Veritas (Atto Melani)

by Monaldi, Rita

  “To tell the truth, some Caesars, including Emperor Leopold of august memory, father of our beloved Joseph I, did plan some rather limited restoration work. But when you get down to it, no emperor has ever carried anything through, or hardly anything.”

  “And why not?” I asked in wonder.

  “Lack of money,” my assistant said with a wink, vigilant and lucid once again. “Their imperial paymasters and court paymasters always found a thousand pretexts not to finance the restoration of the Place with No Name. All of them, just like Ilsung and Hag –”

  “. . . because the great financial families pulling the strings behind the paymasters were still the same ones,” I concluded before him.

  “Exactly, Signor Master. Do you want proof? Even the tutor of the infant Leopold I, father of the present emperor, was a Fugger. They’re the same as ever. And for generations they’ve hated the Place with No Name.”

  “So are they really far more powerful than the emperors?”

  “It’s a question of fear, Signor Master. All the Most August Caesars who reigned between Maximilian and his Caesarean Majesty Joseph I the Victorious kept well away from the Place with No Name for fear of ending up like Maximilian.”

  “Why, what happened to him?”

  But Simonis seemed not to hear me. He had stepped outside and was examining the fading light of day.

  “We must hurry, Signor Master,” he exclaimed, running back in. “It’s very late; soon they’ll be closing the city gates!”

  18.30 of the clock: the ramparts close. Latecomers must pay 6 kreutzer. The beer bell rings, the wine shops close and no one can wander the streets now bearing arms or without a lantern.

  Lashing the poor mule mercilessly, we managed to get through the city gates just in time to avoid paying the 6-kreutzer fine. Money saved, and immediately lost: our dinner at the eating house, because we were so late, cost us 24 kreutzer each instead of the usual 8.

  On our way home, curled up as usual in the cart while Simonis and the boy sat on the box seat, with my guts churning to the jolts of the careering wheels, I thought back to the Greek’s bizarre tale.

  Now that I knew the story of the Place with No Name, the decision of His Caesarean Majesty Joseph I struck me in a new light and raised urgent questions: why on earth had Joseph decided to break the chain of oblivion that his predecessors had bound around Neugebäu? He must know well the sad story of his ancestor Maximilian II and the series of grudges and vendettas that had generated and undermined the parody of Suleiman’s camp. He must have easily guessed, if he had not indeed learned with his own ears, that it was this murky affair that had kept his prudent predecessors away from the Place with No Name. What had given Joseph the Victorious the impulse to intervene in a centuries-old struggle which, according to Simonis, was far from over?

  I considered our beloved Emperor. What did I know of him?

  Ever since my arrival I had tried to collect information on the new Sovereign’s character, fame and actions, and on the expectations that the people had of him. After a life spent as the subject of popes, all of a certain age, I had found it a welcome novelty to become the subject of a young monarch with no cassock or crosier.

  Numerous writings existed on Joseph I, known as the Victorious. They were all panegyrics, or stories of his infancy, of his education entrusted to the Prince of Salm (he was the first emperor not to be educated by the Jesuits, his father Leopold having yielded to the hatred that his subjects nurtured for the Company of Jesus). Then there were detailed descriptions of his marriage to Wilhelmina Amalia of Brunswick-Lunenburg, of his triumphal appointment as King of the Romans, which is the title by which the crown prince is designated in the Empire. There were also accounts of his military campaigns, first of all the siege and conquest of the fortress of Landau in the Palatinate: Joseph himself had seized it from French hands at the age of just twenty-four, in 1702 and 1704. In 1703 the French had reconquered it only because Emperor Leopold, for reasons unknown to me, had not wanted to send his son into battle.

  These were the first things I remembered from all that I had read about my Sovereign, but more particularly from what I had learned at first hand from my sharp-witted fellow chimney-sweeps, who had been happy to satisfy my curiosity about the royal family with lively details, instilling in me a profound devotion to my new Sovereign.

  However, I could remember nothing of any connection with the Place with No Name or its history. Or perhaps there was something: the bold beauty of the young Emperor (something truly unique in the ill-favoured Habsburg line), a mirror to his impetuous and dominating character (equally rare in that stock); Joseph’s desire to impose himself on the family traditions and the consequent clashes with his father, parvus animus educated by the Jesuits, and the conflicts with his brother Charles, of a recondite and indecisive temperament, another product of a Jesuit education.

  But I vowed that I would rummage among the various books and writings on the Emperor that I had acquired on my arrival in Vienna. I would look there for the answers to my questions.

  On returning to the convent, after gulping down our sumptuous dinner at meteoric speed, I was already looking forward to immersing myself in the papers I had collected on Joseph, in search of an answer to the puzzles of the Place with No Name.

  “Here I am. This evening we shall do a lesson on strolling, and on eating and drinking.”

  It was like a blow to the head. The person who addressed me in this fashion, just as I turned into the corridor of the guest house, was Ollendorf, the German tutor. I had forgotten: it was the feared hour of our language lesson. As he had just announced, that evening we were going to try out a conversation to learn the terms connected with walking and with food. Very unwillingly I bade farewell to my research into Joseph I and the Place with No Name.

  My lack of talent for foreign idioms was exposed all the more clearly by the state of exhaustion in which I faced each lesson. That evening I was afraid that I would appear to even greater disadvantage than I had at the previous lesson, when, in an attempt to describe the best way to pay homage to a woman (kissing the back of her hand), instead of the word hand I had said hund (dog), to the great mirth of my wife and my son, and the deep disappointment of Ollendorf.

  Cloridia was still at Prince Eugene’s palace. I was so eager to get on with my readings on Joseph I and my cogitations on the Place with No Name that, after apologising to the teacher and offering as pretext my weariness, I begged him to teach my son by himself that evening.

  I retired to my bedroom and prepared to wash, pouring water from a jug into the pot on the fireplace. As I did so I listened to my son, taking delight in his skills in German.

  “Deß Herrn Diener mein Herr, wie gehets dem Herrn?”, which is to say “Servant of your Lordship my patron, how is your Lordship?” asked the teacher, pretending that his little pupil was a gentleman.

  “Wohl Gott lob, dem Herrn zu dienen, was für gute Zeitungen bringt mir der Herr?” “Praise be to God, to serve your Lordship: what good news does your Lordship bring?” answered the boy diligently.

  I cleaned myself and was just settling down to read the heap of papers – pamphlets and other publications concerning the life and deeds of our Most August Caesar – when I heard a key rattle in the door. My wife had returned.

  “My darling,” I greeted her, resigning myself to a postponement of my research.

  For nearly two days my wife and I had had no chance to talk, and I was curious to hear about the audience that the Agha had had with Prince Eugene. But then I saw her dejected face and dull complexion, features that clearly indicated trepidation and anxiety.

  She kissed me, took off her cloak and lay down on the bed.

  “So, how did it go yesterday?”

  “Oh, what do you expect . . . Those Turkish soldiers, all they can do is drink. And act licentiously.”

  Exalted by the hospitality and courtesy extended to the Agha, the lower-ranking Ottomans had thought they could claim equal
dignities, and had plied Cloridia with absurd requests.

  “Unfortunately,” sighed my wife, “of all the virtues that honour Christian society, the only one the Turks feel obliged to practise is hospitality. When they enter someone else’s home, they think they have a right to whatever they want, because they are muzafir, guests, and in their religion it is God Himself who has sent them, and no matter what they do, they must always be welcome.”

  A virtue that contents itself with appearances, said Cloridia, is very quickly debased; and that is what happens to oriental hospitality as practised by the boorish multitude. Under the pretext of the duty of hospitality, the Ottomans, not content with the rough Stockerau wine, had raided the larder, exhausted the supplies of coffee and acquavite, overturned carpets, mattresses and cushions, and even broken the crockery in their debauches, taking advantage of Prince Eugene’s magnanimity and the pay of the imperial chamber.

  “And they stank too!” my wife said wearily. “In the Ottoman Empire no one undresses for bed, and because of the cold they’re wearing the same furs they’ve been travelling in for months. Remember that for the Turks there’s nothing more elegant than a fur coat and so they think they’re cutting a fine figure dressed like this.”

  In Constantinople, added Cloridia, there’s nothing they fear so much as the cold and so they do all they can to protect themselves from it even when for us Europeans the problem is to withstand the heat. Even in the warm rooms of the Savoy Palace the Ottomans remained wrapped up in their stinking furs and on the lookout for the slightest draught from windows and doors, which they then wanted to stop up with pieces of waxed paper. And so, while the Agha was being received with all honours by Prince Eugene, the Ottomans were bustling to and fro all over the place, making the palace servants complain; and the two groups, like hammer and tongs, had driven poor Cloridia mad, she being the only linguistic intermediary.

  The last straw had come when some Armenians in the retinue had decided to light a tandur to sit around, with the risk of starting a fire or seriously damaging the Most Serene Prince’s furnishings.

  “A tandur?”

  “A little stove full of embers and burning coal which you put under a table covered with woollen drapes that hang down to the ground. They all pull the cover over themselves, bury their hands and arms under it, and keep their bodies at a temperature that we would consider feverish. Of course this custom leads to a great many horrible accidents. And they insisted on lighting one in the palace, repeating that they’re muzafir and so on.”

  That was not the end of it, continued Cloridia. When the Great Court Marshal called to greet the Agha’s train, some of the Turks, wanting to show that they were perfectly familiar with the customs of us Giaours, did nothing but drink from the bottle, burping all the while, and sprawled all over the divans, believing that this was what we consider elegant behaviour. But when the Great Marshal, during the visit, spat into a spittoon on the carpet, the Ottomans gestured wildly and turned up their eyes to show how amazed they were at such barbarous conduct.

  “However,” I said, in an attempt to sweeten her temper, “this idea that guests are sent by God does honour to the Infidels.”

  “It’s all show, my dear: if you call on one of them and then, when you leave, fail to pay twenty times the value of what you’ve consumed, your host will wait for you to step outside, losing the sacred title of muzafir, and stone you,” she concluded.

  “My poor wife,” I sympathised, embracing her.

  “And I haven’t yet told you what happened when they heard my mother was Turkish: they pulled out a tambourine, a drum and a shepherd’s whistle, and beat time faster and faster, wanting me to dance that dance of theirs with wooden spoons, all a twisting of hips and bellies, with nothing graceful about it that I can see, while what’s indecent is all too clear,” added Cloridia, still overcome by disgust.

  “I hope at least they didn’t show you any disrespect.”

  “Don’t worry, despite all the wine I’d supplied them with, they haven’t forgotten what the Sultan will do to anyone who molests a woman. And in any case that dervish of theirs, Ciezeber, was ready to remind them of it,” smiled Cloridia, noticing a flicker of fear in my eyes.

  “I saw him in the procession. But what’s he doing in the Agha’s retinue?”

  “He’s his imam, his priest. I just wonder why he isn’t Turkish.”

  “I’ve read that he’s Indian.”

  “So they say. At any rate he’s not like the others, he behaves most worthily.”

  I asked her what the palace looked like inside, if she had attended the official talks, or if she had at least bumped into Prince Eugene. She told me that, as soon as he set foot inside the palace of the Most Serene Prince, the Agha was led by the master of the palace to the great staircase, and then upstairs. Here, surrounded by a great crowd of noblemen, people of rank and imperial functionaries, the Ottoman ambassador was received by two officials of the War Chancellery, who led him through the famous great hall, decorated throughout in frescoes, and then through the antechamber to the audience chamber. The Agha must have been greatly impressed by the great gathering of people, remarked Cloridia, as well as by the abundance of red velvets with ornamental gold writing that covered the walls and the armchairs. The spectacle of the great hall, of the luxurious wall-hangings and the eager bystanders reached its climax when the door of the audience hall was finally thrown open to reveal the severe face of His Imperial Eminence the President of the Aulic Council of War, His Highness the Most Serene Prince Eugene of Savoy.

  Eugene was dazzling in his gold-embroidered garments, his hat decorated with a cockade studded with diamonds of incalculable value, and also displaying the Golden Fleece and his sword. He sat awaiting the Agha in an armchair underneath a baldachin of red velvet, flanked by Count Herberstein, Vice-President of the Aulic Council of War and a secret referendary and surrounded by numerous generals. The room had now filled with the great throng of noblemen, courtiers and people of note, all craning their necks to catch every detail of the conference.

  “Eugene is far from good-looking,” added Cloridia. “He doesn’t have fine facial features, his body is too lean, but on the whole he inspired respect and deference.”

  As soon as he arrived before the Most Serene Prince, the Agha saluted in the Turkish manner, touching his turban three times, and then sat down on an armchair that had at once been placed opposite that of his host. The first thing the Ottoman did was to present his credentials. The Prince accepted them and immediately passed them to the secret referendary. After which a conversation was held, but neither of them had to make any concessions: the Agha expressed himself in Turkish, Eugene in Italian, which was not only the official court language but also the idiom of his family, he being a Savoy. Their words were made mutually intelligible by the Caesarean interpreter and the interpreter of the Sublime Porte; the former translated, the latter assured the Agha of the correctness of the translation. Only at the outset, Cloridia said, did the Agha formulate a sentence in Latin in honour of the Holy Roman Empire: “Soli soli soli ad pomum venimus aureum!”, which is to say, “We have come to the Golden Apple all alone.” He pronounced it carefully, reading from a document. This was interpreted not only literally – the Agha had indeed come with a retinue of just twenty people or so – but above all as a declaration of honest and peaceful intent. The Turk had come to Vienna, in short, with no ulterior motive. The paper from which the Agha had read was then personally delivered into the hands of the Most Serene Prince.

  During the interview, furthermore, Eugene was seen to play with a strange metal object about two inches across, which he passed incessantly from one hand to the other. At the end, after the ritual farewells, the Agha stood up, turned round and immediately headed towards the door. Only then did Eugene, who had remained seated the whole time, stand up, remove his hat by way of salutation and then, taking care to turn his back on the Agha to show his superiority, look towards his generals. The Turk
was led away by the same officers of the city guard who had conducted him thither. Reseated in his carriage between two lines of onlookers, he was taken back to his lodgings, but only to satisfy the curiosity of the bystanders, since the Agha and his retinue in fact returned that very evening to the palace of the Most Serene Prince, where they were going to stay for three days, to enjoy the most lavish and splendid treatment that the duty of hospitality imposed.

  “So the Turks are staying for three days as Eugene’s guests.”

  “That’s what the Prince has decided, to pay them greater honour.”

  “And on Monday they’ll be returning to their lodgings, at the inn of the Golden Lamb,” I deduced.

  “Haven’t you heard the latest? The embassy isn’t putting up at the Golden Lamb, as the Turkish delegations have done for a hundred years now.”

  “Really?” I said in surprise.

  “It’s still on the Leopoldine Island, in the Jewish quarter, but at the home of Widow Leixenring, which has eleven rooms, a good kitchen and a stable with a barn.”

  “A private house? But why?”

  “It’s a mystery. All I know is that the rent is paid, as always, by the imperial chamber. At the Golden Lamb they’re offended, particularly because there was room for them there. And all the onlookers who were waiting for the procession outside the inn were left looking silly. The strangest thing is that Widow Leixenring’s small palace is guarded like a fortress: they told me you can’t get a peek at the windows even from a distance.”

  “So it’s true that there’s something serious behind this embassy. Have they come out and declared their reason for coming here?” I said, beginning to worry that we might have come all the way to Vienna to escape from Roman poverty, but at the risk of falling victims to a new Turkish siege.

  With the lightning swiftness of fear, I was already seeing myself flayed alive, my wife deported (lucky her, speaking the language of those Infidels) and my son brought up in the barracks of Constantinople to become a janissary – or, worse, made a eunuch for the Sultan’s harem. Meanwhile Cloridia had moved to the door that communicated with the next room. She was discreetly eavesdropping on the dialogue taking place at that moment between our little boy and Ollendorf: