Veritas (Atto Melani)

by Monaldi, Rita

  And this was yet another of the various reasons that had driven Atto finally to settle his debt, making the bequest to me through a notary in Vienna: he wanted to put an end to the separation between the two sisters once and for all, and make Camilla meet Cloridia. However, he had interposed another difficulty: he did not want the Chormaisterin to reveal herself to my wife before Atto himself had left Vienna. “I don’t want to be thanked,” he had said to Camilla with false modesty. The reason was very different: he feared my wife’s rage, once she discovered that for eleven years Atto had kept them apart.

  The old Abbot had hoped to depart from Vienna before the revelation. But events had prevented him from secretly setting off and abandoning us, as he had done in Rome eleven years ago, and twenty-eight years earlier, when I had first met him. At any other moment I would have assailed him with a barrage of accusations, questions and reprimands; but not now. Even if I wished to, without the gift of speech I could not. It was better this way: Cloridia, touched by the old castrato’s flimsy subterfuges, had readily forgiven him.

  Cloridia’s account also dispelled the last cloud that hung over Atto. We now knew the meaning of the phrase I had heard the Armenian say to Melani, that the house servants had “sold their master’s heart”: it simply meant that, via the Armenian, Atto had commissioned the theft of the heart-shaped pendant at great expense! It had nothing to do with the Emperor, or with the Agha’s Armenians.

  I laughed wryly to myself at the tangled web that had had me going round in round in circles, amid deliberately created red herrings and misleading clues, while behind my back the whole world was about to be turned upside down: earth would become water, water earth and the sky fire.

  Finally the sound that deadened all thoughts for me faded away and I heard no more than a distant echo. I dozed off.

  When I re-awoke I found Atto sitting in an armchair by my bed. Our destinies were now more closely linked than ever. As Vienna had nothing more to offer us, Atto would take us back with him to Paris. Just a few years earlier he would never have made so generous an offer, but now he had come to the end of his life and intended to die in God’s grace and so was happy to do so. He had persuaded Cloridia to accept the offer: he would pay us handsomely to enter his service, and he would see to it that our son received a suitable education.

  “I’m sure that I’ll soon manage to persuade the Most Christian King to let me go back to Pistoia; then you and your family will come with me,” he had announced.

  I had not seen Camilla again. Where had she ended up? I looked at Cloridia and I caressed her damp cheeks, unable to console her. She had found a sister again, flesh of her flesh. But she had lost the husband she knew. She now had another one; less satisfying, less cheerful, less able to show his love for her, but highly determined. I already felt within me a growing desire to take up a sword, a very special sword. Soon the time would come.

  While the thoughts and reconstructions of the recent past filled my brain, Vienna plunged into sadness. If Joseph had still been alive, that Saturday it would have been the turn for us artisans and traders, with our respective apprentices, to recite the prayer of the Forty Hours. A very different ceremony awaited us: instead of this oration, we would queue up to go and honour his dead body. We had heard it from the sisters of Porta Coeli: the poor mangled body of His Caesarean Majesty, embalmed by the court chirurgeons, lay ready for the funeral wake on a bier in that part of the royal palace called Ritterstube, or Loggia of the Cavaliers. That evening the wake would be inaugurated, but only for the members of the high nobility, who every hour throughout the night and the next few days would follow one another two by two in paying their last respects to their dead Ceasar. From the next day the body would be displayed to the people as well, who would swarm into the Loggia of the Cavaliers and would be able to keep watch over the bier from the four altars erected for the occasion until the evening of 20th April, when the exequies would be held.

  And at last I learned where Camilla had ended up. Every day between the hours of ten and eleven and eighteen and nineteen the court musicians would sing Psalm 50 in Latin before the imperial corpse. By express order of Joseph, who in full possession of his faculties had arranged everything before the end, the exequies would be conducted by the Chormaisterin.

  At Atto’s request, Camilla had agreed to take him with her and she had just come back to pick him up. While the Abbot prepared to take his leave of me I made my resistance clear: how could I fail to attend this last appointment with the Emperor I had seen die? I got out of bed, shaking off Cloridia’s amorous embrace, put on my best clothes and, rejecting my wife’s warnings with dumb obstinacy, I joined the Chormaisterin and Abbot Melani.

  While we were waiting for Camilla to come back with the carriage (he did not want to walk even a few paces), Atto forestalled the question I would have liked to ask him, and which he had seen in my eyes:

  “No, there is no risk in my showing myself. The plan of those damned souls has succeeded, the Emperor is dead. And after a state murder, the conspirators – killers and hirers – always disappear. The system withdraws into itself; some go away, like Eugene, others remain in hiding to monitor the situation, but the general rule is: for two to four days do not act in any way, do nothing at all. They will see that we go and watch over the body, but they will not intervene. They know that we can no longer do anything.”

  In the Loggia of the Cavaliers, which was decked out for mourning and illuminated by countless candles, archers and trabants mounted guard over the funeral bier. It was placed on three steps and ornamented with stuccos in burnished gold. Above it hung a baldachin in black velvet with silk fringes.

  His Caesarean Majesty was perfect. He lay just where he had so often received visits and honours, and presided over numerous events and ceremonies during his brief life. His clothing and cloak were in black silk and lacework of the same colour. On his head was a tawny wig and a black hat, by his side a dagger and around his neck a small emblem of the Golden Fleece. The sarcophagus was spangled with crimson velvet and also ornamented with stuccos in burnished gold. His head lay on a double cushion. The embalmer had worked well. I was struck by the absence of smallpox pimples on his face: the result of his skill or a sign of foul play?

  In front of the Emperor a large silver crucifix bestowed its blessed protection. To the side was a holy water sprinkler. On the right were the Caesarean insignia: the crown, the Imperial Orb, the sceptre and the Golden Fleece on a golden cushion; on the left the crowns of the kingdoms of Hungary and Bohemia. Not far off, covered with black taffeta, were an urn and a silver shrine: in accordance with the customs of the House of Habsburg, one contained the heart and tongue of Joseph, the other his brain, eyes and internal organs. On two chaises longues draped in black sat the court chaplain and four barefoot Augustinian friars, who murmured the litanies for the dead.

  Then, from afar, I saw them again. They were all there: the castrato Gaetano Orsini (still with some marks of bruising), Landina, the soprano wife of the theorbist Francesco Conti, and the others. I did not let myself be seen: how could I greet them, voiceless as I was? I observed them, their wan faces and lost expressions. They had had to bid farewell to the Sant’ Alessio; the planned performance of the oratorio in honour of the Nuncio had obviously been cancelled. What would become of them, now that their beloved Joseph was dead, now that their young benefactor, who had so greatly expanded the musical staff of the Caesarean chapel, was no more? Would his brother Charles, when he returned from Barcelona to sit on the long-desired imperial throne, keep them where they were or sack the lot of them?

  Vinzenz Rossi came up to us. He exchanged signs of fraternal consolation with Camilla, and while the Chormaisterin prepared to direct the chorus of musicians, he invited us to sit in a corner, where we would be able to stay until the end of the choral performance. I knew Psalm 50 and, while the musicians sang in Latin, I repeated the words mentally in my own language:

  Purge me with hyssop, and I sha
ll be clean:

  Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.

  Make me to hear joy and gladness;

  that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice.

  So it was that the chorus of universal mourning was all one with the void that possessed me. The grief of every imperial subject entered me, passing through my body drop by drop, and my body was a vague spark of sadness, borne on the wind of that song of imploring despair. Nonetheless, my thoughts did not soften. While all around me subdued weeping, sniffling noses and sobs shook the air, I remained cold and impenetrable like a grey chip of slate. The impassive lens of my suffering focused on every event, and like a skilful surgeon I subjected it to anatomical inspection, dissecting it with the scalpel of reason.

  Sitting next to Atto on an uncomfortable velvet seat, I continued to reflect, measuring the present with the yardstick of the past.

  At the time of our first meeting, in September 1683, Abbot Melani had come to Rome to carry out the secret mission that the King of France had entrusted him with. It was not till later that he had had to carry out his own investigation, because he discovered that no one had explained to him either the real nature of, or the reasons for, his mission.

  When we met again in 1700, Atto had been mysteriously stabbed in the arm on his arrival in Rome, and for this reason he had had to undertake a series of enquiries to find out who was threatening him. But actually, on that occasion too, he had a secret mission to carry out for the Sun King, and from the beginning he knew perfectly well what steps to take: to forge a will, with the help of his conspiratorial friend Maria Mancini; to stage a fake quarrel with Cardinal Albani, the future Pope, and so on, with the diabolic skills he was accustomed to employing.

  This time, in Vienna in April 1711, things had gone very differently. The Abbot had come to the Caesarean city to urge Eugene of Savoy to conclude the war. He knew from the very beginning what he had to do (hand over the forged letter to the Emperor), but on account of Joseph’s illness his attempts had soon proved futile, and in the end they had been swept away by the obscure manoeuvres of someone much more powerful than Atto, but without a face. Now we knew that it was a question of an entire system, and not a single person.

  This was the descending parabola of Abbot Melani, as he himself had fully understood. After reaching the heights of his diplomatic career in that warm Roman summer eleven years earlier, he was now in steep decline. It was a new age. Atto was just a little old man, a memory of the past.

  These were not the only comparisons I made between past and present. Joseph the Victorious was dead, but his wake pointed back to another sad day: the death of Maximilian the Mysterious. There were so many things, and great things at that, the two unfortunate emperors had in common!

  They had both gone into battle leading their armies in person, and had been tolerant towards the followers of Luther. They were forever bound to the Place with No Name: Maximilian for having created it, Joseph for having desired its restoration, rendered impossible, alas, by his death. Schönbrunn, too, had been founded by Maximilian, and extended mostly by Joseph. They were both polyglots, and intellectually more gifted than most of their predecessors and successors.

  And yet all this glory had ended in nothing: Maximilian had soon been forgotten, and the same thing (I am prepared to bet) will happen to Joseph, if the dark forces that lead Ciezeber-Palatine are not halted.

  They both died prematurely of illness, and were both subjected to medical treatments that were suspicious, to say the very least. Both, finally, were succeeded by their brother, and not by their son. Oh, how easy for even the most innocent spirit, to see in these twin destinies the stamp of a single murderous will!

  It was not the first time that I had observed the murder of a distinguished person at close quarters. Twenty-eight years earlier I had witnessed the death of Nicholas Fouquet – the Most Christian King’s Superintendent of Finances – the inevitable conclusion of a life fully exposed to calumny and hatred. Once he had been removed, his envied castle at Vaux-le-Vicomte was plundered and stripped, and thus abandoned, like the Place with No Name.

  The Loggia of Cavaliers now resounded with the sombre chorus of musicians, and I made their invocation my own:

  Create in me a clean heart, O God;

  and renew a right spirit within me.

  Oh, Joseph the Victorious! Your death itself already reveals and lays bare the culprit. The assassination of the hero of Landau could never have been the work of one of your peers. If the Sun King, even when it would have been easy for him, refused to have you kidnapped or killed in battle, how could he have assassinated you so furtively? It is low people that murdered you: people low in spirit. Your death is the end of an era: the era of the great kings, of great personages, when sovereigns did not dare to knock off another king’s head, as Abbot Melani taught me when I met him in Rome. We are in another century. Dark forces are on the rise, plots are stirred up by people with no faces or names, and above all no rules.

  The choir conducted by Camilla, rendered sublime by the heavenly voices of Orsini and Landina, exhorted us to trust in the infinite wisdom of God:

  Then will I teach transgressors Thy ways;

  And sinners shall be converted unto thee.

  I watched Atto pray humbly, every so often casting a glance at the body of the young Caesar, stretching his wrinkled neck to do so. He had been the first to understand the new times. The people who may have been behind Joseph’s death, who at first had seemed to rule themselves out one by one, are all part of this play-acting. The new masters are undoubtedly in charge, the lords of the Last Days of Mankind. But all the others, like the lions I had seen sinking their teeth into the carcase of the dying ox at Neugebäu, have found their profit in this death as well. Nothing is missing. England and Holland, the instigators, have prevented the Empire from becoming too powerful, upsetting the equilibrium between the European powers. Then there are the accomplices: the Jesuits have taken their vengeance on the only Emperor they have not educated and who had them banished; his brother Charles, who will now be emperor, has crowned his hatred for his elder brother; the ministers of the old guard, whom Joseph had driven out or reduced to obedience, are sneering with satisfaction; and finally Eugene of Savoy, or Madame l’Ancienne, whatever one wants to call him, has been avenged for the humiliation of Landau, when that little boy Joseph dared to steal the limelight from the greatest invert-general of all ages. Finally, the hired killers: Islam, as ever, has been manipulated to do the dirty work of some faction of the West.

  So who was responsible? All of them. They all armed a crazy dervish with a hundred names: Palatine, or Ammon, or Ciezeber, who is perhaps seven hundred years old. Or perhaps it’s the opposite: it is the dervish, and those who like him have many names but no surname, who have manoeuvred England, Holland, the Jesuits, the ministers and even Eugene and Charles, to get the infamous deed carried out.

  It was stifling in the mortuary chapel; beads of sweat trickled from people’s wigs and all around people gasped with the heat.

  Perhaps Joseph the Victorious had wanted to restore the Place with No Name, I thought, because he felt he was strong enough not to have to care about the forces still living that had devoured Neugebäu and Maximilian. And instead . . .

  I looked at Atto again. He looked back at me and, for an instant, it was as if his eyeballs spoke to me sadly. It was undoubtedly a mere dream, brought about by the sepulchral atmosphere of the place and time:

  “Impress Joseph’s wan face into your memory, boy. You will not see any more sovereigns like that. Kings in future will be just limp puppets in the hands of networks of people with no leaders, of headless monsters that will listen to nobody who is not already one of them. But anyone who enters their circles is a prisoner. There will come a day when the people will go down into the streets from who knows where, as they did during the Fronde on the day of the mysterious barricades, when nothingness vomited forth hosts of hotheads from all sides, ready to des
troy everything, all authority, every sacred symbol, every human boundary. As in Prague, during the funeral of Maximilian II. But it will not last for just one day, or three days. No, there will come a time when terror will wander the streets naked, armed with axes and scythes, for years and years, and it will cut the tongue of truth and the heads of the just. They will call it Liberty, Equality and Fraternity: however, it will be nothing but organised slaughter and disguised tyranny.”

  I took my eyes off Atto’s. A group of nuns had entered the mortuary chamber, and they were reciting a rosary. Then Atto and I looked at each other again.

  “You will hear no more teachings from me. Now that you know, you will not need anything else to understand the events of the world to come. All the rest – the future political alliances, the future wars, the future financial crises – all of it counterfeit. Everything will have been decided beforehand by the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Joseph’s assassins.”

  And then I thought back almost thirty years to when my late father-in-law had inveighed against the marriages between relatives among the monarchs of all lands, the eternal incest among the ruling houses. With a sudden flash in his eyes, Atto told me that matters were very different now:

  “From now on the matrimonial alliances, relationships and consanguinity will be kept secret – indeed, top secret. Nothing will be done in the light of day anymore, to prevent anyone from pointing out where truth is, to have them branded as madmen should they do so.”