“That seems right to me,” said the Poet, who was in a hurry to go to the tavern, “and it’s useless to seek the Earthly Paradise, because it must have been a marvel of hanging gardens, and it has remained uninhabited since the time of Adam, nobody has taken the trouble to reinforce the terraces with hedges and palisades, and during the flood it must all have slid down into the Ocean.”
Abdul, on the contrary, was absolutely certain that the earth was a sphere.
If it were just a flat expanse, he argued with undoubting severity, my gaze—which my love makes very acute, like that of all lovers would be able to glimpse far, far away, some sign of the presence of my beloved, but instead the curve of the earth conceals her from my desire. And he ransacked the library of Saint Victoire to find maps that he then reconstructed summarily, from memory, for his friends.
“The earth is in the center of the great chain of the Ocean, and it is divided by three great bodies of water: the Hellespont, the Mediterranean, and the Nile.”
“Just a moment: where’s the Orient?”
“Up here, naturally, where there’s Asia, and at the far end of the Orient, just where the sun rises, is the Earthly Paradise. To the left of Paradise there’s Mount Caucasus, and nearby the Caspian Sea. Now bear in mind:
there are three Indias: an India Major, which is very hot, just to the right of Paradise; a Northern India, beyond the Caspian Sea, another here, in the upper left, where it is so cold that the water turns to crystal, and where there are the peoples of Gog and Magog, whom Alexander the Great imprisoned inside a wall; and finally a Temperate India, close to Africa. An Africa you see in the lower right-hand corner, where the Nile flows, and where the Arabian Sea opens and the Persian Gulf, just on the Red Sea, beyond which there is desert land, very close to the sun of the equator and so hot that no one can venture there. To the west of Africa, near Mauretania, are the Isles of the Blest or the Lost Isle, which was discovered many centuries ago by a saint from my country. Below, to the north, is the land where we live, with Constantinople on the Hellespont, and Greece, and Rome, and in the extreme north the Germanians and the Hibernian Island.”
“But how can you take such a map seriously,” the Poet snickered, “when it shows the earth flat, and you claim it’s a sphere?”
“What kind of argument is that?” Abdul was indignant. “Could you depict a sphere in such a way that you could see everything on it? A map must serve to point out the way, and when you walk, you see the earth flat, not round. Besides, even if it’s a sphere, all the part underneath is uninhabited, and occupied by the Ocean, for if anybody were to live there he’d be living with his feet up and his head down. So to depict the upper part, a circle like this is enough. But I want to examine better the maps of the abbey, also because in the library I met a cleric who knows everything about the Earthly Paradise.”
“Of course. He was there when Eve was giving the apple to Adam,” the Poet said.
“You don’t have to be in a place in order to know everything about it,” Abdul replied. “Otherwise sailors would be more learned than theologians.” This, Baudolino explained to Niketas, showed how, ever since their first years in Paris, when they were still almost beardless, our friends had begun to be gripped by this story, which so many years later would take them to the far ends of the earth.
- Baudolino makes the Poet write love letters and poems to Beatrice
In the spring, Baudolino discovered that his love was growing greater and greater, as happens to lovers in that season, and it was not allayed by the squalid encounters with maids of no importance, indeed in comparison it grew gigantic, because Beatrice, besides the advantages of grace, intelligence, and royal anointment, had also the advantage of absence. The fascination of absence was a question with which Abdul never ceased tormenting him, spending whole evenings stroking his instrument and singing more songs, until, fully to appreciate them, Baudolino had by now also learned Provençal.
And when the days are long in May
How sweet to hear the distant birdsong,
Because, since this journey first began,
I recall forever that distant love.
In my pain I bow my head
Nor does song ease me more, and the hawthorn…
Baudolino dreamed. Abdul despairs of seeing one day his unknown princess, he said to himself, O happy he! Worse is my suffering, for surely I will have to see my beloved again one of these days, and I haven’t the good fortune never to have seen her, but rather the misfortune of knowing who and what she is.
But if Abdul finds consolation in telling his grief to us, why should I not find the same in telling my life to her? In other words, Baudolino sensed that he could discipline the throbbing of his heart by writing down on paper what he felt, and so much the worse if the object of his love would be deprived of these treasures of tenderness. So, late in the night, while the Poet was sleeping, Baudolino wrote.
“The star illuminates the pole, and the moon colors the night. But my guide is a sole star and if, when the shadows have been dispelled, my star rises from the East, my mind will ignore the shadows of sorrow. You are my radiant star, who will dispel the night, and light itself without you is night, whereas with you night is splendid radiance.”
And he went on: “If I feel hunger, only you sate me; if I feel thirst, only you quench it. But what am I saying? You refresh, but do not satiate. Never have I been sated with you, nor shall I ever be….” And then:
“So great is your sweetness, so wondrous your constancy, so ineffable the tone of your voice, such the beauty and the grace that crown you, that it would be a great offense to attempt to express them in words. May the fire that consumes us grow always, and with new fuel, and the more it remains hidden, the more it will flare up and deceive the envious and the treacherous, so that the question will ever remain: which of us two loves the more, and so between us there will always be joined a beautiful duel in
which both are victorious….”
The letters were beautiful, and rereading them, Baudolino trembled, and was ever more enchanted by a creature capable of inspiring such ardor. At a certain point he could no longer accept not knowing how Beatrice would have reacted to such sweet violence, and he decided to impel her to reply. Trying to imitate her hand, he wrote:
“To the love that rises from the heart of my heart, that is more sweetly fragrant than any perfume, she who is yours body and soul, for the thirsting flowers of your youth, wishes the freshness of an eternal happiness…. To you, my happy hope, I offer my faith, and with all devotion I offer myself, for as long as I may live….”
“Oh,” he immediately replied to her, “be well, for in you lies all my health, in you are my hope and my repose. Even before I am fully awake, my soul finds you again, preserved within itself….”
And she answered, boldly: “From that first moment when we saw each other, I have loved you before all others; preferring you, I have wanted you; wanting you, I have sought you; seeking you, I have found you; finding you, I have loved you; loving you, I have desired you; desiring you, I have set you in my heart above all else … and I have savored your honey … I greet you, my heart, my body, my only joy….”
This correspondence, which lasted for some months, gave, first, refreshment to Baudolino’s exacerbated soul, then a replete happiness, and finally a kind of blazing pride, because the lover had not realized how the beloved could love him so much. Like all those in love, Baudolino became vain, like all those in love, he wrote that he wanted to enjoy jealously with his beloved their shared secret, but at the same time he insisted that the whole world be informed of his joy, and be stunned by the immeasurable loving nature of the woman who loved him.
So one day he showed the correspondence to his friends. He was vague and reticent about the manner and identity of this exchange. He did not lie; indeed he said he was showing those letters precisely because they were the fruit of his imagination. But the other two believed that, only and precisely in this instance, he was lying, and they envied his lot all the more. In his heart Abdul attributed the letters to his princess, and he agonized as if he had received them himself.
The Poet, who made
