Then this description, passing from auctoritas to auctoritas, was transformed through successive imaginative exercises, and unicorns became fanciful animals, white and gentle. So if you hear there’s a unicorn in a wood, don’t go there with a virgin: the animal might resemble more closely the Venetian’s account than the description in this book.”
“But did the ancient masters happen to receive from God the revelation of the unicorn’s true nature?”
“Not the revelation: the experience. They were fortunate enough to be born in lands where unicorns live, or in times when unicorns lived in our own lands.”
“But then how can we trust ancient wisdom, whose traces you are always seeking, if it is handed down by lying books that have interpreted it with such license?”
“Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn’t ask ourselves what it says but what it means, a precept that the commentators of the holy books had very clearly in mind.
The unicorn, as these books speak of him, embodies a moral truth, or allegorical, or analogical, but one that remains true, as the idea that chastity is a noble virtue remains true. But as for the literal truth that sustains the other three truths, we have yet to see what original experience gave birth to the letter. The literal object must be discussed, even if its higher meaning remains good. In a book it is written that diamond can be cut only with a billy goat’s blood. My great master Roger Bacon said it was not true, simply because he had tried and had failed. But if the relation between a diamond and goat’s blood had had a nobler meaning, that would have remained intact.”
“Then higher truths can be expressed while the letter is lying,” I said. “Still, it grieves me to think this unicorn doesn’t exist, or never existed, or cannot exist one day.”
“It is not licit to impose confines on divine omnipotence, and if God so willed, unicorns could also exist. But console yourself, they exist in these books, which, if they do not speak of real existence, speak of possible existence.”
“So must we then read books without faith, which is a theological virtue?”
“There are two other theological virtues as well. The hope that the possible is. And charity, toward those who believed in good faith that the possible was.”
“But what use is the unicorn to you if your intellect doesn’t believe in it?”
“It is of use to me as Venantius’s prints in the snow were of use, after he was dragged to the pigs’ tub. The unicorn of the books is like a print. If the print exists, there must have existed something whose print it is.”
“But different from the print, you say.”
“Of course. The print does not always have the same shape as the body that impressed it, and it doesn’t always derive from the pressure of a body. At times it reproduces the impression a body has left in our mind: it is the print of an idea. The idea is sign of things, and the image is sign of the idea, sign of a sign. But from the image I reconstruct, if not the body, the idea that others had of it.”
“And this is enough for you?”
“No, because true learning must not be content with ideas, which are, in fact, signs, but must discover things in their individual truth. And so I would like to go back from this print of a print to the individual unicorn that stands at the beginning of the chain. As I would like to go back from the vague signs left by Venantius’s murderer (signs that could refer to many) to a sole individual, the murderer himself. But it isn’t always possible in a short time, and without the help of other signs.”
“Then I can always and only speak of something that speaks to me of something else, and so on. But the final something, the true one—does that never exist?”
“Perhaps it does: it is the individual unicorn. And don’t worry: one of these days you will encounter it, however black and ugly it may be.”
“Unicorns, lions, Arab authors, and Moors in general,” I said at that point, “no doubt this is the Africa of which the monks spoke.”
“No doubt this is it. And if it is, we should find the African poets mentioned by Pacificus of Tivoli.”
And, in fact, when we had retraced our steps and were in room L again, we found in a case a collection of books by Floro, Fronto, Apuleius, Martianus Capella, and Fulgentius.
“So this is where Berengar said the explanations of a certain secret should be,” I said.
“Almost here. He used the expression ‘finis Africae,’ and this was the expression that so infuriated Malachi. The finis could be this last room, unless . . .” He cried out: “By the seven churches of Clonmacnois! Haven’t you noticed something?”
“What?”
“Let’s go back to room S, where we started!”
We went back to the first blind room, where the verse read “Super thronos viginti quatuor.” It had four openings. One led to room Y, which had a window on the inner octagon. Another led to room P, which continued, along the outside façade, the YSPANIA sequence. The opening toward the tower led into room E, which we had just come through. Then there was a blank wall, and finally an opening that led into a second blind room with the initial U. Room S was the one with the mirror—luckily on the wall immediately to my right, or I would have been seized with fear again.
Looking carefully at my map, I realized the singularity of this room. Like the other blind rooms of the other three towers, it should have led to the central heptagonal room. If it didn’t, the entrance to the heptagon would have to be in the adjacent blind room, the U. But this room, which through one opening led into a room T with a window on the octagon, and through another was connected to room S, had the other three walls full, occupied with cases. Looking around, we confirmed what was now obvious from the map: for reasons of logic as well as strict symmetry, that tower should have had its heptagonal room, but there was none.
“None,” I said. “There’s no such room.”
“No, that’s not it. If there were no heptagon, the other rooms would be larger, whereas they are more or less the shape of those at the other extremes. The room exists, but cannot be reached.”
“Is it walled up?”
“Probably. And there is the finis Africae, there is the place that those monks who are now dead were hovering about, in their curiosity. It’s walled up, but that does not mean there is no access. Indeed, there surely is one, and Venantius found it, or was given its description by Adelmo, who had it from Berengar. Let’s read his notes again.”
He took Venantius’s paper from his habit and reread it: “The hand over the idol works on the first and the seventh of the four.” He looked around. “Why, of course! The ‘idolum’ is the image in the mirror! Venantius was thinking in Greek, and in that tongue, even more than in ours, ‘eidolon’ is image as well as ghost, and the mirror reflects our own image, distorted; we ourselves mistook it for a ghost the other night! But what, then, can be the four ‘supra idolum’? Something over the reflecting surface? Then we must place ourselves at a certain angle in order to perceive something reflected in the mirror that corresponds to Venantius’s description. . . .”
We tried every position, but with no result. Besides our images, the mirror reflected only hazy outlines of the rest of the room, dimly illuminated by the lamp.
“Then,” William meditated, “by ‘supra idolum’ he could mean beyond the mirror . . . which would oblige us to go into the next room, for surely this mirror is a door. . . .”
The mirror was taller than a normal man, fixed to the wall by a sturdy oak frame. We touched it in every manner, we tried to thrust our fingers into it, our nails between the frame and the wall, but the mirror was as fast as if it were part of the wall, a stone among stones.
“And if not beyond, it could be ‘super idolum,’” William murmured, and meanwhile raised his arm, stood on tiptoe, and ran his hand along the upper edge of the frame. He found nothing but dust.
“For that matter,” William reflected gloomily, “even if beyond it there were a room, the book we are seeking and the others sought is no longer in that room, because it was taken away, first by Venantius and then, God knows where, by Berengar.”
“But perhaps Berengar brought it back here.”
“No, that evening we were in the library, and everything suggests he died not long after the theft, that same night, in the balneary. Otherwise we would have seen him again the next morning. No matter . . . For the present we have established where the finis Africae is and we have almost all the necessary information for perfecting our map of the library. You must admit that many of the labyrinth’s mysteries have now been clarified.”
We went through
