Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

The final proof that the manuscript was genuine came when the Archivio Segreto Vaticano was thrown open to researchers later that year, and it turned out that the Inquisition had begun a preliminary investigation in connection with the publication of On the Nature of Angels . The previously unknown documents consist for the most part of interrogation minutes, in which Antinous Bellori admits that he wrote On the Nature of Angels . In the next breath he distances himself entirely from everything written in it. He was led astray, he was confused, he made it up, he didn’t mean anything by it, he is contrite and begs for forgiveness, again and again. So pathetic and harmless does he seem that the interrogations are terminated, and no case against him is ever brought, and thus he avoids the fate that, fifteen years later, was meted out to Giordano Bruno and Domenico Scandella, two very different men whose paths both crossed Bellori’s before they ended at the stake.

Bergotti’s find provides an explanation for Bellori’s abiding bitterness during the first years after the publication of On the Nature of Angels . After only a few months it had been placed on the Index , the Vatican’s list of forbidden books, and most of the copies had been burned. If his work had merely been ridiculed or suppressed, he could have comforted himself with the thought that time would prove him right. But with the intervention of the Church, he was both laughed at and stripped of any chance of rehabilitation.

Why is there nothing about this in his notes? He who wrote about everything?

During the interrogations with the Inquisition, he had repudiated everything he had believed in and stood for all his adult life. He begged forgiveness for his great theory of the divine. His humiliation must have been too great for him to acknowledge. On the other hand it must have made his choice easier: if he found the angels, the whole long line of defeats would be turned to victory. And perhaps this, too, was part of it: in the angels’ presence, and also in the yearning for their presence, what was false, impure, weak, and cowardly in his nature would cease to exist, or cease to have any meaning: in their sight he was nothing, they everything.

When he drew himself in the mirror that February night in 1606, this was all in the past. He no longer wished for restitution. He no longer cared for pride and fame. Nor did he have any interest in asking questions. Whether about higher things or about the world he lived in. He lived, that was all he needed to know. And he amused himself. At least he did if we are to believe the picture he provides of himself.

Perhaps he suspected that posterity would discover him someday. Perhaps that was why he sketched himself that evening. Perhaps he wanted to send us a greeting. See here, those of you as yet unborn. Here I am, mad Antinous Bellori. Perhaps you think you know who I am? Well, think again!

That same night he had a dream. It was confusing because he never quite knew if he was awake or asleep, the two states intermingled after he heard the cries from outside.

He was lying in bed, it was night, and there was a shout from outside.

At first he lay quite still, thinking that he must have dreamed it. Then the shout came again, now there was no doubt, out in the courtyard voices were calling.

Antinous , they called. Antinous .

He got up and went over to the window, looked down into the courtyard. It was empty. There wasn’t so much as a footprint in the eighteen inches of snow that covered it. He must have dreamed it then, he thought, and was about to return to bed, but changed his mind. Day was breaking outside, he could just see to the wall at the end of the courtyard, and the big tree outside it; its dark, leafless branches shaped themselves into a kind of skeleton ball in the gray dawn. But he couldn’t see it clearly, as it was snowing, heavy and slushy, and the air was damp.

Apart from the wall, which had a subdued, rusty reddish hue, the landscape was quite without color. Everything was somewhere between whitish gray and blackish gray.

Antinous! came the call again.

He started. There was no one out there! So where was the voice coming from? Could there be someone inside?

It didn’t sound like it, but even so he went downstairs to check.

Not a soul.

To make sure, he went into the hallway and opened the courtyard door a crack and stuck his head out.

Over by the wall he saw some shadows moving. Hardly surprising he hadn’t seen them, he thought, and called to them.

“Hello?” he shouted. “Who are you, and what do you want at this time of night?”

He received no reply. Irritated, he thrust his feet into his boots, grabbed the stick he always kept in the corner, and went out to chase them away.

Only when he’d walked a little way out into the courtyard did he realize that they were shadows . They were human in shape, but they contained nothing but darkness.

He halted. He sensed a movement on his left, and he looked toward it. Several shadows came gliding along the wall.

They were coming from the well. They rose up from the well, glided along it, and stopped by the gate some twenty yards in front of him.

Antinous , they called again.

“What do you want with me?” Antinous shouted back.

There came no reply.

He stared intently at them. Even though new shadows kept arriving, the group before him didn’t increase. After a while he discovered that the new shadows merged into the old ones. And with each blending, their features became clearer. He saw something grayish beneath the black hats, there was a forehead, there a nose, there a cheek.

He took a few steps toward them.

The snow was falling wet and heavy.

“What do you want with me?” he asked again.

One of them came nearer. It stopped, and one of the flowing shadows coalesced with it, and then another, and before his eyes he saw his mother’s features starting to materialize.

“Mother,” he said.

Behind her another figure advanced.

“Father,” he said.

They both stood looking at him. He dropped the stick in the snow and went toward them. They stretched out their arms, and he embraced them. But his arms encompassed nothing but thin air.

He retreated a step.

“Why have you come back?” he asked.

“We haven’t come back, Antinous,” said his mother. “We’ve been here all the time. It’s you who’s come to us.”

He took another step back.

“Am I dead?” he asked.

Neither of them answered, they just stood there looking at him mild-eyed. He was their beloved son, they’d died and left him, now he’d followed them.

Then they were gone.

He stood alone in the courtyard, with the snow falling about him, on the ground lay the stick he’d cast aside, and when he bent down to pick it up, he became aware of his boots, they were the only things he was wearing.

He looked around.

What had happened? Had he been sleepwalking?

He must have been. He would never have gone naked into the courtyard otherwise, with a stick in his hand and boots on his feet.

But he hadn’t woken. There had been no waking up! They had stood just there, his mother and father, there, just now, and he hadn’t woken since then.

Or had he?

Or was it as they’d said? Was he dead?

Could one die without noticing it?

“Mad!” he shouted.

He turned and went into the house, took off his boots, went up to his bedroom, and got under the bedclothes again. The bed was still warm.

“Mad!” he shouted again.

Then he laughed out loud. If he’d been quite naked, he thought, he’d have had a shred of dignity to salvage. But not naked wearing boots and with a stick in the middle of the courtyard. And in conversation with his dead parents, too.