Veritas (Atto Melani)

by Monaldi, Rita

  When I had told our few acquaintances that we were about to leave for Vienna, they had looked at me as if I were mad: you’re going off to the cold, among those doltish sausage-eaters! After being there just a few months, I had a strong suspicion – or rather, the certainty – that it was the Romans who were the dolts.

  “Signor Master,” put in Simonis, stemming the stream of self-satisfaction that was swelling in my breast, “I’ve let my student friends know about your interest in the Golden Apple. I took the liberty of arranging a brief meeting here, so you can tell them what you need and instruct them personally. Dànilo Danilovitsch, however, sent me a note a short while ago asking to meet us at midnight: maybe he already has some information.”

  Cloridia came into the eating house on her way back from work at Prince Eugene’s palace. It was clear from the expression on her face that she was deeply upset.

  “Oh, my husband, if you only knew what happened to me today,” she began, taking a seat and draining my glass of wine in a few gulps.

  Then she smiled at our son, who was gazing across the table at her with a worried expression. She leaned over to give him a kiss and fondled his hair. Then she asked Simonis, who had already eaten, to take the boy back to the convent in time for his German lesson; she and I would join them shortly.

  Cloridia wanted to report some grave circumstance to me, but was afraid of our son’s reaction. When Simonis and the boy had gone, my wife dropped her motherly smile and pressed my hand between hers, which were damp with cold sweat.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked in alarm.

  “Thank God that Monday is my last day working at the palace; the Agha will be received by Prince Eugene again, but then he’ll go back to his lodgings on the Leopoldine Island. On Tuesday Eugene will leave for The Hague. The end of the job will mean the end of my pay, but no matter. If what happened to me today were to happen again, it could all get very nasty.”

  “Get very nasty? Why, what happened?”

  “That foul creature . . . the one who promised to get the head for the dervish.”

  “Yes?”

  “He was at the palace again. I met him twice. The first time was on the servants’ staircase, with his Turkish companions. If you could have seen how he eyed me! I saw his face at last, if you can call that bundle of leathery scraps a face. He stared at me with bloodshot eyes, and his grey, suspicious pupils bored into me like grappling hooks. I walked away quickly, but I had the impression his eyes were still on me. I’m afraid he guessed something; let’s hope that later, when I saw him the second time, he didn’t realise I was spying on him.”

  “And why did you have to spy on him?” I exclaimed, horrified at the thought that my sweet spouse might end up a target for a head-hunter.

  After her first encounter with the hooded man, Cloridia had been acting as interpreter between the Agha’s major-domo and one of the palace cooks, when out of the corner of her eye she had seen this monstrous individual again, this time walking up the palace’s main staircase. He had a furtive air and would have got by unobserved if Cloridia had not happened to open the door of the room she was in just as this creature was going up to the second floor. Intrigued by his cautiousness, Cloridia had slipped away from her interlocutors and silently followed him.

  “I was scared, but it was worth taking the risk. Maybe the hooded man was going to have another talk with Ciezeber,” explained my courageous little wife.

  But the unknown figure continued to wander around the palace in perfect solitude. He must have been well informed: it was the hour when the staff was usually concentrated downstairs, between the kitchens and the service rooms, and there was no one about in the corridors on the first and second floor. After quickly exploring some rooms on the second floor, the furtive figure went back to the lower floor.

  Here, explained Cloridia, in a room that looked onto Porta Coeli Street, some large bookcases were being set up: “They say that Eugene intends to fill them with a great collection of books, and to this end he’s already planning to buy a great number of printed volumes and manuscripts as quickly as possible.”

  As the carpenters had not yet finished their work on the bookcases, some wooden chests had been temporarily placed on the empty shelves, whose contents were unknown to everyone, except Eugene and his collaborators. The hooded individual, acting with feline swiftness, entered this future library unchallenged.

  Not being able to enter herself (and above all not wanting to do so), Cloridia tried to work out what he was up to by putting her ear to the door. First she heard a scuffling noise on the left-hand side of the room. Then a tinkling of coins, as if someone were picking up handfuls of them and dropping them into a bag. Finally, footsteps approaching the door.

  The individual then emerged from Prince Eugene’s future library and slipped away along the corridors of the palace, probably planning to leave by some service door.

  As soon as she was left alone, Cloridia entered the library. On the shelves were several large wooden chests of various shapes and sizes. The individual could have searched any number of them but only one drew her attention: its lid was not properly closed, perhaps because it was defective, so that the light-coloured wood of its interior was visible.

  Raising the lid, Cloridia found a dusty jumble of objects: heaps of old gazettes, military maps and drafts of letters. Apparently all things of little value, which Eugene must have put there temporarily, until the library should be ready. Although she only had a few moments to spare, Cloridia groped around the bottom of the chest and her fingers felt something cold and metallic, which emitted the same tinkling sound she had heard a few moments earlier. She peered more closely into the chest and made out a small heap of strange metal fragments of irregular shape.

  “I took one of them, have a look.”

  My sweet spouse had hesitated a while before pocketing the strange object, which after all did belong to the Most Serene Prince, but since there were a great many of these strange metal fragments bearing effigies of coins, it would not make much difference to take just one of them, for the moment at least. There would be plenty of opportunities for her to replace it. In the meantime we could work out just what the devil it was, and why this mysterious individual had apparently carried off a heap of them.

  I turned it round in my hands.

  “It’s blackened with age, but it’s undoubtedly silver,” I remarked.

  “Exactly. And if you look at the top edge, it looks like the rim of a plate. A silver plate.”

  In the middle was a round engraving, on which a nobleman’s coat of arms could be discerned: a lion’s foot on a striped field. Above it, next to a raised border, were the words:

  LANDAV 1702 IIII LIVRE

  At the four corners the lilies of France had been stamped.

  “What on earth is it?” I asked, bewildered.

  “Ah, don’t ask me.”

  “It looks very much like a coin; it says ‘4 livre’, and livres are French liras. And at the corners are the lilies of France. But it looks as if it hasn’t been coined at a mint, but with some rudimentary contraption.”

  “Perhaps it’s a forged French coin,” said Cloridia.

  “It wouldn’t fool many French people, I’d say.”

  “Landau is the German city where Emperor Joseph won two battles, if I’m not mistaken,” said Cloridia.

  “Exactly, in 1702 and 1704. But this is definitely not a commemorative medal. Firstly, because medals of that sort don’t look as shoddy as this. Secondly, because it has lilies, a French symbol, not an imperial one.”

  At that moment we had to break off; Simonis was back. We showed him the strange coin, asking him if he could throw any light on it.

  “Never seen anything like it. I know that Landau is an important German fortress in the region of the Palatinate, and our beloved Emperor besieged it and captured it twice. But what this piece of silver is, I’ve no idea.”

  The discussion was very short, because at that poin
t Simonis’s student friends turned up. There was the whole group: “Baron” Koloman Szupán from Varasdin, the Romanian “Prince” Dragomir Populescu, the Pole Jan Janitzki Count Opalinski, the Bulgarian Hristo Hristov Hadji-Tanjov, and, to complete the set, the Beano – or rather the Pennal – of the Deposition, the Bohemian Penicek, who limped over to stand servilely behind his Barber, Simonis.

  “Thank you for coming to lend us a hand,” I began, inviting them with a gesture to sit at our table.

  “Always at your service,” Hristo Hristov Hadji-Tanjov, the Bulgarian, said at once.

  “Don’t be fooled by appearances, Signor Master,” said the Greek, as if to reassure me, “you can rely on us. Right, Hristo?”

  “Of course, dear Simonis,” said Hristo, drawing breath as if in preparation for a long speech. “Students are the noblest stock of the human race! We are the most valuable treasure, the quintessence of mankind, gold among the baser metals, the gem set in the gold. In the world we are like the wise man among idiots, like man among the unreasoning animals. We are the ornament of the city, the laurel crown of parents, blessed children of the gods, favoured scions of wisdom, pillars of knowledge and of the land!”

  This aroused the first of a long series of clappings and whistles of approval.

  “It’s only that invert Populescu who has no pillar,” remarked Koloman Szupán, provoking a general outburst of laughter.

  “And you have two, one outside and one inside,” retorted Populescu.

  “No smuttiness, you idiots, there’s a lady here,” warned Simonis, politely gesturing towards Cloridia, who actually seemed highly amused by these fatuous jokes.

  Hristo continued his harangue.

  “And what else? We are princes and stars of the world, and all eyebrows should now arch in amazement. I have no doubt that many of our enemies will turn up their noses, but anatomists report that the limbs, veins, flesh and bowels are the same in all men: true nobility resides in the brain and not in so-called noble blood. In ancient Egypt only scholars had a noble title. The Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius, highly cultured and of temperate habits, preferred to give his own daughter in marriage to an impoverished philosopher rather than to a rich imbecile.”

  “He could have given her to Koloman, who’s poor but also an imbecile,” joked Populescu.

  “Or to you, a pederast and an imbecile,” replied Koloman.

  “Don’t get worked up, Dragomir, keep calm,” grunted Populescu to himself.

  “Silence, my good friends, let me finish! Students are to the city what the thumb is to the hand. We should be called angels for our friendliness, since being free and easy is an angelic virtue. Where do civility and humanity flourish, if not in universities? There, even more than in courts, since courtesy in the ignorant is spiced with manifest hypocrisy. We students are the genuine carbuncle, which outshines all other gems; we are the emerald and sapphire of the city, which, with their vivid pleasing colours stimulate the eyes of all spectators: how splendid it is to see these sons of the Muses stroll up and down the city, a feast for the eyes, unlike the vulgar, puffed-up footsloggers! And we will not mention all the indescribable adversities a poor student has to face from early youth to the end of his life! Sources of fear, exhaustion and headaches . . . I will just say that students are the most precious of noblemen, a crown contextam splendidissimis virtutibus, gemmis longe pretiosioribus!”

  “Come off the high horse!” Opalinski retorted.

  “I said we are a crown enriched with the most splendid virtues, and with gems that are even more precious! Does that suit you, ignorant dolt?” Hristo snapped back. “And that’s all I have to say.”

  The Bulgarian’s disquisition and his final quip aroused a great burst of applause from his companions, in which Cloridia and I politely joined. “Let’s hope for the best!” I thought to myself, eyeing the troop of scholarly roisterers.

  I gave a brief account of the mysterious sentence “Soli soli soli ad pomum venimus aureum!” which the Agha had pronounced at the audience with Prince Eugene, and I promised them a suitable reward in money. However, on the advice of Simonis, to whom I had recounted everything, I omitted the fact that Cloridia had heard the Agha’s dervish plotting to cut someone’s head off. According to my assistant, if I told them that detail, all the money in the world would not suffice to keep them there: they would all take to their heels at once. I also left out the fact that the Most Serene Prince had kept the paper containing this sentence, given to him by the Agha, in his personal diary, no less; I was ashamed to reveal that Cloridia had pried into his private papers. Prince Eugene, to tell the truth, deserved much worse, given the treachery revealed in the letter that Abbot Melani had shown me. But I certainly could not spill such a secret to a whole horde of students.

  These high-spirited students all came from the lands east of Vienna. They had suffered under the Ottoman yoke and had a great hatred for that people.

  “Turks: beasts dressed up as men,” whispered Populescu with disgust.

  “Pennal! Do your Turk’s face,” ordered Simonis.

  Poor Penicek mimed an expression that was idiotic and ferocious at the same time.

  “No, Pennal, that’s Jan Janitzki, Count Opalinski,” sniggered Hristo, miming grotesque haughtiness.

  “Go and get buggered by the Turks, Hristo Hadji-Tanjov Junior,” Opalinski defended himself, “seeing that they adore eunuchs like you.”

  The jeering and scoffing against the Sublime Porte and the coarse civility of its subjects went on for a while. I saw Cloridia’s face darken. Simonis’s companions did not know that my gentle consort had a Turkish mother. When she returned from her job at Eugene’s palace, she herself had described the baseness of the Ottomans. But no one likes to hear their own folk scorned by others.

  To distract them, I told them about the mysterious hooded creature in filthy rags who had stared so threateningly at Cloridia.

  “He must have been Turkish too,” sneered Dragomir. “Their women dress so dreadfully that your radiant beauty, Monna Cloridia, must have literally blinded him.”

  I saw my wife cheer up a little at this unexpected compliment.

  “But you hear so much about their harems . . .” protested lame Penicek, who had probably approached very few women in his life.

  “Right, because you get taken in by their boasting; the Ottomans are great at inventing cock-and-bull stories about the supposed wonders of their country. But have you ever entered a harem?”

  “Well, not yet . . .”

  “It’s nothing more than a filthy den, all darkness and confusion, pestilential and full of smoke. Imagine black, peeling walls, wooden ceilings with great cracks, everything covered in dust and cobwebs, greasy torn sofas, tattered curtains, candle grease and oil stains everywhere.”

  Turkish women, went on Dragomir, have no mirrors, which are rare in Turkey, so they put on all sorts of frills at random, unaware how ridiculous they look. They make excessive use of coloured powders, for example putting blue intended for the eyes under their nose as well. They help each other to put their make-up on and, since they’re rivals, they give each other the worst possible advice. They dye their eyebrows with so much black that they paint huge arches on their forehead from the bridge of their nose right up to their temples, or, even worse, draw a single long line right across their forehead.

  “The effect of all this make-up, combined with their idleness and filth, makes Turkish women quite revolting,” remarked Populescu with a grimace.

  “Just when did you become an expert on Ottoman harems?” said Koloman Szupán in surprise.

  As if that were not enough, continued Populescu without answering him, every woman’s face is made up in such a complicated way that it is considered a work of art that is too difficult to wash off and redo every morning. The same for their hands and feet, painted in shades of orange. So they never wash, fearing that water will cancel the rouge. What makes the harems even dirtier are the numerous children and the maidservan
ts, who unfortunately are often negresses, who live there with them.

  “The negresses rest on the same divans and armchairs as their mistresses, with their feet on the same carpets and their backs resting against the same wall-hangings! Ugh!” exclaimed Dragomir.

  “Do you find negresses so disgusting?” sneered Koloman. “I’m amazed you have such a delicate palate . . .”

  “I’m not like you, who would go with a monkey,” retorted the Romanian.

  Populescu added that as glass is still a novelty in Asia, most windows are closed with oiled paper, and where paper is hard to get they solve things by doing away with windows altogether and make do with the light that comes down the chimney, more than enough for smoking, drinking and beating rebellious children, the only pastimes Turkish women engage in during the day.

  “The harems, in short, are hermetically sealed, artificial caverns, heated by stifling cast-iron stoves, and full of unkempt women and badly behaved children!” concluded Populescu with a coarse laugh, clutching his neck with both hands to mimic the sense of suffocation.

  “There’s nothing to laugh about,” put in Cloridia unexpectedly, having listened in silence to Populescu’s whole description. “There’s no air in the harems, it’s true, but the poor women don’t realise it, and actually stay for hours in front of the fire: the poor things are locked up the whole day, hardly ever moving, and they always feel cold. My mother was Turkish,” she revealed calmly.

  This unexpected information cast a sudden damper on the spirits of the jovial crowd.

  “Anyway, you have all my compassion: I didn’t know you were a eunuch,” added my wife, turning a broad smile on Dragomir. “You know, don’t you, that entrance to the harems is strictly forbidden to all men, at least those worthy of the name . . .”

  At this point, she got up and left, leaving them all crestfallen.

  When the meeting was over, I rejoined Cloridia and our son at the convent, where I subjected myself to the torture of the German lesson, which had been brought forward since the next day was Sunday. My wife and I did not do too badly, although our minds were on quite other matters. That evening the subject we were dealing with was travel.