Secretum am-2

by Rita Monaldi

"The Company of Saint Elizabeth?" I asked, recalling that I had in the past heard tell of it. "That group consisting entirely of the halt and the blind?"

  "Yes, poor things. Fortunately, Pope Paul Vgave them a permit to beg. If only there were no catchpolls…"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Oh, nothing. Just that the company has to pay many taxes for religious ceremonies, so that in the end, little remains to them. But you must excuse me now, I have to go to San Pietro in Montorio and I am already late."

  I was unable to detain the young cleric any longer or to obtain from him any other particulars concerning the Company of Saint Elizabeth. After leaving the priest, I spent an infinitesimal proportion of the money received for my literary services to Abbot Melani on the acquisition from a street vendor of a carton of little fish, just fried and deliciously crisp to the teeth.

  I turned towards Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere; contemplating the noble and ancient fagade of the church, I ate, leaning on the steps of the fountain in the middle of the square. I was thinking. I remembered that I had heard tell of the Company of St Elizabeth, because on the saint's day they hold a procession with a great military escort and visit the four holy basilicas. I was not, however, aware that they had a papal authorisation to beg; furthermore, I found the cleric's remark concerning the catchpolls distinctly curious. What could Sfasciamonti's colleagues have to do with the company's contribution to religious festivities? I turned and saw the dusty and sinuous serpent of the procession turning into a side-road. Behind it there remained a breath of air smelling of unwashed bodies, rotting clothes and kitchen odours.

  "And I, what do I pay taxes for?" exclaimed the owner of a tavern with four tables outside, waylaying me loudly and polemically. A middle-aged man with a feline expression and a swollen pot-belly, his accent was from the Abruzzi and he seemed to be one of those people who complains about everything but does nothing about anything. After the company had gone on its way, he had begun to sweep lazily but irately in front of his door.

  "But the Company of St Elizabeth never entered your inn," said I, amazed by the man's anger with those crippled, wretched outcasts.

  "My boy, I don't know how long you've lived in this city, but I can assure you that I am far older than you," said he, leaning his broom against the wall, "and I have seen and heard more than you could ever imagine. For example, whoever owns a shop, market stall, warehouse, store, inn, hostelry, wine-shop, bakery or other place where goods are sold, both foodstuffs and other goods, must, in order to exercise any trade pay in advance ten baiocchi a month to have the street cleaned and washed. Hired carriages, the pozzolana quarries, the docks on the Tiber, even ordinary town carriages, all pay taxes. And even those who don't pay them must slave away to comply with the health regulations against pollution of the air: buffalo herdsmen, butchers and coachmen must cleanse their stables, coach houses and enclosures of all dung and refuse. Market gardeners and the owners of vineyards may not keep manure in the streets of Rome, either within the walls or without. Fruiterers, greengrocers, fishmongers and straw merchants must always remove all the refuse they have produced during the day, down to the last straw, leaf or wood shaving, otherwise they get a fine of five scudi. What else? Ah yes, dyers and tanners cannot throw the waste water from their work into the street and have to pour it into drains specially built for that purpose. And now I tell you: the wastrels of Saint Elizabeth's Company, when they come here, stink and befoul the streets worse than the Nubians of ancient Rome, they take up the whole roadway and make my customers go away. And they, what do they pay?"

  "I have just been told that they pay a tax to the catchpolls," I replied, making immediate use of my conversation with the young cleric.

  "To the catchpolls? Ha ha!" guffawed the innkeeper, grasping his broom and beginning again to sweep the pavement. "And you call that a tax? But that's the catchpolls' fee."

  "The catchpolls' fee?"

  He stopped and looked all around him, as though to make sure that no one was listening.

  "For heaven's sake, young man, where do you live? Everyone knows that the catchpolls take money under the counter from the Company of Saint Elizabeth, in exchange for which they can beg as much as they wish, even in places where it is forbidden by orders and edicts. The money is given on the pretext of paying for religious festivities. But everyone knows that is not what it is all about."

  He resumed sweeping vigorously, as though he wanted to work off an impotent, sulking rage by the activity of cleaning.

  "Forgive me," I resumed, "but if you are telling me…"

  "He talks like he eats, and what he says, even I can see."

  The voice that had come between us was that of a shoe vendor, who was carrying on his shoulders two strings of footwear of every kind and size (boots and clogs, street shoes and slippers) secured to a wooden yoke by long leather thongs. He was a thin, emaciated old man with a pitilessly lined face, wearing only a grey shirt knotted at his belly, breeches that were too short and a half stoved-in straw hat.

  "If people help these ragamuffins, there will only be more and more of them. Look at me, boy. I go out and earn my bread. As for those like the Company of Saint Elizabeth, they have protectors and grow fat."

  "Come on now, they're blind and crippled," I insisted.

  "Oh really? Then how do you explain that there are more and more beggars, vagabonds and wastrels? How do you explain that one Roman out of two begs for charity? And yet, the alms keep rolling in, indeed they do!"

  "Perhaps it's because there's not enough bread for everyone."

  "Not enough bread!" said the shoe-seller scornfully. "Poor fool.. "

  "The truth," the innkeeper went on, "is that the poor are not poor. A beggar who's found a good place, say in front of San Sisto's, can earn far more money than me."

  "But what are you saying?"

  "Let fools give alms," said the pedlar acidly.

  "In Rome, poverty is the best school for theft, impurity, blasphemy and every kind of abomination," insisted the innkeeper without giving me the time to think or to respond.

  The squabble which I have so crudely described in fact went on for quite some time, so that I was able to learn, if not hard facts, at least the opinions of my two contradictors, which I was in time to discover corresponded to a viewpoint widely held.

  While Rome had for centuries been a universal haven for the poor, in recent times there had arisen an ever more solid wall of disgust and mistrust for them.

  Until a few decades ago, pious souls among the poor were counted by the thousand. It was no accident that Robert Bellarmine in his De arte bene moriendi (but this I was to learn later from other sources), referring to wise philosophers and excellent doctors of the Church like Aristotle, Saint Basil, Saint John Chrisostom and above all the celebrated De amore pauperum of Gregory of Nazianzius, preached that in every city two cities existed side by side, that of the poor and that of the rich, united by the bond of piety and generosity. God could in fact have created everyone strong and learned, but did not so intend: with wondrous providence, he was pleased to make the one rich, the other poor, the one learned, the other ignorant; the one robust, the other weak, the one healthy, the other sick. Charity was, however, always to be directed towards the poor (among other things because, as Father Daniello Bartoli put it, he who gives charity does not lose but gains). The lax held it sufficient to give them what is superfluous. Other, more rigorous persons thought that one must always give something, because in truth there exist very few among the faithful, even among kings, who are prepared to admit that they have more than they need.

  With time, however, the problem had become more serious: no longer was the question how much should be given to the poor, but whether the latter really were poor. On the streets of the Holy City (as Father Guevarre wrote, but this the two with whom I had been conversing were not to know) there abounded above all shameless individuals who made use of sackcloth and ashes, healthy limbs swathed in bandages, mimed madnes
s and artificial tremors to extract money from the purses of the ingenuous and to find comfortable places in dormitories. Public and private subsidies, the hospices opened by the popes (like that of San Michele, inaugurated by Pope Innocent XII) and the charitable gifts of the nobility (Cardinal Farnese gave up to a fifth of his considerable income) thus ended up not in the hands of the truly wretched, but in the purses of wastrels and scoundrels, happy to live and die on the street so long as they did not have to work. They preferred a thousand times to lead a rogue's existence, so long as it was a life of ease. The beggars breathed the air of Rome; and such are the Romans that, since air is worth nothing, why, they thought, work for it?

  "But they are surely not all cerretani, Tawneymen or Dommerers.. " said I casually, hoping that the names of the sects would loosen the tongues of the twain even more, so that I might pick up some interesting morsel.

  "Cerretani" exclaimed the innkeeper in surprise.

  "Those who steal," the other translated.

  "No, they're all the same: cerretani, beggars, Romei, pilgrims and vagabonds! If you want to work you look for it and you'll surely find some honest occupation. Those who don't want work — let them rot!"

  "I had hoped that the lively conversation between the two would yield some useful information, some indiscretion, and that this might prove to be one of those not infrequent occasions on which vox populi reveals the best hidden secrets. As it turned out, the publican had only the most approximate idea of who the cerretani were and the same was true of his friend. I could glean nothing from them that might be of any use for the purposes of Atto's investigations. Only one thing was news to me: the fact that a good many Romans nurtured feelings of disgust and resentment for the poor, not pious pity. I had originally believed the indigent to be all good. Then, upon learning of the sordid secret world of the cerretani, I had supposed them to be divided into the poor but worthy and the bad eggs. Now, however, the opinion of the man in the street was teaching me to mistrust the supposedly worthy no less than their rascally companions and to suspect that the prime cause of their condition might be not indigence, but indolence.

  Who, I wondered, could ever find salvation in a world in which even the humblest and most outcast were sinners?

  Yet these thoughts had no time to take wing. No sooner had I taken my leave of the publican and the shoe-vendor than I realised it was becoming late; I must hasten back to the Villa Spada and report for work. The festivities would be resuming straight away after luncheon. I cast aside the oily yellow carton from which I had eaten the fried fish and headed back.

  When I reached the villa, it was almost time for the latest festive entertainments to begin. As I have said, it was agreed that the guests would return to the Villa Spada only in the early afternoon. Those who had chosen to sojourn at the villa would enjoy a leisurely lunch, a sort of picnic, for the heat was such as to rein in even the heartiest appetites. With this in mind, great pieces of coarse canvas had been spread out in the shade of the trees, covered with fine sheets of damasked stuff, on which baskets of fruit and flowers had been agreeably arranged, together with others brimming over with fresh bread, jars containing tender junket or tasty Provolone cheeses, others filled with hams of pork, venison, rabbit and bear, piles of olives stuffed with almonds, dishes of dried fruit most attractively presented, bowls of sweetmeats hot from the oven and a thousand other delicacies, both fresh and simple, such that even under the burning rays of Sirius, the guests should be disposed to eat their fill out in the open, discreetly caressed by the breezes of the Janiculum Hill, enjoying with bucolic torpor the view over the Holy City and the soft couch of the lawn.

  The coaches of the guests were already crowding the square in front of the entrance; among them, I thought I recognised those of Duke Federico Sforza Cesarini, Marchese Bongiovanni and Prince Camillo Cybo; soon I would behold those great gentlemen themselves, together with others no less illustrious, honouring the nuptials between Maria Pulcheria Rocci and the young Clemente Spada by engaging their precious intellect in that most noble of pastimes: an academic discussion.

  Academies, or cenacles of august intellects coming together for discussion and contemplation, had existed in Rome as far back as the fifteenth century. They had emerged joyously, out in the open, amidst the city's gardens and the perfume of freesias, under the stripy shade of wisterias and pergolas; so it was that they were graced with such names as the Academy of Husbandmen of the Vine, or the Academy of the Farnese Gardens. In the middle of the century, there had arisen the most learned Academy of the Vatican Nights and that of Civil and Canon Law, the which engaged in discussions concerning the most elevated topics of theology, logic, philosophy and gnosiology.

  It was, however, in the final years of the last century that they had attained their full flowering. There was not a palace, a salon, a courtyard, a garden or a terrace unfrequented by eloquent confraternities of men of learning and genius, intent upon measuring up against one another in a noble jousting of intellects. For days on end, orations, disputes, controversies and debates followed one another, keeping minds busy late into the night.

  These cenacles were, of course, not open to all comers. Every candidate had to pass a rigorous examination, upon passing which he would be baptised with some unusual name like Indomitable Starry One or Dewy Academic of the Night, or else some name forged from the models of antiquity, like Honorius Amaltheus, Elpomenides Maturitius, Anastasius Epistheno or Tenorius Autorficus.

  The elevated topics forming the battlefield on which wits clashed were often drawn from the names of the cenacles concerned: the Ecclesiastical Academy, or the Academy of Divine Love, and those of Theology, the Councils, and Dogmas, all plainly engaged in discussions pertaining to the faith. On the other hand, the mathematicians and astronomers of the Academy of Natural Philosophy were concerned with science, as were the Academy of the Lynxes (so called because each thing was to be observed with the sharp eyes of the lynx). The Academicians of the New Poesy met to talk of rhymes, as did those of the famous Arcadia, a name taken from the Arcadian shepherds who populate the bucolic visions of so many excellent poets. Last but not least, the members of the Academy of Saint Cecilia, the patroness of music and singers, met to celebrate the cult of music.

  Less plain, however, was the raison d'etre of academies with obscure names which sometimes dedicated their studies to the most curious matters. Such was the Academy of the Oracle, whose members met in the Roman countryside. One of its members, of robust build, would sit upon a rock, enveloping himself completely in his cloak and pretending to be an oracle. Two others stood on either side of him, to act as interpreters of his prophecies. Then another member of the congregation would approach the oracle, playing the part of a stranger, and would consult him about some future event, for instance whether such and such a marriage would or would not take place. The oracle would respond with apparently meaningless words like "pyramid!" or "button!" and the two interpreters would have to explain the meaning of the reply, illustrating the angles, the figure or the purpose of the pyramid, or the nature, form and use of the button. Two exceedingly severe censors would check the explanation with rigid discipline, marking down even the most insignificant errors of language, accent and pronunciation of the two interpreters. Mistakes were punished by a fine, to be paid in cash, which, once collected, served to acquire victuals wherewith to feed and joyously restore the entire company.

  While some doubts might be permitted as to the usefulness of such congregations, it was not even possible to guess at the activities of certain others. One could readily suppose that the Academy of Husbandmen of the Vine concerned itself with matters of art and the spirit, preferably under the foliage of a vineyard. It was suspected that the Symposiacs met from time to time to raise their elbows, as we say, and the symposium was indeed nothing but a topers' reunion. Likewise, the Humorists were inclined to joke. What, however, the Academy of the Precipitate, that of the Snowy or the Academy of the Flour-faced might get up to,
who the deuce can know? What was the real vocation of the Abbreviators or the Neglected? How did the Equivocals manage to agree matters among themselves? And did the meetings of the Suffocated take place only in writing?

  The mystery grew thicker when one realised that academies did not arise one by one but in groups; like contagions and diseases. Thus, within the space of a few years, there had arisen the Imperfects, the Inexperts, the Impetuous, the Incautious, the Incongruous, the Incompetents, the Ineffectual, the Inflammables and the Informals.

  Fashions changed and it soon became the turn of academies inspired by sadness (the Debilitated, the Delicate, the Depressed, the Despised and the Disunited), by passivity (the Melancholies, the Malingerers, the Maltreated and the Moderates), by danger (the Ambitious, the Angry, the Ardent, the Argumentative and the Audacious) or by their very benightedness (the Occult, the Occluded, the Obstinate, the Otiose).

  Silence was, however, almost total when it came to certain semi-clandestine academies. Perhaps these were destined to develop under water, like that of the Fluctuators; or perhaps even secretly to accept non-human members, like the most mysterious Academy of the Amphibians.

  Not unnaturally, such fervid activity did occasion some expenses; however, a prestigious seat in some patrician palazzo, money for refreshments, for the printing of the best (of the rare) works written by the academicians, together with the extravagant (and somewhat less rare) junketing and festivities, were as a rule all bestowed by some benevolent patron, to whom the academicians dedicated their poetic, scientific or doctrinal offerings. Normally, this would be a cardinal or the scion of some wealthy family of the highest standing, when it was not indeed a pontiff who, for reasons of state or out of simple affection, took an interest in the arcane activities of this or that group of studious gentlemen. When the generous patron moved on to a better life, the academy, bereft of its benefactor, would typically opt for its own dissolution; as when the death of Queen Christina of Sweden in 1689 turned dozens, indeed perhaps hundreds of artists, musicians, poets and philosophers onto the streets. They all had to abandon Christina's palace on the Via della Lungara post haste and swiftly seek some other way of earning their keep. With the demise of their Maecenas, the ingenious activities of the Sterile, the Vague or the Aggravated Ones were all too prone to peter out; but their members usually belonged to several academies and kept on founding new ones. Human Knowledge was safe.