Other Terrors, page 27
“Puella canem timet.” The girl fears the dog.
“Canis puellam mordet.” The dog bites the girl.
However, in a medieval manuscript, to conserve space, you were likelier to see “Canis puellā mordet”—no “m” after “puella,” but a line above the final “a” instead. “That macron serves to mark the accusative ending,” said Paolo. He wrote “arbor” (“tree”) and the final “r” trailed off into a squiggling tail, and he pointed to it and said, “This abbreviation, meanwhile, stands for ‘ibus,’ the dative and ablative plural ending. Forgive me, gentlemen, I don’t mean to bore you; I know many of you are frequent guests in the manuscripts reading room, and your Capelli’s are already well thumbed.”
A chuckle radiated between the pillars and the vaulted ceiling.
“Capelli’s?” whispered Jenny.
“A reference book—it lists all these abbreviations,” said Simon, who knew his medieval Latin (and many other languages) much better than either of them.
Paolo went on:
Traccia started off as a joke. Abbreviations supplied where they didn’t belong, to change the meaning of Usignoli verses (so that dogs bit girls rather than the other way around). They added new heads and tails, new odds and ends of meaning. Then the joke took on a new life. Signs that had once belonged to an established system of abbreviations became tangled carpets of script that covered the songs of the Usignoli. As it corrected and gobbled up all it could, Traccia became a kind of language unto itself.
Paolo distributed photocopies of poems in the old southern Italian dialect of the Usignoli, facsimiles of manuscripts containing Traccia, and several reams of tracing paper.
He guided them through a few preliminary exercises, deciphering first the antiquated Italian, then the Traccia, and then he led them through the process of transforming the one into the other on tracing paper. Twenty or so heads bowed through the room, noses and hands hovering over the intertwined texts.
Then Paolo approached Jenny—she glanced uneasily toward Lynn, as though to say, Why did we sit in the front row again? (Good question, thought Lynn, as she slid her own work into her lap, tried to hide the fact that she was pretty lost and had just doodled some of the faces grimacing on the capitals.) Paolo asked to see Jenny’s progress, and she gave him her tracing paper. He nodded, then crumpled her work up into a ball and gave Jenny a new piece of tracing paper. “Again,” he said.
A nervous muttering through the room. “Not just this young lady,” he said. “All of you. Again!”
A rustling, crinkling as they all discarded their first efforts.
“The repetitive nature of the exercise should come to feel rather like prayer,” said Paolo.
Scattered smirks indicated that the comparison wasn’t exactly inviting to everyone.
Just when Lynn figured her dereliction had been overlooked, Paolo’s hand fell on her shoulder and he asked her if she needed any help. She shrugged him off. “No—sorry, I’m always a slow study at first,” she said, “but I’ll catch up. Just watching and learning.” She jerked her thumb in Simon’s direction; his hand darted across the page fluidly, like he’d been possessed by the spirits of the old monks who had inhabited this place back when it was the Monastero di San Giosefo del Ponte all’Oca.
Paolo said, “Don’t be shy. It is natural to make mistakes when you first attempt it. That is why we must try again, and again.”
Lynn nodded, like oh yeah, of course, never would have occurred to her that you learn languages through trial and error. As Paolo surveyed the rest of the room, she tried to look busy, scrawled some nonsense. She could already tell that this routine would become difficult to maneuver around as the summer advanced. But Simon would probably let her copy his work if the situation ever got desperate (she’d just be in for a disappointed frown or two).
Soon, Lynn’s pencil quirked its way into doodles again. There were little birds in low relief, she noticed, all over the room: on the vaults, spiraling downward around the columns, even a few scratched into the flagstones underfoot. Nightingales or doves or something else? And then the carved landscape seemed to vibrate around them, full of sinuous and curling shapes.
While everyone else left for lunch in the refectory, Lynn lingered. She sat on the floor, then stretched out on her back, and studied the ceiling.
Serpents. Very faint, but you could make them out if you looked closely enough. Clouds of carved snakes, coiling around the birds.
There was no such thing as an Usignoli “expert,” and that was really what Lynn wanted to be. Traccia was just a gateway she had to pass through to get there.
They knew so little about them, but most of the Usignoli appeared to have been women (or at least liked to write in women’s voices), and they wrote each other strange and beautiful love poems. Overripe fruit, bursting blossoms, ecstatic birdsong. A lyric register somewhere between the Song of Songs and Sappho and that weird Catullus poem about the sparrow.
While the Accademia had put some effort into compiling and editing a few samples of the language of the Usignoli to serve as classroom materials and model the leap from one language to the next, most of the original texts still remained hidden beneath heaps of Traccia. When Lynn asked why nobody had yet put some effort into extracting the whole known corpus of Usignoli poetry, Paolo told her that the exercise was unnecessary; they had all they needed already in order to understand Traccia.
Paolo showed them fragments of a sermon in Traccia, built on top of a song about nightingales and swallows. Romantic birdsong turned into prayer, feathers became quill pens, kisses on bare arms became the kiss of the divine logos.
Lynn noticed “filomena,” a word for “nightingale,” through a wriggling overlay of Traccia, which transformed it into a word for “sculpture.” As though the monks had tried to petrify the Usignoli’s song.
As the days passed, Lynn could relate.
She noticed that Paolo and his cronies never cold-called her. They preferred Simon and his ilk (not that that was anything new). Probably for the best. Lynn mastered the art of guarding her work with a forearm and a curtain of loose hair. She didn’t need any extra scrutiny.
They were a couple of weeks into their work when their photocopies of Usignoli texts dwindled, then disappeared. They had exhausted their slim supply, and so they turned their attention to Traccia by itself. They traced, they transcribed.
“It’s like prayer,” insisted Paolo.
Low grunts of agreement.
Lynn nodded along, feigned attention while she struggled to unknot something: “sole.” That could be a substantive (“the sun”), or it could be an adjective (“alone” or “lonely”). She couldn’t tell without disentangling the preceding or following words, which were pretty buried beneath Traccia. Sometimes this whole process felt like trimming an unruly hedge. She could almost feel the thorns of the scribes’ unruly script prickle against her palms, resisting her efforts.
Maybe if she cut around the weeds of Traccia on the next line up or down, she could find something, she could figure this out. She looked up from her work and Paolo was off on a tangent about Alan of Lille and his great admiration for the monks of Ponte all’Oca.
Lynn jumped ahead and recognized the edges of a word she had freed once before. Dawn.
The hidden line opened up as she picked at it. The nightingale’s dawn-song, waking up the sun; Lynn’s hand wavered. The nightingale’s song invites the sun into the sky. Without her notes, it would always be night. She could almost hear it—feel it, a fluting, sweet rhythm, hot with new sunlight . . .
“Lynn?” said Paolo.
Her reverie broke.
“Could you remind us what this sign represents?” He pointed at a white square on the chalkboard.
Was he joking?
That kind of simple geometry rarely occurred in Traccia. Simon nudged his notebook with his elbow. Lynn tried to figure out the answer by herself; it wouldn’t come—what with the singing sun-dazzle in her head. She let her gaze lick across Simon’s notes.
Oh.
“It’s a common marginal note, right?” said Lynn. “A reminder to the scribe that there’s a word or a line he still needs to write his Traccia over.” The square was supposed to evoke a veil, to drape across the text.
“Very good, Simon,” said Paolo, earning a ripple of hearty mirth in response. Lynn glowered down at her notes. Nightingales and dawn, she thought, willing herself elsewhere as she pictured a blushing sky and birds’ silhouettes darting across it, their dark beaks pen nibs, writing the sun into being.
Sometimes Lynn needed to be loud. That was how she came to the chapel. Lighter than the rest of the Accademia, with its bright plaster walls. Bucolic molding: grape leaves, ivy, songbirds. Wooden rafters crossed the ceiling overhead, and sparrows sometimes roosted there (Lynn found some bird shit among the pews).
Although the monks had done their best to cover up the language of the Usignoli, they had neglected the neumes, the musical notation, that hovered around their words. Faint memories of choir practice murmured at the back of Lynn’s mind, and sometimes she would tap out an imagined rhythm on her knee while she read. It wouldn’t hurt to try out some fragments of Usignoli song in the chapel.
But she swallowed her reconstruction as Simon entered with a fat textbook tucked under one armpit. Lynn waved. He waved back and settled into one of the pews.
She slipped into a seat in front of his and peered at the open textbook in his lap; he, meanwhile, studied the rose window above the altar.
“What’s that you’ve got there, Simon?”
He showed her a page with a reproduction of a miniature from one of the manuscripts. Above lines of Traccia: an illuminated roundel, tidy petals of red and green ink. Lynn recognized it as an illustration of the chapel’s rose window.
“I’ve switched between various seats in this place,” said Simon, “trying to find the best angle, so that my view of the window will match the version on this page. That way I’ll know that I am sitting in the same spot, more or less, as the monk who drew this image so long ago.”
Lynn stopped herself from laughing when she saw the wounded twitch at the corner of Simon’s mouth. “But the chapel must have changed so much since then,” she said. “I mean, the pews are definitely new, for one.”
Simon shrugged. “I’m just trying to get as close to them as I can,” he said. “Close to Traccia. Close to history.”
“I get it,” said Lynn, though she wasn’t sure that she did. “Didn’t mean to make fun. Your dedication is . . . admirable.”
He offered her a faint smile. “As is your singing,” he said quickly. It became clear that part of his staring so fixedly at the window had to do with working very hard not to make eye contact with Lynn.
Later, she would hear something in the classroom, a faraway kind of music. If she didn’t know better, she would have said that it was like echoes of the tune she had started and then stopped in the chapel had gotten stuck in the Accademia’s walls. Still resounding.
Paolo took his flock along for a visit to the Accademia’s archives. They stored their treasures in what had once been the crypt.
The class descended, filed through the chilly dark.
Paolo stood at the head of a long table and showed them a trio of codices full of Traccia: imposing volumes bound in aged scarlet leather that put up some noisy resistance as he pried them open. Not pretty books, but stained with water damage, riddled with holes, tears stitched together with pale red and white threads. The volumes’ history had left them with scars.
Many lines of Traccia looked more like wounds in person than they tended to in photocopies—rubricated to catch the reader’s eye, letters underlined or filled in with bright, messy crimson.
Paolo invited the students to the reader’s table one by one, had them touch the corner of a folio, to feel the old parchment, study the dead calf’s hair follicles, like shaving stubble.
When it was Lynn’s turn, something like static bit at her skin.
“Something wrong?” said Paolo.
“No,” said Lynn, pinching the book.
When the program first started, Paolo would make bad cranky-grandpa jokes, which the room largely shrugged off. He’d wonder aloud what the inventors of Traccia might suppress, if they were alive today. (Except he never said “suppress.” It was always something like “reinvent” or “rewrite.”) Trashy films, pop stars, godless politicians, all wrapped up and digested in Traccia, their discourse reshaped.
But lately, a number of students—maybe in a misguided effort to ingratiate themselves—acted like they got what he meant, stopped groaning and sighing.
Simon kept interrupting Lynn at her work.
She would set up shop in the common room between the students’ cells, arrange a quilt of papers on the table. The corners of her pages shifted slightly whenever a breeze crept in through the wide arched windows; she weighed them down with stones she found in the cloister garden.
She was onto something. She knew it. The dawn-song. She’d cleaned up a few new patches of text: Let us echo through, the sound of us will still resound . . . There is a cure, made of stone and sound . . . She needed to figure out what came next. But then the photocopied ink got blurred and unruly, and the language of the Usignoli drowned in it.
Simon appeared in the common room; he stood at one end of the table and watched Lynn as she jotted down ideas, scratched them out, rubbed her temples. Then he picked up one of the stones idly, and she lunged as the page it had anchored floated on a wayward breeze.
Simon sat down, attention tugging at her.
Lynn clicked her pen. “What is it?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he muttered. But it didn’t take long for him to burst out: “Do you know why I want to learn Traccia?” She could tell even before he answered his own question that a flood of tangent was about to carry him off, and she couldn’t stop him. “I want to hold the abstract substance of the language in my head, to pretend that I’m one of the monks, that I’m lost in the act of writing their words down myself, as if they were my own. I feel like, if I do this, if I transcribe everything, then I can feel the very sensations that they must have experienced when they first generated a new language, when their ideas first lay cradled only by thought, before being filtered through the pen.” He stopped. Breathed.
“That’s nice, Simon,” said Lynn. She didn’t like herself for the vague embarrassment she felt for him—his passion too transparent. Sometimes she worried his ideas would overwhelm hers. She studied her notes, hoped he would leave.
He didn’t.
“Simon.” She turned to face him. And the person she saw didn’t look like Simon anymore—or he did and he didn’t. She saw two faces, a new Simon inscribed on the old and faded one, a palimpsest; he had the same features—dark eyes overlarge in his gaunt face—but there were lines that didn’t belong, as though a pen had etched new and angry ridges between the eyebrows, across the bridge of his nose.
“You never listen to me,” he said. “Listen!”
He slammed his palms down on the table. The stones atop Lynn’s papers rattled.
Lynn closed her eyes for a moment, gathering herself. “Simon, that’s ridiculous,” she said. “Of course I listen to you.”
The worst part: seeing her own contained rage these past few weeks sketched across his face, mirrored back at her, distorted.
“No.” Simon inched closer, loomed. Lynn tried to shrink away from the wrong lines on his face. “Where are your passions, Lynn? Do you feel so strongly about anything? Why do you refuse to learn Traccia properly? Why are you even here?”
Lynn faltered, tried to remind him that the Usignoli were her real project—once, he had understood and respected that—but Simon wouldn’t listen.
And then, to Lynn’s relief, Jenny drifted in, hair shaped like an amoeba. Her cell was right next to the common room, and apparently she had been sleeping.
“Would you two stop bickering like an old married couple?” she begged.
“Old divorcing couple’d be more accurate,” grumbled Lynn. Simon glanced sharply at her, frowning.
“Whatever your imaginary marital status may be, shut it, pretty please,” said Jenny. “Or divorce more quietly.”
They apologized, said their good-nights. Lynn tried to unhear the curse Simon muttered darkly, before he left.
Paolo had been doing his rounds of the room and Lynn hadn’t even noticed him, creeping up behind her desk.
“You are here to learn Traccia,” he said, “not the nonsense underneath it.”
And this time he actually grabbed her hand, wrapping his fingers around her knuckles until he could clutch her pen and guide it across her tracing paper; he dragged her through a line of Traccia. Lynn squirmed; his palms were damp and hot, like something’s maw had clamped around her rather than a hand.
She studied the room and all its eyes looked back in silence—including Simon’s and Jenny’s. Blank-faced, not a single sign of empathy, horror, anything. Was she crazy? This was inappropriate, right?
Paolo let go of her hand.
The meaning of the line he had forced her to trace sank in: Drink not of the poisonous song.
“There,” said Paolo. “Isn’t that better?”
As Lynn changed into her pajamas, something flickered into view in the shadow of her nightshirt, tented over her head—
She shrieked, banged her tailbone against her bed frame, then twitched in a ragged circle, scanned all the walls of her cell. But—nothing out of the ordinary. All empty.
Lynn crumpled in a corner by the door, pressed her forehead to her knees, squeezed her eyes shut. She breathed, reined in her galloping pulse.
She went to the mirror, just saw herself. Circles below her eyes, hair a mess as usual.
But before.
There had been a snake—something like a snake. Draped around her neck, across her shoulders and chest—a tangle of bright bronze and mottled black, like an ink spill. A head just beneath her collarbone, and it had been writing something across her with its dark tongue, her skin its parchment. Calligraphic text mirrored the sinuous curves of its own tail.
