by Rita Monaldi
My thoughts turned to Sfasciamonti: it was no surprise that he had to encourage his colleagues to investigate the cerretani. Why, I wondered, should they go out of their way to discover the secrets of the sects of mendicants if they already had to go to such lengths to conceal their own?
Of course, Sfasciamonti had shown himself to be familiar with the worst practices: falsifying police reports, arresting people unjustly, lying, threatening those detained for questioning. He would even have been prepared to have Il Roscio kept illicitly in prison. But all that was, I thought, in order to arrive at a goal that was in itself praiseworthy: to combat the cerretano scum and find out what had become of Abbot Melani's manuscript, the telescope and the relic. If these were the methods necessary to arrive at the truth, they were perhaps less than ideal; but they could doubtless be accepted.
When I arrived at Atto's lodgings, I was already awaited for my report.
"It is about time. Where on earth have you been?" he asked me, while getting Buvat to spread an ointment on his arm.
I then told him of the many vicissitudes which had kept me busy, including those before the hunt for Caesar Augustus which I had not yet had occasion to report on: the conversation with the Master Florist, Albani's desperation at the loss of his note, stolen by the parrot; and finally, the scandal caused by the repeated argument between Atto himself and Albani, thanks to which the Secretary for Breves was ridding himself of his inconvenient reputation for fidelity to France.
The Abbot received these three items of news with excitement, amusement and thoughtful silence, respectively.
"So the Master Florist is prepared to talk. That is good, very good. Only, he said that I should be correctly informed before meeting him: in what sense? He will surely not be of the imperial party."
"Signor Abbot," Buvat intervened, "with your permission, I have an idea."
"Yes?"
"What if the Tetrachion, which Romauli mentioned, were the flower of some household? The arms of noble houses are full of beasts with the most singular names such as the dragon, the gryphon, the siren and the unicorn, and it may be that plants follow the same pattern."
"Ah yes, it could come from some family coat of arms!" Atto jumped up, bespattering his poor secretary's clothing with the ointment from his arm. "All the more so in that the Master Florist knows all about flowers. You are a genius, Buvat. Perhaps Romauli hoped that I should be well informed before I meet him because he does not wish to name names and so he expects that, when I go and talk with him, I should already know what family is hidden behind the Tetrachion."
"So," I asked, "would this provide the proof of the heir to the Spanish throne, as Ambassador Uzeda's maid said? And if that is the case, what would that have to do with the fact that Capitor named the dish after a heraldic flower?"
"I have not the faintest idea, my boy," replied Melani, overexcitedly, "but Romauli does seem to intend to provide us with useful information."
Having said this, Abbot Melani sent his secretary off to search through the official registers of recognised arms for a hypothetical noble shield bearing a flower named Tetrachion.
"You can start at once in the library of the villa. You may be sure that they will have the precious opus of Pasquali Alidosi, which is illustrated with woodcuts of the arms, and that of Dolfi, which has the advantage of being more recent. After that, Buvat, you will resume work on that other matter."
"When am I to copy your reply to the letter from Madama the Connestabilessa?" asked the secretary.
"Afterwards."
Once Buvat had left, not in truth that keen to set to work again at that hour (which he ordinarily dedicated to repose in the company of a fine bottle of wine), I would have liked to ask Atto what else he had in mind for his secretary, who had, for a couple of days, been largely out of sight. But the Abbot spoke first:
"And now let us pass from the vegetalia to the animalia. So Albani is much troubled through the fault of your parrot," said he, referring to what I had told him not long before. "Ha, so much the worse for him!"
"And what do you think of the comments they have been making on him?"
He looked at me with a grave expression on his face, but uttered not a word.
"We must be vigilant in all directions, without excluding anything," said he in the end.
I nodded, at a loss for words, without understanding what he might mean by that all-embracing phrase which clearly said all and nothing, like most political statements. He had not wished to comment on Albani's new public image. Perhaps, I thought, he too did not know where that might lead, but did not wish to admit it.
Ignorant as I was of matters of state, I was mistaken.
Evening the Fifth
11th July, 1700
I had a bone to pick with Abbot Melani. Who was the Countess of S., the mysterious poisoner to whom the Connestabilessa referred so reticently in her letter? Had she something to do with the Countess of Soissons mentioned by Atto, who had spread trouble between Maria and the young King? And who was she? When I asked him, the Abbot, engrossed in his own narration, had not deigned to answer.
While Atto enjoyed himself at dinner in the gardens with the other illustrious guests, once again I plunged my hands amidst his dirty linen and found the ribbon binding his secret correspondence with the Connestabilessa. Unlike previous occasions, however, I was unable to find either the message from Maria Mancini or the reply which the Abbot had recently penned and which, as I had just heard, he had not yet sent. Where were they then?
Meanwhile, I felt myself drawn to the bundle of reports, and that brought to mind what I had read on the previous occasion about the unfortunate King Charles II of Spain. I thought that, if I were to read on, I might be able to find other traces of the Countess of S. and understand what she might have to do with Abbot Melani's business. I opened the report from the Connestabilessa which Atto had marked in a corner with the number two:
Observations concerning matters spanish
Given the state to which the Catholic King is reduced, and the absence of an heir, in Madrid they could think of only one explanation: witchcraft.
For a long time now there has been talk of this. Two years ago, El Rey in person turned to the powerful Inquisitor-General, Tomas Rocaberti.
The Inquisitor, after consulting with His Majesty's confessor, the Dominican Froilan Diaz, put the question to another Dominican, Antonio Alvarez de Arguelles, the modest director of an obscure convent in Asturias, but an excellent exorcist.
It is said that, when he received Rocaberti s letter, Arguelles nearly fainted. In his letter, the Inquisitor- General explained the matter to him in detail, asking him to implore the Devil to reveal what evil spell had been cast on the Sovereign.
Arguelles did not need to be asked twice. In a chapel, he summoned one of the sisters whom he had earlier freedfrom a diabolical possession. He made her place her hand upon the altar, then recite the spells suitable for that purpose.
From the mouth of the sister, he heard the Evil One speak thus. The voice revealed that King Charles had been the victim of a spell at the age of fourteen, cast by means of a bewitched beverage. The purpose was ad destruendam materiam generationis in Rege et ad eum incapacem ponendum ad regnum administrandum: in other words, to make him sterile and incapable of reigning.
Arguelles then asked who had cast the spell. Through the nun's mouth, the Devil replied that the potion had been prepared by a woman called Casilda, who had extracted the malefic liquid from the bones of a condemned man. This juice had then been administered to the King mixed with a cup of chocolate.
There was, however, a way of curing the diabolical infection: El Rey was once a day to drink half a quart of holy oil on an empty stomach.
Action was taken at once. Only, the first time that Charles swallowed a little oil, he was at once convulsed with such dreadful bouts of vomiting that the little group of monks and nuns, exorcists and physicians feared for his life. Thus, they were compelled to use the o
il externally, on his head, chest, shoulders and legs; after which the relevant formulae, litanies and antidotes were recited.
Just a year ago, however, Rocaberti died suddenly. Obviously, everyone feared that this might be revenge on the part of Satan. Froilan Diaz, the King's confessor, had to go ahead on his own. Help arrived from an unexpected quarter: in Vienna, the Emperor Leopold had also taken an interest in the question, for something unheard of had occurred in the Imperial capital In the Church of Saint Sophia, a young man, possessed by evil spirits and subjected to exorcism, had revealed that the Catholic King was a victim of witchcraft. The boy (or the spirits which spoke through him) had even explained that the magical instruments employed were concealed in a certain place in the Spanish Royal Palace.
In Madrid, a furious search began. Squads of workmen unscrewed planks, drilled through panels, demolished party walls, tore away marble plaques, and in the end something was indeed found: a number of dolls and a pile of paper scrolls.
There could be no doubt about it: dolls are fetishes used for the casting of spells. On the scrolls, however, no one knows what was written.
The Emperor then sent a Capuchin Father to Madrid, a famed and feared exorcist, to eradicate the influence of the Evil One from the apartments of El Rey. There, however, matters became more complicated: not a day passes without rumours of the discovery of some other malefice, which some priest is said to have been taken on to combat, and so on and so forth. The situation is beginning to get out of hand. It even happened that a madwoman entered the Pcdace screaming and shouting; yet, so obscure and tormented is the atmosphere these days that no one had the courage to stop her, for fear that she might be a messenger of powers supernatural.
The madwoman succeeded in getting past the guards and even entering the royal apartments, screaming that El Rey was the victim of black magic, that the spell had been cast by means of a snuff box, and that the person behind the sorcery was none other than his wife.
The revelation was immediately accorded much credit, because the King's second wife, Maria Anna of Neuburg, is very ill-tempered and has sometimes behaved as though she were out of her mind.
Whenever Charles denies her some little favour, she tells him that this was in fact destined for someone capable of casting the evil eye (of which El Rey is terrified) and, if the King does not give in to her, the mysterious person will take revenge; not condemning him to death or sickness, but making him evaporate into nothingness, like a withered flower. Trembling with fear, the Catholic King invariably gives in to her.
When the rumours of sorcery and exorcisms got around, the Queen decided to act against the person responsible for all that chaos, who in her view was none other than poor Froilan Diaz. In short, he has been arrested.
Now, in this Jubilee Year, every day in Madrid new lunatics emerge, witches and maniacs overcome by their own nightmares. They scream and tear their hair out or roll on the ground, crying out in public places, under the anxious gaze of the populace, supposed revelations about the ensorcelment of the royal family. There seems to be no way of defending the Catholic King and his consort, and above all the honour of the Kingdom, from the defamatory attacks of those possessed by demons.
Tired and confused by this infernal round, the King is struggling to cope with a sense of guilt, shame and profound sadness. He is visiting the crypt of the Escorial ever more frequently, where he has the tombs of his ancestors opened in order to look upon their faces, thus condemning those regal corpses to immediate decomposition. When they opened the coffin of his first wife, Marie Louise of Orleans, he suffered a fit of desperation, kissing the corpse and wanting to take it away with him, caring nothing for the fact that it was crumbling in his hands. They had to drag him from the crypt by brute force, invoking the name of Marie Louise and screaming that he would soon be rejoining her in Heaven.
In this, El Rey is a true Habsburg, an epigone of Joan the Mad who could not be separated from the coffin of her husband Philip the Fair; or of Charles V who, after abdicating and withdrawing to a monastery, was wont to have himself enclosed in a sarcophagus naked and swaddled in bandages, to listen to his own requiem mass. Philip II slept with his coffin by his bed, with the Crown of Spain surmounted by a skull; and, like his son, Philip IV, was wont to visit the crypt of the Escorial, sleeping every night in a different tomb.
Queen Maria Anna, too, is desperate. For her the one solution would be to become pregnant. If the Monarchy has an heir, there will at long last be some hope amidst its dark future prospects. Only a couple of years ago, the Queen underwent the special cures of a monk of the Order of Jerusalem who was granted free access to her apartments.
It was in fact never clear what these exercises against sterility may have involved. It has, however, come to light that the monk, in the ecstatic fervour of prayer, suddenly made a great leap into the air, whereupon the Queen, who lay under the bedclothes, took fright and in turn leapt out of bed. The ambiguous event caused such a stir at Court that the monk had to be sent away forthwith. No few persons insinuate that the Queen, in her frenetic desire to become pregnant, may have imposed upon her own body acts redolent of the most unrestrained concupiscence.
Everything, alas, is possible. The Queen is weighed down by too much bitterness. Her soul, already sufferingfrom years of conjugal disappointment, is exasperated by the sinister and unsettling atmosphere that pervades the Court. Maria Anna needs sympathy; it is well known that she sends tormented letters to her German correspondents, in which she attempts to explain and justify the madness into which what was once the greatest and most feared Kingdom in the world has descended, becoming the object of universal pity and derision.
But she writes in vain. Suffering poisons her thoughts and makes her unable to express them in writing. It is said that she often confides by letter in the Landgrave of Hessen. The Landgrave, however, hesitates to answer her; from what one can gather, the Queen's letters are a meaningless nonsense, the product of a disturbed mind, in which verbs and subjects wander without rime or reason, like the possessed who go howling through the dark night of Madrid.
Here the Connestabilessa's report, which continues and expands upon the desolate picture of the wretched Catholic King, came to an end.
I tried again to find those two last letters, which the Abbot had evidently placed elsewhere. Why, I wondered, had he done that? Was he perhaps beginning to get wind of my incursions?
I looked briefly among Buvat's papers, but found nothing. Then I looked among his clothes. There I discovered a curious series of sheets of paper, carelessly folded and placed in the pockets of his breeches, each filled with a different letter. One sheet was full of the letter e, another of o's, yet another, the letter y, and finally, a page of l's and one of the letter R. Perplexed, I turned those pages over in my hands. They looked like the kind of exercises one does when learning to write. It was certainly no fine handwriting: the hand was heavy and uncertain. I laughed. It looked like some weird exercise undertaken by Melani's secretary in order to rid himself of the fumes of wine before returning to the Abbot's service. Such overindulgence was, indeed, not rare in those days in which not only the noble guests but those accompanying them were spoiled.
A little later, in a coat, I found without too much difficulty the two letters that I sought. I calmed down: perhaps the Abbot had simply handed them to Buvat to remind him to prepare an archive copy of the reply to the Connestabilessa before sending it. So I sat down to read.
Rather than clarifying my ideas, the Connestabilessa's letter left me even more confused.
My dearest Friend,
My fever shows no signs of abating and I am rather sorry to have to delay so long my arrival at the Villa Spada. The physician does, however, assure me that I should be able to resume my journey within a couple of days.
Here, meanwhile, I continue to receive news. It seems that Charles II has employed the most heartfelt tones in begging for a mediation by the Pope. The poor Catholic King is caught in a dile
mma. As I had occasion to tell you, he asked his cousin Leopold I to send his youngest son, the fifteen-year old Archduke Charles from Vienna. El Rey wants him in Madrid. He even had a naval squadron made ready in the port of Cadiz to go and fetch the Archduke. It is clear that El Rey means to make him his heir. But, as you well know, the Most Christian King now comes into the picture. As soon as he learned of this move, he instructed Ambassador Harcourt to inform El Rey that such a decision would be regarded as a formal breaking of the peace and, following up this message, he immediately had a fleet rather stronger than the Spanish one put out from the port of Toulon, ready to intercept and bombard the ship carrying the Emperor's youngest son. Leopold dared not make his son run such a risk. El Rey then proposed that the Emperor should send him to Spain's Italian territories, but Leopold is temporising. After years of fighting against the Turk, the Empire is unwilling to spill its subjects' blood in its defence, and that the King of France knows.
The Most Christian King has indeed determined that now is the time to strike the decisive blow: as you know, in order to frighten the Spaniards even more, a month ago he made public the secret pact into which he had entered with Holland and England a couple of years ago, pursuant to which Spain is to be partitioned. Upon hearing the news, they royal couple hastened back to Madrid from El Escorial in a state of shock. The Queen flew into a rage and smashed everything in her bedchamber. Even I could not calm her. There is a state of emergency at Court: the Council of Grandees fears France and is ready to welcome a nephew of the Most Christian King if that will spare the country an invasion.
