Imprimatur

by Rita Monaldi;Francesco Sorti

  Oft have I returned in vain to the Via dell'Orso, to ask the new occupants of the house where the Donzello stood (now there are only apartments for rent) whether any letters have arrived for me from Paris, or whether anyone has ever asked after the one-time prentice. Every time, as I feared, my hopes have been dashed.

  Time has helped me to understand. Only today have I understood that in reality Abbot Melani never intended to betray Fouquet. It is true that Atto gave the Sun King the letters which he had stolen from Colbert, from which the Superintendent was found to be hid­ing in Rome. However, before then, the King had already begun to show clemency for Fouquet; he had alleviated the conditions of his imprisonment and by now there was even hope that he might be freed. Everyone believed that his liberation was being delayed by Colbert as usual: so why should it not have been a good idea to bring the Coluber's letters to the King? Melani could certainly not foresee that the King's mind would, as soon as he laid eyes on the letters stolen by Atto from Colbert's study, move as swiftly as lightning to a deadly conclusion: Fouquet was in Rome with the secretum pestis, and perhaps he would give it to the Pope, who was sustaining the defenders of Vienna...

  Louis XIV could not permit his plans to fail at precisely that mo­ment, when his pact with the Turks was on the point of yielding fruit. He will have coldly dismissed Atto. He will have accorded himself time for reflection. He will have recalled him a little later and told him who knows what deceitful tale. Whatever that may have been, I am sure of the conclusion of that meeting: Atto was sent to accom­plish an extreme and tragic act of fidelity to the Crown.

  Today, all this no longer seems horrible to me. I look back almost with tenderness at the stratagem of robbing those little pearls off me in order to involve me in his investigations. And I wish I could turn back to that last day when I saw Atto Melani: Signor Abbot, please stop, I should like to tell you...

  The chance was lost and now that is impossible. We were sepa­rated, then and forever, by my boyish candour, my disappointed en­thusiasm and my impatience. Now, I know that it was wrong to sac­rifice friendship on the altar of purity, confidence on that of reason, sentiment on that of sincerity.

  One cannot befriend a spy without bidding farewell to the truth.

  All the prophecies came true. On the first days of the quarantine, I dreamed that Atto gave me a ring and that Devize played the trum­pet. Well, in my Cloridia's book on the interpretation of dreams, I have read that the ring is a symbol of the good conjoined with dif­ficulty, while the trumpet signifies occult knowledge, such as the se­cret of the pestilence.

  In my dream, I had seen Pellegrino rise from the grave: a presage of travails and harm, which did indeed befall us all. In those dream fantasies I saw salt scattered, symbolising assassination (the death of Fouquet); and then, a guitar, indicative of melancholy and labour without reputation (I and Cloridia, unknown and neglected on our little plot). Only one symbol had been favourable, and Cloridia knew that well: the cat, which signals lust.

  Stilone Priaso's astrological almanack had also predicted all that befell us: not only the collapse of the inn, but also the imprisonment of a group of gentlemen (the quarantine at the Donzello), a city besieged (Vienna), malignant fevers and venomous distempers (which struck more than one guest), the death of a sovereign (Maria Teresa), and the journeys of ambassadors (bringing news of the victory in Vienna). Only one vaticination had not come true; or rather, it had been overtaken by an even greater force: the "Barricades Mysterieuses" had prevented the death of "certain enclosed noblemen", as foreseen by the almanack.

  All this has helped me to come to a decision, or rather, to free myself of an old and unhealthy desire.

  No longer do I wish to become a gazetteer. Nor is this only be­cause of the doubt (incompatible with the Faith) that our destinies may be governed by the caprices of the stars. It was something else that extinguished that old ardour in me.

  In the gazettes which, since the adventure of the Donzello, I have had occasion to read in great numbers, I have found nothing of what Atto taught me. I am not speaking of facts: I already knew that the real secrets of sovereigns and states are never to be found in the broadsheets which are sold in our city squares. What is most lacking from the gazetteers' accounts is the courage to think matters through to their conclusion, a thirst for knowledge, and bold and honest test­ing of the intellect. It is not that newspapers are quite useless: they are simply not made for searchers after the truth.

  I could certainly, even with the poor abilities at my disposal, have changed that state of affairs; but whoever dared divulge the myster­ies of Fouquet and Kircher, Maria Teresa and Louis XIV William of Orange and Innocent XI, would at once be arrested, bound in chains and thrown forever into the prison for the insane.

  What Atto said is true: knowing the truth is of no use to those who write gazettes. On the contrary, it is the greatest of obstacles.

  Silence is the only known salvation.

  What no one can restore to me and which I most sorely miss are not, however, words, but sounds. Of the "Barricades Mysterieuses" (alas, I could keep no copy) there remains to me only a faint and patchy memory, some sixteen years old.

  I have made of it a sort of solitary divertissement, a joyous contest with my own memory. How was it, how did that passage sound, that chord, that bold modulation?

  When the dog days of summer dry the head and the knees, I sit down under the oak that shades our modest cottage, in Pompeo Dul­cibeni's favourite seat. Then I close my eyes and gently hum Devize's rondeau, once, twice, and then again, in the sure knowledge that my every attempt will be more faded, more uncertain, more distant from the truth.

  A few months ago, I sent a letter to Atto. Not having his address in Paris, I sent it to Versailles, in the hope that someone would forward it to him. I am sure that everyone at court knows the famous castrato abbot, counsellor to the Most Christian King.

  I confided to him my deep pain at having taken my leave without first expressing to him my gratitude and devotion. I offered him my services, begging him to do me the favour of accepting them and call­ing myself his most faithful servant. Last of all, I mentioned to him that I had written these memoirs, based upon my diary of those days, of which Atto will not even have suspected the existence.

  Yet he has not so far replied to me. Thus, an atrocious suspicion has in recent times begun to disturb my mind.

  What will Atto have reported to the Most Christian King on his return to Paris? Will he have succeeded in concealing all those royal secrets which he had discovered? Or will he have lowered his guard, browbeaten by so many questions, thus enabling the King to perceive that he was privy to too many infamies?

  Thus, I sometimes imagine a nocturnal ambush in some obscure alleyway, a stifled cry, the footsteps of fleeing ruffians and Atto's body lying in blood and mire...

  I shall not give up. Struggling with my fantasies, I continue to hope. And as I await the post from Paris, I sometimes quietly sing a verse or two of his old master, Le Seigneur Luigi:

  Speranza, al tuo pallore

  so che non speripiu.

  E pur non lasci tu

  di lusingarmi il core...

  Hope, from your pallor

  I know you hope no more.

  And yet you do not cease

  From flattering my heart...

  Addendum

  *

  Dear Alessio,

  You will at last have completed your reading of my two old friends' opus. It will now be up to you to take the final step that will place it in the hands of the Holy Father. While consigning these lines to paper, I pray that the Holy Spirit may inspire your reading and the decision to which it gives rise.

  Almost forty years have passed since I received by post the type­script narrating the tale of the Donzello and its dwarf apprentice. Obviously, my first thought was that here was a work in which fantasy was predominant. True, the two authors had (or so they said) drawn upon a historical document: the unpublis
hed memoir of an appren­tice, dating back to 1699. I knew moreover, as a priest and a scholar, that the text was correct in regard to Abbot Morandi and Tommaso Campanella, the Jansenists and the Jesuits, the ancient Societas Orationis et Mortis, as well as the no longer existent monastery of the Celestines, and even the bizarre beliefs circulating in the seventeenth century concerning Confession and Extreme Unction. Finally, the many examples of lexical licence and a certain cavalier handling of Latin quotations all point indisputably to the language in use in the seventeenth century.

  Indeed, the characters often indulge in all the linguistic and terminological excesses of the writers of baroque treatises, including their heavy pomposity.

  Apart, however, from those few points, what was in fact freely invented? Doubt was unavoidable; and not only because of the audacious and at times bewilderingly sensational character of the plot, but the very representation of the two protagonists, who—as I have already mentioned—resemble all too closely the traditional duo of investigators comprising Sherlock Holmes and his assistant and narrator, Watson; not to mention Agatha Christie's Poirot and Hastings, all of whom likewise show a preference for investigating in enclosed spaces (trains, ships, islands): just like the Locanda del Donzello...

  Do we not also find in the seventeenth-century memoirs of Lazarillo de Tormes an analogous teacher-and-pupil couple, an old man and a young one? And what are we to say then of Dante and his "maes­tro e duca” Virgil, who guides and instructs him in infernal galleries all too like the subterranean tunnels beneath the Donzello?

  I therefore assumed that 1 had before me a Bildungsroman, to em­ploy the terminology of literary experts, among whom I certainly can­not be numbered: in other words, a novel which instructs; in this instance, written in the form of a memoir. Is it not perhaps true that the ingenuous apprentice becomes an adult in the course of the nights spent underground following Abbot Melani and his teachings?

  Be that as it may, I soon realized that such considerations did not answer the question: who was the author of this text? My two friends, or the apprentice himself? Or both? And, if so, in what proportions?

  For as long as the presumed models that I found remained distant in time, I was completely unable to reach any conclusion. What point was there in obstinately referring back to the fact that in the work of Aretino or, better, in Boccaccio's Decameron, the narrative is divided up into days, and, above all—just as in the Donzello—the characters are held in captivity because of the plague and, in order to while the time away, tell each other the most varied tales? Might that not be the model present in the mind of our unknown apprentice?

  "Books always speak of other books and every story tells a tale which has already been told": so I concluded, to quote someone whose name I forget. I therefore desisted from such wild-goose chases.

  There were, however, a number of blatant borrowings which cast far deeper doubts upon the authenticity of the entire text: for ex­ample, one of the tirades in which Pompeo Dulcibeni rails against crowned heads, accusing them of opportunism and incest, was lifted in part, without a by-your-leave, from a famous speech by Robespi­erre, to which the authors themselves jokingly referred by leaving Dulcibeni on his bed "sans culotte".

  Finally, the text contains no few excesses, such as the eccentric fig­ures of Ugonio and Ciacconio: modelled on the archetype of the tomb- robbers or tombaroli, those predators of antiquities who still infest our land to this day; like the other corpisantari Baronio and Gallonio, they take their names from famous seventeenth-century scholars and ex­plorers of the catacombs. Not to mention the courtesan Cloridia who, when listening to and interpreting the apprentice-boy's dreams, has him lie down on her bed and sits behind his head, obviously in anach­ronistic imitation of the psychoanalyst's typical posture.

  Even the malevolent representation of the personage of Pope Innocent XI seemed to me no more than a clumsy attempt to upset histori­cal reality. As a good citizen of Como, I was of course well acquainted with the figure and the work of this Pope and fellow-citizen. Likewise, I was aware of the malign comments and calumnies which—even during his lifetime—were spread concerning him, for obvious purposes of political propaganda, and which Padre Robleda so foolishly divulged to the young apprentice. Such insinuations had, however, been amply disproved by the most serious historians. To take one example, Papasogli had penned an excellent though weighty monograph of over three hundred pages on the Blessed Innocent XI. Published nearly a century ago, in the 1950s, this work had done much to cleanse his memory of all deceit. Even before that, Pastor, that giant among Church histori­ans, had cleared away many suspicions.

  Nor was this the only improbability: there was also the story of Superintendent Fouquet.

  In the apprentice's tale, Fouquet dies in the Locanda del Donzello, poisoned byAtto Melani on 11th September, 1683; yet, even in school text-books we read that the Superintendent died in the fortress of Pinerol in 1680, and not in Rome in 1683! A number of fanciful his­torians and novelists have, it is true, put forward the hypothesis that Fouquet did not die in prison, and the question is too old and too worn for me to need repeat it here. Voltaire, who was able to speak with the Superintendent's still surviving relatives, held that we shall never know with certainty when or where he died. Yet it really did seem to me excessive to affirm, as I had read in the opus sent to me by my two old friends, that Fouquet died in Rome, in a hostelry, as­sassinated on the orders of Louis XIV

  Here, I had found something that simply could not hold water, a mere manipulation of history. I was at that point close to consigning the typescript to the waste-paper basket. Had I not found the proof that it was a forgery? I was soon, however, to discover that matters were not quite so simple.

  Everything began to become more and more unclear when I de­cided to study the figure of Fouquet in depth. For centuries, the Superintendent has been held up by history books as the veritable prototype of the venial and corrupt minister. Colbert, on the contrary, passes for a model statesman. According to Atto Melani, however, the honest Fouquet was an innocent victim of the envy and hostility of the mediocre Colbert. At first, I ascribed that surprising reversal to pure fantasy, all the more so in that I found in the text echoes of an old novel about Fouquet by Paul Morand. I was, however, soon to revise my beliefs. I found in a library an authoritative essay penned by the French historian, Daniel Dessert, who, a century ago—documents in hand— spoke out to restore Fouquet's merited glory and to unmask the base­ness and conspiracies of Colbert. In his admirable essay, Dessert set out point by point (and proved unequivocally) all that Atto told the young man in defence of the Superintendent.

  Unfortunately, as so often happens to those who call hoary old myths into question, the precious work of Dessert was consigned to oblivion by the consortium of historians, whom Dessert had made so bold as to accuse of laziness and ignorance. It is, nevertheless, significant that no historian has ever had the courage to disprove his weighty and impassioned study.

  Thus, the dramatic case of Fouquet, as evoked with such feeling by Abbot Melani, was anything but a mere narrative invention. Not only that: continuing my library research, I also verified the acquaint­ance between Kircher and Fouquet which, although not clearly docu­mented, is quite probable, given the fact that the Jesuit (Anatole France mentions this in his opuscule on Fouquet, and it is partially borne out in Kircher's writings) really was interested in the Superin­tendent's mummies.

  Even the thoroughly mysterious tale of Fouquet's sequestration at Pinerol, as I have scrupulously verified, is authentic in every de­tail. The Sun King really did seem to be holding the Superintendent in prison for fear of what he knew; yet it has never been discovered what that might have been. The ambiguous Comte de Lauzun is also faithfully represented, he who for ten years was imprisoned at Pinerol, where he succeeded in communicating secretly (and quite inexplicably) with Fouquet and was released immediately after the Superintendent's demise.

  The book did, then, contai
n a number of solid and well-documented references to historical reality.

  "Now, what if it were all true?" I found myself thinking, as I turned the pages of this disturbing typescript.

  At that juncture, I was unable to restrain myself from undertaking a number of other library searches, in the hope of uncovering some gross error which might demonstrate the falseness of my two friends' writings, and which might enable me to be free of the question. I must confess, I was afraid.

  Alas, my suppressed fears were borne out. With unimaginable rapidity, bursting out from dictionaries, encyclopaedias and contemporary manuals, there emerged before my eyes—exactly as I had read in the typescript—descriptions of Rome, quarantine measures, all the theories concerning the plague, both in London and in Rome, Cristofano's remedies and the apprentice's menus; and similarly with Louis XIV, Maria Teresa, the Venetian mirror-makers, even down to Tiracorda's riddles and the plan of the underground galleries in the Holy City.

  My head was in a whirl of thoughts about the divining rod, the interpretation of dreams, numerological and astrological doctrines, the saga of mamacoca (i.e. coca); and lastly, the battle for Vienna, in­cluding the secrets of French siege technique which the Turks had so mysteriously acquired, as well as the mystery of the strategic errors which led to the Infidels' ruinous defeat.