Veritas (Atto Melani)

by Monaldi, Rita

  “How much did it cost?”

  “All that you gave me, effendi.”

  “What?!”

  “They sold their master’s heart. There’s no price for such a thing, effendi.”

  These words were spoken by a man dressed in the Armenian fashion, in the classic turban and cloak. His interlocutor was Atto Melani. Cloridia was not there.

  The Abbot was standing, leaning on his stick, in the recess of a palace in the dark street. I saw the Armenian hand him a small coffer, which he opened to touch its contents carefully. Atto held out a little bag.

  “Here is your reward. Farewell,” he said, moving furtively in the direction of the convent.

  “May God bless you, effendi,” answered the other man, bowing several times in the direction of the Abbot after quickly checking the contents of the bag.

  Atto walked slowly in the direction of the convent, staying close to the wall so as not to get lost and feeling the way ahead with his stick, to avoid tripping up. Bold behaviour, I thought, for Abbot Melani to venture out into the street, blind and alone; the business he had with the Armenian must have been very important!

  The master’s heart: one did not have to be a genius to understand what this shady transaction was all about, or whose heart it was! One just needed to put two and two together! Not only had Atto Melani arrived in Vienna at the same time as the mysterious Turkish embassy, just when the Emperor had fallen ill: now I had actually caught him in secret consultations with an Armenian – which is to say, a subject of the Sublime Porte! What was more likely than that he was one of the Armenians in the Agha’s retinue, maybe a minion of the dervish, Ciezeber, who wanted the Emperor’s head? This time the Armenian had mentioned the heart: fine metaphors these Easterners had for their misdeeds! Strip away the poetic flourishes and the meaning was clear: do away with His Caesarean Majesty.

  That crazy castrato, I moaned, would drag me with him to the gallows! And we would be joined by that madman Ugonio. I had to run back and tell Cloridia what I had just seen and heard. She must give up that new job with him at once.

  When I got home I saw that my wife had preceded us.

  “Wohlan! Come along now!” Ollendorf addressed us, when I opened the front door.

  It was the evening appointed for our German lesson and Cloridia had started without us.

  As soon she saw us she broke into a broad smile. She asked Ollendorf to continue the lesson with just our little boy and led me swiftly to the bedroom.

  “You’ll never guess what news,” she exclaimed radiantly as soon as we had closed the door behind us.

  She told me all about her new job working alongside Abbot Melani.

  “What do you think? This way you and I can spend more time together!” she concluded.

  I answered with a forced smile. Suddenly my courage failed me. Poor Cloridia: every time Melani had turned up in my life, I had neglected her to go in pursuit of intrigues and misadventures. Now that she could finally spend the day with Atto, I was supposed to tell her to keep as far away from him as possible. What was worse, the mere thought that to spend time with my wife I would have to put up with the old spy’s company made me feel sick.

  “Darling, I’m afraid it’s not possible,” I began to say, hugging her close.

  “What’s not possible?” she said acidly, drawing away.

  She did not yet know the gravity of the situation and I had spoiled her mood. I started my explanation from the very beginning. I told her of my suspicions about the Emperor’s illness and the Abbot. And also of the furious accusations that I had hurled against him the previous evening and his subsequent collapse. I ended with the episode I had witnessed just moments earlier.

  “For these reasons, dear, you must leave Abbot Melani alone. Tomorrow you’ll tell him that you can’t work for him,” I concluded. “Anyway, before accepting you might have consulted me: you knew that his sudden arrival here in Vienna had struck me as suspicious right from the start.”

  “Is that all?” she asked in surprise. “What you’ve just told me seems a very good reason to stick close to him and keep an eye on him.”

  “But we could get involved . . . And in any case,” I added with a touch of impatience, “haven’t you reproached me all these years for letting Melani drag me into terrible danger? Now that it’s your turn you don’t seem to be so keen on staying away from him.”

  “My love, I told you before we came to Vienna that the Abbot was up to his old tricks again, but you wouldn’t listen to me. And in a certain sense, you weren’t wrong: now we’re doing fine and I wouldn’t go back to Rome and our hungry life there for anything in the world. As for your Abbot’s shady dealings, accept it, we’re already in it up to our necks. In fact you should be happy that this time it’s I who will be keeping an eye on him: you never notice anything and you regularly fall into his traps. Trust me.”

  She was right, I am sorry to say. There was nothing for it but to trust in my wife’s shrewdness. It was a good thing she was always so courageous.

  “Just listen to what a clever little boy we’ve got,” she said, putting her ear to the door.

  The young pupil was diligently spelling out:

  “Nach dem ich deß Morgens aufgestanden bin, so lege ich mich an, campele, und wasche mich, und thue mich GOtt dem Herrn befehlen, und nach dem ich mein ordinari gebet verrichtet habe . . .”

  “After I have got up in the morning, I get dressed, I comb my hair and I wash, and I commend myself to God, and after I have said my ordinary prayers . . .”

  My wife hugged me; in this sweet conjugal embrace all my tension suddenly evaporated and like a river in spate I poured out my heart to her. I recounted all the recent events, giving an awe-inspiring description of the journey on board the Flying Ship and telling her about the Golden Apple that it was supposed to have carried from Portugal to Vienna, with the aim of placing it on top of the spire of St Stephen’s.

  Cloridia, as always when faced with a supernatural or at any rate inexplicable event, reacted naturally and practically:

  “Why don’t you try and exploit the Flying Ship?”

  “How?”

  “To spy on the Turks, for example. Today they left Prince Eugene’s palace and went back to their lodgings in the house of the widow Leixenring on the Leopoldine Island. It would be interesting to have a look through their windows.”

  “But I’m not a sailor, I don’t know how to navigate a ship – let alone a flying one!” I protested. But the niggling notion of such a move began to stir at the back of my mind. “By the way, today they had their farewell audience with the Agha, didn’t they?”

  “Yes. Prince Eugene is leaving tomorrow for The Hague,” Cloridia confirmed.

  “Did the Agha say anything else that was strange?”

  “Nothing at all. And I don’t think I saw anything that was remotely suspicious. The dervish wasn’t there.”

  I still had a little time before Simonis would call to take me to the students’ post-paschal ceremony, where we would find his companions. I started tidying up my papers and I came across the two treatises by Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsili, the man who had brought to Europe the recipe for drawing the piquant beverage from the coffee plant, but more particularly the Italian who, during the first siege of Landau, had been favoured by Joseph I over the inept Margrave of Baden and who had enabled the Emperor to conquer the citadel in just four days. To tell the truth, I had scarcely glanced at them since buying them. But now, after Melani’s gripping account of Landau, I was curious and wanted to embark on a more careful reading of the treatises written by this valiant compatriot, which – in the editions I owned – also contained exhaustive biographical data on the distinguished author.

  And so I discovered, with no little patriotic pride, that Count Marsili was a man of refined understanding and acute spirit, always ready to take on mental as well as physical challenges. In his youth he had made keen studies of mathematics, philosophy and natural sciences, and had bee
n the disciple of some of the most brilliant minds of the day, like the famous Marcello Malpighi. He had enriched his senses and his intellect by visiting Venice, Padua, Florence, Rome and Naples: an artistic and intellectual journey that only the scions of the wealthiest and most illustrious families could afford. As a member of the retinue of the Ambassador of the Most Serene Republic of Venice he had visited the glorious and remote city of Constantinople, observing the Turkish army, on which he had then written an essay, revealing its character and organisation. On his trip to the Orient he also carefully studied the coastal waters and shorelines of the lands he traversed, even studying the underwater flora and fauna, which resulted in further learned publications. This enterprising spirit cost him dearly: infected by the plague, he had to return to Venice for treatment, and his father, on account of the frequent visits he paid him, also fell victim to the disease and died of it. In 1682, only twenty-four-years old but fully mature, he decided to embark on a military career in the service of the Empire. With humility he rose through all the ranks: simple soldier, corporal, sergeant and finally captain.

  It was 1683 and the Turkish siege was raging at the gates of Vienna. Marsili was one of the defenders of the city. Wounded and captured by the Ottomans, he avoided certain execution by casting off his uniform and documents and passing himself off as the servant of a Venetian merchant: thanks to his previous trips to the East he knew a little Turkish and managed to fool his prison guards. They medicated him with ox dung and salt, and he ended up as a slave in the Turkish camp at the gates of Vienna, where he suffered mistreatment and torture. He was assigned to a coffee shop, his task being to grind the beans and offer them to purchasers (in the Ottoman camp every sort of luxury was available, even artificial fountains to give a sense of pomp and opulence). Just like any other slave he was sold to two visiting Bosnians who hoped to make a profit by reselling him to the merchant whose servant Marsili had – mendaciously – claimed to be. And so negotiations began with Italy; friends and relatives in Bologna paid two hundred florins and so freed him.

  He came back to Bologna from Vienna on foot. He arrived in the city at two in the morning, the left side of his body semi-paralysed, his legs swollen, his right arm wounded and dangling, one eye tumefied and swollen with tears, his skin burned by the sun. He had lost his hair, and he covered the baldness as best he could with a wig. But as soon as he had recovered some of his strength, he returned to Vienna, to Emperor Leopold, to report what he had learned of the Turkish army. They put him in charge of the imperial cannon foundry. He immersed himself in the study of military engineering and with great skill he created the fortifications of the fortresses of Esztergom and Visegrád. Then he returned to the war zone and took part in the siege of Buda, in which he revealed his unfailing military talent: he drew a map of the city, planned the conduct of the siege, selected the building materials and personally chose the utensils for the sappers. As soon as Buda was conquered, his soldiers pillaged the city. He, meanwhile, although wounded in one arm, wandered through the smoking rubble in search of the famous library of the King of Hungary, which he had long dreamed of exploring (alas, he was to find only a few volumes).

  He was not a simple man of arms: for Marsili the art of war was the handmaid of knowledge and of right thinking. War, for him, was less and less an exercise in cruelty and more and more a chance to observe and understand. He studied the course of the Danube, revealing its every secret detail, publishing the results in a lavish scientific volume. He discovered an ancient bridge, hitherto unknown, constructed by Trajan, and many other Roman remains. As soon as the military operations gave him a little breathing time, he applied himself to the study of wave motion, of the riverbed and of the winds. He observed and scrupulously recorded numerous species of fish, of aquatic birds and of mineral stones. He summarised his observations in notes, illustrated tables and maps. He knew that the art of war was always advancing; to keep up with it, one had to follow developments in all subjects: geography, medicine, engineering, politics, diplomacy and even economic science. “Idiots believe,” he said scornfully, “that soldiers are destroyers of the fine arts, ememies of literature and ultimately that they are people who profess something wholly barbarous, believing that they do nothing but burn, pillage and kill, without realising what art and what study are required to reap rewards from this profession and what profits the human republic derives from it. Many who have sons or brothers with no aptitude for study say: we will send them to war. In so doing they malign the nobility of war.”

  In 1699, when the imperial troops had to sign the peace of Karlowitz with the Ottomans, he was invited to take part in the negotiations: he was the only one able to make detailed suggestions for the new borders that the peace treaty was to establish. During the pauses in the negotiations he tirelessly inspected the territories of Croatia and Hungary destined to be divided with the Turks, without neglecting his scientific observations: he ordered his soldiers to collect the local species of mushrooms, complete with the clods of earth; this led to another treatise.

  On his return to Vienna he was rewarded with the title of General of Battle. But another war had already broken out: the one for the succession to the throne of Spain, King Charles II having died without leaving an heir. The first theatre of operations to which he was assigned was none other than the siege of Landau, where he would emerge victorious, along with his emperor.

  But at this point I had to break off: there was a knock at the door.

  “What a noble creature the student is, has been sufficiently well proven. But the nobler he is, the more he is exposed to disadvantages, misfortunes and dangers!”

  Simonis and I were attending the students’ ceremony for the recommencement of university lessons. My assistant’s knock at the door had brusquely torn me from my admiring contemplation of the life and feats of the valiant Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsili, my compatriot.

  We arrived right in the middle of the inaugural speech, delivered by Jan Janitzki Opalinski, who was standing on a ramshackle table in what appeared to be a damp cellar:

  “In youth the student must put up with great disappointment and hard blows from dull rod masters who thrash these tender young plants instead of treating them with sympathy and benevolence, and so impede their full blossoming. As Horace says, and even more eloquently the scholar Dornavio Anitympanistas, they treat students in the manner of an executioner and so repress the free workings of the spirit.”

  Applause broke out.

  “It is commonly said – we heard it said by our own rector at the ceremony today – that there are six mortal dangers for students: drunkenness, anger and idleness; and then constant lechery and the pursuit of prostitutes, which is said to be fatal to the soul, to weaken the understanding and memory, to dim one’s sight and to cause shaking in the limbs; and finally post-meridian slumber, which is said to be fatal to good temper. False, it’s all false! And whoever says such things has no love for us, nor any understanding of our delicate nature.”

  The cellar was crowded with students right up to the ceiling. They were nearly all Bettelstudenten, poor students. Some of them still bore on their chests the much-coveted university badge which allowed them to beg in order to support themselves in their studies. In one corner, a rickety table with miserly slices of black bread and a scanty collection of chipped glasses gave an idea of their straitened circumstances. The only thing that flowed in abundance was youthful merriment.

  “Opalinksi is there making the speech. But how are we going to find the others in this mob?” I asked Simonis disconsolately.

  “We’ll just have to try. Along with poor Hristo, Jan Janitzki Opalinski is one of the most erudite students I know. It’s no accident that he’s Polish – Poland is a beacon of Christian civilisation facing Half-Asia. Jan is perhaps the best orator in the whole Alma Mater Rudolphina – when he talks the students all listen entranced,” answered my assistant. “When Janitzki finishes, you can talk to him. We’ll ask him about the othe
r two. He should at least know where Koloman is, they’re great friends.”

  “What are truly insidious and fatal to students’ health” continued the Polish student, as we elbowed our way through the crowd – “are other factors, wrongly considered virtues. First of these are the long vigils of study and meditation, which consume every humour of the body, desiccate the limbs and organs and, according to Hippocrates, leave food and drink raw in the stomach. The body undergoes a wasting process known as marasmus, your breath grows shorter and tuberculosis wells up. Elucubration is an oppressor of health, especially at night, when the smoke of oil lamps clogs the air. It is not necessary to read a great deal to be good students, but to read what is useful, and not continuously but with order and method. Otherwise you grow pale, your body begins to itch in several places, your eyes burn and your expression becomes bovine and absent.”

  “Look, there’s Populescu over there!” I said, suddenly spotting the imposing bulk of the Romanian.

  “Where?” asked Simonis, stepping in front of me to have a look himself.

  When he moved, Populescu was no longer there.

  “Damn it, we’ve lost sight of him,” I groaned.

  “Signor Master, let me look for him. I’ll do a tour and report back to you.”

  He was right. With my short stature I could hardly see anything: I certainly could not compete with his bird’s-eye view. I crouched down on a step descending to the cellar and waited for the Greek to get back to me after he had found his companions.

  “Most harmful to the health of us students,” the speech continued, “is perpetual sedentariness, which clogs the veins and arteries, squeezes the bowels so that they emit too much bile, makes the body grow sour, forms stones in the kidneys and turns the face yellow and black.”

  “It is extremely beneficial to bathe and dive in the beautiful rivers of this blessed city,” Jan concluded, “to smoke tobacco, and to drink wine and beer. It is not so harmful to health, if not indulged in to excess. You can drink as many as three times: the first as a toast to health, the second to friendship and the third to favour sleep.”