Baudolino by Umberto Eco Read Free Book Online Page B

host a dinner worthy of a logothete. A fat kid, stuffed with garlic, onion, and leeks, covered with a sauce of marinated fish.
    "More than two hundred years ago," Niketas said, "there came to Constantinople, as ambassador from your king Otto, a bishop of yours, one Liudprand, who was the guest of our basileus Nicephorus. It was not a happy encounter, and we learned later that Liudprand had set down an account of his journey, in which we Romei were described as sordid, crude, uncivilized, shabbily dressed. He could not bear even our resinous wine, and it seemed to him that all our food was drowned in oil. But there was one thing he described with enthusiasm, and it was this dish."
    The kid tasted exquisite to Baudolino. And he went on answering Niketas's questions.
    ***
    "So, living with an army, you learned to write. And you already knew how to read."
    "Yes, but writing is harder. And in Latin. Because, if the emperor had to curse some soldiers, he spoke Alaman, but if he was writing to the pope or to his cousin Jasomirgott, he had to do it in Latin, and the same with every document of the chancellery. I had to struggle to write down the first letters, I copied words and sentences without understanding what they meant, but by the end of that year I knew how to write. Still, Rahewin hadn't yet had time to teach me grammar. I could copy but I couldn't express myself on my own. That's why I wrote in the language of Frascheta. But was that really the language of Frascheta? I was mixing memories of other speech that I had heard around me, the words of the people of Asti, and Pavia, Milan, Genoa, people who sometimes couldn't understand one another. Then later, in those parts we built a city, with people who came from here and from there, all united to build a tower, and they spoke in the same, identical way. I believe it was a bit the way I had invented."
    "You were a nomothete," Niketas said.
    "I don't know what that means, but maybe I was. In any case, the later pages were already in fair Latin. I was by then in Ratisbon, in a quiet cloister, entrusted to the care of Archbishop Otto, and in that peacefulness I had many, many pages to leaf through.... I learned.
    You will notice, among other things, that the parchment is clumsily scraped, and you can even glimpse parts of the text underneath. I was really a rogue. I was robbing my teachers; I had spent two nights scraping away what I believed was ancient writing, to make space for myself. The nights following, Bishop Otto was in despair because he could no longer find the first version of his
Chronica sive Historia de duabus civitatibus
that he had been writing for more than ten years, and he accused poor Rahewin of having lost it on some journey. Two years later he determined to rewrite it, and I acted as his scribe, never daring to confess to him that I had been the one who scraped away the first version of his
Chronica.
As you say, justice does exist, because
I then lost my own chronicle, only I didn't have the courage to write it over. But I know that, as he rewrote, Otto changed some things...."
    "In what sense?"
    "If you read Otto's
Chronica,
which is a history of the world, you see that he—how should I put it?—did not have a good opinion of the world and of us human beings. The world had perhaps begun well, but it had grown worse and worse; in other words,
mundus senescit,
the world grows old, we are approaching the end.... But in the very year that Otto began rewriting the
Chronica,
the emperor asked also that his feats be celebrated, and Otto began writing the
Gesta Friderici,
which he didn't then finish because he died just over a year later, and Rahewin continued the work. You can't narrate the feats of your sovereign if you're not convinced that with him on the throne a new era begins, that this, in other words, is a
historia iucunda.
..."
    "One can write the history of one's own emperors without renouncing severity, explaining how and why they advance