“Good heavens, boy, you don’t . . . Domenico, please!” implored Atto, pressing his hand to his belly with a grimace and making as if to get up.
“Signor Uncle, here I am,” said his nephew solicitously, rushing to hold him up and lead him behind a curtain, where there was a seat for his bodily needs.
Here Abbot Melani had an attack of colic, the so-called gravel sickness, accompanied by discharges of diarrhoea and by a robust venting of piles or haemorrhoids, or whatever they are called. I suddenly found myself without an adversary, and in a state of great embarrassment. I offered my assistance, but Domenico rejected it from behind the curtain with a sulky grunt.
“The Emperor . . . the poison . . .” I heard Atto gasping.
“Signor Uncle, you’re losing a lot of blood, you must drink your citron juice.”
“Yes, yes, quickly, I beg you . . .”
Domenico drew aside the curtain and signalled to me to support the old Abbot for a few seconds, who was sprawling awkwardly on the seat. For the first time I saw his castrato’s pudenda. Atto, paying no attention to me, continued to moan, while his volcanic intestine gave no sign of settling, nor the piles of ceasing to gush forth. His nephew rushed away and poured a few drops from a little flask into a large glass of fresh water, which he handed to his uncle.
“Well, I think that . . .” I blathered, getting ready to take my leave.
But Domenico thought that I wanted to continue with my accusations and from behind the curtain he yelled:
“Have you no pity for a poor old man? Do you want to kill him? That’s enough now. Go away, go away!”
Thus dismissed, I crossed the convent in a daze and dragged myself to my bed, where Cloridia was still sitting up, in a light doze. She had tried to stay awake for me, but had been overcome by weariness. And so I was left to writhe in solitary despair and doubt. I collapsed on the bed, with my head between my hands. Ever since we had heard the fateful announcement in church I had not had a single second to reflect: so was the Emperor about to die? It seemed a nightmare; but sadly there were too many signs that I was not dreaming. That same Sunday, had not my assistant and I encountered as many as three processions heading towards the Cathedral of St Stephen, while Penicek’s cart took us to our appointment with poor Hadji-Tanjov?
I saw Hristo’s chessboard on the table. I ran my fingertips over the dent which, by blocking the projectile, had saved my life.
The evening before, I reflected, we had all noticed the Chormaisterin’s inexplicable nervousness during the rehearsal of Sant’ Alessio, when she had lashed out at poor Gaetano Orsini with such unusual irritation. Camilla had chosen an extremely melancholy and gloomy aria for the rehearsal and had then talked of omens: now I realised that she had been brooding over grim presentiments of death. She had been thinking of the Emperor, who had lingered at the tomb of his friend Lamberg, and undoubtedly also of the sombre prediction of the English divine and the anathema of that treacherous Jesuit, Wiedemann, and probably of countless other signs, since there was no shortage of people wishing for the death of His Caesarean Majesty. How could one blame her? Twenty-eight years earlier, as a servant boy in the Inn of the Donzello in Rome, with my own eyes I had read in an astrological gazette a correct prediction of the death of a sovereign: the unfortunate consort of the Most Christian King.
No, unfortunately it was not a bad dream, I moaned, as I opened the chessboard. One question tormented me above all others: what lay concealed in Abbot Melani’s heart and mind? He had arrived in Vienna on the same day that the Emperor had fallen ill, and just one day after the Agha’s arrival. Atto had come to play France’s game on two different boards. On the one hand, to expose Eugene’s treachery, putting him out of action once and for all, without even granting him the Low Countries, as he had asked. He had confessed this to me openly. On the other hand, the more radical solution: to assassinate Joseph I. Just how the two things were linked to one another was not entirely clear to me, but what did that matter? The Abbot himself had taught me years ago: it is not necessary to know everything, but just to understand the sense of what happens. And the sense of it all – I had grasped that all too well. With all the experience I had accumulated alongside the scheming castrato, I just needed to put two and two together. This time it had not been necessary to wait for all the misadventures to come to fruition for me to work it out; I had not discovered Melani’s game only after his departure, but just twenty-four hours after first meeting him again. I was getting better at this game, I told myself with bitter sarcasm.
And yet it was also true, on the other hand, that my accusations seemed to have upset Atto greatly. But I should not let myself be fooled, I told myself: he had always pretended in front of me, even at the most dramatic moments. I had even seen him sobbing over the death of his dearest friends, only to discover later that he himself had been involved in it up to his neck! I must not forget that Atto had come to Vienna on the very day that the Emperor had felt the first symptoms of his illness. The same thing had happened in the past: twenty-eight years earlier Melani had turned up at the Inn of the Donzello on the same day that the aged French lodger had mysteriously died...
The baleful castrato had always used me as a pawn, as if I were of no more importance than the poor white pawn I now held in my hand, a helpless meal for the treacherous black bishop – the scoundrel of an abbot.
Poor me: I had become a master chimney-sweep, and the owner of a cottage and vineyard in the Josephina, only thanks to Atto Melani! If his plot were to be discovered, I would end up on the scaffold alongside him. After putting my life and my family’s livelihood at risk, now the old castrato might easily drag me with him to death! But he was a venerable old man of eighty-five: the executioner, after all, would only be anticipating the grim reaper by a few days or weeks. Whereas I was in the full flush of life and had a family to support! I suddenly felt giddy and began to shake with fear.
I clutched the black bishop tightly in my other hand, almost as if I could thus strangle Abbot Melani, crush him, make him miraculously vanish from my life.
I looked at our child, serenely asleep, and then at Cloridia’s sweet face. I cursed the castrato and his intrigues, so eager to unsettle their dreamless sleep! And what about my two girls, who had stayed in Rome and were longing to join us? What would their wretched fate be, when they heard that their father had been condemned for high treason and hanged like a common malefactor, or beheaded, or even (and here my shudders became uncontrollable) drawn and quartered on the terrible wheel?
With overpowering remorse, I confessed that I had brought these ills on my family by myself. What an unworthy husband and father I had proved! A poor insipid foot soldier, just like the white pawn I now clutched in my hand and whose head I would have liked to rip off with one bite out of sheer rage.
Oh, my Cloridia, the bold, enchanting and learned courtesan of twenty-eight years ago, who had set my boy’s knees a-trembling! To what wretched fate had I consigned that lovely complexion of gleaming dark velvet which contrasted with her luxuriant Venetian blond curls, which framed those large black eyes and the serrated pearls of her mouth, that rounded yet proud little nose, those lips smiling with a touch of rouge just sufficient to remove their vague pallor, and that small but fine and harmonious face and the fine snow of her bosom, intact and kissed by two suns, on shoulders worthy of a bust by Bernini? I had met her when she was more sublime than a Raphael Madonna, more inspired than a motto of Teresa of Ávila, more marvellous than a verse of the Cavaliere Marino, more melodious than a madrigal of Monteverdi, more lascivious than a couplet by Ovid and more edifying than an entire tome of Fracastoro.
What had I done to her? Widow of a gallows bird! To begin with I had not been a bad husband, I told myself: to unite herself with me she had abandoned prostitution, into which she had been cast by the foul and secret events that I had uncovered when we met in the Donzello Inn. Yes, but afterwards? We had lived in the little house purchased by my father-in-law, not b
y me, and until two years ago we had lived on the income of the small farm he had bequeathed to us. I had worked hard at Villa Spada, it was true, but what about the fame that Cloridia had won as an excellent midwife, to the great financial benefit of the whole family?
What a good-for-nothing I must be, since in three decades I had been unable not only to guarantee my Clorida prosperity but even to spare her the insult of poverty and finally the loss of the property inherited from her father. And yet she had not stinted herself: she had given herself to me wholly, remaining ever-loving and faithful, giving birth to three children, bestowing on them with her womb the gift of being, and with her breast the gift of well-being.
At the end of all this reasoning, the trial I had been conducting against myself concluded with a conviction.
I looked again at the black chess bishop. I had to admit it: if he had not arrived, the black Abbot Melani, to save us from poverty, at this hour we would still be in Rome, in the jaws of hunger, our little boy perhaps already dead from cold after yet another hard frost, myself dead from a fall from a roof, or, worse, burned alive in a chimney fire. Who could say? It is true that with his donation Atto had been fulfilling a promise, I considered with wavering spirit; but if I had never met him, would I not in any case have fallen victim to the famine of 1709 and the decadence of the Spada family, for whom I had been working?
Vienna and Rome, Rome and Vienna: suddenly the hidden thread of my existence unravelled in my mind. Twenty-eight years earlier, while the future of Europe was being decided in Vienna, in that small inn in the centre of Rome, just a few yards from Piazza Navona, the meeting with Abbot Melani had changed my life forever. He had trained me in the ruses and stratagems of politics, of state intrigues, in the dark facies of human existence. He had pulled me prematurely from the blind ingenuousness to which I would otherwise have been destined. Revealing to me the evil of this world, he had caused me (although that had not been his purpose) to flee it, to abandon my vacuous youthful dream of becoming a gazetteer and instead to withdraw into a world constituted by the important things of existence: my family, the love of my dear ones, a modest and virtuous life, marked by the fear of God.
But over the course of time, in order to achieve his ends he had tricked, exploited and deceived me. I had been his docile and unconscious instrument, and I had helped him to set in motion machinations favouring the King of France. He had got what he had wanted from me: help, advice, even affection.
Everything now seemed changed, and even to have turned into its opposite. I was no longer the ingenuous little boy of our first meeting, nor the young family man he had met on his return to Rome. I was a mature man of forty-eight, hardened by a life of labour. In the Vienna that had played such an important part in our first adventures, almost three decades earlier, I had finally found the reward for all that Atto Melani had taken from me with his empty promises. My God, did it all have to end tragically on a gallows?
Having given vent to panic, rage, a thousand regrets and torments, just like a duck flapping his wings dry on leaving a pond I now shook off all reminiscences and pondered on the present. The old castrato’s fainting fit had not seemed faked: with my own eyes (and not least with my nose... ) I had had clear evidence of the pitiful state he had been reduced to by the news of the Most August Caesar’s illness. And in any case, had I not heard Atto describing in passionate tones the heroism of Joseph the Victorious? And even earlier, the very day we had met at the coffee house of the Blue Bottle, had not Atto himself painted in gloomy colours the wretched end of France and the failure of the vainglorious reign of Louis XIV, while he praised Vienna and the Habsburgs? Those had not been the speeches of an enemy of the Empire. Unless . . .
Unless he had made all those speeches deliberately to deceive me and allay any suspicions I might have.
I did not yield to sleep – rather, I almost fainted when, after dropping Hristo’s chessboard, a little piece of paper emerged from its false bottom:
Shah matt
checkmate
the King is enclosed
Day the Fifth
MONDAY, 13TH APRIL 1711
It was midnight when, with lightning speed, I dashed to Simonis’s room.
“We must find your companions,” I exhorted him, waking him from a deep sleep, “and at once. I’ll pay them and tell them to leave off their enquiries: it’s too dangerous.”
I told him about the Emperor’s sudden illness, about my suspicions that he was being murdered (but I omitted Atto’s probable involvement), and I showed him the little piece of paper written in poor Hadji-Tanjov’s own handwriting.
“The King is enclosed,” the Greek read slowly, and I could not tell whether his tone was one of distraction or concentration.
“Do you understand, Simonis?” I asked, wondering whether at that moment I was speaking to the usual idiot or the alert student I had discovered over the last few days. “Hristo told you that the solution of the sentence was in the words soli soli soli, and that it was linked to checkmate. Now with this piece of paper we can finally understand the meaning of Hristo’s words: ‘checkmate’ comes from ‘shah matt’, which I imagine is Persian, since chess, unless I’m mistaken, comes from that part of the world.”
“And ‘shah matt’, according to what Hristo wrote here, literally means ‘the King is enclosed’,” concluded the Greek.
“Exactly. I think Hristo, playing one of his chess games, had an intuition and understood something that links the Agha’s statement with the Emperor.”
“Aren’t you getting ahead of yourself? Are we sure that ‘the King is enclosed’ refers to His Caesarean Majesty?”
“Just use your brain,” I said impatiently, “who else could it be? The Agha came to Rome, he uttered that strange sentence, his dervish wants someone’s head, Joseph the First just happens to fall ill . . .”
“How can you be sure they’re poisoning him? And suppose it were really smallpox?”
“Trust me,” I answered curtly.
I would have liked to say, “When Abbot Melani’s around, nothing happens by chance and above all nobody dies a natural death.”
“But what’s the link between soli soli soli and ‘the King is enclosed’?”
“Well, we don’t know that yet,” I admitted, “but I know enough already not to want any more students on my conscience. I’ll tell your companions what Cloridia heard from Ciezeber. I want to be sure they drop this business and that none of them takes it any further, even just out of curiosity.”
Simonis grew thoughtful.
“All right, Signor Master,” he said at last, “we’ll do as you wish. This matter concerns you. Tomorrow I’ll start looking for my friends to tell them that you –”
“No, look for them now. At once. Right now those boys are running the risk, without knowing it, of ending up like Dànilo and Hristo. Who shall we tell first, at this hour?”
“Dragomir Populescu,” answered my assistant, after a moment’s reflection. “With the job he does, the night is his world.”
Saint Ulrich, Neustift, the Jägerzeile, Lichtenthal and the lands of the chapter of the cathedral: we were rapidly combing all the zones in the suburbs where music and dancing took place. Thanks to Penicek’s mysterious connections – Simonis had got him out of bed and forced him to drive us in his cart – we had passed through the city gates by paying a mere “offering”, as he called it, to the guards.
Simonis had already hinted that Populescu scraped the barest of livings, and that night he revealed to me the list of his various occupations.
“A cheat at cards and billiards, and a specialist in rigging all forms of gambling: dice, bowls and so on. And in his spare time, an unauthorised violinist.”
“Unauthorised violinist?”
The Greek explained that dancing and music were not such an obvious and innocent pastime as one might think. Pater Abraham from Sancta Clara had thundered against them in his sermons: “It is well known good habits can by good strings
be ripped: chiefly in dances, where leap as you may, one’s honour oft is tripped.”
For about a decade now, for reasons of public decency and morality, the authorities had been trying to impose limitations on dances: two years earlier the municipal council had even asked the Emperor to abolish them. An exception was made for weddings, during which violins were allowed to play until nine or ten p.m., but no later. However, these rules were not respected; indeed, there had been a wild outbreak of Geigen und Tanzen, those dances to the merry sound of violins, especially in the suburbs.
In the meantime we had visited a dozen places with orchestras and dancers: there was no sign of Populescu.
In the beer halls, Simonis continued as we drove on to the next tavern, the town council had even forbidden dancing entirely, on the pretext that the instruments played in such places (reed-pipes, colasciones or mandoras) did not deserve the name of musical instruments, and the customers – people vilioris conditionis, of vile condition – under the influence of beer, violins and dancing, abandoned themselves to unmentionable liberties and abominable practices.
In the end, however, since these prohibitions achieved very little (even the Emperor was in favour of greater freedom for innkeepers, dancers and musicians), they had introduced a tax on dancing; as Austrian wisdom has it, what cannot be forbidden must be taxed.
Everyone was taxed, except the noblemen, so long as the balls they gave were free of charge. There was a tax on weddings, baptisms and all the various local celebrations et cetera. The owners of taverns, beer halls and such like had to pay five florins a year. In addition, places of entertainment within the city walls, on the occasion of public festivals, had to pay thirty kreutzer per musician, and a full florin for private parties! The result was that people played and danced in secret, or declared fewer musicians than there actually were. The Office of the Court Treasury sent inspectors out but the innkeepers would not let them in and even threatened them. Even the musicians had to pay something: to play they had to have a licence. The fine for unlicensed musicians was six florins.
Veritas (Atto Melani) Page 34
