Imprimatur

by Rita Monaldi;Francesco Sorti

  It would have been possible for me, by virtue of the legislation approved by Pope John Paul II over fifty years ago, to request further inquiries. But in that case, I would not have been able secretum servare in iis ex quorum revelatione preiudicium causae vel infamiam beato afferre posset. In other words, I would then have had to reveal the contents of Rita and Francesco's typescript, if only to the promoter of justice or to the postulator (the saints' prosecution and defence lawyers, as the press so crudely describes them).

  In so doing, I would have permitted grave and irreversible asper­sions to be cast on the virtue of the Blessed: a decision which could be taken only by the Supreme Pontiff, certainly not by myself.

  If, however, the work had in the meantime been published, I would have been freed from the obligation to secrecy I therefore hoped that my two parishioners' book had already found a publisher. I confided the search to some of the youngest and least experienced members of my staff. But in the catalogues of books on sale, I found neither any writings of the kind nor my friends' names.

  I tried to trace the two young people (by now surely no longer young): the registers showed that they had indeed moved to Vienna, at Auerspergstrasse 7. I wrote to that address but received a reply from the head of a university hostel, who was unable to provide me with any assistance. I asked the Commune of Vienna, but nothing useful came of that.

  I feared the worst. I wrote to the parish priest of the Minoritenkirche, the Italian church in Vienna. But Rita and Francesco were unknown to everyone there, including, fortunately, the keeper of the graveyard records.

  In the end, I decided to go to Vienna myself, in the hope of trac­ing at least their daughter, even though, some forty years after the event, I could no longer remember her Christian name. As was to be expected, this last attempt also came to nothing.

  For three years, I have sought them everywhere. Sometimes I find myself looking at girls with red hair like Rita's, forgetting that hers will now be as white as my own. Today, she will be seventy-four and Francesco, seventy-six.

  Now, I take my leave of you, and of His Holiness. May God inspire you in the reading which you are about to undertake.

  Msgr Lorenzo Dell'Agio

  Bishop of the Diocese of Como

  To the defeated

  Sir,

  In conveying to you these memoirs

  which I have at last recover'd,

  I dare hope that 'Your Excellency

  will recognise in my Efforts

  to comply with Your Wishes

  that Excess of Passion and of Love

  which has ever been the cause of my Felicity,

  whenever I have had Occasion

  to bear Witness thereof

  to your Excellency.

  Memorials

  Day the First

  11th September, 1683

  The men of the Bargello arrived in the late afternoon, just as I was about to light the torch that illuminated our sign. In their fists, they grasped planks and hammers; and seals and chains and great nails. As they advanced along the Via del Orso, they called out and gestured im­periously to the passers-by and knots of curious bystanders that they must clear the street. Truly, they were most wrathful. When they came level with me, they began to wave their arms about: "All inside, all inside, we must shut up the house," cried the man who gave the orders.

  Barely had I time to descend from the stool onto which I had climbed than hard hands shoved me roughly into the entrance, while some began to bar the door with threatening mien. I was stunned. I came abruptly to my senses, jostled by the gathering which, drawn by the officers' cries, had piled up in the doorway as though a bolt of lightning had fallen from an empty sky. These were the lodgers at our inn, known as the Locanda del Donzello.

  They were but nine, and all were present: waiting for supper to be served, as was their wont every evening, they wandered about the ground floor among the day-beds in the entrance hall and the tables of the two adjoining dining chambers, each feigning some business; but, in reality, all turning around the young French guest, the musician Robert Devize who, with great bravura, was practising the guitar.

  "Let me out! Ah, how dare you? Remove your hands from me! I cannot remain here! I am perfectly healthy, understood? Perfectly healthy! Let me by, I tell you!"

  He who thus cried out (and whom I could barely descry through the thicket of lances with which the men-at-arms held him at bay) was our guest Padre Robleda, the Spanish Jesuit, who, panic-stricken, began to groan and to pant, his neck all red and swollen. So piercing were his screams that they minded me of the squeals of swine, hang­ing head downwards before slaughter.

  The noise resounded down the street and, it seemed to me, as far off as the little square, which had emptied in a trice. On the far side of the street, I caught sight of the fishmonger who, with two servants from the nearby Locanda dell'Orso, was observing the scene.

  "They are shutting us in," I cried to them, trying to capture their attention, but the trio remained unmoved.

  A vinegar-seller, a snow vendor and a group of little boys whose cries had, only moments earlier, enlivened the street, now hid fear­fully round the corner.

  Meanwhile, my master, Signor Pellegrino de Grandis, had placed a small bench on the threshold of the inn. One of the officers of the Bargello laid thereon the register of the lodgers at our inn, which he had just received, and began the roll-call.

  "Padre Juan de Robleda, from Granada."

  Since I had never been present at a closure for quarantine, and no one had ever spoken to me of such a thing, I thought at first that they meant to imprison us.

  "A dreadful, dreadful business," whispered Brenozzi, the Venetian.

  "Come out, Padre Robleda!" called the officer, growing impatient.

  The Jesuit who, in his vain struggle against the men-at-arms, had fallen senseless to the ground, now rose to his feet and, once he had made sure that every escape was barred by lances, responded to the call with a sign of his hairy hand. He was at once pushed towards me. Padre Robleda had arrived from Spain a few days earlier, and ever since morning, because of the day's events, he had sorely tried our ears with his fearful screaming.

  "Abbot Melani, from Pistoia!" called the official, reading from the register of guests.

  Darting up from the shadows came the fashionable French lace ornamenting the wrist of our latest guest, who had arrived only at sunrise. He raised his hand diligently when his name was called, and his little triangular eyes shone like stilettos piercing the shade. The Jesuit did not move a muscle to make room when Melani, with tran­quil gait and in silence, joined us. It was the abbot's cries that had raised the alarum that morning.

  We had all heard them, they came from upstairs. Pellegrino, the host, my master, was the first to stir his long legs and run swiftly. But hardly had he reached the large chamber on the first floor, giving onto the Via dell'Orso, than he stopped. There, two guests had taken up lodgings: Signor di Mourai, an aged French gentleman, and his companion Pompeo Dulcibeni, who hailed from the Marches. Mourai, in an armchair, with his feet soaking in the basin for his customary bath, sprawled sideways, his arms hanging down, while the abbot held him upright and strove to revive him, shaking him by the collar. Mourai's attention seemed fixed upon his helper's shoulders and he appeared to be scrutinising Pellegrino with great astonished eyes, while an in­distinct gurgle issued from his throat. It was then that Pellegrino realised that the abbot was not calling for help but, with great uproar and agitation, interrogating the old man. He was speaking to him in French, which my master could not understand; but imagined that he was enquiring of him what had happened. To Pellegrino (as he was later to recount to us all) it did, however, seem that Abbot Melani was shaking Mourai with excessive vigour in his attempts to revive him, and so he rushed to release the old man from that all-too- powerful grasp. It was at that instant that poor Signor di Mourai, with an immense effort, uttered his last words: "Alas, so it really is true," he gasped in Italian.
Then he left off from panting. His eyes remained fixed upon his host and a greenish dribble ran from his mouth to his breast. And so he died.

  "The old man, es el viejo," gasped Padre Robleda mixing languages in a terrorised whisper, no sooner than we had heard two men-at-arms murmur the words "pestilence" and "shutting up".

  "Cristofano, physician and chirurgeon, from Siena!" called the of­ficer.

  With slow and measured gestures, our Tuscan guest stepped for­ward, holding the little leather bag containing all his instruments from which he was never parted.

  "It is I," he responded in a low voice, after opening his bag, shuf­fling through a mass of papers and, with frigid dignity, clearing his voice. Cristofano was rotund and short of stature, careful of his ap­pearance and with a jovial expression that set one at ease. That evening, his face was pale and dripping with perspiration, nor did he take the trouble to wipe it; his pupils focussed on something invis­ible in front of him and, before he moved, he made a quick gesture, smoothing his pointed beard. His every movement betrayed the ex­treme apprehensiveness behind his would-be phlegmatic calm.

  "I wish to make it clear that, following a preliminary but careful examination of Signor di Mourai's body, I am by no means certain that this is a case of infection," began Cristofano. "The medical ex­aminer of the Magistrate for Health, who asserts this with such con­fidence, spent very little time with the corpse. I have here," and he showed the papers, "my written observations on the case. I believe they could help you to reconsider the situation a little longer and delay any over-hasty decision on your part."

  The Bargello's men, however, had neither the power nor the de­sire to enter into such points of detail.

  "The Magistrate has ordered the immediate closure of this inn," said the officer who seemed to be in charge, adding that, for the time being, a proper quarantine had not been declared: the closure was for twenty days only, and without evacuation of the street; so long, of course, as there were no further deaths or suspected cases of distemper.

  "Seeing as I too am to be locked up, and in order that I may the better arrive at my diagnosis," insisted Signor Cristofano with some irritation, "may I not at least know something more about the last meals on which the late Signor di Mourai supped, he being accus­tomed always to eat alone and in his chamber? It may have been no more than a simple congestion."

  The objection had the effect of creating hesitancy on the part of the men-at-arms, who besought the innkeeper with their eyes. The latter had, however, not even heard the physician's request: slumped on a chair, plunged in dejection, he groaned and uttered impreca­tions, as was his wont, against the innumerable torments which life inflicted upon him. The last of these had been when, scarcely a week earlier, a small crack had appeared in one of the walls of the inn, no rare occurrence in the old houses of Rome. The fissure entailed no danger whatever, so we were told; yet it was more than enough to engender in my master both melancholy and rage.

  Meanwhile, the roll-call continued. Evening shadows were length­ening and the officers had decided to admit of no further delay with the closure.

  "Domenico Stilone Priaso, from Naples! Angiolo Brenozzi, from Venice!"

  The two young men, the former a poet, the latter a glass-blower, stepped forward, looking at one another, seemingly relieved to be called up together, almost as though that lessened the apprehen­sion. Brenozzi, the glass-blower—with fearful expression, his shining brown curls and small turned-up nose like a hillock between blushing cheeks—resembled a little porcelain Christ Child. What a pity that, as was his habit, he relieved himself of nervous tension by pinch­ing obscenely the celery stem that lay between his thighs, almost as though he were plucking a one-stringed instrument. A vice which caught my eye more than anyone else's.

  "May the Most High assist us," sobbed Robleda at that moment; whether in disapproval of the glass-blower's misplaced gesture or be- weeping our plight, I knew not; and he let himself collapse, purple in the face, onto a stool.

  "And all the saints," added the poet, "for I have come from Naples to catch the infection."

  "And you did not do well," responded the Jesuit, wiping the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief. "You had only to remain in your own city, where the opportunities for contagion are not lacking."

  "Perhaps so. And here, now that there is a good Pope, we believed we enjoyed the favours of heaven. But first we must see what those think who are, as they say, behind the Porte," whispered Stilone Priaso.

  Tight-lipped and sharp-tongued, the Neapolitan poet had struck where none wished so much as to touch.

  For weeks now, the Turkish army of the Ottoman Sublime Porte had been pressing at the gates of Vienna, thirsty for blood. All the In­fidel hosts were converging implacably (or so the bare accounts that reached our ears would have it) on the capital of the Holy Roman Empire, and threatened soon to burst through its bastions.

  The warriors in the Christian camp, almost on the point of capitu­lating, resisted only thanks to the power of the Faith. Short of arms and victuals, reduced by famine and dysentery, they were moreover terrorised by the first signs of an outbreak of the plague.

  All knew that if Vienna were to fall, the armies of Kara Mustapha would have free passage to the West. And they would spread every­where with blind and terrible joy.

  To ward off the threat, many illustrious kings, princes and captains had mobilised: the King of Poland, Duke Charles of Lorraine, Prince Maximilian of Bavaria, Margrave Ludwig-Wilhelm of Baden, and oth­ers too. Almost all had been convinced to fly to the assistance of the besieged by the one true Bulwark of Christendom, Pope Innocent XI.

  The Pontiff had, indeed, struggled long and strenuously to league together, gather and strengthen the armies of Christendom. And this he had done, not only by political means but also through precious financial support. From Rome there departed continuously generous sums of money: over two million scudi to the Emperor, five hundred thousand florins to Poland, more than a hundred thousand scudi donated by the nephew of the Pontiff, other subscriptions by individual cardinals and, lastly, a generous extraordinary levy on the ecclesiasti­cal tithes of Spain.

  The Holy Mission which the Pontiff was desperately seeking to accomplish followed upon innumerable pious works wrought during the seven years of his Pontificate.

  Now aged seventy-two, the successor of Saint Peter, born Bene­detto Odescalchi, had above all set the example. Tall, very thin, broad of forehead, with an aquiline nose, severe of mien, his chin prominent yet noble, wearing goatee and mustachios, he had gained renown as an ascetic.

  Shy and reserved in character, he was but rarely to be seen riding in a carriage through the city, and took care to avoid popular acclamations. It was noted that he had chosen for himself the smallest, barest and most inhospitable apartments that ever a Pontiff inhab­ited, and that he almost never descended into the gardens of the Quirinale or the Vatican. He was so frugal and parsimonious as only to wear the habits and vestments of his predecessors. From the time of his election, he always wore the same exceedingly threadbare white cassock, and changed it only when it was pointed out to him that too negligent a dress ill-befitted the Vicar of Christ on earth.

  Likewise, he had acquired the highest merit in the administration of the Church's patrimony. He had restored order to the funds of the Apostolic Chamber which, since the bad times of Urban VIII and Innocent X, had suffered all manner of robbery and fraud. He had abolished nepotism: no sooner was he elected than he summoned his nephew Livio, warning him—so it was said—that he would not have him made a cardinal, nor would he be allowed near the affairs of state.

  Moreover, he had at last recalled his subjects to more austere and temperate usages. The theatres, places of disorderly entertainment, were closed. The Carnival which, only ten years earlier, had attracted admirers from all over Europe, was all but dead. Musical festivities and divertissements were reduced to a minimum. Women were for­bidden to wear dresses too open and decollete after t
he French fashion. The Pontiff had even sent forth bands of police spies to inspect the laundry hanging from the windows and confiscate any over-audacious bodices or blouses.

  It was thanks to such austerity, both financial and moral, that Innocent XI had been able laboriously to raise money to combat the Turks, and great had been the succour given to the cause of the Christian armies.

  But now the war had reached the critical moment. And all Christendom knew what to expect from Vienna: salvation or disaster.