Veritas (Atto Melani)

by Monaldi, Rita

  Having given my assistant and apprentice all the necessary instructions and sent them off, I was about to settle in my armchair when Doctor Abelius’s handbook on the artifices of students slipped from my belt.

  As I picked it up my eye ran over the titles of some of the mini chapters on the page where it had opened. It was not the part we had read and used for the Agha’s paper. The pages were densely annotated in the margin; I recognised Simonis’s unintelligible handwriting. Alas, it was written in Current, that German cursive which to the eyes of a Latin might just as well be Arabic. Growing curious, I glanced at the passages that seemed to have drawn my assistant’s closest attention:

  Do you wish to see if a wounded person will get better or die? Take rue juice and put it in his nose; if he sneezes he will get better, otherwise it means he is fatally wounded.

  It was just what Simonis had tried with Dànilo when we had found him dying on the ramparts. So my assistant had taken the trick from Doctor Abelius’s handbook. After this there was a description of another technique to see if a wounded person was destined to die or not. Then there were remedies to make someone drunk without any harm, and other remedies to make a drunk person immediately sober, like drinking a lot of vinegar or putting a wet cloth on their pudenda. I had heard this from Simonis as well. Like his methods for not falling asleep: carrying a bat around with him, exactly as he had done the night of the Deposition and the night we had wandered round all the bowling alleys in Vienna in search of Populescu. When I came across the methods for testing the virginity of girls, I thought of poor Dragomir . . . I went on reading where the Greek seemed to have lingered with most attention:

  To make someone sleep for three days in a row, take bile of a hare and make him drink it in wine: he will fall asleep at once. When you want to wake him pour vinegar into his mouth. Or take a sow’s milk and place it where he sleeps. Or take bile of eel and mix it in a drink: he will sleep for three days. To wake him up, pour rosewater into his mouth.

  To make an animal stay with you, take a piece of bread and put it under your armpits. When it is soaked in sweat, give it to the animal to eat.

  To make an animal run with you wherever you want, give it a cat’s heart to eat: it will follow you wherever you go.

  Doctor Abelius had written every student’s gospel!

  How to make sure that a dagger, sword or knife can cut an adversary’s weapon: take the noble herb known as Verbena, crush it and mix it with mullein and urine, boil them together, leave the weapon in them for a while and you will soon note the difference!

  To make a pair of pistols that look the same as others, but which with the same charge of powder and balls can fire further and more powerfully than others: have pistols made with a more resistant and heavier butt than usual. Apparently they will be the same as ordinary pistols. At the rear screw have a little tripod welded to insert into the barrel with a tube in the middle, through which the powder can fall on the ignition hole. Load the pistols as usual: they will fire further and more powerfully. The reason is this: the powder charge is lit at the centre and so more powder is burned.

  The short chapters that followed had even more notes and comments penned by Simonis.

  Camisole proof against shooting, clubbing or stabbing: take two pounds of the fish called ichthiocolla, shred it and leave it all night in vincotto, then drain the vincotto and pour fresh spring water on it, cook until it becomes a thick muddy pulp, put in five ounces of fine leather rubber and leave it to dissolve in this hot pulp. Then put in four ounces of powdered smir, which has been prepared by heating it and cooling it many times in vinegar, and two ounces of old turpentine. Cook it all together again and spread this mixture on a thick linen cloth which has been stretched out on a smooth board and fixed with nails. Put another linen cloth on top and spread the mixture on this one too, and continue until you have placed ten or twelve linen cloths one on top of the other. Leave them to dry (in summer eight days are enough). Before they are completely dry, fold them and give them the shape you want. With this material you can make camisoles, helmets and such like. A camisole of this sort can be seen at Baron K’s at Labach and also at N. in the Royal Kunstkammer.

  Swords, pistols, fighting clothes. What did my Greek assistant want with all this stuff?

  Another material resistant to daggers, maces and guns: take ichthiocolla and fish glue, dissolve and squeeze until they become clear. Cook them ad consistentiam melleam, until they have the consistency of honey. Dip a linen cloth into this and when it has dried a little, spread the mixture on it with a brush and leave it to dry. Spread it again and leave it to dry as many times as necessary.

  Or, if you want to make a garment proof against a dirk, take a new heavy linen cloth and spread it with fish glue dissolved in water. Leave it to dry on a table. When dry, take yellow wax, resin and mastix, two ounces of each. Dissolve it all with an ounce of turpentine, mix it well and spread it on the linen until the cloth has sucked in the whole mixture.

  And again:

  A collar proof against musket balls: take the skin of a racing or game ox that has just been killed, and on the cleaner side cut out a collar that is of your exact size and stitch it. Leave it to ferment for twenty-four hours in vinegar and dry it well in the open air.

  All of this Simonis had meticulously underlined and commented on in the margin in his abstruse calligraphy.

  I thought back to Atto’s sceptical remark on Simonis’s ingenuousness. Clearly the Abbot suspected him. Absurd! In addition, Melani had refused to say another word. Maybe because he had too little to go on and not even he could be sure of anything now.

  And in any case, how could one help suspecting everyone? We were groping in the dark. Years ago, when I had followed false trails with Abbot Melani, sooner or later they would peter out, sending us back to the correct path towards the truth. But this time, having abandoned our initial false track, we now found ourselves in the dense tangle of a forest where everything shifted, slipped from our grasp, or turned into its opposite. I had suspected everyone: first Atto and Ciezeber, then Penicek and even Simonis; without counting Ugonio and Orsini, whose relationship was still unclear. All the others were dead: Dànilo Danilovitsch, Hristo Hadji-Tanjov, Dragomir Populescu, Koloman Szupán, the two mysterious hanged men of Ugonio’s note. All of them apart from Opalinski. Should we suspect him as well? Whatever the truth was, the question remained the same: why had the students been murdered?

  In the shadow of the illness that threatened the Emperor (and the Grand Dauphin), there were too many deaths, too many culprits and no truth.

  The only ones not included among the suspects were Cloridia and myself: and now perhaps . . .

  The paradox, however absurd it might be, took my breath away. The series of deaths had begun as soon as I had asked Simonis’s companions to carry out research into the Golden Apple, but we had seen that this research had nothing to do with the murders.

  Therefore the only connecting element was ourselves – or rather myself. I had already thought of this, but only now had begun to put two and two together: I was in fact the only real suspect. After meeting me, those poor students had started to die, just hours apart, like flies.

  That was not all. They had been murdered just when they had an appointment with me and Simonis, or when we were looking for them. True, I had been with the Greek each time I had discovered a corpse, but he had known his university companions for a long time. It was he who had introduced them to me and who had even proposed that I should engage them. Why should he have wanted them to die just now?

  Atto was right. If you are looking for a culprit, he had told me a few days earlier, look in the mirror: anyone who has an appointment with you dies.

  Now Ugonio was supposed to come, but he was nowhere to be seen yet. Anyone who has an appointment with me dies . . .

  20 of the clock: eating houses and alehouses close their doors.

  Like a pack of panting hounds following an agile fox, it was only thanks
to their great bravura that the orchestra managed to keep up with the serpentine glissades of the soprano. In the fiction of the oratorio, Alessio’s mother sang her anguished rage against cruel destiny. On this rage the Chormaisterin had constructed a sprightly and superb edifice of vocal acrobatics, which, with its sinuous arches, depicted better than any painting, and explained better than any poem, the just anger of a mother grieving over her son’s uncelebrated nuptials:

  Un barbaro rigor

  Fé il misero mio cor

  Gioco ai tormenti

  E il crudo fato vuol

  Che un esempio di duol

  L’alma diventi . . .13

  While these indignant verses echoed in the Caesarean chapel, a similar resentment filled my own heart, and the hearts of those who were with me.

  Ugonio had not turned up. We had waited for him for three hours. It was clear that something must have happened to him. The corpisantaro, who had begged for his keys back and had implored us pitifully to treat them like gold until his return, would never have missed the appointment of his own free will. Fearing the worst, I had gone to the rehearsal of Sant’ Alessio. What mysterious thread bound Gaetano Orsini to Ugonio? What obscure threat had yet to be revealed to us? After the tragic deaths of Dànilo, Hristo, Populescu and Koloman Szupán, what new tragedy awaited us?

  E il crudo fato vuol

  Che un esempio di duol

  L’alma diventi . . .

  No, we would not wait passively. Camilla de’ Rossi’s furious and sublime music fired my heart and spirit, exciting me to bold revenge. I looked carefully this time at the Chormaisterin’s Italian musicians and wished I could put them all through the mill, and squeeze from them, like a fistful of olives, the dishonourable truth of their shady pursuits. I stared at the theorbist Francesco Conti and his scrawny face: weren’t they the features of one ready to sell his honour for a handful of coins? I passed onto his round-cheeked wife, the soprano Maria Landina, known to everyone as Landina, and I said to myself: wasn’t that florid face the image of a woman who has grown fat on underhand dealings? And the tenor Carlo Costa, with his pointed beard – didn’t everything about him suggest a shameless, double-dealing mind, wholly bent on evil? And Gaetano Orsini, with his incessant prattle, wasn’t he the epitome of the hypocritical huckster? Then I observed a second violinist with the crafty little eyes of one who knew it all, a group of violone players with hooked noses that betrayed greed, and flutists with the affected manners of congenital liars. There came back to me, like an ill-digested meal regurgitated, Atto’s tales of musician-spies like Dowland and Corbetta, and the conspiratorial and musical activities of Atto Melani himself, and I said to myself: you fool, do you really think you can shake hands with a musician and not find your palm greasy with a spy’s guilty sweat? And I fell back on bitter reflections: on the cruel fate for Euterpe and Erato, sweet Muses of sounds, ever to find sly Mercury, lord of the wicked arts, at their heels. And I felt ashamed of having taken pride in the friendship of such people, who must have been laughing up their sleeves at my naivety.

  But what weighed most heavily on me was the thought of the Chormaisterin. Was she, too, involved in this sordid practice of spying? A number of things about Camilla were still obscure to me. How, for example, had she guessed that Cloridia knew Turkish so well? Not even I knew that, and I was her husband! And yet the Chormaisterin had proposed her for the job in Prince Eugene’s palace while the Agha was staying there, already quite certain of my consort’s linguistic skills. And then there was her curiosity about Cloridia’s past, her Turkish mother, and the fact that that she cooked with spelt, just as my wife did, and, finally, her acquaintance with Atto Melani. She had been introduced to him in Paris, she said, along with her husband Franz de’ Rossi, nephew – so she said! – of Seigneur Luigi, Atto’s old master. But what proof did I have of all this? If one questioned her on her past, Camilla would refuse to talk of her life before her marriage. She said she was Roman – Trasteverine, to boot – but she did not have the faintest trace of a Roman accent.

  And then this Anton de’ Rossi, Cardinal Collonitz’s ex-chamberlain, must clearly have been a relative of Franz! Simonis, on his return from the Coppersmiths’ Slope, had told me that he had not found the owner at home and had been unable to elicit much about Gaetano Orsini, except that their friendship was based on the fact that the young castrato, years ago, had taken lessons from Anton de’ Rossi’s deceased cousin, a court composer who had died prematurely, named Franz . . . Why had Camilla wanted to deny this? Sitting next to Cloridia, I took the opportunity to tell her about it. She gazed at me open-mouthed: shades of suspicion fell on the person she now considered a dear friend. She furrowed her brows. I could guess what she was thinking. Some time ago the Chormaisterin had also denied being a relative of the Camilla de’ Rossi whom Cloridia had known briefly in Trastevere: perhaps she had been lying then as well?

  That evening Sant’ Alessio was followed by a short rehearsal of another composition, also to be performed in the next few days.

  It was now a sweet boy’s voice that sang, and his innocence, I thought, was in sharp contrast with the murky hearts of the musicians all around. The composition was by Francesco Conti, the theorbist, and the Latin words sung by the boy seemed to have been written specifically to stir my desire for justice. First a heartfelt prayer to the Saviour:

  Languet anima mea

  Amore tuo, o benignissime Jesu,

  Aestulat et spirat

  Et in amore deficit . . .

  “For your love, O sweet Jesus, my soul languishes, burns and sighs, and consumes itself with love“; oh yes, I said to myself sardonically, just the right words for this motley crew of crooked spies. Much more appropriate was the next stanza, which gave way to an allegro moderato:

  O vulnera, vita coelestis,

  Amantis, trophea regnantis,

  Cor mihi aperite . . .

  “O wounds, celestial life, symbols of victory of the loving sovereign, open your heart to me!”

  With all this tangled skein of suspicions I would have been very happy to open the heart of the beautiful and candid Chormaisterin. Oh yes, but I was even more eager to delve inside that of Gaetano Orsini – and very soon I would get the chance to do so, and to get all that I wanted from it.

  “Four have already died. If Ugonio has ended up the same way you’ll be the first to follow him.”

  “Four people dead? Ugonio? What are you talking about?”

  At the end of the rehearsal Simonis, Penicek and Opalinski took Gaetano Orsini by surprise as he walked home.

  I had told my assistant about Ugonio’s disappearance and the need to put pressure on Orsini. Simonis had rushed round to Opalinski’s house and had persuaded him to make peace with Penicek. “We must remain united – if we start to accuse one another it’ll be the end,” he said. The Pole’s anger, to tell the truth, had simmered down. He had begun to feel that he had accused the Pennal too precipitately, carried away by his despair at Koloman Szupán’s death, which might have been accidental.

  And so the three students moved in threateningly on Orsini. The young castrato was terrified, finding himself menaced by the muscles of the imposing Polish student, by the lanky Simonis and the shuffling, bespectacled Penicek, whose shifty, lopsided figure shuffling along in the dark had something decidedly fiendish about it.

  I had simply pointed out the victim to them and then hidden round the corner. In the silence of the evening I could hear their questions and answers distinctly:

  “It doesn’t matter if you won’t give us the other people’s names – we already know them. It’s too late for Koloman but if you don’t spill where the corpisantaro is, you’ll be spilling something else: your life’s blood!” the Greek threatened him.

  “The corpisantaro? I assure you there’s been a mistake! You’ve got the wrong person, I have no idea what you’re asking me, I swear,” whimpered Orsini.

  At a sign from Simonis, Opalinski punched him in the bell
y. Orsini bent double. The Pole gave him another backhander on his right cheek, while Penicek and my assistant gripped him from behind. The Pennal clutched his hair, pulling his head back, while Simonis twisted his arms behind his back. The poor singer, definitely not accustomed to such low-life techniques, moaned as Penicek covered his mouth.

  “Take . . . take all the money I have on me . . . It’s not much, but not so little either! Please don’t kill me.”

  “So we haven’t made ourselves clear,” persisted Simonis. “We want to know about Ugonio, the corpisantaro. Was he supposed to come and see you? Or did you have an appointment somewhere? And what can you tell me about the two hanged men?”

  “What are you talking about? I hate forests. I hardly ever leave the walls. I tell you,” he said in a bewildered, imploring voice, “I don’t even know who –”

  Opalinski gave him two more punches in the stomach.

  “We’re fed up with your meaningless nonsense, do you understand?” whispered the Greek, while Jan went on: “Ugonio: the one dressed in a stinking greatcoat. The relic thief. Don’t tell me you’ve already forgotten . . .”

  Janitzki, just to be certain, smacked him robustly three or four times. Orsini stopped yelling. This earned him a hail of blows on the head and a piece of his own jacket thrust down his throat. The fight was ridiculously unequal.

  “I’ve got a little money on me, take it all,” Orsini offered again.