I thought back to Albicastro, the strange violinist I had met eleven years earlier during my second adventure with Atto. He too had expounded a similar prophecy to me, and now I understood its full significance: it contained the instructions needed to face this new world.
The Flying Ship, the vessel abandoned by all but still able to fly – with its first mysterious helmsman, who had arrived from Portugal, like the tune that Albicastro was always playing, the folia, and who had been secretly executed – was the heavenly sign that forces contrary to those teachings had been unleashed.
I kept silent. But was it right?
Paris
EVENTS FROM 1711 TO 1713
The journey to Paris was very long, painful and punctuated by innumerable halts. Although assisted by Domenico, Cloridia and myself (now recovered except for the voice), Atto had to travel constantly in a litter.
We had sold my profitable chimney-sweeping business very quickly to a family of Italians. Camilla, with the influence of Porta Coeli to back her, had handled the negotiations brilliantly: nuns, as is well known, are always highly skilled negotiators. I had sent the proceeds from the sale to our two girls in Rome: it was the longed-for dowry.
I would have liked to sell the vineyard with the house in the Josephina as well: I was terrified at the idea of abandoning the property like that, until who knew when. But Cloridia did not agree and had asked her sister for help. So Camilla reassured us that she would keep an eye on it personally. Abbot Melani approved: “What the merchants want to do is strip us of our lands, giving us waste paper in return, which, at their own whim, may turn out to be worth nothing at all from one day to the next. Land has no price, my boy: it feeds us and so makes us free.”
In Paris Atto lived in the Street of the Old Augustinians, in a rented apartment belonging to a certain Monsieur de Montholon. Curious, I thought; we had left the convent of the Augustinians of Porta Coeli to come and live in a street named after the same religious order.
At first I had thought I would be a servant of Atto’s, a footman or something similar. But when I arrived I realised I was not needed at all: the old castrato had a great swarm of house servants. And even though the old housekeeper had retired, and Cloridia had therefore quickly found a place for herself in the Abbot’s house, while our little boy filled his days with study, I could not really see what there was for me to do, without even the gift of speech.
I did not yet know that Atto had some very particular projects in mind – and he had been planning them for some time now.
It was not the first time that he had asked me to go and live with him. He had offered me the chance twenty-eight years earlier, in 1683, but I had refused, outraged by the Abbot’s thousand intrigues and lies.
Now he could finally make his wish come true. In order that I should not feel superfluous he put me in charge of numerous things and gave me a salary worthy of a cardinal’s secretary. I spent most of the time, to tell the truth, just listening to him. He began one day, almost by chance, to tell me about his origins, his infancy and his childhood dreams, more and more confidentially, omitting nothing, not even the terrible day when the barber turned up at his father’s house with the blades that were to castrate him, confining his dreams to one inevitable path.
Very soon Atto was in full spate. He held forth to me day and night: during meals, with his mouth full, after leaving everyone else outside the door, until late at night, when he found it hard to fall asleep and tore me from my conjugal bed to keep him company. Cloridia understood the old castrato’s whims and was patient: she had grown very fond of the now almost totally harmless old man.
Abbot Melani told me everything, absolutely everything: what I did not yet know of him, intrigues and secrets that shocked me, unforgivable sins which he would soon have to account for before the Most High. As he relived that past, sometimes he was overcome by dejection. At other times he seemed resigned to the fact that he must pay the price of the penitent sinner. And so, during the three years I remained with him, the numerous decades of his long life went sweeping before my eyes, until he began to recall the years of his maturity, and then he told me what I already knew, or rather what I thought I knew, stories I had lived through with him and where I thought I had uncovered everything, understood everything, and instead . . .
In other respects, our lives together with the old castrato ran smoothly. We received regular letters from our daughters, who had finally got engaged to good young men, of modest circumstances (in Rome, capital of usury, it could hardly be otherwise), but full of goodwill.
From the very beginning, our stay in Paris was plagued by the continual squabbles between Atto and his relatives. Domenico, as Abbot Melani had told me in advance, was soon sent back to Tuscany. A certain Champigny assiduously visited the house now and acted as secretary: Atto dictated to him all the missives that he sent to his relatives in Italy, so that his nephews and nieces would continue to think that he was irremediably blind. Domenico would not betray him: he knew that a substantial bequest awaited him by way of reward.
It was a continual tug of war, not unlike a squabble among children. In June the Abbot vainly rebuked his relatives for not having sent him the candied oranges, as if Paris were not full of Italian patisserie shops! Then he went on to complain about the little wood he owned in Tuscany, which was going to rack and ruin from neglect. In August the Abbot finally wrote to his relatives that he knew perfectly well how much money entered the Melani household, because when Domenico had obtained the post of secretary of the Council of Siena, he had been sent a note from Florence of all the emoluments and honours the household enjoyed. After this blow, his nephews and nieces, in an attempt to appease him, promised to send him a fellow villager with a sausage and mortadella of excellent quality, not like the hard, peppery one that they had sent him before he set out for Vienna.
But it was not only sorrows that came from Tuscany. His lands, indeed his country house itself, were being visited at that time by the Connestabilessa Maria Mancina, his old and adored friend, the one whom I myself had seen intriguing with Atto eleven years earlier in Rome, and who had changed the destiny of Europe.
When letters came from the Connestabilessa, all clouds would vanish from Atto’s face. He would at once make plans to travel to Versailles for an audience with His Majesty, to ask permission to join Maria in his Pistoia.
Every year it was the same story: when the warm weather came, Maria would arrive at Atto’s Tuscan villa. The old castrato would have the carriage prepared and would drive off to ask the King for permission to return to Italy. After which, at every refusal, he would chafe miserably. But between one attempt and another, the Abbot, despite the heat, would travel back and forth from Versailles to Paris unstintingly, almost like a young man, such was the force that drove his limbs when he thought of his Connestabilessa, the only woman the old castrato had ever loved in his life. And to say that they had not seen one another for fifty years.
The Grand Duke also continued to torment him with requests to assist his favourites. In autumn that year Atto had a fall in his bedroom, from which he hardly ever emerged for the whole winter, despite feeling in good health. The candied oranges, the high-quality mortadella and sausage, to which he had added a request for manteca cheese and orange-flower sweets, had still not arrived. Meanwhile he sent emissaries to Pistoia to report on the condition of his house and the appearance of his little nephew. Their task was also to get the longed-for delicacies (the Abbot would not give up) and to announce to his nephews and nieces that if the war ended in spring they would see him arrive in Pistoia, where he would stay for a whole year.
But a year later, in March 1712, peace had not come yet, and I was surprised to hear from the Abbot’s own mouth words of bitter repentance at having engineered, twelve years earlier, the election of Pope Albani. He now missed his late friend, Cardinal Buonvisi, so much so that he had copies made of some of his letters which he had already sent to Pistoia so that they might be p
reserved for posterity.
“If he had been pope,” he whined, “Tuscany would not have been oppressed by the Alemanni, and peace would have been made years ago. But since God wished to castigate the Christian world, he called that great man to himself two months before the election of the reigning pontiff, because if he had been alive and healthy, he would have become pope and not Albani, and I might have ended my days in Rome and not in France!”
As announced by Palatine, the war continued to rage and the people to get poorer, and so it would go on until Europe, totally destroyed, would be at the mercy of the peace that had been decided and settled by the merchants. The Abbot also ended up at their mercy: the payment of his pensions was suspended, both those of the King and those of the Hôtel de Ville, and in order to pay the thousand francs of monthly rent Atto had to start drawing on his savings.
But this was not possible for everyone. Poverty was so widespread that even people recommended by the Connestabilessa ended up behaving like common cheats. A certain Monsieur Jamal, for example, suddenly set off from Paris and changed his name so as not to pay the Abbot back the two hundred francs he had borrowed. Fortunately Madame Colonna intervened at once to settle the debt.
Amidst these tribulations, the longed-for candied oranges, finally sent by his nephews and nieces, got stolen on the journey.
Atto’s only consolation was to learn from the letters of the Most Serene Grand Duke that his new-born great-nephew, for whom the Grand Duke had acted as godfather, had greatly pleased the Connestabilessa, reminding her of one of the little stucco putti that they make in Lucca. And as soon as he read news of Maria Mancini, Atto was off at the first light of dawn to beg the King yet again to let him return to Pistoia.
In 1713 Atto had two great-nephews, but his health would now not allow him to walk two paces in his room without support and he could no longer even go to mass. Furthermore, Atto was now truly blind. In a moment of inattention he had written to his nephews and nieces that “my final misfortune is I cannot read or write anymore,” which amazed and infuriated his relatives, and the Grand Duke as well, who had believed him blind for years. His friend Monsieur de la Haye, who had recovered his sight at the age of eighty, had given him hope, but no such miracle came about in Atto’s case.
Sensing that the Abbot would not live long, the Grand Duke sent Domenico to him in the summer. Atto was very weak, but still hoped for a miracle that would allow him to return to Pistoia.
In that same year, 1713, France hit rock-bottom: the economy was in such a state that according to Abbot Melani a hundred years of peace would not suffice to pay the King’s debts. All the kingdom’s revenue was tied up, and for this reason it was feared that the accounts of the Hôtel de Ville’s revenue were being falsified. For two whole years pensions had not been paid, even though half the kingdom survived on that income. Atto had now gone though all his cash savings, and did not know how to pay the rent, and the return to Pistoia now took on the meaning of a flight in extremis: fortunately he was still very rich in real estate.
In November 1713 he learned that Maria was still in his house in Pistoia, and hoped that the King would finally set him free. Peace was almost made: Prince Eugene and the Marshal of Villars had met up in Rastatt and it was thought that before Christmas the armistice would be signed. Europe was in ruins. Atto planned to return to Versailles as soon as winter was over, in April, to beg the Most Christian King to let him go back home. Gondi, the Medicis’ secretary, was looking for a house for him in Florence, in Borgo Santo Spirito: as soon as he found a suitable residence he would let him know. Atto, in fact, had no intention of retiring from political life and, heedless of his age, planned to travel between Florence and Pistoia.
He trusted that with the coming of peace the King would finally agree to let him go, and so he wrote to everyone in Pistoia. He could not know that this was to be his last letter to his nephews and nieces.
In that harsh winter, while Atto lived his last few months of life, I went into a bookshop that I often visited, owned by a Pontevedrine. Another customer, who was following me, overtook me on his long legs and got served before me. His face was wrapped in a thick woollen scarf. He asked the bookseller if he had a book of stories: From Half-Asia was the title. The bookseller said in surprise that he had never heard of it. As he turned to walk out the customer grumbled in vexation:
“Pontevedrines, bah. Half-Asia!”
I raised my eyes as in a dream and saw the glaucous eyes of a slightly stooping spindleshanks whom I well knew winking at me slyly from behind his woollen scarf . . .
He thrust something into my hand and then disappeared rapidly down the road. I would have liked to chase him, but he was much younger and faster; I would have liked to shout, but I was dumb; I would have liked to cry but it would have been useless. I laughed, more and more heartily, and feeling as light as a feather I lowered my eyes to see what he had thrust into my hand. It was a slim volume:
Doctoris Henrici Casparis Abelii
Studenten-Künste
There was a small bookmark. I opened it. It indicated – as I had anticipated – the page concerning the artifices to make clothes resistant to weapons, to put someone to sleep for three days and finally to get dogs to obey one. In a flash I could see it: the panther and the other animals drugged or tamed, my assistant escaping down the tunnel that emerged onto the plain of Simmering. And of course, Frosch had even told us about it. I had forgotten; Simonis had not. In the margin was a scrawled message from Simonis, or Symon, or whatever his real name was: “Thank you.” And I was happy.
One night I dreamed of a mysterious being, concealed in a pure white, perfumed cloak, turning up in the Flying Ship and lifting me up to the bell tower of St Stephen’s. There I saw the pedestal that long, long ago had held the Golden Apple. In its place stood the Imperial Orb, symbol of the Archangel Michael, defender of God’s people. The being pointed out some words written there. They were the seven words of the Archangel Michael:
Imprimatur
Secretum
Veritas
Mysterium
And then, a little below these: Unicum . . . And the last two words inscribed by the Archangel? The Flying Ship, as if at the mercy of a storm, lurched away from the spire. I floundered, desperately seeking a handhold so that I could finish reading the message, but in vain. “Imprimatur et secretum, veritas mysteriumst!” the ineffable entity pronounced in a stentorian voice, adopting the concise practice of ancient epigraphs, which omits verbs and adverbs. “Let the secret be uncovered, the truth remains a mystery!” he translated.
Then he continued: “Unicum . . .” “There remains only . . .” What remains? Here the entity revealed itself to me. It removed its hood and revealed a smiling face: it was Ugonio. I woke with a start and so now I do not know how the sentence ends. But perhaps it is best not to investigate too closely: it might just be another of the corpisantaro’s harebrained messages, like the allium ursinum or the Gran Legator and the Albanum of the events of Villa Spada, which many years ago had thrown me and Atto off the trail in our investigations . . .
Paris
6TH JANUARY 1714
Someone accidentally jostles me and jerks me back to the present. The few bystanders are moving: Abbot Melani’s funeral is now at an end. The silver angels that have compassionately supported his mortal remains during the ceremony now return the bier to his old servants, and they make towards the side chapel near the high altar, opposite the door to the sacristy, for the entombment. The place is ready, open and empty, awaiting the coffin. The funerary monument by the Florentine Rastrelli will soon ornament the chapel with a noble bust of the Abbot, for any French subjects who pass this way to remember him by.
It took the epidemic of catarrhal influenza, recorded in the medical annals and well described by Doctor Viti in his treatise, to break the old Abbot’s resistance. The first symptoms began in December: fever; coughing; some slight inflammation of the throat; low, weak pulse; copious spitt
ing of thin blood. Atto joked: “Here’s the Tekuphah,” laughing to overcome his fear at having really reached the end. We treated him with massages and barley water, which made him sweat and brought about great improvements. But the spitting was still copious, though now it was white. The doctors declared: “spurious lymphatic pleuritis”: cryptic words that sounded like Ugonio talking. They administered myrrh mixed with camphor, laxatives, emollients and even whale sperm, a remedy that was so expensive that the Abbot lost all the benefit when the moment came to pay.
When the worst was over, Atto once again had all his wits about him and had recovered his usual spirits. However, I often saw him by the window, absorbed, with his half-closed eyes ranging over the grey slate rooftops, while he hummed for the umpteenth time an aria written for him by Luigi Rossi, and – I was sure of it – thought with a smile of the boy king listening to him in the castle of Saint Germain, sixty years earlier. And perhaps he thought of the capricious intertwining of fortune and bad luck, of jealous fits, friendships, betrayals, impossible loves; of acts of violence endured; of one in particular, and of the destiny it had implacably determined. Observing him unseen, I liked to imagine that he was using the delicate scales of memory to weigh up faults and merits, knowing that he had served music and the Most Christian King with equal loyalty; and that soon it would be time to serve a greater master.
Domenico, Champigny and I still feared the excessive catarrh he had in his chest and the slight tertian fever that disturbed him during the day. We prayed he would get through the winter, but he appeared resigned to the will of God. He was fully prepared and ready for the great step, and discussed his death with firmness and constancy, instructing Domenico on a number of things that he wanted carried out afterwards, and personally making sure that all his writings and books were packed up and delivered to Count Bardi, the envoy of the Medici in Paris, who could then send them on to Pistoia. There were too many secrets hidden in Abbot Melani’s letters and memoirs to run the risk of leaving them in the house after his death!
Veritas (Atto Melani) Page 74
