Veritas (Atto Melani)

by Monaldi, Rita

  I was an exception: chimney-sweeps and roof tilers usually came from the Alpine valleys, from Lake Como, Lake Maggiore, from the Valcamonica, the Val Brembana and also from Piedmont. In these poor areas the great hunger forced families to give up children as young as six or seven seasonally to the chimney-sweeps, who made use of them to clean – at the risk of their lives – the narrower flues.

  Having the build of a child but the strength of an adult, I could offer the best guarantee that the job would be done properly: I would screw myself into the narrow openings and clamber up agilely through the soot, but I would also scrape the black walls of the hood and flue with greater skill than any child could apply to the job. Furthermore, the fact that I was so light saved the tiles from damage when I climbed onto the roof to clean or adjust the chimney pot, and at the same time there was no risk of my dashing my brains out on the ground, as happened all too often to the very young chimney-sweeps.

  Finally, as a local chimney sweep, I was available all year round, while my Alpine colleagues only came down at the beginning of November.

  I myself, to tell the truth, was often obliged to take my lively little son along with me, but I would never have made him clamber up a flue; I merely used him as a small apprentice and assistant, this being a job that requires at least two people.

  To reassure the customers of my skills, I would boast a long apprenticeship in the Aprutine Mountains (where, as in the Alps, there is a long tradition of chimney sweeping). Actually I had no real experience. I had learned the rudiments of the art only at Villa Spada, on those occasions when I had been asked to climb up the flues to solve some unexpected problem, or to repair the roof.

  And so, every night, I would load my barrow with tools – rasp, palette knife, wire brush, butcher’s broom, a rope, a ladder and counterweights – and set off, never without first seeing my consort give her sleep-befuddled child a loving hug. Cloridia detested this risky trade, which kept her awake at nights, praying that nothing would happen.

  Wrapped in my short black cloak, by the first light of dawn I would have reached the outlying areas of the city or the nearby villages. And here, uttering the cry “Chimney-sweeeep, chimney-sweeeeeeeeep!”, I would offer my services.

  All too often I would be greeted with hostile words and gestures; the chimney-sweep arrives in the winter, bringing bad weather with him, and so is considered a figure of ill-omen. When people did open their doors to us, if we were lucky my son would receive a bowl of warm broth and a scrap of bread from some kindly housewife.

  A black jacket buttoned on the left, below my arm, to prevent the buttons from snagging on the walls of the chimney, and closed all the way to the top, the sleeves tied tightly at the wrists with string, to stop the soot entering; knee-length trousers of rough moleskin, which did not hold the dirt, with protective patches on the knees, elbows and bottom, the points of greatest wear when clambering up the narrow flues: this was my uniform. Narrow and black, it made me look only a little less tiny and scrawny than my son, so that I was often taken for his slightly elder brother.

  As I wormed my way up the flue, my head would be swathed in a canvas sack, hermetically sealed at the neck, to save me, at least in part, from inhaling the soot. Hooded like this, I looked like a prisoner condemned to the gallows. I was completely blind, but in the flue there was no need to see: you worked by touch, scraping with the rasp.

  My son would wait down below, trembling with fear lest something should happen and he should be left all alone, far from his dear mother and sisters.

  In the fireplace and on the roof, however, I would climb up barefooted, so as to be unimpeded and thus able to brace myself and push more efficiently. The problem was that it reduced my feet to a mass of bruises and sores, and so throughout the winter, the period when I had most work, I would walk with a limping, unsteady gait.

  Working on the roofs was often extremely dangerous: however, it was a mere nothing to someone like me, who had once climbed the dome of St Peter’s.

  The most painful aspect of our poverty, however, was not my wretched job, but our two girls. My daughters, unfortunately, were still unmarried, and everything indicated that they would remain so for a long time. The Lord God, praise be given, had endowed them with an iron constitution: despite their privations, they were still beautiful, rosy and florid (“Thanks to their three years of breast-feeding!” their mother would say proudly). Their hair was so gorgeous and glossy that every Saturday morning they would go to the market to sell the hair that got caught in their combs during their morning toilet for two baiocchi. Their health was a real miracle, as all around us the cold and famine had taken a heavy toll.

  My two girls – sweet, healthy, beautiful and virtuous – had just one flaw: they had not a penny of dowry. More than once the nuns had come from the convent of Santa Caterina Sopra Minerva, which annually distributed large sums to the families of poor girls who would agree to take the vows, to try to persuade me to send them to the cloisters in exchange for a neat little nest egg. The girls’ robust constitution and perfect health attracted the nuns, who needed strong, humble sisters to do all those chores in the convent that the nuns from noble families could not be expected to do. But even at our worst moments I had politely declined these offers (Cloridia was rather less polite; shaking her breasts angrily, she would berate the nuns to their faces: “You think I breastfed each of them for three years to see them end up like that?”), and in any case my girls themselves showed no inclination for the veil.

  Already fully acquainted with the joys of maternity thanks to their experience as assistant midwives, they yearned to find husbands as soon as possible.

  Then the cold ceased and the famine too. But the poverty did not vanish so quickly. After two years, my daughters were still waiting.

  A futile anger would gnaw at me whenever I saw my elder daughter’s face grow asbstracted and sad without a word being said (she was already twenty-five years old!). My rage was not directed against a blind and cruel fate, far from it. I knew perfectly well whom to blame: not the cold, nor the famine that had laid all Europe low. No. I had a name in mind: Abbot Melani.

  A ruthless schemer, an interloper, a man of a hundred deceits and a thousand tricks; master of the lie, prophet of intrigue, oracle of dissimulation and falsehood; all this, and more, was Abbot Atto Melani, a famous castrato singer of former days, but most especially a spy.

  Eleven years earlier he had grimly exploited me, even putting my life at risk, with the promise of a dowry for my daughters.

  “Not just money, houses. Property. Lands. Farms. I shall make over your daughters’ dowry. A rich dowry. And, when I say rich, I am not exaggerating.” Thus he had duped me. Those words were still engraved in my memory as in my bare flesh.

  He had explained that he had various properties in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany: all valuable, with excellent incomes, he had specified, and he had even set down a promise in writing, in which he engaged to establish in my daughters’ names a marital dowry, each with incomes or properties that were “substantial”, all to be defined before a notary of the Capitol. But he was never to take me to that notary.

  Having made use of my services, he had gone off to Paris on the sly, and all my wandering from lawyer to lawyer, from notary to notary, in search of someone who might give me some hope, had proved useless. I would have had to file a very expensive lawsuit against him in Paris. In short, that document containing his promise was mere waste paper.

  And so he enjoyed his riches, while I endeavoured to drag myself and my family from the desperate swamp of indigence.

  But now I was summoned to appear before a Roman notary. He had been charged, by a colleague in Vienna, with the task of tracking me down and delivering to me a deed of donation signed by Abbot Melani.

  What exactly it consisted of was a mystery. The asset, which the notary considered must be something of great value (“a piece of land, or a house”), was described by abbreviations and numbers, probably referr
ing to Viennese registries, all of which were totally abstruse. Abbot Melani had moreover opened an unlimited credit in my favour at an exchange bank, so that I could provide for the journey without any financial hindrances.

  As for me, I just had to present myself at a certain address at the imperial capital, and there all would be revealed and I would receive what was due to me.

  It was not, unfortunately, a donation in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, as the Abbot had led me to believe back then, but much further off, on the other side of the Alps even.

  However, in our current dire straits, it was manna from heaven. How could we refuse?

  Vienna

  FEBRUARY 1711

  The drum roll resounded over the bare snowy plain that lay before the city walls. Its powerful thunder interwove with the silvery serpentine sounds of the parade trumpets, the military pipes and horns. This martial commotion was redoubled by the echo that bounced off the massive walls, amidst fortifications, ravelins and earthworks, so that it sounded as if there were not just one line of players, but three or four, or perhaps even ten.

  While a military regiment drilled outside the city walls, from within the ramparts we felt upon us the severe gaze of church spires and palace pinnacles, belfries crowned with crosses and castellated towers, serene domes and airy terraces – a host of sacred and profane rooftops that warn the traveller: what you have reached is not an anonymous cluster of men and things, but a benign cradle of souls, a powerful fortress, a protector of trade, blessed by God.

  As our carriage drew close to the Carinthian Gate, the entrance to Vienna for travellers from the south, I saw those proud and noble pinnacles rise up one by one against the leaden sky.

  Supreme among them, as the coachman pointed out, was the lofty and sublime spire of the Cathedral of St Stephen, a dazzling fretwork of intricate decorations, with the added embellishment of a gleaming mantle of snow. Not far off was the sturdy octagonal campanile of the church of the Dominicans. Then came the noble bell tower of St Peter of the Holy Trinity, as well as those of St Michael of the Barnabite Fathers and St Jerome of the Coenobite Franciscan Fathers, and then the pinnacle of the Convent of the Virgins at the Gate of Heaven, and many others besides, crowned by onion spirals, typical of those lands, each culminating, at the very top, in golden globes surmounted by the holy cross.

  Finally, there was the symbol of the supreme imperial authority: I espied the great tower of the Caesarian Palace, in which Joseph the First of the Habsburg House of Austria, glorious Sovereign of the Holy Roman Empire, had reigned happily for six years.

  With the music of the military regiment calling us to discipline, the grandiose fortified walls of the city obliging us to modesty and the innumerable bell towers of the city disposing us to the fear of God, I began to picture to myself the sinuous curves of the Danube, which, as I knew from the books I had perused before our departure, flowed on the far side of Vienna. But above all I silently invoked the name of the leafy dark mass, which now, between one cloud and another, began to take shape on the horizon, gentle with its hilly rotundities, and yet mighty, as it loomed steeply over the waters of the river and gazed silently eastwards: the city’s silent and heroic sentinel. It was the Kahlenberg, the glorious mountain that had saved the West: it was from this woody promontory, overlooking Vienna and the river, that the Christian armies, twenty-eight years earlier, had freed the city from the great siege of the Turks, and delivered Europe from the threat of Mahomet.

  It was no surprise that I remembered those events so clearly. All those years ago, in September 1683, while everyone in Rome and Europe was tremulously awaiting the outcome of the Battle of Vienna, I was working as a servant boy in an inn, where I served lunches and dinners. There I had met my wife, Cloridia, and, among the many guests in the hotel, a certain Abbot Melani.

  Screwing up my eyes, with the carriage wheels creaking as they forced their way out of yet another ditch, I saw a ray of sunlight strike the little building on the summit of the Bald Mountain, perhaps a church – yes, a little chapel, the very one where (so memory – or rather history, as it was by now – told me) a Capuchin father, at dawn on 12th September 1683, the day of the decisive assault, had said mass and harangued the Christian commanders before leading them to the bloody but blessed final victory over the Infidels. Now I was going to touch with my own hand, or rather my own feet, the shining relics of the past; I myself would tread the gentle hills of neighbouring Nussdorf, where the infantrymen of the Christian armies, battling from house to house, from barn to barn, from vineyard to vineyard, had driven back the wretched curs of Mahomet.

  I turned with emotion to Cloridia. With our little child sleeping in her lap, my wife said not a word. But I knew that she shared in my reflections. And they were not light thoughts.

  We had endured a grim journey of nearly a month, setting off from Rome at the end of January, not without first anxiously prostrating ourselves before the sacred relics of Saint Filippo Neri, patron of our city. Abbot Melani had seen to it that we always obtained seats well inside the carriages and not the far less comfortable ones by the doors. After changing horses at Civita Castellana and spending the night at Otricoli, we had passed through the Umbrian town of Narni, then Terni and finally, at midnight, ancient Foligno. And in the days that followed, I, who had never travelled beyond Perugia, had spent each night in a different city: from Tolentino, Loreto and Sinigaglia, a city situated in a charming plain looking onto the Adriatic Sea, up to the Romagnolo cities of Rimini and Cesena, and then Bologna and Ferrara, and even further north, up to Chioggia on the delta of the river Po, and Mestre at the gates of Venice, and then Sacile and Udine, capital of Friuli Veneto, a notable and splendid city of the State of the Most Serene Republic. And I had then seen the nights of Gorizia and Adelsberg, arriving happily in Ljubljana, despite the fact that snow had been falling incessantly from the moment of our departure until our arrival. And then I had slept at Celje, Maribor on the Drava, Graz, capital of Styria, Pruch and finally Stuppach. Equally numerous were the cities that I had passed through, from Fano to Pesaro and Cattolica, a small town in Romagna, and from there through Forlì and Faenza. We had travelled along the river Po, passing through Corsola and Cavanella on the Adige, and along the Brenta. We had passed through the delightful town of Mira and reached Fusina, where one enters the waters of the great lagoon of Venice. And, finally, we had sailed along the river Lintz in one of those small boats that are rightly called wooden homes, since they possess all the comforts of a house. Twelve men rowed it and went so fast that in just a few hours the view before our eyes had changed from rocks to forests, from vineyards to cornfields, from great cities to ruined castles.

  The cold and the snow that had accompanied us throughout our journey seemed to have no intention of leaving us. Now we were finally at the gates of Vienna, anxious as to what awaited us. The city about to welcome us to her bosom, which we had so long dreamed of, was justly known as the “New Rome”: it was the capital of the immense Holy Roman Empire. Under its dominion lay, in the first place, Higher and Lower Austria, Carinthia, the Tyrol, Styria, the Vorarlberg and the Burgenland: the hereditary lands of the Habsburgs, the so-called Archduchy of Austria above and below the Enns, over which they had reigned as archdukes long before being crowned emperors. But the Holy Roman Empire also embraced countless other lands and regions, on the coast or in the mountains, such as Krajina, Istria, Dalmatia, the Banat, Bukovina, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slavonia, Hungary, Bohemia and Moravia, Galicia and Lodomeria, Silesia and the Siebenbürgen; and it watched over the German Electorates, including Saxony and therefore also Poland; and since the Middle Ages it had been (or it used to be, or would soon be) also Switzerland, Swabia, Alsace, Burgundy, Flanders, Artois, Franche-Comté, Spain, the Low Countries, Sardinia, Lombardy, Tuscany, the Grand Duchy of Spoleto, Venice and Naples.

  Millions and millions of subjects lay under the Caesarian City, and dozens and dozens of different cultures and idioms. Germans, Italians,
Magyars, Slavs, Poles, Ruthenians and Swabian artisans and Bohemian cooks, attendants and servants from the Balkans, poor fugitives fleeing from the Turks, and above all hosts of hirelings from Moravia, who swarmed to Vienna like bees.

  Of all these peoples the city that lay before us was the capital. Would we find what Atto Melani had promised us there?

  Relying on the Abbot’s credit, we had entrusted all our meagre savings to the girls, whom we had decided to leave in Rome to continue in their jobs as midwives, leaving them to the strict surveillance of our dependable co-tenants from Istria. We had said our tearful goodbyes, promising to return as soon as possible with us the long-awaited dowry so that they could finally marry.

  However, if anything were to go wrong in Vienna, we would not have a penny, either to make our departure or to survive on. We would just have to beg and wait for death to bear us off in the freezing weather. This is what poverty can do: drive mortal beings to travel all the way across the world, and then immobilise them in its crushing embrace. In short, we had made a classic leap into the dark.

  Cloridia had finally agreed to the journey: “Anything, just so I don’t have to see your face covered in soot anymore,” she said. The mere idea that I would at last give up the job she loathed so intensely had persuaded her to accept Abbot Melani’s offer.

  I instinctively looked at my hands: after days without working, they were still black under the nails, between the fingers and in the pores. The distinguishing mark of wretched chimney-sweeps.

  Cloridia and the child were coughing hard, as they had done for several days. I myself was tormented by a fluxion in my chest, night and day. The bouts of fever, which had begun halfway through the journey, had gradually worn us out.

  The carriage now rumbled over a little bridge that crossed one of the defence moats, and finally passed through the Carinthian Gate. In the distance I could see the green woods of Kahlenberg. The diurnal star lifted its gilded fingertips from the hill and laid them gently on my own poor person: a ray of sunlight, sudden and joyous, hit me full in the face. I smiled at Cloridia. The air was cold, sharp and immaculate. We had entered Vienna.