Perhaps it seemed to her that, by showing no sign of intimacy and affection, she would betray embarrassment; therefore she placed her other hand maternally on his head, mussing his hair—forgetting that a woman just over thirty could no longer act this way towards a man only a little younger than she. To Frederick it all seemed normal, he the father, she the mother, even if both adoptive. The one who felt out of place was Baudolino. That double contact, her nearness, which enabled him to catch the perfume of her dress as if it were that of her flesh, and the sound of her voice—luckily in that position he could not look into her eyes, for he would immediately have blanched and fallen senseless to the floor—filled him with unbearable joy, but it was poisoned by the sensation that with this simple act of homage he was once again betraying his father.
He would not have known how to take his leave if the emperor had not asked a favor of him, or given him an order, which was the same thing. To have a clearer view of the situation in Italy, trusting neither official messengers nor messenger officials, Frederick had decided to send down there a few trusted men, who knew the country, but were not immediately
identifiable as imperials, so that they could sniff out the atmosphere and gather information not vitiated by treason.
Baudolino liked the idea of escaping the embarrassment he felt at court, but a moment later he felt something else. He felt extraordinarily moved by the idea of seeing his old places, and he realized finally that this was the reason he had undertaken his journey.
After moving through various cities, one day Baudolino, riding on and on—or, rather, bumping along on his mule, because he was passing himself off as a merchant, peacefully going from town to town—was attracted by those heights beyond which, after a good stretch of plain, he ought to be able to look at the Tanaro and reach, between stony fields and swamps, his native Frascheta.
Even though in those days, when you left home, you left without thinking of ever returning, Baudolino felt at this moment a tingling in his veins, as, all of a sudden, he was seized by an eagerness to know if his old parents were still alive.
Not only that. Suddenly faces of other boys of the neighborhood came into his mind: Masulu Panizza, with whom he used to set traps for hares; and Porcelli, known as Ghino (or was it Ghini, known as Porcello?), with whom, at first sight, they had thrown rocks at each other, Aleramo Scaccabarozzi, known as Bonehead, and Cuttica of Quargnento, from the days when they fished together in the Bormida. Good Lord, he said to himself, surely I’m not dying now, though they say that on the point of death you remember the things of your childhood so well….
It was the eve of Christmas, but Baudolino didn’t know that, because in the course of his journey he had lost track of the days. He was trembling with cold, on his equally frozen mule, but the sky was clear in the sunset light, clean, with a smell of snow already in the air.
He recognized these places as if he had passed by the day before. He remembered how he once went into these hills with his father, to deliver three mules, toiling up paths that could wear out the legs even of a boy, so you can imagine driving reluctant animals up them. But they enjoyed the return, looking at the plain from above and taking their time on the way down.
Baudolino remembered that, not very far from the flowing river, the plain for a short stretch humped into a hillock, and from the top of that knoll one time he had seen, piercing a milky shroud, the spires of some towns: Bergoglio along the river, then Roboreto, and, farther on, Gamondio, Marengo, and the Palea, the area of marshes, of gravel and scrub, at whose edges perhaps there still stood the hut of the good Gagliaudo.
But when he was on the hillock, he saw a different view, as if all around, on the hills and in the valleys, the air was clear, and only the plain before him was murky with foggy vapors, those grayish, misty clumps that every now and then assail you on the road, enveloping you until you can see nothing, then they pass you, and off they go whence they came—so now Baudolino said to himself: Why, look at that, it could be August here, but over Frascheta the eternal fog rules, like the snow on the peaks of the Alps —nor did this displease him, because one who is born in fog always feels at home in it.
Gradually, however, as he descended towards the river, he realized that those vapors were not fog, but clouds of smoke that allowed glimpses of the fires that fed them. From the smoke and fires, Baudolino now understood that, in the plain beyond the river, around what had once been Roboreto, the town had overflowed into the countryside, and everywhere there was a sprouting, mushroomlike, of new houses, some of stone, others of wood, many still only half-built, and to the west you could make out the beginning of a girdle of walls, such as there had never been in those parts. And on the fires, in the freezing cold, pots were boiling, heating water, for, farther on, men were pouring it into holes filled with lime or perhaps mortar. Baudolino had seen the beginning of the construction of the new cathedral in Paris, on the island in the middle of the river, and now he recognized the machines and the scaffoldings that master masons use:
judging by what he knew of cities, he realized that over there people were about to bring one into existence from nothing, and it was a sight that—if you’re lucky—you see once in a lifetime.
“Madness!” he said to himself. “You turn your back for a moment and they pull a trick like this on you,” and he spurred his mule to reach the valley as quickly as possible. After crossing the river, on a big barge that transported stones of every kind and size, he stopped where some workers, on an unsteady scaffolding, were constructing a little wall, while others, from the ground, with a winch, were raising to those above some baskets of rubble.
But it was a winch only after a manner of speaking, for a more crude contraption could hardly be imagined: made of withes instead of sturdy stakes, it swayed constantly, and the two men on the ground made it spin. They were less concerned with pulling the rope than with controlling that menacingly wide sway of the baskets. Baudolino promptly said to himself: There, it’s obvious, the people from around here, when they do something, they do it either bad or worse. Just look; is this any way to work? If I were master here, I’d grab all of them by the seat of the pants and throw them in the Tanaro.”
Then he saw, a bit farther on, another group, supposedly constructing a loggetta, with crudely hewn stones, beams clumsily finished, and capitals that seemed shaped by an animal. To hoist the construction material they had rigged up a kind of pulley, and Baudolino realized that, compared with this bunch, the men at the little wall were masters worthy of Como. He then stopped making comparisons as, proceding a little farther, he saw others building the way children do when they play with mud, and they were putting the finishing touches, the last licks, you might say, on a construction similar to three others near it, made of mud and shapeless stones, with roofs of straw carelessly packed: thus a sort of street was being born of hovels very ill-made, as if the workers were competing to see who could finish first before the holiday, with no regard for the rules of the art.
As he tried to find his bearings in that multitude of crafts, Baudolino discovered a multitude of dialects—which showed how one collection of
huts was being made by peasants of Solero, a twisted tower was the work of Monferrato people, that mortar was being stirred by the Pavesi, those planks were being sawed by men who until then had cut down trees in the Palea.
But when he heard someone giving orders, or saw a band working properly, he heard Genoese spoken.
Have I fallen into the midst of the construction of the tower of Babel? Baudolino asked himself. Or into the Hibernia of Abdul, where those seventy-two sages have reconstructed the speech of Adam, putting all languages together, just as you mix water and clay, pitch and bitumen? But here they no longer speak the language of Adam and, though altogether
they speak seventy-two languages, men of such different breeds, who as a rule would be hitting one another, they are all mixing in loving harmony! He had approached a group that was skillfully covering a construction
of wooden beams, as if it were an abbatial church, using a windlass of great dimensions which was not moved by manpower but by the toil of a horse.
Not oppressed by the collar still in use in some rural districts, that would constrict his throat, the animal pulled with great energy thanks to a comfortable harness. The workmen emitted sounds surely Genoese, and
