Little by little, as he spoke, he noticed, glancing up, the beautiful face, and he felt again all the ardor of those years multiplied a hundred times over—until Beatrice said to him,
with one of her most seductive smiles: “You haven’t written as much as I ordered you to, or as often as I would have wished.”
Perhaps she said it with her usual sisterly solicitude, perhaps she wanted only to animate the conversation, but for Baudolino anything Beatrice said was at once balm and toxin. With trembling hands, he drew from his bosom his letters to her and hers to him and, holding them out to her murmured: “No. I have written, and very often, and you, my Lady, have answered me.”
Beatrice did not understand. She took the pages, began to read them in a low voice in order better to decipher that double calligraphy. Baudolino, two paces from her, wrung his hands, sweating, told himself he was mad, that she would send him away, calling her guards. He wished he had a weapon to plunge into his heart. Beatrice continued reading, and her cheeks grew increasingly flushed, her voice trembled as she spelled out those inflamed words, as if she were celebrating a blasphemous Mass.
She stood up, once, twice she seemed to sway. Twice she waved off Baudolino, who had risen to support her. Then in a faint voice she said only: “Oh, child, child, what have you done?”
Baudolino stepped closer, to take those pages from her hand, all atremble; she reached out to stroke the back of his neck; he turned his head aside because he was unable to look into her eyes; she stroked his scar with her fingertips. To avoid that touch, too, he again moved his head, but by now she had come closer, and they found themselves nose to nose.
Baudolino put his hands behind his back, to prohibit himself an embrace, but now their lips had touched, and after touching they parted slightly, so for an instant, only one instant of the very few that the kiss lasted, through their parted lips their tongues also met.
As that swift eternity ended, Beatrice drew back, now white, as if ill, and, fixing Baudolino’s eyes, harshly, she said to him: “By all the saints in Paradise, never do again what you have done.”
She said this without wrath, almost without emotion, as if she were about to faint. Then her eyes became moist and she added, sweetly: “I beg you!”
Baudolino knelt, almost grazing the ground with his forehead, and left, with no conscious direction. Later he realized that in a single instant he had committed four crimes: he had offended the majesty of the empress, he had stained himself with adultery, he had betrayed the trust of his father, and he had given way to the insidious temptation of revenge. “Revenge, why?” he asked himself. “If Frederick had not committed that massacre, had not insulted me, and I had not felt hatred in my heart, would I still have done what I did?”
In trying not to reply to this question, he realized that, if the answer were what he feared, then he would have committed the fifth and most horrible of sins: he would have indelibly besmirched the virtue of his idol only to satisfy his rancor; he would have transformed the meaning of his existence into a sordid weapon.
“Master Niketas, this suspicion has accompanied me for many years, even if I could never forget the heartrending beauty of that moment. I was ever more in love, but this time with no hope, not even in my dreams.
Because if I wanted any kind of forgiveness, her image had to vanish from my dreams, too. After all, I said to myself during many long, sleepless nights, you have had everything, and you can desire nothing else.”
Night was falling on Constantinople, and the sky was no longer reddening. The fire by now was dying out, and only on some city hills could you see a glow, not of flames but of embers. Niketas meanwhile had ordered two cups of honeyed wine. Baudolino sipped it, his eyes lost in the void. “It’s wine from Thasos. Sweet, isn’t it?” Niketas asked. “Very sweet,” Baudolino replied, as he seemed to be thinking of other things. Then he set down the cup.
“That same evening,” he concluded, “I forever renounced judging Frederick, because I felt more guilty than he. Is it worse to cut off the nose of an enemy or to kiss the mouth of your benefactor’s wife?”
The next day he went and asked his adoptive father’s forgiveness for the harsh words he had said, and he blushed on realizing that it was Frederick who felt remorse. The emperor embraced him, apologizing for his wrath, and saying that he preferred, to the hundred flatterers he had around him, a son like this, capable of telling him when he was wrong. “Not even my confessor has the courage to tell me that,” Frederick said, smiling. “You are the only person I trust.”
Baudolino began paying for his crime, with burning shame.
- Baudolino finds the Magi and canonizes Charlemagne
Baudolino arrived at Milan when the Milanese were at the end of their strength, partly because of their internal arguments. In the end, they sent delegations to agree on the surrender, and the conditions were still those established by the Diet of Roncaglia, which meant that after four years, and with so many dead and such devastation, they were right where they had
been four years earlier. But it was a surrender more shameful than the preceding one. Frederick would have liked again to grant his pardon, but Rainald, implacable, fanned the flames.
A lesson had to be taught, which no one would ever forget, and the other cities had to be satisfied, those that had fought alongside the emperor, not out of love for him but out of hatred for Milan.
“Baudolino,” the emperor said, “this time you mustn’t oppose me. There are times when an emperor must do what his counselors want.” And he added, lowering his voice: “That Rainald frightens me more than the Milanese.”
So he ordered Milan erased from the face of the earth, and had everyone, men and women, sent out of the city.
The fields surrounding the city now teemed with Milanese roaming aimlessly about.
Some sought refuge in neighboring cities, others remained encamped below the walls, hoping that the emperor would pardon them and allow them to go back inside. It was raining, the refugees shivered with cold during the night, the children fell ill, the men by now were disarmed, huddled along the edge of the roads, shaking their fists at the heavens, for it was wiser to curse the Almighty than the emperor, since the emperor had his men patrolling and demanding explanations for any violent lamentation.
Frederick had first tried to annihilate the rebel city by setting it on fire; then he had thought it better to leave the matter in the hands of the Italians, who hated Milan more than he did. He assigned the Lodi forces the task of destroying the whole quarter at the eastern gate known as Porta Renza, the Cremonesi were to destroy Porta Romana, the Pavese should raze to the ground Porta Vercellina, and the Co-masques should destroy Porta Comacina, while the men of Seprio and Martesana should reduce Porta Nuova to a single ruin. The task greatly pleased the men of those cities, who indeed had paid the emperor much money to enjoy the privilege of settling with their own hands their scores with defeated Milan.
The day after the beginning of the demolition, Baudolino ventured inside the girdle of the walls. In certain places nothing could be seen, except a great dust cloud. Entering the cloud, he could discern here a group of men, who had tied heavy ropes to a façade, pulling in unison until it collapsed; there, expert masons on the roof of a church swinging their picks until the roof was gone, and then with great mallets breaking the walls, or uprooting the columns by inserting wedges at their base.
Baudolino spent a few days wandering through the convulsed streets; he saw the spire of the main church crumble, the most beautiful and mighty of all Italy. The most zealous were the Lodigiani, who sought only revenge:
they were the first to demolish their assigned area, then they rushed to assist the Cremonesi in leveling Porta Romana. But the Pavesi seemed the most expert. They struck no random blows, and they controlled their rage: they scraped away the mortar wherever the stones were joined together, or else they dug at the foot of the walls until the rest collapsed.
In short, for anyone who did not understand what was going on, Milan seemed a merry workplace, where everyone labored with alacrity, praising the Lord. Except that it was as if time ran backwards: it seemed that from the void a new city was rising, when instead an ancient city was returning to dust and bare earth. Absorbed in these thoughts, Baudolino, on Easter day, when the emperor had decreed great celebrations in Pavia, hastened to discover the mirabilia urbis Mediolani while Milan still existed.
So he happened to pass a splendid basilica still intact, and to see in the vicinity some Pavesi who were completing the demolition of a
