Veritas (Atto Melani)

by Monaldi, Rita

  The battle began, even harder and bloodier than the two that had preceded it. This time winter came early, they fought in the cold, in the rain, in the mud. On 27th September the French tried to effect a sortie, but unsuccessfully. Four days later the imperial heavy artillery (carried to the front through the mire with great difficulty and heavy losses of men) began to pound Landau. A hail of fire was unleashed upon the fortress, but the French held out tenaciously. Eugene of Savoy was furious: Landau should have been taken in five or six weeks, he wrote to Vienna from his tent: instead things were dragging out while the French went on the rampage in Italy.

  “But maybe there was a more serious reason for his agitation,” said Atto. “He and Marlborough had been pushed to one side by Joseph. They had lost their place of honour.”

  In the end the bloodshed was horrific, the fortress of Landau only yielded after nine weeks of relentless cannon fire and assaults. The commander Laubanie lost his sight in both eyes, and would die two years later from his wounds, which never healed. The French garrison surrendered, once again throwing their arms down at Joseph’s feet. The young heir to the throne had shown that he could retrieve the situation with his presence alone. His first victory had made him a young hero, with his second he had become a model for all soldiers. Winter had come, the military campaign of 1704 had concluded with an important victory, the English and Dutch allies could go back home satisfied. In Vienna the victory bells rang out again, and Eugene nursed dark, malicious thoughts of resentment. And suppose Joseph were to become the new rising star of the war, effacing the legend of Prince Eugene, which had been spreading throughout Europe? But the year after the recapture of Landau, things changed. Emperor Leopold, Joseph’s father, died. It was not wise for the new young sovereign to leave Vienna and to set out for war, since he did not yet have any male heirs (his little son, Leopold Joseph, had died in infancy). Eugene remained commander-in-chief of military operations, and the fate of the war lay in his hands for the next three years.

  The silent contest between the Sovereign and his general started up again in 1708. The Queen of England asked that Eugene should be sent to fight in Spain, where Charles, Joseph’s brother, was unable to get the better of the French armies of Philip of Anjou, the grandson of the Most Christian King who had ascended to the Spanish throne. The imperial troops in the Iberian peninsula were captained by Guido Starhemberg, on whom fortune did not always smile. Eugene chafed at the bit: he knew he was superior to Starhemberg, and in his place could win great glory and honour.

  There began a feverish back-and-forth with the English allies, but the imperial forces were adamant: the Prince of Savoy could not travel so far from Austria. Eugene had to put up with it, and hold his peace.

  The silent war was repeated in autumn 1710. Once again there was a plan to send Eugene to Spain, but His Caesarean Majesty was still opposed to it, and it came to nothing. Eugene gave vent to his feelings among his friends, using allusive, indirect words. “Could it be that Stahremberg has not done all that was expected of him?” he asked ironically. And he revealed that with his own eyes he had seen Joseph arrive at the conference of ministers holding the paper nominating Eugene as commander in Spain, but he had rejected the idea without even referring to it. Joseph was not wrong: he was thinking of the safety of the Empire.

  Twice with Landau, and twice again with Spain, Joseph had trampled over the pride and ambition of Eugene of Savoy. The loser had kept silent and obeyed; he had no choice in the matter. But what would happen if the secret competition, evident only to the two rivals, continued always to the advantage of one of them? And what connection was there with the strange coin that Cloridia had come across so fortuitously in Eugene’s palace?

  “That coin is the symbol of Landau,” concluded Atto, “the first serious defeat that Eugene had to swallow. And it shows that the Prince of Savoy has not forgotten the affronts that Joseph has inflicted on him. Not a single one.”

  Caressing the coin in his fingers, Atto gloated. Once Joseph read Eugene’s treacherous letter, the path to peace would be very short.

  “If only we could get close to that little Pálffy woman,” he grumbled impatiently, while he was seized by a great yawn, urging him to slip once again under the blankets, into the arms of Morpheus.

  Back home, on the other side of the convent, Cloridia came to greet me.

  “My love,” she said, stretching her arms out to me, “it’s been a terrible day.”

  “You don’t know the whole of it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I told her what had happened. At the end we stood there, both trembling, appalled at the violence that had broken out around us. I told her about the coin of Landau as well.

  “I’ve a story connected with that.”

  “Really?”

  “You’re not the only one who’s had a bad experience. Today at Prince Eugene’s palace I was followed.”

  “Followed? Who by?”

  “By that monstrous fellow who stole the coins of Landau. I kept coming across him. I would go to the kitchen and see him following me at a distance. I would go back to the first floor, and he would turn up from some nook or corner. I would go away and then find him just a few minutes later behind me. I’d go here, and so would he; I’d go there, and so would he. It was enough to drive me mad. If you could only have seen him . . . The last time he even walked in a half-circle around me, and then showed me his sharp brown teeth in a frightful smile. Ugh! – like a hellish dream. At that point I ran back home.”

  “But who is he, what does he want?” I exclaimed in agitation. “He promises the dervish a decapitated head, then he stares at you, follows you around, steals Prince Eugene’s coins . . . What’s the link between all these things?”

  “All I know is that a man with a face like that is capable of anything. Including what they did to Hadji-Tanjov.”

  But we still had not heard the most serious news of the day.

  To cheer ourlseves up we went into the cloisters to see our little boy playing there, and then we went into the convent church. Unnerved by all the evil that had been unleashed around us we felt the need to collect our thoughts in prayer before the Most High and to plead for grace and protection.

  As soon as we stepped within its cold, incense-laden half-light, we found the church full of the nuns of Porta Coeli. They had all gathered together to recite the holy rosary. We were a little surprised: that late hour was certainly not a time of prayer at the convent. We made the sign of the cross and, settling in a corner at the back, we joined fervently in the oration, supplicating divine help and praying for the souls of the two poor murdered students.

  After the holy rosary came the moment to implore the Blessed Virgin of Porta Coeli. We gradually realised that an indistinct murmuring was acting as counterpoint to the nuns’ litany, and we soon made it out as the sound of sobbing. Our eyes wandered in search of its source and fell upon the Chormaisterin, prostrate beneath the statue of the Blessed Virgin of Porta Coeli, to the left of the altar, her breast shaking convulsively. Our feeling of puzzlement suddenly turned to utter incredulity and bewilderment.

  “Pro vita nostri aegerrimi Cesaris, oramus,” we heard the nun who was leading the prayers cry.

  Those words struck us like a gust of icy wind: “Let us pray for the life of our Emperor, gravely ill,” the nun had said. I hoped for an instant that I had misunderstood, but the grief and anguish with which Cloridia lifted her hand to her forehead sadly confirmed that I had heard correctly. So the Emperor was ill? The Most August Caesar, our beloved and radiant Joseph the First, was in mortal danger? What had happened? And how on earth had we not heard anything? But there was no way for us to find out any further details at that moment: we had to wait until the end of the oration. Those moments that separated us from a fuller explanation seemed interminable. And then the church emptied at last and Camilla, rising to her feet, turned towards us. As soon as she saw Cloridia she embraced her.

  “Camill
a . . .” murmured my consort on seeing the young face disfigured by grief.

  She motioned us to follow her: she had to put out the candles. The tiny flames were mirrored in Camilla de’ Rossi’s tear-streaked cheeks, and she continued to clutch Cloridia’s hands in a vain effort to repress her sobs.

  In town everyone had been talking about it since that morning. At first it had circulated as a vague rumour, then the word had become more insistent, until, like a bolt from the blue, orders were issued for public prayers to be offered every hour and for exposition of the blessed sacrament both in the public Caesarean chapel and in the Cathedral of St Stephen. In the Caesarean chapel the various members of the court had followed upon one another from hour to hour: the tribunals, the ministers, the grandees, the cavaliers, the dames and other people of noble rank. And similarly, in the cathedral, orations had begun in the afternoon attended by Monsignor the Bishop Prince in person and the chapter of the cathedral; and then the religious orders, confraternities, schools, arts, trades and hospitals had come in procession, with great throngs of the common people, who, with anguished devotion and zeal, had implored divine intercession.

  Prayers had been going on in all the other parish churches inside and outside the city. Special couriers had even been sent throughout the Archduchy of Austria above and below the Enns, to announce the Oration of the Forty Hours, so that – as the public announcement stated – His Divine Majesty might be pleased to grant longer Life and happy Government to this Most Clement and Most August Monarch of ours, for the consolation of his faithful Peoples, and for the benefit of all Christianity in these grave and dangerous circumstances of War, which involved the whole of Europe.

  Even Ottomans and Jews residing in the Caesarean city had called for extraordinary days of prayer and fasting and had distributed special alms.

  The Emperor was ill. For some days he had been in bed, isolated from everything and everyone; no one could approach him. And not because Joseph the Victorious was unable to hold a conversation, or to preside over the conference of ministers, but because his illness was contagious. And mortal. The doctors’ diagnosis seemed clear: smallpox.

  “Like Ferdinand IV . . . just like him,” sobbed Camilla.

  Within my breast, as on a racecourse trampled by the hooves of maddened horses, dire portents were galloping towards their own incarnation.

  My thoughts ran to Ferdinand IV, the young King of the Romans carried off by smallpox fifty years earlier. The firstborn of Emperor Ferdinand III and elder brother of Leopold, he had suddenly died at the age of just twenty-one. I had read the story of Ferdinand, a child prodigy, in the books I had bought on my arrival in Vienna. It was on his magnificent gifts that his father had set his hopes of reviving the Empire after the ill-fated Thirty Years’ War. This blow had fallen at such a delicate moment that the House of Habsburg had even risked losing the imperial crown. France had immediately taken advantage of the situation to block Leopold’s election as Emperor and he had been forced to pay out huge sums of money to the Protestant princes to get himself elected, and had had to renounce solemnly before them any intention of going to assist the Habsburgs in Spain in their war against France. And so the French-Spanish war had ended with the defeat of Spain and King Philip IV had been forced to give the hand of his daughter Maria Teresa to Louis XIV rather than to Leopold. And it was that very marriage that had given the French their right to the throne of Spain, which was at the root of the present War of the Spanish Succession. In short, if Ferdinand had not died so prematurely and unexpectedly, the Bourbons of France would not have become related to the Habsburgs of Spain and so the war of succession would not have broken out.

  The young Ferdinand, despite enjoying excellent health and rare good looks, had been swiftly carried off by smallpox. When the older people recalled that bereavement of the imperial family, which had led to so many other past and present bereavements, they trembled: Joseph was not yet geblattert – which is to say he had not yet had smallpox.

  Now it had happened.

  “The first symptoms began five days ago. Until today the thing had been kept secret. I myself only heard about it last night,” said the Chormaisterin, her voice still hoarse from weeping.

  And so we learned that on Tuesday 7th April Joseph the Victorious had dined with his mother and had been affected by a slight headache. A minor nuisance, which disappeared the next day, so that on Wednesday morning the young Emperor had decided to devote himself to his usual hunting trip. On his return he had complained of a strong constriction in his chest, trouble in breathing and strange pains all over his body. Suddenly he had been seized with a fit of vomiting, expelling a considerable quantity of pituitary matter. The doctor had been summoned, and he had attributed the sickness to excessive eating during the Easter celebrations, and for that evening he had prescribed shredded hyacinth with some species of buds.

  The night had been troubled. The morning of the next day, Thursday 9th April, Joseph had been seized with another violent fit of vomiting, regurgitating viscous, ill-digested matter, followed by pure bile in quantities equivalent to several spoonfuls. The slight headache had returned, but above all he was afflicted with great pain shifting between the abdomen and chest, and finally settling in his loins. Joseph the Victorious, a young man, robust and vigorous, a most courageous soldier, was to be heard screaming like a child. Fortunately, his urine and pulse were normal, and so an enema had been applied – an insufflation of water and salt, which had proved highly beneficial. But the pains had continued until the evening, together with the screams. The enema had been repeated, bringing on copious bilious excretions, and an eye powder had been prescribed (in accordance with Aristotle’s well-known instructions), as well as a powder of native cinnabar. In the evening his pulse had begun to quicken, and at one in the morning he had begun to grow decidedly feverish.

  While Camilla talked, like a lugubriously tolling bell, a date was thrumming in my mind: 7th April. On that day Joseph’s illness had begun, but also the Turkish Agha had come to Vienna. And that was not all: the next day Abbot Melani had arrived in the city.

  “Are you absolutely sure it’s smallpox?” I asked Camilla.

  “That’s what they’re saying at the moment.”

  “How is the Emperor now?”

  “Nobody knows. All information about the last three days is kept strictly private. But . . . where are you going?”

  “Eh? What are you saying?” mumbled Abbot Melani from beneath the blankets, his tongue still thick with sleep.

  “You’re acting the innocent? I knew it!” I shouted, beside myself.

  I had come crashing into Atto’s apartment like a Fury. I had hammered frantically on the door (the nuns’ cells were all at some distance, after all) and Domenico, jumping out of bed in alarm, had opened up to me, convinced the city must be on fire at the very least.

  “The Turkish Agha arrived in Vienna just a day before you, and you pretend you know nothing about it! Once again you had it all planned, you and that dervish!”

  “Dervish? I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Atto, sitting up in his bed.

  “Signor Uncle . . .” Domenico tried to interpose.

  “Yes, the dervish in the Turkish retinue, that Ciezeber, who slices himself up with his disgusting rituals and then heals himself as if nothing had happened. Nice people you go around with, Abbot Melani! And you’re conniving with the dervish to get the Emperor’s head. Ah, now you put on your astonished look! You didn’t think I knew, did you?”

  Uncle and nephew fell silent. This gave me courage and I went on:

  “You, Abbot Melani, you say you came here to force the Empire to make peace. You waved that letter under my nose from the traitor Prince Eugene, who wants to sell himself to France, but you kept quiet about the other manoeuvre, the more important one, which removes the main obstacle in this war: the Emperor! His Caesarean Majesty Joseph I has no sons. If he were to die, the heir to the throne would be his brother Charles,
who for the last ten years has been fighting to wrest the throne of Spain from Philip of Anjou, the Sun King’s grandson. If Joseph died, Charles would have to come straight back to Vienna to become emperor, and that would be the end of the war. Eugene has betrayed his side by now: even if the Empire wanted to, it no longer has a king to set up in Spain, nor a general. The throne of Madrid would be left permanently to your sovereign’s grandson. A perfect plan! That’s why the Emperor is sick. Smallpox, my foot: it was you French, in league with the Turks as usual, who poisoned him.”

  “Is the Emperor sick? Smallpox? What are you saying, boy?”

  “And the sickness, strangely enough, started with the head . . . the same head that the dervish was plotting to get. Or is that just a coincidence? But who could believe that! Not me, that’s for sure, knowing you as I do, alas! But how could you do it? At your age, do you have no fear of God?” I asked, my voice broken.

  “I don’t know where you –” protested Atto, who had put a hand to his belly, while his face contracted.

  “And don’t think that I’ve forgotten that Philip of Anjou was proclaimed King of Spain thanks to a forged will. And it was you who forged it, eleven years ago in Rome, under my nose!”

  “Signor Uncle, you shouldn’t allow him –” said Domenico.

  “Such a generous reward – I don’t think!” I went on with renewed fury. “You found me a job and a home here in Vienna so that you could exploit my loyal service yet again, and then skip out at the right moment, as you did twice in Rome! This time it’s an even dirtier game: get the Emperor assassinated, a young man not yet thirty-three! That’s why you made me rich. You wanted to buy me. But you won’t succeed, ah no! This time you won’t get away with it. There’s no price for the life of my king! I’ll go back to Rome and starve in the tufo, but not before I’ve done all I can to impede your dirty plans. It’ll have to be over my dead body!”