In which justice is meted out, and there is the embarrassing impression that everyone is wrong.
Bernard Gui took his place at the center of the great walnut table in the chapter hall. Beside him a Dominican performed the function of notary, and two prelates of the papal legation sat flanking him, as judges. The cellarer was standing before the table, between two archers.
The abbot turned to William and whispered: “I do not know whether this procedure is legitimate. The Lateran Council of 1215 decreed in its Canon Thirty-seven that a person cannot be summoned to appear before judges whose seat is more than two days’ march from his domicile. Here the situation is perhaps different; it is the judge who has come from a great distance, but…”
“The inquisitor is exempt from all normal jurisdiction,” William said, “and does not have to follow the precepts of ordinary law. He enjoys a special privilege and is not even bound to hear lawyers.”
I looked at the cellarer. Remigio was in wretched shape. He looked around like a frightened animal, as if he recognized the movements and gestures of a liturgy he feared. Now I know he was afraid for two reasons, equally terrifying: one, that he had been caught, to all appearances, in flagrant crime; the other, that the day before, when Bernard had begun his inquiry, collecting rumors and insinuations, Remigio had already been afraid his past would come to light; and his alarm had grown when he saw them arrest Salvatore.
If the hapless Remigio was in the grip of his own fear, Bernard Gui, for his part, knew how to transform his victims’ fear into terror. He did not speak: while all were now expecting him to begin the interrogation, he kept his hands on the papers he had before him, pretending to arrange them, but absently. His gaze was really fixed on the accused, and it was a gaze in which hypocritical indulgence (as if to say: Never fear, you are in the hands of a fraternal assembly that can only want your good) mixed with icy irony (as if to say: You do not yet know what your good is, and I will shortly tell you) and merciless severity (as if to say: But in any case I am your judge here, and you are in my power). All things that the cellarer already knew, but which the judge’s silence and delay served to make him feel more deeply, so that, as he became more and more humiliated, his uneasiness would be transformed into desperation instead of relaxation, and he would belong entirely to the judge, soft wax in his hands.
Finally Bernard broke the silence. He uttered some ritual formulas, told the judges they would now proceed to the interrogation of the defendant with regard to two equally odious crimes, one of which was obvious to all but less deplorable than the other, because the defendant had been surprised in the act of murder when he was actually being sought for the crime of heresy.
It was said. The cellarer hid his face in his hands, which he could move only with difficulty because they were bound in chains. Bernard began the questioning.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Remigio of Varagine. I was born fifty-two years ago, and while still a boy, I entered the convent of the Minorites in Varagine.”
“And how does it happen that today you are found in the order of Saint Benedict?”
“Years ago, when the Pope issued the bull Sancta Romana, because I was afraid of being infected by the heresy of the Fraticelli … though I had never shared their notions … I thought it was better for my sinning soul to escape an atmosphere filled with seductions, and I applied and was received among the monks of this abbey, where for more than eight years I have served as cellarer.”
“You escaped the seductions of heresy,” Bernard mocked, “or, rather, you escaped the investigation of those who had determined to discover the heresy and uproot it, and the good Cluniac monks believed they were performing an act of charity in receiving you and those like you. But changing habit is not enough to erase from the soul the evil of heretical depravity, and so we are here now to find out what lurks in the recesses of your impenitent soul and what you did before arriving at this holy place.”
“My soul is innocent and I do not know what you mean when you speak of heretical depravity,” the cellarer said cautiously.
“You see?” Bernard cried, addressing the other judges. “They’re all alike! When one of them is arrested, he faces judgment as if his conscience were at peace and without remorse. And they do not realize this is the most obvious sign of their guilt, because a righteous man on trial is uneasy! Ask him whether he knows the reason why I had ordered his arrest. Do you know it, Remigio?”
“My lord,” the cellarer replied, “I would be happy to learn it from your lips.”
I was surprised, because it seemed to me the cellarer was answering the ritual questions with equally ritual words, as if he were well versed in the rules of the investigation and its pitfalls and had long been trained to face such an eventuality.
“There,” Bernard cried, “the typical reply of the impenitent heretic! They cover trails like foxes and it is very difficult to catch them out, because their beliefs grant them the right to lie in order to evade due punishment. They recur to tortuous answers, trying to trap the inquisitor, who already has to endure contact with such loathsome people. So then, Remigio, you have never had anything to do with the so-called Fraticelli or Friars of the Poor Life, or the Beghards?”
“I experienced the vicissitudes of the Minorites when there was long debate about poverty, but I have never belonged to the sect of the Beghards!”
“You see?” Bernard said. “He denies ever having been a Beghard, because the Beghards, though they share the heresy of the Fraticelli, consider the latter a dead branch of the Franciscan order and consider themselves more pure and perfect. But much of the behavior of one group is like that of the others. Can you deny, Remigio, that you have been seen in church, huddled down with your face against the wall, or prostrate with your hood over your head, instead of kneeling with folded hands like other men?”
“Also in the order of Saint Benedict the monks prostrate themselves, at the proper times….”
“I am not asking what you did at the proper times, but at the improper ones! So do not deny that you assumed one posture or the other, typical of the Beghards! But you are not a Beghard, you say…. Tell me, then: what do you believe?”
“My lord, I believe everything a good Christian should….”
“A holy reply! And what does a good Christian believe?”
“What the holy church teaches.”
“And which holy church? The church that is so considered by those believers who call themselves perfect, the Pseudo Apostles, the heretical Fraticelli, or the church they compare to the whore of Babylon, in which all of us devoutly believe?”
“My lord,” the cellarer said, bewildered, “tell me which you believe is the true church….”
“I believe it is the Roman church, one, holy, and apostolic, governed by the Pope and his bishops.”
“So I believe,” the cellarer said.
“Admirable shrewdness!” the inquisitor cried. “Admirable cleverness de dicto! You all heard him: he means to say he believes that I believe in this church, and he evades the requirement of saying what he believes in! But we know well these weasel tricks! Let us come to the point. Do you believe that the sacraments were instituted by our Lord, that to do true penance you must confess to the servants of God, that the Roman church has the power to loosen and to bind on this earth that which will be bound and loosened in heaven?”
“Should I not believe that?”
“I did not ask what you should believe, but what you do believe!”
“I believe everything that you and the other good doctors command me to believe,” the frightened cellarer said.
“Ah! But are not the good doctors you mention perhaps those who command your sect? Is this what you meant when you spoke of the good doctors? Are these perverse liars the men you follow in recognizing your articles of faith? You imply that if I believe what they believe, then you will believe me; otherwise you will believe only them!”
“I did not say that, my lord,” the cellarer stammered. “You are making me say it. I believe you, if you teach me what is good.”
“Oh, what impudence!” Bernard shouted, slamming his fist on the table. “You repeat from memory with grim obstinacy the formula they teach in your sect. You say you will believe me only if I preach what your sect considers good. Thus the Pseudo Apostles have always answered and thus you answer now, perhaps without realizing it, because from your lips again the words emerge that you were once trained for deceiving inquisitors. And so you are accusing yourself with your own words, and I would fall into your trap only if I had not had a long experience of inquisition…. But let us come to the real question, perverse man! Have you ever heard of Gherardo Segarelli of Parma?”
“I have heard him spoken of,” the cellarer said, turning pale, if one could still speak of pallor on that destroyed face.
“Have you ever heard of Fra Dolcino of Novara?”
“I have heard him spoken of.”
“Have you ever seen him in person and had conversation with him?”
The cellarer remained silent for a few moments, as if to gauge how far he should go in telling a part of the truth. Then he made up his mind and said, in a faint voice, “I have seen him and spoken with him.”
“Louder!” Bernard shouted. “Let a word of truth finally be heard escaping your lips! When did you speak with him?”
“My lord,” the cellarer said, “I was a monk in a convent near Novara when Dolcino’s people gathered in those parts, and they even went past my convent, and at first no one knew clearly who they were….”
“You lie! How could a Franciscan of Varagine be in a convent in the Novara region? You were not in a convent, you were already a member of a band of Fraticelli roaming around those lands and living on alms, and then you joined the Dolcinians!”
“How can you assert that, sir?” the cellarer asked, trembling.
“I will tell you how I can, indeed I must, assert it,” Bernard said, and he ordered Salvatore to be brought in.
The sight of the wretch, who had certainly spent the night under his own interrogation, not public and more severe than this one, moved me to pity. Salvatore’s face, as I have said, was horrible normally, but that morning it was more bestial than ever. And though it showed no signs of violence, the way his chained body moved, the limbs disjointed, almost incapable of walking, the way he was dragged by the archers like a monkey tied to a rope, revealed very clearly how his ghastly questioning must have proceeded.
“Bernard has tortured him…” I murmured to William.
“Not at all,” William answered. “An inquisitor never tortures. The custody of the defendant’s body is always entrusted to the secular arm.”
“But it’s the same thing!” I said.
“Not in the least. It isn’t the same thing for the inquisitor, whose hands remain clean, or for the accused, who, when the inquisitor arrives, suddenly finds support in him, an easing of his sufferings, and so he opens his heart.”
I looked at my master. “You’re jesting,” I said, aghast.
“Do these seem things to jest about?” William replied.
Bernard was now questioning Salvatore, and my pen cannot transcribe the man’s broken words—if it were possible, more Babelish than ever, as he answered, unmanned, reduced to the state of a baboon, while all understood him only with difficulty. Guided by Bernard, who asked the questions in such a way that he could reply only yes or no, Salvatore was unable to tell any lies. And what Salvatore said my reader can easily imagine. He told, or confirmed that he had told during the night, a part of that story I had already pieced together: his wanderings as a Fraticello, Shepherd, and Pseudo Apostle; and how in the days of Fra Dolcino he met Remigio among the Dolcinians and escaped with him, following the Battle of Monte Rebello, taking refuge after various ups and downs in the Casale convent. Further, he added that the heresiarch Dolcino, near defeat and capture, had entrusted to Remigio certain letters, to be carried he did not know where or to whom. And Remigio always carried those letters with him, never daring to deliver them, and on his arrival at the abbey, afraid of keeping them on his person but not wanting to destroy them, he entrusted them to the librarian, yes, to Malachi, who was to hide them somewhere in the recesses of the Aedificium.
As Salvatore spoke, the cellarer was looking at him with hatred, and at a certain point he could not restrain himself from shouting, “Snake, lascivious monkey, I was your father, friend, shield, and this is how you repay me!”
Salvatore looked at his protector, now in need of protection, and answered, with an effort, “Lord Remigio, while I could be, I was your man. And you were to me dilectissimo. But you know the chief constable’s family. Qui non habet caballum vadat cum pede….”
“Madman!” Remigio shouted at him again. “Are you hoping to save yourself? You, too, will die as a heretic, you know? Say that you spoke under torture; say you invented it all!”
“What do I know, lord, what all these heresias are called…. Patarini, gazzesi, leoniste, arnaldiste, speroniste, circoncisi … I am not homo literatus. I sinned with no malicia, and Signor Bernardo Magnificentissimo knows it, and I am hoping in his indulgencia in nomine patre et filio et spiritis sanctis…”
“We shall be indulgent insofar as our office allows,” the inquisitor said, “and we shall consider with paternal benevolence the good will with which you have opened your spirit. Go now, go and meditate further in your cell, and trust in the mercy of the Lord. Now we must debate a question of quite different import. So, then, Remigio, you were carrying with you some letters from Dolcino, and you gave them to your brother monk who is responsible for the library….”
“That is not true, not true!” the cellarer cried, as if such a defense could still be effective. And, rightly, Bernard interrupted him: “But you are not the one who must confirm this: it is Malachi of Hildesheim.”
He had the librarian called, but Malachi was not among those present. I knew he was either in the scriptorium or near the infirmary, seeking Benno and the book. They went to fetch him, and when he appeared, distraught, trying to look no one in the face, William muttered with dismay, “And now Benno is free to do what he pleases.” But he was mistaken, because I saw Benno’s face peep up over the shoulders of the other monks crowding around the door of the hall, to follow the interrogation. I pointed him out to William. We thought that Benno’s curiosity about what was happening was even stronger than his curiosity about the book. Later we learned that, by then, he had already concluded an ignoble bargain of his own.
Malachi appeared before the judges, his eves never meeting those of the cellarer.
“Malachi,” Bernard said, “this morning, after Salvatore’s confession during the night, I asked you whether you had received from the defendant here present any letters….”
“Malachi!” the cellarer cried. “You swore you would do nothing to harm me!”
Malachi shifted slightly toward the defendant, to whom his back was turned, and said in a low voice, which I could barely hear, “I did not swear falsely. If I could have done anything to harm you, it was done already. The letters were handed over to Lord Bernard this morning, before you killed Severinus….”
“But you know, you must know. I didn’t kill Severinus! You know because you were there before me!”
“I?” Malachi asked. “I went in there after they discovered you.”
“Be that as it may,” Bernard interrupted, “what were you looking for in Severinus’s laboratory, Remigio?”
The cellarer turned to William with dazed eyes, then looked at Malachi, then at Bernard again. “But this morning I … I heard Brother William here present tell Severinus to guard certain papers … and since last night, since Salvatore was captured, I have been afraid those letters—”
“Then you know something about those letters!” Bernard cried triumphantly. The cellarer at this point was trapped. He was caught between two necessities: to clear himself of the accusation of heresy, and to dispel the suspicion of murder. He must have decided to face the second accusation—instinctively, because by now he was acting by no rule, and without counsel. “I will talk about the letters later…. I will explain … I will tell how they came into my possession…. But let me tell what happened this morning. I thought there would be talk of those letters when I saw Salvatore fall into the hands of Lord Bernard; for years the memory of those letters has been tormenting my heart…. Then when I heard William and Severinus speaking of some papers … I cannot say … overcome with fear, I thought Malachi had got rid of them and given them to Severinus…. I wanted to destroy them and so I went to Severinus…. The door was open and Severinus was already dead, I started searching through his things for the letters…. I was just afraid….”
William whispered into my ear, “Poor fool, fearing one danger, he has plunged headlong into another….”
“Let us assume that you are telling almost—I say, almost—the truth,” Bernard intervened. “You thought Severinus had the letters and you looked for them in his laboratory. And why did you think he had them? Why did you first kill the other brothers? Did you perhaps think those letters had for some time been passing through many hands? Is it perhaps customary in this abbey to gather relics of burned heretics?”
I saw the abbot start. Nothing could be more insidious than an accusation of collecting relics of heretics, and Bernard was very sly in mixing the murders with heresy, and everything with the life of the abbey. I was interrupted in my reflections by the cellarer, who was shouting that he had nothing to do with the other crimes. Bernard indulgently calmed him: this, for the moment, was not the question they were discussing, Remigio was being interrogated for a crime of heresy, and he should not attempt (and here Bernard’s voice became stern) to draw attention away from his heretical past by speaking of Severinus or trying to cast suspicion on Malachi. So he should therefore return to the letters.
“Malachi of Hildesheim,” he said, addressing the witness. “You are not here as a defendant. This morning you answered my questions and my request with no attempt to hide anything. Now you will repeat here what you said to me this morning, and you will have nothing to fear.”
“I repeat what I said this morning,” Malachi said. “A short time after Remigio arrived up here, he began to take charge of the kitchen, and we met frequently for reasons connected with our duties—as librarian, I am charged with shutting up the whole Aedificium at night, and therefore also the kitchen. I have no reason to deny that we became close friends, nor had I any reason to harbor suspicions of this man. He told me that he had with him some documents of a secret nature, entrusted to him in confession, which should not fall into profane hands and which he dared not keep himself. Since I was in charge of the only part of the monastery forbidden to all the others, he asked me to keep those papers, far from any curious gaze, and I consented, never suspecting the documents were of a heretical nature, nor did I even read them as I placed them … I placed them in the most inaccessible of the secret rooms of the library, and after that I forgot this matter, until this morning, when the lord inquisitor mentioned the papers to me, and then I fetched them and handed them over to him….”
The abbot, frowning, took the floor. “Why did you not inform me of this agreement of yours with the cellarer? The library is not intended to house things belonging to the monks!” The abbot had made it clear that the abbey had no connection with this business.
“My lord,” Malachi answered, confused, “it seemed to me a thing of scarce importance. I sinned without malice.”
“Of course, of course,” Bernard said, in a cordial tone, “we are all convinced the librarian acted in good faith, and his frankness in collaborating with this court is proof. I fraternally beg Your Magnificence not to chastise him for this imprudent act of the past. We believe Malachi. And we ask him only to confirm now, under oath, that the papers I will now show him are those he gave me this morning and are those that Remigio of Varagine consigned to him years ago, after his arrival at the abbey.” He displayed two parchments among the papers lying on the table. Malachi looked at them and said in a firm voice, “I swear by God the Father Almighty, by the most holy Virgin, and by all the saints that so it is and so it was.”
“That is enough for me,” Bernard said. “You may go, Malachi of Hildesheim.”
Just before Malachi reached the door, his head bowed, a voice was heard from the curious crowd packed at the rear of the hall: “You hid his letters and he showed you the novices’ asses in the kitchen!” There was some scattered laughter, and Malachi hurried out, pushing others aside left and right. I could have sworn the voice was Aymaro’s, but the words had been shouted in falsetto. The abbot, his face purple, shouted for silence and threatened terrible punishments for all, commanding the monks to clear the hall. Bernard smiled treacherously; Cardinal Bertrand, at one side of the hall, bent to the ear of Jean d’Anneaux and said something to him. The other man reacted by covering his mouth with his hand and bowing his head as if he were coughing. William said to me, “The cellarer was not only a carnal sinner for his own purposes; he also acted as procurer. But Bernard cares nothing about that, except that it embarrasses Abo, the imperial mediator….”
He was interrupted by Bernard, who now spoke straight to him. “I would also be interested to know from you, Brother William, what papers you were talking about this morning with Severinus, when the cellarer overheard you and misunderstood.”
William returned his gaze. “He did misunderstand me, in fact. We were referring to a copy of the treatise on canine hydrophobia by Ayyub al-Ruhawi, a remarkably erudite book that you must surely know of by reputation, and which must often have been of great use to you. Hydrophobia, Ayyub says, may be recognized by twenty-five evident signs….”
Bernard, who belonged to the order of the Dominicans, the Domini canes, the Lord’s dogs, did not consider it opportune to start another battle. “So the matters were extraneous to the case under discussion,” he said rapidly. And the trial continued.