The Secret Supper (31 page)

“Almost everything is in the Scriptures. If you read the Gospels attentively, you will see that Jesus didn’t begin His public life until John baptized Him in the waters of the Jordan. The four evangelists needed to justify Christ’s mission by referring to John as part of the Messiah’s preparations. That is why I always paint him with a finger pointing toward Heaven. It is my way of saying that he, John the Baptist, arrived first.”

“Then why do we worship Jesus and not John?”

“It was all part of a carefully calculated plan. John was incapable of transmitting to that group of rough and uncultured men his spiritual teachings. How could he have made a handful of fishermen understand that God is within us all and not inside a temple? Jesus would help him educate these savages. They designed a temporal Church in imitation of the Jewish one, and another secret one, a spiritual one, such as had never been seen on Earth before. And these teachings were entrusted to a very intelligent woman, to Mary Magdalene, and to a keen-spirited young man whose name was also John. And that John, my dear Marco, is indeed in the Cenacolo.”

“And so is Mary Magdalene!”

Leonardo was not able to hide his admiration for the tempestuous young woman. Luini, blushing, was forced to clarify the source of her response. It was he, Luini, who had taught her that, there where she saw a large, visible knot, she would know that it was a work linked somehow to Mary Magdalene. There was such a knot depicted in The Last Supper.

“Let me tell you something else,” Leonardo added. A note of fatigue had crept into his voice. “John is much more than a name. It was the name of both the Baptist and of the Evangelist. But John is also a title. It is the nomen mysticum, or ‘mystical name,’ carried by all depositaries of the spiritual Church. Just like Pope Joan, who appears on the Visconti cards.”

“Pope Joan? Was that not a myth? A fable for credulous folk?”

“And what fable doesn’t mask real facts, Bernardino?”

“That means—”

“You should know that the man who painted those cards was Bonifacio Bembo, of Cremona. One of the ‘perfect men.’ Seeing that the fate of our brothers was in danger, he decided to conceal in this pack of cards for the Visconti family some of the basic symbols of our faith. Like the belief that we are the mystical offspring of Jesus. What better symbol of this belief than to paint a pregnant Pope, holding in her hand the Cross of the Baptist, making clear to all who can read it that the New Church is about to be born? That card,” Leonardo said in a reverential voice, “is the precise prophecy of that which is to come…”

42

I cannot tell for what strange reason the Father Prior sent me on such a mission. Had he been gifted with foresight and been able to see what was to befall me, I am certain that he would have kept me by his side. But fate is unpredictable, and God, on that January day, had cast the die of my future, moving, as always, in His mysterious ways.

At first, I must confess, the business turned my stomach.

To exhume the funeral remains of Father Alessandro—in the presence of Brother Benedetto, Mauro the grave digger and Brother Giorgio—made me utterly sick. Fifty years had passed since the Holy Office had last dug up the body of a criminal in order to burn it, and even though I begged the Father Prior to leave the dead in peace, I could do nothing to prevent the disinterment of Father Alessandro. His corpse, waxy and pale, gave off an unbearable stench. However carefully my companions and I took the precaution of wrapping him up in a clean winding sheet and tying him up like a roast, his pestilential odor accompanied us throughout our excursion. Fortunately, not all was so unpleasant. I was surprised to notice that, though it was almost impossible to breathe close to the body of Father Alessandro, the same could not be said about Brother Giberto’s. Brother Giberto had no smell at all. The grave digger attributed this phenomenon to the fact that the fire that had consumed him in the Piazza Mercanti had put an end to his corruptible parts, conferring on his remains this singular quality. Brother Benedetto, on the other hand, defended a different theory. According to him, the fact of having stayed out in the open, in the courtyard of the Dominican hospital, in a temperature several degrees below freezing, had sucked into the air the sexton’s worst effluvia. I never knew which of the two was right.

“If you notice, the same happens with animals,” Brother Benedetto attempted to convince me. “Does the corpse of an abandoned horse on a frozen road smell of anything?”

We arrived at the Campo Santo Stefano without having concluded our discussion. It was still an hour and a half before vespers. We had crossed the military control at Porta della Corte all’Arcivescovado and left behind us the offices of the Capitano di Giustizia, without having had to answer too many questions from the guards. The police knew of our labors and approved of our decision to take the heretics far away from the city. Our carriage, laden with ropes and other trappings, passed all the inspections. And so we arrived at Santo Stefano, a clearing in the woods, lonely and silent, with a firm rocky ground on which it would not be difficult to pile up the wood we had brought in order to set fire to our dead.

Most affably, Brother Giorgio directed the proceedings.

He gave instructions as to how to best build the mountain of logs and to render it solid, so that it would burn appropriately. For someone such as myself, who had witnessed so many autos-da-fé without lifting a single log, this was an entirely new experience. Giorgio taught us to pile them up in inverse order of their size. He had attended the procedure many times. He explained that we must place the thinnest branches at the base, so that, as they burned, the thicker logs would catch fire more easily. Once the pile was finished, he made us throw a rope over the lot, tighten it, and then heave the bodies of our brothers to the top. In this way, we would fulfill the Father Prior’s instructions and return to Milan before nightfall, when the duke’s soldiers would bar the city’s several entrances.

“You know what’s best about this undertaking?” Brother Benedetto panted, after succeeding in lifting Brother Giberto’s body onto the pyre. He had climbed to the top with the grave digger in order to pull up the corpses and put them into place.

“So you think there’s something good in what we’re doing?” the grave digger asked.

“What’s good about it, Brother Mauro,” I heard Brother Benedetto say, “is that with a bit of luck the ashes of these infidels will fall on the Cathars still hiding in those mountains.”

“Cathars here?” Brother Mauro snorted. “You see them everywhere, Brother.”

“And you lend them too much cunning,” I added, from the ground, securing the rope around Father Alessandro. “Do you think them capable of distinguishing these ashes from those of their own bonfires? Allow me to doubt it.”

This time, the one-eyed monk did not answer. I waited a moment for the rope to tighten and begin pulling on the librarian’s corpse, but nothing at all seemed to be happening. Mauro Sforza made no reply to Brother Benedetto’s comments, and I noticed that a long and uncomfortable silence had settled suddenly on the clearing.

Puzzled, I stepped back to see what was happening. High up on the pile of logs, Brother Benedetto was standing still as a statue, his face turned and his eye lost in the distance. He had let go of the rope. Mauro seemed to be trembling and breathing heavily, like a mystic in an ecstatic vision, silent and almost incapable of movement. I understood that they were trying to point out something, gesturing toward a point behind my back. I turned and looked, and almost fainted.

By the edge of the woods, a short distance from where we found ourselves, a group of some fifteen hooded men were observing our movements in silence. None of us had noticed them earlier. They were dressed in black from head to foot, with their hands tucked inside their sleeves, and they appeared to have been there for a long while, watching us. They did not look hostile, since they carried no weapons of any kind with which to attack us, but neither was their attitude reassuring. They simply stared at us through the slits in their hoods without speaking a word or making any attempt to draw near us. Where had they come from? As far as we knew, there was no monastery or convent near, nor was this a holy festivity that would explain the presence of a group of monks in the open field.

What then did they want? Had they come to attend the post mortem execution of our heretics?

Mauro Sforza was the first to descend from the pyre and head toward the hooded men with his arms held high, but his gesture was received with utter indifference. None of the visitors moved a muscle.

“Good Lord!” Brother Benedetto exclaimed at last. “The heretics!”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t you see, Father Agostino?” he spluttered, half in surprise and half in anger. “I told you. Dressed in black. No belts or ornaments. Like the Cathars seeking perfection.”

“Cathars?”

“They’re not armed,” he added. “Their religion forbids it.”

Mauro, hearing what Brother Benedetto had said, advanced one step further toward the group.

“Go on, Brother,” the one-eyed monk encouraged him. “You’ll not risk anything by touching them. If they’re not capable of harming a chicken, how do you think they’d hurt you?”

“Laudetur Jesus Christus! They’re here for their dead!” cried Giorgio, who had stuck to my side as soon as he had seen them. “They want them returned!”

“And why does that frighten you? Haven’t you heard what Brother Benedetto just said?” I attempted to calm him down. “These people are incapable of using violence against us.”

I never knew if Brother Giorgio managed to mouth an answer, because at that moment the intruders launched into a moving Our Father that filled the clearing with their voices. Their deep notes echoed through Santo Stefano, leaving us speechless. Giorgio was mistaken. The bonshommes had not come to collect the bodies of their brethren. They would never have thought of it: they loathed the very thought of the flesh, which they considered the prison of the soul, a diabolical obstacle to the purity of the spirit. If they had come here, risking detention, it was because they wished to pray for the souls of their dead brothers.

“Cursed be you all!” cried Brother Benedetto, raising his fists at the top of the pyre. “A thousand times cursed!”

We were all taken aback by his reaction. Brothers Giorgio and Mauro stood back as he jumped down from the pile of wood and ran toward the hooded men as if possessed. He was red in the face with wrath, his veins gorged to the point of bursting. Brother Benedetto charged against the first man he met, throwing him to the ground. Then he knelt on his victim and pulled out a knife.

“You should be dead! All of you should be dead! You have no right to be here!” he shouted.

Before we could stop him, Brother Benedetto had plunged his knife to the hilt into the hooded man’s back. A cry of pain rang through the clearing.

“To Hell with you all!” he shouted.

The next few minutes are blurred in my memory.

The hooded men looked at one another before falling on Brother Benedetto. They tore him off their wounded brother, who was bleeding copiously, and held him against a pine tree. He kept spurting curses at them, his only eye bloody with wrath.

As to the others, I think that Giorgio ran toward the city gates, as far as his eighty years allowed him. I lost sight of Mauro when one of the men threw a sack over my head and tied it around my neck with a rope. The sack must have been soaked in some narcotic, because shortly afterward, I felt that I was fainting. Seconds later, I heard no more the cries of the wounded man and an extraordinary feeling of lightness spread through my arms and legs.

Before losing consciousness, I still had time to hear a voice whispering a few words whose meaning was lost to me.

“Now, Father, I’ll be able to answer all your doubts.”

Stunned and perplexed, I fell into a deep stupor.

43

I awoke with a feeling of nausea and a powerful headache, not knowing how long I had remained unconscious. Everything kept turning around me and my thoughts were more confused than ever. There was a constant pressure against my temples that provoked a cyclical, circular pain. Every so often it ran through my skull from left to right, troubling my senses. Its poundings were so hard that for a long while I did not even try to open my eyes. I remember I felt my head, trying to find a wound. I found nothing. The wound was no doubt interior.

“Don’t worry, Father Agostino. You’re all in one piece. Rest. Soon you’ll feel better.”

A gentle voice, the same one that spoke to me before I lost consciousness, surprised me before I managed to stand up. It spoke to me again, in a familiar, soft tone, as if it had know me for long.

“The effects of our oil will last only a few hours more. Then you’ll feel yourself again.”

“Your…oil?”

Disoriented and weak, with my arms and legs stiff, lying on an uneven surface of some kind, I gathered strength to speak. I realized that I’d been taken to some kind of shelter, since my clothes felt dry and the cold was not as bitter as in the Santo Stefano clearing.

“The cloth in which we wrapped you was soaked in a dream-provoking oil. It’s an old recipe from the sorcerers of this area.”

“Poison…,” I murmured.

“Not exactly,” the voice answered. “It’s a balm extracted from bearded darnel, henbane, hemlock and poppies. It never fails. A small dose absorbed through the skin suffices for its lethargic effect to work. But it will soon be over. Don’t worry.”

“Where am I?”

“Somewhere safe.”

“Give me something to drink, I beg you.”

“At once, Father.”

I groped for the mug that the unknown placed between my hands. A pungent broth helped my weary body to restore itself. I gripped at the mug until I felt strong enough to glance around and inspect my prison.

I had intuited correctly. I was no longer in Santo Stefano. And indeed, my captors had separated me from Giorgio, Mauro and Benedetto and placed me in a closed, windowless room, probably an improvised cell in a remote country house. I realized that I must have spent a fairly long time stretched on this straw matting. My beard had grown and someone had dared strip me of my Dominican habit, replacing it with a rough woolen outfit. But exactly how long had I been here? Impossible to tell. And where had my brothers been taken to? Who was responsible for bringing me to this place? And why?