The Absolute, page 14
Once news of these events reached his ears, Rigoberto de Nobili, the provincial in charge of the Jesuit monastery in Louvain, decided to order an investigation. It wasn’t convenient to give the game away, of course, something that would happen if he were to comply with protocol and request the Latvian government to send him the book for examination; nor could he hire a petty thief to seize it. After thinking it over a bit, Nobili called to his cell Bernard Stierli (his right-hand man and devil’s advocate), and after exchanging a few words with him, shared some details about the significance of his mission.
Nobili’s decision to appoint him took place at an extremely delicate moment in Bernard Stierli’s life. A great admirer of Robert “Hammer of the Heretics” Bellarmine (he knew his books Controversiae and The Art of Dying Well like the back of his hand), Father Stierli’s only sorrow in this world was never to have been assigned a mission at the level of his abilities. He’d been born too late to meet the founder at the heart of the Company, and had missed out on the missionary feats in Paraguay and the adventures of evangelization in China, Japan and Ethiopia . . . In short, he existed in the perpetual angst of feeling himself consumed by an objectless frenzy, which his rivals in the Company defined as an “eternal succession of small-potatoes crises.” As soon as Nobili informed him of his task and destiny, Stierli had to contain himself so as not to cry out with joy. In under two hours, he was on his way.
He reached Riga early in the morning, dressed in civilian clothes. An unnecessary precaution, as no one noticed him. All was turmoil: the police had discovered neatly carved human parts scattered around the city.
Stierli ate a frugal breakfast, chose a pension room that suited the modesty of his funds, picked out an appropriate outfit and made his way toward the National Library. There he was disappointed by the lack of safety measures put in place by the institution to secure its most valuable work; the copy of the Spiritual Exercises remained open for public consultation. Out of an elementary impulse for prudence, he filled out the form with a false name, one that had Anglophile echoes and private resonances (to Charles Hope, a dear fellow student of the seminary, now deceased), and—like the Jesuit he was—he practiced a bit of the art of subterfuge by requesting Voltaire’s Candide.
“Ah. Pornography. The good sir likes it filthy . . .” Gunda Gwrolin, the librarian and non-abstinent widow, licked her lips.
So as not to complicate his character’s profile, over the next few days Stierli, disguised as Hope, requested and pretended to read volumes of memoirs by Casanova, by a German singer, by an English erotomaniac and by an unquestionably far more depraved solitary mariner (Birds and Fish). In the meantime, he kept an eye on the reading room: the flow of visitors, the bulk or slenderness of the spine in the tomes requested for consultation, the glimpsed contents of a box, the design of a cover. Every two or three hours, with the purported aim of courting Gwrolin, he would approach the counter and compliment the way she ran things, as out of the corner of his eye, he peeked at the form where she transcribed reading requests. Maybe this was a period of obscurity after the book’s vulgar explosion of fame, or maybe the residents of Riga were too upset by the succession of murders to worry about the mysterious emanations of this volume or any other; the fact is that since his arrival, no one had requested the annotated copy of the Spiritual Exercises.
The days passed in vain. Stierli did all he could to gain the sympathy of Gunda and achieve the position of “trusted reader” (a category that allowed free consultation without prior completion of the form), from bringing her slightly withered bouquets of flowers (the shy plan of attack of the bungling gentleman caller) to inviting her out for an orange liqueur and finding himself being pawed in a dark suburban entryway—the Being, thank God, is not the Thing—as the fat drunk lady sucked on his ear and drew aside the heavy fabric layers of his undergarments. The episode left him perplexed. Technically it was impossible to verify whether he’d broken his vow of chastity or not. In any case, the alleged Hope had little time to verify it. As soon as he’d reached the position at which he’d been aiming, and was already meditating on the risks of stretching out his hand without further formalities toward the Loyolan tome . . . an unnecessary, comforting tragedy occurred. One more episode in the horrifying series of Riga crimes. Stierli felt a warm, Christian, relieved compassion when he found out. A nice, sharp tip. Plunged straight in the heart. Luckily Gunda hadn’t felt a thing.
The next day, there was a new librarian. A man. Everything has its limit and Stierli knew it wasn’t time to start again. When he approached the counter and asked for the book, he barely maintained the discretion necessary to keep using his pseudonym. The librarian hesitated—a doubt, a suspicion by a possible police agent?—raised his quill filled with ink and thought for a few seconds. Then he said:
“Exercises, requested by Mr. Hope . . . is your surname with or without an ‘H’ at the start?”
This is the central moment in the life of Bernard Stierli. He’s alone, almost alone, in the reading room, and in his hands he’s got a treasure to sound out, the possibility of finding a proof for the true existence of the miraculous, a proof that, who knows, might open the closed doors that lead to the abyss: a demonstration of the existence of God. To achieve this leap, this demonstration, would justify his life . . . any life . . . the existence of the Universe itself . . . And to find it in a copy of a book by the founder of the order would be the ne plus ultra. Understandably, the Jesuit returns to his chair racked by emotion (just as fifty years before, Andrei Deliuskin had been racked by writing). He taps his fingers against the hard cover, trembling. And what if after the revelation there were no Paradise or truth, but instead . . . ? “Psst. Psst.” “Eh?” “Do you feel all right, mister?” “Why?” “Are you shivering?” “Ah, yes, thank you dear, don’t worry. It’s my excitement, I mean, my age, Saint Vitus’s dance.” “Do you want me to call a . . . ?” “I don’t want you to call anyone, damn it.” “Well, pardon me then, what a temper.” Chair legs scraping over the floor, the disappearing body of a woman. As always. Desire and regret: woman is a spirit the castles of theology don’t know how to accommodate. Now, as he caresses the embossed gold letters with pious dread, Father Stierli remembers that Saint Ignatius was a kind of Don Quixote of the Church; his conversion, his fit of madness, occurred as he was taking a forced rest, following wounds suffered in the Battle of Pamplona, when the only distraction at hand was the New Testament. “What would my fate have been,” Stierli wonders as he opens the copy of the Spiritual Exercises, “if instead of the Holy Scriptures, Loyola had stumbled upon Amadís de Gaula?” Closer than ever to the feeling of personal disappearance, the Jesuit murmurs: “Anima Christi, sanctifica me.”
No warm wind sweeps through to rustle the pages of the book, pull it from his hands and send it spinning through the air. And you can forget about the sound of harps (God increases in discretion as he ages). But despite the poverty of effects, the event is of a radical order. Stierli leans over the first page and the reading comes as a shock, a convulsion. At the margin of the author’s oracular introductory words (an entire declaration of principles), he finds the first phrases that Andrei Deliuskin, in his small industrious strokes, in his abysmal scribble, wrote over the course of that forgotten Riga summer of 1797. The opening invocation (because some phrases are prayers) already seems to simplify and contain and position in its true dimension the full essence of Loyola’s concerns:
How does a spirit move?
Stierli trembles with joy. At night, from his room in the pension, he writes to Rigoberto de Nobili, the brevity of his missive a testament to the happiness that overwhelms him: “Everything is true.”
Belief is one thing and proof another. With the perceptiveness that characterizes him, Stierli knows that in addition to being the traditional investigation of a Church expert attempting to disentangle the subtle differences between the mystical trance and the hysterical fit, his work must aim toward a resolution of the following questions: Why is miraculous power attributed to this (and not another) copy of the Spiritual Exercises? Is it due to some particularity of design or typography in the printed matter itself? Or is it perhaps due to the annotations made by somebody totally unknown in the margins (as he believes, and wagers on this belief)?
Every morning, Stierli wanders around Riga and the surrounding areas trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, the miracle from the knockoff. And every afternoon, seated at the table of the empty consultation room, supplied with quill and ink, leaning like a cribbing student over the second copy of the Spiritual Exercises he’s managed to acquire, which every day he brings into the National Library as contraband, he transcribes my great-grandfather’s annotations with a reverent and faithful hand, both in the spirit of the letter and in its calligraphic form. The ink is special, acquired at the shop of a known antiquities forger, such that every stroke, as soon as it dries, plausibly imitates the damages of time. But that’s important only at the level of visibility. In essence, as his hand goes moving over the pages, the old and devoted Jesuit transforms into the quivering incarnation of a great, already dead young man: my great-grandfather. Stierli reads with him, understands with him, interprets with him, writes with him. And in doing so, slowly, completely, he finds that the extent of Loyola’s work begins to open up in its significance. During each of these afternoons of copying, as he advances letter by letter, he feels how the signs of utmost comprehension gradually take possession of his being. “It isn’t possible to understand the whole without celestial guidance,” he thinks. “What’s more, it isn’t possible these annotations were written by a single person. They seem to come straight from a divine mind that wants to guide a truth into the world, one hidden until now, an unexpected reform in the plan of creation. But why me? Why has it fallen to me to reveal it?”
Stierli suspects and fears, of course. In spite of his role as devil’s advocate, it’s hard for him to believe in the physical existence of Satan, yet he doesn’t reject the possibility that such a being might exist as a complementary figure within the systems of trial and punishment that are part of the economy of salvation. If this is the case, he thinks, then any questioning of his purpose in the Almighty’s plan could be the preface to a terrible error, maybe even his own fall. But he consoles himself: “God may not spare His efforts, but neither does He squander them uselessly. He wouldn’t do all of this just to condemn me. After all, what am I to Him? Less than nothing.” Maybe—he tells himself—he’s being overly suspicious about everything. Even so, the figure he’s created for himself draws his attention. The greatest nestles within the smallest: a Jesuit copies the texts of an illuminated scribe, God Himself perhaps, who at some moment deigned to silently come down from the throne and sit in a chair at the Riga Library in order to write these marginal notes, corrections, improvements to the work of the founder of the Society of Jesus. Is this a circle? Or might it perhaps be an ascending spiral, an elliptical movement toward a heaven our eyes can’t make out?
Astonishment can be a vocation, a sublime aide to faith, but even the most credulous will find his capacity for surprise diminish when such marvel becomes routine. Over the years, Stierli has got used to grinding away at the most arduous texts, a training that allows him to anticipate the moment his intelligence will catch up to or surpass the ideas of the powerful minds whose course he’s following, yet now he finds himself before a capacity that exceeds his. He judges the paths taken by my great-grandfather’s thought to be unexpected, his constructions to be fanciful and his derivations to be abrupt leaps, flares of a truth that doesn’t require the onerous scaling of syllogisms, but whose ultimate logic somehow knots into a point where it is possible to glimpse infinity. And the strangest thing is the lack of style, as if this writing didn’t require a man (or any being) to be written. A serene or supreme impersonality, not urgent or demonstrative, but whose very reticence, when tapped to sound it out, divulges beneath the entire phrase, as well as within each particular concept, bottomless pits where dimensions smolder, awaiting discovery. In these moments of terror or abjection, Stierli believes himself to be in the presence of a machine or monster. He writes to Rigoberto de Nobili again. His tone is no longer that of a pure, limpid happiness, but is flecked with anxiety: “Simple in a complicated way. Sublime, or rather: Ineffable.” Nobili doesn’t answer: he keeps silent and waits. Stierli continues his process. The truths, which impose themselves on him each day as perfections of form, accept a subsequent expansion of meaning that works to either complement or oppose them, without these scruples invalidating the original postulations. To sum up: he’s stunned by the blast effect that follows the detonation, with its rippling waves of both intellectual and practical consequences, capable of being measured only at the moment when these writings—Andrei Deliuskin’s annotations—are distributed to the minds of their intended recipients, whether these be a universal subject, the entire species or—taking into account the book where they make their appearance—the members of the Jesuit order.
In any case, and as Loyola himself also said: “Do it yourself.” He has to keep on copying, keep on thinking. And at the same time, not neglect the world. For some time now, Stierli has begun to feel he’s the object of a number of stares that don’t seem incidental. Without effort he notices how an individual wearing a peculiar jabot, trousers, spats and red trilby follows him over the few blocks of his evening route, then is replaced by another dressed entirely in black. Stierli believes he’s been discovered by his fraternal adversaries, the Dominicans, who naturally must also be after the secret in the library copy of the Spiritual Exercises (with the likely intention of vilifying it, accusing it of fraudulence or interpreting it in their own way, for the purposes of their own order). But he’s wrong. The ones dogging his steps are no more than low-ranking police officers, since his name—that is, his pseudonym, Hope—appears on the list of suspects to be investigated for what Europe has already begun to call the Riga crimes. Ever since the world has been the world, State powers have treated the word “foreigner” as a near synonym for “criminal.” In any case, Stierli’s inclusion on the list does have a certain degree of relevance, given that as Hope, he enjoyed a fleeting connection with one of the terms in the series, or more precisely one of its victims: Gunda Gwrolin. Both the police and the interested party are unaware of this. Which is a shame, since if Stierli had paid some attention to the matter, following the consecutive links and the sequence, then starting from the third or fourth crime he’d have had no problem deducing the logical criterion and patronymic that guided the hand of the murderer.
Who was it?
Let’s leave his identity in suspense for a moment, as we concentrate on his biography: an unhappy childhood with blows of a poker across his knuckles, inflicted by an alcoholic father; incomplete penetrations by an older brother, an unemployed miner. And then, the first acts of revenge: he becomes a specialist in piercing the tiny eyes of larks, and cultivates his aura of doom by pinching useless objects from abandoned houses. In late adolescence, a certainty about the importance of his being fills him, and the consequent need to share this news with the rest of the planet is revealed. Someone tells him that Nero became famous by burning Rome. “Let’s see, what can I do to achieve that same end?” he asks himself. In Riga’s buildings, there is more stone than wood. That’s why he decides to cement his glory without resorting to fire, and instead chooses his victims based on the first letter of their surnames, which, emerging in successive order with the unfolding of events, will announce his own: every small-time criminal harbors the allegorical intent of the lesser intelligence. To kill, to stain his hands with blood, gives him the same amount of pleasure as to imagine the way he’ll reveal himself, and the moment an astute detective will proceed to arrest him. And if this doesn’t happen at the end of the first struggle, then there will be other, even more spectacularly morbid rounds . . . But just in case (out of fear of being misunderstood), he offers the poor alternative of a coded message, whose text he copies onto sixteen pages of graph paper: “Sixteen people will be annihilated and carved up, their remains scattered through the city, only because I want to proclaim, to the reverence and horror of History, that my surname is composed of the first letters of the surnames of every person dead by my hand.” With zero result, Mr. Aglarevopphigius—limping, scrawny, insignificant, bug-eyed, celibate and ugly—pastes up these messages in the bathrooms of the city’s bars, after he’s accentuated the first letter of his surname with blood.
But it doesn’t end here. There is another sign. For Aglarevopphigius, the choice of a surname is also the choice of the organ or body part that will be hacked by his dagger, perforated by his bullet, corroded by his poison, squeezed by his rope. Thus the eminent watchmaker Acantus receives a gunshot to the Abdomen, and Gimmel bleeds to death after his murderer chews his Glans . . . The strangest choice by Aglarevopphigius is precisely Gunda Gwrolin, victim to a dagger that slashes her intestine. Could it be for gassy, gastric, greasy?
How to know? Poor Aglarevopphigius was never arrested, and Stierli, who stayed at the margins of the evolution of this affair (though not at its close) remained convinced that a group of conspirers knew of his mission and was dogging his steps.
Believing the fence of persecution to be closing around him, Stierli hurries. He copies quickly, without stopping or thinking, and runs the risk of committing an error, producing a variation in the handwriting, in the expression, in the meaning of my great-grandfather’s annotations.3 One afternoon, he marks the dot of a full stop to end his work. It’s the most delicate moment of his mission: the one when he must perform the substitution, leaving behind his copy and taking the original to Louvain; it’s also, therefore, the moment any enemy would pounce upon to denounce him as a thief and falsifier. This is why, anticipating the trap, Stierli walks out of the library with the copy. The operation is typical of his extremely subtle intelligence, and also his propensity for stupendous error. If they trap or capture what’s in his hands, the thieves won’t have what they’re looking for, but its simulacrum. Furthermore, if the transcription is artful in spirit and letter, won’t it fundamentally be indistinguishable from the original? For the first time in months, Stierli treads the streets of Riga with the look of a satisfied delinquent. He takes one step, then another. His guilty right hand caresses and reveals the secret pocket in his coat where he stores the book-decoy. To his surprise, no one stops him, no one assaults him, no one asks him to give back or hand over what’s been stolen.
