William had often said to me that, even when he had been an inquisitor, he had always avoided torture; but Berengar misunderstood him (or William wanted to be misunderstood). In any case, the move was effective.
“Yes, yes,” Berengar said, bursting into a flood of tears, “I saw Adelmo that evening, but I saw him already dead!”
“How?” William asked. “At the foot of the hill?”
“No, no, I saw him here in the cemetery, he was moving among the graves, a ghost among ghosts. I met him and realized at once that I did not have a living man before me: his face was a corpse’s, his eyes already beheld the eternal punishment. Naturally, it was only the next morning, when I learned of his death, that I understood I had encountered his ghost, but even at that moment I realized I was having a vision and that there was a damned soul before me, one of the lemures… Oh, Lord, what a gravelike voice he had as he spoke to me!”
“And what did he say?”
“ ‘I am damned!’ That is what he said to me. ‘As you see me here, you see one returned from hell, and to hell I must go back.’ So he said to me. And I cried to him, ‘Adelmo, have you really come from hell? What are the pains of hell like?’ And I was trembling, because I had just left the office of compline where I had heard read the terrible pages on the wrath of the Lord. And he said to me, ‘The pains of hell are infinitely greater than our tongue can say. You see,’ he said, ‘this cape of sophisms in which I have been dressed till today? It oppresses me and weighs on me as if I had the highest tower of Paris or the mountain of the world on my back, and nevermore shall I be able to set it down. And this pain was given me by divine justice for my vainglory, for having believed my body a place of pleasures, and for having thought to know more than others, and for having enjoyed monstrous things, which, cherished in my imagination, have produced far more monstrous things within my soul — and now I must live with them in eternity. You see the lining of this cloak? It is as if it were all coals and ardent fire, and it is the fire that burns my body, and this punishment is given me for the dishonest sin of the flesh, whose vice I knew and cultivated, and this fire now unceasingly blazes and burns me! Give me your hand, my beautiful master,’ he said to me further, ‘that my meeting with you may be a useful lesson, in exchange for many of the lessons you gave me. Your hand, my beautiful master!’ And he shook the finger of his burning hand, and on my hand there fell a little drop of his sweat and it seemed to pierce my hand. For many days I bore the sign, only I hid it from all. Then he disappeared among the graves, and the next morning I learned that his body, which had so terrified me, was now dead at the foot of the cliff.”
Berengar was breathless, weeping. William asked him, “And why did he call you his beautiful master? You were the same age. Had you perhaps taught him something?”
Berengar hid his head, pulling his cowl over his face, and sank to his knees, embracing William’s legs. “I don’t know why he addressed me like that. I never taught him anything!” And he burst into sobs. “I am afraid, Father. I want to confess myself to you, Have mercy, a devil is devouring my bowels!”
William thrust him away and held out a hand to draw him to his feet. “No, Berengar,” he said to him, “do not ask me to confess you. Do not seal my lips by opening yours. What I want to know from you, you will tell me in another way. And if you will not tell me, I will discover it on my own. Ask me for mercy, if you like, but do not ask silence of me. Too many are silent in this abbey. Tell me, rather, how you saw his pale face if it was darkest night, how he could burn your hand if it was a night of rain and hail and snow, and what you were doing in the cemetery. Come” — and he shook him brutally by the shoulders — “tell me this at least!”
Berengar was trembling in every limb. “I don’t know what I was doing in the cemetery, I don’t remember, I don’t know how I saw his face, perhaps I had a light, no … he had a light, he was carrying a light, perhaps I saw his face in the light of the flame…”
“How could he carry a light if it was raining and snowing?”
“It was after compline, immediately after compline, it was not snowing yet, the snow began later… I remember that the first flurries began as I was fleeing. toward the dormitory. I was fleeing toward the dormitory as the ghost went in the opposite direction… And after that I know nothing more; please, question me no further, if you will not confess me.”
“Very well,” William said, “go now, o into the choir, go to speak with the Lord, since you will not speak with men, or go and find a monk who will hear your confession, because if you have not confessed your sins since then, you have approached the sacraments sacrilegiously. Go. We shall see each other again.”
Berengar ran off and vanished. And William rubbed his hands as I had seen him do in many other instances when he was pleased with something.
“Good,” he said. “Now many things become clear.”
“Clear, master?” I asked him. “Clear now that we also have Adelmo’s ghost?”
“My dear Adso,” William said, “that ghost does not seem very ghostly to me, and in any case he was reciting a page I have already read in some book conceived for the use of preachers. These monks read perhaps too much, and when they are excited they relive visions they learned from books. I don’t know whether Adelmo really said those things or whether Berengar simply heard them because he needed to hear them. The fact remains that this story confirms a series of my suppositions. For example: Adelmo died a suicide, and Berengar’s story tells us that, before dying, he went around in the grip of a great agitation, and in remorse for some act he had committed. He was agitated and frightened about his sin because someone had frightened him, and perhaps had told him the very episode of the infernal apparition that he recited to Berengar with such hallucinated mastery. And he was going through the cemetery because he was leaving the choir, where he had confided (or confessed) to someone who had filled him with terror and remorse. And from the cemetery he was heading, as Berengar informed us, in the opposite direction from the dormitory. Toward the Aedificium, then, but also (it is possible) toward the outside wall behind the stables, from where I have deduced he must have thrown himself into the chasm. And he threw himself down before the storm came, he died at the foot of the wall, and only later did the landslide carry his corpse between the north tower and the eastern one.”
“But what about the drop of burning sweat?”
“It was already part of the story he heard and repeated, or that Berengar imagined, in his agitation and his remorse. Because there is, as antistrophe to Adelmo’s remorse, a remorse of Berengar’s: you heard it. And if Adelmo came from the choir, he was perhaps carrying a taper, and the drop on his friend’s hand was only a drop of wax. But Berengar felt it burn much deeper because Adelmo surely called him his master. A sign, then, that Adelmo was reproaching him for having taught him something that now caused him to despair unto death. And Berengar knows it, he suffers because he knows he drove Adelmo to death by making him do something he should not have done. And it is not difficult to imagine what, my poor Adso, after what we have heard about our assistant librarian.”
“I believe I understand what happened between the two,” I said, embarrassed by my own wisdom, “but don’t all of us believe in a God of mercy? Adelmo, you say, had probably confessed; why did he seek to punish his first sin with a sin surely greater still, or at least of equal gravity?”
“Because someone said words of desperation to him. As I said, a page of a modern preacher must have prompted someone to repeat the words that frightened Adelmo and with which Adelmo frightened Berengar. In these last few years, as never before, to stimulate piety and terror and fervor in the populace, and obedience to human and divine law, preachers have used distressing words, macabre threats. Never before, as in our days, amid processions of flagellants, were sacred lauds heard inspired by the sorrows of Christ and of the Virgin, never has there been such insistence as there is today on strengthening the faith of the simple through the depiction of infernal torments.”