Saved by Suetonius

Brother Anselmo exists, of course, even if he doesn’t.

 

You wouldn’t have seen anybody if you had stumbled into my bedroom at six this morning. You would have glanced at the bedroom and retreated: who needs to see an old guy struggling out of bed, limping his way to the bathroom, coming back to pull the bedclothes (lovely word, that) into slightly less disorder, and bending his creaking knees onto the blue bath towel at the foot of the bed?

 

He prays.

 

It’s the only thing that makes any sense at all, to Anselmo, whom you don’t see but who must still be there.

 

He’s gotta be there, since how else can you explain the fact that the old guy got out of bed, paid lip service to the idea of making his bed, and knelt to pray? Nine years ago he was waking up at any odd hour of the morning, turning on his side, and reaching for the bottle of Scotch stashed under the bed. It was a two-note aria: detox and retox. Anselmo purses his lips, remembering it. He saw it all, and remembers especially that last weekend before he was taken away: how the old man was drunk as a lord on a Sunday afternoon, listening to Ernest Chausson’s Poéme de l’amour et de la Mar, sobbing and trying to recite the French poem (or poéme) on which it’s based.

 

Anselmo can’t believe what he’s hearing.  He knows perfectly well what the drunk is trying to say, since Anselmo is from Upper Burgundy—an area that gets traded around a lot and is currently part of Italy. But Anselmo knows Latin, of course, and he will become abbot of Bec, in Lombardy. French, Italian, Spanish—they were all spoken and understood at the monastery of Bec, which became the preeminent center of learning after Cluny.  So it’s perfectly clear what he should be hearing, which is a particularly mawkish bit of doggerel from / by a guy named Bouchor. 

 

You haven’t heard about him, and you should keep it that way.

 

Anway, Bouchor had written the poem, and it was perfectly clear to Anselmo:

 

Le temps des lilas et le temps des roses 
Ne reviendra plus à ce printemps ci; 
Le temps des lilas et le temps des roses 
Est passé, le temps des œillets aussi. 

 

The old man, drunk in his bed nine years ago, had heard the words and recalled the translation, here given by Wikipedia:

 

The season for lilac and the season for roses 
will not return this spring;
the season for lilac and the season for roses 
is passed, the season for carnations too.

 

Anselmo shakes his head in disgust: a cheap translation of a tawdry poem. He would have said “the time of roses and of lilacs won’t come back to us this spring; the time of roses and lilacs is gone, and the time of carnations as well.” Perhaps better, but ultimately fruitless. Anselmo knows that the lilacs, the roses, and even the carnations return every spring and will ever do so. He saw them from the mullioned windows at Bec. The roses and lilacs were there where they were supposed to be, and they never failed in any spring. It was only he, behind his thick walls, who could not smell them.

 

And the old man in the bed, drunk—well, he wasn’t smelling them either. Anselmo had had a time of it—even the next day, when the old man had been brought to do penance in rehab, there was no smell of lilac or rose anywhere about. It was several days before the filth-encrusted jeans could be stripped from the man, and he could be showered. And it was a week before he could be sent home, with no more supervision than an old monk, his erudition and his resolve crumbling a bit from the winds of centuries.

 

Anselmo got him up the next day—somehow, God knows—and got him to his first AA meeting. He gets him up most mornings, and if you see the old man and he’s not drunk, well, Anselm has done his job, whether he was there or not. But the work of a monk doesn’t stop—it’s 24 / 7. Anselmo also has to get the old man to bed at night, and now it’s tricky because it’s not booze but YouTube that he has to work with.

 

For three or four years, at the end, the old man wasn’t going to sleep, he was passing out, which was the completion of the “retox” part of the cycle. (“Waking” was actually coming to, and marked the beginning of “retox”). If you could get him down the long marble hallway to his bed, the affair was over. In a minute or two, the hellish snores would tell Anselmo—the night is yours. Pray and refresh your soul.

 

YouTube is more difficult that the bottle. And the thoughts that follow YouTube?

 

I had gone to bed thinking of Donald Trump and what in the world to do about him. Every natural calamity—floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, drought, scorching heat, fire, ice, hatred, greed and lust---has decided to hit everywhere at once. The assaults on our democracy has been relentless and incessant. Two weeks ago, we were worried about the 15 or so high members of the military and the intelligence communities sharing information about how and when we were going to bomb the Houthis on Signal—an unsafe, only-marginally encrypted messaging app. Then were we worried about the 285 mostly Venezuelans who had all been kidnapped from the streets and thrown into a concentration camp: only a quarter of them had any criminal record in the States or in their home countries. This week we are worried about the tariffs that Trump has imposed, revoked, reimposed, paused, reinstated, given an extension, revalidated, repealed, redone, recalled, rethought and re-invoked. It has been dizzying, and the stock market tanked to the tune of 6 trillion, four hundred billion dollars and change. I saw the number written as a numeral, and I think it looked like this, but who can say? It’s been a long time sine I had 6,400,000,000,000 (I think) bucks in my pocket.

 

There’s plenty to keep an old man up at night, and YouTube is just as effective as Scotch, in an entirely different way. Anselmo leaves the bedroom, where he’s been waiting for me to get to bed, so that he can turn out the light and put the blue bath towel back on the night stand, where if luck holds and prayers are answered the old man will get out of bed and onto his knees. 

 

Which is where he belongs, thinks Anselmo.

 

And where he should be a lot more often, says the darker side of Anselmo, who has turned his face away from the mullioned windows of Bec, and is looking into the living room. Anselmo sees the old man on the couch, and hears Rachel Maddow who is there and isn’t there, in just the same way as Anselmo. Rachel Maddow is in New York and Anselmo is in the 11th century, and the old man is lying on a couch in Old San Juan watching his democracy crumble.

 

“Idiot!” he is shouting.

 

“Wonderful—the world economy is in peril because no one, not even a old man selling cold Coca Cola at the entrance to the Sahara, can figure out how to run a business. My retirement account is gone, as is everyone else’s. And you post this shit????””

 

He’s looking at the post Trump put up on Truth Social, which Rachel Maddow has evoked and manifested onto a screen in Puerto Rico. It looks like this, so that you can imagine it too.

 

  

 

Rachel Maddow has never been to Bec, thinks Anselmo, but she has been to Oxford, which even had teaching going on as early as 1096, only three years after Anselmo had been appointed Archbishop of Canterbury. Anselmo had seen Oxford, of course, but not the Oxford that Maddow saw. Maddow had seen a half a millennium of architectural greatness, green lawns and Japanese tourists. And she had seen, or known enough to look to see, this:

 

 

 

That wasn’t the graph that Maddow was showing yesterday, but it was very similar in one respect, something that even Anselmo can see: that steep drop, that cliff that must have been a devastating thing, after so many hours or months of waft gently upward. And that’s what Maddow was showing us yesterday—the day opened dismally on Wall Street, then shot up when Trump announced that IT WAS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! (capitalization and punctuation marks as in the original). Maddow, with no charity of spirit, does not see Trump’s message as a friendly bit of advice to fellow investors. She sees it as market manipulation. She couldn’t care less about the pain felt from those who had suffered the fall. She cared about the vultures who had come to pick the stocks for nothing from the dying hands of the now-broke investors. Because they had a very nice ride, indeed, the people who had bought stocks at 9:37 AM, right after Trump tweeted. Four hours later Trump would lift the tariffs and the market would soar. Maybe not up to where it had been—but enough to make you very rich, if you had timed it well. Buy low, sell high—it’s not that difficult. And it’s really easy when you know when the low is coming and the high is around the corner. 

 

“Suetonius,” says Anselmo, from the bedroom door. He copied the damn thing in his non-existent scriptorium, and he hated it. A ligator, which is all the old man lying on the couch is, has it easy. Anselmo sees what he does—the old man sits at his laptop and finds a “file,” which is neither stiffened paper for carrying documents nor an iron tool for chewing off wood. It’s a series of unseen zeroes and ones, which has to be purified by another lavation of zeroes and ones until it can be feed into what he calls a printer. The printer does what Anselmo used to do.

 

‘How very convenient,’ thinks Anselmo.  Anselmo was a scribe, and he was cursed because he actually knew Latin, and could read Suetonius. The problem, in fact, was to learn how NOT to read. The problem was to do what God had ordered: to take the lines, the curves, the spaces of words from one book and put it into a new book. 

 

Without thinking.

 

Without judging.

 

Anselmo lures the old man to bed, telling him: “the elders—it is they whom you seek. The Romans called in their elders, whom they named senators or consuls. Now is the time for Barrack Obama and George W. Bush to unite in brotherhood and lead the beleaguered populace to safety. The elders, the elders…”

 

The old man—the ligator who can only sew and never copy—gets up and stumbles to his bed. Anselmo soothes him. Platitudes about American exceptionalism don’t work, but time and distance will. Anselmo remembers copying Suetonius, and tiring of the dreadful tumult of the daily abuses and horrors the Romans endured. But they were balm to the generations who followed in the centuries after Anselm relinquished his time at Bec, at Canterbury, and here on earth. Suetonius sang to the founders of the American republic, in those dusty days in Philadelphia. I am not the first old man lured to his bed by the memory of ancient Rome, and the glory it had achieved in spite of itself.

 

“The elders,” says Anselmo. The old man throws the blue bath towel on the floor and kneels. He pays no attention to Anselmo, who anyway has no time for a man in prayer. Or rather, he has all the time in the world, now. The old man is rendered helpless now: on his knees and praying. Nothing to do here, at last, for Anselmo. He steps outside and lights a cigarette.

 

The wind blows the smoke away, and Anselmo looks up at the moon, who has seen every night and said nothing at all. As will Anselmo, who tosses the cigarette and returns to the bedroom. The day, the stock market, Suetonius, and the three hundred Venezuelans rotting in El Salvador—they’re all gone now. Anselmo gets to his own knees, wiser than the old man’s. His knees, too, creak, and the hands clasped together are dry and brittle. 

 

Two old men in a bedroom. 

 

The one we can see is sleeping.

 

The one we cannot see is praying.

 

Nine years ago, the bedroom stank of urine, old men, and cheap Scotch. The air is sweet in the bedroom tonight, and the drunken snores have softened. The hordes are sacking the temples and pulling down the idols outside, of course. That’s what they do.

 

Anselmo has his work to do, tonight, as well. There’s a mass to be said, in the privacy of his cell in the bedroom. The bell will ring at six AM, and the old man will have to be coaxed from bed and put to use. But there’s work to be done now, as the hordes run amok.

 

Anselmo is grateful: his work is done.

 

And is never done.