The Letter Killers Club (14 page)

“You're too afraid of book bindings: they won't slam shut on me because I'm … not a rat. Unlike some people, I've never been a famous writer, and the alphabet cannot lure me, but then—”

Motioning Fev to silence, Zez turned abruptly to me. “Let our guest be the judge of our dispute: as an outsider he sees things more clearly and will find it easier to be fair.”

All eyes were upon me. I ventured a reply: “But that would turn your dispute into a ‘wandering dispute,' against the permissibility of which you have just spoken.”

“Gambit refused, well done,” said Fev. “Now step aside, Zez, and let my three heroes go where it's high time they went. The dawn is flaring. Any minute now the tavern-keeper will wake and want payment for the night's lodging and broken crockery. And not a copper in their pockets.”

Ing, Nig, and Gni tiptoed out of the Three Kings. The town was still abed behind closed shutters when they met a mendicant friar with a sack and bell on the end of a stick. He held out his jingling bag to them, but in place of alms he received a question: “Why did God give you a mouth: for food, for kisses, or for speech?”

The friar left off shaking his sack; the little bell was silent, and so was he. Nig peeped under his cowl.

“A Camaldulan,”
*
he whistled. “We've run straight into a vow of silence. Bad news for you, Ing. After all, this is almost an answer: holiness does without words.”

“Yes, but it also forces itself to fast. And kissing floozies, methinks, does little to save one's soul. It turns out that the mouth on one's face is just a useless hole one ought to darn and not give a damn. No, something's wrong here. Let's go on.”

The little bell began to jingle again and the three disputants passed on. At the town gates, Ing, Nig, and Gni met a deaf old woman; no matter how they shouted their question—first one of them, then two, and finally all three—she kept repeating, “A cow. With a black star on her forehead. Have you seen her? A cow. With a black star on her forehead.”

“To each his own care,” sighed Ing.

Just then, creaking rustily, the town gates swung open. The three friends began their wanderings.

Having walked a couple of leagues, they met a clattering cart driven by a long-legged lad, a crust of bread stuffed between his teeth. Ing wanted to call out, but the fellow would scarcely have heard for the clatter, and even if he had, his mouth was too full to settle the matter of the mouth. They walked on.

Toward noon, in a field of wind-ruffled wheat, they saw a fellow wanderer: a sack on his back, a staff in hand, and a merry face beneath the dust and sunburn, he was walking along whistling to the quails: perhaps he was a wandering cleric (his face was clean-shaven), perhaps even your Father François …

The storyteller turned to Tyd and raised his right hand. Tyd smiled and responded in kind: the two themes, like ships whose paths have crossed, saluted each other—then Fev went on.

“Why does a man have one mouth, and not three?” Nig asked, bowing to the cleric.

The cleric stopped and surveyed the wanderers. First he rinsed his mouth with wine from the flask on his belt, then he winked and said, “My children, are you sure, God's grace be with us, that you have only one mouth? When I've gone, pull down your trousers and see if you don't have two. And when you reach the next bawdy house, any wench will prove that you have three. Good speed!”

Striding off on long legs in leather laced tight, Father François soon passed out of sight and this story.

“That priest wanted to make fools of us,” Gni scratched his head.

“And so he did,” Nig spat with annoyance.

“Fooling people,” said Ing, “amuses only fools. Men's minds have become as coarse and flat as this field: it's easier to cackle than to think. Where are the syllogisms of the great Stagirite,
*
the definitions of Averroes,
*
Erigena's
*
hierarchy of ideas? People no longer know how to treat ideas: rather than look an idea in the eye, they peek under its tail.”

The three continued on in silence.

Now and then they came across peasants returning from the fields or merchants drowsing to the sounds of the little bells on their mules. Since meeting the goliard, they had decided to be more circumspect and not put their question to every man they met. After a day's walk, they saw in the distance, above the olives springing to earth, the crenellated walls of a city. The dust and heat had begun to abate. The cicadas in the grass sang more loudly, the sun shone more faintly. Just outside the city gates, the wanderers saw a woman sitting on the grass by the road, a swaddled baby in her arms. She did not reply to their greetings at first, being busy with her own affairs: she unfastened her blouse and brought a pink nipple to the baby's mouth, which took it greedily as she gazed smilingly at the child's bulging cheeks.

“By goose!”
*
roared Gni. “Swaddle me because I would like some milk.”

Nig merely licked his lips, while Ing shook his head and said, “If not the whole truth, then two-thirds of it is revealed by that infant: look at that tiny toothless mouth; it is given what we are not—the ability to eat and kiss at the same time. That silly little baby turns my thoughts, O my friends, from these scant and dusty words to the magnificent lushness of Eden where everything was given to man not in parts and not separately, but wholly and completely. Still the groves of Paradise faded, and the three meanings came to feel cramped, alas, in one mouth. Tell me, sweet miss, whose child is that?”

“I wait upon the wife of the local judge. My mistress's name is Felicia,” the wet nurse replied.

Getting up off the ground, she bowed to the strangers, and went back to the city. Nig blew a kiss after her. The friends decided before entering the city to have a rest on the greensward. They sat down. Gni began chewing on a fragrant frond of grass. Nig blew the downy clocks off dandelions. Ing, arms wrapped around his scrawny knees, kept sighing and mumbling under his breath.

“What are you muttering about,” asked Gni, now beginning to feel pangs of hunger.

“Ah,” said Ing with another sigh, “I was remembering the words I said to her.”

“To the wet nurse?” Nig yawned.

“No, to her mistress. Happy is the man who has found a mooring. I might not be traipsing about with you from bonfire to bonfire, but warming myself before my own hearth, my pockets full of talers, and surrounded by little ones … That's right, now don't laugh, but listen to the story I'm about to tell you.

“We were both young then—Felicia and I. She was the daughter of wealthy merchants who lived not far from here, in a city by the sea. The parents had many sacks of gold, the daughter many admirers. On feast days, dressed in rich array, they would sit around the fair Felicia, silently eyeing her with motionless stupidity, like sacks of straw. These fellows knew only how to let their mouths gape, but I knew of another use. I regaled her with tales of countries I had never seen, of books I had never read, of stars and fireflies, of heaven and hell, of peoples' pasts and our future: Felicia's and mine. She loved to listen to me, a pink ear cocked and scarlet lips half parted: one day, blushing wildly, she suggested I talk to her parents. With them, of course, it was harder. Girding my words with quotes from Horace
*
and Catullus,
*
I tried to explain the eternal rules of passion to the rich miser—but he just whistled and walked off.

“After consulting Felicia, I decided to sneak up on my happiness by a roundabout route. Felicia had an old nurse; at length we persuaded her to take part in our plan. The plan was this: on the appointed night Felicia and her nurse would come to me. Her nurse would keep watch outside the door, while Felicia … Well, in short, come morning we would confront the old fools with a
fait accompli
, after which a priest would have to bind us in holy matrimony, while the misers who had slept whilst their daughter strayed would have to unbind their sacks of gold. On the agreed-upon evening I heard a knock at the door—a minute later Felicia and I were enfolded in the semidarkness, alone.”

“And then?” Nig pressed, edging up to Ing on one elbow.

“Then I began whispering to her about the majesty and the meaning of this night, I said that at last we were alone, that even the stars in the heavens had lowered their eyes and that only God—”

“Fool,” said Nig, moving away on the same elbow.

“I spoke to her of fabled lovers in antiquity—of Hero and Leander,
*
Pyramus and Thisbe,
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Sappho and Phaon.
*
But then, feeling her fingers graze my lips, it occurred to me that, if these examples of pagans struck her as unpersuasive or a danger to the soul, I might quote the Old Testament—and so I began to tell her, book by book, about Ruth and Boaz,
*
about … I remember that at Boaz I heard a noise at the door. I peeked out and saw that the old nurse, sitting with one ear pressed to the keyhole, had fallen asleep and was softly snoring. I woke her, then went back to Felicia and on with my story.”

“Fool,” groaned Nig. He stopped his ears and lay facedown, while Gni, who had finished his frond, asked, “But weren't you both starving?”

“No, my mind was teeming with so many eloquent love strophes, exquisite metaphors, and hyperboles I didn't notice the hour. The sky was turning cindery by the time I came to Naso's captivating
*
Ars amandi
, wishing to convey the exquisite refinements of Ovidian erotica, that sublime art of seizing the moment, of stealing happiness, the fight for a kiss, an embrace, for … Felicia was sitting—I could see her now in the dusky half-light—almost with her back to me, her lips sternly pursed. I asked her what the matter was. Without answering, she went to the door and rapped loudly.

“‘We're going,' said she to her nurse, her voice trembling with a rage I could not understand, ‘perhaps we'll manage to return unobserved. Hurry.'

“‘Stop,' I cried, completely at a loss. ‘How will you prove that you have been with me?'

“Felicia ignored me, as if my words had lost all sound and sense.

“‘Hurry!' she exclaimed. ‘And if I do return to my bed unseen, I promise to take the most silent of all my suitors for my husband.'

“They vanished in the early morning mist without glancing back, despite my cries. We never met again.”

“Well now, you see,” Nig gloated, “if you had understood the mouth's true purpose, your story might not have ended so sadly.”

“It's not over yet,” said Ing, getting to his feet. “The end awaits me just beyond those gates.”

The three entered the city.

They were obliged to spend the night out of doors. The inn was full of pilgrims from neighboring towns come to worship the miraculous icon for which the city was famed. To boot, the friends' pockets were empty and their dreams that night fraught with hungry visions.

Next morning a line of pilgrims filed past; Ing tried to bar their way with the question about mouths, but they were deep in prayer, their fingers entwined in rosaries. So the three friends joined the procession and soon found themselves before an icon glittering with a gold cover and precious stones: Nig kissed the cover, Gni leaned into the image and bit the largest stone out of its setting, while Ing looked at him askance and, beating his chest, said loudly, “
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa
.” A few hours later the pockets of Ing, Nig, and Gni were jingling—miraculously—with gold coins.

To start drinking is easy—to stop is hard. Corks were popping and wine was gurgling all around the three strangers. First they drank, then they treated others, then others treated them, and again they treated—and so on till the stars and the watchman's rattle. Now that there were more bodies under the benches than on them, Gni crawled about on all fours trying to pour wine into the snorers' gaping, funnel-like mouths, Nig fell to kissing now the stove damper now the keyhole, while Ing, winking slyly and laughing gently, told the story of the stone's miraculous metamorphosis into gold. The story was a success and soon repeated. When they woke next morning, Ing, Nig, and Gni couldn't even rub their eyes: their hands were in stocks.

The judge before whom they were brought for the gem's theft was the most silent man in the district: he surveyed them, buried his nose in his papers, and again eyed them in silence. Given the absence of any questions, Ing exchanged glances with his friends and posed one himself.

“Your Honor, as troubled as we are by the circumstances that have led us to you, we are still more troubled by this question: what is the purpose of a mouth? One of us says it is: for kisses. Another: for food. And I say: for the articulation of words. We have come from a great distance in search of the answer. Our freedom and our lives are in your hands, but before dying we should like to know: why were men given mouths?”

The judge bit his lip, scratched his nose with his pen, and again rummaged in his papers. A minute later the herald's trumpet sounded, and the court secretary, rising solemnly, read out the verdict.

“Guilty as charged: release the defendants from custody on the recognizance of all those who see and hear. The culprit, by name Ing, is forbidden to speak; the culprit, by name Nig, is forbidden to kiss; the culprit, by name Gni, is forbidden to eat. Any violation shall be reported without delay, the transgressor seized and put to death. This decision is effective upon publication and not subject to appeal.”

The unfortunate friends were taken out of chains and set free. Hundreds of malicious smiles now surrounded them. They walked along side by side without responding to the taunts and abuse, as though their mouths had been sealed shut.

“What do you say to that?” Nig finally asked, turning to the oddly silent Ing, then stopped short.

Ing looked fearfully about, his lips made to move, but he pressed them more tightly together and meekly hung his head. The three turned into the tavern. At a sign from Gni, they were served a dish of smoking meat; Ing and Nig took up their spoons only to put them down: poor Gni sat with his back to them, hungrily swallowing saliva. For a minute he raised his eyes—they shone with tears.