Secretum am-2

by Rita Monaldi

  "Seen, seen…" the Abbot corrected me, abruptly changing his tone, and suddenly denying the turn our thinking was taking. "How you let your mind run away with you. I'd say that we simply imagined these things. Do not forget that we might simply be the victims of vapours released from the ground, and perhaps encouraged by my tales."

  "Signor Atto, what you say may certainly be true of the second of the three episodes we have witnessed: Maria Mancini in the company of the young King. But neither for the first nor for the last: how could I have imagined with such exactitude circumstances of which I did not even know the existence? Or do you mean to tell me that our hallucinations have the quality of clairvoyance?"

  "Perhaps: rather, you have simply shared a hallucination of mine."

  "What does that mean?"

  "Well, it might have been an episode of transmission of thought. Recently in France and England, a number of treatises have come out, like that of the Abbe de Vallemont, which explain that this is a real phenomenon readily explicable by the laws of reason. This takes place through the action of the most subtle and invisible corpuscles emitted by our thoughts, which sometimes meet with those of others and impregnate their imagination."

  "So they say, then, that we are surrounded by invisible parcels of others' thoughts?"

  "Exactly. A little like the exhalations of quicksilver."

  "I know nothing of that."

  "Nothing better than quicksilver demonstrates the subtle nature of vapours and exhalations. This metal, which is both liquid and dry, exhales fumes so subtle and penetrating that if you move it with one hand, you will see that a piece of gold tightly held in the other hand will be all covered with quicksilver. The same thing will happen to the piece of gold even if you hold it in your mouth. If then you place it in contact with gold, silver or tin, you will see that these metals soften and are reduced to a paste known as amalgam. If you place quicksilver in a leathern tube and heat it a little, it will penetrate the leather and emerge as though through a sieve."

  "Really?" I exclaimed in astonishment, having never heard anything of the sort.

  "Yes, and I have read that exactly the same thing may happen with the imagination."

  "So I may simply have witnessed some unconscious fantasising on your part?"

  Atto nodded in confirmation.

  We walked a while longer, one beside the other, in silence. From time to time, I would glance at him out of the corner of one eye: frowning, Atto appeared to be plunged in grave meditations, in which he did not, however, include me.

  I meditated for a long time on the explanations furnished by the Abbot. So we had seen, not what happened between Maria Mancini and Fouquet, but what might have happened if Maria's destiny and that of the Superintendent had followed their natural and benevolent course. If I had had the leisure and the means to philosophise, I should have asked myself: does a chaste hand restore in some Utopian place the broken threads of history? Does some merciful refuge give shelter to events which will not take place? All these were questions which, like the pikes of an armed battalion, seemed to point to the place where we were.

  "Look at this," said the Abbot suddenly, stopping abruptly before a fine, broad flower bed. "Look at these plants: each one of them has a plate before it with its name."

  "Hyacinth, violet, rose, lotus…" I read mechanically. "And what of it?"

  "Just go on: ambrosia, nepenthes, panacea, even moly," he insisted, growing pale.

  My attention wandered from those names to Melani's face, questioningly.

  "Do these mean nothing to you?" he insisted. "These are the plants to be found in the mythical gardens of Adonis."

  I remained silent and perplexed.

  "In other words, they do not exist!" exclaimed Atto in a strangled voice. "Ambrosia is the food of the gods of Olympus, which gave immortality; nepenthes is a legendary Egyptian plant which, according to the ancient Greeks, gave serenity to the soul and made one forget suffering. The panacea…"

  "SignorAtto…"

  "Silence, and listen to me," he interrupted me brusquely, while fear at last appeared on his face. "The panacea, as I was saying, but perhaps you too know, is a fantastic plant which the alchemists have been seeking for centuries; it is capable of healing all diseases and preventing old age. As for the moly, it is a magic herb which Mercury gave to Ulysses to make him immune to the potions of the witch Circe. Do you understand now? These plants do not exist! Tell me what they are doing here, on show, with their names before them?"

  He turned suddenly, hastening nervously towards the villa. I moved to catch up with him. Hardly had I done so than we witnessed a spectacle which made the hairs stand up on our heads.

  A waxen spectral figure, playing the violin, hovered in the air behind an arcaded open loggia on the battlements of the villa's outer wall. An impalpable mantle of black gauze billowed capriciously from his shoulders, moved by a sudden, turbulent wind. The music which sprung from his bow was none other than the folia which had so many times accompanied us on our peregrinations through the Vessel.

  We drew back instinctively, and I felt my flesh grow as cold as marble. A moment later, however, the Abbot, ashen faced, advanced again. He then stood awhile staring open-mouthed and tense with shock, almost as though transformed into a tragic mask.

  "Oh thou!" cried Melani at length to the apparition, stretching out his arms in front of him as to an apocalyptic vision and brandishing his walking stick at it. "Whence comest thou and what is thy race? What troubles bring thee here? By the Numina, I beseech thee and by all that is dearest to thee: respond to my request, hide nothing, that I may know at last!"

  "I am an officer of the armed forces of Holland!" thundered the being up above, without putting down his violin, and in no way put out by our presence or by the Abbot's singular manner of addressing him.

  Melani seemed to be on the point of fainting. I rushed to support him, but he at once resumed his speech.

  "Thou Flying Dutchman!" cried Atto with all the breath that remained in his body, almost as though these must be his last words. "From what spectral world didst thou come to embark here in this phantom Vessel?"

  The stranger stopped playing and said nothing, scrutinising us attentively. Suddenly, he bowed, disappeared behind the loggia and reappeared immediately after with a rudimentary rope ladder which he unrolled on our side of the wall.

  Atto and I stood silently with bated breath.

  The being who had appeared before our eyes in such spectral guise and who had seemed to float freely in the air now, however, to our great wonderment came down to us, violin and bow tucked under one arm, prudently stepping on the rope ladder like any other mortal.

  "Giovanni Henrico Albicastro, soldier and musician, at your service," he introduced himself, bowing slightly to Abbot Melani, and showing no sign of noticing our pallid expressions.

  Atto, after the great shock he had suffered only moments before, could not find the strength to do or say a thing, and stayed silent, leaning heavily on his walking stick.

  "You are right," said the curious stranger, addressing the Abbot. "This villa is so faded and tranquil that it seems a phantasm. That is why I like it. When I come to Rome, I take refuge here, on the cornice of that little loggia. To play standing up there is not very comfortable, I must confess, but the panorama which one can descry does, I guarantee you, provide the best of inspiration."

  "A cornice?" said the Abbot, shivering.

  "Yes, 'tis a little walkway, on the other side," said he, indicating with his eyes the outer wall from which he had just descended.

  The Abbot lowered his eyes, looking exhausted.

  "Was it yours, the folia which you were playing a moment ago?" he asked in a broken voice.

  Albicastro replied only with a questioning look.

  "Sir, you have the honour to be speaking to Abbot Atto Melani," I intervened, overcoming my reticence.

  Having at last learned the name of the person before him, Albicastro added: "Yes
, Signor Abbot, 'twas I who composed it. I hope that I have not unduly offended your ears. You seemed to be in a state of great agitation when you addressed me."

  "Far from it, far from it," replied Melani weakly, while the pallor of fear gave way to the purple of shame.

  "I would not wish to detain you, Sir," said Albicastro. "You seem to me to be rather tired. With your permission, I shall take my leave of you. We shall be seeing each other later: after all, you too are visiting the villa, is that not so? There's no end to discovering it."

  Accompanying his words with a slight bow, the musician strode away from us.

  Alone once more, silence reigned between the Abbot and me for several moments. I resolved to go and see. I scaled the rope ladder which Albicastro had left hanging down the outer wall and, reaching the loggia, clambered over to the far side.

  "Is it there?" asked Atto, with a vague, nervous air, without taking his eyes off his fine shoes.

  "Yes, it is there," I replied.

  The cornice was there, obviously. Nor was it even that narrow. Albicastro was anything but a flying Dutchman.

  The Abbot said nothing. The thought of the scene of terror which he had imagined only moments before filled him with shame.

  "That Dutchman is, nevertheless, a trifle eccentric," I observed. "It surely is not every day that one finds a violinist playing up on a shelf."

  "And those mysterious flowers, which made me…" continued Atto.

  "Signor Atto," I interrupted, "with all due respect, permit me to say that those flowers are by no means as mysterious as you believe them to be."

  The Abbot started, as though I had stung him.

  "And what do you know of that?" he protested, visibly annoyed.

  "It may indeed be true," I replied with all the modesty of which I was capable, "that ambrosia, nepenthes, panacea and moly were, as you say, all present in the mythical garden of Adonis; that I do not doubt. And perhaps that is precisely why Elpidio Benedetti chose these plants. But it is quite untrue that they do not exist. Of course, I speak only in my capacity as an assistant gardener, and on the basis of such humble experience as I have gained over the years in the plantations of the Villa Spada, as well as from a few manuals on flowers which I enjoy reading from time to time. Nevertheless, I can tell you that ambrosia, if it was once the food of the gods of Olympus on whom it conferred immortality, I know today as a mushroom which the ants are gluttons for. The same with nepenthes: it is described as a carnivorous plant which the Jesuit fathers brought back from China; whether it comes rather from Egypt and, as the ancient Greeks believed, makes the soul serene and enables one to forget pain, that, I'm afraid, I do not know. The panacea may have been sought for centuries by alchemists, but I know it as a medicinal plant that cures warts. As for moly, 'tis merely a form of garlic, which does not of course mean that it could not immunise Ulysses from Circe's magic potions. Everyone knows the infinite virtues of garlic…"

  I broke off, when I became aware of the grave humiliation painted in dark tints on Atto's face.

  Poor Abbot Melani. In the face of the mysterious apparitions which we had repeatedly witnessed in the Vessel, he had always espoused scepticism, attributing those inexplicable apparitions to corrupted vapours, corpuscles, imaginings and who knows what else. Yet tension and fear had grown in his breast no less than in mine, of this I now had the certain proof.

  These had, however, materialised at precisely the wrong moment: before the plants in the flower bed in which the Abbot had thought to see the legendary flowers of the gardens of Adonis, and immediately after that, through a bizarre set of circumstances, before the image of that singular individual Albicastro, musician and soldier, seemingly suspended in mid-air. Atto had, in other words, given in to fear of the unknown just when there was nothing unknown involved. He had deceived himself several times over and now the shame of it was gnawing cruelly at his liver.

  "That is what I meant to say," he commented at last, perhaps sensing my thoughts. "All this confirms what I have been preaching to you since the very first day we set foot in this place: superstition is the daughter of ignorance. Every single thing in this world can be explained by the science of things and phenomena; had 1 possessed sufficient knowledge of floriculture, I could not have made so dreadful a mistake."

  "Of course, Signor Atto, but permit me to point out to you that, in my modest opinion, we have not yet found a convincing explanation for the apparitions we have seen here."

  "We have not found one because of our ignorance. Just as we thought we saw a flying man, when he was simply walking along a cornice in a strong breeze."

  "Do you think that someone has been playing tricks on us?"

  "Who can say? The scope for disguising the truth is infinite."

  A few moments later we had entered the ground floor of the building.

  "After the shock which Buvat gave us yesterday, you should have put a few questions to me," said Atto.

  "That is true. How the deuce did Buvat manage to locate and get to us without being either seen or heard? He appeared so suddenly that he seemed to have descended from heaven."

  "I too could not believe my eyes, but then I found the explanation," said he, drawing me into a little room to the right of the main door.

  "Now I understand," I exclaimed.

  The room was in fact the base of a minuscule service staircase. Unlike us, Buvat had not taken the main stairs on the opposite side of the building (in other words at the end and to the left, for those entering it) but these little service stairs. That was how he had appeared unexpectedly just in front of us, at the end of the first-floor salon that gave onto the Vatican. Although we could hear them, we could not understand where his footsteps were coming from, and this was not only because of the echo produced by the high vault of the gallery but because we were quite unable to conceive of the presence of another way up, of which we knew nothing.

  So we went up to the first floor by the service stairs which were, like their more spacious counterpart, of spiral construction. We were just climbing the last steps when we were transfixed by a powerful siren, accompanied by a deep and menacing reverberation. Instinctively I brought my hands to my ears to protect them from the powerful shock.

  "Damn it," cursed Abbot Melani. "Again that folia!”

  Upon reaching the first floor, we found ourselves facing Albicastro. He had begun to play just at the top of the little spiral staircase which thus acted as a sound box, amplifying the violin and transforming the bass into gigantic lowing sounds and the treble into vertiginous whistling. The music ceased.

  "It seems that the theme of the folia gives you more joy than any other music," said Melani, plainly enervated by the latest shock.

  "As the great Sophocles put it, 'life is more beautiful when one does not reason'. Besides, this music is suited to the Vessel, the stultifera navis, or Ship of Fools, if you prefer," he replied with Dutch brio, dusting down his instrument and then beginning to tune it, thus emitting a series of mewing sounds at once comical and irritating.

  Atto's sole response was to begin to declaim:

  On streets or highways you can find

  A pack of fools who vaunt their shame

  And yet prefer to shun the name.

  Thus have I thought this was the time

  To launch a ship of fools in rhyme:

  A galley, bark, skiff, ketch or yawl -

  But one ship wouldn't hold them all.

  Atto, with those verses, seemed plainly to be calling Albicastro a madman.

  "So you know my beloved Sebastian Brant?" asked the Dutchman, surprised and in no way offended.

  "I have been received too many times at the court of Innsbruck or that of the Elector of Bavaria not to have understood your allusion to Brant's Stultifera Navis, the most widely read book in Germany over the past two hundred years. One cannot claim to know the German peoples if one has not read that book."

  Once more I was taken aback by Atto's encyclopaedic knowledge: se
venteen years ago he had admitted to having few clear notions of the Bible, but when it came to matters political and diplomatic, he always knew everything.

  "You will therefore agree with me that the Stultifera Navis goes well with the villa in which we now stand," replied the musician, who then recited:

  Know, foolishness is ever bold

  And fools themselves for wise men hold,

  But should a man himself despise,

  Why then, at last, a fool's made wise!

  And Abbot Melani responded:

  But what fools are, we plainly see,

  The fools themselves don't want to be.

  Whereupon, Albicastro, eying with amusement the thousand pleats, leather embroideries and tassels and decorations on Atto's ceremonial dress:

  Right now I will not mention those

  Who gad about in foolish clothes;

  Indeed, were I to count the same,

  I'd anger legions by the name.

  They have no taste for wearing twill

  Or simple jerkins void of frill

  Prefer to wear the Holland stuff

  With slitted sleeves and bright enough

  With colours woven in, befurred,

  And on the sleeve a cuckoo bird.

  "Nevertheless, 'tis quite true, many strange things do happen here," I swiftly interposed, fearing that the tourney might all too easily degenerate, what with the pair calling one another mad. "I mean," said I, correcting myself at once, for Atto was showing signs of impatience at my observation, "that 'tis said that corrupt vapours circulate here, or other strange exhalations able even… how can one put it?… to produce hallucinations."

  "Exhalations? Perhaps. That is the beauty of this place. Did not nature's prudence perhaps bestow upon children the seal of folly wherewith to increase the pleasure they can give their educators and to soften the latter's trials? Likewise, this villa lightens the cares of travellers who find solace therein."

  As he spoke, he placed the violin in its case, from which he drew a series of sheets of music.