The rain rattled deafeningly on the slate roof and the shutters banged. The howling of the north wind was trying to get in through the chimney, but by the time it reached the hearth, choked by the smoke and the soot, it emitted only a dull moan. Tuscan peasants in rags and Florentine burghers wrapped in their cloaks sat huddled on the benches. An icy cold lashed their cheeks whenever the door of the inn burst open. The candles flickered, threatening to go out. A tall strapping man appeared in the doorway. He was so big, and made all the bigger by his thick leather cape, that he took up the whole doorframe, barring the wind from entering. He peered into the gloom, looking the drinkers up and down, as if he were searching for someone. The innkeeper was about to reprimand him, but changed his mind when the brute turned toward him. His grimacing smile, lost amid the cuts and scars that crisscrossed his face, had all the seduction of an open wound. So it was with a keen sense of relief that the innkeeper saw the rogue at last close the door and go straight to the far end of the room.
A hooded monk was sitting in a corner, holding a bowl of hot cider in his cracked hands to warm them. He did not move when the giant shadow of the man in the cape loomed on the wall.
“Brother Benoît?”
The monk nodded.
The ogre immediately sat down and poured himself a drink. “What news do you bring from Galilee?”
The monk’s only response was to raise his bowl, take a decent swig of cider, then wipe his lips with his sleeve. The hood left the features of his face obscured. Only his chin protruded. His lips, though, could vaguely be made out in the red glow from the hearth. They were slightly twisted, the corners lifted toward the cheeks in a disconcerting grin. “Hello, Colin,” he said at last.
Colin lost his balance, his bench fell backwards, and he ended up lying full-length on the filthy flagstones of the tavern, much to the amusement of the customers. Colin stood up again, groaning, ready to strike those who were mocking him, but then he merely threw them a scornful glance, turned his back on them, threw himself on François, and gave him an almighty hug. The audience looked on speechless, unable to decide if the monster was going to devour the prey he was crushing in his arms or if the monk would brandish his wooden cross and repulse this attack with a quick “Vade retro, Satanas!”
Colin at last relaxed his embrace and quietly sat down again, his cheeks red with emotion. Disappointed, the gallery lost all interest. The two men decided nevertheless to speak in low voices, leaning toward each other across the table.
“You’re looking well for a priest,” Colin said
“The book hunters have taken good care of me.”
François was amused to see the lines of bewilderment that furrowed his old companion’s brow. Whenever Colin thought hard about something, his features became twisted and his veins stood out, as if he were lifting a tree trunk.
“You made yourself the accomplice of those unbelievers!”
“To each his own treachery . . . ”
“That’s rich, coming from you!” Colin replied, offended. After his convoy had been ambushed and he had escaped by a miracle, he had hurried to Italy to inform Federico and claim the payment that was due to him. In order not to die of starvation, he had committed a few thefts on the way, and had been caught by the constabulary not far from Parma. It was to save his skin that he had denounced the bookseller. He had merely paid the Florentine back in his own coin.
“Whereas you set about getting him released. And at what a price! By selling off the words of our Lord Christ!”
François shrugged. He knocked back what remained in his tankard, avoiding his friend’s angry glare. After a moment, he even seemed to forget his presence, and sat lost in thought, gazing at the reflections of the fire dancing on the wall. Outraged, Colin grunted and stood up, throwing a couple of coins on the table for his cider. François held him back by his sleeve. He held out his bag, the flap open.
Colin, still standing, took the bag and felt the weight of it. There were no crowns or ingots in it. He fingered the outside of it with an expert hand—the hand of an experienced brigand.
He distrusted François’s tricks. Head thrown back, holding the thing at arm’s length, he gently moved the canvas sides apart. All he could see was a package rolled up into a ball. Making up his mind, he took the package out, turned it in every direction, then peeled it like an onion, throwing off one by one the crumpled scraps that surrounded it. All he found in it was a hunk of dry bread. Annoyed, he abruptly thrust his hand back into the bag, touched the rough bottom with his fingernails, even looked for a secret pocket, while François bent down to pick up the fragments that had fallen to the floor. Suddenly he brandished a whole bundle of them.
“These are the words of Jesus.”
The dim lighting in the tavern made the pages look even more pitiful. The faded ink and soiled parchment gave them an ashen hue. The letters were barely visible amid the folds in the hide and the patches of mold. There were no illuminations, not even any margins, just spidery scribbles covering almost the whole page. Colin wondered if François was making fun of him That would have been sacrilege.
“The Pope doesn’t have the Savior’s last wishes in his palace. What he has is quite another testament.”
“The testament of a thief like you?”
“Who better to recount the concerns of a man condemned to death?”
“And of a saint?”
François proceeded to tell how Colin how he had spent time in the desert, how he had slowly been initiated, how he had familiarized himself with the scriptures of Qumran, and how he had produced parodies and imitations, corrected by Gamliel and translated by Eviatar. Nobody had suspected how opportune these pranks and stylistic exercises would prove to be—not even François, who had only agreed to take part in the game while waiting for an opportunity to play the winning hand and escape the clutches of the Brotherhood.
“Yes, it was necessary to get out of a tight spot. But not like you.”
“How, then?”
“By fooling everyone.”
Colin looked at the shriveled pieces of parchment. He wondered why the Lord had been unable to escape punishment while the criminal opposite him claimed to have successfully led Rome, Jerusalem, and even Satan by the nose. The answer no doubt lay in those yellowed pages, thrown willy-nilly on the table of the inn. There they were, between two wretched thieves, just like Jesus on his cross.
“What does Christ say?”
“I have no idea. I can’t read Aramaic.”
That took Colin’s breath away. François hadn’t even read the testament of Jesus. He had simply composed his own pastiche of it. Colin scratched his beard. François surely couldn’t have concocted, all by himself, an imitation that could fool the doctors of the faith so totally. To commit such an act of treachery, he would have needed the help of a mentor versed in the Holy Scriptures, assisted by a translator capable of putting his Parisian troubadour’s language into old Aramaic, as well as a skilful copyist, not to mention skillful forgers able to imitate the right ink, and so on. In other words, a whole team of pen pushers and Bible punchers!
François let Colin ponder like this for a while before deigning to enlighten him. “Do you remember Brother Paul?”
Colin nodded. François explained to him how, as soon as he returned to the monastery, he had persuaded the prior to help him save Jesus’s confession from the hands of the inquisitors. But also from the book hunters. He had presented him with quite another testament, the Ballad of a crucified man, which he had composed in secret in the desert. Paul, who had read and studied Annas’s minutes, had suggested a few changes and corrections to François, and then Brother Médard and his monks had immediately set to work. François had delayed his departure for Acre by pretending to be sick. For three days, Aisha had made him teas from wild flowers that induced fever. She had believed that François was using this subterfuge to stay with her a while longer. François had asked that she be allowed to come on the journey, disguised as a gypsy, but Gamliel had been firmly opposed to the idea. It was only once he was at sea that he learned the real reason for this refusal. The pregnant Aisha had feared that François did not want a child. She had not even seen fit to tell him the news. What if, once he had regained his freedom, François decided never to return to the Holy Land?
“That girl really has brought you nothing but bad luck. And now she’s burdening you with a bastard.”
It was a slap in the face, but François refrained from responding. Colin was a lout, who knew nothing of the affairs of the heart. So how could he understand that it was “that girl” who had set him on the path he was currently following? Preserving the words of Jesus Christ was of no interest to her, she had made that quite clear. She was a Berber. On the other hand, she had seen it as a way for François to save his own soul. And his own Testament. For it wasn’t so much the Nazarene’s words that mattered, it was the poetry that emanated from them, the emotion they inspired over and above the words themselves. And it was the same with Villon’s song. It was the sound of both these singular voices that had to be preserved at all costs because they were the song of mankind.
Aisha had nurtured François with her silences, her caresses, never burdening him with idle chatter, in the same way as she respected the breath of the wind. François, though, had owed it to himself to act in a more decisive manner, armed with his pen and his incorrigible nerve, but not only that. He had first of all to walk in the footsteps of Christ, from Galilee to the desert, from Nazareth to Jerusalem. Constructing his own legend as he went, just as Jesus, that other rebel, that other dreamer, had done from village to village. As a woman, Aisha had foreseen “all these things,” and had simply wanted to be there, by François’s side, just as Mary Magdalen had wanted to be with Jesus in his ordeal. She would never have forgiven herself for standing in his way, robbing him of his destiny.
Colin, who did not care about his own destiny, or that of his fellow men, did not give a hoot for whatever fate had in store for him. He was as fatalistic as a mule pulling a plow. So what was the point of bothering him with these explanations? On the other hand, he could appreciate a good trick. So François told him how, having arrived in Florence, he had switched the manuscripts, under the noses of Gamliel’s spy Eviatar and of old Marsilio Ficino, who had been eager to free his friend Federico as soon as possible.
Colin found it hard to believe that François could have fooled the Brotherhood so easily. There was nothing to prove that these pages were not just as fake as the pastiche he had composed with such ardor. François had not even taken the trouble to read them, or to verify their authenticity.
Had he pretended to believe the words of Brother Paul and Gamliel? Why would he have lent himself to such a game? And what about Ficino and the Papal experts? Had they all played this same game at the expense of the Savior?
François, in no way troubled by such doubts, stroked the pieces of parchment with a veneration that disconcerted Colin.
“I have no idea what the Lord recorded here. Whether these scraps really contain what Christ said or not, I have vowed that His word will never again be distorted by zealots, whether they are Catholics, Jews, or Saracens. Nor will they ever usurp His name for their own ends.”
Colin grimaced, but François was enjoying himself.
“The Vatican has calculated things with a discernment that does it honor. Now the Pope won’t get any nasty surprises concerning the content of Christ’s last words. By placing its seal on my pastiche, the Church has protected itself wonderfully. Any other version that its enemies would try to make public will immediately be taken for dubious. Including the real one.”
“Which is still kept by the book hunters!”
“Or else by me, at the bottom of this bag. You see, it would have been in Jerusalem’s interest to have the Pope read it. Most of what Jesus says in it was either censored or even dictated by Annas to exonerate the Jews in the eyes of Rome. But if the Brotherhood gave me a fake after all, or a version that had been cut to serve its purposes, it must now be keeping the existence of the original secret.”
Colin was still not convinced. He gave the bag back to François. “Real or fake, Jerusalem must surely have a copy.”
“Yes. But, real or fake, it couldn’t use this text twice.”
“Except to discredit yours.”
“But mine suits everyone better than the truth.”
François and Colin both laughed out loud. They poured themselves more cider and drank each other’s health, just as they had in another tavern, in Lyon, not so long ago.
“Nobody will dare admit such an outrage . . . ”
“After all Christ can’t contradict himself . . . ”
“Nor can eminent popes and wise rabbis get things so wrong . . . ”
“Especially not Chartier, who commissioned you.” Colin’s face clouded over and he thought for a moment. “You’re just as caught as they are, François. You’ll never be able to give the game away . . . ”
“They know that perfectly well. That’s why I’m sure these are the genuine minutes.”
“In that case, the Jews have played a nasty trick on you. It won’t be them the Pope’s men will be hunting down, it’ll be you.”
“And all Christians who take Jesus at his word and challenge dogma.”
Colin put down his tankard. He looked at his companion with a suddenly severe air, pointing at the canvas bag lying on the bench. He now saw the old pieces of parchment in a new light. With reverence.
“What are you going to do with them?”