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The Abbey burned for three days and three nights, and the last efforts were of no avail. As early as that morning of the seventh day of our sojourn in that place, when the survivors were fully aware that no building could be saved, when the finest constructions showed only their ruined outer walls, and the church, as if drawing into itself, swallowed its tower — even at that point everyone’s will to combat the divine chastisement failed. The rush for the last few buckets of water grew more and more listless, while the chapter house and the superb apartments of the abbot were still burning. By the time the fire reached the far side of the various workshops, the servants had long since saved as many objects as they could, and had chosen to beat the countryside to recapture at least some of the livestock, which had fled beyond the walls in the confusion of the night.
I saw some of the servants venture into what remained of the church: I presumed they were trying to get into the crypt to seize some precious object before running away. I do not know whether they succeeded, whether the crypt had not already collapsed, whether the louts did not sink into the bowels of the earth in their attempt to reach the treasure.
Meanwhile, men were coming up from the village to lend a hand or to try to snatch some further booty. The dead for the most part remained among the ruins, which were still red-hot. On the third day, when the wounded had been treated and the corpses found outside had been buried, the monks and all the others collected their belongings and abandoned the still-smoking abbey, as a place accursed. They scattered, I do not know whereto.
William and I left those parts on two horses we found astray in the wood; we considered them res nullius by now. We headed east. When we reached Bobbio again, we began to receive bad news of the Emperor. On arriving in Rome, he had been crowned by the people. Considering any agreement with John now impossible, he had chosen an antipope, Nicholas V Marsilius had been named spiritual vicar of Rome, but through his fault, or his weakness, things very sad to report were taking place in that city. Priests loyal to the Pope and unwilling to say Mass were tortured, an Augustinian prior had been thrown into the lions’ pit on the Capitoline. Marsilius and John of Jandun had declared John a heretic, and Louis had had him sentenced to death. But the Emperor’s misrule was antagonizing the local lords and depleting public funds. Gradually, as we heard this news, we delayed our descent to Rome, and I realized that William did not want to find himself witnessing events that would dash his hopes.
When we came to Pomposa, we learned that Rome had rebelled against Louis, who had moved back up toward Pisa, while John’s legates were triumphantly entering the papal city.
Meanwhile, Michael of Cesena had realized that his presence in Avignon was producing no results — indeed, he feared for his life — so he had fled, joining Louis in Pisa.
Soon, foreseeing events and learning that the Bavarian would move on to Munich, we reversed our route and decided to proceed there, also because William sensed that Italy was becoming unsafe for him. In the ensuing months and years, Louis saw the alliance of his supporters, the Ghibelline lords, dissolve; and the following year the Antipope Nicholas was to surrender to John, presenting himself with a rope around his neck.
When we came to Munich, I had to take leave of my good master, amid many tears. His destiny was uncertain, and my family preferred for me to return to Melk. After that tragic night when William revealed to me his dismay before the ruins of the abbey, as if by tacit agreement we had not spoken again of that story. Nor did we mention it in the course of our sorrowful farewell.
My master gave me much good advice about my future studies, and presented me with the glasses Nicholas had made for him, since he had his own back again. I was still young, he said to me, but one day they would come in handy (and, truly, I am wearing them on my nose now, as I write these lines). Then he embraced me with a father’s tenderness and dismissed me.
I never saw him. again. I learned much later that he had died during he great plague that raged through Europe toward the middle of this century. I pray always that God received his soul and forgave him the many acts of pride that his intellectual vanity had made him commit.
Years later, as a grown man, I had occasion to make a journey to Italy, sent by my abbot. I could not resist temptation, and on my return I went far out of my way to revisit what remained of the abbey.
The two villages on the slopes of the mountain were deserted, the lands around them uncultivated. When I climbed up to the top, a spectacle of desolation and death appeared before my eyes, which moistened with tears.
Of the great and magnificent constructions that once adorned that place, only scattered ruins remained, as had happened before with the monuments of the ancient pagans in the city of Rome. Ivy covered the shreds of wa is, columns, the few architraves still intact. Weeds invaded the ground on all sides, and there was no telling where the vegetables and the flowers had once grown. Only the location of the cemetery was recognizable, because of some graves that still rose above the level of the terrain. Sole sign of life, some birds of prey hunted lizards and serpents that, like basilisks, slithered anion g the stones or crawled over the walls. Of the church door only a few traces remained, eroded by mold. Half of the tympanum survived, and I still glimpsed there, dilated by the elements and dulled by lichens, the left eye of the enthroned Christ, and something of the lion’s face.
The Aedificium, except for the south wall, which was in ruins, seemed yet to stand and defy the course of time. The two outer towers, over the cliff, appeared almost untouched, but all the windows were empty sockets whose slimy tears were rotting vines. Inside, the work of art, destroyed, became confused with the work of nature, and across vast stretches of the kitchen the eye ran to the open heavens through the breach of the upper floors and the roof, fallen like fallen angels. Everything that was not green with moss was still black from the smoke of so many decades ago.
Poking about in the rubble, I found at times scraps of parchment that had drifted down from the scriptorium and the library and had survived like treasures buried in the earth; I began to collect them, as if I were going to piece together the torn pages of a book. Then I noticed that in one of the towers there rose, tottering but still intact, a circular staircase to the scriptorium, and from there, by climbing a sloping bit of the ruin, I could reach the level of the library: which, however, was only a sort of gallery next to the outside walls, looking down into the void at every point.
Along one stretch of wall I found a bookcase, still miraculously erect, having come through the fire I cannot say how; it was rotted by water and consumed by termites. In it there were still a few pages. Other remnants I found by rummaging in the ruins below. Mine was a poor harvest, but I spent a whole day reaping it, as if from those disiecta membra of the library a message might reach me. Some fragments of parchment had fade, others permitted the glimpse of an image’s shadow, or the ghost of one or more words. At times I found pages where whole sentences were legible; more often, intact bindings, protected by what had once been metal studs… Ghosts of books, apparently intact on the outside but consumed within; yet sometimes a half page had been saved, an incipit was discernible, a title.
I collected every relic I could find, filling two traveling sacks with them, abandoning things useful to me in order to save that miserable hoard.
Along the return journey and afterward at Melk, I spent many, many hours trying to decipher those remains. Often from a word or a surviving image I could recognize what the work had been. When I found, in time, other copies of those books, I studied them with love, as if destiny had left me this bequest, as if having identified the destroyed copy were a clear sign from heaven that said to me: Tolle et lege. At the end of my patient reconstruction, I had before me a kind of lesser library, a symbol of the greater, vanished one: a library made up of fragments, quotations, unfinished sentences, amputated stumps of books.