Veritas (Atto Melani)

by Monaldi, Rita

  “After his first years of government,” declared Simonis, “everyone understood that his intellect was clouded, obsessed with magic arts and alchemy, consumed by fears and phobias. As time passed Rudolph locked himself up in secret laboratories of necromantic arts, and gave heed to the lowest and unworthiest of his own servants. And in the end he soiled even this place with these absurdities.”

  “So it’s true that he had an alchemical workshop here at Neugebäu as well.”

  Simonis nodded gravely. “Rudolph was mad, but, what is worse for a Caesar, he was also, sadly, ridiculous. He had seen too many horrors in his youth. And so he preferred to spend his evenings stargazing, instead of using his eyes and judging for himself.”

  Going against his father’s will, Rudolph moved the capital: from Vienna the sweet the court was transferred to Prague the magical, Prague the obscure, Prague the diabolic. It was here that the disgrace of Maximilian’s funeral had taken place, it was here that Rudolph would lose his senses.

  In August 1584 two English magicians arrived in Prague: Jan Devus (but he was called John Dee) and Edward Kelley. Devus, Queen Elizabeth’s astrologer, was preceded by his fame as a wise man. He conversed with spirits after summoning them with a magic mirror, a globe of quartz he said he had received from the Archangel Uriel. It was not clear whether he was an impostor or was actually possessed. Kelley wanted to be called Engelander (but his real name was Talbot) and appeared to be a vulgar swindler; his ears had been cut off (the punishment for forgers in England) and he covered them with his long greasy hair. He had a corvine nose, mouse-like eyes and a base, greedy expression.

  The two men charmed and wheedled and swindled their way into court, extorting money with astrological predictions, remedies against sickness, vague promises to find the philosopher’s stone. Rumours arose: they were spies and rabble-rousers, sent by Queen Elizabeth to undermine the Habsburgs’ power in the region. Or contrariwise, their ugly appearances were deceptive: they were real enchanters. But what difference did it make? The devil is English, people say.

  Like crazed magnets, Devus and Engelander attracted legions of warlocks, necromancers, dark wizards, alchemists and spagyrists. Prague opened up its soft, dark underbelly; the forces of darkness were welcome, the Emperor’s feeble mind threw wide the gates, and the fetid wind of the magical arts swept in triumphantly.

  The people were confused, the noblemen let themselves be swindled, the slimy English pair grew rich rapidly and finally wormed their way into Rudolph’s confidence. The Emperor was also obsessed with astrology; he asked all those who visited him to bring their own horoscopes with them. If the astrologers gave a negative verdict, the visitors were driven out. Rudolph spent crazy sums on talismans, elixirs, amulets and panaceas. He never stirred a finger, even with women, if he suspected that the person in front of him was born under an evil star. Everyone took advantage of this and bribed his councillors to gain access to him. Anyone could deceive the Emperor.

  Pious Maximilian’s son was first fond of Devus, then drove him out because the Papal Nuncio scented the stench of black magic. That left him with Engelander, who was even worse, spending his time guzzling, bullying and drinking. He bought a house next to that of a certain Dr Faust, an expert in the dark arts (black magic and the printing press) who was said to fly over Prague mounted on a horse with dragon wings and to have made his way from his own village of Kutna Hora (Gutenberg in German) to Germany, to invent printing. Engelander was hot-headed; during a duel he killed a nobleman, and Rudolph took advantage of this to lock him up in a tower: he wanted to extort the secret of the philosopher’s stone from him with hard imprisonment. The Englishman refused, tried to escape, fell into the moat of the fortress and broke his leg, which was replaced with a wooden one. No-Ears thus became Wooden-Leg. His wealth was swallowed up by his creditors, and Rudolph did not want him anymore, but he still believed him to be the custodian of countless secrets, loved him and hated him. Sent back to prison, Engelander tried to escape again; he broke his other leg and committed suicide.

  In Prague, the diabolic city, the revenge plot of Ilsung and his companions had been fully accomplished: Rudolph was now a prey to hallucinations and fits of anger; he saw plots and conspiracies on all sides and sought death himself several times. What was worse, his madness was to survive him: his bastard son, the bloody Don Giulio, obsessed with hunting, always surrounded by packs of wild dogs, a beast among beasts, often drunk and reeking with the stench of the skins he liked to tan himself, passed from a passion for the chase to a passion for tormenting animals, and then for torturing men and women, until, in a mad night of love and slaughter, he ended up killing and cutting to pieces his own lover, the defenceless daughter of a barber in the village to which he had retired. He was declared mad and locked up in the castle of Krumau, where he later died, probably assassinated.

  I said nothing, overwhelmed by the terrible story. I had been gripped from start to finish by Simonis’s words. From one of the windows I cast a glance out at the immense gardens of the Place with No Name.

  “As you can imagine, Signor Master,” concluded Simonis, “with Maximilian it wasn’t only his son’s brain that fell into ruin, but also Neugebäu. Since then no one has ever done any work on these gardens, this villa or the menagerie. But without maintenance gardens die, walls crumble and animals are no longer acquired. How much longer can all this go on? Joseph I is the first Emperor to have wanted to save this place. May God grant him his wish.”

  From the great entrance hall we passed into the room on the left. Here too the bare walls, the time-worn floor, the great windows that opened onto the sky and the immense vault above our heads, which transformed our voices into a chorus of echoes, seemed to warn the visitor of the greatness of the Place with No Name, an uncompleted glory still awaiting its moment.

  While we explored the walls of the great room, in search of the flues, a date was nagging at me: the 5th of September, the day Maximilian had begun to succumb to death. As we had made our way towards one of the students’ meetings, Koloman Szupán had recounted that on that same date, during the great Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683, from within the city a traitor had informed the Ottomans that Vienna was in its last throes, and could be conquered at once. But that day also figured in the memories of my first adventure with Atto, twenty-eight years earlier: it was on 5th September in the distant year of 1661 that Nicholas Fouquet – the French finance minister and Atto Melani’s friend, whose destiny would be bloodily fulfilled in Rome in the inn where I worked, and where I had met Atto – had been arrested. The day of Fouquet’s arrest was also the Sun King’s birthday: the greatest and most powerful sovereign in Europe had been born on 5th September. And Suleiman’s death: again, 5th September.

  That date, the fifth day of the ninth month of the year, seemed to sound a fateful knell in the history of Europe, but also in my own life. The Sun King, Emperor Maximilian and Sultan Suleiman, Fouquet, Vienna, Rome and Paris: these imposing names all seemed to be swirling around me, a mere nothing in the great theatre of human affairs, as if my destiny were mysteriously bound up with theirs. Or was this just the delusion of a poor chimney-sweep?

  Having completed my work in the room to the left and in the identical, mirror-image one on the right, we passed through the door that led beyond the second of the two rooms. Suddenly the pure cold air of the wintry countryside lashed our faces: we had emerged onto the great terrace overlooking the northern garden. There was a broad view over the plain of Simmering, the surrounding countryside, the distant walls of Vienna and, even further off, the hazy green of Kahlenberg. The terrace was supported on Cyclopic stone columns, hewn from entire blocks: sculptural marvels. Above our heads, the high vault of the terrace was ready to receive the enormous frescoes that Maximilian must have imagined, maybe conceived, perhaps even sketched in pencil with his Italian artists, and which had never been realised.

  High up on the great walls of the terrace there hung a horizontal line of stone ox
skulls of splendid workmanship. These skulls, horrid and solemn, set something stirring in my memory. What did they remind me of? And at once I realised: Rome, twenty-eight years earlier, during my first adventure with Abbot Melani. In the underground passages beneath the Holy City we had visited a strange island where we had found precious Roman remains, amid which Atto, a great connoisseur of ancient things, had recognised a taurobolium: a pagan religious image, dear to the worshippers of the god Mithras, depicting a scorpion and, more significantly, a bull. Another echo, I thought, another thread linking past and present. The Place with No Name continued to cast subtle allusions around me, like a tangled web I had to unravel.

  I looked out again at the great terrace and the view that could be enjoyed from it.

  “Everything is grand here,” I sighed, “and on a scale I’ve never seen before. It’s like the Villa Medici in Rome, and at the same time also like a Venetian villa, and then . . . well, I imagine Versailles to be a bit like this,” I said, gesturing to the gardens and the fountains that extended to north and south of the mansion, behind and in front of us.

  “I don’t know what Versailles is like,” answered Simonis, “but anyone can understand what a great jewel Neugebäu could have been, instead of being condemned to oblivion.”

  It was just then that I heard a curious noise coming from the west wing of the mansion. It was halfway between a trumpeting and a roar, and I could not have said whether it was mechanical or human in origin, or whether it came from above or below. I instinctively turned to Simonis, but my assistant had already gone back inside and had not heard anything. From the large interior room my little boy had called to us: he had been looking for us everywhere in the enormous spaces of the mansion. He had at last seen Frosch walking away from the eastern entrance; the old guard had been heading towards a cottage some way off. It was the moment we had been waiting for.

  Lying lazily on the ground, which was still frozen, the Flying Ship seemed to be patiently awaiting the arrival of spring. I quickly climbed aboard to reconnoitre, using the large raptor’s wing, and then I jumped down again.

  “We have to search methodically,” I said to Simonis. “I’ll explore the keel, you start inside.”

  While Simonis rummaged through the cockpit I remained on the ground to explore the exterior of the ship, exhausted by the work we had been doing in Neugebäu and nervous about Frosch’s possible return. I was looking for the Golden Apple in the worst of spirits. The embassy of the Turkish Agha, the ambiguous position of Eugene of Savoy, the outcome of the war, the deaths of Dànilo and Hristo, Abbot Melani’s journey, the dervish Ciezeber, the Emperor’s sickness, Ugonio’s strange manoeuvres, even the Flying Ship itself: everything revolved in some way around the mystery of the Golden Apple. It was imperative that we get to the bottom of this matter. If we did not clear up these secrets, everything would remain shrouded in impenetrable fog, and maybe I would stay entangled in Abbot Melani’s manoeuvres without even realising it. There was no choice: we had to find the Golden Apple, or at least discover what had happened to it.

  Spurred by these reflections, my poor blackened fingers scraped desperately at the freezing wood of the ship, in search of a crack, a hiding hole or a drawer that would finally reveal the symbol of power over the West.

  “If only we could understand just what happened to this wretched thing . . .” I muttered to myself, uncertain whether to address a plea to the Almighty or to let off steam by cursing.

  At that moment the Flying Ship juddered slightly. This was followed by another light tremor, like a jolt that shook the strange bird-shaped craft from its tail to the tip of its beak. I thought that it was Simonis’s movements in the cockpit that had provoked these oscillations. I looked up, but the Greek was sitting calmly and fingering the seats, to see if they concealed a false bottom. If it had not been an inanimate object I would have been tempted to stare hard at the Flying Ship’s eyes, to see if they moved . . . And at last I did so. The two lifeless wooden eyeballs had the harmless expression of all stuffed creatures.

  I climbed on board myself. As soon as I had done so, I felt another strange vibration.

  “Signor Master, did you feel that?” Simonis asked me, when I reached the prow.

  I did not answer. Something else had caught my attention. Something wrong. I looked out of the cabin: the ground had become . . . too low down. If I were to leap down now, I would break my leg. How could that be?

  Then came a new perception: no longer that of the air coming towards me, but rather of my cheeks cleaving the cold wind of the plain of Simmering; they themselves had become small, trembling vessels. And then a crazy, inexplicable conviction: that underneath the Flying Ship an immense wave, a sort of powerful volcano, was exerting a propulsive force skywards, and we were just above it.

  “What’s happening, Simonis?” I asked at last, dimly realising that the same bizarre thoughts were in both our minds.

  Everything came to a sudden head: the sensation of a volcano erupting beneath our buttocks, our cheeks being jerked backwards, the ground dropping. My heart began to hammer hard, and I thought back to the dream I had had a few days earlier, the mad dream in which I had risked being eaten by Mustafa, in which I had foreseen precisely what was now happening: the Flying Ship was taking off.

  How will I ever explain or describe those moments to my grandchildren? And yet one sensation was perfectly clear to me. It was as if the laws of nature, mastered by some benign sorcerer, had chosen to grant us our wish to find the Golden Apple, and tremendous ancient forces, capable of overturning the world, had been revived for us, and like mystic handmaids had clustered to form a circle, or rather a chalice, and were lifting the Flying Ship higher and higher. My little child, down below, was gazing up at us in dismay: was it possible that his father was escaping into the heavens?

  “Simonis, I . . . I felt the ship moving beneath me, the first time I climbed aboard, to escape from Mustafa, but I wouldn’t believe it!” I almost yelled to my assistant, as if these words could explain the impossible.

  As we ascended, the great terrace of the Place with No Name seemed to plunge downwards, but it was we who were climbing, and far below my son reacted with a mixture of laughter, tears and shouts. After a few exclamations of surprise and horror, Simonis now fell silent. I looked downwards, assessing the fatal dive we were soon bound to make, and I prayed.

  But we did not fall. Like a young bee greedy for pollen, a powerful and mysterious force continued to suck us upwards. We were now twice as high as the roof terrace of Neugebäu. We felt like the highest thing in creation, higher than the hills, than the mountains, maybe even than the clouds themselves. While the wood of the old ship creaked beneath our feet, as light and dry as a cuttlebone, my head began to spin, stifling my cries of wonderment and fear, and I joined my hands in prayer, since Deus caritas est (this grave concept is given us by the Lord with his miracles!); and if God created the world out of love, those ancient divine forces, which had now been unleashed to grant us the exhilaration of flight, perhaps wished to free us for a few instants from the tyranny of matter, and to teach us and welcome us at last into their wild recklessness of love.

  “Signor Master, we . . . we’re flying! Like a bird – or rather, like an angel,” Simonis said at last, his voice choking, making the sign of the cross over and over again.

  As the wind whipped through my hair, I admired the boundless view over the plain of Simmering, and in the distance I could see, as on an architect’s drawing board, the suburbs of Wieden, the Danube, the Leopoldine Island, even the distant Josephina, with their almost invisible inhabitants, and I laughed and cried in a mixture of fear and madness: perhaps the same folly that, they say, unhinges the mind in the high mountains, when the air is too thin.

  Between one prayer and another I murmured those famous lines of the Divine Poet that refer to a magic air vessel: I did it for Cloridia and our children. As I saw the gardens of the Place with No Name become as small as a kitchen gar
den, its towers shrink to childish toys, the great fish ponds contract to miserable wells, Frosch’s lions turn into mice, I asked the Poet for protection, and recited under my breath:

  Guido, I would that Lapo, thou, and I,

  Led by some strong enchantment, might ascend

  A magic ship, whose charmed sails should fly

  With winds at will where’er our thoughts might wend,

  So that no change, nor any evil chance

  Should mar our joyous voyage; but it might be,

  That even satiety should still enhance

  Between our hearts their strict community

  And then I saw the clouds sailing below us, and, much as father Dante had done, I wished that my wife and our children were on the ship, and that we could always remain together with those dearest to us.

  . . . and here always talk about love.

  “Look, Signor Master, look at the city!”

  The Caesarean city, its ramparts, its towers, its steeples, the spire of St Stephen’s: even at that distance, everything seemed to be flattened on the ground and to become our slave. Simonis, as white as a sheet, was torn between his desire to gaze out and enjoy the view, and his instinct to crouch down in the middle of the ship in order not to fall.

  Meanwhile we had ceased to rise.

  “Maybe we’ll go down now,” I muttered in a hoarse voice, desperately gripping the seat.

  But I was wrong. No sooner had I uttered those words than my cheeks and forehead felt the cold rush of air coming straight at me. The Flying Ship was now proceeding, as a sailor might have put it, full speed ahead.

  “It’s going towards Vienna,” I shouted, torn between dismay and exaltation.

  As fields with fruit trees, cottages and vineyards slipped beneath us, I realised I was trembling from head to foot. The temperature was freezing up there, as if we had climbed a mountain. Powerful gusts of wind lashed through our chimney-sweeps’ overalls, and also through the ship, which offered us no shelter. Goaded by the wind, the craft juddered and creaked.