Ties

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Quite impressive.

Since he met Gemma, he felt that she alone could fill the void that all the other girls would cause him. She was so different from the girls he had met sofar. She was not an easy girl, she did not like dark places, she had a wild head of blonde curly hair. They would often sit on the park benches, on cool days in December and Guglielmo was always fascinated by her golden hair, as if his eyes were captured by a shimmering piece of jewellery.

It was early morning on the last Tuesday of the year and Guglielmo was already at the library. He got up that morning and was sure that he was going to find something interesting. He took a tiny volume from the last shelf full of ancient-looking books. It had thin pages which had turned yellow over time and was quite different from the other ones. Guglielmo opened the book and buried himself in those pages:

The image of the year 1000, which is still vivid in modern times, shows people gripped by paralysing fear that the world was about to end […] in people’s minds the millennial set of events have not lost at all their charm to this day […] the Dark Ages, a dark era, subjugated, where gothic superstitious beliefs played an important part […] the first description of the year 1000 terrors appears with the new humanism, which is a reaction to the contempt that the young Western culture had for the dark and barbarous centuries it was coming out of, it rejected them to look beyond barbarity, and place antiquity as its model […] among all that darkness, the year 1000, unlike the Renaissance, displayed an image of death and inane prostration!

He got it!

He found a little something that would help him carry on with his task. He rested the palm of both hands on the open pages of that book and took a deep breath, stretched his spine against the back of that hard chair and threw his head back. Had he not found any information that day, he would have asked his Medieval History professor for an appointment to tell him that he could not go ahead with his research paper.

He went back reading and realised once again how little information was available about that period. During those days of fear, if there was any, that the world was about to end, everyone was too busy selling souls and other goods so they could not describe people’s emotions. Once that frightening time was gone, probably most of them thought that it was out of place to talk about a threat that posterity would have considered unreal. To make things worse, Guglielmo knew only so well that none of the scholars back then would have wondered about the mental condition of the people. Only exceptional or unusual events would have been taken into consideration, whatever was breaking up the regular flow of things.

The wild world, nature almost uncontaminated, men were not so numerous, only equipped with basic tools, struggling with their bare hands against nature powers and earth powers, incapable of controlling them, getting scarce nourishment from them with difficulty, hit by bad weather conditions, lashed periodically by famine and illnesses, constantly tormented by starvation […] an extremely hierarchical society, a large number of serfs, peasants living in extremely poor conditions, utterly subdued to the power of a few families which branch out in more or less illustrious families, which strong kinship ties keep firmly around just one family .

He wanted to find some information, some stories about those people who were distressed by the hardship of their daily lives and by the fear of the end of the world that was looming over them like a dark shadow.

He was so absorbed in his book that he did not even hear any sound but he flinched when he saw a shadow on virtually all the pages of that book. Guglielmo was annoyed and looked up expecting to find the librarian standing in front of him wondering if he had found something for his work.

His face went from annoyed to surprised when he saw Gemma instead, with her arms crossed on her chest and with a half smile on her lovely face.

They stared into each other’s eyes for a few seconds, motionless, as if they were on the stage of a theatre.

Gemma was wearing a sage green twinset: her beautiful eyes were the same beautiful colour that morning; and they were persistently looking at Guglielmo, peering at every single detail, every gesture, trying to pierce through her appearance in search of some thought that had escaped from her control.

She was a clever girl.

She took a seat beside Guglielmo and placed her hand on his hand. He could still feel the thin pages of that book underneath it. Finding that book gave him some hope to get to know what emotions, worries and frustrations upset the people back in the year 1000.

«I feared you had been gobbled up by a fire-breathing dragon!» she laughed heartily. «I dropped over to your house, and your mother told me that she did not even hear you leave this morning. I thought that you surely had a sudden brainwave while you were sleeping for your research paper. Is there a better place than a library for Guglielmo to get rid of all his morning energy?»

Gemma was getting dangerously closer to Guglielmo. She was well aware of this, she had known that boy for a while now. She was taking a chance standing so close to him… probably it was what she wanted, a bit of flirting first thing in the morning, among the shelves of a library…

She was changing.

Gemma was aware of the change that was slowly turning her from the stage of chrysalis into that of a beautiful butterfly.

She was starting to have strange thoughts, desires that she had never felt before.

Everything was happening because of Guglielmo.

He saw her leaning over towards him from where she was standing with a sensual movement. For a moment they stared into each other’s eyes, their faces were just a few inches apart, close enough to feel each other’s warm breath. Gemma closed her eyes, she tilted her head slightly, her nose gently touched Guglielmo’s, and a few moments after their lips joined.

It was the same story every time.

It was as if they were taken by magic. Guglielmo’s mind was going off in a moment of ecstasy when he could hear sensuous whispers, and could travel to places where only his imagination could take him.

«Did you find anything on these people living at the turn of the last century, frightened by the end of the world?»

«Yes, I actually did find something, Gemma but not as much as I was expecting though; anyway it is a start. There is too much mystery around these events and I am not convinced. Maybe there’s more to it than what has been written, after dozens, hundreds of years,..something that nobody was supposed to know. I wonder whether I could find something out…»

Guglielmo was gazing blankly into the distance as if he was the only living soul who could see things through a hole in the atmosphere that no one else could.

«Your mother told me that last night you had another argument with your father, she was a bit upset over it, and I can’t blame her… could you not at least try to…»

Come on Gemma, you know perfectly well how things are between us. It’s not up to me. Last night I was in the sitting room browsing through some books that I had taken from the library. He came over and told me that I should not waste so much time with books, life is something completely different… as if he really knew… Gemma I don’t want him to make me into a professional soldier, the same as his ancestors, following the inviolable family tradition. I love my family but I do not want it to be like a loop around my neck, I do not want to feel suffocated by them, no matter what I do, I do not want them to make decisions on my behalf. Surely my parents brought me into this world, they raised me, they made me into who I am now but I do not want them to go over my head and make decisions for my future. Can you understand what I am saying?»

Gemma was looking at him with a tender and sympathetic smile. She felt so sorry that he was so upset about that, but she felt she could not help him because she knew that family matters have to be kept within the family itself.

After that thought had crossed her mind, without saying a word, she got back to reality and looked at her watch. It was 10:45am, his lecture in History of the Civilizations was starting in just 15 minutes. She got up from the chair and put her black backpack on her shoulders.

«Guli, I am off, damn, if I don’t hurry up, I am going to be late for my lecture. I will talk to you tonight».

She gave a hasty kiss on Guglielmo’s forehead, then she disappeared among those shelves full of books, almost swallowed by all that paper.

Four

Guglielmo kept on reading that tiny book. After a good search, he also managed to retrieve the cover, which gave out the title and the author of the book. Those pages were already providing him with some answers to quite a few questions. It was written by some guy called Mr Duby, and was entitled “The year 1000”.

He borrowed that tiny book from the library, under the inquisitive eye of the librarian, in order to take it home and read what was left in peace and quiet.

It was late at night and he was lying on his bed, his book resting on his chest, he was greedily taking in all the words written on those thin pages, looking for some new information.

[…] of the feudal period, there is just one chronicle left which depicts the year 1000 as a tragic year: the one written by Sigerbert of Gembloux. There were in those days many prodigies, a horrific earthquake, a comet with a blazing tail; the bright and intense light brightened up even the inside of the houses, and in the sky, that seemed to cleave, it traced the image of a snake […] Many people thought it was the anticipation of the last day.

[…] in the Annals of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire an important announcement about the year 1003, pointed out an unusual flooding, a mirage, the birth of a monster who was drowned by the parents; but the place of the thousandth year of the incarnation is empty.

Further ahead in the book, he came across a reference, just a few lines, which drew his attention. Saint Abbon, abbot of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire Abbey left a record of one of his memories from his youth:

[…] about the end of the world, I hear someone preaching in a church in Paris about the Antichrist coming at the end of the year 1000 and that the final judgement would come shortly after.

While reading those words, his mind wondered off to a previous event that happened going back a few years.

In 1997 comet Hale-Bopp could be seen at the same time of the spring equinox. Something strange happened while she was shining in the sky: roughly thirty cult members of a religious sect from southern California, computer experts, committed mass suicide in the belief that they would have hitched a ride on an alien’s spaceship travelling in the wake of a passing comet, and be whisked to the “next level”. In a footage that they made while committing suicide, they felt they were the chosen ones, lucky people who were being freed from weaknesses and meanness related to the human condition.

During the same year a number of disastrous events had hit poor souls all over the world: earthquakes, strong winds, torrential rain, tornadoes. It seemed that history repeated itself.

He had just photocopied some pages from another book written by Jules Michelet about the oppressed waiting for the end of the world to free them from sufferings tormenting them:

The prisoner was waiting in the black fortified tower, in the sepulchral cell; the serf was waiting on his furrow, in the shade of the despised tower; the monk was waiting, among the abstinences inflicted by cloistered life, solitary inner turmoil, among temptations and falls, remorses and strange visions, despicable devil’s decoy who was cruelly goofing around him, and pulling his cover at night time, was gaily saying into his ear “You are doomed!” All of them wished to put an end to their dreadful living condition, it did not matter at what price. However, it should be quite charming to see the moment when the trumpet would blast into the tyrants’ ear. Then, from the fortified tower, from the cloister and from the furrow, a terrible laughter would burst amid the sobbing.

In order to demystify mass suicide, scholars in the 90s engaged themselves to convince people that the spot in the tail of the comet was just a star and that the cult members had been brainwashed with all the lies told by their leader. However, the press kept on publishing articles with sensational and allusive headlines.

Was the end of the world really so close?

Would the terrors of a new medieval period spread all over mankind in a few years’ time?

Guglielmo’s mind was racing. He was matching theories, comparing events, combining events. He thought that at the dawn of the year 2000 it would have been much easier to spread panic and turn it into an obsessive psychosis.

After all, in 999AD, a persuasive voice, a public square or a pulpit in a church and a big crowd, hadn’t all this been enough to spread the universal belief that the world was about to end?