth. From the age of twenty I have borne this secret, of which my people are ignorant. I asked the eunuchs to send messages to my father, so he will know I will not live to succeed him, and so he may hasten to rear another heir—let them even say I am dead, I would go to hide in some colony of my similars and no one would hear of me again. But the eunuchs say that my father wants me to remain. And I don't believe it. For the eunuchs a frail deacon is convenient; perhaps I will die and they will go on keeping my embalmed body in this cavern, governing in the name of my corpse. Perhaps at the Priest's death one of them will take my place, and no one will be able to say that it is not I, because no one has ever seen my face, and in the kingdom they saw me only when I was still sucking my mother's milk. This, Baudolino, is why I accept death by starvation, I who am steeped to my bones in death. I will never be a knight, I will never be a lover. Even you now, unaware, have stepped back three paces. And as you may have noticed, Praxeas is always at a distance of at least five paces when he speaks to me. You see, the only ones who dare stand beside me are these two veiled eunuchs, young like me, stricken with the same disease, who can touch the objects I have touched, having nothing to lose. Let me cover myself again. Perhaps you will not consider me unworthy of your compassion, if not of your friendship."

"I sought words of consolation, Master Niketas, but I was unable to find any. Then I said to him that perhaps, more than all the knights who rode to attack a city, he was the true hero, who lived out his fate in silence and dignity. He thanked me, and, for that day, he asked me to leave. But by now I had grown fond of that unhappy man. I began seeing him daily, I told him of my past reading, the discussions heard at court. I described the places I had seen, from Ratisbon to Paris, from Venice to Byzantium, and then Iconium and Armenia, and the peoples we had encountered on our journey. He was fated to die without having seen anything but the caves of Pndapetzim, so I tried to make him live through my tales. And I may also have invented: I spoke to him of cities I had never visited, of battles I had never fought, of princesses I had never possessed. I told him of the wonders of the lands where the sun dies. I made him enjoy the sunsets on the Propontis, the emerald glints on the Venetian lagoon, the valley in Hibernia where seven white churches lie on the shores of a silent lake; I told him how the Alps are covered with a soft white substance that in summer dissolves into majestic cataracts and is dispersed in rivers and streams along slopes rich in chestnut trees; I told him of the salt deserts that extend along the coasts of Apulia; I made him shiver as I described seas I had never sailed, where fish leap as big as calves, so tame that men can ride them; I reported the voyages of Saint Brendan to the Isles of the Blest, and how one day, believing he had reached a land in the midst of the sea, he descended on the back of a whale, which is a fish the size of a mountain, capable of swallowing a whole ship, but I had to explain to him what ships were, fish made of wood that cleave the waves, while moving white wings; I listed for him the wondrous animals of my country, the stag, who has two great horns in the form of a cross, the stork, who flies from one land to another,
and takes care of its own parents when they are old, bearing them on its back through the skies, and the ladybug, which is like a small mushroom, red and dotted with milk-colored spots, the lizard, which is like a crocodile, but so small it can pass beneath a door, the cuckoo, who lays her eggs in the nests of other birds, the owl, whose round eyes in the night seem two lamps and who lives eating the oil of lamps in churches; the hedgehog, its back covered with sharp quills who sucks the milk of cows, the oyster, a living jewel box that sometimes produces a dead beauty but of inestimable value, the nightingale that keeps vigil singing and lives worshiping the rose, the lobster, a loricate monster of a flame-red color, who flees backwards to escape the hunters who dote on its flesh, the eel, frightful aquatic serpent with a fatty, exquisite flavor, the seagull, that flies over the waters as if it were an angel of the Lord, but emits shrill cries like a devil, the blackbird, with yellow beak, that talks like a human, a sycophant repeating the confidences of its master, the swan, that regally parts the water of a lake and sings at the moment of its death a very sweet melody, the weasel, sinuous as a maiden, the falcon that dives on its prey and carries it back to the knight who has trained it. I imagined the splendor of gems that he had never seen—nor had I—the purplish and milky patches of murrhine, the flushed and white veins of certain Egyptian stones, the whiteness of orichalc, transparent crystal, brilliant diamond; and then I sang the praises of the splendor of gold, a soft metal that can be transformed into the finest leaf, the hiss of the red-hot slivers when they are plunged into water to be tempered, and the unimaginable reliquaries to be seen in the treasures of the great abbeys, the high and pointed spires of our churches, the high and straight columns of the Hippodrome of Constantinople, the books the Jews read, scattered with signs that seem insects, and the sounds they produce when they read them, and how a great Christian king had received from a caliph an iron cock that sang alone at every sunrise, then what a sphere is that turns belching steam, and how the mirrors of Archimedes burn, how frightening it
is to see a windmill at night, and I told him also of the Grasal, of the knights still searching for it in Brittany, about ourselves and how we would give it to his father as soon as we found the unspeakable Zosimos. Seeing that these splendors fascinated him, but their inaccessibility saddened him, I thought it was good to convince him that his suffering was not the worst, to tell him of the torment of Andronicus with such details that they far surpassed what had been done to him, of the massacres of Crema, of prisoners with a hand, an ear, the nose cut off, I brought before his eyes images of indescribable maladies compared to which leprosy was the lesser evil, I told him how horrendously horrible were scrofula, erysipelas, St. Vitus' dance, shingles, the bite of the tarantula, scabies, which makes you scratch your skin, scale by scale, and the pestiferous action of the asp, the torture of Saint Agatha, whose breasts were torn away, and that of Saint Lucy, whose eyes were gouged out, and of Saint Sebastian, pierced by arrows, of Saint Stephen, his skull shattered by stones, of Saint Lawrence, roasted on a grill over a slow fire, and I invented other saints and other atrocities, such as Saint Ursicinus, impaled from the anus to the mouth, Saint Sarapion, flayed, Saint Mopsuestius, his four limbs bound to four horses, crazed and then quartered, Saint Dracontius, forced to swallow boiling pitch ... It seemed to me these horrors brought him some relief, but then I feared I had gone too far and I began describing the world's other beauties, often a solace of prisoner's thoughts: the grace of Parisian girls, the lazy opulence of the Venetian prostitutes, the incomparable complexion of an empress, the childish laugh of Colandrina, the eyes of a far-off princess. He became excited, asked me to tell him more, wanted to know what the hair was like of Melisenda, countess of Tripoli, the lips of those abundant beauties who had enchanted the knights of Broceliande more than the Holy Grasal itself. He became excited; God forgive me, I believe that once or twice he had an erection and felt the pleasure of casting his seed. And more, I tried to make him understand how the universe was rich in spices with languid scents, and, since I had none with me, I tried to recall the names of both the spices I had known and those I had only heard of, words that would intoxicate him like perfumes, and for him I listed malabaster, incense, nard, lycium, sandal, saffron, ginger, cardamom, senna, zedoaria, laurel, marjoram, coriander, dill, thyme, clove, sesame, poppy, nutmeg, citronella, curcuma, and cumin. The deacon listened, on the threshold of delirium, touched his face as if his poor nose could not bear all those fragrances; he asked, weeping, what they had given him to eat till now, those accursed eunuchs, on the pretext that he was ill, goat's milk and bread soaked in
burq,
which they said was good for leprosy, and he spent his days stunned, almost always sleeping and with the same taste in his mouth, day after day."