Imprimatur

by Rita Monaldi;Francesco Sorti

  One day, he confided, he would unveil the secret. I knew, how­ever, that given his proud, stubborn nature, to ask him for it would, have been utterly useless. I must wait.

  In the autumn of 1688, the gazettes bore news of the gravest and most painful occurrences. The heretical prince William of Orange had, with his fleet, crossed the English Channel and disembarked at a place called Torbay. His army advanced and met with almost no re­sistance. Within a matter of days, he had usurped the English throne, deposing the Catholic King James II of the House of Stuart, guilty of having only two months previously sired from his second wife the long-desired male heir to the throne, who would have robbed the Prince of Orange of all hope of ever becoming King of England. With William's incursion, England fell into the hands of the Protestant heretics and was thus forever lost to Rome.

  When I informed Dulcibeni of the dramatic news, Pompeo made no comment of any kind. He was seated in the garden, stroking a kit­ten which lay in his lap. He seemed tranquil. Yet, suddenly I saw him bite his lip and chase the little creature away, with trembling fist, banging hard on the nearby table.

  "What has come over you, Pompeo?" I asked, jumping to my feet and fearing that he might be unwell.

  "He has done it, the wretch! He has done it at last!" he panted, staring at the horizon beyond my head in cold fury.

  It had all started almost thirty years ago. It was then, Dulcibeni recounted, that the Odescalchi family had besmirched itself with the most infamous of crimes: aiding heretics.

  It was about 1660. At that time, William of Orange was still a child. The House of Orange was, as ever, short of money. To give an idea of what that meant, William's mother and grandmother had pawned all the family jewels.

  For Holland, there were portents of tremendous wars in the Euro­pean theatre; and indeed, these were not long in breaking out: first, against England, then France. Fighting these wars cost money: huge sums of money.

  After a series of highly secret overtures, of which not even Dulci­beni knew the details, the House of Orange turned to the Odescal­chi. They were the most solvent moneylenders in Italy, nor did they draw back from the transaction.

  Thus, the wars of heretical Holland were financed by the Catholic family of Cardinal Odescalchi, the future Pope Innocent XI.

  The whole loan operation was, of course, conducted shrewdly and with all possible discretion. Cardinal Benedetto Odescalchi lived in Rome; his brother, who was the principal of the family business, re­sided in Como. The money for the Orange family was, however, sent to Venice through two trusted men of straw, so that it would in no way be possible to retrace it to the family of Innocent XI. The loans were, moreover, not addressed directly to members of the House of Orange, but to secret intermediaries: Admiral Jean Neufville, the financier Jan Deutz, the merchants Bartolotti, and to Jan Baptista Hochepied, Amsterdam councillor.

  From the latter, this money was then redirected to the House of Orange, in order to finance the wars against Louis XIV

  "And what about you?" I interrupted.

  "I went back and forth to Holland on behalf of the Odescalchi; I made sure that the letters of exchange arrived at their destination and were duly encashed, and that the relevant receipt was obtained. Moreover, I made sure that all took place far from prying eyes."

  "In other words, the money of Pope Innocent XI was used to finance the heretics' landing in England!" I concluded, utterly shocked.

  "More or less. The Odescalchi, however, only lent money to the Dutch until some fifteen years ago, while William has only now landed in England."

  "So, what happened then?"

  Something bizarre had then taken place, explained Dulcibeni. In 1673, Carlo Odescalchi, the brother of the future Pope, had died. Thus, Cardinal Odescalchi was no longer able to follow the family business from Rome and decided to suspend the loan to the Dutch. The game had become too dangerous and the pious Cardinal could no longer risk discovery. His image must remain immaculate. He was far-sighted: within three years, the conclave took place which was to make him Pope.

  "But he had lent money to the heretics!" I exclaimed, scandal­ised.

  "Listen to the rest of it."

  With time, the debt of the House of Orange to the Odescalchi had increased beyond all measure, to over five hundred and fifty thou­sand scudi. Now that Benedetto had been elected Pope, how was all that money to be recouped? In the event of insolvency, the initial agreement stipulated that the Odescalchi would be able to lay claim to William's private property. Now, however, Benedetto Odescalchi, having become Pontiff, was in the public eye: he could not impound the property of a heretic prince, for that would also reveal the loans to that prince. And that would lead to a dreadful scandal. It is true that in the meantime Benedetto had made an apparent donation of all his goods to his nephew Livio, but in reality it was well known that it was still he who continued obstinately to control everything.

  Besides, there was another problem. William was still short of money, since his Dutch creditors (in other words, the wealthy fami­lies of Amsterdam) had tightened their purse-strings. Thus, Inno­cent XI was in danger of never seeing his money again.

  That was why, said Dulcibeni, Innocent XI had always been so hostile to Louis XIV: the Most Christian King of France was the only one who could bar the way to William's mounting the throne of Eng­land. Only Louis XIV came between Innocent XI and his money.

  The Odescalchi had in the meantime succeeded in keeping all this secret. In 1676, however, a little before the conclave, the Huygens incident took place: the right-hand man of the slave merchant Francesco Feroni (who also had dealings with the Odescalchi) be­came infatuated with Pompeo Dulcibeni's daughter by a Turkish slave and—with the support of Feroni—wanted to take possession of her. Dulcibeni could not oppose this legally, since he had not married the child's mother. So he let the Odescalchi understand that, if Huygens and Feroni did not renounce their claims, indiscretions might circulate which would be somewhat dangerous for Cardinal Bene­detto: a matter of loans with interest, granted to Dutch heretics... And Cardinal Odescalchi could then bid the conclave adieu...

  The rest, I already knew: the maiden was abducted and Dulci­beni defenestrated, escaping death only by a miracle. Pompeo had to go into hiding, while Benedetto Odescalchi was elected Pope.

  "Until now, the Pontiff will not have been able to lay his hands upon the money loaned to William of Orange. I am quite sure of that; I know how these matters are managed. Nevertheless, that will all now be settled," Dulcibeni concluded.

  "Why is that?"

  "It is quite clear: now William will become King of England and he will somehow manage to repay his debts to the Pope."

  I fell silent. I was confused and felt lost.

  "So that was what lay behind your plans: the visits to Tiracorda, the experiments on the island... Abbot Melani was right: you were not motivated solely by your daughter's abduction. It was as though you were acting to punish the Pope—I do not know how to put this—for betraying..."

  "For betraying religion, precisely that. For lucre, he bartered the honour of the Church and of Christendom. Now, never forget that disease of the body is nothing compared to that of the soul. That is the true pestilence."

  "Yet, you wanted the ruin of all Christendom: that was why you chose to infect the Pope during the siege of Vienna."

  "The siege of Vienna... There is something else that you should know; and it concerns not only the gold of the Odescalchi but the Emperor too."

  "The Emperor?" I exclaimed.

  "The ploy was straightforward, and this time, too, it was conduct­ed in great secrecy. In order to finance the war against the Turks, the House of Habsburg had been subsidised from the coffers of the Apostolic Chamber. At the same time, however, the Emperor con­tracted a private loan with the Odescalchi. In surety, the Pope's fam­ily received the quicksilver extracted from the imperial mines."

  "And what did the Odescalchi do with that quicksilver?"

  "T
hat is simple. They resold it to the Dutch heretics; to be quite precise, to the Protestant banker Jan Deutz."

  "But then Vienna owes its salvation to the heretics!"

  "In a sense, that is true. Nevertheless, the city was saved above all by the money of the Odescalchi. And you may be certain that they will obtain a return of the favour which they did the Emperor; and here, I am not speaking only of money."

  "What do you mean?"

  "In time, the Emperor will surely grant the Pope, or his nephew and sole heir, Livio, some great political favour. Wait a few years, and you will see."

  September 1699

  I am now closing this memoir. As I write, eleven years have passed since William of Orange's landing in England. The heretical sover­eign still reigns there, and his reign is a successful one: the honour of religion and of the English Catholics was sold by Innocent XI for mere lucre.

  Pope Innocent will not, however, be repeating that miserable business. He expired ten years ago, after a long and painful agony. The autopsy showed that his bowels had rotted and his kidneys were full of stones. Someone has already proposed that he should be held up as an exemplar and beatified.

  Pompeo Dulcibeni has left us, too. He died this year, as a good Christian, after much prayer and sincerely repenting his sins, which were not few. It happened one day in April; we had perhaps eaten rather more than we should and he (who was always too red in the face and had, in his last years, tended to partake too much of the bot­tle) asked me to help him to bed, so that he might take a little rest. He never rose again.

  What I am today, I believe that I owe in great part to him: he had, so to speak, become my new mentor, God only knows how different from Abbot Melani. Thanks to his long and sorrow-laden sojourn on this earth, Pompeo was able to reveal much to me of his life and sufferings, while always seeking to transmit all that he told me with the comforts of the Faith and in the fear of God. I have read all the volumes which he gave me: books of history, theology, poetry and even medicine, along with some containing the rudiments of the science of commerce and business ventures, in which Dulci­beni was so deeply versed and which, these days, one can no longer permit oneself to ignore. This makes me think that I may perhaps have penned these memoirs of former times with today's thoughts in my mind, often attributing to the poor, destitute prentice of the Donzello words and cogitations with which God has graced me only of late.

  I have, moreover, found that my greatest discoveries came, not from the tomes of political or moral doctrine, but from those of medicine. I have burned much midnight oil to convince myself that I was, in reality, never immune to the plague, as Cristofano had assured me at the beginning of our quarantine; my unfortunate condition in no way protected me from infection. The doctor had lied, perhaps in order to avail himself of my services, and had invented everything: from the fable of the sodomising African homunculus to the classifications of Caspar Schott, Fortunius Licetus and Johannes Eusebius Nierember- gius, in none of whose works did I find any mention of my supposed immunity. Cristofano knew perfectly well that stature bears no relation to the pestilence. Against infection, it avails me nothing to be what I am, a poor dwarf: "a source of amusement for princes and of astonish­ment for fairground idlers", as Dulcibeni once put it so scornfully.

  I shall, nevertheless, always be grateful to Cristofano: thanks to his venial lie, my pygmy breast was blown up with pride. That was never to recur. My cruelly diminutive stature resulted only in my be­ing abandoned at an early age and the derision of the entire human race; and that, despite the fact that—as Cristofano once stressed—I was to be counted among the more fortunate of my kind, the mediocres in stature, and not the minores or, worst of all, the minimi.

  When I look back to the adventure of the Donzello, the mocking laughter of the Bargello's men still rings in my ears, as they shoved me violently into the hostelry at the start of the quarantine: and then, there was Dulcibeni, who amused himself by ascribing to me the Latin tag of pumilio, or "little dwarf". I can still see, as though he were there, the obscene vice of Brenozzi, pinching the celery between his thighs, just at the height of my nose; and the corpisantari when they mistook me for one of the daemunculi subterranei, the minuscule de­mons which people their nightmares. And I can see myself, almost as though I had been created for that underworld, as I moved agilely before Atto through the narrow tunnels under the hostelry.

  In those days at the Donzello, my unhappy condition weighed upon me not less than throughout the rest of my life. I have, however, preferred to leave that in the shadows in my evocation of the great theatre of those events; who would ever accord the slightest credence to the words of one whom only a few wrinkles differentiate from a small boy?

  Dulcibeni's revelations have, in the time that has intervened, been confirmed by the facts. The nephew of Innocent XI, Livio Odescalchi, who was the Pope's sole heir, has for a derisory price purchased from the Emperor the Hungarian fief of Sirmio (acting, so it is whis­pered in Rome, against the advice of the officials of the Imperial Household). To add to the lustre of that most profitable transaction, the Emperor even made him a Prince of the Holy Roman Empire. Yet, every excessive gift always, it is said, hides the repayment of a favour. So it was true: the Emperor too was indebted to the Odescalchi. Now he has repaid that money with interest.

  Livio Odescalchi himself seems to feel no shame for his odious and bare-faced trafficking. Upon the death of Innocent XI, it is said that his fortune amounted to more than a million and a half scudi, as well as the fief of Ceri. He at once laid his hands on the dukedom of Bracciano, the marquisate of Roncofreddo, the county of Montiano and the lordship of Palo, as well as on the Villa Montalto at Frascati. He was even on the point of buying the fief of Albano, but the Ap­ostolic Chamber itself managed in extremis to snatch the transaction from him. Finally, after the death of King Jan Sobieski, the victor of Vienna, Livio attempted to succeed him on the throne of Poland with an offer of eight million florins.

  There is no point in waxing indignant: money—that infamous scourge, without land and without pity—has never ceased to corrupt Europe and will ever more trample underfoot the honour of the Faith and of crowns.

  I am no longer the innocent boy of those days at the Donzello. The things I then saw and heard, and which I shall never be able to reveal to anyone, have marked my life forever. The Faith has not abandoned me; yet, inevitably, the sentiments of devotion and fidelity which every good Christian should foster for his Church have been forever corrupted.

  The act of confiding my memories to these pages has, if nothing else, helped me to overcome the moments of greatest discomfort in my life. The rest has been provided for by prayer, the companionship of Cloridia and the reading with which I have nourished my spirit over the years.

  Three months ago, Cloridia and I were at last joined in matrimony: we seized upon the opportunity when a mendicant friar arrived in our wretched locality.

  A few days ago, I sold a few bunches of grapes to a cantor from the Sistine Chapel. I asked him if he ever happened to sing arias by Luigi Rossi.

  "Rossi?" he replied, furrowing his eyebrows. "Ah yes, I think I have heard that name, but it must be old stuff, from the days of the Barberini. No," he added, laughing, "nowadays no one remembers him: today in Rome, all glory goes to the great Corelli, did you not know that?"

  Only now do I realise how I have let the years flow past beyond the threshold of my little house. No, I do not know that Corelli; but I do know that I shall never forget the name of the Le Seigneur Luigi or the sublime accents of his arias, which were already out of fashion when Abbot Melani evoked them for himself and for me.

  From time to time, sometimes even in my dreams, I recollect the voice and sharp little eyes of Atto Melani, whom 1 imagine bent by age in his house in Paris, that spacious house in which he had once invited me to go and live.

  Fortunately, the weariness of my labours banishes nostalgia: our farm has grown and there is always more work. Among other thin
gs, we sell fresh vegetables and good fruit to the nearby villa of the Spada family, where they often call upon me for some other services.

  Whenever my work allows, however, I turn to my memories of Atto's words and repeat to myself that phrase of his about solitary eagles and flocks of crows, inwardly seeking to reproduce the tone, the intonations and the intentions, although I know them to be both audacious and ill-advised.