Veritas (Atto Melani)

by Monaldi, Rita

  “But . . . these are portraits of our girls!” were the first words I managed to utter.

  I had come to myself just a few moments earlier on a couch next to the fireplace. When I opened my eyes I was at once seized with an attack of vertigo: cruel, stabbing pains tormented my whole body. Cloridia had taken something from a little box and put it into my hand. I looked. It was a chain, from which hung a pendant in gold filigree, in the shape of a heart. It opened up. Inside there were the miniatures of two charming girls’ faces: my daughters when small! What were these portraits I had never seen before? Was this another of my dreams?

  “No, love. They’re not the girls. Not exactly,” smiled my wife.

  Then, as my thoughts ordered themselves with difficulty and my whole being was convulsed with inward turmoil, Cloridia told me the whole story.

  When it was all clear, I turned my head in search of Abbot Melani. Sitting by the fire, he was wrapped from head to toe in a woollen blanket, and was talking wearily but intensely with Camilla. Our eyes met. It should have been a happy moment, that was how he had imagined it; but we could not enjoy it, not now.

  The horse pulling the buggy raced swiftly through the night on the way home, back to Vienna. Abbot Melani groaned at each jolt of the wheels. We had to be quick, very quick. We had to stop the hand that was raised against the Emperor. But how? In the first place, how would we enter the Hofburg?

  I could not think, except with immense effort. Of all that I had lived through in the previous hours, only one thing had remained with me: a sound. It was the reverberation of the yelling of the forty thousand of Kasim. It was no longer present, but its roar still lived within me, like a foot that has left its print, and the vibration in my guts became deafening at times. I found it hard to discern sounds, even my own voice. I was not deaf, but deafened.

  Nonetheless, once we reached Porta Coeli, even before getting out we heard a resounding rumble of carriage wheels. A two-horse carriage had pulled up abruptly in front of us. It bore the imperial coat of arms. Two footmen got out bearing torches.

  “Open up, quickly!” they shouted, knocking insistently at the door of the convent.

  “Are you looking for me?” asked Camilla, who had already grasped the situation, approaching the door. “I’m the Chormaisterin.”

  “Is it you? Then hurry up,” one of them answered, thrusting an envelope with the Caesarean seal at her, which she opened at once.

  “It’s His Majesty,” Camilla informed us with, an anxious quiver in her voice, after reading the note. “He’s summoning me. At once.”

  This was the answer to our prayers: I would enter the Hofburg in Camilla’s wake; with her I would get right to the Emperor. We left Cloridia and Atto at the convent.

  The Caesarean palace stood out against the gloom, still immersed in the darkness of the night that had decided the fate of the world. We knocked at a side door. Despite the hour, it was opened at once. I guessed that Camilla must have made frequent and confidential use of that entrance, since the servant who opened up did not protest or ask who we were. They made us wait in a small room, and a few minutes later a footman with a sleepy face arrived. At once he and Camilla embraced and kissed fraternally.

  “How is he?” asked the Chormaisterin.

  He answered with a serious gaze, saying not a word.

  “Let me introduce Vinzenz Rossi, a cousin of my late husband,” Camilla said then. “He’ll get us what we need.”

  Vinzenz came back a moment later with a page’s costume: it was just my size. I changed into it and we set off along the corridors, guided by the footman and the dim light of his candle.

  In addition to the darkness that filled the rooms of the Hofburg, and which also enveloped my tired limbs and exhausted spirit, I recall only an endless series of corridors, staircases and then more corridors. Finally a large antechamber, and then another one. A silent and velvety bustle of more footmen, doctors and priests. Nervousness, lowered eyes, a sensation of impotent expectancy. I saw a woman, shaken by suppressed sobs, half covered by a veil, walking away accompanied by two maidens and supported by someone whom I heard addressed as “Lord Count of Paar”. Was this the Empress? I did not dare ask. We were allowed to proceed quickly, with discretion but no subterfuge: all the service staff seemed to recognise Camilla.

  Finally the last great door opened and we entered.

  The Chormaisterin talked in a subdued and even voice. Outlined by the light of a candle holder set behind him, I could just glimpse the haggard profile of the invalid breathing to the rhythm of agony.

  When Camilla had approached the bed, no one had dared to go up to her and urge caution. Only Joseph had turned to the new arrival, but without the strength to make any sign of greeting.

  The entourage of doctors was made to withdraw to the far side of the room, as did the father-confessor, clutching to his chest the chalice of the Holy Sacrament from which His Caesarean Majesty had just taken communion. They went to join the Apostolic Proto-Notary, who was still holding the oil of extreme unction, which had just been administered in the presence of the Apostolic Nuncio. It was for the Nuncio that Camilla had been working on her Sant’ Alessio; instead, he now found himself bestowing the Pope’s last benediction on the dying Caesar.

  Now Camilla was whispering into the Emperor’s ear; he was simply listening. All around, it was as if the whole room were holding its breath. Camilla could have been infected by the fatal sickness, and yet she knelt at the bedside as if at a child’s cradle. Then she rose, and it seemed to me (I cannot swear it on account of the gloom) that she dared to caress the head of Joseph the Victorious.

  I guessed that I would never know what she had said to him. I was right.

  10.15 of the clock

  Then Roland feels that death is now upon him

  As from his ears his brain comes oozing forth.

  Then Roland feels that he has lost his sight,

  He struggles to his feet with all his force;

  The colour now has vanished from his face.

  Then Roland feels that death is clutching at him,

  It passes from his head down to his heart.

  Then Roland feels his time is fully over,

  With one hand he has struck upon his chest.

  He offers up his right-hand glove to God:

  The Archangel has seized it from his hand.

  Above his arm he keeps his head low-bowed,

  With hands close-joined he’s come now to the end.

  It was over. His Caesarean Majesty, successor of Charlemagne on the throne of the Holy Roman Empire, had handed his glove to the Archangel and given up his soul to the Most High. His suffering was finally over. Fever had consumed him like a burning flame, pain had prostrated him until he fainted, vomiting fits had scraped his bowels. Then the disease had flayed, devoured, and mangled him from within.

  Joseph the Victorious died like the Paladin Roland, defeated by the Infidels in the retreat from Roncesvalles.

  He had remained lucid to the last. Shortly before ten he had had the strength to ask his chaplain to approach with the blessed lamp and had placed his hands on it in the Christian fashion. The chaplain, kneeling by the bed, held the lamp up and also the young palms of Joseph the Victorious, which had no strength left in them. And so, gazing eagerly at that light, His Majesty had listened to the oration for the dying murmured by the father-confessor, who had tottered from the torment of it all and had had to be supported.

  In his last moments His Majesty had been shaken by a violent convulsion: black blood had spilled from his eyes and ears; mucus and bits of brain had come dripping from his nose; derma, tissues, vessels, capillaries and lymphatic ducts had burst under the action of a thousand mines bursting silently. It did not seem to be – it was not – a simple illness: Evil itself, with its wicked arts, had torn the body of Joseph the Victorious asunder, and had taken pleasure in so doing.

  When the Queen Mother, present throughout, approached and knelt to kiss her
son’s now upturned hands, we all knew that it was truly over.

  I hid no longer. Still dressed as a page, amid the crowd of courtiers attending the imperial death in the antechamber, I made my departure unobserved.

  I went down the stairs clutching an extinguished candlestick, just to give my hands something to do. And so I strode on, while my heartbeats, which had paused the instant my king had yielded up his last breath, began throbbing once again, beat after beat, and a few minutes later, they were hammering wildly, piercing my chest like a sharp burning dart. The gasping pendulum of flesh and lymph that vibrated in my chest dug and dug into my bowels and then surged back up, to my very eyes. My swollen eyelids pulsated painfully, and I imagined them full of the same ferruginous humours which I had seen, to my horror, pouring from my young Emperor’s half-closed and contorted eyelids, while his pupils had rolled backwards and the heavens had dissolved in universal weeping.

  I could barely make out where my legs were taking me. I was staggering, and I thought I would not be able to go very far. I dragged myself painfully until I came in sight of the ramparts. It was then that a new impulse took possession of me. I stopped struggling, my thighs became hard and strong, my heart beat regularly: I began to run. I ran with no restraint or aim, and I yelled with all the breath in my body. I hurled the extinguished candle from me, tearing off my wig, tailcoat, cravat and shirt, yelling and shrieking bare-chested, and my jaws throbbed and I wanted to explode in a thousand proclamations of horror. But no one could hear me: I was shouting all alone and running all alone, convinced that blood, instead of tears, was coursing down my cheeks, and I did not bother to dry it, not caring that it might leave a red trail on the pavement. I saw my fresh red blood being joined by the black blood that spurted from the mangled bowels of the Pontevedrin Dànilo Danilovitsch, and my yell merged into that of the forty thousand martyrs of Kasim; I saw the cold, coagulated blood of the Bulgarian Hristo Hadji-Tanjov, and my yell became a whistling blizzard; and then again the black blood of the Tekuphah invoked upon us by the old man in the Armenian coffee house, which had gushed down Atto’s face from the pudenda of the Romanian Dragomir Populescu, severed like the sex of Uranus from which Venus was born; and the sharp poles soaked in the blood of the Hungarian Koloman Szupán from Varasdin, and again the blood that the iron spits had sent spurting from the beetle eyes of the proud Pole Jan Janitzki Opalinski; and finally, the Greek blood of Simonis, Simonis, my friend, my son, blood of my blood, which had quenched the thirst of the panther of the Place with No Name, whose fatal roar had shaken my chest, drowning out the cries from my own innards and merging with the yelling of the forty thousand martyrs.

  The red trail of blood that I imagined marking my progress was now a long trail of death. Thanks to it, I repeated to myself, Cloridia would find me again. My veins were bursting at the thought of all the innocent blood that had been shed, but they also quivered at the notion of other blood, the blood of Judas, cursed in saecula saeculorum, which had flowed in trickles during the ritual in the woods from the wounds of the dervish Ciezeber alias Palatine, the Chaldean or Armenian or Indian traitor, or all these things together. And above all, the unshed blood of Penicek, the foul spawn of Lucifer. On all that blood the sun rose each day, itself tinged with blood soli soli soli, “to the only sun of the earth”, a blood-stained sun, just as my young Emperor had been suffocated in blood, “the only man alone on earth.”

  Then I raised my fists to heaven and proclaimed: let the sky darken, the moon and vermilion sun cease their course, women cover their faces, banquets be suspended, every mouth be rendered dumb, all doors be bolted. It is over! The Emperor is no more. Death and injustice have had their dark triumph.

  The echo of my bloody folly and no other sound came to me from the wreckage of creation: a sad fanfare with which my dead – but also the millions and millions of soldiers who are dead, dying or about to die from this war, the war without end – accuse me of still living. What have you died for? Ah, if only you had known, at the moment of sacrifice, of the profits of war, which increase despite – nay, with – your sacrifice, and grow fat on it! All of you, victors and defeated, have lost the war: it has been won by your murderers, the usurers of meat, of sugar, of alcohol, of flour, of rubber, of wool, of iron, of ink and of arms, who have been compensated a hundred times over for the devaluation of other people’s blood. That is why you have rotted and will rot for centuries and centuries, generations on generations, in mud and water. You will stay alive until they have stolen enough, lied enough, fleeced mankind enough. Then, away with you! Bring on the next one, under the executioner’s axe. They will go on dancing until Ash Wednesday and Lent in this great tragic carnival, in which men have died under the cold eyes of those like Palatine, and the butchers have become philosophers honoris causa.

  And you, the sacrificed, you have not risen up and will not rise up against this plan. You, down there, murdered and cheated! You have supported and will support the freedom and welfare of the strategists, parasites and buffoons, just as you did your own misfortune, your own coercion. They have sold and will sell your skin at the market, but also ours. You that are dead! Why do you not rise again from your ditches? To call this breed to reply, with the contorted faces you had in death, with the mask that your youth was condemned to wear by their diabolically demented scheming. Rise up then, and go out and face them, wake them from sleep with the scream of your agony: they were capable of embracing their women in the night following the day they flayed you. Save us from them, from a peace that is contaminated by their presence.

  Help, slaughtered ones! Help me! So that I shall not have to live among men who ordered hearts to stop beating, mothers to grow old on the tombs of their children. As God is my witness, nothing but a miracle can redress this atrocious affair. Awaken from this rigidity, come forth! May future times listen to you!

  But if it were true, as Atto says, that the ages will no longer listen, would a being above them listen? My Jesus! The tragedy composed of scenes of mankind decomposing – carve this tragedy into my flesh as You did into Your own, so that the Holy Spirit who has pity on victims may heed it, even if it has renounced forever all contact with a human ear. May it receive the fundamental note of this age. The echo of my cruel folly, which makes me equally responsible for these sounds, may it count as Redemption.

  Redemption, redemption. I repeated this and nothing else over and over. I was now half naked, and I no longer had anything to pluck from my chest. So I began to plunge my nails into my arms, my shoulders, my neck, my cheeks hollowed by that cry, my belly and my navel, which had once bound me to the mother I had never known. I ran bare-chested all day, tearing shreds of flesh from myself, from my ears that I might hear no more, from my tongue that I might speak no more, from my eyelids that I might see no more, from my nose that I might breathe no more, and biting my very fingers, that I might touch no more. I ran through fields and craggy gorges, and my single long cry ran through every clod of earth with me. My eyes were open, but I was running blindly. I saw and did not see, I heard and did not hear. At last a distant melody reached me, enveloped me, confused the soles of my feet, and my feet recognised it and wavered in their mad flight and at last danced to its subtle song. Without arresting their march, my soles swivelled freely and my arms followed docilely and also drew broad figures in the air to the sound that (now I recognised it) was a violin, that violin. And then I saw . . . I was at Neugebäu. The cry from my chest gradually died down into the modulation of that old musical motif, which I now called by its name: a Portuguese melody known as folia, or Folly.

  My bare feet now trod the gardens of the Place with No Name, but they were no longer uncultivated and abandoned; graceful blue and gold mosaics decorated them, pure fresh water leaped in a jet from the lovely fountain of alabaster in the middle and blessed everything around it with its freshness. It fell on my shoulders as well, washing my wounds of their coagulated blood.

  It was only then, for the first time, that
I truly saw the Place with No Name. As if my wounds had opened up the Kingdom of the Just to me, my eyes became new and superhuman, and in an explosion of retrospective truth they showed me the true and living face of Maximilian’s creation, the glorious life it had been conceived for, and never attained: the roofs glittering with gold; the garden towers rising capriciously in the Turkish fashion; flower beds and luxuriant bushes teeming with buds; rare plants; trees bearing oranges, lemons and exotic fruits; precious floral creations; generous leaping fountains, whose silvery waters cascaded down onto beds of gleaming inlaid marble; the façade of the mansion decorated with a thousand lintels, sculptures, capitals, all adorned with delicate artefacts in embossed gold; the walls standing proudly with their robust battlements; a great bustle of carriages, servants, labourers, secretaries and footmen, all in the velvet clothes of two hundred years earlier; and finally, in the background, the wild but subdued sound of the animals, while the immense masterpiece of the imagination that was Neugebäu was so consciously harmonious that its bellicose symbols (the towers, battlements and lions) seemed to announce a message of peace, just as its creator, Maximilian the Mysterious, had been a man of peace.

  I sobbed at the thought that this timeless vision was being granted to me only this once. I thought back to Rome, to the Villa of the Vessel, which had lived so long and retained so much of its past life; its walls still full of mottoes, it narrated the splendour of an age that would never return and, almost like a Medusa in reverse, imparted its wisdom to anyone whose eyes should fall on those mottoes even for an instant. But Neugebäu, the Infant with No Name cut down along with the womb that had given birth to it, had never lived its moment. Its day had never come; hatred had aborted it before its time. Only the gardens had been allowed a single brief glimpse of life, but those parts of the Place with No Name that were intended not for nature but for human spirits had awaited life in vain. All that the castle of Neugebäu could tell the visitor or the curious passer-by was: “My kingdom is not of this world.” So what had all my existence been until that moment? What was the meaning of those lives that had been cut down before their prime, the lives of Joseph I and Maximilian II, and – eleven years earlier in the Villa of the Vessel – the unrealised destinies of the Most Christian King and his beloved Maria, and – even earlier, thirty years ago, again in Rome, in the Inn of the Donzello – the martyrdom of Superintendent Fouquet and the hatred that despoiled his mansion at Vaux-le-Vicomte, that great swaggering statement in stone that had lived just one night, that of 17th August 1661? What were they all but Beings and Places with No Name, with no history because they had been deprived of the history that was their right, all of them therefore preludes to Neugebäu? Of what had they spoken to me? Why had they approached me, why had they sought out my poor, obscure life and painfully dazzled it with their mournful effulgence?