A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M. Miller [74]
“Face inward,” corrected the hermit. “As long as there are tents to be mended in Israel-but let’s not begin teasing each other until you’ve rested. I’ll get you some milk, and you tell me about this visitor that’s worrying you.
“There’s wine in my bag if you’d like some,” said the abbot, falling with relief onto a mound of skins. “But I’d rather not talk about Thon Taddeo.”
“Oh? That one.”
“You’ve heard of Thon Taddeo? Tell me, how is it you’ve always managed to know everything and everybody without stirring from this hill?”
“One hears, one sees,” the hermit said cryptically.
“Tell me, what do you think of him?,”
“I haven’t see him. But I suppose he will be a pain. A birth-pain, perhaps, but a pain.”
“Birth-pain? You really believe we’re going to have a new Renaissance, as some say?”
“Hmmm-hnnn.”
“Stop smirking mysteriously, Old Jew, and tell me your opinion. You’re bound to have one. You always do. Why is your confidence so hard to get? Aren’t we friends?”
“On some grounds, on some grounds. But we have our differences, you and I.”
“What have our differences got to do with Thon Taddeo and a Renaissance we’d both like to see? Thon Taddeo is a secular scholar, and rather remote from our differences.”
Benjamin shrugged eloquently. “Difference, secular scholars,” he echoed, tossing out the words like discarded apple pits. “I have been called a ‘secular scholar’ at various times by certain people, and sometimes I’ve been staked, stoned, and burned for it.”
“Why, you never-” The priest stopped, frowning sharply. That madness again. Benjamin was peering at him suspiciously, and his smile had gone cold. Now, thought the abbot, he’s looking at me as if I were one of Them-whatever formless “Them” it was that drove him here to solitude. Staked, stoned, and burned? Or did his “I” mean “We” as in “I, my people”?
“Benjamin-I am Paulo. Torquemada is dead. I was born seventy-odd years ago, and pretty soon I’ll die. I have loved you, old man, and when you look at me, I wish you would see Paulo of Pecos and no other.”
Benjamin wavered for a moment. His eyes became moist.
“I sometimes-forget-”
“And sometimes you forget that Benjamin is only Benjamin and not all of Israel.”
“Never!” snapped the hermit, eyes blazing again. “For thirty-two centuries, I-” He stopped and closed his mouth tightly.
“Why?” the abbot whispered almost in awe. “Why do you take the burden of a people and its past upon yourself alone?”
The hermit’s eyes flared a brief warning, but he swallowed a throaty sound and lowered his face into his hands. “You fish in dark waters.”
“Forgive me.”
“The burden-it was pressed upon me by others.” He looked up slowly. “Should I refuse to take it?”
The priest sucked in his breath. For a time there was no sound in the shanty but the sound of the wind. There was a touch of divinity in this madness! Dom Paulo thought. The Jewish community was thinly scattered in these times. Benjamin had perhaps outlived his children, or somehow become an outcast. Such an old Israelite might wander for years without encountering others of his people. Perhaps in his loneliness he had acquired the silent conviction that he was the last, the one, the only. And, being the last, he ceased to be Benjamin, becoming Israel. And upon his heart had settled the history of five thousand years, no longer remote, but become as the history of his own lifetime. His “I” was the converse of the imperial “We.”
But I, too, am a member of a oneness, thought Dom Paulo, a part of a congregation and a continuity. Mine, too, have been despised by the world. Yet for me the distinction between self and nation is clear. For you, old friend, it has somehow become obscure. A burden pressed upon you by others? And you accepted it? What must it weigh? What would it weigh for me? He set his shoulders under it and tried to heave, testing the bulk of it: I am a Christian monk and priest, and I am, therefore, accountable before God for the actions and deeds of every monk and priest who has breathed and