Veritas (Atto Melani)

by Monaldi, Rita

  “Look!” exclaimed my little boy, pointing towards the sun.

  Fighting against the light, I fixed my eyes for a moment on the day star.

  “It’s blood-red, it’s blood-red again,” I observed with dismay.

  Simonis did not remark on the bizarre phenomenon that had manifested itself repeatedly over the last two weeks and which was feared as a sign of ill omen.

  With our hands still shading our eyes, we slowed down as the spectacle both enthralled and blinded us. At that point, above the creaking sound of the cart carrying our tools, we heard a distant sound of salutation. It came from behind the towers, behind the garden’s encircling walls and behind the castle itself, almost as if it issued from a Beyond that belonged only to the Place with No Name: in the still undisturbed dawn peace, the cavernous roar of the lions resounded again.

  This time we entered by the West Gate, the one we had left by on our last visit. Crossing the main courtyard, in front of the façade of the castle, I cast watchful glances around myself, remembering with a shiver my adventure with Mustafa.

  Our first thought, obviously, went to the Flying Ship. But we were disappointed; no sooner had we arrived in the ball stadium than we found Frosch wandering around restlessly. He was taking food to the birdcages, opposite the stadium, and every so often he threw pieces of meat to the wild animals in the ditches. The watchman gestured towards a hole low down in the wall of one of the ditches: it was a small tunnel, barred by a simple little gate. It was what remained of the underground passages that once made it possible to escape, when necessary, from the Place with No Name and to re-emerge in the surrounding countryside.

  While Frosch chattered away, Simonis and I exchanged knowing glances: we would have to wait for a more suitable moment to inspect the Flying Ship. In the meantime, to work.

  While we lifted the tools out of our cart and got ready for work, I asked Frosch the question I had pondered on our way from the city: whether we were in fact the only people – artists, labourers or artisans – who had turned up at Neugebäu to start the restoration work.

  “Of course you’re the only ones. Who else would dream of working here?”

  I answered that the imperial chamber paid generously for this kind of work, and there was no reason why carpenters, painters, bricklayers or decorators should not be happy to honour the ancient and glorious manor house with their labour.

  “Oh they would honour it willingly enough,” said Frosch with a laugh, “if they were not afraid.”

  “Afraid of what? Of the lions?” I said in surprise.

  Frosch burst into noisy laughter, and asked me who could possibly be frightened of poor old Mustafa, the only ferocious beast at Neugebäu that was ever allowed out of its cage. My face flushed a little with anger; Mustafa had frightened me, sure enough, when I had met him for the first time. His paws and teeth were not made of feathers or wool, after all. Suddenly Frosch grew serious again and said almost inaudibly:

  “No, no, nothing like that: they’re afraid of the ghosts.”

  This time it was my turn to smile, showing my scepticism. Frosch paid no heed, and explained in all seriousness that – according to what the people said – for decades now at Neugebäu strange presences had been manifesting themselves, making the place inhospitable and frightening.

  “Everyone knows about the spectres of Neugebäu,” he added, “but they pretend not to know. If they’re asked about it, they look the other way.”

  He moved off for a moment, in search of a little millet to distribute to the birds. From the birdcages behind the old stables we could hear them squawking.

  Left on my own I remembered that, when I had asked my fellow chimney-sweeps about the Place with No Name, none of them had offered to accompany me to the place, and indeed they had pretended not to know the old mansion at all, although it must be familiar to all inhabitants of Vienna.

  But another memory, a more remote one, made me even more pensive. Eleven years ago in Rome, during my previous adventure with Abbot Melani, in the deserted villa of the Vessel I myself had had an experience of immaterial presences, whose nature I had never been able to ascertain. I had reflected on this just a little earlier, that same morning, on hearing Ugonio’s tale: had not the mysterious pilot of the Flying Ship from Portugal, in his monk’s habits, whom I had learned about from the old gazette that Frosch had shown me, reminded me of the black violinist, named Albicastro, who had appeared to hover over the battlements of the Villa of the Vessel and who had played the Portuguese melody of the folia?

  And now from Neugebäu, the forgotten mansion, came another unexpected reminder of the abandoned villa of the Vessel. What was this allusion, this echoing chime between two places and two experiences so distant from one another in time and in space?

  In the meantime Frosch had come up to me again. I certainly could not share all my cogitations with him, and confined myself to asking him if he knew any more details about the ghosts of the Place with No Name.

  He said that the son and successor of Maximilian II, the unhappy Emperor Rudolph II, had been a fanatical occultist. Forever surrounded by astrologers and alchemists, for years and years he had spent huge sums acquiring rare materials, retorts and alembics, and hiring magical consultants, in the attempt (pursued in vain by legions of alchemists) to give life to the famous and mysterious Philosopher’s Stone.

  I asked him why he had called Rudolph “unhappy”?

  “Everyone knows that!” he exclaimed. “Because of his father’s death.”

  It was perhaps because of the calm that reigned in the plain of Simmering, and the privacy that the large isolated mansion guaranteed him, that Maximilian’s son had chosen the Place with No Name as his laboratory, setting up there a well-equipped secret alchemical workshop.

  “It was down there, in the basement,” said Frosch, pointing at the doorway to the round keep on the east side of the mansion, where we had entered on the previous occasion and I had bumped into the bleeding sheep carcass.

  The watchman added that when Rudolph carried out his nocturnal experiments, people on the plain of Simmering had been able to see, through the single little round window of his alchemical workshop, the iridescent flames of the alembics with which Maximilian’s successor invoked the occult forces of the elements.

  “There are ghosts there, but they also call it the ‘witches’ kitchen’,” said Frosch, with a little ironic smile, making it clear that the fear everyone felt for that place was as strong as its spectres were evanescent.

  “Signor Master, the boy and I are ready,” Simonis interrupted us. He had put on his working clothes and had selected all the tools necessary for the job at hand.

  I had a special task for my boy: I told him to keep an eye on Frosch, and to let us know if he went away. We would take advantage of his absence to visit the Flying Ship.

  Obviously I was tingling all over with the desire to inspect the Flying Ship. But now, after Frosch’s words, the Place with No Name had been graced by yet another mystery. As we worked away amid the dust of the chimneys and flues in the kitchens of Neugebäu, completing the job we had begun on the previous occasion, Frosch’s words continued to echo in my mind.

  The keeper of the lions had referred to Maximilian’s death and to the son who had succeeded him, the unhappy Rudolph II. Curiously, it was at Maximilian’s death that Simonis’s tale had broken off during our last visit to the mansion of Simmering: it was then that my assistant had suddenly remembered that the gates into Vienna were about to close and we had had to rush back to town.

  I told him what Frosch had just recounted about Maximilian and his son Rudolph. He paused briefly; he was scraping encrusted brick dust off a large iron palette knife. He wiped his cheeks and forehead with the back of his hand, and it was as if with the particles of coal and dust a thin layer of skin fell from his face, and my assistant Simonis, the penniless young man with a vaguely idiotic smile, the listless and slightly retarded student, turned back into the acute
connoisseur of imperial history that he had revealed himself to be over the last few days.

  “The lion keeper wasn’t lying to you, Signor Master; the Viennese really do believe that there are ghosts in this place. And it’s true that Rudolph, Maximilian’s son, was an alchemist, occultist and a very unhappy person. But Frosch didn’t explain why this came about. As you well know, this place doesn’t have a name.”

  “Right. Which is why it’s known as the Place with No Name.”

  “But you also know that it has a nickname: Neugebäu, which means ‘New Building’.”

  “Of course, I know that.”

  “Well, don’t you find it strange? Such an impressive place, and two non-names: ‘Place with No Name’ and ‘New Building’.”

  “I thought that Maximilian had died before he found a definitive one,” I answered.

  “No, Signor Master. There are residences, like Schönbrunn for example, that received their names even before the first stone was laid. Neugebäu would never be baptised with its real name: it had to be guessed.”

  “Guessed?”

  He wiped a bead of sweat from his brow and started cleaning the palette knife once more, which had fallen from his hands in the meantime and got dirty again.

  The construction of the Place with No Name, explained Simonis, in his tortuous, long-winded fashion, was the riddle whose solution would be revealed as work proceeded. Only when it was completed would the mansion and its gardens reveal, to those who knew how to look, their true nature. Its name would burst spontaneously from the eyes and lips of those who had guessed the metaphor.

  And then the vox populi would call it “Suleiman’s Tent”, or “The Ruin of the Turks”, “Maximilian’s Revenge” or even “The Triumph of Christ”, depending on the inclinations and acumen of those who would visit it.

  But Maximilian had died too soon. His jewel had been left incomplete, and therefore anonymous: it was simply “the new building”, and therefore a Place with No Name.

  “Maximilian’s death, Signor Master: all the events that followed had their origin there.”

  In 1576, the year the Emperor died, Neugebäu was not yet finished. The main body, in particular, did not have its interior furnishings: the long gallery on the ground floor, which in the designs was intended to hold an antiquarium, a gallery of wonders to amaze the world. It was to have contained statues, displays of weapons, paintings, tapestries, coins, works in gold and porcelain. The great Jacopo Strada – the brilliant Italian antiquarian whom Maximilian had engaged at great cost, and who was famous for having conferred glory and splendour on the greatest palaces in Munich – was to have collected them. When this last part had been completed, Neugebäu would be ready to be presented to the world.

  However, with Ilsung and Hag breathing down his neck, as Simonis had already recounted, the Emperor was having problems in finding the money.

  The previous year Ungnad had returned from Constantinople after a two-year sojourn there, and shortly afterwards the Turks (it just so happened) had once again begun to threaten the borders of the Empire. The Diet of Regensburg, the assembly of all the princes of the Empire, urgently needed to be convened. On 1st June Maximilian set out from Vienna to superintend the meeting. Like the first session he had presided over ten years earlier, it was a diet of crucial importance: it was essential that the princes, both Catholics and Lutherans, should rediscover a form of unity or the Turks would prevail.

  Maximilian confided to his acquaintances that he intended to be present no matter what, even should it cost him his life. Prophetic words. The imperial caravan made its way up the Danube. The weather was bad, and so was the Emperor’s mood. He confessed to his counsellors that if he had not found the strength to start his journey just then, maybe he would never have set out at all. He was indisposed, and felt weak at times. He opened the diet on 25th June; after the initial speeches he himself addressed the assembly. His hearers were impressed by the eloquence with which he described the Turkish threat, which loomed ever closer and ever more formidable. An agreement must be found, if the whole of Christendom was not to be overwhelmed. Negotiations began at once among the Protestant and Catholic princes and the Pope’s legates. There were long, tortuous and exhausting discussions. Maximilian seemed worn out again. He complained that the air of Regensburg did not suit him, and wished he were back in Vienna.

  At the end of July he was seized with haemorrhoidal pains. The month of August went by without any problems, but in the night between the 29th and 30th he had a severe attack of calculosis accompanied by tachycardia, which continued until 5th September. On that day, amidst severe pain, he expelled a calculus the size of an olive pit.

  “The 5th of September was a fateful day, Signor Master. If you remember what I told you, on that same day ten years earlier Suleiman had died without Maximilian hearing anything about it. And in the days that followed there had come the military defeat against the Turks which had ruined his fame and prestige forever.”

  From 5th September Maximilian’s condition grew visibly worse. The tachycardia persisted, his breathing grew laboured, his appetite vanished. A fit of palpitations lasted for ninety consecutive hours. Everybody, except doctors and imperial counsellors, was forbidden to approach the bishop’s house, where Maximilian was staying. The bells were forbidden to ring. The Emperor was in his fiftieth year: a critical age, said the doctors. Over the next few days he would have colic, difficulty in breathing and stomach pains. He slept badly, and this made it difficult for him to recover.

  Meanwhile his old personal doctor was called for, the Italian Giulio Alessandrino, who on account of his advanced age had retired and was living in Italy. But at the same time, those attending on Maximilian began to talk about a strange woman. She came from Ulm and was called Magdalena Streicher.

  “She was a healer, according to some. Others called her a charlatan,” said Simonis with a sharp edge to his voice. “At first no one was against her visits. Perhaps because the idea came from someone highly influential: Georg Ilsung.”

  “Ilsung?” I said in amazement, “Ilsung the traitor?”

  Yes, Simonis repeated, it was he who recommended that this charlatan woman should be hired. He assured everyone that she was able to solve the most difficult cases, ones that had baffled official medicine. Princes and court dignitaries all quickly agreed: they had heard good things about this woman, and some even claimed to have been treated by her, and successfully.

  Our inspection of the kitchens had finished. Simonis stood up, and for the umpteenth time he dropped the palette knife, which ended up on my poor right foot. My assistant apologised. As we gathered our tools and prepared to enter the mansion itself, I noticed once again how awkward Simonis’s movements were, and what a contrast they made with the sharpness of his storytelling and the adroitness of his nocturnal activities.

  There were three Simonises, I thought as we made our way into the interior of the mansion. The first was the Simonis of every day: a rather foolish student, with a silly expression, slightly squinting eyes, a dopey smile and clumsy movements. Then there was the second Simonis: he still had the doltish expression, but beneath his half-lowered eyelids his mind (as in his stories about Maximilian) darted about nimbly and sinuously. Finally there was the determined, courageous and even cruel Simonis, who bullied the poor Pennal and led me around nocturnal Vienna in Penicek’s cart facing mortal dangers. The face of this last Simonis, the third one, had no trace of the foolish expression. I still trembled at the thought of the bullet that had been fired into my back in the Prater, miraculously repelled by Hristo’s chessboard. What memory did he have of the terrible dangers we had faced together, of Dànilo’s last gasp, of Hristo’s frozen corpse? His face showed nothing.

  As to the existence or not of a fourth Simonis, the Simonis who pretended to be an idiot and like a puppeteer pulled the strings of the first three just as he wished, I could not yet form an opinion. I thought I had caught just one fleeting glimpse of him since we
first met: the previous night, after taking leave of Populescu. But finding no reason for such behaviour, I had instinctively shelved the suspicion.

  And so, from the anonymous kitchen spaces lying outside the main body of Neugebäu, we made our way towards the mansion. As we approached we were at once caught up in the dark, sombre atmosphere of those walls, which contrasted so sharply with its white stone, its airy gardens and its lofty, soaring towers.

  As we crossed the eastern courtyard, leaving the maior domus to the left, Simonis went on with his story.

  As soon as she arrived in Regensburg, Magdalena Streicher, the mysterious healer, went to converse with Maximilian, who nonetheless rejected her treatment: he was still waiting for his trusted Italian doctor, Giulio Alessandrino.

  On 14th September the invalid’s condition inspired greater optimism. But over the weeks he had made a number of dietary errors: he had eaten sour fruit and drunk frozen wine. He complained of heart trouble and he was never free of an insidious cough for more than an hour or two. His pulse was weak and irregular.

  Maximilian granted no audiences, but he had enough strength to work: every day he summoned his secret imperial council and dealt with the most important matters. On 26th September Giulio Alessandrino, on whom they were all pinning their hopes, finally arrived. But while the Italian was on his way, the charlatan woman had been given a free hand, and she had started to administer her own treatment to Maximilian. The invalid was immediately entrusted to the care of Giulio Alessandrino, but then for mysterious reasons he was consigned once again to Streicher. This toing and froing between the experts had disastrous consequences. Ever since the charlatan had started treating him at the beginning of October, Maximilian’s condition had worsened to such a point that they were all expecting him to die. When they approached his bed, they would hear him murmuring heartrending phrases: “Oh God, no one can know how much I suffer. I beg you, Lord, let my hour come.”