The Historian’s Debt
by Angelisa Fontaine-Wood
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
conclusion
In the many months following his homecoming, Adrienne watched with worry as Aurélien slowly regained strength and even most of his memory, though the time between his wound and his homecoming remained a blank. The family fussed over him while doctors came and went.
It surprised no one that he expressed little interest in his former pursuits after all he must have seen and suffered. Indeed, nightmares plagued his sleep, which he would not confide, not even to Adrienne, try though she did to find out what they were. When she inquired, his blue eyes, somehow paler now than hers, turned strangely flat.
Nor did he show any curiosity when she told him that she had taken charge of his papers during his long absence, and that she had gone to Verona to further his findings. For all answers, he turned to her with those oddly dull eyes, so different from her memory of his quick, bright gaze. While she certainly understood the need to handle him with kid gloves, at the same time she champed at the bit to speak of the Italian incident, which she had confided to no one.
Then came a letter from the University of Bologna notifying her of their establishment of a professorship in the name of Bettisia Gozzadini, a female law professor who had taught at the school in the Middle Ages. They were conducting, therefore, a search even now for female scholars concentrating on duecento and trecento letters. They had heard of her scholarship and would like to see a sample of her work, all in view of hiring her for the new year.
Now that Adrienne’s twin was safely returned to her, her ambition, too, returned in full force. She dared not show the message to their parents, but could no longer resist speaking with Aurélien. She chose a moment when father and mother were gone for the evening to see a Gounod opera.
“I meant to tell you of my time in Verona; you might be interested to know that I did track down something interesting.”
“I don’t know, Adrienne. I had those dreams again last night. I’m tired.”
“Can you tell me about them?”
“I don’t want you to hear any of that, I’ve told you.”
“Well, it’s just up in your study. I left it for you there. You haven’t been up there since you got back. I just know it would do you good to look into it. You used to love talking about all this with me.”
“I don’t think I’m up to climbing the stairs.”
“You’ve been climbing the stairs every day now for weeks!”
When he demurred again, she herself went up and came back with the book. She opened it to the fateful page and placed it alongside the leaf of her deciphered Tuscan terza rima.
Aurélien read and stopped dead.
She told him then of the professor she met, who surely had a hand in bringing Aurélien to safety, and further to the point, the offer of a post in Bologna. When she showed him the letter, he stirred back into something like life again.
“Adrienne, this professor fellow—”
“You didn’t meet him! He said—”
“I never thought I’d tell anyone about any of this, even you.” She had already opened her mouth to object, but at those words stayed silent. After a moment, as if in resignation, he slowly rose from the couch and led her up to his study. He seemed to be making a superhuman effort to speak, and his labored words amounted to more than she had heard him say in all of his convalescence.
“It started back with that first piece I wrote on Dante and heresy. Digging around, I managed to find out how to invoke the demon who had been named in the article I was answering. At first it was a lark; I didn’t think for a moment that anything would come of it.
“But then, there it stood in front of me, demanding the life of Pius X. All this hatred, still after so many centuries, just for the very fact of his being pope. You know I never cared about the pope qua pope but I didn’t want someone — anyone — losing their life, certainly not by my hand.
“So I invoked Love, Dante’s god of Love. That tamed it right away and I thought: ‘Well, I have a demon now to do my bidding, and I can keep it on a short leash just by reciting poems I know by heart anyway.’ It — and let me assure you this was no elegant Mephistopheles — was enraged at serving me without collecting his end of the bargain, but what I asked for I received: every single one of my articles was published, to acclaim and, after that, the chair at the Collège de France.
The demon never ceased demanding that I follow through on my end with the life of the pope, but all I had to do was pronounce a sonnet, and it would quiet down. Through all of that, Pius was alive and well, or at least until just after the war started. As far as I know when Benedict was announced in Rome, it had nothing to do with me, though who knows.
“I had asked for protection for myself right after I signed up. But afterwards, once I was at the front, I couldn’t hold it to my will as before — imagine trying to perform a ritual in the trenches — and it kept coming to me in dreams demanding its due. Now it was either the pope’s life or my soul.
“It became unliveable: one nightmare hellscape of the bolgie by day and then another by night. There was no respite. I went into No Man’s Land for the sake of the boys, to rescue whom I could and give burial to the others, yes, but also so that it would finally stop, hoping that a sacrifice like that might put paid to whatever debt I had somehow incurred to a creature I could no longer fully dominate. Nor do I remember anything from that moment to coming home.
“Adrienne,” he continued, cheeks pale with effort, “you deserve this post. Who more than you? but I don’t know if we, if you, can entirely control it. If I hadn’t gone to war, I think I could have kept it up indefinitely. Could you? Alone? Sine die? In Italy I can’t be there to back you up. It could bring you all you could wish for, without the bill ever coming due, but you have to be able to absolutely command the reins.”
After this, he slumped, inanimate, in his chair. His frailty tugged at her, but then she felt the letter in her hands, its words and the worlds they offered burning into her flesh.
“I already have you alive, that was my dearest wish. And if I have you here with me, now at least, together we can bend it to our will! After that, in Bologna, I’ll know how to do it myself. Do it with me, Aurélien, or I’ll do it alone now. I have the book, I know what to say. I just won’t have your protection while I do it. Please,” she entreated him, just as, jointly with him, she had so often faced down the iron will of their father.
She saw him struggle, but he had never refused her anything before. And at his heavy sigh, she knew she had won.
Though the air there was fine at that moment — come to think of it, it had not suffered that odor since he had been gone — he lit a stick of incense and opened his copy of the Vita Nova. After pausing a moment he opened a desk drawer, reached to the very back to remove a false partition, and brought out a small Morocco-leather case of deep red. He hesitated yet again, murmured something Adrienne could not make out and opened it. Inside lay a silver statue of a man, that would fit snugly into the palm of the hand. It was engraved thrice over: with the sign of Saturn, and two names: the pope’s and Amaymon’s.
He took salt from another drawer and with trembling hand he cast it in a circle. His shaking almost stopped him, but with will he managed lighting a black candle. Then he recited a Vita Nova sonnet calling on the God of Love. Lastly, invoking the protection of Beatrice, Aurélien bid Amaymon into their presence.
The electricity blinked and shorted, the temperature dropped, and a familiar smell filled the room. Adrienne knew it immediately as the old odor of the office from years before, but newly as well as the breath of the professor she had met in Verona.
It appeared. Eight ocelli gazed hatefully at them: spider eyes, red with rage. They stared up, as with the rest of its face, from its belly. The thing had no head. It did, however, have shoulders, furred with coarse hair like the rest of its body. There sprouted up spikey, membraned wings emitting hot, foul winds every time they beat. A sort of cloven pincer appeared on the ends of its arms, dripping now black, now green, now red, as though bile, pus, and blood in turn.
Where its navel should have been, a phallic tongue protruded from a mandible. As it opened and closed, the breath reeked of the ditches of Dis. An echo resounded inside their heads and brought on a blinding headache, the aura of a migraine. A voice welled up as from the abyss, despite the slavering from the maw’s corners, curdling her bone marrow, for she heard again that cultivated, urbane voice she first had heard behind her in Sant’Anastasia in inviting her to dinner.
Adrienne faltered, realizing she had eaten in that company She had sat across from that at a table and accepted wine from its claws.
“The boy thought to escape his debt, dying for others. Now the price comes due with interest.”
The stench became so violent that instead of completing another protective sonnet, Aurélien vomited. As he failed and choked, grasping at his own temple and breast, Amaymon burst through his ring, lurching for her brother’s body, ripping at his heart. Adrienne felt a wrenching pain in her own. Desperate, she thought the pope a paltry price to pay for her twin’s soul. In agony, she managed to grab her notebook and cry aloud the poet’s spell for the demise of the Holy Father.
“With interest!” That articulate voice rose now to a screech. If the spell spoke true, she had, of her own powers and on her own soul, murdered the pope, but this to her paled in comparison to Aurélien’s life, whom she had back and refused to relinquish to death once more. The pontiff’s, though, no longer sufficed; the fiend now wanted into the bargain the soul of her twin, who had so long commanded it and eluded its grasp.
Despite the blinding pain in head and heart, Adrienne thought to invoke Beatrice’s words to counter the demon. In the Paradiso the lady spoke of light and the intellect, but the pain striking Adrienne’s temples and her breast at each of the its utterances, still as refined and suave despite the mandible, would not let her remember properly.
Somehow, though, the muse’s words in the Inferno lay within recall. Relayed to Dante through Virgil, the speech did not issue from the her holy mouth directly, but Adrienne hoped against hope that, however second-hand, however declared in the midst of Hell, by the intercession of Beatrice they might still defend Aurélien from being twice lost to her.
Go now; with your persuasive word, with all
that is required to see that he escapes,
bring help to him, that I may be consoled.
The fiend cowered at this then rallied, pitching itself towards her now. Resolute, she cited Beatrice again:
Love prompted me, that Love which makes me speak.
At the mention of love, it shuddered and began to fade into a murky black mephitic hole. Behind it, borne on its stench, echoed into the darkness a ringing, bitter laugh, still in the articulate urbane tones that she recalled so well: “I have what is owed and will have what has accrued.”
* * *
The following morning, over coffee and tartines, her father read from the Figaro’s headlines, announcing the death of Benedict XV. Aurélien showed no reaction. Since the ritual he had slunk back into his mechanical lifelessness. Adrienne refused to think about any of it. She contemplated instead a new life in front of her with all the libraries and books she might ever wish for, now that she had her brother back, or at least some semblance of him. With the paper, a letter also came from Bologna replying to her inquiry concerning Professor Amone Monzone as her possible benefactor. The administration had no knowledge of any one by that name at the university.
* * *
Her final day at home, Aurélien was to take her bags and trunk down and carry them with her father to the Gare de Lyon, but by breakfast’s end had not yet appeared downstairs. The hour advanced. Despite calling up to him and knocking on his door, still he did not come down. Their parents surmised that he must have overindulged in the Veuve Clicquot the night before, celebrating his sister’s new position. Adrienne did not share their certainty.
“I’ll wake him.” This last day before taking up her post was the moment of truth. Had she foiled the creature? She climbed the stairs two at a time, her fear growing at each step, that her parry with words in Hell, even Beatrice’s, could never suffice to entirely stave off a demon. She knocked to no answer. She knew then, as surely as she had known in her gut the first time.
Opening the door, she found him in the half-light of his closed shutters, or at least what he had been. Empty eye sockets stared at her. What little skin lay over the bone was swarming with larvae.
She left the shutters closed and turned from the scene in which there was nothing more she loved. There was no daylight that could end this nightmare now, for him or for her. Now it was the demon, she determined, who owed her, and she too would see its debt paid in full.
* * *
After the funeral, her parents insisted that she wait until the following year to take up her post, adamant that her duty lay now with them. Adrienne knew too that they meant for the foreseeable future and beyond. She did not argue. She did not object.
But in the small hours of the pre-dawn dark, she trod the familiar stairs for the last time, down, down to her father’s office. Her slim fingers opened up the left bureau drawer. She again stole out the door towards the station, towards the life she dreamed of. She boarded the train heading points south to chase it, despite the nightmares now plaguing her. And to track down Professor Amone Monzone, to settle scores, whatever the cost.
Copyright © 2021 by Angelisa Fontaine-Wood
