Veritas (Atto Melani)

by Monaldi, Rita

  I do not know how it was that Cloridia found me and took me back to the convent. I lay on the bed, inert. I saw and heard my wife and my little boy bending over me. Next to them, in the armchair of green brocade by my bed, and reduced to a dejected shadow of his former self, sat Abbot Melani and his nephew. My eyes wandered over their faces, lingered on their mouths. They were all saying something to me. Domenico wanted to shake me; Atto, whimpering, blamed himself for everything and proposed calling a doctor; Cloridia, devastated by the disaster that had befallen me, in which she insisted on finding a touch of heroism, begged for a sign of understanding for her and our child, if not from my lips, at least from my expression.

  And once more I went back in my mind to eleven years earlier in Rome, to the luxurious Villa of the Vessel built in the shape of a craft like the Flying Ship, and abandoned like the Place with No Name. And yet again I thought back to Giovanni Henrico Albicastro, the strange Dutch violinist dressed in black, who had seemed to fly over the battlements of the villa and, playing a Portuguese melody called folia, or folly, and declaiming verses of a poem entitled “The Ship of Fools”, had taught me about life. I would never find out if he and the unknown helmsman of the Flying Ship were the same person, but that mattered little now: it was time to put Albicastro’s warnings to good use.

  In my chest I had started to yell again and had never ceased, but my lips, obedient to those ancient exhortations, had fallen silent. I had become dumb. My wife wept and I wanted to say to her: how can I speak to you with this din in my ears? Can’t you hear it too? Only occasionally did the yelling change to the song of the folia, and then I would moan. I wanted to tell Cloridia that I loved her, but at once my interior yell started up again.

  And so, lying as an invalid on that undesired bed, I once more fell prey to my Furies. I suffered from that silence, which was like a place anyone could enter and be sure of a welcome. I ardently wished that my silence would close around me, as in a burial chamber at the centre of which lay mankind, my tragic hero.

  Ah, if it were possible to let posterity hear the voice of this age! I tormented myself in my sweat-soaked blankets. Then external truth would give the lie to internal truth, and our descendants’ ears would recognise neither one: that is how time makes essence unrecognisable and prepares people to condone the greatest crime ever committed under the sun and under the stars.

  Only in the archive of God is essence safe. No, it is not for your death, all my friends, fallen in war and in peace, those who died yesterday, today and tomorrow, but for what you have lived through, that God will wreak his vengeance on those who inflicted it on you. God will turn them into shadows, the shadows they are within, shadows that have mendaciously clothed themselves with the guise of real men. He will strip them of their flesh, in which they conceal their own empty souls. He will provide bodies only for the thoughts produced from their stupidity, for the feelings of their wickedness, for the tremendous rhythm of their nullity, and he will make them move, like marionettes, on the Day of Judgement, so that the righteous may see what perished under His Hand.

  I had embarked on the long road of silence in anticipation of the day when, as Albicastro had taught me, “the bow will be drawn”. But the Dutch violinist, eleven years earlier, had also warned me: it is not in this world that the bow will be drawn. And Christ Himself has admonished us: “My kingdom is not of this world.”

  While waiting for the Kingdom of God, where should I take shelter? Albicastro, the Vessel, the Place with No Name: it was as if my adventures alongside Atto were coming together to form a single great design, the key to which would be found during these very days. Life, which had amazed me and taught me much, and before which I had always regarded myself as an empty vessel, receiving and giving nothing back except greater fullness; that life of mine now seemed to fold in on itself, to return to old themes, teachings I had already heard, almost as if it did not intend to teach me any new things. Why?

  Day the Tenth

  SATURDAY, 18TH APRIL 1711

  I was in bed, immersed in my new silent world. I had just heard various items of news from Cloridia: at dawn the previous day the sun had risen more scarlet than ever, almost as if it were announcing that Joseph’s last drop of blood was about to be shed. The Viennese had been right to consider this phenomenon an ill omen. Special emissaries had been sent to the Diet of Regensburg to announce the Emperor’s death to all the prince-electors. The inevitable pamphlets with obituaries had appeared in abundance, especially in Italian:

  Nel Fior degli Anni, ed in April fiorito

  Il Maggior de’ tuoi Figli, AUGUSTA, muore:

  Saggio fù nella Reggia, in Campo ardito,

  Fù de Guerrieri, e de’ Monarchi il Fiore.

  Lagrima Austria, e nel Dominio Avito . . .16

  Reading these was unbearable for me. I had quite other things to think of: the Grand Dauphin, son of His Majesty the Most Christian King of France, had died. The news had reached Vienna the previous day. Today my wife had brought me the pamphlets, which were full of details.

  The Dauphin had died without communion or confession, and the Archbishop of Paris had even forgotten to have the church bells tolled. But what was even more surprising was that one of the doctors, Monsieur de Fagon, had assured the King that the Dauphin was in no danger. The very night he died, Monsieur de Boudin, his first doctor, had been to see the King during dinner to tell him that his son’s illness was taking its normal course and that he was getting better by the day. But just half an hour later he had come back to tell him that the fever had returned with extraordinary violence, and there were fears for his life. The King had at once risen from the table and run to the Dauphin’s chamber, to find him already dying and unconscious. He had not had time to make his confession, having only just had extreme unction. However, as he had confessed and taken communion on Easter Saturday, the King confined himself to censuring the doctors for their ignorance, in not recognising and foreseeing the vicissitudes that this illness was subject to.

  The doctors said in their defence that the Dauphin had died after suffocating during an apopleptic fit. His body was so ravaged that the court surgeons did not wish to open it for fear of dying from the operation, since the innards and the heart were supposed to be taken to Val de Grâce. And the smell was so terrible in the room where he had died that the body had to be taken to St Denis two days later with no funeral ceremony, in a lead sarcophagus carried by a simple carriage. Two Capuchin monks were supposed to travel with it but they were unable to bear the great stench from the body, even though the sarcophagus was closed and fully lined with lead.

  The Grand Dauphin was greatly loved by the good and peace-loving French people, so that the streets of Paris were filled with people weeping, from the humblest to the gravest. They knew that with his death France had lost a great opportunity to live in peace at last.

  Now that it was all over, I clearly saw not only my own failure, but that of Atto as well. His plan (to force the Empire to put an end to the war) had been totally swept away by events.

  He had succeeded in just one mission: to get Cloridia to meet Camilla, her sister.

  Two days earlier, in the buttery, Cloridia had explained everything to me, and each piece of the mosaic had finally slipped into place. My wife had begun by telling me about her mother, the Turkish mother she had always been so reluctant to talk of until then. She had been the daughter of a janissary doctor, she said, and had grown up in Constantinople. From her father Cloridia’s mother had learned the rudiments of an ancient oriental medical art which treated people with spelt. During a voyage, however, when barely adolescent, the girl had been captured by pirates and sold as a slave.

  There then followed a part of the tale that I had heard. As I already knew, Cloridia’s mother had been bought by the Odescalchi family, the moneylenders for whom my late father-in-law had worked, and the sixteen-year-old Turkish girl had given birth to my wife. When Cloridia was twelve, her mother had been sold again and C
loridia herself kidnapped and taken to Holland.

  Here began the part of the story I did not yet know. Now that I was lying in bed and was surrounded by so much death, I asked my wife in gestures to repeat the story to me, the only one with a happy ending, and so provide my cogitations with some temporary comfort far removed from the fury of tragic events.

  Cloridia held my hand, her beautiful face dissolved in tears, and while waiting for yet another doctor she agreed to tell it over again. Three doctors had already been, and had declared that I was in perfect health. My voice would probably (but not “certainly”) come back, they said confidently.

  The Odescalchis, Cloridia lovingly recounted all over again, stroking my head, had sold her mother to Collonitz, the cardinal who had been one of the heroes of the siege of Vienna.

  From him she had had another daughter in 1682. Collonitz had had her raised discreetly by his Spanish lieutenant, Gerolamo Giudici, also ceding the mother to him. Giudici had kept both of them in service in his house, where the mother had transmitted to the daughter her medical skills and her perfect knowledge of Turkish as well as Italian. When the girl was thirteen years old, in 1695, she already had a respectable education, especially in music. She played, even composed, but above all sang: the young, hot-blooded King of the Romans saw her performing and became infatuated with her. She seemed to return his love. So Collonitz, wishing to guarantee her safety, baptised her personally in the church of St Ursula on the Johannesgasse, and through Giudici had her sent to the convent of Porta Coeli.

  It was, in short, the story of the young Turkish girl rejected by the nuns of the convent, which Camilla herself had told us a few days earlier.

  The sisters had protested against the arrival of the Ottoman girl: they were all schoolgirls of noble birth, while the new arrival was a slave. Afraid of being locked away (another convent might always accept her), the girl had fled. No one knew where she had gone or with whom.

  “She had fled with her music-teacher, Franz de’ Rossi,” my wife explained to me.

  Joseph’s musician, who was also Luigi Rossi’s nephew, gave her the name of Camilla, like her Roman cousin in Trastevere, whom Cloridia also remembered.

  “Our mother had called her Maria,” said Cloridia, smiling and wiping the silent tears that wet my pillow.

  I was not moved by this story, whose stirring vividness was almost outrageous when seen against the unnatural death of the Emperor, of the Grand Dauphin, of Simonis and his friends. I was crying for the opposite reason: the refuge that I sought in Cloridia’s story, I was unable to find. Her consolation at having finally found a grave where she could mourn her mother did not soothe my despair; her joy at having discovered the blood of her blood in Camilla did not console me for the blood that had been shed.

  I thought with sombre dejection that in almost thirty years of marriage Cloridia had never been wrong in her assessments: every time I was lost in doubt, she saw everything clearly and gave me the correct advice. But now she had actually believed that the dervish wished to contribute to the recovery of the Emperor, thus dragging herself and me into a fatal mistake. She, like Atto, had been vanquished by the new times. And I realised now that nothing, not even my sweet and wise wife, could offer me any relief from the sensation of hopeless slaughter that had overwhelmed my spirit.

  While I observed her thus through my tears, Cloridia proceeded all unawares with her story. Franz and Camilla had got married, and from this point we had already heard the whole story from the Chormaisterin. When the War of the Spanish Succession broke out, they had returned to Vienna, where unfortunately they found that Camilla’s mother (and Cloridia’s) had died. Franz went back into Joseph’s service, and with him his wife. However, the young King of the Romans did not recognise the Turkish slave he had once been infatuated with. A year later Franz died.

  Joseph, even without recognising her, felt newly attracted to Camilla, so much so that he bestowed on her (as we already knew from Gaetano Orsini) his friendship and confidence. In response to Joseph’s feelings, the young woman composed an oratorio for him once a year for four years in a row, but refused all payment, a mystery that had aroused my suspicions.

  Camilla had now explained this: she had been afraid that if her name ended up in the hands of those in charge of making payments from Joseph’s private coffers or from the funds of the court employees, they would ask her questions about her identity. With the Viennese mania for bureaucratic precision, sooner or later they would find out who she really was.

  And so she preferred to support herself by travelling around the villages of Austria and working as a healer with the spelt-based medicine she had learned from her mother, which fortunately derived from the same ancient tradition that had inspired the holy abbess Hildegard of Bingen centuries earlier. This allowed Camilla to proclaim herself a disciple of Hildegard, concealing her Eastern origins. She could not practise in Vienna, since the Examiniert und Approbiert, or university licence, was required. In addition, Cardinal Collonitz remained alive until 1707, so it was better not to show herself too much in the Caesarean city.

  At the end of the previous year, 1710, Joseph had asked her to settle in the capital permanently because he needed her advice. Instead of agreeing to be paid she told him that she no longer felt able to compose and asked permission to enter a convent. His Majesty placed her in Porta Coeli, opposite the young Countess Pálffy. Eugene of Savoy had managed to set the Countess up in Strassoldo House, close to his own palace, so that he could make use of her to keep tabs on Joseph.

  When the Emperor asked her to arrange an oratorio in honour of the Papal Nuncio, she chose, as I already knew, the last one she had composed, Sant’ Alessio. What I did not know as yet was that this oratorio had a special meaning. Camilla had portrayed herself in it: like Alessio, she had returned without anyone recognising her. Who could say whether Camilla – just like Alessio, who is recognised by his parents and his betrothed only on the point of death – had revealed herself to Joseph in their last encounter? Cloridia told me that her sister had preferred not to say anything to her; she prayed night and day to overcome her despair.

  The young girls portrayed in the heart-shaped pendant were therefore not my daughters, but Cloridia and Camilla as children. The necklace had belonged to their mother – it was one way for her to fill the void, both daughters having been prematurely snatched from her – and, after her death, it had remained in the home of Girolamo Giudici, Collonitz’s lieutenant.

  The previous day, when Atto, Simonis and I had still not returned from the Place with No Name, Cloridia, in her alarm, had turned to the Chormaisterin. Together they had at once set out from the convent towards Neugebäu by cart, and then, having realised from afar that something strange was going on, Camilla had suggested taking shelter in the buttery that the nuns of Porta Coeli owned nearby. On the journey, fearing some intrigue of Abbot Melani’s, Cloridia had finally made up her mind to force open the little chest that he had entrusted me with, on condition that I should not open it before his departure, and which had remained in her hands. And there she had found what she would never have expected: her own portrait as a child, alongside another child that Camilla instantly recognised as herself. At that point the Chormaisterin had confessed everything. She already knew the whole story: thanks to Atto, of course.

  Here my wife’s tale ended. After asking her to repeat it to me four times, I let her go. The silence I fell back into dried my tears and left room for clearer meditation. Everything slipped gradually into place. The background to Atto’s and Camilla’s acquaintance, for example.

  In Paris, in September 1700, Camilla had told Abbot Melani her own story and that of her mother. Knowing about my wife’s past, Atto had realised that the future Chormaisterin and Cloridia could not but be daughters of the same mother. He had revealed his intuition to Camilla, but had pretended to have no idea where to find Cloridia . . . whereas he had in fact just returned from Rome, where for ten days he had met my consort al
most daily.

  As usual, Melani was looking out for his own interests. He did not want Franz de’ Rossi and Camilla to go to Rome, as they would certainly have done if they had heard that Camilla’s sister was there. After the intrigues in which he had deceived and exploited me, he certainly did not want Cloridia telling her sister all his misdeeds. Atto would much rather that Franz and Camilla went back to Vienna, where they could be very useful to him, since the war for the Spanish succession was about to break out. It had not been difficult to find the arguments to persuade them to remain in the Empire: as Camilla had reported, he had told them that Vienna was the real centre of Italian music, the papacy being in decline, France impoverished by the crazy expenses of battles and ballets, and the golden age of Cardinal Mazarin long over.

  He had backed up his arguments with a white lie: he had said that he was indebted to me and Cloridia (true), and that for this reason he was trying to trace us (false, he knew perfectly well where to find us: he had just abandoned us at Villa Spada). Finally he had promised Camilla that he would inform her of any progress in his search. In this way he had found a pretext to remain in contact with Camilla and Franz, in case he should need some favour in Vienna.