Just look at this, Baudolino said to himself: the city is lost, people are getting their throats cut in the streets, only two days ago this man risked losing his entire family, and now he wants someone to shave him.
Obviously the people of the palace in this corrupt city are accustomed to such things—faced with such a man, Frederick would have sent him flying out of the window.
Later Architas arrived, with a basket of silver instruments and phials of the most unexpected scents. He was an artist, who first softened your face with hot cloths, then covered it with emollient creams, smoothed it, freed it of every impurity, and finally covered the wrinkles with cosmetics, lightly treating the eyes with bistre, making the lips delicately rosy, depilating the ears, to say nothing of what he did to the chin and the head. Niketas sat with closed eyes, stroked by those knowing hands, cradled by the voice of Baudolino, who continued telling his story.
It was actually Baudolino who interrupted himself every now and then to discover what that master of beauty was doing, for example, when he took a lizard from a pot, chopped off its head and tail, almost minced the rest, and set this paste to cook in a little pan of oil. What a question! It was the decoction meant to keep alive the few hairs that Niketas still bore on his pate and make them shiny and perfumed. And that phial? Why, it contained essences of nutmeg or cardamom, or rose water, each to restore vigor to a part of the face; that thick honey was to strengthen the lips, and this other one, whose secret he could not reveal, was to harden the gums.
In the end Niketas was splendid, as a judge of the Veil should be and a logothete of the secrets, and as if reborn, he shone in his own light on that wan morning, against the frowning background of Byzantium smoldering in agony. And Baudolino felt a certain embarrassment in telling about his adolescent life in a monastery of Latins, cold and inhospitable, where Otto’s health obliged the youth to share meals composed of boiled vegetables and insipid broth.
That year Baudolino had to spend little time at court (where, when he had to be there, he wandered around shyly, yearning at the same time to encounter Beatrice, and all was torment). Frederick first had to settle things with the Poles (Polanos de Polunia, wrote Otto, gens quasi barbara ad pugnandum promptissima). In March he convened a new diet at Worms to
prepare for another descent into Italy, where Milan, as usual, with her allies, was becoming more and more unruly, then a diet at Herbipolis in September, and one in Besançon in October; in short, he seemed possessed. Baudolino for the most part remained in the abbey of Morimond with Otto, continued his studies with Rahewin, and acted as copyist for the bishop, who was increasingly frail.
When they arrived at that book of the Chronica that tells of Presbyter Johannes, Baudolino asked what it meant to be a Christian sed Nestorianus. Were these Nestorians then a bit Christian and a bit not?
“My son, in plain words Nestorius was a heretic, but we owe him much gratitude. You should know that in India, after the preaching of the apostle Thomas, it was the Nestorians who spread the Christian religion. Nestorius committed only one error, but a very grave one, concerning Jesus Christ Our Lord and his most holy mother. You see, we firmly believe that there exists a single divine nature and that nevertheless the Trinity, within the unity of this nature, is composed of three distinct persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
But we believe further that in Christ there was a sole person, the divine one, and two natures, the human and the divine. Nestorius on the contrary sustained that in Christ there are, indeed, two natures, human and divine, but there are also two persons. So Maria had begotten only the human person and could not thus be called the mother of God, but only the mother of Christ the man, not Theotokos, or God-bearer, she who has begotten God, but at most Christotokos.”
“Is it bad to think that?”
“It’s bad and it isn’t….” Otto became impatient. “You can still love the Blessed Virgin even if you consider her as Nestorius did, but it is certain that you are paying her less honor. And besides, the person is the individual substance of a rational being, and if in Christ there were two persons, were there then two individual substances of two rational beings? Where would this all end? Would we be saying that Jesus one day reasoned in one way and the next day in another?
This said, it isn’t that Presbyter Johannes is a perfidious heretic, but it would be well for him to enter into contact with a Christian emperor who would make him appreciate the true faith, and since he is surely an honest man, he could only be converted. However, it is certain that if you don’t set yourself to studying a bit of theology, you will never understand these things. You are quick-witted, Rahewin is a good teacher as far as reading and writing go, and doing sums, and learning a few rules of grammar; but trivium and quadrivium are a different matter.
To arrive at theology you should study dialectics, and these are things you cannot learn here at Morimond. You must go off to some studium, one of those schools that exist only in the great cities.”
“But I don’t want to go to a studium, whatever that is.”
“When you understand what it is, you’ll be pleased to go. You see, my son, everyone is accustomed to saying that the human community is based on three forces: warriors, monks, and peasants, and this may have been true until yesterday. But we live in new times, in which the man of learning is becoming equally important, even if he is not a monk but a man who studies law, philosophy, the movement of the stars, and many other things, and who doesn’t always give an account of what he is doing to his bishop or to his king. And these studia, which are slowly growing up in Bologna and in Paris, are places where learning is cultivated and transmitted, and learning is a form of power.
I was a pupil of the great Abélard, may God have mercy on this man who sinned greatly but also suffered and expiated. After his misfortune, when through a bitter vendetta he was robbed of his virility, he became a monk, an abbé, and lived apart from the world. At the peak of his glory he was a master in Paris, worshiped by his students, and respected by the mighty precisely because of his learning.”
Baudolino told himself he would never leave Otto, from whom he continued to learn so many things.
But before the trees had blossomed for the fourth time since Baudolino had met him, Otto was reduced to a shadow of himself by malarial fevers, pains in all his joints, fluxions of the chest, not to mention gallstone. Numerous physicians, including some Arabs and some Jews, and therefore the best that a Christian emperor could offer a bishop, had tormented his now fragile body with countless leeches, but— for reasons that those pillars of wisdom were unable to explain—after almost all his blood had been extracted, he was worse than if they had left him with it.
Otto first called Rahewin to his bedside, to entrust to him the continuation of his account of the feats of Frederick, assuring him that it was easy: he should narrate the events and put in the emperor’s mouth speeches drawn from the texts of the ancients. Then he summoned Baudolino.
“Puer dilectissime,” he said to him, “I am going away. You might even say I am going back, and I’m not sure which expression is the more appropriate, since I am not sure whether my story of the two cities is more true or the story of the feats of Frederick….” (“You must understand, Master Niketas,” Baudolino said, “the life of a boy can be marked by the confession of a dying teacher who can no longer distinguish between two truths.”)
“It’s not that I am content to go away, or back, as it so pleases the Lord, and if I were to question his decrees, there’s the risk he might strike me dead at this very instant, so it’s best to take advantage of the little time he is granting me. Listen. You know how I have tried to make the emperor understand the reasoning of the cities beyond the Alps. The emperor can do nothing but subject them to his rule. However, there are many ways to acknowledge submission, and perhaps a way can be found other than the way of siege and massacre.
So you, who have the emperor’s ear, and who are still a son of those lands, must try to do your best to reconcile the demands of our lord with those of your cities, so that the smallest possible number of people may die, and that finally all may be content. To do this you must learn to use your reason properly, and I have asked the emperor to send you to study in Paris. Not in Bologna, where they concern themselves only with law; a rogue like you should never stick his nose into the Pandects, because with the law
