The Bonfire

by Antonio Bellomi

Part 1 appears
in this issue.

conclusion

The flames went on roaring for a long time and from the wood transferred to the paper of the books, which caught fire immediately. A few sheets of paper detached from the books and the heated air lifted them above the flames and then they came down again, or were swept away by the wind and fell to the soil not too far from the bonfire. Here there always was a keen soul, who picked it up and threw it again amid the flames.

It was an exhilarating show for the people around the bonfire, but at long last it came to an end when the stack of wood and books was reduced to a heap of smoking ashes. Then silence descended over the crowd that just a few instants before was roaring with excitement.

“It’s over!” Denis said, and he sounded as if he had been drained of every ounce of energy.

“Yes, it is over,” Bruno said too, but he felt a knot in his throat.

The crowd began to trickle away silently. The moment of collective exaltation was over and a state of inexplicable depression seemed to have taken over. In a few minutes the big square was empty. Dominus Picpus, too, had disappeared with his cohort of acolytes.

The shadows of night were falling, but Bruno still lingered, unable to leave. He had half hidden himself in the entrance of a house and his eyes were focused on the wisps of smoke that were slowly dissipating in the air. It would take many hours before the ashes became cold and the remnants were removed from the square the following day.

Bruno could not have told how long he stood there, but when it was dark enough, two or three hours later, he cautiously came out of his shelter and approached the remnants of the bonfire.

He looked around. Nobody else was there. People had shut themselves at home to take supper and the square was deserted and silent. The ashes still emanated an intense heat, and Bruno looked at them with pain and distaste. Who could tell what had been destroyed with the bonfire? Which kind of knowledge? Because he was sure that science was not evil at all. On the contrary.

He circled the bonfire, even if he could not tell why he did so. He nudged a few charred, unrecognizable blocks with his foot and a few sparks went up glittering in the air. Then his eyes fell on something white. He came near to it and saw something that should have not been there because nothing should have escaped the ceremony of the Purification.

It was a book, a book with charred sides that for some inexplicable reason had escaped the flames. Perhaps its pages had not fully opened when the acolytes of Dominus Picpus had gone around with long poles to dislodge the pages and let the flames easily devour the paper. At any rate, the book had not been completely destroyed!

Bruno felt his brow suddenly oozing sweat and his heart began pounding furiously. The book was a forbidden book! He looked around: nobody in sight. Only darkness and silence. And then, for the first time in his life, he did something really blasphemous, because his hand rummaged amid the ashes without even taking notice of the heat and he rescued those sheets of paper from their deadly trap.

He slipped them under his jacket to hide them from the sight of anyone he might pass by, and ran home, utterly terrified by his deed but full of exaltation because he had challenged the omnipotence of Dominus Picpus.

* * *

That night Bruno skipped supper with his family, giving some feeble excuse, and went to his lab in the cellar. He cleared the bench of his tools and laid the forbidden book on it. As he had glimpsed in the dusk, the volume was nearly untouched by the flames. Only its sides had been scorched and the pages had crumpled. Some of them were now of a brownish color, but although the cover had been irreparably ruined, the rest was perfectly readable.

He thumbed through the pages with the utmost care, taking care not to spoil them, because some of them looked weakened by the heat and were fragile. His heart skipped a beat when he saw there were numbers and geometrical drawings. The first page said My First Book of Arithmetic and Geometry.

Surely it was a scientific book, he had no doubt about it. One of the books that were the cornerstones of ancient knowledge. He felt tears in his eyes when he read a few pages here and there and realized he could not understand what they meant. This language seemed to be utterly incomprehensible, the obscure dialect of an unknown tribe.

But on reflection, he wisely decided he needed to read the book from the beginning and digest its contents one line after the other, page after page, provided he actually was smart enough to understand those concepts which seemed so hard to understand on first sight.

One page caught his attention in the second part of the book, which was about geometry. There was the illustration of a three-sided closed figure that was called a triangle. More, the line read “rectangular triangle,” but what precisely the word ‘rectangular’ meant in this context evaded him. However, he realized it was something important.

On every side of the triangle another four-sided figure had been built and it was called “square.” Then a long and complicated explanation, that it took him some time to understand, said that when the surfaces of the two squares with shorter sides were summed up, they were equivalent to the square on the longer side... well, something like this, at least. On first sight it did not seem true, but if this book was a Science book, it was unlikely it could lie.

He pondered a long time on the title of the section of the book called Pythagoras’ Theorem, but that title meant nothing to him, nor was it in itself explanatory. He continued to study the drawing until he came up with an idea.

The figure on the book was rather small and unsuitable to the experiment he had in mind, so he cleared the workbench and with a chalk stick drew the same figure, just on a bigger scale. When he had finished he stared at his work. He felt satisfied, the image was identical, only much bigger. Now he needed something else, and he had to climb upstairs and take a sack of dried beans from the larder, paying attention not to be seen by his mother, because he did not want to explain his action.

Then he came downstairs again and, after choosing a set of beans all of the same size, he painstakingly put one bean near the other on one of the smaller squares so as to cover the whole surface; when it was fully covered he did the same thing on the other small square.

He took a deep breath. Now it was time to check. He put the sack of beans aside and used only the beans he had put on the smaller squares to cover the bigger square.

And... lo and behold...the whole surface of the bigger square was covered with the same quantity of beans used to cover the other two squares.

The book had not lied. Who would have imagined that it was possible? At this point a doubt wormed into his mind. Could it be only a mere coincidence? There was only one trick to try. Cover another triangle of different size.

Now he was well-practiced, and the second experiment was finished very quickly. The number of beans used to cover the two smaller squares of the new figure was obviously different, but even in this case he covered the surface of the bigger square with the same quantity of beans used to cover the two smaller squares.

“It is true, then!” he cried ecstatically.

It was a wonderful discovery, he would say even a miracle, and this word recalled the rapacious image of terrible Dominus Picpus who thundered against Science.

“Why? Why?” he asked, half crying. Why did the Domini want to hide those concepts? What evil could be generated by the three-sided figure called triangle? People thought the Domini were the keepers of infinite wisdom, but if before now Bruno had only suspected that this was not true, now he was fully convinced that the attitude of the Domini had its origin in an abysmal ignorance or in the mere intention of keeping the people fettered with a meaningless belief.

Well, this second hypothesis was probably the right one, because people whispered that the Domini knew the location of the Vault of Knowledge, where all the knowledge of ancient times was kept. But nobody had a hint about where this Vault was... and it might be it was just a story of old crones.

Pythagoras’ theorem was followed by a sort of explanation called a “demonstration,” which referred to someone called Euclid. But it was too complicated for him and he could not understand most of it. He did not give up, though, because he had all the time he needed.

He went on examining a section devoted to arithmetic and he felt thrilled when he read a mysterious chapter about a thing called “the four operations”: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. There were numbers and strange symbols and he thought he understood that by combining the numbers in certain orders you could obtain certain results, even though it was not clear to him what they really were.

An example looked clear enough, though.

One line ran: 1 + 1 = 2

Now it was true that people could generally count up to twenty, but could write numbers only 1 to 9. All people knew that a goat together with another goat made two goats, therefore he was almost sure that the line written in the book was actually a means to express that concept. But the rest was utterly incomprehensible to him and he needed to study the book with much attention. What the heck could a line such as this mean?

20 x 15 = 300

He could not even understand the meaning of those numbers. He knew what 2, 1, 5, 3 meant, but what did 20, 15 and 300 mean? And what was the function of that mysterious symbol called “zero.”

Another obscure line was: 125 ÷ 5 = 25.

And another one, even more mysterious, was:

1/5 - 1/3 = -2/15

Or another line where there was a hint to something called a square root. Well, he knew perfectly well what a root was, but he doubted there were square roots; they usually were round or knobby.

There were so many incomprehensible things, but he was sure they had a precise meaning and that the meaning was explained in the book. The only way was to start from page one and carefully read every explanation and try to catch the sense of it. Certainly it would not be easy, but it would be very, very exciting. And ultimately he would succeed.

He was sure of that.

to Challenge 402...