The Historian’s Debt
by Angelisa Fontaine-Wood
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
The quiet of the Verona archives had long closed in around her, burying her now in the dust motes and shadows of dusk. This was her signal that the library would soon shut its doors, though there was still tomorrow and the next day, and the next. For she loved this soft, concentrated silence of study, punctuated only by the sounds of turning pages and padding librarians. No matter that she had to bribe her way in, here in a foreign country and far indeed from her parents’ townhouse on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, Adrienne felt she had come home, here in the midst of this rarefied world of books and manuscripts.
She caught herself again envying Aurélien, her twin, that he had spent his short life in such surroundings, pursuing knowledge for its own sake. At the thought she bit her tongue and regretted once more that he would never come back to share a roof with her.
These memories haunted her as she gathered her notebooks along with the black-inked Mont Blanc fountain pen that he had so treasured, her gift to him at his dissertation defense. She recalled when the telegram arrived. Aurélien, it said, had gone into No Man’s Land to save wounded men of his troop and had not been seen since. Although the authorities declared him missing in action, Adrienne had viscerally felt his death deep in the night, just days before the telegram.
While her parents hoped on, she mourned privately by holing herself up in his study, its walls lined with disorderly books jumbled on the shelves. Here, missing him, she gazed at his photo with his advisor the day of his doctoral defense, so much like her with his high cheekbones and pale, wavy hair, but a man, and that had made all the difference.
She turned from his image and pored over his old notes, retracing his words and thoughts through his sprightly scribble. This much comforted her and his study had became her refuge in the long silence that followed. Thus, when a few years after the 1918 Armistice, the family had felt ready mourn their only boy, and to deal with his papers, they put Adrienne, who knew his research better than anyone, to the task.
When the librarian called for the return of the day’s books, she reflected on how her presence there had ever come about. So many years before, she would listen in on his Latin lessons, beginning her career in stolen knowledge. Catching wind of these goings-on, her father at first objected, fearing the strain of declensions on a young female brain. Aurélien, however, had joined her in arguing the case, and the next day found them seated side by side in the schoolroom; two fair-haired heads leaning over one grammar book.
Years later, she disputed with her father about sending her to the Sorbonne. Once more her twin came in to second her, and they soon began finishing each other’s sentences: Adrienne enrolled in the licence that September. When their parents stopped her from pursuing a further degree, Aurélien not only shared his books but bought volumes especially for her. Their heated debates on the nature of orthodoxy in late medieval literature, following his own curriculum for his PhD, worked as a makeshift graduate school for her.
Thus, with the legacy of her twin’s help, Adrienne took up his unfinished work fully armed to do so. One particular lead tempted her. It went back to an article Aurelien had found early in his career, demonstrating that Dante’s contemporaries thought him capable of murdering the pope by black magic.
A 1319 Vatican deposition held that scions of the Visconti dynasty, in an effort to foil papal incursions in their territories, had a silver figurine made, engraved with the cabalistic sign of Saturn, the name of the pope and that of the demon Amaymon. The next step was to find a magus powerful enough to use it to do away with the vicar of Christ on earth, and the Visconti thought to turn to the poet. Adrienne remembered her long reveries with her brother over this bit of lore and the what-ifs the two of them imagined.
Responding to this article with one of his own, Aurélien had linked this choice of Dante to connections the poet maintained with Muslim mystics. From that publication, her twin’s career took off. In the few years before the declaration of war, paper after paper of his appeared in the most prestigious journals, linking Dante to Sufism by way of the Vita Nova, the poet’s earliest sonnets to Love and to Beatrice.
His theories centered on the idea that Dante, under this influence, led a cohort of poet-heretics, the Fedeli d’Amore, who worshiped Love as such, above and beyond the Abrahamic deity. These set the tone even for professors at the height of Dante Studies. By the time he volunteered for the army, the young scholar had — astonishingly — been offered a chair at the Collège de France despite his age.
Adrienne had often gone to see him in his study to discuss his latest research but found it always much colder or hotter than the rest of the house and the electricity faulty, with the lights turning off and on again at whim. An odd, unpleasant smell plagued the place as well, and he took to lighting incense to counter it. She wondered how he could concentrate, but concentrate he did, enough that she could hear him talking to himself well into the night through the shared wall of her bedroom.
Acutely feeling her solitude in the study, she sifted through his glosses and truncated observations. Peering once more into his coded shorthand, she spied a trail her twin had left for the one person who could read into the messy fragments of his unfinished thoughts, as into so many tea leaves.
In this trail it was clear that he thought, as Adrienne always believed as well, that the archives of Verona, where the poet had been living in exile from Florence, would contain some trace of his spell to end the pontiff’s life. There and then she decided the lead would be followed and she would be the one to do so.
When confronted with her plans, her father refused outright. “No daughter of mine is traipsing down to Italy on a fool’s errand—”
“It’s a tribute to his memory—”
“And utterly unfit for a young woman of good family! It is not your place—”
“It is my place to finish what he started.”
When he answered that any one of Aurélien’s colleagues could accomplish this better than she, Adrienne ran up to her room and slammed the door, sobbing in fury. Once her tears ran dry, she swore to herself that, come hell or high water, this was her beholden duty.
Her monthly allowance she kept hidden away in his own dog-eared copy of the Comedy. She took this, but not only this. As sleep was impossible, she crept down to her father’s office with a small leather bag in hand, and silently opened his left bureau drawer where he kept petty cash. She slipped the whole amount into her pocket book and stole out the front door.
* * *
And so April of 1921 came to find Adrienne seated in the Italian city’s archives. At first, the director denied her entry as “most irregular.” She argued her case, even played on her looks, but found that her funds more effectively greased hinges of the doors. This left her short on money for meals, but she nourished herself instead with the library’s manuscripts, the store of knowledge and potential discoveries it contained. She vowed each morning would find her there from opening until it closed at dusk, studying the collection of manuscripts dealing with Dante’s Verona sojourn.
Adrienne grew to sense what help she might expect from the librarians, those who looked askance and those who looked at her as a sort of performing circus animal that might or might not be dangerous. She could swear that they fibbed about the availability of certain items, on the excuses that it was with another reader, checked out, destroyed by time, lent to another library, not in the holdings at all, or any number of other reasons. When their smirks became too much to bear, she recalled Aurélien at her side, coaching her from puella studiis to the ablative. This effort was in his name and for his honor. At the thought of him, she soldiered on.
As days turned to weeks, and her money disappeared into the “tip” for her daily entries, she persisted in seeking the occult needle in a haystack of fourteenth-century parchment. Adrienne coughed over the dusty vellum of correspondence, cartularies, and chronicles but frustratingly found nothing resembling necromancy.
Spells could be identified in that, in imitation of ancient Hebrew, the scribe would often excise the vowels from the words. Nothing of the sort came across her desk, no matter how she combed through the books she did access. Her labor itself came to seem some Dantean punishment in endless futility, but for what sin precisely she wasn’t sure. Pride or theft or envy?
In off-hours, instead of spending her precious lire on earthly sustenance, while avoiding her shabby little pensione and its ferocious landlady, she wandered among the rose-colored stones of Verona, visiting the Roman ruins, the arena, the medieval churches. She particularly loved Sant’Anastasia for Pisanello’s fresco of Saint George, admiring the knight’s determined features as he saddled his mount. His golden locks and delicate face, oddly enough, recalled Aurélien’s and thus her own. And the saint prepared to battle a dragon, a stand-in for the devil, just as she battled against librarians and against the oblivion that threatened Aurélien’s work with his premature death. Contemplating the scene stoked her courage to persevere against the scaly book-hoarders.
She sat back again in the pew and sighed. Her twin had detached her quite young from her parents’ conventional Catholicism. With his heterodox suggestions about the very nature of the divine echoing in her head, she couldn’t call herself a believer. Still, though she was not entirely sure to whom or to what, she addressed a brief but intense petition to find the spell itself, if spell there really was, and soon.
For she was on the verge of no longer being able to pay for her shelter, such as it was, having abandoned food for some time now and her shirtwaists growing ever looser on her already slender frame. The script in the tomes she consulted often swam beneath her eyes. She certainly couldn’t wire her father for help and, in fact wasn’t sure if she would ever be welcome home again.
Beyond this, buried several layers underneath, there lay in her wish another desire, which she had confided to no one, not even Aurélien and hardly even to herself, a different dragon to slay: to publish and make her own name, another A. Augustin, a woman now, in Dante Studies and, ultimately, like her brother, to profess from the rostrum. A discovery of such magnitude would at least be worth an article, a book even. A professorship remained an absurdity, but continuing Aurélien’s work in her own research would keep him in some sense alive.
Adrienne jumped then at a murmur in her left ear and an odd stench to go along with it. She half-turned to find someone kneeling behind her, head bent in rapt prayer, a susurrus of words which seemed to be a whisper just to her. The pews were set close certainly, but why this person, a man, had chosen a seat immediately behind her when the church was otherwise empty, she did not like to think. As she got up to leave, the individual lifted his head and watched her walk out.
* * *
The following day she struggled with the librarians again and more than usual, as they insisted the book she requested had never existed. Trudging her reluctant way back to her depressing lodgings with the peeling paint, she passed by way of Sant’Anastasia. As if some beauty — and courage — might serve as dinner, she returned to the Pisanello fresco, to Aurélien’s faded image in the knight heading to slay the dragon.
She supplicated again whatever powers that be to guide her search for something definitive that would help her secure her way into the world of knowledge. These were her thoughts when she was overcome again by a malodorous whisper. She turned to find, once more, the man from yesterday.
Given the stench, she was surprised to find a figure in expensive shoes and camel coat. Above these, she stared at a well-shaped beard going salt and pepper, and greying temples where small professorial gold glasses were held in place, resting on a particularly Italian nose, long and arched. It was an arresting face, with penetrating eyes. When he spoke again, with refined articulation and mannerly tones, she understood the origin of the smell: his breath.
“Forgive me, Signorina, I disturb you. I am not so much praying as seeking inspiration. My name is Amone Monzone, professor of art history at Bologna and a scholar of Pisanello. It seems as though I pray but, really, I am organizing my thoughts and putting them into some sort of order before I finish my excursus on the role of the dragon, a trickier turn of thought than one might suppose.”
Though this was not the first time a man in Italy had approached her, she did not know how to respond. Firstly, the dragon was near invisible from the damage of centuries. Then, if this man were bold enough to address an unattended lady in a place of worship at all, how did he know to address her in French? A shiver refracted through her slight body. Did she need to pull out her hatpin for self-defense?
As if she had spoken aloud, he replied, “Be not afraid. I have seen you more than once in the archives. We go to different sections, but I see you at the opening and again at closing. I seem to have forgotten the acquaintance is not mutual: you know me not at all; please, a thousand pardons for the informality. Perhaps you will allow me to make up for my rudeness by inviting you to dinner.”
The possibility of a solid meal was difficult to refuse. She was sure, too, her hunger could even get the better of any nausea at his halitosis. Still, he was an utter stranger and how had she never seen him at the archives? Yes, she spent her days absorbed by her task, but there were not so many scholars there that she would not have recognized his face.
Her hesitation must have registered, for he tried another tack, “I would love to hear of what brought you to Verona and to the archives here. Perhaps I could help.”
This volley hit home. It had been a good month since she had spoken with anyone in any depth, much less in her mother tongue or of her present predicament. Her move to take her father’s money left her even uncertain as to whether she would be permitted to return. And this was an academic not hindering her, but instead offering help? Torn, Adrienne looked into this odd man’s dark eyes. Ultimately, the idea of confiding in another sympathetic soul was too much to resist. And, after all, she still did have her hatpin.
* * *
Copyright © 2021 by Angelisa Fontaine-Wood
