the others went to bed the three of us often stayed up late discussing our hopes and our fears; we still drank the thick, tepid ale – or else that bitter Étampes wine which went down without one noticing. That was when we were all excellent friends.
One night, when Arnold had finally fallen asleep, stretched out like a bearskin rug in front of the fire, Christian and I went for a walk among the statues. We were drunk of course. More than ever, it seemed to me that we were in the midst of a forest of stone, two figures who could have been struck motionless and dumb at a wave of the hand – that was how Christian would become a prophet and I an apostle.
For a long time he made me talk about my wanderings and about the people I had come across – the wise men and the warriors, those who were born under a magic constellation, those who had come back from the world of the dead. I told him about Courtly Love and the tournaments, the perfumes of Spain, and about waiting for the Lady.
‘Do you still want to know what I do?’
‘I’m no longer so sure.’
‘You’re right. It’s best kept a secret. I don’t know it myself.’
He looked at me solemnly.
‘All sorts of people dwell within me and sometimes, when I’ve finished drawing an initial, I feel furious that the universe is not mine so that I can celebrate the glory of God and the greatness of man.’
‘Nothing more?’
He pummelled me with his fists and we could not stop laughing.
‘Come on now,’ he said when we had calmed down, ‘close your eyes and trust your little brother Christian!’
He slipped off my gown and my tunic and he placed his hands on my bare shoulders.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Don’t be frightened,’ he whispered, ‘I’ve actually been to Sodom, but it was as an angel . . .’
‘Can I open my eyes now?’
‘If you promise me you won’t be afraid.’
I wasn’t frightened. I was simply shivering because of the cold. By the light of a candle he laid out his colours, his quills and his brushes. I watched him, eyes riveted, as he prepared this pagan ritual.
‘Now turn round, you’re not allowed to see.’
When his quill touched me, light as a wing, I had a dreadful desire to laugh, but I controlled myself.
‘Don’t move. Remember you’re a stone now; you’ve got to keep still.’
I obeyed. I almost managed to forget the sensation, by turns unpleasant and gentle, of being licked by an army of insects. My breathing became so soft that I could have been dead, imagining myself sent to heaven, with my feet in the air, among the army of saints who decorate a row on the arches of those curved porticos you see everywhere at the entrance to churches. Or could I be a monster, crushed beneath some foot? At the Last Judgement, I would be both vice and virtue.
‘Very good, William.’
His voice came to me from another world. He probably talked like that to the pages of his books. Then he began circling round me, a joyful faun, a dancing priest, and I no longer found it difficult pretending to be still. With my feet firmly planted on the ground, I didn’t know where my breath had gone and it would have needed a thrust from a sword to bring me back to life.
‘Now you can look. But be sure to move very slowly. Don’t forget you were a stone.’
My heavy head slumped forward: the tip of my breast was an initial letter painted in gold, and across the whole of my chest I could see letters of a language which, from upside down, looked as if it belonged to a race of barbarians. I looked particularly at the images that hung down me: at my sides, which were covered by intertwining foliage in which a squirrel or an egret was hiding; at my neck, from which the column of a temple of Solomon rose up; and the base of my stomach, where a woman swathed in veils was offering herself upon a bed with sky-blue sheets studded with gold stars. Her lips were the colour of blood.
‘Do you recognise her?’
‘I am dark but comely . . . If I have the Song of Songs on my belly, what have you painted on my back? The Apocalypse?’
He was putting away his materials.
‘Don’t try to look. There’s nothing evil there, but I’ve hidden a little secret patch, on your own body, so that you may remember that even the body can’t teach you everything. One day you will be allowed to know, but not before I tell you.’
Although he was speaking a little ironically, there could be no doubting his seriousness. I moved so that I could see my page move, prompted by the invisible hand that was my body, my muscles, my breathing, my own heartbeat. I am black, but comely, O daughters of Jerusalem . . . He snuffed out the candle with his fingers. Dawn came. I picked up my tunic and I got dressed: the Song of Songs disappeared in the folds of my gown.
‘It’s very strange, my friend, to be a book written by you and whose last words are still secret . . .’
‘Every book is like a pilgrimage or a man’s life: the reward comes at the end.’
The street itself, at daybreak, where I stretched my legs among the cats, was a book in the process of being written; the street was a line that snaked between the houses, gardens and vines, along which my flaxenhaired friend, with his rainbow fingers and ink-stained nails, walked beneath a stormy sky.
‘I am weary,’ said Abelard, ‘and I am old: I shall soon be forty.’
‘The acme! The floruit!’
‘You may mock. The time that a generation of men has passed, I have spent in arguing. As far back as I remember, when I was at my first school, in Nantes, I was no taller than a box hedge and I was arguing with my first masters about Latin declensions . . . Along the entire length of the Loire, at Angers, at Saumur, then at Loches with that devil Roscelin, and at Laon with old Anselm, I was still arguing . . .’
‘You’ll die arguing.’
He struck the table.
‘Indeed, I will not!’
Two or three days had passed since his confession – if that is what that soldier’s demand for booty can be called. I avoided his lectures and held my breath. I knew very well that the miracle of Heloise’s absence would not last.
He picked himself up again and grew more mellow.
‘Seriously, William, don’t you think it’s time for me to take a woman?’
‘Do you want to get married?’
‘Me? You must be joking! It would wreck my reputation, undermine my career, preclude my . . .’
‘You see.’
‘But taking a woman is not the same as getting married. Taking a woman is . . .’
‘What
