"The Historian's Debt" by Angelisa Fontaine-Wood

 

The Historian’s Debt

by Angelisa Fontaine-Wood

The quiet of the Verona archives had long closed in around her, burying her now in the dust motes and shadows of dusk. This was her signal that the library would soon shut its doors, though there was still tomorrow and the next day, and the next. For she loved this soft, concentrated silence of study, punctuated only by the sounds of turning pages and padding librarians. No matter that she had to bribe her way in, here in a foreign country and far indeed from her parents’ townhouse on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, Adrienne felt she had come home, here in the midst of this rarefied world of books and manuscripts.

She caught herself again envying Aurélien, her twin, that he had spent his short life in such surroundings, pursuing knowledge for its own sake. At the thought she bit her tongue and regretted once more that he would never come back to share a roof with her.

These memories haunted her as she gathered her notebooks along with the black-inked Mont Blanc fountain pen that he had so treasured, her gift to him at his dissertation defense. She recalled when the telegram arrived. Aurélien, it said, had gone into No Man’s Land to save wounded men of his troop and had not been seen since. Although the authorities declared him missing in action, Adrienne had viscerally felt his death deep in the night, just days before the telegram.

While her parents hoped on, she mourned privately by holing herself up in his study, its walls lined with disorderly books jumbled on the shelves. Here, missing him, she gazed at his photo with his advisor the day of his doctoral defense, so much like her with his high cheekbones and pale, wavy hair, but a man, and that had made all the difference.

She turned from his image and pored over his old notes, retracing his words and thoughts through his sprightly scribble. This much comforted her and his study had became her refuge in the long silence that followed. Thus, when a few years after the 1918 Armistice, the family had felt ready mourn their only boy, and to deal with his papers, they put Adrienne, who knew his research better than anyone, to the task.

When the librarian called for the return of the day’s books, she reflected on how her presence there had ever come about. So many years before, she would listen in on his Latin lessons, beginning her career in stolen knowledge. Catching wind of these goings-on, her father at first objected, fearing the strain of declensions on a young female brain. Aurélien, however, had joined her in arguing the case, and the next day found them seated side by side in the schoolroom; two fair-haired heads leaning over one grammar book.

Years later, she disputed with her father about sending her to the Sorbonne. Once more her twin came in to second her, and they soon began finishing each other’s sentences: Adrienne enrolled in the licence that September. When their parents stopped her from pursuing a further degree, Aurélien not only shared his books but bought volumes especially for her. Their heated debates on the nature of orthodoxy in late medieval literature, following his own curriculum for his PhD, worked as a makeshift graduate school for her.

Thus, with the legacy of her twin’s help, Adrienne took up his unfinished work fully armed to do so. One particular lead tempted her. It went back to an article Aurelien had found early in his career, demonstrating that Dante’s contemporaries thought him capable of murdering the pope by black magic.

A 1319 Vatican deposition held that scions of the Visconti dynasty, in an effort to foil papal incursions in their territories, had a silver figurine made, engraved with the cabalistic sign of Saturn, the name of the pope and that of the demon Amaymon. The next step was to find a magus powerful enough to use it to do away with the vicar of Christ on earth, and the Visconti thought to turn to the poet. Adrienne remembered her long reveries with her brother over this bit of lore and the what-ifs the two of them imagined.

Responding to this article with one of his own, Aurélien had linked this choice of Dante to connections the poet maintained with Muslim mystics. From that publication, her twin’s career took off. In the few years before the declaration of war, paper after paper of his appeared in the most prestigious journals, linking Dante to Sufism by way of the Vita Nova, the poet’s earliest sonnets to Love and to Beatrice.

His theories centered on the idea that Dante, under this influence, led a cohort of poet-heretics, the Fedeli d’Amore, who worshiped Love as such, above and beyond the Abrahamic deity. These set the tone even for professors at the height of Dante Studies. By the time he volunteered for the army, the young scholar had — astonishingly — been offered a chair at the Collège de France despite his age.

Adrienne had often gone to see him in his study to discuss his latest research but found it always much colder or hotter than the rest of the house and the electricity faulty, with the lights turning off and on again at whim. An odd, unpleasant smell plagued the place as well, and he took to lighting incense to counter it. She wondered how he could concentrate, but concentrate he did, enough that she could hear him talking to himself well into the night through the shared wall of her bedroom.

Acutely feeling her solitude in the study, she sifted through his glosses and truncated observations. Peering once more into his coded shorthand, she spied a trail her twin had left for the one person who could read into the messy fragments of his unfinished thoughts, as into so many tea leaves.

In this trail it was clear that he thought, as Adrienne always believed as well, that the archives of Verona, where the poet had been living in exile from Florence, would contain some trace of his spell to end the pontiff’s life. There and then she decided the lead would be followed and she would be the one to do so.

When confronted with her plans, her father refused outright. “No daughter of mine is traipsing down to Italy on a fool’s errand—”

“It’s a tribute to his memory—”

“And utterly unfit for a young woman of good family! It is not your place—”

“It is my place to finish what he started.”

When he answered that any one of Aurélien’s colleagues could accomplish this better than she, Adrienne ran up to her room and slammed the door, sobbing in fury. Once her tears ran dry, she swore to herself that, come hell or high water, this was her beholden duty.

Her monthly allowance she kept hidden away in his own dog-eared copy of the Comedy. She took this, but not only this. As sleep was impossible, she crept down to her father’s office with a small leather bag in hand, and silently opened his left bureau drawer where he kept petty cash. She slipped the whole amount into her pocket book and stole out the front door.

* * *

And so April of 1921 came to find Adrienne seated in the Italian city’s archives. At first, the director denied her entry as “most irregular.” She argued her case, even played on her looks, but found that her funds more effectively greased hinges of the doors. This left her short on money for meals, but she nourished herself instead with the library’s manuscripts, the store of knowledge and potential discoveries it contained. She vowed each morning would find her there from opening until it closed at dusk, studying the collection of manuscripts dealing with Dante’s Verona sojourn.

Adrienne grew to sense what help she might expect from the librarians, those who looked askance and those who looked at her as a sort of performing circus animal that might or might not be dangerous. She could swear that they fibbed about the availability of certain items, on the excuses that it was with another reader, checked out, destroyed by time, lent to another library, not in the holdings at all, or any number of other reasons. When their smirks became too much to bear, she recalled Aurélien at her side, coaching her from puella studiis to the ablative. This effort was in his name and for his honor. At the thought of him, she soldiered on.

As days turned to weeks, and her money disappeared into the “tip” for her daily entries, she persisted in seeking the occult needle in a haystack of fourteenth-century parchment. Adrienne coughed over the dusty vellum of correspondence, cartularies, and chronicles but frustratingly found nothing resembling necromancy.

Spells could be identified in that, in imitation of ancient Hebrew, the scribe would often excise the vowels from the words. Nothing of the sort came across her desk, no matter how she combed through the books she did access. Her labor itself came to seem some Dantean punishment in endless futility, but for what sin precisely she wasn’t sure. Pride or theft or envy?

In off-hours, instead of spending her precious lire on earthly sustenance, while avoiding her shabby little pensione and its ferocious landlady, she wandered among the rose-colored stones of Verona, visiting the Roman ruins, the arena, the medieval churches. She particularly loved Sant’Anastasia for Pisanello’s fresco of Saint George, admiring the knight’s determined features as he saddled his mount. His golden locks and delicate face, oddly enough, recalled Aurélien’s and thus her own. And the saint prepared to battle a dragon, a stand-in for the devil, just as she battled against librarians and against the oblivion that threatened Aurélien’s work with his premature death. Contemplating the scene stoked her courage to persevere against the scaly book-hoarders.

She sat back again in the pew and sighed. Her twin had detached her quite young from her parents’ conventional Catholicism. With his heterodox suggestions about the very nature of the divine echoing in her head, she couldn’t call herself a believer. Still, though she was not entirely sure to whom or to what, she addressed a brief but intense petition to find the spell itself, if spell there really was, and soon.

For she was on the verge of no longer being able to pay for her shelter, such as it was, having abandoned food for some time now and her shirtwaists growing ever looser on her already slender frame. The script in the tomes she consulted often swam beneath her eyes. She certainly couldn’t wire her father for help and, in fact wasn’t sure if she would ever be welcome home again.

Beyond this, buried several layers underneath, there lay in her wish another desire, which she had confided to no one, not even Aurélien and hardly even to herself, a different dragon to slay: to publish and make her own name, another A. Augustin, a woman now, in Dante Studies and, ultimately, like her brother, to profess from the rostrum. A discovery of such magnitude would at least be worth an article, a book even. A professorship remained an absurdity, but continuing Aurélien’s work in her own research would keep him in some sense alive.

Adrienne jumped then at a murmur in her left ear and an odd stench to go along with it. She half-turned to find someone kneeling behind her, head bent in rapt prayer, a susurrus of words which seemed to be a whisper just to her. The pews were set close certainly, but why this person, a man, had chosen a seat immediately behind her when the church was otherwise empty, she did not like to think. As she got up to leave, the individual lifted his head and watched her walk out.

* * *

The following day she struggled with the librarians again and more than usual, as they insisted the book she requested had never existed. Trudging her reluctant way back to her depressing lodgings with the peeling paint, she passed by way of Sant’Anastasia. As if some beauty — and courage — might serve as dinner, she returned to the Pisanello fresco, to Aurélien’s faded image in the knight heading to slay the dragon.

She supplicated again whatever powers that be to guide her search for something definitive that would help her secure her way into the world of knowledge. These were her thoughts when she was overcome again by a malodorous whisper. She turned to find, once more, the man from yesterday.

Given the stench, she was surprised to find a figure in expensive shoes and camel coat. Above these, she stared at a well-shaped beard going salt and pepper, and greying temples where small professorial gold glasses were held in place, resting on a particularly Italian nose, long and arched. It was an arresting face, with penetrating eyes. When he spoke again, with refined articulation and mannerly tones, she understood the origin of the smell: his breath.

“Forgive me, Signorina, I disturb you. I am not so much praying as seeking inspiration. My name is Amone Monzone, professor of art history at Bologna and a scholar of Pisanello. It seems as though I pray but, really, I am organizing my thoughts and putting them into some sort of order before I finish my excursus on the role of the dragon, a trickier turn of thought than one might suppose.”

Though this was not the first time a man in Italy had approached her, she did not know how to respond. Firstly, the dragon was near invisible from the damage of centuries. Then, if this man were bold enough to address an unattended lady in a place of worship at all, how did he know to address her in French? A shiver refracted through her slight body. Did she need to pull out her hatpin for self-defense?

As if she had spoken aloud, he replied, “Be not afraid. I have seen you more than once in the archives. We go to different sections, but I see you at the opening and again at closing. I seem to have forgotten the acquaintance is not mutual: you know me not at all; please, a thousand pardons for the informality. Perhaps you will allow me to make up for my rudeness by inviting you to dinner.”

The possibility of a solid meal was difficult to refuse. She was sure, too, her hunger could even get the better of any nausea at his halitosis. Still, he was an utter stranger and how had she never seen him at the archives? Yes, she spent her days absorbed by her task, but there were not so many scholars there that she would not have recognized his face.

Her hesitation must have registered, for he tried another tack, “I would love to hear of what brought you to Verona and to the archives here. Perhaps I could help.”

This volley hit home. It had been a good month since she had spoken with anyone in any depth, much less in her mother tongue or of her present predicament. Her move to take her father’s money left her even uncertain as to whether she would be permitted to return. And this was an academic not hindering her, but instead offering help? Torn, Adrienne looked into this odd man’s dark eyes. Ultimately, the idea of confiding in another sympathetic soul was too much to resist. And, after all, she still did have her hatpin.

* * *

Once seated at the small table, she asked after his studies of Pisanello but he waved away this question with a graceful but hairy hand.

“Oh, I have ample opportunity to blather at length about that; I have always cherished a pet passion for Dante, however; perhaps all Italians do. So please do tell me what you are researching.”

She had not recalled telling him that this was her subject of inquiry, but she raced past this. The possibility of speaking of her theories was entirely too tempting.

“Well, with my brother — he died in the war — we shared a theory that Dante fell in fact under the sway of Sufi mystics and that his circle of friends, calling themselves Love’s Faithful, vehiculated a whole new way of thinking about God beyond anything that the pope could stipulate, a God of Love that was different from Yahweh.”

“I am not unaware of the theory of Dante as heresiarch; perhaps I have run across your brother — his work — in my various dealings. I am sorry for his loss. But tell me more, please, of your own contribution to this idea.” Adrienne raised her guard for any mockery or patronizing tone to find only rapt interest.

“As for me, I think you could posit that in his mind, Beatrice served as a kind of secular saint of Love, more akin to the Virgin, in fact in this new religion, actually beyond her. Beatrice never speaks in the Vita Nova, but by that very fact I hold that Dante endowed her words in the Comedy with a special power, I would say even of intercession.”

He continued to draw her further out, complimenting her with exacting questions that allowed her to show off the full array of her knowledge. An entire bottle of Valpolicella later, she found they were finishing their plates of risotto. When he tempted her with a glass of grappa to accompany a dessert, she could not refuse. She even found that his breath was not so entirely offensive as it had been.

“All of this is most fascinating. You’ll know, of course, of the pope’s recent encyclical.”

“I’m sorry, no, I’ve been wrapped up in the archives.”

“It would reclaim our national poet for the Church, capital-C. A lot of other nonsense besides, for I agree with you that Dante was not what anyone could call orthodox in his beliefs. Damned Benedict, if you’ll pardon my language, Signorina Augustin. Never mind, he’ll pay for that sooner or later.”

“But he tried to stop the war!”

“You’ll forgive me, my background is profoundly anti-clerical; I come from a long line of enemies of the very idea of the Throne of Saint Peter. Anyway, you are only too right to pursue this avenue of Dante, heresiarch. Your mind is an impressive one.”

With flattery of the kind, he extended his long arm almost to her lips, offering her another glass of grappa. Adrienne felt lightheaded. Surely because she had not felt this kind of rapport with anyone since Aurélien’s departure for the front. Before she knew it, she could hear herself, almost without her own volition, confiding in this odd, attentive man about the spell she tracked.

“I can certainly gather how important this is for Dante Studies, but why do you not leave it to one of his colleagues?”

“This is my debt to my brother, and this is the one way I can think of repaying it. But only if I do actually find the spell.”

His eyes were intent on hers. “A most noble gesture on your part.”

“The problem is I can’t stay much longer. As it is I... in fact, if I hadn’t been so hungry, I’m not sure I would have accepted your kind invitation. My funds are quickly reaching their limit, and if I don’t find the spell soon, then I will need to head home. And then I’m not sure what welcome I’ll find there. I left, well, rather precipitously... And not entirely with my father’s blessing.” The grappa was not enough for her to confess taking her father’s cash.

“Signorina... would you humor me in answering a question?”

Her head was foggy. “I could try.”

His keen gaze bore into her own. “What is it you wish for?”

Spirits and the imminent failure made her reckless. “I can’t have him back, but as I said, if I could find that spell, I feel as though I could properly repay my brother for all he did for me.” Her voice caught, but she wrested it back. “I could lay him finally to rest.”

“There is something else, I think. Perhaps if I tell you this: you would be a brilliant professor in your own right, with your theories and your way of explaining them. Students could only benefit from such expertise and passion as yours.”

She never had thought to articulate this to a living soul, but before she knew it, she was confessing her most desperate longing to this stranger.

“I can’t have my brother alive. That would have been the first thing, but I know in my soul that he’s gone. That being impossible, then I would give anything if I could publish like him, if I could also be a professor like he was, if I could guide my own students in their research in turn. Aurélien would have wanted that for me too. And it would be a way of keeping his flame alive, in my own way. If only I could follow a path like that. But how could that be? If I just could find the spell, maybe I could publish at least that much, but I certainly can’t afford to go beyond another few days.”

After a time of reflection, he spoke again, to purpose. “Signorina Augustin, we — and I speak here for the academy, for Italianists everywhere — we cannot have you abandon such a line of inquiry at this date. And we certainly cannot leave Dante to the Church, capital C. You must allow me to fund this research in my own humble way.”

He took out his wallet and his hairy hand began to count out lire in fresh and crisp banknotes, each with an impressive number of zeros after. And just as her hunger and loneliness had the way of her better judgment for the dinner, then the wine and the digestivo now had the way of her better judgment in this matter. She found her hand accepting the bills in spite of herself.

“This is a first payment. You must come to me immediately as soon as you need further means.”

Adrienne was sure the heat prickling her eyelids was exhaustion, nothing more. She refused to cry in front of this stranger. “How can I ever—?”

“For now, your scholarship and research are enough. Should it come to that, I’m sure we can work something out.”

* * *

The following day Adrienne’s head ached again, but from the grappa now rather than hunger. Once at the archives, the librarian returned yesterday’s volumes to her so she might continue her research. As she sifted through the pile, one slim, unfamiliar codex stood out. It was amateurishly bound, and she did not recognize it as among those requested in the days preceding. She wondered bitterly if it were not the volume that the librarians insisted did not exist? It didn’t even seem to have a call number. She riffled through the pages: a compiled miscellany, filled with astrological schemata and obscure tables in a careless Gothic hand. It was the lack of vowels, however, that took her breath away.

As she thumbed her way through it, one particular page opened onto a note in a flourished hand on elegant paper, recent and in French, noting “Try this one.” She looked and here, as far as she could make out, was an incantation to “*m**m*n” - Could it be? The “Amaymon,” that the Visconti had inscribed on the papal effigy? The rest of the text was written, as far as she could make out without vowels, in trecento Tuscan. And if it were terza rima? Her heart stopped and then began to pound. This could be Dante’s very hand. The discovery could guarantee her publication, even fame.

At that moment she felt a whisper at her ear and smelt a familiar odor. There stood Professore Monzone looming over her. “You received my note.”

“But how did you—?”

“Never mind. I’ve been at this game far longer than you, I know something of how libraries — especially Italian libraries — work.”

“This is... this could be—”

“Your lucky day! You should take that home with you to examine it further on your own time.”

“What?”

The librarian looked up sharply and frowned at her.

“I mean that book is not only not under your name, it is also not listed in the holdings. You’d be safe; you can return it tomorrow, if you felt the need, but I don’t think you’d have trouble proving its authenticity. I have a sideline in book collecting if provenance turns out to be a difficulty. Your fortune could be easily made.”

“How can you...? How do you...? You can’t steal a book. You can’t steal a book from a place like this!”

“It’s not as though it would be the first time you’ve stolen. And do be quiet, we’re in a library.” He turned and disappeared down a shadowy corridor.

* * *

Adrienne returned excitedly to her work. Somehow she blinked and it was already closing time. She looked for him in vain. Anyway, although she could now afford her own dinner, she found herself utterly without any desire to eat, only to return to her room.

Once back within her cramped and dingy lodgings, she opened her satchel and gently removed the codex. Taking utmost care, she opened it to the page marked by the professor’s note. She took out her notebook and began to transcribe the passage, guessing at vowels until she could make some kind of sense of the wording. In order to test her deciphering powers, she read aloud what she had partially reconstructed: an invocation of Amaymon.

A knock at the door startled her: the authorities? Surely by now the librarians had noticed the missing book. Perhaps they had even seen her slip it into her satchel and now they or the police had come for her. She had no excuse at the ready and stashed the volume between mattress and box springs.

“Come in.”

There at her door stood Professore Monzone, smiling. Shocked at finding him there, defying the authority of her dragoon of a landlady, Adrienne was at a loss for words.

“I wished to inquire as to the progress of our project, but I’m guessing you’ve made good headway.” He made himself at home on the bed, reached down under the mattress, and pulled out the codex. He opened it to the page in question and then glanced at the scribblings in her notebook, also turning to the right page, and nodded, “Yes, yes, fine work indeed. With a little polishing up, this should take care of the pope.”

She simply stared at him.

“Listen, I wanted to tell you. Signorina, you are a fine scholar, one of the finest minds I’ve met, regardless of sex. We could use that mind here in Italy, and I know that Bologna has a post tailor-made for you. Or rather one that we could tailor-make for you, if you would accept it.”

If her jaw dropped, she was unaware. She wasn’t even sure if she was hearing him correctly.

He did not wait for her to answer but continued: “I have another possibility that may interest you. Professors, as you might imagine, have many international contacts and, by way of this, I have some access to records of war prisoners and a certain Lieutenant Aurélien Augustin, as of the end of 1918, was still alive but wounded, in a camp near the Rhine. His memory went for some time due to a head wound, and he seems to have been shuffled about among different military hospitals, but there is someone of that name in Germany right now. Rather the worse for wear, but he could possibly be set to rights, and I could only be gratified if he should come home and take up his research again. The two of your minds, paired, would be formidable together. I can almost see it now, the discoveries you could make as a team.”

She wondered that she might have been mistaken — but she had felt it! — that he had fallen at the front, and yet her heart had the better of her doubts. “Again, I don’t know how I can ever repay you.”

“Never say never, something might someday come up. And on that note, don’t be surprised if your brother has some debts of his own to pay off.”

“What?”

“Oh, young men of his ilk often do. As for us, I have perfect faith that our paths will cross again. Perhaps even with the young hero.”

* * *

Another knock at the door woke her from sickening dreams. She had never suffered from such things before, but all through the night she had stood behind a podium, teaching an auditorium full of students that were slumped corpses in Aurélien’s shape. Monzone had been there, handing her books out of which she attempted to read but they were all signatures written backwards in a rusty brown.

She shook the sleep from her head at the second knock. If he was back to discuss her findings, she didn’t want to see him. Instead the landlady opened the door with a telegram. Adrienne felt, in some unavowed part of herself, more unsettled than surprised, but still the paper found its way to the floor as her shaking hands covered her weeping eyes and even the thought of Bologna, dream and nightmare, faded.

AURELIEN FOUND STOP COMING HOME STOP PLEASE COME JOIN STOP ALL IS FORGIVEN STOP

* * *

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.

                                      

END

“The Historian’s Debt” first appeared in Bewildering Stories, issue 913, August 2021 (ed. Don Webb). Editor’s Choice, Third quarter, 2021.

If you've enjoyed this story perhaps you would like to buy me a coffee?