“And you?”
“One night, while the others were sleeping, I sneaked into the place where they kept the silver pots of green honey, and I tasted it. Taste, did I say? I gulped down two spoonfuls and I began to see wondrous things….”
“Did you feel you were in the garden?”
“No. Maybe the others dreamed of the garden because, when they arrived, Aloadin told them about the garden. I believe the green honey makes you see what you want from the bottom of your heart. I found myself in the desert, or, rather, in an oasis, and I saw a splendid caravan arriving, the camels all decked with plumes, and a host of Moors with colored turbans, beating on drums and clashing cymbals. Behind them, on a baldachin carried by four giants, there she was, the princess. I can’t tell you what she was like, she was so … how can I say it?…so dazzling that I recall only the dazzle, a dazzling splendor….”
“But what was her face like? Was she beautiful?” “I didn’t see her face; she was veiled.”
“But … then whom did you fall in love with?”
“With her, because I couldn’t see her. In my heart, here—you understand? there was an infinite sweetness, a languor that has never since died. The caravan moved off towards the dunes, and I realized that the vision would never again return. I told myself that I should have followed that creature, but towards morning I began to laugh, with what I believed was joy, while it was the effect of the green honey when its power dies. When I woke the sun was already high, and the eunuch almost caught me still dozing in that place. Since then I have told myself that I should have fled, to find again the distant princess.”
“But you realized it was only the effect of the green honey…”
“Yes, the vision was an illusion, but what I now felt inside was not; it was true desire. When you feel it, it’s not an illusion. It’s real.” “But it was the desire of an illusion.”
“By then I wanted never to lose that desire. It was worth devoting my life to it.”
Abdul eventually managed to find an avenue of escape from the castle, and to rejoin his family, who had by then given him up for lost. Concerned about the revenge of Aloadin, Abdul’s father sent him away from the Holy Land, to Paris. Before fleeing from Aloadin, Abdul had seized one of the pots of green honey, but, as he explained to Baudolino, he had never tasted it again, for fear that the cursed substance would carry him back to that same oasis, to relive infinitely his ecstasy. He was not sure he could bear the emotion. At this point the princess was with him, and nobody could take her away from him. Better to dream of her as a goal than to possess her in a false memory.
Then, as time went on, to find strength for his songs, in which the princess appeared, present in her distance, he had ventured to taste the honey, just barely, on the tip of a spoon, only enough to sense the flavor on his tongue. He had some ecstasies of brief duration, and this is what he had done that evening. Abdul’s story fascinated Baudolino, and he was tempted by the
possibility of having a vision, however brief, in which the empress would appear.
Abdul could not deny him that taste. Baudolino sensed only a slight torpor, and the desire to laugh. But he felt his mind stimulated, and, curiously, not by Beatrice, but by Prester John. So he asked himself if the true object of his desire was not that inaccessible realm, more than the mistress of his heart. So it had been that night. Abdul, almost free of the effect of the honey, and Baudolino, slightly inebriated, had resumed discussing the Priest, posing for themselves the question of his existence. And as it seemed that the virtue of the green honey was to make tangible that which has never been seen, they decided the Priest did exist.
He exists, Baudolino decided, because there are no reasons opposing his existence. He exists, Abdul agreed, because a cleric had told him that, beyond the land of the Medes and the Persians, there are Christian kings who fight the pagans of those regions.
“Who is this cleric?” Baudolino asked eagerly.
“Boron,” Abdul replied. And so it was that the next day they went out to find Boron.
He was a cleric of Montbéliard, who, a vagrant like his similars, was now in Paris (and a regular visitor to the library of Saint Victoire), and tomorrow he would be God knows where, because he seemed to pursue a plan of his own of which he never spoke with anyone. He had a great head with a mop of hair and eyes reddened from all his reading by lamplight, but he truly seemed an ark of learning. He fascinated them at this first meeting —in a tavern naturally asking them subtle questions on which their teachers would have spent days and days of disputation. Can sperm freeze? Can a prostitute conceive? Does the sweat of the head stink more than that of other parts of the body? Do the ears flush when one feels shame?
Does a man grieve more over the death of a beloved or over her marriage? Must nobles have drooping ears? Do the mad worsen during the full moon? The question that fascinated them most was that of the existence of the vacuum, on which Boron considered himself wiser than any other philosopher.
“The vacuum,” Boron said, his tongue already thick, “does not exist, because nature has a horror of it. The fact that it does not exist is evident for philosophical reasons, because if it did exist it would be either substance or accident. It is not material substance, because otherwise it would be body and would occupy space, and it is not incorporeal substance, because
otherwise, like the angels, it would be intelligent. It is not accident, because accidents exist only as attributes of substances. In the second place, the vacuum does not exist for physical reasons: take a cylindrical vessel…”
“But why,” Baudolino interrupted, “are you so interested in demonstrating that the vacuum does not exist? What does the vacuum matter to you?”
“It matters. Yes, it matters. Because the vacuum can be either interstitial, that is, between one body and another in our sublunar world, or else extended, beyond the universe that we see, closed by the great sphere of the celestial bodies. If that were so, there could perhaps exist, within that vacuum, other worlds. But if it is demonstrated that the interstitial vacuum does not exist, all the more reason why the extended vacuum cannot exist.”
“But what do you care whether other worlds exist?”
“I care. It matters. Because if they did exist, Our Lord should have sacrificed himself in each of them and in each he should have consecrated the bread and the wine. And hence the supreme object, which is testimony and evidence of that miracle, would not be unique, and there would be many copies of it. And what value would my life have if I did not know that, somewhere, there is a supreme object to be found again?”
“And what would this supreme object be?”
Here Boron tried to truncate the discussion. “That’s my business,” he said, “things that are not good for the ears of the profane. Let us speak of something else. If there were so many worlds there would have been so many first humans, so many Adams and so many Eves, who have committed original sin infinite times. And therefore there would be so many Earthly Paradises from which they were driven. Can you think that something sublime, like the Earthly Paradise, could exist in so many copies, as there exist so many cities with a river and a hill like that of Saint Geneviève? Only one Earthly Paradise exists, in a remote land; beyond the realm of the Medes and the Persians.”
They had come to the core of the discussion, and they told Boron of their speculations about Prester John. Yes, Boron had heard a monk talk about this question of the Christian kings of the Orient. He had read the account of a visit, many years ago, by a patriarch of the Indies, to Pope Calixtus II. It told of the effort the pope had to make to understand his visitor, thanks to the extreme difference of language.
The patriarch described the city of Hulna, where a river flows that originates in the Earthly Paradise, the Physon, which others call the Ganges; and where, on a mountain outside the city, stands the sanctuary containing the body of the apostle Thomas. This mountain was inaccessible because it rose in the center of a lake, but for eight days every year the waters of the lake withdraw, and the good Christians of the region can go and worship the body of the apostle, still intact as if he were not dead, but, rather, as the text described him, with a star’s shining face, red hair falling to his shoulders, a beard, and garments that seemed just sewn.
“But nothing tells us that this patriarch is Prester John,” Boron concluded cautiously.
“No, of course not,” Baudolino replied, “but it tells us that for a long time there has been talk about some distant
