So I told of the mirabilia that I had been told about and I added a few of my own … for example, that in the Lateran palace I had seen a reliquary of gold studded with diamonds and inside it were the navel and the foreskin of Our Lord. They were all devouring my words, and they said too bad in those days we had to kill the Romans and weren’t able to see all
those mirabilia. So for all the years I’ve been hearing others talk about the wonders of the city of Rome, in Germany, in Burgundy, and even here, it is only because I had told about them.»
Meanwhile the Genoese had come back, dressed as monks, ringing their little bells and preceding a troop of creatures wrapped in lurid whitish sheets, which covered even their faces. These people were the pregnant wife of Master Niketas, with her youngest in her arms, and the other sons and daughters, very young and pretty girls, some other relations, and a few servants. The Genoese had brought them through the city as if they were a band of lepers, and even the pilgrims had kept well out of their way as they passed.
«How could they take you seriously?» Baudolino asked, laughing. «The lepers maybe… but you men, even in those robes, don’t look anything like monks!»
«With all due respect, the pilgrims are a bunch of dickheads,» Taraburlo said. «And besides, after all the time we’ve been here, we also know what Greek we need. We repeated kyrieleison pighè pighè, in a low voice, all together, like a litany, and they stepped back, some made the sign of the cross, some made the horns sign to ward off the evil eye, and some touched their balls.»
A manservant brought Niketas a box, and Niketas withdrew to the back of the room to open it. He returned with some gold coins for our hosts, who uttered extravagant blessings and insisted that, until he left, he was the master here. The sizable family had been divided among some nearby dwellings, along somewhat filthy alleyways, where no Latin would ever think of searching for loot.
Now content, Niketas called Pevere, who seemed the most authoritative of the hosts, and said that, if he had to remain in hiding, he was unwilling to give up his habitual pleasures. The city was burning, but in the port merchant ships continued to arrive, and fishermen’s boats, but they now had to stop in the Golden Horn, unable to unload their goods at the storehouses. With money, it was possible to purchase cheaply the things necessary to a comfortable life.
As for a proper cuisine, among the relatives just rescued was his brother-in-law Theophilus, who was an excellent cook; they had only to ask him what ingredients he needed. And so, towards afternoon, Niketas was able to offer his host a dinner worthy of a logothete.
A fat kid, stuffed with garlic, onion, and leeks, covered with a sauce of marinated fish. «More than two hundred years ago,» Niketas said, «there came to Constantinople, as ambassador from your king Otto, a bishop of yours, one Liudprand, who was the guest of our basileus Nicephorus. It was not a happy encounter, and we learned later that Liudprand had set down an account of his journey, in which we Romei were described as sordid, crude, uncivilized, shabbily dressed. He could not bear even our resinous wine, and it seemed to him that all our food was drowned in oil. But there was one thing he described with enthusiasm, and it was this dish.»
The kid tasted exquisite to Baudolino. And he went on answering Niketas’s questions.
«So, living with an army, you learned to write. And you already knew how to read.»
«Yes, but writing is harder. And in Latin. Because, if the emperor had to curse some soldiers, he spoke Alaman, but if he was writing to the pope or to his cousin Jasomirgott, he had to do it in Latin, and the same with every document of the chancellery. I had to struggle to write down the first letters, I copied words and sentences without understanding what they meant, but
by the end of that year I knew how to write. Still, Rahewin hadn’t yet had time to teach me grammar.
I could copy but I couldn’t express myself on my own. That’s why I wrote in the language of Frascheta. But was that really the language of Frascheta? I was mixing memories of other speech that I had heard around me, the words of the people of Asti, and Pavia, Milan, Genoa, people who sometimes couldn’t understand one another.
Then later, in those parts we built a city, with people who came from here and from there, all united to build a tower, and they spoke in the same, identical way. I believe it was a bit the way I had invented.»
«You were a nomothete,» Niketas said.
«I don’t know what that means, but maybe I was. In any case, the later pages were already in fair Latin. I was by then in Ratisbon, in a quiet cloister, entrusted to the care of Archbishop Otto, and in that peacefulness I had many, many pages to leaf through…. I learned.
You will notice, among other things, that the parchment is clumsily scraped, and you can even glimpse parts of the text underneath. I was really a rogue. I was robbing my teachers; I had spent two nights scraping away what I believed was ancient writing, to make space for myself. The nights following, Bishop Otto was in despair because he could no longer find the first version of his Chronica sive Historia de duabus civitatibus that he had been writing for more than ten years, and he accused poor Rahewin of having lost it on some journey.
Two years later he determined to rewrite it, and I acted as his scribe, never daring to confess to him that I had been the one who scraped away the first version of his Chronica. As you say, justice does exist, because I then lost my own chronicle, only I didn’t have the courage to write it over. But I know that, as he rewrote, Otto changed some things….»
«In what sense?»
«If you read Otto’s Chronica, which is a history of the world, you see that he—how should I put it?—did not have a good opinion of the world and of us human beings. The world had perhaps begun well, but it had grown worse and worse; in other words, mundus senescit, the world grows old, we are approaching the end…. But in the very year that Otto began rewriting the Chronica, the emperor asked also that his feats be celebrated, and Otto began writing the Gesta Friderici, which he didn’t then finish because he died just over a year later, and Rahewin continued the work.
You can’t narrate the feats of your sovereign if you’re not convinced that with him on the throne a new era begins, that this, in other words, is a historia iucunda….»
«One can write the history of one’s own emperors without renouncing severity, explaining how and why they advance towards their ruin.» «Maybe you can do that, Master Niketas, but not the good Otto; and I’m only telling you how things went. So that holy man on the one hand was rewriting the Chronica, where the world went badly, and on the other the Gesta, where the world could only become better and better.
You will say he contradicted himself. If it were only that. What I suspect is that in the first version of the Chronica the world went even worse, and so as not to contradict himself too much, as he gradually went on rewriting the Chronica, Otto became more indulgent towards us humans. This is what I caused by scraping away the first version. Maybe, if that had remained,
Otto wouldn’t have had the courage to write the Gesta, and since it’s thanks to the Gesta that in the future they will say what Frederick did and didn’t do; if I hadn’t scraped away the first text, in the end Frederick wouldn’t have done everything we say he did.»
«You,» Niketas said to himself, «are like the liar of Crete: you tell me you’re a confirmed liar and insist I believe you. You want me to believe you’ve told lies to everybody but me. In all my years at the court of these emperors I have learned to extricate myself from the traps of masters of deceit far more sly than you…. By your own confession, you no longer
know who you are, perhaps because you have told too many lies, even to yourself. And you’re asking me to construct the story that eludes you. But I’m not a liar of your class. In all my life I have questioned the stories of others in order to extract the truth. Perhaps you’re asking me for a story that will absolve you of having killed someone to avenge the death of your Frederick. You are building, step by step, this story of love for your emperor, so that it will then be natural to explain why it was your duty to avenge him—assuming that he was killed, and that he was killed by the man you have killed.»
Then Niketas looked outside. «The fire is reaching the Acropolis,» he said.
«I
