Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose

“Lycurgus had a statue erected to laughter.”

“You read that in the libellus of Cloritian, who tried to absolve mimes of the sin of impiety, and tells how a sick man was healed by a doctor who helped him laugh. What need was there to heal him, if God had established that his earthly day had reached its end?”

“I don’t believe the doctor cured him. He taught him to laugh at his illness.”

“Illness is not exorcised. It is destroyed.”

“With the body of the sick man.”

“If necessary.”

“You are the Devil,” William said then.

Jorge seemed not to understand. If he had been able to see, I would say he stared at his interlocutor with a dazed look. “I?” he said.

“Yes. They lied to you. The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt. The Devil is grim because he knows where he is going, and, in moving, he always returns whence he came. You are the Devil, and like the Devil you live in darkness. If you wanted to convince me, you have failed. I hate you, Jorge, and if I could, I would lead you downstairs, across the ground, naked, with fowl’s feathers stuck in your asshole and your face painted like a juggler and a buffoon, so the whole monastery would laugh at you and be afraid no longer. I would like to smear honey all over you and then roll you in feathers, and take you on a leash to fairs, to say to all: He was announcing the truth to you and telling you that the truth has the taste of death, and you believed, not in his words, but in his grimness. And now I say to you that, in the infinite whirl of possible things, God allows you also to imagine a world where the presumed interpreter of the truth is nothing but a clumsy raven, who repeats words learned long ago.”

“You are worse than the Devil, Minorite,” Jorge said. “You are a clown, like the saint who gave birth to you all. You are like your Francis, who de toto corpore fecerat linguam, who preached sermons giving a performance like a mountebank’s, who confounded the miser by putting fold pieces in his hand, who humiliated the nuns’ devotion by reciting the ‘Miserere’ instead of the sermon, who begged in French, and imitated with a piece of wood the movements of a violin player, who disguised himself as a tramp to confound the gluttonous monks, who flung himself naked in the snow, spoke with animals and plants, transformed the very mystery of the Nativity into a village spectacle, called the lamb of Bethlehem by imitating the bleat of a sheep… It was a good school. Was that Friar Diotisalvi of Florence not a Minorite?”

“Yes.” William smiled. “The one who went to the convent of the preachers and said he would not accept food if first they did not give him a piece of Brother John’s tunic to preserve as a relic, and when he was given it he wiped his behind and threw it in the dung-heap and with a stick rolled it around in the dung, shouting: Alas, help me, brothers, because I dropped the saint’s relic in the latrine!”

“This story amuses you, apparently. Perhaps you would like to tell me also the one about that other Minorite Friar Paul Millemosche, who one day fell full length on the ice; when his fellow citizens mocked him and one asked him whether he would not like to lie on something better, he said to the man: Yes, your wife … That is how you and your brothers seek the truth.”

“That is how Francis taught people to look at things from another direction.”

“But we have disciplined them. You saw them yesterday, your brothers. They have rejoined our ranks, they no longer speak like the simple. The simple must not speak. This book would have justified the idea that the tongue of the simple is the vehicle of wisdom. This had to be prevented, which I have done. You say I am the Devil, but it is not true: I have been the hand of God.”

“The hand of God creates; it does not conceal.”

“There are boundaries beyond which it is not permitted to go. God decreed that certain papers should bear the words ‘hic sunt leones.’ ”

“God created the monsters, too. And you. And He wants everything to be spoken of.”

Jorge reached out his shaking hands and drew the book to him. He held it open but turned it around, so that William could still see it in the right position. “Then why,” he said, “did He allow this text to be lost over the course of the centuries, and only one copy to be saved, and the copy of that copy, which had ended up God knows where, to remain buried for years in the hands of an infidel who knew no Greek, and then to lie abandoned in the secrecy of an old library, where I, not you, was called by Providence to find it and to hide it for more years still? I know, I know as if I saw it written in adamantine letters, with my eyes, which see things you do not see, I know that this was the will of the Lord, and I acted, interpreting it. In the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”

The old man was silent. He held both hands open on the book, as if caressing its pages, flattening them the better to read them, or as if he wanted to protect the book from a raptor’s talons.

“All of this, in any case, has been to no avail,” William said to him. “Now it is over. I have found you, I have found the book, and the others died in vain.”

“Not in vain,” Jorge said. “Perhaps there were too many of them. And if you needed proof that this book is accursed, you have had it. And to ensure they have not died in vain, one more death will not be too many.”

He spoke, and with his fleshless, diaphanous hands he began slowly tearing to strips and shreds the limp pages of the manuscript, stuffing them into his mouth, slowly swallowing as if he were consuming the host and he wanted to make it flesh of his flesh.

William looked at him, fascinated, and seemed not to grasp what was happening. Then he recovered himself and leaned forward, shouting, “What are you doing?” Jorge smiled, baring his bloodless gums, as a yellowish slime trickled from his pale lips over the sparse white hairs on his chin.

“You were awaiting the sound of the seventh trumpet, were you not? Now listen to what the voice says: Seal what the seven thunders have said and do not write it, take and devour it, it will make bitter your belly but to your lips it will be sweet as honey. You see? Now I seal that which was not to be said, in the grave I become.”

He laughed, he, Jorge. For the first time I heard him laugh… He laughed with his throat, though his lips did not assume the shape of gaiety, and he seemed almost to be weeping. “You did not expect it, William, not this conclusion, did you? This old man, by the grace of God, wins once more, does he not?” And as William tried to take the book away from him, Jorge, who sensed the movement, feeling the vibration of the air, drew back, clasping the volume to his chest with his left hand while his right went on tearing the pages and cramming them into his mouth.

He was on the other side of the table, and William, who could not reach him, tried abruptly to move around the obstacle. But he knocked over his stool, catching his habit in it, so that Jorge was able to perceive the disturbance. The old man laughed again, louder this. time, and with unexpected rapidity thrust out his right hand, groping for the lamp. Guided by the heat, he reached the flame and pressed his hand over it, unafraid of pain, and the light went out. The room was plunged into darkness, and for the last time we heard the laughter of Jorge, who said, “Find me now! Now I am the one who sees best!” Then he was silent and did not make another sound, moving with those silent footsteps that always made his appearances so unexpected; and we heard only, from time to time, in different parts of the room, the sound of the tearing paper.