by Rita Monaldi
Sfasciamonti, motionless under me, was hunched up in terror as well as under the combined weight of Atto and myself. Melani was overcome by shock and pain and moaned, barely moving. With an immense effort I struggled out from under that double human carpet and gave thanks to the Lord that I was able to sit on the ground. The floor was no longer burning hot. A pungent and familiar odour, disquieting under those tragic circumstances, impregnated my skin and my clothing. I became aware of the environment surrounding me, and anguish gripped my soul.
The lantern, of course, was broken. It was, however, possible to descry everywhere a weird luminosity, a mixture of fog and bluish half light, like that which glow worms dispense in gardens after nightfall, subtly pervading all things.
Was I still in one piece? I looked at my hands and trembled. They emitted light, no, they seemed even to be made of light.
I was no longer a man. An opalescent glow issued from every point on my body, as I could see when I looked at my legs and my belly. My mortal remains were elsewhere. In their place was a poor lost soul, a wretched effigy wandering in the Underworld, of substance translucent and immaterial.
At that moment, Sfasciamonti rose to his feet and saw me.
"You… you are dead!" he whispered in horror, his eyes fixed on what remained of me.
He looked all around him with mad, bulging eyes. Then he looked at himself, his hands and his arms. He too emitted that bluish light which was everywhere, within us and without.
"Then I too… all of us… oh, my God," he sobbed.
Then came the apparition. A being of darkness, enveloped in a menacing black shroud, his face hidden by a great mystic cowl, was watching us from a niche in the wall, closed with an iron grate.
Atto too rose from the ground and saw him. All three of us were suspended for long, interminable moments between breathing and breathlessness, between desperation and hope, between life and death. Other hooded figures appeared behind the figure in the niche, which must have been, or so it seemed, a little gallery. Evil emissaries of the infernal regions, they would soon be upon us. It was clear that they were about to seize and devour us.
The grate rose. Now nothing separated us from the demons. Their leader, he who had appeared to us first, took a step forward. Instinctively, we drew back. Even Sfasciamonti, or rather the great bluish phantom who had taken his place, trembled like an autumn leaf.
It all happened in moments. The satanic being extracted from his shroud a long, lurid orange object. It was a glowing dagger, in keeping with the white heat of the flames of Hades. This he pointed at us, as though casting an anathema. Soon, said I to myself, from it would issue the tongue of flame that consumes every residual mortal atom, reducing us (if our luminous manifestation still possessed any substance) to poor wandering ectoplasms.
He pointed the dagger in my direction, in a gesture of condemnation. Whatever had I committed, I asked myself blubbering, to merit, not purgatory, but the irremediable horrors of hell? Four devils ran to me, seized me and forced me to the ground on my back, nailing me down with their horrid clawed arms. I did not scream: terror itself, choking my throat, prevented that.
Besides, said I to myself in a flash of desperate humour, who can hear the lament of the damned?
Their leader came to me. Even now, his face could not be seen, only the macabre hooked hand (likewise bluish and phosphorescent) brandishing the fiery dagger. Meanwhile, I knew not what had become of Atto and Sfasciamonti; I heard only an indistinct scuffling. Probably they too had been overcome in their turn.
The angel of evil leaned over and was upon me. With his dagger, he aimed directly at my forehead. He directed the tip just above my eyes, in the middle. He was about to penetrate the bony covering (or its appearance) with the overwhelming force of fire. Then, twisting the blade in the hole, he would stir and fry the grey matter of my brain.
"No," I implored, I know not if with thought alone or with the whisp of voice that I had been allowed to retain from my earthly life.
In the lightless abyss which was my executioner's hood, I thought I saw (the powers of darkness and their agents) a malign smile, which heightened my terror at the approaching end. The absurd heat of the blade dried my eyeballs (had I still any?). Only an animal lust for life still kept them open.
The point of the incandescent blade was less than a hair's breadth from my forehead. It was about to strike. Now, in less than a second. Now, yes, Cloridia my love, my sweet little girls…
It was then, as though in a gentle prelude to death, that I lost consciousness. Before fainting, heart and soul beat together for one last instant. Just long enough to hear:
"One momentary: periculous blunderbungle."
"What? Wretched imbecile, I'll blast you to bits!"
Then, violent noises, as of a struggle, and the shot.
"Take courage, hero, stand up."
A smack. Rapid, violent and alarming as a bucketful of water in the face. It had awoken me, recalling me from the torpor of my swoon. Now I heard Atto's voice addressing me.
"I… I do not…" I stammered, still prone, while my head seemed to be on the point of exploding. I coughed several times. There was a smell of burning, and smoke everywhere.
"Return among the living," Melani chanted to me. We must leave here before we are asphyxiated. First, however, let me present you Beelzebub. You will, I think, be surprised to find that you have already met."
Still trembling, I sat up. The bluish light no longer pervaded the cavern. Now all was yellow, red and orange: a torch had been lit, which illuminated the surroundings. I looked at my hands. I too no longer emitted that arcane phosphorescence.
"I have reloaded," I heard Sfasciamonti announce.
"Good," replied Atto.
I opened my eyes wide. The scene moments before, faced with which I had believed myself to have bid life farewell, had changed utterly.
In his right hand, Sfasciamonti brandished the dagger with which I was on the point of being put to death. He was pointing it at a little group of hooded demons, all huddled oh so quietly against the wall, without giving the faintest sign of resistance. Such discipline was not without cause: in his left hand the catchpoll held his ordnance pistol. Atto, for his part, grasped an improvised torch: a cone made up of sheets of paper which he had lit with the incandescent dagger and which now illuminated the narrow space in which we stood, while however spreading fumes that rendered the air unbreathable.
"Up, you wretch, and get us out of here," said Atto to the chief of the demons, placing a handkerchief across his nose in order not to breathe in too much smoke.
It was then that I recognised the leader of the infernal company. That foul, oversized covering, the odours of filth and decay spreading all around, those clawed hands…
The cowl shifted a little. Once more I beheld that crumpled parchment of a face, that miserable patchwork of bits of skin held together only by inertia, that tumescent cankered nose like a mouldy carrot, the evasive eyes, bloodshot and deceitful, the few broken yellow-brown stumps of teeth, the wrinkles deep as ploughed furrows, the skeletal cranium and the yellowish scalp from which hung resignedly a few rare tufts of rust-coloured hair.
"Ugonio!" I exclaimed.
It is necessary that I should at this juncture make clear the nature and history of the personage in question, as well as his companions, with whom it was my fate to share no few adventures many years ago.
Ugonio was a corpisantaro, one of those bizarre individuals who spend their lives searching Rome's subterranean innards for the relics of saints and of the first martyrs of the Christian faith. The corpisantari are truly creatures of darkness, whose time is spent grubbing with their bare hands underground, separating dirt from shards, earth from stones, splinters from mould, and exulting whenever this stubborn and meticulous labour of filtering reveals a mere fragment of a Roman amphora, a coin of the imperial age or a piece of bone.
They are wont to sell for a high price the relics (or corpisanctorum, w
hence their name) which they find in the subsoil, exploiting the good faith, or better, the unpardonable ingenuousness of buyers. The piece of amphora is sold as a fragment of the cup from which Our Lord drank at the Last Supper; the little coin becomes one of the thirty pieces of silver for which Judas Iscariot betrayed the Son of God; the sliver of bone is palmed off as part of Saint John's collarbone. Of all the vile substances that the corpisantari glean under the ground, nothing is thrown away: a half-rotten piece of wood is sold dear as an authentic splinter of the True Cross, a feather from a dead bird is auctioned as a plume from an angel's wing. The mere fact of spending a lifetime grubbing, piling up and archiving all that disgusting material has endowed them with a reputation as infallible hunters after sacred objects and thus guarantees them a large number of readily hoodwinked customers. Over a long period of time and thanks to the astute bribery of servants, they have accumulated copies of the keys to cellars and store rooms throughout the whole city, thus gaining access to all the most recondite recesses of subterranean Rome.
Surprisingly enough, the corpisantari combine their execrable practices with a genuine, intense, almost fanatical religiosity, which surfaces at the most unexpected moments. If my memory does not betray me, they have asked several pontiffs for the right to form a confraternity; but there has never been any response to that request.
So, Ugonio was one of their number. Being a native of Vienna, he spoke my language with inflections and accents which often made it difficult to discover any coherent sense behind the verbiage; hence his nickname, the German.
"The German…" I exclaimed, utterly astonished, turning to Ugonio. "So 'tis you!"
"I recognate not this disgustiphonous appellation, from which I dissocialise myself with my entire personage," he protested. "I commandeer the Italic tongue, not as an immigrunter, but as if 'twere my own motherlingo."
"Silence, beast," cut in Atto, who had already heard many years before how Ugonio loved to boast about his disastrous gibberish. "Just to hear you talk gives me nausea. So you have made your fortune with this Jubilee, cheating the pilgrims with your so-called relics, perhaps selling some ham bone at a good price as the tibia of Saint Calixtus. I hear that you have become a big noise. And now you've sold yourself to Lamberg, eh? But, what am I saying? Far from selling yourself, you are a true patriot. After all, you're Viennese and, as such, a faithful subject of His Imperial Majesty Leopold I, like that damned ambassador of yours. Bah, who would have guessed that I'd ever again in my life have to put up with your disgusting presence?" concluded Melani, spitting on the ground in disdain.
I, meanwhile, looked at Ugonio and a thousand memories raced around my head. Certainly, the Abbot's suspicions seemed utterly justified: if the infamous German was in cahoots with the cerretani, it followed that they too would all have been in the pay of Vienna and conspiring against us. Nevertheless, I was content to see the old corpisantaro again, with whom I had shared so many adventures, and I sensed that the Abbot too was not displeased, despite his indignant reaction.
"What have you to tell me about the stab wound in the arm which I got from that cerretano accomplice of yours? Was it perhaps meant for my breast? Speak!"
"I deny, redeny and ultradeny your absurdious inculpations. Nor was I beware that someone had stubbed your member with a messerblade."
"I see, you don't mean to collaborate. You will regret it. And now, get us out of here," Atto continued. "Show us the way. Sfasciamonti, give me the pistol and keep Ugonio covered with the dagger. Anyone who makes a false move will end up with a hole in his belly."
The group of hooded beings, whom in my momentary panic I had taken for devils, filed back through the niche whence they had come. We followed, keeping them under the threat of pistol and dagger and, obviously, Sfasciamonti's muscular bulk. Thus, we entered a fetid and narrow burrow which led out from what we'd taken for a bolgia from Dante's Inferno, once again towards the unknown.
"But… we are underground!" I exclaimed at one point, as I became aware of a certain strange humidity and recognised the opus reticulatum, the brick structure typical of ancient Roman walls.
"Yes," Sfasciamonti assented, "where did the tower end and this begin?"
"We are in some secondary conduit of the Baths of Agrippina," replied Abbot Melani. "Who knows, perhaps this was once a corridor on the second floor, with windows and balconies, and one could breathe the fresh air. The rest, I'll explain to you later."
As will by now be quite plain, the ambiguous arts of the corp-isantari meant that they had de facto much in common with another execrable group, the cerretani. It was no accident that we should have run into them in the course of our search for the famous German.
As we proceeded along the tunnel, faintly lit by Atto's torch (which he revived by adding a little piece of canvas found on the ground) Sfasciamonti began to interrogate Ugonio.
"Why do they call you the German? And why did you order the theft of Abbot Melani's text and of the relic?"
"'Tis a vilethy, iniquilous falsehoodie. I am pletely innocuous, this I perjure now and forever, indeed almost never, I mean."
Sfasciamonti fell silent for an instant, taken aback by the corpisantari's garrulous and ramshackle jargon.
"He said that it is not true. Anyway, they call him the German because he was born in Vienna and his mother tongue is German," I explained.
Meanwhile, we had passed from the corridor to a stairway. I was still affected by the experiences from which I had just emerged, shaken through and through by having passed from life to death (or so it had truly seemed to me) and then back again. I was exhausted and in pain from the innumerable kicks, shoves and bruises I had received. My clothing stank of a thousand strange essences and, what was more, I had the inexplicable feeling that my back was covered with a fine layer of lard. Last but not least, I was burning with shame at having been the one member of the group to have fainted from fear, and what was more, at the very moment when Atto and Sfasciamonti had brought the situation under control.
Atto's torch had ended its brief life; we found ourselves suddenly proceeding in the most stygian darkness, testing the terrain with our feet and groping along the walls with our hands. I trembled at the thought that another battle might break out on that airless staircase, with unforeseeable and surely bloody consequences. However, the hooded troop proceeded up the stairs in good order; Atto and Sfasciamonti needed to suppress no insurrection. That was in the nature of the corpisantari. shamelessly deceitful cheats, up to all manner of scheming and chicanery, yet incapable of harming anyone or offering violence; except, of course, when (as I had seen seventeen years earlier), it came to aiding some high-ranking ecclesiastic, on which occasion their Christian zeal inspired them to act with a courage and audacity worthy of true heroes of the Faith.
"Accursed ragamuffins," Atto railed. "First of all that hoax with the Inferno and now these infernal stairs."
"Signor Atto," I found the courage to ask him, "we were enveloped in a strange blue light. How the deuce did they manage to make us look like spectres?"
"That is an old trick. Indeed, if I remember rightly, two tricks were involved. In the first room, where we seemed to be under a rain of fiery droplets, there was an iron platform, under which they had placed hot coals. The platform was burning hot, but that we realised only after the heat had penetrated our shoes. Under the iron plate, on the coals, they will have placed a vessel, probably made of enamelled terracotta, containing wine spirits, together with a piece of camphor, which will have filled that small space with its exhalations."
"I see! That is why I smell so strange. I thought that it was…"
"It was just what you thought: camphor," Atto cut me short. "What they use against moths. But let me continue: at a certain point in our advance, we tripped against a mobile step which lowered and, in so doing, activated some machinery. That in turn caused a trap door to fall vertically, making a hellish noise. Meanwhile, the flame from our lantern penetrated that den full of
the vapour of spirits and camphor, which immediately caught fire. The surprise and the tremendous burning under our feet worked perfectly. What with all that dancing fire and the heat coming up from below, we thought we were in hell. Then we escaped through the little door, taking the only way out, down the iron rungs, when we were sucked down as not even Scylla and Charybdis could have engulfed us."
"Quite! But how was that done?"
"I and Sfasciamonti worked that out while you were taking your little nap. At the end of the iron rungs, there was a metal slide, smooth and well greased with abundant kitchen fat."
I touched my backside. Yes, it was just the same lard I had used when I was an apprentice at the inn, when I greased the pots and pans before cooking chicken in a wine sauce with walnuts, or preparing some poultry in broth.
The grease, Atto continued, caused us to rush down the slide at great speed, descending the whole height of the tower in an instant.
"The whole height? What does that mean?" interrupted Sfasciamonti who had listened open-mouthed to Atto's explanation.
"The tower is not really as low as we had thought; on the contrary, it is very high, but over the centuries it has been partially buried. We entered through a sort of lean-to hut that was built quite recently and led, not to the ground floor of the tower, but about halfway up its original height. The slide, however, hurled us down, down to the original, ancient base of the tower, which is today many feet under the ground."
"And deep down, the tower communicates with a whole network of tunnels," I concluded, drawing on the strength of my old acquaintance with subterranean Roman galleries, all joined up to one another.
"Yes, and here the second trick awaited us. As soon as they saw us arrive at the Baths of Agrippina — what was more, at a late hour, which gave away our intention of entering their rabbit warren — they burned a glass of spirits or some similar liquor in this second space. And in the spirits, if I recall the recipe correctly, they dissolved a little common salt."
