Veritas (Atto Melani)

by Monaldi, Rita

  Joseph was religious, of course, but he detested the conniving Jesuits. He swore to himself that as soon as he ascended to the throne there would be no more room for them at court.

  Out of laziness and in order not to lose his own flatterers, his father had for decades kept a grossly swollen court and government, full of useless, time-wasting ministers, all overpaid and litigious. Joseph could not wait to throw them all out and replace them with people he trusted – young men, efficient and competent. The ministers knew it (Joseph had even founded a kind of parallel palace, the so-called Young Court) and detested him.

  His father’s continual rebukes, upbraiding him for his amorous excesses, only worsened matters. In the end, his father banned him from participating in affairs of state. He did not understand and could not tolerate this son who was so different from him, and so similar to his great enemy, the Sun King: splendid, victorious and concupiscent. Leopold preferred mediocrities to wits, old people to young, bunglers to specialists, cowards to heroes. How could he ever have loved his own firstborn child?

  And in fact he loved another: Charles, the younger son.

  Charles was the perfect incarnation of all the mediocre qualities that put Leopold at his ease. Joseph was impetuous; Charles, educated by the Jesuits, was measured. The elder was attractive, the younger barely passable. Joseph gave his opinion at once, and was garrulous; Charles hesitated, and so kept quiet. Joseph laughed, and made others laugh. Charles was afraid of being laughed at.

  They had both come from the same womb, but one was born to rule and the other to be part of the flock. Charles could perhaps have lived with his brother without too much antagonism, but the seed of rivalry was sown between them by their own father, who never concealed the fact that he preferred the younger. On his deathbed, at the very last moment, he hastened to insert a few clauses favouring Charles to the detriment of Joseph, just when the latter was excluded from politics.

  And so Joseph felt mortally offended, and Charles hated him because he believed that he deserved the throne: did not his father say he was the better man? The younger son, a gloomy, rancorous spirit, had not been brought up as a younger son, but as a future king – of Spain. And now he was unable to resign himself to the fate of being left without a crown on his head.

  The two brothers had not met for eight years: Charles had left for Spain in 1703 to compete for the crown against Philip of Anjou, grandson of the Most Christian King, and he had never been back to Vienna. But there had been a thousand occasions of friction: first the question of dominion over Milan and Finale, then the administration of Lombardy, and finally Naples, where they incited their protégés against one another. Even though Austria and Spain were separated by entire nations, armies, seas and mountains, Charles thought of his brother with envy every day, every hour, every single moment. A fine legacy Joseph had been bequeathed by his father, I thought: the enmity of his ministers, the rivalry of his brother and that strange juvenile ingenuousness, which could only expose him to danger: for example, the machinations of Abbot Melani.

  Cogitating in this fashion, I got up from bed and tiptoed towards my papers: all possibility of sleep having evaporated, I was curious to continue reading those papers that I had collected on my beloved Caesar, and which I had promised myself I would finish reading as soon as possible.

  I did not only want to find the answers to my questions about the Place with No Name; now that Abott Melani intended with my help to bring Joseph I the proof of Eugene’s treachery, my Sovereign filled my thoughts more than ever.

  I began to leaf through the writings in German. I came across an account of his wedding:

  Pomposer Einzug Ihro Königl. Mayest. Josephi Römisch: und Hungarischen Königs / etc. Mit Ihro Mayestätt Wilhelmina Amalia, Röm. Könign / Als Königl. Gespons / etc. So Den. 24. Februarij 1699. zwischen 4. und 5. Uhr.

  As I ran my eyes over this description, overladen – as was always the case with Teutonic gazetteers – with boring details, I remembered other gossip I had heard around town. Joseph was so sweetly ingenuous in his behaviour, so youthfully spontaneous, so nobly candid! It would be all too easy for a sly trickster like Abbot Melani to gain the young Sovereign’s trust, expressing himself in perfect Italian and concealing the fact that he had been sent by the French. And what if Atto were in league with the Turks?

  Only after Joseph had taken a wife (he had married the German princess Wilhelmina Amalia of Brunswick-Luneburg) had Leopold allowed him to concern himself with affairs of state again. But by then the young man had earned the hatred of his father’s ministers.

  On 5th May 1705, after a half century of rule, Leopold finally died. The position of the Empire was extremely grave: war was raging against France and its allies, entire armies were ready to invade Austrian soil. Taxes were collected haphazardly, the country’s finances were in a disastrous state, the imperial chamber on the verge of bankruptcy. The army was disorganised, the militias badly armed and the men undisciplined. There was a risk of losing all control over the imperial territories (rebellious Hungary, the troubled regions of Italy, never-peaceful Bohemia).

  During Leopold’s funeral a Jesuit, the court preacher Wiedemann, dared to admonish Joseph: only a prince educated by the Jesuits, he thundered, could hope to reign happily and successfully.

  Joseph refused to be intimidated; he sent the Jesuit into exile and confiscated the two thousand printed copies of his speech. Then he warned the other Jesuits who resided at court: from that moment they would not be allowed to interfere in political matters. After this he sacked, one after the other, the incompetent ministers and functionaries his father had cherished, and replaced them with new men, fresh and eager to serve him. The only one who was not dismissed was Eugene of Savoy. The new ministers chosen by Joseph were not all little lambs. There were plenty of quarrels and rivalries, but thanks to his charisma he knew how to treat them and how to settle disagreements.

  The young Caesar set about the long, arduous work of economic recovery, without losing sight of what could improve, even minimally, the daily life of his subjects, starting with Vienna. And so, among the many initiatives, he ordered the city’s streets to be cleaned regularly; he organised the drainage system; he made it obligatory to register deaths promptly in the suburbs as well as in the centre; and he had a theatre built for the common people near the Carinthian Gate, where they put on popular comedies of the old Viennese tradition, which derived from the even older Italian Commedia dell’Arte. Finally, from the city’s arsenal he picked out 180 Turkish cannons, which had been left as spoils of war after the siege of 1683; a foundry was to transform them into the glorious new bell of the Cathedral of St Stephen, the largest and most beautiful that had ever been seen in the capital and Caesarean residence, Vienna. This work was to be presented and inaugurated on this coming 26th July 1711, the propitious thirty-third birthday of Joseph the Victorious.

  At this point I came across a “Prognostico cabalistico Prototipo”, a horoscope of Joseph: Horoscopus gloriae, felicitatis, et perennitatis, Joseph Primi, Romanorum Imperatoris, semper Augusti, Germaniae, Bohemiae, Hungariae, &c.&c. Regis.

  It had been compiled with arithmetical calculations on the basis of the Holy Scriptures by Doctor saluberrimae Medicinae of Padua Josepho Wallich, olim Hertzwallich, in 1709. The prophecy, written in Hebrew, Latin, Greek, Chaldean, Syrian, Cabalistic, Rabbinic, Jerusalemite, Polish, Italian, French and German, was crystal-clear:

  Joseph First, Emperor of the Romans, forever August, Father engendering Heirs for the Peace of Kingdoms and Provinces, and all his days will be victorious.

  The prophecy had proved true. In that year 1711, after six years of rule, the anathema of the Jesuit Wiedemann seemed to have been definitively disproved. The financial and military situation had greatly improved. The people loved and feared Joseph, as he had wished: Timore et Amore. Now that his father’s memory had been effaced, he felt in charge of his kingdom. But under the surface of this new state of affairs, the old mi
nisters nurtured their undiminished hatred, longing for revenge. And no less poisonous, in distant Spain his brother Charles’s rivalry throbbed like a living thing: a vicious force lying coiled under the unextinguished ashes of hatred.

  Here it was again, I thought – hatred; the same terrible passion that had marked the fate of the Place with No Name and its builder, and which had frightened the predecessors of the Most August Emperor. Now, perhaps, I had the answer to my questions: Joseph the Victorious was used to overcoming obstacles. He claimed for himself alone the right to inspire fear: Timore et Amore . . .

  However, at the end of the previous year, something else had come along to arouse apprehension among his subjects. The almanac of the Englischer Wahrsager, or the English fortune-teller, in its forecasts for the year 1711, had declared:

  Man hört von ungemeiner Plage:

  am Käyserhof grosse Klage.

  Käyserlicher schneller Fall

  Gibt weit und breit den Widerschall;

  Viel Böses wird dadurch gestifft,

  So einen felicem Staat betrifft.

  The dire prophecy had spread around the city with the speed of lightning. I had heard it from my fellow countrymen as soon as I arrived in Vienna, and I had rushed to get hold of the Italian version:

  A canker now appears:

  The palace floods with tears.

  The swift imperial fall

  With thunder does all ears appal;

  A great Evil is perpetrated,

  A felix State is lacerated.

  The English fortune-teller’s almanac spoke of a “swift imperial fall” that would cause floods of tears and tear asunder a prosperous nation: how could one not fear for the House of Habsburg and for felix Austria, as the land that hosted me was known? Luckily there came the Warschauer Calender, the Almanac of Warsaw, to counter the pessimism of the English fortune-teller, calming the fears of the people with its prophecy written in clear letters:

  Oesterreich

  Wird die Letzte auf der Welt seyn

  This too was quickly published in Italian:

  Austria

  Will be the last in the world

  People’s fears were assuaged and soon forgotten. But since the beginning of April a strange atmospheric phenomenon had been noted: on certain days the sun rose not with its usual golden hue but tinged blood-red. I myself, on my way to work, had often noticed this curious occurrence with amazement. Some attributed it to natural causes, but the Viennese shook their heads, muttering that it was an ill omen: innocent blood would be spilled in the Archduchy of Austria.

  As if that were not enough, another bizarre and grim episode confirmed people’s fears.

  The Emperor was visiting the church where his beloved friend the Prince of Lamberg was buried – the inseparable companion of his hunting adventures and procurer of young lovers. Joseph I asked a minister where Lamberg’s tombstone was. The minister answered: “Your Majesty, right beneath your feet.” This was interpreted by the young Emperor as an omen that he himself would soon join his friend.

  This lugubrious episode was soon on everyone’s lips in Vienna, and some compared it to the Presagium Josephi propriae mortis, the biblical episode in Genesis, where the patriarch Joseph foresees his own death and the fate of his loved ones, telling his brethren: “And Joseph said unto his brethren, I die: and God will surely visit you, and bring you out of this land unto the land which he sware to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.” And people remembered too how Jacob appeared in another portent, because everyone knew that Emperor Ferdinand I had foreseen in a dream that he would die on St Jacob’s day, and so a doleful chain of whispers passed around the city, full of references to famous presages of death taken from the Bible, from history or just from legends.

  I went back to bed, thinking over the words pronounced that evening by the Chormaisterin. Foresight, she said, is the divine gift of the wise.

  23 of the clock, when Vienna sleeps (while in Rome the foulest trades begin their traffickings).

  I had finally dropped off when there came a discreet knock at the door.

  “Who’s there? Who wants me?” I exclaimed in German, jumping out of bed. I had been dreaming that I was having a lesson with Ollendorf and in the excitement of this unexpected awakening I repeated phrases that I had just learned, parrot-fashion, from him.

  “Signor Master, it’s me.”

  It was Simonis: I had completely forgotten the appointment we had at midnight with Dànilo Danilovitsch, his Pontevedrin companion.

  Just a few minutes later we were in the street. My sense of the cold was exacerbated by sleepiness, and I would have gladly stayed in my soft bed. Luckily, to alleviate the torture of this nocturnal excursion there was a carriage waiting for us. It was actually an uncovered wagon – or, to put it simply, a cart. A modest vehicle, one of those used to transport people to places close to the city. On the box was Penicek, whom I greeted with amused surprise. When we were aboard, Simonis explained this unexpected presence.

  “Our Penicek drives a wagon to maintain himself as a student.”

  He reminded me that the Bettelstudenten, on account of the Rector’s edict, risked being locked up in the academic prison if they were found begging without a monthly permit, which was extremely difficult to obtain. He added that the cart we were in was an example of an old Fliegenschutz – an uncovered vehicle with just a cloth by way of protection against insects.

  “And is Penicek employed by someone with a licence, as you are?”

  “Well, you see, Signor Master, it’s not always possible to find a regular job like the one you were so kind as to give me. Let’s say that Penicek is . . . outside the rules.”

  “What do you mean? Doesn’t he have a permit to transport people or goods?” I asked, vaguely alarmed.

  “Well, officially, no.”

  “He’s unauthorised? How can he be? I know that they’re very strict in checking up on travellers. They inspect all coach drivers and I know that they have to file information on everyone they transport!”

  “It’s true, I’m afraid,” admitted the Pennal. “My trade is full of spies, but also of inspectors who are, let’s say . . . tolerant!” He turned and winked in a knowing fashion.

  “Penicek,” added Simonis, “is, so to speak, tolerated by the authorities, as happens with others. You just have to make a little ‘offering’ . . . and this way of working gives you a number of advantages. You explain, Pennal.”

  “Well, yes, Signor Master,” Penicek said, as the old cart went creaking through the deserted city-streets. “First of all, as I’m not included among the Kleinfuhrleute, the small-scale transporters of people, nor among the Großfuhrwerker, who do the heavy transporting, I don’t pay taxes, and they don’t confiscate my cart and horses for court journeys, or for carrying cannons when war breaks out. I’m not obliged to help get rid of rubbish or, in the winter, snow. If I don’t want to, I don’t even have to get dirty carrying coal, or breaking my back between Vienna and Linz. I just do trips between the city and the suburbs, and that’s more than enough for me. The heavy transporters have for some time now been obliged to own at least eight horses and four carts. Last year hirers of horses joined in the same confraternity as the small coach drivers. And so now they have to decide which rules to abide by. Everything’s getting so complicated – I have no wish to be involved! I’ve got my little animal, my four wheels and my shed in the Rossau area. It cost me just two soldi, and when I want to quit I can sell the whole lot. Of course, I have to be careful: if I have an accident, and they find out that I was drunk, I’d not only be fined heavily but I’d get into a lot of trouble. The important thing is to be very careful all the time.”

  Despite his subdued air, I thought, this Penicek clearly knew his way around.

  “Simonis,” I asked my assistant, “you came into my service to earn some money, while Penicek is a coach driver. But I imagine Danilovitsch, as a count, is kept in his studies by his family.”

  “Yes, he’s
a count, he belongs to one of the most illustrious families of Pontevedro – which, unfortunately, is a little state that’s totally bankrupt. To restore his nation’s credit Dànilo did try his luck with some rich widows in these parts, but it all came to nothing.”

  “Too bigoted!” Penicek shook his head, holding the horse’s reins. “He should have tried in Paris: plenty of merry widows there . . .”

  “Unfortunately with this wretched war he couldn’t,” the Greek explained. “And so now to make ends meet he’s forced to carry out a rather dishonourable trade: spying.”

  I gave a start: after Atto Melani, another secret agent?

  “Not in the sense you fear,” Simonis added at once. “He’s a legal spy, an authorised one.”

  He explained that the previous Emperor, Leopold, Joseph I’s father, had been a pious, modest, upright and moderate spirit. He had shunned all excesses and cultivated prudence, patience and parsimony. And since Austria, as I well knew, was kissed by the Goddess of Opulence and even the lowest subjects could live like kings, in order that noblemen should not be confused with labourers, princes with woodcutters, ladies with servant girls, Leopold had divided society into five classes: he set down rules on the luxuries that each class was permitted to have. Only noblemen and cavaliers were exempt from these rules, holding special privileges.