Chapter 8 I, the Mute Ox
I, the Mute Ox
All the way to my lonely monastery on the mountain, that’s how far the Queen of Sheba went to find me after I’d been living there for three years, even though at that point I thought of myself as an adult and was pouring all my enthusiasm into the work of Thomas Aquinas, studying it so obsessively that I thought I’d forgotten my Moorish queen, the Lady of Sheba.
But it turned out that she hadn’t forgotten about me.
First, let me be clear that I’ve never been the combative type, I’m more of one to hang back, made small by shyness or caught in daydreams. I spoke so little that the other novices called me Bos Mutas, the Mute Ox, a nickname I willingly accepted, because it was true that I kept my mouth shut almost all the time and also because I was writing my theology thesis on Summa Theologiae by Aquinas, who was given that very nickname, Bos Mutas, as a teenager, when he was just starting out at the monastery in Lazio; he had a big, heavy body and went around so quiet and lost in thought that the others assumed him to be rather dumb.
I, his timid student, received his nickname as an extremely humbling tribute to him, the great master, since my mind was a mere nanofraction of his; I was a poor, common ox perpetually in the yoke, while he was a winged ox of the majestic, Assyrian kind.
At that time, I spent days in the library, a refuge full of silence, ancient manuscripts, and the rancid smell of goat cheese, since ours was no magnificent Borgesian library, nor memorable like the Alexandrian one, nor was it labyrinthine like the one in The Name of the Rose.
No. Ours had been assembled against the odds in ancient sheds that, years before, the monks had used to make cheese out of raw sheep’s milk.
The crude shelves now filled with books had formerly held piles of cheese in various states of maturity.
Despite the inadequate facilities, you could breathe in the warm atmosphere there, it was somehow welcoming, a smell more of dairy than of books.
This effect was heightened by the coarse wood, uneven floor, and persistent animal musk, which blended harmoniously with the leather that bound the parchments.
As soon as I came through the door, I’d fall headfirst into the Middle Ages, as if through a wormhole.
One day, I was there at what we called the hour of mercy—after eating, in the refectory, the cooked vegetables the Dominican diet recommends at midday—and my fellow seminarians were strolling in the gardens, placid as cows as they digested their rations.
Rations, that’s what we called that bland, boiled meal that must have been the same one served to Thomas eight centuries before; it comforted me to think he must have loathed it too.
Meanwhile, I was in the almost empty library, studying the Latin version of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae.
I’d lingered over his reflections on man and woman as two beings in a single flesh, and I wondered how he could have reached that profound insight when he’d had no contact with women and, worse, feared them like the devil, according to Velázquez’s portrait of him in oil.
In that painting, Thomas appears faint and weak, but with his virtue intact, after using a burning log to ward off a prostitute who’d tried to seduce him.
That painting had always struck me as pathetic, much as it was also very Velázquez.
It wasn’t believable to me, this sorry portrayal of the immense Thomas collapsing and near-unconscious in the arms of a fragile angel after threatening to burn that poor woman, who flees fearfully in the background.
Lies! This, and so many more! A misogynous distortion schemed up by the Church, which aims to make people believe its male saints are asexual and immune to desire.
Placid Thomas, with his gentle manners, a noble education, and a lamb’s docile nature, trying to burn a woman with a flaming piece of wood, to reduce her to ash like some vampire? No. Not remotely believable.
I was reflecting on this matter, seated in front of that big tome, when Cirio the librarian came up behind me.
His name was Friar Silvio but we called him Friar Cirio because of his cerulean skin, which gave him a reptilian look.
All monks are a little medieval and reptilian—just look at their coarse brown habits, shaved tonsures surrounded by a gourd of cropped hair, pallor, and garlic-soup breath.
Not Friar Cirio, though. He dressed like a layman: wool sweater, gray pants, tennis shoes, and mouthwash breath.
Still, a sickly whiteness, a hook nose, sunken cheeks, and a prominent Adam’s apple made him a direct descendant of Friar Savonarola.
Friar Cirio’s demeanor matched his appearance, as it was severe and detached, draconian when it came to demanding the prompt return of books or enforcing silence in his domain.
And yet, there was something in him that I didn’t see in other monks; let’s just say that, to me, this Friar Cirio was a man who held some secret knowledge that kept him alive.
That’s why it wasn’t a complete surprise when, that afternoon, he came up behind me and whispered devastating gossip in my ear.
“You there, scalding your eyelashes with that reading,” he said, spraying me with his Listerine breath and tapping the handle of the paper cutter I had lying against the open pages.
“You, Bos Mutas, should know that when Thomas Aquinas was about to finish Summa Theologiae, he stopped all of a sudden, cast his pen aside, and said that everything he’d written up to that point was a whole lot of cheap hay and hot air without rhyme or reason. ”
I couldn’t comprehend what I was hearing.
“What are you saying?” I asked.
“You heard me. I said that Thomas refused to keep writing. He said everything he’d written was a bunch of useless hay.”
What was Friar Cirio trying to do with that low blow? Did he want to demoralize me, send me off the deep end? What was in it for him, in making me believe Thomas had recanted his own work, disillusioned with it to the point of calling it useless?
“Why are you telling me this, brother?” I managed to ask, annoyed, verging on angry.
“I’m telling you so you’ll think about it. You should also know your famous Queen of Sheba had something to do with it,” he said with the satisfaction of a man delivering a death blow.
Friar Cirio knew about my weakness for the Queen of Sheba because he’d often seen me in that very spot, seated on that very bench, in front of that very table, combing books for information about her.
“Out, vermin!” I said to him. Well, I didn’t say “Out, vermin,” but I thought it, playing down his words and washing my hands of the whole affair.
But not entirely. That is, not all the way.
The truth is, his words had marked me, they hummed in my ears, a little worm of curiosity now ate at me from the inside.
The Queen of Sheba had forced Thomas to abandon his writing?
An absurd tale. Although, improbable as it was, it wasn’t impossible; I already knew that in certain circumstances her influence could be disastrous, her kiss poisoned.
Thomas wouldn’t have been the first or last sage to cast doubt on his own truths.
Yes. After turning it over and over in my mind, I started to see it as not only possible, but probable.
When Aquinas refused to keep writing, Church leaders must have chided him.
“Drop the nonsense, Thomas, finish your never-ending Summa once and for all!” And he, smiling, modest, would have replied, like Bartleby: “I’d prefer not to.
” Or like Socrates with his “All I know is that I know nothing”; César Vallejo with his “I want to write, but only foam comes out.” The great mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, who forbade the reprinting of his books because, he claimed, they were little more than scribbles.
Gérard de Nerval, who suggested for his epitaph: “He wanted to know everything, but learned nothing.”
Friar Cirio showed me several manuscripts where he assured me that, at the same time Thomas went mute, there took place a certain revelation, illumination, poltergeist encounter, or expansion of vision that dazzled the saint and left him without words.
And that supernatural apparition had been a woman.
Not just any woman, but a young one, brown-skinned, secular, intelligent, in love with knowledge and with freedom of the spirit, leader of multitudes, proverbially beautiful, blessed with immense power and sovereignty over an incredibly rich empire, and, as if that weren’t enough, she was the most pagan of all biblical figures: the Queen of Sheba.
If I—a nobody, a piece of goat shit, a speck of dust—could lose my head over a vision of the queen, what impact would she have on the great Thomas, and what rarified knowledge or erotic shivers must have shaken the saint on seeing her, utterly gorgeous and dressed like Aurora Consurgens, wrapped in ripples and spirals and emitting brilliant blue or neon green rays of light, her incredibly long hair floating in gusts of solar wind all the way to the horizon.
That’s how Thomas must have seen her, or so I imagined, and the impact of that vision was so great he never wrote again.
“You again, Goat Foot?” I said to her. “You’ve come all the way to this monastery lost in the mountains, to find me? Are you trying to drive me mad, like you did with Thomas?”