Mostly the students played ball, true, but they also brawled with the people of the Abbey of Saint Germain, or among students of different origin, Picards against Normans, for example, and they traded insults in Latin, so that anyone could understand you were offending him. These were all things frowned upon by the Great Provost, who sent his bowmen to arrest the most unruly. Obviously, at this point the students forgot their differences and all together fell to exchanging blows with the bowmen.
No men in the world were more easily corrupted than the bowmen of the provost. So if a student was arrested, they all had to dig into their purses to persuade the bowmen to set him free. This made the pleasures of Paris even more costly.
Second, a student who has no amorous affairs is derided by his fellows. Unfortunately, the most inaccessible thing for the students was women.
There were very few female students to be seen, and there were legends still circulated about the beautiful Héloïse, who had cost her lover the cutting off of his pudenda, even if it was one thing to be a student, hence by definition ill-famed and yet tolerated, and another to be a professor, like the great and unhappy Abélard. Mercenary love was expensive, and so they had to rely on the occasional tavern wench or some common woman of the neighborhood, but in that quarter there were always more students than females.
Unless they managed to assume an idle air and ribald look while strolling on the Ile de la Cité, and thus succeed in seducing ladies of higher station. Much desired were the wives of the butchers of La Grève, who, after an honored career in their trade, no longer slaughtered cattle but governed the meat market, behaving like gentlemen. With a husband born quartering oxen, who had achieved comfort late in life, the wives were alert to the fascination of the more handsome students.
But these ladies wore sumptuous dresses decorated with fur, and silver and bejeweled belts, which made it difficult at first sight to distinguish them from grand prostitutes who, though the laws forbade it, usually dressed in the same fashion. This exposed the students to some unfortunate misunderstandings, for which
they were all the more derided by their friends.
If a student succeeded in winning a real lady, or indeed a virtuous maiden, sooner or later husbands and fathers would find out, and there would be a fight, sometimes with weapons; and someone died or was wounded, almost always the husband or father, and then there was more brawling with the bowmen of the provost. Baudolino hadn’t killed anyone, and in general he also stayed well away from brawls, but with one husband (and butcher) he had had to deal. Ardent in love but cautious in matters of war, when he saw the husband enter the room, swinging one of those hooks used to hang slaughtered animals, Baudolino immediately tried to jump out the window. But, as he was judiciously calculating the distance before making the leap, he had had time to receive a slash on the cheek, thus decorating forever his face with a scar worthy of a man-at-arms.
On the other hand, even winning working-class women was not an everyday occurrence and demanded long sieges (at the expense of lessons), and whole days spent observing from the window, which generated boredom. Then dreams of seduction were abandoned, and the youths threw water down on the passersby, or they used the women as targets, firing peas with a slingshot, or they even taunted teachers who went past below, and if these grew angry, the students would follow them, in a body, to their house, throwing stones at the windows because, after all, it was the students who paid them and thus had earned some rights.
Baudolino, in fact, was telling Niketas what he had not told Beatrice, namely, that he was becoming one of those clerics who studied the liberal arts in Paris, or jurisprudence in Bologna, or medicine in Salerno, or sorcery in Toledo, but in no place learned good behavior. Niketas did not know whether to be shocked, amazed, or amused. In Byzantium there were only private schools for the sons of well-to do families, where, from their earliest years, they learned grammar and read pious works and the masterpieces of classical culture; after the age of eleven they studied poetry and rhetoric, they learned to compose on the literary models of the ancients; and the rarer the terms they used, and the more complex their syntactical constructions, the more readily they were considered for a bright future in the imperial administration. But afterwards, either they became sages in a monastery or they studied things such as law or astronomy from private masters. Still, they studied seriously, whereas it seemed that in Paris the students did everything except study.
Baudolino corrected him. “In Paris we worked very hard. For example, after the first years, we were already taking part in debates, and in debate you learn to posit objections and to move on to the determination, that is, to the final solution of a question. And you mustn’t think that the lessons are the most important things for a student, or that the tavern is only a place where they waste time. The good thing about the studium is that you learn from your teachers, true, but even more from your fellows, especially those older than you, when they tell you what they have read, and you discover that the world must be full of wondrous things and to know them all since a lifetime will not be enough for you to travel through the whole world— you can only read all the books.”
Baudolino had been able to read many books with Otto, but he hadn’t realized that there could exist as many in the world as there were in Paris. They were not at everyone’s disposal, but through good luck, or, rather, through good attendance at his lessons, he had come to know Abdul.
“To explain the connection between Abdul and the libraries, I have to go back a little, Master Niketas. While I was following a lesson, always blowing on my fingers to warm them, and with my bottom freezing, because the straw didn’t offer much protection against that floor, icy like all of Paris on those winter days, one morning I noticed a boy near me who, by the color of his face, seemed a Saracen, except that he also had red hair, which you don’t find among Moors. I don’t know if he was following the lesson or pursuing his own thoughts, but he was staring into space. Every so often he would shiver and pull his clothing around him, then he would return to looking into the air, and at times he would scratch something on his tablet.
I craned my neck, and I realized that half of what he wrote looked like those fly droppings that are the Arabs’ alphabet, and for the rest he wrote in a language that seemed Latin but wasn’t, and it even reminded me of the dialects of my land. Anyway, when the lesson was over, I struck up a conversation; he reacted politely, as if he had been wanting for some time to find a person to talk with; we made friends, we went walking along the river, and he told me his story.”
The boy’s name was Abdul, a Moor’s name, in fact, but he was born of a mother who came from Hibernia, and this explained the red hair, because all those who come from that remote island are like that, and according to report, they are bizarre, dreamers. His father was Provençal, of a family that had settled overseas after the conquest of Jerusalem, fifty some years
before. As Abdul tried to explain, those Frankish nobles had adopted the customs of the peoples they had conquered.
They wore turbans and indulged in other Turkeries, they spoke the language of their enemies, and were within an inch of following the precepts of the Koran. For which reason a half-Hibernian, with red hair, could be called Abdul and could have a face burned by the sun of Syria, where he was born. He thought in Arabic, and in Provençal he told the ancient sagas of the frozen seas of the north, which he had heard from his mother.
Baudolino immediately asked him if he was in Paris to become a good Christian again and speak as one should, namely, in proper Latin. As to his reasons for coming to Paris, Abdul remained fairly reticent. He spoke of a thing that had happened to him, something fairly upsetting apparently, a kind of terrible ordeal to which he had been subjected while still a boy, so that his noble parents had decided to send him to Paris to save him from some unknown vendetta. Speaking of this, Abdul turned grim, blushing as much as a Moor can blush, his hands trembling, and Baudolino decided to change the subject.
The youth was intelligent, and after a few months in Paris he spokeLatin and the local vernacular. He lived with an uncle, canon of the abbey of
