The Secret Supper

10020

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sierra, Javier, date.

[Cena secreta. English]

The secret supper : a novel
Javier Sierra ; translated by Alberto Manguel.p>

p. cm.

1. Leonardo, da Vinci, 1452–1519. Last Supper.—Fiction. I. Manguel, Alberto. II. Title.

PQ6719.I54C4613 2006

863’.7—dc22 2005055889

ISBN: 1-4165-2467-3

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To Eva, who has illuminated the path of this traveler

No one took any notice.

None of the merchants, moneylenders or friars strolling by in the twilight around San Francesco il Grande noticed the slovenly, ill-dressed man who hurried into the Franciscan church. It was the eve of a holiday, a market day, and the inhabitants of Milan were busy gathering provisions for the coming days of official mourning. Under such circumstances, it was only natural that the presence of yet another beggar left them unconcerned.

But the fools were once again mistaken. The beggar who entered San Francesco was not an ordinary man.

Without giving himself a moment’s respite, the ragged man left behind him the double row of benches that lined the nave and hurried on toward the main altar. There was not a soul to be seen inside the church. At last he had been permitted to see a painting, The Virgin of the Rocks, that few in Milan knew by its real name: the Maestà.

He approached the altar cautiously. His heart beat faster. There, utterly alone in the church, the pilgrim warily stretched out his hand, as if he might be forever united to the sacred scene. As he cast his eyes on the celebrated painting, suddenly a detail caught his attention. How strange! The pilgrim was overcome by a vertiginous feeling of horror. Someone had meddled with the Maestà.

The pilgrim did not dare move a muscle but remained frozen to the spot at the sound of the dry, deep voice behind him. He hadn’t heard the door of the church creak open, so the intruder must have been watching him for a fair while now.

“I can tell you’re like all the others. For some dark reason you heretics come in droves to this House of God. Its light attracts you, but you are incapable of recognizing that.”

The pilgrim’s pulse was racing. His hour had come. He felt dazed and angry, cheated in having risked his life to kneel before a fraud. The painting he was looking at was not the Opus Magnum.

“It can’t be—” he whispered. The intruder laughed out loud.

“It is easy enough to understand. I’ll grant you the mercy of knowledge before sending you to burn in hell. Don’t you realize that Leonardo has betrayed you?”

Was it possible that Leonardo had actually betrayed his brethren?

The pilgrim realized that something was terribly wrong. He heard behind him a metallic scraping, like that of a sword being unsheathed.

“Am I to die as well?”

“The Soothsayer will do away with all of the wicked.”

Architectural plan of the convent and church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in present-day Milan.

1. Tribunal

2. Refectory

3. Leonardo Da Vinci, The Last Supper

A cast of characters appears at the back of the book.

Preface

In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Europe still held intact its gift for understanding ancestral images and symbols. Its people knew how and when to interpret the design on a column, a particular figure in a painting or a simple sign on the road, even though only a minority had, in those days, learned to read and write.

With the arrival of the Age of Reason, the gift for interpreting such languages was lost, and with it, a good part of the richness bequeathed to us by our ancestors.

This book makes use of many of those symbols as they were conceived once upon a time. But it also intends to restore to the modern reader the ability both to understand them and to benefit from their infinite wisdom.

1

I cannot recall a more dangerous and tangled puzzle than the one I was called upon to solve in the New Year of 1497, when the duchy of Ludovico il Moro lay in its painful death throes, while the Papal States watched on.

The world was then a dangerous, fast-changing place, a hellish quicksand in which fifteen centuries of faith and culture threatened to collapse under the onslaught of new ideas imported from the Far East. Suddenly, from one day to the next, Plato’s Greece, Cleopatra’s Egypt and even the extravagant curiosities of the Chinese Empire that Marco Polo had discovered seemed to deserve greater praise than our own Scriptural stories.

Those were troubled days for Christendom. We were ruled by a simoniac Pope (a Spanish devil crowned under the name of Alexander VI who had shamelessly bought his own tiara at the latest conclave), governed by several princes seduced by the beauty of all things pagan, and threatened by Turkish hordes armed to the teeth, waiting for an opportunity to invade the Western Mediterranean and convert us to the faith of Islam. In all truth, it can be said that never before, in almost fifteen hundred years of history, had our own faith stood so utterly defenseless.

And there, in the midst of it all, was this servant in God, Agostino Leyre, the very same who is writing to you now. I found myself at the threshold of a century of transformation, an epoch in which the world was shifting its borders daily and demanding from us all an unprecedented effort to adapt. It was as if, with every passing hour, the Earth became larger and larger, constantly obliging us to update our store of geographical knowledge. We, men of the cloth, had already begun to realize that there would no longer be enough of us to preach to a world peopled by millions of souls who had never heard of Christ, and the more skeptical among us foresaw a period of imminent chaos that would bring into Europe a whole new tide of pagans.

In spite of such terrible things, those were exciting years. Years that I look upon now with a certain nostalgia, today, in my old age, from this miserable exile that slowly devours both my health and my memories. My hands barely obey me, my eyes grow dim, the burning sun of southern Egypt melts my brain and only in the hours before dawn am I capable of ordering my thoughts and reflecting on the curious fate that led me to this place—a fate from which neither Plato, nor Alexander VI, nor even the pagans were excluded.

But I must not run ahead of my story.

Suffice it to say that now, at last, I’m alone. Of the secretaries I once had, not a single one remains, and today only Abdul, a youngster who doesn’t speak my tongue and who believes I am an eccentric holy man who has come to die in his land, looks after my most basic needs. I eke out my life in an ancient tomb hollowed in the rocks, surrounded by sand and dust, threatened by scorpions and almost prevented from walking by my two weak legs. Every day, faithful Abdul brings into my cubicle some unleavened bread and whatever leftovers he finds at home. He is like the raven that for sixty years would carry in his beak half an ounce of bread to Paul the Hermit, who died in these same lands, more than a hundred years old. Unlike that ominous bird, Abdul smiles when he delivers his burden, without quite knowing what else to do. It is enough. For someone who has sinned as much as I have, every moment of contemplation becomes an unexpected gift from the Creator Himself.

But, as much as solitude, pity too has come to gnaw away at my soul. I’m sorry that Abdul will never learn what brought me to his village. I would not know how to explain it to him by signs. Nor will he ever be able to read these lines, and even in the remote eventuality that he might find them after my death and sell them to some camel driver, I doubt whether they will serve any purpose other than fueling a bonfire on a cold desert night. No one here understands Latin nor any of the romance languages. And every time that Abdul finds me in front of my pages, he shrugs in astonishment, knowing full well that he is missing something important.

Day after day, this thought fills me with anguish. The intimate certainty that no Christian will ever read what I am writing clouds my mind and brings tears to my eyes. When I finish these pages, I will ask that they be buried with my remains, hoping that the Angel of Death will remember to collect them, and carry them to Our Everlasting Father when the time comes for my soul to be brought to Judgment. It is a sad story. But then, the greatest secrets are those that never see the light.

Will mine manage to do so?

I doubt it.

Here, in the caves they call Yabal al-Tarif, a few steps away from the great Nile that blesses with its waters an inhospitable and empty desert, I only pray God that He give me enough time to justify my deeds in writing. I am so far removed from the privileges I once enjoyed in Rome that, even if the new Pope were to forgive me, I know I would be unable to return to God’s fold. I would find it unbearable to hear no longer the distant cries of the muezzins in their minarets. And the longing for this land that has so generously welcomed me would slowly torture my final days.

My consolation lies in setting down those past events exactly in the order in which they took place. Some I suffered in my own flesh. Others, however, I only heard of long after they had happened. And yet, told one after the other, they will give you, hypothetical reader, an idea of the enormity of the puzzle that changed my life forever.

No. I cannot continue to turn my back on my fate. Now that I have reflected on all that which my eyes have seen, I feel irrevocably compelled to tell everything…even if the telling will serve nobody’s purpose.

2

The puzzle begins on a January night in the year 1497, far, very far from Egypt. That winter, three decades ago, was one of the coldest that the chronicles record. It had snowed copiously and all of Lombardy was covered in a thick white mantle. The monasteries of San Ambrogio, San Lorenzo and San Eustorgio, and even the pinnacles of the cathedral, had all vanished under the snow. The wagons laden with wood were the only things still moving in the streets, and most of Milan slumbered, wrapped in a silence that seemed to have settled in many centuries ago.

It happened at about eleven o’clock at night on the second day of the year. A woman’s heartrending howl broke the frozen peace of the Sforza palace. The howl was followed by sobs and the sobs by the piercing cries of the court’s professional mourners. The last stirring of the serenissima Beatrice d’Este, a woman in the flower of life, the beautiful wife of the Duke of Milan, had forever shattered the kingdom’s dreams of glory. Dear God! The duchess had died with her eyes wide open, furious, cursing Christ and all his saints for having taken her so soon to His side, clutching, with what strength she had, the habit of her horrified confessor.

Yes, that is when everything started.

I was forty-five years old when I read for the first time the report of what happened that day. It was a terrifying story. The Order of Bethany, as was its custom, had requested the report secretly from Ludovico il Moro’s chaplain, who had sent it down to Rome without delay. That is how the Papal States worked in those days: more swiftly and efficiently than any other state, so that, long before the official announcement of the duchess’s death had arrived at the Holy Father’s diplomatic office, our brethren already knew all the details of the story.

At the time, my responsibility within the complex structure of Bethany was to attend to the Master General of the Order of Saint Dominic. Our organization survived within the narrow margins of strict confidentiality. In an age characterized by palace intrigues, murders by poison and family treason, the Church required an information service that would allow it to know exactly where it could tread safely. We were a secret order, faithful to none other than the Pope and to the visible head of the Dominicans. That is why, in the outside world, almost no one had ever heard of us. We hid behind the ample cloak of the Secretariat of Keys of the Papal States, a marginal, neutral organism of scarce public visibility and very limited competence. However, behind the walls, we functioned as a secret congregation, a sort of permanent commission set up to examine government matters that might allow the Holy Father to foretell the movements of his many enemies. Any scrap of news, however minuscule, that might affect the status quo of the Church would immediately pass into our hands, where it would be weighed and transmitted to the pertinent authority. That was our sole mission.