Farther on, at a stand, a woman was selling chickpea flour, dried figs, and carobs, and a shepherd wearing a fleece jacket held a little basket. “Right here, ladies! Good fresh cheese,” he shouted. In an empty space between two houses, two men were discussing the sale of a pig. In the background, a pair of girls were lazily leaning against a door, their teeth chattering, their shawls allowing a glimpse of an ample low-cut bodice; one of them said to Baudolino: “What a pretty boy you are! Why don’t you come spend Christmas with me, and I’ll teach you how to make the beast with eight paws?”
They turned the corner and found a wool carder, crying in a loud voice that this was their last chance for mattresses and paillasses, to sleep warm, and not freeze like the Baby Jesus, and next to him a waterman was shouting, and as they continued along the streets, still roughly laid out, they could see doorways where a carpenter was working his plane, and over there a smith striking his anvil in a festival of sparks, and farther on another man taking loaves from an oven that glowed like the mouth of Hell; and merchants were arriving from afar to do business on this new frontier, also people who usually lived in the forest: charcoal burners, honey gatherers, peddlers of ashes for soap, collectors of bark for making cord or tanning leather, vendors of rabbit skins, jailbird faces who assembled in the new settlement thinking they would find profit there, and the blind and the halt and the maimed and the scrofulous, for whom begging in the streets of a town, and during the holy holidays, promised to be richer than wandering along the deserted roads of the countryside.
The first snowflakes were beginning to fall; they grew thicker, and for the first time there was a layer of white on those young roofs, though no one could know if they were capable of bearing the weight. At a certain point Baudolino, remembering his invention in conquered Milan, opened his eyes wide: three merchants entering on three asses through an arch in the wall seemed to him to be the Magi; they were followed by their servants, carrying pots and precious stuffs. Behind them, beyond the Tanaro, he thought he could make out some flocks descending the slopes of the silvered hill, the shepherds playing bagpipes, and caravans of Oriental camels with Moors wearing great varicolor-striped turbans. On the hill sparse fires were dying under the twinkling snow, more persistent now, but to Baudolino one of them seemed a great caudate star, which moved in the sky towards the city that was wailing in birth pangs.
“You see what a city is?” Ghini said to him. “And if it’s like this before it’s even finished, imagine what will happen afterwards: it’s another life. Every day you see new people for the merchants, just think, it’s like having the Heavenly Jerusalem; for the knights, since the emperor forbade them to sell lands so as not to divide the fief, and they were bored to death in the countryside, now they command companies of bowmen, they ride out in parades, they give orders left and right. But things don’t prosper just for the gentry and the merchants: it’s a providence also for a man like your father, who doesn’t have much land but has some livestock, and people arrive in the city and ask him for stock and pay cash; they’re beginning to sell for ready money and not through barter.
I don’t know if you understand what that means: if you exchange two chickens for three rabbits sooner or later you have to eat them, otherwise they grow too old, whereas two coins you can hide under your mattress and they’re good ten years from now, and if you’re lucky they stay there even if enemies come into your house. Besides, it’s happened in Milan and in Lodi and Pavia, and it will also happen here with us: it’s not that the Ghinis or the Aularis have to keep their mouths shut and only the Guascos or the Trottis give the orders.
We’re all part of those who make the decisions; here you can become important even if you’re not a noble, and this is the fine thing about a city, and it’s specially fine for one who isn’t noble, and is ready to get himself killed, if he really has to (but it’s better not), because his sons can go around saying: My name is Ghini and even if your name is Trotti, you’re still shit.”
Obviously, at this point Niketas asked Baudolino what this city was called. What a talent that Baudolino had as a storyteller, having kept that revelation in suspense until this moment! The city didn’t yet have a name, except a generic Civitas Nova, which was a genus name, not an individuum. The choice of name would depend on another question, and no small one: legitimation. How does a new city, without history and without nobility, gain the right to exist? Ideally by imperial investiture, just as the emperor can create a knight or a baron; but here we were dealing with a city born against the emperor’s wishes. So? Baudolino and Ghini went back to the tavern, as all there were debating that very question.
“If this city is born outside the imperial law, it can only become legitimate through some other law, just as strong and ancient.” “And where will we find that?”
“Why, in the Constitutum Constantini, in the donation that the emperor Constantine made to the church, giving it the right to govern territories. We donate the city to the pope and, seeing that at this moment there are two popes around, we donate it to the one who is siding with the League, that is to say, Alexander III. As we said before at Lodi, months ago, the city will be called Alessandria, and it will be a papal fief.”
“First of all, at Lodi you should have kept quiet, because we hadn’t yet decided anything,” Boidi said, “but that’s not the point. As names go, it’s a beautiful name, or at least it’s no uglier than a lot of others. But what sticks in my craw is that here we bust our behinds to make a city and then we present it to the pope, who already has so many. And that way we’ll have to pay him tribute, and any way you look at it, it’s still money that we lose, so we might as well be paying the emperor.”
“Boidi, don’t be dumb, as usual,” Cuttica said to him. “First, the emperor doesn’t want the city, not even if they make him a present of it; and if he was ready to accept it, then it wasn’t worth it. Second, it’s one thing not to pay taxes to the emperor, who then comes and chops you to pieces, as he did with Milan; and it’s another thing not to pay them to the pope, who’s a thousand miles away and, with all the problems he has, he’s not likely to send an army just to collect small change. Third…”
Baudolino spoke up: “If you’ll allow me to express an opinion, I’ve studied in Paris and I have some experience of how you make letters and diplomas; there are all sorts of ways of making presents. You draw up a document that says Alessandria is being founded in honor of Alexander the pope and consecrated to Saint Peter, for example. As proof, you build a
cathedral to Saint Peter on allodial land, which has no feudal obligations. And you build it with money contributed by all the people of the city. After which you make a gift of it to the pope, with all the formulas that your notaries find most suitable and most binding. You flavor it with expressions of filial devotion and all those things, you send the parchment to the pope, and you receive all his benedictions. Anybody who later scrutinizes that document will see that, in the final analysis, you’ve given him only the cathedral and not the rest of the city, and I can’t see a pope coming here to take away his cathedral and carry it to Rome.”
“It sounds magnificent to me,” Oberto said, and all agreed. “We’ll do what Baudolino says, as he seems to me very clever and I really hope he’ll stay here to give us more good advice, since he’s also a grand Paris scholar.” Here Baudolino had to resolve the most embarrassing part of that fine day: namely, reveal, without anyone being able to reproach him, since they too had been imperials until a short time past, that he was a ministerial of Frederick, to whom he was bound by filial affection—and then to tell the whole story
