style="font-size:15px;"> I wept, all of a sudden aware of a pain in my back, a pain in my balls, a pain in my ribs, and feeling that the earth was cold and the world unjust.
‘Are you dead or alive?’ enquired a voice belonging to the realm of shadows.
I sat up, still groaning and blinking, and brushed my hand over my mouth and cheeks. A lantern was swinging above my reeling head.
A powerful hand, as broad as a saddle, raised me to my feet. I found myself face to face with a dark countenance over which the lantern cast a ghostly light.
‘What are you doing there?’ he growled.
‘How about you?’
‘I see a poor wretch lying on the ground. What would you do if you were me? Would you strip him bare before kicking him to death?’
I laughed along with him. The full moon lit up the ruined tower of the cathedral of Saint-Étienne and to my left I could make out the dark mass of Saint-Jean-le-Rond and the walls of Notre-Dame Close. Apart from the odd cry in the night, everyone was asleep in the Hôtel-Dieu. It was the time when only madmen, stray beasts, and the dying are to be heard. Restless souls could be glimpsed, furtively hurrying by.
He placed his hand in mine; this fierce grip which had crushed necks and abducted women could be gentle.
‘My name is Arnold,’ he said, suddenly affable, ‘and I come from Brescia, in Italy, land of the unworthy popes.
‘And I am William, who set off from Oxford and journeyed through many a town and country in order to learn and to watch others quarrel.’
‘Are you thirsty, William?’
He gave me no time to reply. We walked past the Grand Pont and crossed the deserted Grève. The rain had stopped. There was no longer a breath of air; the heat rose up our legs; the stench of rotten fish tickled our nostrils. In a tavern hidden away at the bottom of an alleyway in the Monceau Saint-Gervais, I drank strong ale with my new-found friend.
He spoke in the natural way a child does, without fear or restraint. He had been brought up in a spirit of anger against those in power, which was rekindled whenever he witnessed injustice, malice or folly. He loathed oppression and he believed that God wished men to be free. He asked me what I was searching for in Paris. I demurred.
‘My master,’ I said eventually in a low voice, staring into my glass of ale.
‘What do you mean?’
I repeated what I had just said, looking into his dark eyes.
‘My master, I tell you.’
He struck the wooden bench on which he was sitting and his face lit up.
‘Friend,’ he said, enunciating his words, ‘I am your salvation. I have just the master you need – the only master I can abide myself – and to speak truthfully the only master there is around here.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘Peter Abelard.’
‘How do you know of him?’
I told the story of my wanderings, about Brother Andrew, about Fontevrault and its women. Arnold gazed at me wide-eyed, as if I had come from another planet. I also told him that I knew nothing about Abelard – apart from the power of his mind and the solitude he kept. That made him laugh. Solitude? The philosopher could not take a step on the Île de la Cité without crowds surrounding him. He was the greatest philosopher of his age, a man who could clench a stone in his hands and make it ooze with syllogisms, a man who spoke of the unity of the divine trinity in daring analogies, who caused the brave to tremble and cowards to flee.
‘When he speaks,’ said Arnold, ‘it’s as if Aristotle and Plato were re-embodied in this one man so that mysteries crumble and reason triumphs. With him, you feel prompted to go where no man has been before, due to ignorance and fear especially, and you realise that it is not wrong to understand everything we believe in. He’s a man who opens doors, and if he can’t open them he overcomes them . . . He speaks the languages of others better than any other master – and that’s why everyone fears him, hates him and refuses to confront him. Have you heard about how he destroyed William of Champeaux, and held old Anselm of Laon up to ridicule?’
‘No.’
‘It was as wonderful as Jesus in the Temple . . .’
There was a look of childlike emotion in his eyes.
‘You love him, don’t you?’
‘You will love him.’
After that we spoke about the sins we had committed, our cowardly acts, our derelictions of duty, about Cordoba and Rome, about Jerusalem where we would soon be going; he and I had both seen soldiers of Christ returning from that place, their hands bloodied and laden with gold, their eyes still wild from having seen the face of Yahweh – and not that of his Angel. I told him what he wanted to hear about my past. He made me laugh with his gesticulations. We were happy in one another’s company and we didn’t want to part. After the beer came the wine, a light wine from the Orléans region, which flowed down the corners of our lips as though we were drinking it from the vine itself, and which made us sing psalms.
Arnold had climbed up onto the table and was dancing with all the dexterity of a bear, singing Italian songs. He was denouncing all hypocrites and liars and claiming to settle his accounts in private with God.
He wanted us to perform a raucous dance together, but I was feeling as heavy as an oak door, I could scarcely keep my eyes open and I believed I was participating in some new Bible, at the mercy of the curses of a drunken Jeremiah.
That night, once Arnold had at last succumbed to silence, he hauled me over streams and across gardens; we encountered shadows which could have been those of lost animals, or could have been creatures that return to the city when it’s dark and which tremble with fear at every noise, every glimmer of light and every breath of wind.
We arrived at what he informed me was an inn, where students, poor pilgrims, vagabonds and brigands all slept together, waiting for sunrise, at the time of the Lendit fair. It was a large wooden house behind the Saint-Lazare leper hospital.
‘Don’t worry about anything,’ he whispered as I was about to fall asleep on a straw mattress that smelled of corpses, ‘you only get woken up by prayers and the dead.’
That night I slept like a man who has found himself, a free man. A soft voice was whispering in my ear that she would not forget me.
I was woken by the sound of groaning. It was the death-rattle of a dying man not far away from me, a man among a heap of others, some of whom were asleep and resembled corpses, while others were shivering and covering their ears, if that could be called being alive. It mattered little to me: dawn had come; I was eager for the city. I had travelled too much to have to wait long for my first morning among the streets, the smell of stables and rubbish, and the yellow sunlight on the stone. I shook Arnold’s elbow, and he had barely given a grunt before he was on his feet. Be ready! says the Apostle. He was.
‘Let’s go,’ I said in a low voice. ‘Come.’
He looked down his beard at me, as if contemplating a new breed of animal and rubbed his eyes with his fists as if he wanted to
