The Rule of Four

Hypnerotomachia was published, it was addressed to a confessor at a local church, and it told the story of a high-ranking Roman scion. His name was Francesco Colonna.

It's difficult to re-create my father's excitement when he saw the name. The wire-frame glasses he wore, which slunk down his nose the longer he read, magnified his eyes just enough to make them the measure of his curiosity, the first and last thing most people ever remembered about him. At that moment, as he sized up what he'd found, all the light in the room seemed to converge inside those eyes. The letter he held was written in a clumsy hand, in broken Tuscan, as if by a man who was not accustomed to that language, or to the act of writing. It rambled on and on, sometimes directed at no one in particular, sometimes directed at God. The author apologized for not writing in Latin or in Greek, which were unknown to him. Then, at last, he apologized for what he had done.

Forgive me, Holy Father, for I have killed two men. It was my own hand that struck the blow, but the design was never mine. It was Master Francesco Colonna who bid me do it. Judge us both with mercy.

The letter claimed that the murders were part of an intricate plan, one that no man as simple as the author himself could have contrived. The two victims were men Colonna suspected of treachery, and at his direction they were sent on an unusual mission. They were given a letter to deliver to a church outside the walls of Rome, where a third man would be waiting to receive it. Under pain of death the two men were not to look at the letter, not to lose it, not to so much as touch it with an ungloved hand. So began the story of the simple Roman mason who slew the messengers at San Lorenzo.

The discovery my father and I made that summer came to be known, in academic circles, as the Belladonna Document. My father felt sure it would revive his reputation in the scholarly community, and within six months he published a small book under that title suggesting the letter's connection to the Hypnerotomachia. The book was dedicated to me. In it, he argued that the Francesco Colonna who'd written the Hypnerotomachia was not the Venetian monk, as most professors believed, but instead the Roman aristocrat mentioned in our letter. To bolster this claim, he added an appendix including all known records on the lives of both the Venetian monk, whom he called the Pretender, and of the Roman Colonna, so that readers could compare. The appendix alone made believers of both Paul and me.

The details are straightforward. The monastery in Venice where the false Francesco lived was an unthinkable place for a philosopher-author; most of the time, to hear my father tell it, the place was an unholy cocktail of loud music, hard drinking, and lurid sexual escapades. When Pope Clement VII attempted to force restraint on the brethren there, they replied that they would sooner become Lutherans than accept discipline. Even in such an environment, the Pretender's biography reads like a rap sheet. In 1477 he was exiled from the monastery for unnamed violations. Four years later he returned, only to commit a separate crime, for which he was almost defrocked. In 1516 he pled no contest to rape and was banished for life. Undeterred, he returned again, and was exiled again, this time for a scandal involving a jeweler. Mercifully, death took him in 1527. The Venetian Francesco Colonna-accused thief, confessed rapist, lifelong Dominican-was ninety-three years old.

The Roman Francesco, on the other hand, appeared to be a model of every scholarly virtue. According to my father, he was the son of a powerful noble family, who raised him in the best of European society and had him educated by the highest-minded Renaissance intellectuals. Francesco's uncle, Prospero Colonna, was not only a revered patron of the arts and a cardinal of the Church, but such a renowned humanist that he may have been the inspiration for Shakespeare's Prospero in The Tempest. These were the sorts of connections, my father argued, that made it possible for a single man to write a book as complex as the Hypnerotomachia— and they were certainly the connections that would've ensured its publication by a leading press.

What sealed the matter entirely, to me at least, was the fact that this blue-blooded Francesco had been a member of the Roman Academy, a fraternity of men committed to the pagan ideals of the old Roman Republic, the ideals expressed with such admiration in the Hypnerotomachia. That would explain why Colonna identified himself in the secret acrostic as Fra: the title Brother, which other scholars took as a sign that Colonna was a monk, was also a common greeting at the Academy.

Yet my father's argument, which seemed so lucid to Paul and me, clouded the academic waters. My father hardly lived long enough to brave the teapot tempest he stirred up in the little world of Hypnerotomachia scholarship, but it nearly undid him. Almost all of my father's colleagues rejected the work; Vincent Taft went out of his way to defame it. By then, the arguments in favor of the Venetian Colonna had become so entrenched that, when my father failed to address one or two of them in his brief appendix, the whole work was discredited. The idea of connecting two doubtful murders with one of the world's most valuable books, Taft wrote, was nothing but a sad and sensational bit of self-promotion.

My father, of course, was devastated. To him it was the substance of his career they were rejecting, the fruit of the quest he'd been on since his days with McBee. He never understood the violence of the reaction against his discovery. The only enduring fan of The Belladonna Document, as far as I know, was Paul. He read the book so many times that even the dedication stuck in his memory. When he arrived at Princeton and found a Tom Corelli Sullivan listed in the freshman face-book, he recognized my middle name immediately and decided to track me down.

If he expected to meet a younger version of my father, he must have been disappointed. The freshman Paul found, who walked with a faint limp and seemed embarrassed by his middle name, had done the unthinkable: he had renounced the Hypnerotomachia and become the prodigal son of a family that made a religion out of reading. The shockwaves of the accident were still ringing through my life, but the truth is that even before my father died, I was losing my faith in books. I'd begun to realize that there was an unspoken prejudice among book-learned people, a secret conviction they all seemed to share, that life as we know it is an imperfect vision of reality, and that only art, like a pair of reading glasses, can correct it. The scholars and intellectuals I met at our dinner table always seemed to hold a grudge against the world. They could never quite reconcile themselves to the idea that our lives don't follow the dramatic arc that a good author gives to a great literary character. Only in accidents of pure perfection does the world actually become a stage. And that, they seemed to think, was a shame.

No one ever said it that way, exactly, but when my father's friends and colleagues-all but Vincent Taft- came to see me in the hospital, looking sheepish about the reviews they'd written of his book, mumbling little eulogies for him they'd composed in the waiting room, I began to see the writing on the wall. I noticed it the moment they walked to my bedside: every one of them brought handfuls of books.

This helped me when my father died, said the chairman of the history department, placing Merton's Seven Storey Mountain on the food tray beside me.

I find great comfort in Auden, said the young graduate student writing her dissertation under my father. She left a paperback edition with one corner clipped off to remove the price.

What you need is a pick-me-up, another man whispered when the others left the room. Not this bloodless stuff.

I didn't even recognize him. He left a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo, which I'd already read, and I could only wonder if he really thought revenge was the best emotion to encourage just then.

None of these people, I realized, could cope with reality any better than I could. My father's death had a nasty finality to it, and it made a mockery of the laws they lived by: that every fact can be reinterpreted, that every ending can be changed. Dickens had rewritten Great Expectations so that Pip could be happy. No one could rewrite this.

When I met Paul, then, I was wary. I'd spent the last two years of high school forcing certain changes on myself: whenever I felt the pain in my leg, I would continue to walk; whenever instinct told me to pass by a door without pausing-the door to the gym, or to a new friend's car, or to the house of a girl I was beginning to like-I would make myself stop and knock, and sometimes let myself in. But here, in Paul, I saw what I might have been.

He was small and pale beneath his untended hair, and more of a boy than a man. One of his shoelaces was untied, and he carried a book in his hand as if it were a security blanket. The first time he introduced himself, he quoted the Hypnerotomachia, I felt I already knew him better than I wanted to. He'd tracked me down in a coffee shop near campus just as the sun began to set in early September. My first instinct was to ignore him that evening, and avoid him ever after.

What changed all that was something he said just before I begged off for the night.

Somehow, he said, I feel like he's my father too.