Perhaps to find new themes for his songs, Abdul jealously copied the letters, to reread them at night in Saint Victoire. Then one day he realized that someone had stolen them from him, and he feared that by now some dissolute canon, after having lubriciously spelled them out at night, had thrown them among the thousand manuscripts of the abbey. Shuddering, Baudolino locked his correspondence in his trunk, and from that day on he wrote no further missives, so as not to compromise his correspondent.
Having, in any case, to release his adolescent fervor, Baudolino then took to writing verses. While in the letters he had spoken of his wholly pure love, in these new writings he practiced that tavern poetry with which the clerics of the period vaunted their dissolute and carefree life, not without some melancholy reference to their wasting of it.
Wishing to give Niketas evidence of his talent, he recited a few hemistichs:
Feror ego veluti—sine nauta navis,
ut per vias aeris—vaga fertur avis …
Quidquit Venus imperat—labor est suavis,
quae nunquam in cordibus—habitat ignavis.
Realizing that Niketas did not clearly understand the Latin, he made a rough translation: “I am derelict like a ship without a helmsman, like a bird along the pathways of the sky…. But what pleasant toil it is to obey the commands of Venus, unknown to common souls.”
Baudolino showed these and other verses to the Poet, who flushed with envy and shame, and wept, confessing the aridity that dried up his imagination, cursing his impotence, shouting that he would have preferred not to know how to penetrate a woman than to find himself so incapable of expressing what he felt inside—and that it was exactly what Baudolino had expressed so well, making the Poet wonder if his friend had not read his heart. Then he observed how proud his father would be if he were able to compose such beautiful verses, for one day or another he would have to justify to his family and to the world the acquired nickname of Poet, which, while it flattered him, made him feel a poeta gloriosus, a braggart, who steals a dignity that is not his.
Seeing him in such despair, Baudolino pressed the parchment between the youth’s hands, offering him the poems so he could display them as his own. A precious gift, because it so happened that Baudolino, to have something new to tell Beatrice, had actually sent her the verses, attributing them to his friend. Beatrice had read them to Frederick. Rainald of Dassel, a lover of literature, though always taken up with palace intrigues, heard them and said he would like to have the Poet in his service….
In that same year Rainald was raised to the lofty office of archbishop of Cologne; and to the Poet the notion of becoming official poet to an archbishop and thus, as he put it, half-joking and half swaggering, the archpoet, did not displease him, not least because he had very little desire to study; the paternal funds in Paris never sufficed, and he had got the idea not mistaken—that a court poet ate and drank all day long without a thought for anything else.
But to be a court poet you have to write poems. Baudolino promised to
write at least a dozen for him, but not all at once. “You see,” he said, “great poets are not always diarrhoic, sometimes they’re styptic, and those are the greater ones. You must seem tormented by the Muses, able to distill only
one couplet every now and then. With the ones I’ll give you, you can keep going for quite a few months, but allow me some time, because while I’m
not styptic, I’m not diarrhoic either. So postpone your departure and send a few verses to Rainald, to whet his appetite. For the present it’s a good idea for you to introduce yourself with a dedication, a eulogy of your benefactor. He thought about it all one night, then gave the Poet some verses for Rainald:
Presul discretissime—veniam te precor,
morte bona morior—dulci nece necor,
meum pectum sauciat—puellarum decor, et
quas tacto nequeo—saltem chorde mechor.
Which is to say: “Most noble bishop, forgive me, for I face a happy death and am consumed by such a sweet wound: maidens’ beauty pierces my heart, and those whom I cannot touch, I possess at least in my thoughts.” Niketas remarked that Latin bishops found pleasure in things that were not very holy, but Baudolino told him that he should first understand what a Latin bishop was: it was not required that he necessarily be a sainted man, especially if he was also chancellor of the empire. And second, who Rainald was: a little bit bishop and very much chancellor, certainly a lover of poetry, but still more inclined to use a poet’s talents also for his own political ends, as he would subsequently do.
“And so the Poet became famous thanks to your verses.”
“That’s right. For almost a year the Poet sent Rainald letters overflowing with devotion, accompanying verses that I wrote for him from time to time.
Finally Rainald insisted that this unusual talent should join him at any price. The Poet set off with a good provision of verses, enough to supply him for at least a year, however styptic he might seem. It was a triumph. I’ve never understood how anyone can be proud of a fame received as alms from another, but the Poet was content.”
“Speaking of amazement: I ask myself what pleasure you can have felt, seeing your creations attributed to someone else. Isn’t it atrocious that a father should give away, as alms, the fruit of his loins?”
“The fate of a tavern poem is to pass from one mouth to another: it is happiness to hear it sung, and it would be egoism to want to exhibit it only to increase one’s own glory.”
“I don’t believe you’re that humble. You are happy to have been once again the Prince of Falsehood, and you flaunt it, just as you hope that one day someone will find your love letters among the jumble of papers in Saint Victoire and attribute them to God knows whom.”
“I don’t mean to seem humble. I like making things happen, and to be the only one who knows they are my doing.”
“The question doesn’t change, my friend,” Niketas said. “Indulgently, I suggested you wanted to be the Prince of Falsehood, and now you make me realize you would like to be God Almighty.”
- Baudolino in the Earthly Paradise
Baudolino was studying in Paris but he kept abreast of what was happening in Italy and in Germany. Rahewin, obeying the orders of Otto, had continued writing the Gesta Friderici; but, having now reached the end of the fourth book, he had decided to stop, because it seemed to him blasphemous to exceed the number of the Gospels. He left the court, satisfied, his duty done, and was dying of boredom in a Bavarian monastery.
Baudolino wrote him of his free access to the endless library of Saint Victoire, and Rahewin asked him to indicate a few rare treatises that could enhance his knowledge.
Sharing Otto’s opinion of the poor canon’s scant imagination, Baudolino considered it useful to nourish it a bit. After sending him a few titles of codices he had seen, he also mentioned others of his own invention, such as De optimitate triparum of the Venerable Bede, an Ars honesti petandi, a De modo cacandi, a De castramentandis crinibus, and a De patria diabolorum
—all works that provoked the amazement and the curiosity of the good canon, who hastened to ask for copies of these unknown treasures of learning. A service that Baudolino would have done him willingly, to heal his remorse for the parchment of Otto that he had scraped, but he simply did not know what to copy, and he had to invent the excuse that those works were, indeed, in the abbey of Saint Victoire, but were in odor of heresy and the canons would not allow anyone to see them.
“Then I learned,” Baudolino said to Niketas, “that Rahewin had written to a Parisian scholar, begging him to ask the Victoriens for those manuscripts, but the scholars obviously found no trace of them.
They accused their librarian of negligence, and the poor man had to swear that he had never seen them. I imagine, in the end, some canon, to put matters right, really did compose those texts and I hope that someday someone will come upon them.”
Meanwhile, the Poet kept him informed of the exploits of Frederick.
The Italian communes were not keeping faith with all the oaths they had sworn at the Diet of Roncaglia. According to the pacts, the unruly cities were to demolish their walls and destroy their war machines; but instead the citizens pretended to fill in the moats around the cities, and the moats were still there.
Frederick sent envoys to Crema, to enjoin them to act quickly, and the people of Crema threatened to kill the imperial envoys, who would really have been killed if they hadn’t run off. Then to Milan they actually sent Rainald and a Palatine count, to name the podestà, because the Milanese could not claim to acknowledge the imperial rights and then elect their consuls on their own.
