Imprimatur

by Rita Monaldi;Francesco Sorti

  Ciacconio was pulling us by the sleeves, drawing us towards the cen­tre of the arena. The corpisantaro had moved out of the labyrinth, the better to follow the scent of Dulcibeni. Hardly had he entered the open space when he gave a start. "Gfrrrlubh," said he, indicating a point on the immense and impervious perimeter walls of the Colosseum.

  "Are you sure?" we asked in unison, vaguely put out by the danger and inaccessibility of the place.

  Ciacconio nodded and we at once set out for our objective.

  The great perimeter walls of the stadium were composed of three superimposed orders of arches. The point indicated by Ciacconio was an arch at the intermediate level, at a height above ground perhaps exceeding that of the entire Locanda del Donzello.

  "How are we to get up there?" asked Abbot Melani.

  "Get some help from your monsters," we heard Dulcibeni cry; this time Atto had spoken without lowering his voice sufficiently.

  "You are quite right, that is a good idea!" he yelled back. "You were not mistaken," he then added, turning to Ciacconio, "the voice does come from up there."

  Ciacconio was meanwhile beating a path in all haste across the labyrinth. He led us towards one of the two great wooden gates which were left open in daytime to give access to the interior of the amphitheatre. Just in front of the gate there rose a great, steep staircase which entered into the majestic body of the Colosseum.

  "He must have come up this way," murmured Melani.

  The stairs did indeed lead to the first storey of the building, in other words to the level of the second order of arches. Hardly had we ascended the last steps than we emerged into the open and found ourselves in an enormous corridor which ringed the entire amphi­theatre. Here, rising no little above the level of the auditorium, the moonlight spread more surely and more generously. Spectacular was the view over the central space and the ruins of the tiers of seats; and, above us, the enormous walls that contained the entire mass of the circus, standing out majestically against the heavens. With our breath short after our rapid climb, for an instant we halted and almost forgot our objective, ravished by so grandiose a spectacle.

  "You are almost there, spy of kings," the harsh, grating voice of Dulcibeni called us from the right.

  From there, came a detonation that terrified us, and almost instant­ly we flattened ourselves on the ground. Dulcibeni had fired at us.

  We were then startled by a loud clatter a few paces away. I approached on all fours and found Dulcibeni's pistol, half-broken by the hard impact.

  "Two misses, what a pity! Take courage, Melani, now we are on an equal footing."

  I handed the arm to Atto, who looked thoughtfully in Dulcibeni's direction. "There is something that escapes me," he commented, as we approached the place from which the voice and the pistol had come.

  For me, too, something was amiss. Already, as we ascended the great staircase, I had been assailed by no few doubts. Why had Dul­cibeni drawn us into that bizarre moonlight pursuit among the ruins of the Colosseum, thus losing precious time and risking being caught by the police in flagrante delicto?

  Why should he have wanted so much to attract Abbot Melani all the way up here with the promise that he would reveal to him all that he wanted to know?

  Meanwhile, as we clambered breathlessly over the last time-worn tiers of seats, we heard the echo of distant cries, sounding something like the warlike bustle of troops converging upon an agreed objective.

  "I knew it," commented Abbot Melani, panting. "It was impos­sible that a few caporioni and members of the watch should not show up. Dulcibeni could not hope to pass unobserved after that episode with the runaway carriage."

  With his mocking provocations, our prey had facilitated our search. Yet it at once became clear that it would be very difficult indeed for us to approach him. Dulcibeni had in fact hauled himself up on top of one of the walls supporting the terraces; from the corridor in which we stood, the wall climbed obliquely to a window in the perimeter wall, at almost the highest point of the Colosseum.

  There he was, comfortably seated under the window with his back to the wall, still holding the chest with the leeches tightly in his arms. I was astounded by the extraordinary way in which he had succeeded in taking refuge up there; under the oblique wall on top of which he had ventured there yawned a horrible and most perilous gulf, and anyone who fell into it would meet with a ghastly death. Beyond the window, there was a chasm as deep as two entire palaces were high, yet Dulcibeni did not seem in the least perturbed by this. Three awesome and sublime worlds opened up around the fugitive: the great arena of the Colosseum, the tremendous abyss beyond the facade, and the starlit night which set the seal on the grandiose and fatal theatre of that night's events.

  Under the Colosseum, in the meantime, we seemed to hear the voices and presence of strangers: the men of the watch must have arrived. We were separated from our prey by a space of empty air as wide as a middling city street.

  "So here they are, the saviours of the usurer with the tiara, of the insatiable beast from Como," and he exploded into what seemed to me to be forced, unnatural laughter, the fruit of an insane blend of wrath and euphoria.

  Atto glanced questioningly at me and Ciacconio.

  "I have understood, you know," said Atto.

  "Tell me, tell me, Melani, tell me what you have understood," exclaimed Dulcibeni.

  "The tobacco is not tobacco..."

  "Oh, how clever. Do you know what I have to say to that? You are quite right. So many things are not what they appear to be."

  "You inhale those strange dried leaves, what are they called...?" insisted Atto.

  "Mamacoca" I exclaimed.

  "How perspicacious! I am lost in admiration," Dulcibeni replied caustically.

  "That is why you are not tired at night," said the abbot. "But then in the daytime you become irascible and feel the need to have more and more of it, and so you continue to stuff your nostrils with it: and then you declaim complete speeches before your mirror, imagining that you still have your daughter with you. And when you launch into one of your insane diatribes about sovereigns and crowns, you be­come inflamed, and no one can stop you, because that herb sustains your body, but it... In short, it confuses the mind, which becomes possessed. Or am I mistaken?"

  "I see that you have amused yourself teaching the art of spying to your little prentice instead of leaving him to his natural destiny as a source of amusement for princes and of astonishment for fair­ground idlers," replied Dulcibeni, with roars of laughter which he flung vengefully at me.

  It was, moreover, true that I had spied at the Jansenist's door and had then gone to recount all that I had heard to the abbot.

  Dulcibeni then bounded nimbly along the oblique wall, oblivious of the chasm beneath his feet and (despite the burden of the little chest which he still carried) hauled himself onto the top of the great wall of the fagade, the width of which exceeded three paces.

  There our adversary now stood, majestically dominating us from above. A few yards away from him rose a great wooden cross, higher than a man, placed above the facade of the Colosseum to signify the consecration of the monument to the memory of the Christian mar­tyrs.

  Dulcibeni glanced downwards, outside the Colosseum. "Take courage, Melani. Reinforcements will soon be arriving. There is a group of guards down there."

  "Then tell me, before they arrive," Atto rejoined, "why do you want the death of Innocent XI?"

  "Rack your brains," said Dulcibeni, withdrawing from the edge of the great wall; at that precise moment, Atto was climbing in his turn onto the narrow cornice that led to the perimeter wall.

  "What has he done to you, damn it?" Atto continued with a stran­gled voice. "Has he dishonoured the Christian faith, has he covered it in shame and ignominy? Is that what you think? Say it, Pompeo, admit that you are possessed, like all the Jansenists. You hate the world, Pompeo, because you cannot manage to hate yourself."

  Dulcibeni did not reply. Meanwhile Atto, h
olding tightly onto the naked stone, was climbing painfully along the wall that led up to him.

  "The experiments on the island," he continued, clumsily grap­pling on all fours with the top of the wall, "the visits to Tiracorda, the nights in the underground galleries... You did all that for a bastard, half-Infidel bitch, you poor madman. You should thank Huygens and that slobbering old Feroni if they did her the honour of ripping open her maidenhead before they threw her into the sea."

  I was shocked by the cruel obscenities which Abbot Melani had unexpectedly unleashed. Then I understood. Atto was provoking Dulcibeni to make him explode. And he succeeded.

  "Silence, castrato, shame of God, you who can only get your arse ripped open," screamed Dulcibeni from afar. "That you liked plung­ing your cock in the shit, that I knew; but that your head was full of it too..."

  "Your daughter, Pompeo," Atto continued, taking advantage of the moment, "old Feroni wanted to buy her, is that not so?"

  Dulcibeni let out a groan of surprise: "Go on, you are getting close," was, however, all that he replied.

  "Let us see," said Atto, panting from the effort of his climb, yet drawing ever closer to Dulcibeni. "Huygens looked after Feroni's af­fairs; therefore, he often dealt with the Odescalchi, and so with you too. One day he discovered your little girl and took a fancy to her. That idiot Feroni, as usual, wanted to give her to him at all costs. He offered to buy her from the Odescalchi, perhaps even to sell her again when Huygens grew tired of her. Perhaps he obtained her from Innocent XI himself when he was still a cardinal."

  "He obtained her from him and from his nephew Livio, damned souls," Dulcibeni corrected him.

  "You could not legally oppose the sale," continued Atto, "because you had not deigned to marry her mother, a wretched Turkish slave, and so your daughter belonged not to you but to the Odescalchi. Then you found a remedy: to rake up a scandal against your masters, a stain on the honour of the Odescalchi. In short, you blackmailed them."

  Dulcibeni again remained silent, and this time his silence seemed more than ever to be a confirmation.

  "I am lacking only one date," Atto asked. "When was your daugh­ter abducted?"

  "In 1676," Dulcibeni replied icily. "She was only twelve years old."

  "Just before the conclave, is that not so?" said Atto, taking an­other step forward.

  "I believe you have understood."

  "The election of the new Pope was being prepared, and Cardinal Benedetto Odcscalchi, who had lost the previous conclave by a hair's- breadth, was determined to triumph this time. But with your threats, you held him in your power: if a certain item of news were to reach the ears of the other cardinals, there would have been an enormous scandal, and goodbye to the election. Am I on the right track?"

  "You could not be more right," said Dulcibeni, without concealing his surprise.

  "What was the scandal, Pompeo? What had the Odescalchi done?"

  "First, finish your own little story," Dulcibeni invited him scorn­fully.

  The night wind, which at that height makes itself felt more acute­ly, whipped relentlessly at us; I trembled, without knowing whether it was from cold or fear.

  "With pleasure," said Atto. "By threatening them, you believed that you could prevent the sale of your daughter. Instead, you signed your own death warrant. Feroni, perhaps with the complic­ity of the Odescalchi themselves, abducted your daughter and thus closed your mouth for long enough for Benedetto to be elected Pope. After which, you tried to find the child. But you were not clever enough."

  "I raked through Holland from end to end. God only knows that 1 could do no more!" roared Dulcibeni.

  "You did not find your daughter and you were the victim of a strange incident; someone caused you to fall from a window, or some­thing of the sort. Yet you escaped with your life."

  "There was a hedge below, I was lucky," explained Dulcibeni. "Pray continue."

  Atto hesitated before this latest exhortation from Dulcibeni. Even I wondered why he was doling out so much rope to us.

  "You fled Rome, hunted down and terrorised," continued Melani. "The rest, I already knew: you converted to Jansenism and in Naples you met Fouquet. There is, however, something else which I do not understand. Why take revenge now, after so many years? Perhaps be­cause... Oh my God, now I see."

  I saw the abbot bring his hand to his forehead in a gesture of sur­prise. He had, meanwhile, in a bold balancing act, crossed another stretch of the wall, drawing even closer to Dulcibeni.

  "Because there is a battle now for Vienna and if you kill the Pope, the Christian alliance will collapse, the Turks will win and will dev­astate Europe. Is it not so?" exclaimed Atto in a voice hoarse with astonishment and indignation.

  "Europe has already been devastated: by her own kings," retorted Dulcibeni.

  "Oh, you wretched madman," replied Atto. "You would like... you want..." and he sneezed three, four, five times with unaccustomed violence, at the risk of losing his grip on the wall and tumbling into the abyss.

  "Damn it," he swore, thoroughly put out. "Once there was only one thing that made me sneeze: textiles from Holland. And now at last I know why I have been sneezing so much since I entered that accursed hostelry."

  I too understood: it was the fault of Dulcibeni's old Dutch cloth­ing. Yet, I suddenly recalled, Atto had sometimes sneezed upon my arrival. Perhaps I was just returning from the Jansenist's apartment. Or...

  This was no time for such cogitations. I observed Dulcibeni move along the top of the amphitheatre's facade, first to the left, then to the right, continuing to keep an eye on Tiracorda's carriage.

  "You are still hiding something, Pompeo," cried Atto, recovering from his bout of sneezing and regaining his balance as he straddled the wall. "With what did you manage to blackmail the Odescalchi? What is the secret with which you held Cardinal Benedetto in your power?"

  "There is no more to be said," Dulcibeni cut him short, again looking in the direction of the Chief Physician's carriage.

  "Ah no, that is all too convenient! Besides, your daughter's story does not hold water: it is simply not enough to explain an attempt on the life of a Pope. Come, come: first, you were not even willing to wed her mother, and now you would do all this to avenge her? No, that makes no sense. Besides, this Pope is a friend of you Jansenists. Speak, Pompeo."

  "It is no business of yours."

  "You cannot..."

  "I have no more to say to a spy of the Most Christian King."

  "Yes, but with your leeches, you wanted to do the Most Christian King a great favour: to free him of the Pope and Vienna at a blow."

  "Do you really believe that Louis XIV will defeat the Turks too?" replied Dulcibeni invidiously. "Poor deluded creature! No, the Otto­man tide will cut off the head of the King of France, too. No regard for traitors: that is the victor's rule."

  "So is this then your plan for palingenesis, your hope for a return to the pure Christian faith, you true Jansenist?" retorted Atto. "Yes, of course, let us sweep away the Church of Rome and the Christian sovereigns, let the altars go up in flames! Thus we shall return to the times of the martyrs: our throats cut by the Turks, but firmer and stronger in the Faith! And you believe that? Which of us is the more deluded? Dulcibeni?"

  Meanwhile, I had moved away from Atto and Dulcibeni, reaching a sort of little terrace, near the stairs which we had climbed to the first storey; from that viewpoint, I could observe what was taking place outside the Colosseum, and I understood why Dulcibeni was looking down with so much interest.

  A group of the Bargello's men were busying themselves around the carriage, and in the distance the voice of Tiracorda could be heard. Some of them were observing us; soon, I imagined and feared, they would come up and capture us.

  Suddenly, however, I had cause to shiver, not on account of the freshness of the late night wind: a howl arose, nay, a savage chorus which came from all sides of the open space before the Colosseum, and a diffuse crackling sound which seemed to be caused
by the throwing of many stones and projectiles.

  The horde of corpisantari (who had evidently planned their incur­sion with care) poured screaming into the forecourt of the Colosse­um, armed with clubs and sticks and charging at full speed, without even giving the Bargello's men time to understand what was happen­ing. Our view was somewhat improved by the light which the guards' torches spread here and there on the scene.

  The ambuscade was sudden, barbarous, pitiless. A group of at­tackers emerged from the Arch of Constantine, a second descended from the wall around the orchards overlooking the ruins of the Cu­ria Hostilia, another rushed out from the ruins of the Temple of Isis and Serapis. The warlike cry of the assailing mob rose high and wild, utterly disconcerting their victims, who numbered only five or six.