Congo Days: William and Adso

I have been thinking about the principal characters of "The Name of the Rose" lately. We bought the DVD on our last visit to Belgium, and watched it a couple of weeks ago. I loved the film when it first came out, and loved the book, too.

When the abbey's library burned, I identified with William of Baskerville. I would have done the same thing and tried to save as many books as possible. I would have mourned for the lost books. Even though the story is fictional, I still felt sad when I watched the film.

I often think about all the knowledge that has been lost to accidents, ignorance, war, and intolerance. I miss the books I'll never get to read. I crave the smell of libraries and to think of the possibilities, of the things you can discover in forgotten shelves in far-off libraries. I love books.

I spent Wednesday and Thursday at the Botanical Garden of Kis@ntu. I went there to discuss a small participatory research project with the director and Francesca, who is the technical adviser to the garden's rehabilitation project. I was sitting outside the Garden's tiny library when I heard some commotion inside. Francesca came out a few seconds later carrying some old documents. She was furious.

Termites had gotten into one of the oldest collection of plant books the garden has. We took the books out and started killing the bugs immediately. The new garden intern helped us, too.

I felt sad and angry. The collection includes drawings for the flora of every province of the Congo, and the drawings are delicate and detailed. They come from a time before digital cameras and GPS, they're over 100 years old.

I could understand if the library held thousands of tomes, but there aren't even 1000 books in that library. Where was the librarian while the termites feasted away a few meters from his desk? The collection still has the original receipts, so we know they were delivered to the priest who founded the garden from the editorial house in Belgium. The books survived dictators and wars, only to be destroyed by bugs. I took special pleasure in decapitating and squishing as many termites as possible.

After our termite killing spree, we left the gardens for the cité where we were to lodge. The Catholic sisters that run the local hospital make ends meet by lodging visitors at their house. Having gone to Catholic school all my life, and after interacting with nuns on a relatively regular basis, I felt right at home in the simple but comfortable house.

At dinner, conversation turned around the upcoming project, which will focus on improving some of the living conditions of the cité, or village that neighbors the gardens. The sisters agreed that having a market next to the hospital wasn't ideal, and that in general the living conditions in the village weren't the most salubrious ones.

I thought about Adso and how he confronts what he sees and lives in the abbey with the poverty he saw outside. It was the XIV century, things were pretty bad. Listening to the sisters say how people couldn't pay for their surgeries, how different government divisions owed the hospital thousands of dollars in medical fees for their employees, and how they struggled to keep the hospital running, made me think of the termite-ridden books again, and of the library. And of the story of the abbey.

Do those books matter when thirteen year-old girls are coming in for C-sections because they're too young to deliver naturally? Is it normal to feel sad and angry about the loss of beautiful books AND about the dire conditions around the garden? What do you say to a librarian that struggles to feed his family? does it make sense AT ALL to point out the value of the books, the fact that they're part of the Congolese heritage, of the garden's heritage, of you-name-it heritage? Can he still be asked to do his job?

I left the gardens yesterday with all these questions in my head. I thought that I was William and I was Adso and that it was hard to make sense of it at all. The little participatory project is supposed to find a few doable solutions to improve the living conditions outside the gardens. The goal of the director is to deter encroachment on the garden. He fears that when the last tree outside is turned to charcoal for a few francs congolaises, the end of the garden will begin, and then there'll be nothing left. If the garden starts making sense to the people, perhaps the abbey won't need to burn.

Sometimes things seem not to change.