Now I could no longer find the banqueters or the gifts they had brought, it was as if all the guests of the symposium were now in the crypt, each mummified in its own residue, each the diaphanous synecdoche of itself, Rachel as a bone, Daniel as a tooth, Sampson as a jaw, Jesus as a shred of purple garment. As if, at the end of the banquet, the feast transformed into the girl’s slaughter, it had become the universal slaughter, and here I was seeing its final result, the bodies (no, the whole terrestrial and sublunar body of those ravenous and thirsting feasters) transformed into a single dead body, lacerated and tormented like Dolcino’s body after his torture, transformed into a loathsome and resplendent treasure, stretched out to its full extent like the hide of a skinned and hung animal, which still contained, however, petrified, the leather sinews, the viscera, and all the organs, and even the features of the face. The skin with each of its folds, wrinkles, and scars, with its velvety plains, its forest of hairs, the dermis, the bosom, the pudenda, having become a sumptuous damask, and the breasts, the nails, the horny formations under the heel, the threads of the lashes, the watery substance of the eyes, the flesh of the lips, the thin spine of the back, the architecture of the bones, everything reduced to sandy powder, though nothing had lost its own form or respective placement, the legs emptied and limp as a boot, their flesh lying flat like a chasuble with all the scarlet embroidery of the veins, the engraved pile of the viscera, the intense and mucous ruby of the heart, the pearly file of even teeth arranged like a necklace, with the tongue as a pink-and-blue pendant, the fingers in a row like tapers, the seal of the navel reknotting the threads of the unrolled carpet of the belly … From every corner of the crypt, now I was grinned at, whispered to, bidden to death by this macrobody divided among glass cases and reliquaries and yet reconstructed in its vast and irrational whole, and it was the same body that at the supper had eaten and tumbled obscenely but here, instead, appeared to me fixed in the intangibility of its deaf and blind ruin. And Ubertino, seizing me by the arm, digging his nails into my flesh, whispered to me: “You see, it is the same thing, what first triumphed in its folly and took delight in its jesting now is here, punished and rewarded, liberated from the seduction of the passions, rigidified by eternity, consigned to the eternal frost that is to preserve and purify it, saved from corruption through the triumph of corruption, because nothing more can reduce to dust that which is already dust and mineral substance, mors est quies viatoris, finis est omnis laboris…”
But suddenly Salvatore entered the crypt, glowing like a devil, and cried, “Fool! Can’t you see this is the great Lyotard? What are you afraid of, my little master? Here is the cheese in batter!” And suddenly the crypt was bright with reddish flashes and it was again the kitchen, but not so much a kitchen as the inside of a great womb, mucous and viscid, and in the center an animal black as a raven and with a thousand hands was chained to a huge grate, and it extended those limbs to snatch everybody around it, and as the peasant when thirsty squeezes a bunch of grapes, so that great beast squeezed those it had snatched so that its hands broke them all, the legs of some, the heads of others, and then it sated itself, belching a fire that seemed to stink more than sulphur. But, wondrous mystery, that scene no longer instilled fear in me, and I was surprised to see that I could watch easily that “good devil” (so I thought) who after all was none other than Salvatore, because now I knew all about the mortal human body, its sufferings and its corruption, and I feared nothing any more. In fact, in the light of that flame, which now seemed mild and convivial, I saw again all the guests of the supper, now restored to their original forms, singing and declaring, that everything was beginning again, and among them was the maiden, whole and most beautiful, who said to me, “it is nothing, it is nothing, you will see: I shall be even more beautiful than before; just let me go for a moment and burn on the pyre, then we shall meet again here!” And she displayed to me, God have mercy on me, her vulva, into which I entered, and I found myself in a beautiful cave, which seemed the happy valley of the golden age, dewy with waters and fruits and trees that bore cheeses in batter. And all were thanking the abbot for the lovely feast, and they showed him their affection and good humor by pushing him, kicking him, tearing his clothes, laying him on the ground, striking his rod with rods, as he laughed and begged them to stop tickling him. And, riding mounts whose nostrils emitted clouds of brimstone, the Friars of the Poor Life entered, carrying at their belts purses full of gold with which they transformed wolves into lambs and lambs into wolves and crowned them emperor with the approval of the assembly, of the people, who sang praises of God’s infinite omnipotence. “Ut cachinnis dissolvatur, torqueatur rictibus!” Jesus shouted, waving his crown of thorns. Pope John came in, cursing the confusion and saying, “At this rate I don’t know where it all will end!” But everyone mocked him and, led by the abbot, went out with the pigs to hunt truffles in the forest. i was about to follow them when in a corner I saw William, emerging from the labyrinth and carrying in his hand the magnet, which pulled him rapidly northward. “Do not leave me, master!” I shouted. “I, too, want to see what is in the finis Africae!”
“You have already seen it!” William answered, far away by now. And I woke up as the last words of the funeral chant were ending in the church:
A sign that my vision, rapid like all visions, if it had not lasted the space of an “amen,” as the saying goes, had lasted almost the length of a “Dies irae.”
AFTER TERCE
Dazed, I came out through the main door and discovered a little crowd there. The Franciscans were leaving, and William had come down to say good-bye to them.
I joined in the farewells, the fraternal embraces. Then I asked William when the others would be leaving, with the prisoners. He told me they had already left, half an hour before, while we were in the treasure crypt, or perhaps, I thought, when I was dreaming.
For a moment I was aghast, then I recovered myself. Better so. I would not have been able to bear the sight of the condemned (I meant the poor wretched cellarer and Salvatore … and, of course, I also meant the girl) being dragged off, far away and forever. And besides, I was still so upset by my dream that my feelings seemed numb.