Secretum am-2

by Rita Monaldi

  My eyes then turned to the gardens of the Vessel and to the great pergola of grapes over the avenue leading from the entrance: as the Abbot had observed, Benedetti welcomed his visitors with grapes, the Christian symbol of rebirth.

  "We're standing on the prow," said Atto.

  In the naval architecture of the Vessel, that hanging balcony did indeed correspond to the upper deck.

  Like two admirals on the bridge, we looked towards the Vatican Hill, that custodian of things imperishable. The Vessel dared point its bows towards the apostolic palaces, as though it were claiming: I too possess a fragment of eternity. Then I thought to myself, was not the Vessel perhaps a place of rebirth, where the broken threads of past and present again came together? Had this not perhaps happened when I had been able to witness the apparation of the young Louis and his beloved Maria and their dalliance? Likewise, when we beheld in the garden the image of Superintendent Fouquet, serene, free, untouched by disgrace or calumny. Those apparitions in that garden had recreated for us what history had denied them. The theatre of what should have been but never was: such was the Vessel.

  It was on the strength of that very high office that this galleon claimed its place near the Vatican Hill. Saint Peter's, rock of the Faith and, near it, that other guardian of things eternal: the Vessel, fortress of justice, banished from the pedestal of history.

  So it was that, standing on that little terrace suspended above infinity, with the wind raising the laces of my shirt, for an instant I felt like an intrepid sailor on the deck of a new Ark, a miraculous craft able to salvage just Fate and to stand guard over it in another time.

  While I was thus wandering off into my daydreams, Atto suddenly called me back to things present.

  "Perhaps you will have formed a precise image of it."

  I knew at once to what he was referring.

  "No," I replied. "It is a monster; that is the only thing I have understood. If the forecast is correct, a monster with four legs is about to succeed to the Spanish throne. That really doesn't seem to make much sense, does it?"

  "I know. I've not stopped thinking of it for a moment, but nothing else comes to mind. Until your wife gets hold of the book that Romauli saw, I fear we shall not be able to make head or tail of it."

  "I hope that Cloridia is as quick as usual."

  "Let us go back down," said Atto at length. "I want to go and take another look at the picture."

  It was then that we made the discovery.

  "Look!" said Atto. "That is where they get through."

  It could be seen only from there, at that particular angle. No other observation point anywhere in the Vessel was high enough or faced in the right north-westerly direction like the steps on which we stood. From here we could descry a little gate in the boundary wall of the garden through which one could pass unseen into a street adjoining the Vessel. This exit was cleverly concealed by a barrier of plants and brambles. It was quite impossible to locate unless one already knew of its existence. Once out, where did one go? That, we could see for ourselves: a furtive little group, perhaps the escort of one of the three cardinals, was entering a similar gate in the wall of a villa further down the road, the property of a Genoese nobleman by the name of Torre.

  Peering more closely, I could make out a little further off the three cardinals of our acquaintance as they strolled undisturbed in Torre's garden.

  "So that's why Spada, Spinola and Albani always make their appointments at the Vessel," said Atto. "They confound anyone who might wish to follow them, including us, by entering here then mysteriously disappearing. In actual fact they meet at Torre's villa. For your master Cardinal Spada, that is an ideal solution. At a short distance from his own estate he has a safe house in which to hold secret meetings, Torre's villa, and a place to muddy the waters, namely the Vessel. It is not by chance that until this moment he has always succeeded in shaking us off."

  As he spoke, Abbot Melani did not take his eyes off the trio for one moment. I saw him suddenly stretch out his neck and screw up his eyes as though trying to see better what was going on; but the distance was too great. Our lookout point may indeed have been exceptional, but it would soon be useless. It was then that the Abbot suddenly slapped his forehead.

  "What a fool I am. Fortune assists me and I neglect it!"

  He reached into his jacket and drew out a long, fine cylinder: the telescope. He had kept it on his person ever since we had located Romauli in the garden of Villa Spada, as thence we had gone directly to the Vessel.

  Fie looked briefly, then handed me the spyglass.

  "Take a look yourself; it will be a useful experience."

  I brought the eyepiece to my pupil and looked.

  Cardinal Spinola was shaking his head gently, as though he were hesitating, while Spada and especially Albani were deep in conversation. The thing really did not last long; following a few words from Albani, Spinola assented with a somewhat unwilling nod, or so it seemed to me from that distance. Then Albani took him by the arm with visible pleasure and the three continued their stroll. Atto then took the telescope back from me and resumed his observation.

  In the light of what I had learned the evening before from reading the exchange of letters between Atto and the Connestabilessa, the episode had no more mysteries, even for me. The three cardinals had to provide His Holiness Innocent XII with an opinion on the question of the Spanish succession, so that the Pope could respond as best he could to the request for help put to him by the King of Spain, Charles II. The three eminences had therefore to agree on a common line: a gesture of immense political importance which could make the fortune of the trio or be their ruin. It was quite clear that Spinola was not of exactly the same opinion as the other two prelates.

  I looked once again at Atto as he spied avidly on the meeting between the three cardinals. He was worried, and I knew why. Were those meetings, at which the election of the future Pope would almost certainly be decided, impartial? Barely two days before, we had learned that Albani was in cahoots with the Imperial Ambassador, Count von Lamberg. As for Spada, being the Secretary of State of a Neapolitan pope, he was naturally pro-Spanish. Spinola, as I had read in the Abbot's last letter, was pro-Empire. French interests, or so it seems, were not represented. This could certainly not please Atto. As though that were not enough, Lamberg and Albani had got hold of the treatise on the Secrets of the Conclave and probably intended to use it against Atto.

  "And now, what are we to do?" I asked.

  "There's no point in sticking our noses in over there and being seen by Torre's guards."

  "So?"

  "I declare myself defeated. By now the festivities at Villa Spada are at their last gasp and tomorrow all the guests will leave. We shall never know what those three were confabulating about."

  The seraphic resignation with which Atto had replied to me only reinforced my conviction. I already knew that, opinion or no opinion, conclave or succession, something quite different lay behind his presence at the Villa Spada: the mission of love with which the Most Christian King had entrusted him, in the hope of persuading Maria Mancini to see him once more.

  "Let us go and take one last look at the picture," said he at last, "even if I despair of getting anything more from it; then let us go and see whether Buvat has found Cloridia."

  We descended the little iron staircase, but just as we were about to enter the service stairs once more and descend to the second floor, we heard that voice:

  T his work I call a looking-glass

  In which each fool shall see an ass.

  The viewer learns with certainty;

  My mirror leaves no mystery.

  It was Albicastro's inimitable timbre, although slightly muffled. It came from within the little penthouse from which the balcony was suspended.

  "Again that Dutch lunatic," moaned Abbot Melani. "As if that fiddle were not enough, now he must needs pester us again with his damned Sebastian Brant. But what's Albicastro up to in there and how did
he get in?" he asked, thoroughly vexed.

  "Oh, to the Devil with him," said Atto, opening the door to the little penthouse which we had not even noticed before that. It was then that it all happened.

  The penthouse was empty. Albicastro was not there. Curiously, the light was very dim. It came from two windows on the side facing Saint Peter's. The glass was partially blackened, so as to reduce the light drastically and — so I suspected — to make the visitor's steps uncertain. The space was quadrangular, with two pillars in the middle, perhaps supports for the little balcony. We were just next to one another and it was comforting in that strange place to feel Atto's by my side. Then we heard the Dutchman once more.

  Whoever sees with open eyes

  Cannot regard himself as wise,

  For he shall see upon reflection

  That humans teem with imperfection.

  A disembodied voice, quite impossible to place. True, those verses were typical of Albicastro's usual inane ramblings, yet it was as though, in order to reach us, they had passed through some alien dimension in which sound is drained, washed free of its very properties. It was (to give the reader a fair idea) the voice of Albicastro's ghost. It seemed to come from the left.

  We therefore turned to the left, and we saw.

  It was there, or rather, they were both there looking at us. What cruel comedy there was in that sharp vision, I thought in a sudden flash of humour, as I beheld the being both one and double, and he looked at us. After Albicastro's ghostly voice, the Tetrachion overwhelmed us with the evidence of its utterly carnal presence, its stolid bestiality.

  They stared at us as one, both with that dazed expression which only the Habsburg chin, that monstrously protruding jaw, can confer upon a human visage. Moreover the eyes were mismatched, the one sticking out, the other caved in, while the neck was twisted, the bodies deformed: one was stunted, as so often happens to beings ill-favoured by nature, the other, bloated. The flanks fused together, the legs wavering and horridly twisted one against the other, almost like the tentacles of some marine monster, gave that being the miserable destiny of twins who share the same body.

  Incapable of opening my mouth, I raised my hand to shield my sight, and saw that the wretched creature (or one of them, but which?) gestured towards me, greeting me or begging perhaps to be left in peace. Then their features, as though made of quicksilver, became even more distorted, so that the chin of the one protruded absurdly, while the other collapsed on itself, and one chest was contorted in a horrendous spasm, while the raised hand of the other became a paw, a hoof, a stump. What nauseous and horrifying force dominated that flesh, those skins, those bones, and deformed them with the same cruel mastery as a taxidermist exercises upon the cadavers of the beasts which he stuffs?

  Without a care for the sad spectacle of the monstrum Tetrachion and the horror it inspired, Albicastro's voice rang out as mockingly and ferociously as those paintings in which Death, a walking skeleton shouldering a scythe, walks calmly amongst the plumed knights and ladies whom he is about to harvest:

  He's stirring at the dunces' stew;

  He thinks he's wise and handsome too,

  And with his mirror form so pleased

  You 'd think he had a mind diseased;

  Indeed he cannot see the ass

  That's grinning at him from the glass!

  Then there remained nothing, only horror, folly and desperation, my scream, our disorderly, precipitous flight down the stairs and then down the road, each paying no attention to the other, and at last the pain of having found in the mysterious abyss of the Vessel a second abyss peopled by monsters, sad morbidity, incest and death.

  "Do you know who Ulisse Aldrovandi is?"

  "No, I do not," I heard my distant voice reply, as pale and empty as my face.

  We were in Atto's apartments at Villa Spada, where Buvat had summoned Cloridia. My legs were still trembling, but I had come back to myself sufficiently to hear others' voices, or at least to pretend that I heard them.

  "But what ails you, husband?"

  "Nothing, nothing," I answered, indicating Atto's frowning forehead with my glance and gesturing that only later would I be able to explain. "Now, tell us."

  Cloridia had found out at once. She had found, not the book, but something better: now, at last, she could explain to us what the Tetrachion was.

  "'Tis a very curious business indeed that your secretary has asked me to advise you on, Signor Abbot Melani," she began.

  "Why curious?"

  "It is something reserved for the very few, a matter that's almost obscure, I'd say. These are things which midwives are in fact not even obliged to know; even if we do, in the end, learn a little of everything: medicine, anatomy, natural philosophy…" said she with a knowing grimace.

  "And what is this subject that's so unusual?"

  "It is the science of abnormal foetuses and the generation of prodigies and portents: the science of monsters."

  "Monsters?" asked Atto, on whose face I could for an instant descry the same terified expression as it had taken on when faced with the Tetrachion.

  Cloridia then explained that the literature on the subject was most extensive. Among the most exhaustive works, one must mention the Deux livres de chirurgie by Ambroise Pare, first chirurgeon to the King of France, published over a century ago, and the more recent Monstrorum historia by the learned Bolognese Ulisse Aldrovandi, which listed the most famous cases of monstrous births and unnatural features.

  "There is, for example, the celebrated case of an Ethiopian born with four eyes, one next to the other, or that of a man who came into this world with the neck and head of a crane, and there was another born with a dog's head…" said Cloridia, apparently savouring our reactions.

  The list of monstrous births, in nature and in man, continued with hairy little girls, infants with horse's legs, new-born babes like fishes enveloped in a monk's habit, creatures in the form of scorpions, with two hands on each arm and huge asses' ears, or with the face of a wolf; or others with the features of a goat-like biped, raptor's talons, flaccid breasts, demon's wings, eagle's claws and canine chest; with mermaid's characteristics (but masculine) and with a devil's head, horns, goat's ears, great bestial fangs, protruding tongue, hands with thumbs but no other fingers, crested fins on the arms and back, seal's tail; or again, creatures with a woman's belly, one foot a pig's trotter and the other made like a hen's, or with the whole body covered in feathers; even gruesome entities formed like fish-pigs, with webbed and clawed fins, human eyes emerging from their scaly sides and a mouth full of fangs; and, to end with, a fine exemplar of the monstrum cornatum amp; alatum: with a bear's head, no arms, an enormous spindle-shaped penis ending in a point, one leg feathered, eagle's wings, an eye on the knee and the left foot webbed.

  "Enough, enough, that will do for me," Atto protested at length, as disgusted by the descriptions as I. "So, what then is the Tetrachion?"

  "The Tetrachion, Signor Abbot Melani," replied Cloridia in a subtly sarcastic tone of voice, "might prove somewhat indigestible for you, like some of those poor beings of which you have just heard, almost all of which miscarried or were stillborn."

  "And why is that?"

  "It is another kind of misfortune of nature. In the language of the specialists, it concerns a well-known case that occurred in Paris in 1546: a woman six months pregnant gave birth to a creature with two heads, four arms and four legs. Doctor Pare, who carried out the autopsy on the child, found that it had only one heart. From this he concluded, on the basis of Aristotle's well-known statement, that it must really be one infant, not two. The malformation was probably caused by a material defect, or by something wrong with the womb, which was too small, so that the seed was hard pressed and coagulated into a globe, producing two infants connected and united."

  "And those two beings, or rather, that being, had… four legs?" asked Atto.

  "Two heads, four arms and as many legs."

  Atto lowered his eyes and scrat
ched his forehead, while with the eyes of thought he returned to the infernal vision he had shared with me.

  "But," continued Cloridia, "there have been less grave examples of a Tetrachion."

  "What do you mean?"

  "There have been cases of twins, perfect in every way, but united in some part of the body solely by their skin; or joined by a member, an arm or a leg, which is thus deformed. Both such cases cannot, however, be distinguished at birth from the more severe cases, for they cannot be separated as that might kill them. They must be allowed to grow. If they attain adulthood, they may be operated on with little harm. At most, they will be crippled."

  I could not have said whether the being (or beings) which we faced in the little house on the terrace corresponded in all details to the image cited by my wise spouse: too great was the horror that had seized me upon seeing it. At least one detail did, however, correspond: the number four; the four contained in the Tetrachion, the being that stands on four columns, as in the (clearly stylised and beautified) image of the two marine deities on Capitor's dish.

  "In any case, there are worse things," commented Cloridia.

  "Worse things…" repeated Atto, somewhat shaken. "What do you mean?"

  Cloridia explained that she was referring to unheard of entities like th e Monstrum triceps capite Vulpis, Draconis amp; Aquilae which was for some time to be found near the banks of the Nile and which, besides having an arm and limb like an eagle's, a horse's tail, feathered legs ending in two feet, one fin and one dog's paw, had three heads. There was also the Monstrum bifrons born to a Frenchwoman in Geneva in 1555: it had two faces, like the god Janus, with a head, arms and legs, both in front and behind; or again the Monstrum biceps caudatum born on 26th October 1598 in a citadel between Augeria and Tortona: two boys with two backs, but joined on the right side so that they had one arm and one leg for each head but, in the middle, instead of the other two legs, an enormous, horrendous fleshy excrescence.