Veritas (Atto Melani)

by Monaldi, Rita

  Of course, with the education that my son received at Abbot Melani’s home, he could aspire to something greater. He could continue to study, acquire learning and knowledge: but to know is to suffer. And anyway, as Abbot Melani said, land feeds you and so makes you free. The best choice is still the one Cincinnatus made.

  I have finally found the answer to my query. Now, only now, can I hear their voices distinctly. I have not heard the yelling again, nor the song of the folia. I remain in religious silence. But I now hear all those spectres that appeared to me at the Place with No Name whispering among themselves. They have formed a circle around me. I see landscapes and faces that are not unknown to me: the French castle of Vaux-le-Vicomte fades into the Roman Villa of the Vessel and the Place with No Name; and Superintendent Fouquet into Maximilian II and Joseph I. And two dates that I have encountered many – too many – times, come back to me: the 5th and 11th September.

  The 5th September was the Most Christian King’s birthday, but also the day when he had Superintendent Fouquet arrested. It was also the day Suleiman died and the day Maximilian, ten years later, succumbed to agony. On that same day, over a century later, Vienna under siege came close, thanks to an Armenian traitor, to falling prey to the Infidels. My wife Cloridia, who sometimes likes to amuse herself with the occult science of numbers, which was her specialty when young, has informed me that the sum of Louis XIV’s birthday is 5, and also Suleiman’s day of death, while that of the arrest of Fouquet is 10, which is to say twice 5.

  On 11th September 1683 the Christian troops arrived to free Vienna with the battle that would be fought at first light on the following day. And again it was 11th September when I first met Abbot Atto Melani. The same day in 1697 Prince Eugene defeated the Turks in the famous Battle of Zenta, and in 1709 the French at Malplaquet. On 11th September 1702 Joseph conquered Landau for the first time. The same day in 1714 Barcelona and Catalonia, abandoned by Charles, finally fell into the hands of Philip V with a bloodbath.

  Only now do I finally understand: I have returned to where I started from. You have received, you will not receive anymore, I hear them whisper to me. Now you must give. You have learned, now you must teach. You have lived, now you must give life.

  From the day of my arrival in Vienna, in 1711, everything gradually began to talk to me of the past: first just in hints, like the resurfacing of Cloridia’s mother on Camilla’s lips. From the time I finally visited the Place with No Name, the events of the past and those of the present interwove their frantic double gallop: from the Flying Ship to the death of Ugonio, whom I had met twenty-eight years earlier, up to the news in the Corriere Ordinario and the Wiennerisches Diarium, which in one way or another spoke to me of the past.

  Life, in imparting its teachings to me, had chosen to repeat old tunes from the past: it indicated that it was time to give back what I had received. It was time to transform myself, from the spectator that I was, into an actor for other spectators; to turn from schoolboy into teacher, for new schoolchildren; to change from a vessel into a source of living water, to be poured into other vessels. As in the parable of the talents, I was called not to bury the money that the Lord had entrusted to me but to risk it, investing it in order to multiply it. In what form? I had already been given the answer: with the past. With the experience accumulated and with the tales that Abbot Melani had told me in the three years spent with him in Paris. Atto’s life would become my life, his memories my memories. Art would be my shelter and my workshop.

  And so, that which thirty years ago had been just a pastime for a young inn servant, and seventeen years ago had become a task una tantum given me by Atto, has now become a life choice.

  I write of the last century, of time now lost, the last century of mankind. In my books I transfuse what I have experienced with the Abbot, and what I have experienced through his tales. My ear has discovered the sound of actions, my eye the gesture of speeches, and my voice, where it limited itself to repeating, dictates to the pen so that the fundamental note shall be fixed for all time.

  It is a lengthy task to pour so much of the past onto paper! At times I ask: “Will I have enough time? Am in a fit condition to do it?” Cradling in my hand the coin of Landau that Cloridia never returned to Prince Eugene’s chest, I fear that I will not have the strength to keep a close hold on this past, which already seems so far away. For the most part I work when everything around me is asleep. I will need many nights, perhaps a hundred, perhaps a thousand or more, to transfer to paper the imprint of time.

  Our senses make many mistakes and hence falsify the real appearance of life, if such a thing exists. In my transcription, which I try to make as accurate as possible, I do not alter sounds or colours, I never separate them from their cause, which is where intelligence locates them after hearing and seeing them. I describe the hundred masks that every face possesses; in some personages I represent every gesture, however slight, that was the cause of mortal upheavals and led to variations in the light of our moral heaven, unsettling the serenity of our certainties. In transcribing a universe that is to be entirely redesigned, I do not fail to represent the reader, but with the measurements not of his body but of his years – years that he unconsciously drags about with him wherever he goes in life, a task that is increasingly arduous and which finally overwhelms him.

  We all occupy a place, not only in space, but also and above all in time. So, this concept of incorporated time, of the years spent that are not separate from us: this is the truth, the truth suspected by everyone, and which I have to try to elucidate. And on the day that, having “drawn the bow” and separated the wheat from the chaff, the master of my fate will ask me to account for myself, I will pour into His Hands the fruit of my labour.

  A quill pen and a piece of paper: I have no other way of communicating with men. I have not regained my voice, I have remained dumb forever. In some part of these notes appear these words: “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.” Well, now it has. I could not present myself more fittingly as servant of the black thread in a white field – an image that reminds me strongly of Hristo’s chess-board, which saved my life.

  The pen is my voice, and, apart from occasionally helping my two sons-in-law to hoe the vineyard, writing is the only job that a dumb man can do. A printer in Amsterdam kindly prints and sells my books. I send my manuscripts up there, into free Holland: “Under the sign of the Busy Bee” is the address, and I like to think that it is a metaphor for my humble but unflagging work.

  Sometimes the old discouragement seizes me. I, who had eyes to see the world in this way, with a fixed stare that affected it and made it become what I had prophetically seen it to be – if Heavenly Justice was behind this, it was unjust that I had not been not annihilated beforehand; I repeat this to myself from the depths of my soul.

  Have I deserved that my mortal anguish should be appeased in this way? What is it that proliferates in my nights? Why was I not given the power to strike down the world’s sin with a single axe-blow? Do my books touch any consciences? Why am I not given the intellectual strength to force violated mankind to start shouting? Why is my shouted response, which I entrust to pen and paper, not louder than the shrill command that dominates the souls of a terrestrial globe?

  I preserve documents for an age that will not understand them, or which will live so far from what happens today that it will say I was a forger. But no, the time to say this will not come, because that time will not be. In my books I write of a single immense tragedy, the defeated hero of which is mankind, whose tragic conflict, being that between world and nature, finishes with death. Alas, since it has no other hero than mankind, this drama does not even have any other audience. But what does my tragic hero perish of? He is a hero who perishes as a consequence of a situation that intoxicated him, even as it constrained him.

  Ah . . . if mankind one day, by the grace of God, sh
ould emerge safely from this adventure – however afflicted, impoverished and aged – and the magic of a supreme law of retaliation should give it the power to call them to answer one by one – them, the ringleaders of universal crime, who always survive: Palatine, Penicek, and all the other serfs, the henchmen and satraps, Beelzebub’s little slaves. Ah, if we could lock them up in their temples and then draw by lot a death sentence for one in ten, but not kill them; no: slap them! And say to them: what, you didn’t know? You didn’t imagine that following upon a declaration of war, among the countless possibilities of horror and shame there was the chance that children might go without their mother’s milk? What, you didn’t measure the tribulation of a single hour of anguish in an imprisonment that lasts for years? You didn’t measure the tribulation of a sigh of nostalgia, of love soiled, violated, murdered? And you did not realize how tragedy could turn into farce – or rather, given the coexistence of the present monstrous situation, and the old formalist delirium – into comic opera? Into one of those revolting comic operas so popular today, whose texts are an insult to the intelligence and whose music is a torture.

  Under the shelter of this new demon from England called finance, hysteria overcomes nature. Its armed henchman is paper. The gazettes have experienced a real boom in these years, one that shows no sign of letting up. And as a young man I wanted to be a gazetteer! Fortunately Abbot Melani, in that distant, so distant 1683, did what was needed to put me off the idea.

  They are nothing but machines, these newspapers, which feed upon the life of men. The life that these machines devour is naturally no more than it can be in such an age, an age of machines; production that is stupid on the one hand, and mad on the other, inevitably, and both bearing the stamp of vulgarity.

  Paper rules the military and has crippled us even before there were any victims of the cannons. Had not all the realms of fantasy already been stripped bare when that sheet of paper imprinted by the press declared war on the inhabited land? It is not that the press set in motion the machines of death, but it drained our hearts, so that we can no longer imagine how things would be without newspapers and without war. It is to blame for that. And all the people have drunk of the wine of its lust, and the kings of the earth have fornicated with it, and we fell because of the Whore of Babylon, which – having been printed and propagated in all the languages of the world – persuaded us that we were enemies and that there must be war.

  There, it is done. As far as writing goes, I have written. I have done my duty, to the very end. Have I been fed to life? Well then, I feed my life to pen and paper. My books combat the gazettes. It is good. No one can deny that I have attained my perfection. “The stone the builders rejected has now become the cornerstone,” recites the Psalm, as Simonis said to the dervish that night at the Place with No Name.

  Like the chariot of the sun careering at a dazzling gallop, other words from Simonis pierce my thoughts: the game is never really over, the world is a test bed that the Almighty has prepared for souls and so we are all a part of his plans, even His enemies. I forgot those words too quickly, even though they sent a shiver down the dervish’s spine. I’m sorry, Simonis, my despair – unbridled Cassandra of the Last Days of Mankind – prevents me from letting them germinate within me, at least for now.

  Meanwhile I find my salvation, all alone, in my silence, with my silence, which has made me so – as the age wishes – perfect.

  Only Cloridia has gradually understood; she smiles serenely and our embraces have the warmth of earlier days. My two good sons-in-law, however, do not wish to understand, and every day they come to try and shake me out of this silence of mine, now absolute. They would like me to cry, so that at least with my eyes I should appear afflicted or enraged, so that I too should believe that life is out there, in the superfluity of the world. I do not bat an eyelid. I replace my quill in the inkwell and gaze at them, rigid and motionless, and I make them run off again, infuriated. On my account my daughters study these new treatises of nervous pathology, so fashionable among young doctors, who only know how to hold a scalpel to dissect corpses, but can no longer compose a small poem. As if science could exist without letters . . . My daughters propose injections and balsams, they hover around me to persuade me to get my vocal cords examined by some renowned doctor.

  No, thank you. Thank you, everyone. Enough now. I want to stay as I am. This is our age; this is life; and in the meaning I give to my work, I want to continue like this – dumb and impassive – to be a writer.

  Is the stage ready?

  Raise the curtain!

  Pistoia

  1644

  The carriage groans, the horses foam at the mouth while the dust that enters our compartment envelops us like a cloud of misapplied rouge. We will eat a good deal of this stuff on our way to Rome. We have only been travelling for a quarter of an hour, and my poor limbs are already creaking like the axle of our coach.

  I lean out of the window, gaze back and in the morning mist I see the roofs of Pistoia gradually become veiled. Soon they will vanish. Then I look ahead, towards the invisible, distant zenith where the embrace of the Holy City awaits us.

  My young lord, the eighteen-year-old Atto Melani, stays in his seat. His eyes are closed. He opens them every so often, looks around himself and then closes them again. It almost seems that the great journey is of no interest to him, but I know that it is not so.

  Atto’s baptismal godfather, Messer Sozzifanti, before entrusting him to me, had given me profuse advice: “His nature is impulsive. You will have to keep an eye on him, advise him, temper him. Such refined talents must be made use of: he will have to obey the master we found for him, the great Luigi Rossi, in all things, and win his sympathy. Let him avoid bad company, behave righteously, and never give scandal if he wishes to acquire honour. Rome is a nest of vipers, where hotheads always fall into error.”

  I nodded and thanked him, before bowing, without asking any questions. I already knew what I had not been told: the essence.

  I have in my care the most talented castrato that has ever been seen in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. In Rome the greatest teachers will transform him into the greatest soprano of our age. He will become rich and celebrated.

  It is easy to guess that it will not be simple to make him behave sensibly. He comes from a poor family (his father is the humble bell ringer of the Cathedral of Pistoia) but the Grand Duke’s brother, the powerful Mattias de’ Medici, already holds him in the palm of his hand. I just glance at him, the young Atto, I see the cleft in the middle of his chin tremble a little and I understand everything. While he keeps his eyes closed, and pretends to be asleep, I can almost hear his chest swelling with pride at the protection he is being afforded by the powerful, and his eyes flickering under his eyelids, trying to grasp the dreams of glory that are dancing before him like crazy butterflies. Instead of thinking of petticoats, like young men of his age, his head is filled with dreams of glory, honour and social ascent. No, it will not be easy to bridle him.

  And anyway: why should a young castrato be wise, and behave prudently, given that he has been set on the road to Rome by a mad and atrocious night in his childhood, when he was placed in a bathtub and had his virtues snipped by a pair of scissors, and, as the water turned crimson and his shrieks filled the room, what stepped from the bathtub was no longer a male but an atrocious freak of nature?

  No, it will not be easy to keep a check on the young Atto Melani. In Rome interesting days await me, I am certain.

  Veritas is written on the cover of this book [. . .]

  In this comforting belief I close my book, which is at the service of truth. I have had to report so much darkness and despair. Lies and prejudice are as thick as fog over my homeland, but we wish to remain restless and not lose courage . . . Vincit Veritas!

  (Karl Emil Franzos, From Half-Asia)

  Letter

  Vatican City, 14th February 2042

  To Don Alessio Tanari

  Centrul Salesian
<
br />   Costantia – ROMANIA

  Dear Alessio,

  This comes to bring you news of myself. On opening the parcel, you will have realised: I have sent you a copy of the new work I have received from my two friends, Rita and Francesco. Renewing a now well-established tradition between them and me, they have sent me their third work even before publication.

  I am sure that you will enjoy reading it too, just as you were able to put your reading of the two previous books to good use. By the way, did you notice? After Imprimatur, their second book was published under the title Secretum. And to think that it was I who sent it to you, just a year ago. At the time I was in Romania – in Costantia, or the ancient Tomi, where Emperor Augustus had exiled the Latin poet Ovid and where you now are.

  Who would have guessed that things would have altered in such a short space of time? With the death of the old pope and the election of this German pope everything has changed. His Holiness has had the benevolence to appoint me cardinal and assign me to the Holy Office. When I happen to pass in front of a mirror and see my reflected image unworthily adorned with all that purple, I find myself smiling as I recall that just a year ago, an exile in Romania, I thought I was destined to quite other purple: that of martyrdom.