Veritas (Atto Melani)

by Monaldi, Rita

  “How can we put it back in Prince Eugene’s diary in this state?” I fretted. “If Cloridia sees it, I’m done for!”

  It was now two in the afternoon. We had been racking our brains for almost three hours over this little piece of paper, which refused to give up its secrets, if it had any. To the great dismay of Opalinski, our only resource now was Koloman Szupán.

  On the way, Opalinski seemed in a state of mute anxiety. Perhaps he was wondering what Koloman would say when he saw us arriving.

  I was in a grim mood too. If Koloman could not manage to extract anything from the Agha’s paper, this would be good news in one way, since it would free us from the terror of the Turks. On the other hand, it would leave us in utter darkness: three students had died one after the other and the murderers (or the murderer) did not yet have a name.

  I looked at Simonis: he was sitting opposite me, his dull eyes distractedly following the rows of vineyards running by our sides. Before setting out he had put a small bag around his neck, which he now stroked meditatively, probably sharing my serious thoughts.

  “Why on earth did Koloman choose to hide in the House Goat?” I asked Janitzki.

  “An Italian monk took him there. Koloman actually asked for shelter in a monastery, but they didn’t want him there.”

  “Didn’t your companion go to an Italian monk to get news of the Golden Apple?” I asked him at once.

  “I remember that,” confirmed Simonis, “an Augustinian who used to hear the confessions of the Turkish prisoners of war who wanted to convert.”

  “Yes, it’s true, but I don’t know whether it’s the same one,” answered Opalinski.

  “What?” said Penicek in alarm. “Has Koloman gone mad?”

  “Why?” we asked in unison.

  “Didn’t you hear that they arrested an Augustinian this morning? An Italian who has been accused of a string of murders and rapes.”

  A chill descended upon us.

  Our lame cart driver, by contrast, seemed in a feverish state:

  “So Koloman had to go and hand himself over to an Italian monk, of all people? I thought he was smarter than that!” he repeated, shaking his head, as he drove us outside the city walls, towards the suburb of Ottakring.

  “Praguer brute!” Simonis reacted. “How dare you? Apologise and then shut up.”

  But either because of the praise he had received earlier from his Barber or from underlying fear, Penicek seemed to have no intention of shutting up. On the contrary, laying aside his humble and contrite air he persisted doggedly:

  “Doesn’t Koloman know that monks are the most treacherous and dangerous breed? And Italians to boot!”

  “Why do you say that?” I asked, annoyed that this wretched lame Pennal, the servile laughing stock of his companions, should take such a knowing tone when talking about my fellow countrymen.

  “Filthy Bohemian animal!” snarled Simonis, leaping to his feet and striking the driver on the back of his neck. “What’s got into you? Apologise to Signor Master.”

  “Forget it,” I said to my assistant. “But you,” I said brusquely to the Pennal, being accustomed now to treat him as roughly as all the others did, “I asked you a question. What’s wrong with Italian monks?”

  Halfway through the sixteenth century, answered Penicek, made nervous by his Barber’s reprimand, Martin Luther came along and lifted the stones off those whitened sepulchres and vipers’ nests, the monasteries. All the things that had previously gone on in the dark were now exposed to the light. Many monks abandoned their orders, got married and joined the Lutherans. The number of Catholic monks went down alarmingly.

  “Just what are you saying, Pennal?” Opalinski said indignantly. “Are you on the side of Luther’s cankerous heresy?”

  “What can you expect from a Praguer?” muttered Simonis.

  “Go on, Penicek,” I ordered him.

  The ancient monastery of the Augustinian Hermits of Vienna, at the time situated next to the Caesarean palace, was on the point of closing down. The order was forced to seek the help of brothers from other countries. Reinforcements came from the religious houses of Italy, which had not been affected by the wind of the Reformation.”

  “A godless wind from the backside,” added Opalinski.

  But unfortunately the Italian fathers (especially those of a higher rank), being closer to and more familiar with Rome, felt somehow superior and worthier. They despised and mistreated their Viennese brothers and wove mysterious diplomatic intrigues with the foreign ambassadors in the Caesarean city.

  “You mean the Italian brothers were spies?” I asked suspiciously.

  “The imperial authorities were convinced of it.”

  As a consequence of certain visits or inspections in the monastery, suspicious characters of every type were found in the cloisters: bandits, plunderers and all sorts. The Italian monks were accused of exploiting the proximity of the royal palace and their links with the imperial court to spy on all those in the pay of France or other foreign powers, and in the end orders came to drive them out, forbidding them to return and decreeing that in future all fathers superior must be German-speaking.

  The Germans were more honest, but they had other faults. They were a little cold in their faith, and, above all, incompetent. They lacked the human touch that, although often perverse, came naturally to their Italian brothers. They were great rogues, these brothers from the south, but they knew how to nurture souls and to win over people, and when necessary they were extremely wily and shrewd. Rome and the fathers general of the Augustinian order meanwhile insisted on having their own men on the spot, and in the end they won. The Italians were readmitted, then driven out again, taken back, thrown out yet again and so on, while the people looked on in amazement and wondered whether the problem was the dishonesty of those being expelled or the confused ideas of the expellers.

  Meanwhile the Catholic Counter-Reformation got under way, the principal lines being dictated by Rome. The fathers superior sent some of their trusted compatriots to Vienna. The court could not refuse them, because in the meantime the Prior of the Augustinian monastery, who was not Italian, had fled to Prague just before an inspection, where he was finally arrested. He was guilty of serious financial malpractice, which had left the monastery up to its ears in debt, having broken the same imperial edicts that forbade the monks from selling off the property of the monastery, from turning themselves into wine traders, from trading in agricultural commodities, et cetera et cetera.

  In short, within the holy walls peace was a chimera. When the Italians came back, quarrels and rows broke out continually. All privileged relations with the Emperor’s court had broken down in an atmosphere of diffidence and mutual contempt. The monks continued to quarrel with the civil authorities; the fathers superior quarrelled with their subordinates, and also among themselves. If one of them bought a vineyard or a piece of land for the monastery, his successor would sell it, and then they would accuse one another of having squandered the order’s money. The case would end up before the civil authorities, who would find faults on both sides, blaming all the monks, and so on, partly because the fathers superior were substituted too frequently, and this greatly multiplied the number of litigants.

  Since no one was above reproach, the Italians had no difficulty in lording it over everyone. Acrimony, quarrels, backbiting, envy and calumny lit the fuse of hatred between the Teutonic monks and the Italians, and if the new prior tried to make peace, he would quickly be insulted by the Germans and get drawn into the intrigues of the Italians, who had a damnable gift for sowing discord and creating incomprehensible disputes out of nothing, so that everyone suffered, including the Italians.

  “In the end the Jesuits got involved in the matter, obtaining a bull from Pope Urban VIII with permission to confront the Augustinian Hermits – Italians and non-Italians – and move them outside the walls, without any warning, into the suburb of Landstrasse, where they still remain. Their place was then taken by the B
arefoot Augustinians, ‘imported’ from Prague, a far more virtuous order.”

  “The order of Pater Abraham from Sancta Clara,” I said.

  “The very one. And as far as I know there’s not a single Italian among them,” sniggered Penicek.

  “Are you happy now, Pennal?” grumbled Simonis. “What have you proved with your tirade? That the monks from Prague are better?”

  “Or that the Jesuits, as usual, are the cleverest?” added the Pole. “In any case the story of the expulsion of the Augustinians is as old as the hills.”

  “But the news of the Augustinian murderer . . .”

  “Was he an Augustinian Hermit or a Barefoot Augustinian?” asked my assistant point blank.

  “Mm . . . Hermit.”

  “Koloman’s monk friend is a Barefoot Augustinian,” snapped Simonis.

  “So, nothing to worry about,” I concluded with a sigh of relief, while the cart pulled up in front of the gate of a vineyard.

  We had arrived at the House Goat. It was one of those delicious Heuriger, open-air inns kept by vine growers and their families, where you can go and taste Heuriger, the new wine produced in the vineyard at the back of the house. The House Goat was considered one of the best wine shops, but actually it was difficult to go wrong with the Heuriger inns: the white or red wine trodden in the family cellar is never less than decent, the turkey coated in breadcrumbs by the host’s wife or mother is always crisp, the pork with caraway seeds as fragrant and juicy as the cheeks of the maiden with blond tresses who serves it to you piping hot.

  Usually you pass through a gate and find a table under the trees, in an internal courtyard, where even the coarsest customer has the good manners to whisper (in such a place in Rome you would have to plug your ears against the noisy chattering, the guffawing and the clattering of plates, tables and chairs). If there is no room at the tables, you find a place in one of the niches carved into the centuries-old tree trunks, or you can eat at a makeshift counter, formed by rustic planks fixed roughly to a low wall or, if it rains, inside an old barrel quaintly kitted out with table, stools and lace cloths like a squirrel’s den in a fairy-tale. At the entrance you are at once charmed by the graceful, gentle atmosphere, so that even if they served you vinegar instead of wine, and dry bread instead of turkey, you would eat and drink with relish all the same, revelling in the rustle of the branches, the twittering of the birds, the smile of the host’s daughter and the peace that breathes forth from the blessed land where Vienna the Wise sweetly reposes. And as you rotate a glass of ruby-coloured new wine in your hands, and lose yourself in its vermilion depths, the clucking of the nearby hen house will sound like a chorus of Aegean virgins, the braying of the donkey on the nearby farm a verse from Sophocles; and you will not be surprised to find yourself recalling, as happened to me that day, the austere description of Austria by Enea Silvio Piccolomini which I had read before I came to Vienna, and in your memory it will almost turn into a poem:

  The Archduchy of Austria above and below the Enns provides wine for Bavarians, Bohemians, Moravians and Silesians, hence the great wealth of the Austrians. They make the grape harvest last forty days, and two or three times a day three hundred carts loaded with wine enter Vienna from the suburbs, and every day one thousand two hundred horses, or perhaps more, are used in the work of the harvest. It does no harm to anyone’s prestige to open a wine shop in their own house; many citizens keep a tavern, heat the place and do magnificent cooking . . .

  My wife and I dreamed of opening a wine shop one day, in the vineyard in the Josephine that Atto Melani had donated to us, I reflected, as I sat on a bench in the Heuriger, which was curiously deserted at that moment, while Penicek waited on the box seat and the other two went in search of Koloman. With my little boy I would keep up our profitable chimney-sweeping activity, in which my son would succeed me; Cloridia would find a steady job as a hostess in our Heuriger; our two daughters would join us, and they would help their mother in the kitchen and the wine shop, while we would find a couple of good strong boys from the neighbourhood to work in the vineyard, and, who knows, maybe they would ask our blessing to wed our daughters, and so the whole family, including (God willing) our grandchildren, would prosper in . . .

  “Signor Master, Signor Master, quick!”

  The voice came from afar, and from above. I looked around but could see nothing. I got up from the garden bench and walked a few steps. Simonis was calling to me from the attic of a service building, which looked onto the animal yard and was connected to the main house by a low building, perhaps the stables. He was at a dormer window, on the rear side of the building, and was waving to attract my attention, rousing me from the languor I had been lulled into by the idyllic setting and the first sips of red wine.

  There was no need to climb the stairs and go all the way up there. Walking round in search of the entrance, I ran into a small crowd of people. They were clients of the Heuriger (so that was where they had all ended up) and with them were the host and his wife. They were gathered around the hen run. Then I saw.

  At first I took it for a scarecrow, one of those figures made of old clothes and straw that are used to keep birds off the newly sown fields. But what was a scarecrow doing in a hen run? It was Koloman. It wasn’t very different from the way we had found Populescu: Koloman too had been impaled, but by wooden pikes, not by candlesticks.

  A fence of pointed poles, thrust deeply into the ground, protected the animals from raids by foxes, martens and wildcats, which could not reach their prey either by digging or by climbing. Impaled on the forest of sharp points, Koloman the great lover, Koloman the poor Hungarian waiter, Koloman the self-styled baron of Varasdin, was gazing eastwards, towards the great plain of his native Hungary. Chickens, hens and turkeys took no notice. They continued to scratch around calmly in the shady pen, disturbed more by our presence than by their scarecrow of flesh and blood.

  “Murderers, beasts . . . They’re just beasts,” stammered Opalinski, stifling his sobs.

  We were now in the little attic room from which Simonis had called out to me.

  “Murderers? Who?”

  It was my assistant who said this, without removing his eyes from the corpse.

  “The ones who murdered Koloman,” I answered, fearing that he was feeling the effect of this blow.

  The Greek said nothing. He stood there, looking out of the dormer window. He looked up, to the roof, and then down, towards Koloman and the pikes. Then his eyes shifted again towards the stables that joined the building to the host’s house. I followed the direction of his eyes, and at the window opposite ours I saw the shocked faces of two rosy-faced girls, probably the host’s daughters. Beside them, on the wall of the house, a sundial showed that it was half past three. At that moment Simonis turned towards us:

  “What if it were an accident?”

  Nothing was clear anymore. We had made a hasty departure from the House Goat and now we were wandering around the nearby high ground known as The Pulpit.

  From the top of the steep hill, there was a view over the Caesarean city. It stretched out before our eyes, under the menacing shade of black rain clouds, while we were bathed in warm and inopportune sunlight.

  Much had happened since we took our leave of poor Koloman, starting with the scuffle that had broken out involving Opalinski. Things had gone in this fashion.

  In exchange for a hefty tip the host had agreed to wait another half-hour before calling the city guard.

  The landlord stood gazing at us with an impatient air, waiting for us to go: he had not even asked our names. The only thing he was interested in was the money with which we had bought those few moments of peace for our final farewell to our friend; he thought we were friends or relatives of Koloman who had come to visit him. When the city guard eventually came he would simply show them the boy’s body and say that he had fallen from the roof.

  He had never seen or met him, he would say. Actually, he had met him most definitely the day before, wh
en Koloman had been brought to him by the Italian monk to whom the student had turned for help. What had happened after that, the host neither knew nor cared to know. The money he had been given by the monk was enough, he said, though he was quite happy to take our offering as well.

  We had just a few moments to ourselves before we slipped away. Koloman’s death, the fourth, left only Simonis and Opalinski of the group of friends I had met at the Deposition just a few days earlier. It was all too obvious that their deaths were interconnected, and that I, in one way or another, was not unrelated to them. And yet we could find no evidence of a common motive or of a link between those deaths and myself. The enquiries into the Turks had led to a dead end. Ciezeber the dervish had nothing to hide, nor did the Agha’s phrase on the Golden Apple, and it was highly improbable that the paper on which it was written concealed anything either. And so Atto Melani’s allusion to the fact that both Hristo and Dragomir were Ottoman subjects meant nothing. By contrast, each of the four victims had an excellent reason for passing into the next world. Dànilo’s and Hristo’s dangerous occupations had perhaps been fatal to them; the Armenian girl to Dragomir; and Koloman?

  “He died at three, his regular hour for lying with a woman.”

  “Right,” I said, remembering the hour marked by the sun dial, “and at the window opposite there were the host’s two beautiful daughters. Do you think he fell trying to reach them?”

  “Koloman, I’ve already told you, was a specialist in climbing over roofs and cornices for his romantic appointments. Perhaps this time he put a foot wrong. It’s just that . . .”

  “What?”

  “It’s just that it seems very unlikely to me that, terrified as he was, he would have felt like having a woman.”

  With Koloman Szupán, in short, it was very difficult to work out whether he had been killed or not. Although I myself had looked repeatedly at the place where it had happened, at the position of the body and the trajectory of the fall, although I had examined every detail in the little room in which Szupán had spent his last hours, I could but reach the same conclusion as Simonis: the only thing certain was that the Hungarian had fallen. God alone knew if he had been pushed.