Secretum am-2

by Rita Monaldi

  "Of course. Back in Cicero's day…"

  Ugonio silenced us with a sudden movement of his arm. A few paces behind us there was still that old cripple with his two friends who had escorted him from outside. The animal caution with which the corpisantaro was leading us seemed all but tangible; and already we could feel the dismal atmosphere of a secret meeting of brigands clutch at our shoulders like some rapacious lemur.

  From the centre of the arena shone the rays of several torches which, from what we could hear and see, lit up an assembly. At the same time, a confused babble of voices reached us. We approached, still following prudently in Ugonio's footsteps. After passing a heap of firewood, we could at last get a look at the scene.

  A few paces ahead of us stood a huge brazier, as high as a man, in which a great flame burned generously, crackling and sending sparks high up into the sky. All around were small groups of cerretani; some were idly eating a wretched meal, others were gulping down cheap wine and yet others were playing cards. Then there were some who were welcoming new arrivals, raising their arms in salutation. The company was one great multitude of sordid, ill-dressed, mud-bespattered, evil-smelling people.

  "We have arrivalled at the most suitful moment," murmured Ugonio, motioning us with his hand to follow him in single file.

  From another part of the amphitheatre, we saw approaching us a sort of procession, upon seeing which those camped near the brazier stood up dutifully.

  "The electrocution has just taken place. The Maggiorenghi are now entrifying with the Grand Legator," said Ugonio pointing to the procession and inviting us to stand aside. "The firstsome is the head of the Company of Mumpers. Behind him are all the adjuncts and conjuncts of the othersome companies: Dommerers, Clapperdogeons, Brothers of the Buskin, Abram Coves, Pistoleros and Tawneymen…"

  "So these are the heads of the cerretani companies?" asked Atto, opening his eyes wide, as we prepared to join the procession.

  I looked at that vile troop. On the basis of what Il Roscio had told us, I could identify the head of the Dommerers' company. Around his neck, he wore a huge iron chain and he was constantly murmuring "bran-bran-bran"; as I recalled, the speciality of his group was imposture: they claimed to have been prisoners of the Turks and so spoke Turkish. Of course, there was no pigeon to pluck that evening but the Dommerers, like all the other cerretanii, had, after a manner of speaking, come to their general meeting wearing their company uniform.

  "And where is the Grand Legator?" he added, looking all around (although the very idea was absurd) for Lamberg's face.

  In lieu of an answer, Ugonio moved to the head of the procession of Maggiorenghi. He greeted the head of the Mumpers, an individual with a flowing grey beard and long hair that spilled out from under a showy plumed hat; in accordance with the practice of his sect, he wore the clothes of a nobleman, save that these were unbelievably dirty and threadbare. The Mumpers, as I had just read in Geronimo's statement, were those who begged, saying that they were ruined gentlefolk or artisans. Ugonio knelt in the most unctuous and servile manner, momentarily slowing down the little cortege of Maggiorenghi. Instantly, we pulled our cowls down even lower, fearing that our faces might be seen. Fortunately, we were helped by the intermittent, flaming light of the torches which illuminated the space somewhat irregularly. I looked around me again: the whole place was crawling with cripples and lepers, with men blind, mutilated or emaciated, their bodies half naked, twisted and limping, bearing the marks of flagellation, chains and torture. It was a veritable catalogue of the cerretani' s impostures: all those apparent lacerations, those pustules, that exhausted dragging of legs, were merely the tricks of the trade: not suffering, but art, of which the canters kept the signs even when they were not actually engaging in their scoundrelly activities. Observing more closely, I saw that they were strolling peacefully here and there, downing their cheap wine, laughing and joking without a care in the world. I wavered between horror, fear and wonderment, but there was no time to exchange any comment with Atto. After a brief muttered colloquy, Ugonio returned to us and the procession continued on its way.

  "Bemark the Mumper posterior to the Maggiorengo," he whispered.

  This was a bald, half-hunchbacked old man, wearing a badly torn artisan's apron and a pair of down-at-heel shoes. He, too, according to the dictates of his sect, begged, pretending to have been an honest workman who had fallen on hard times. On his shoulder, he carried an old bag in which one could just descry the white pages of a small tome.

  "He is the Grand Legator," announced Ugonio.

  "What!" hissed Atto, his eyes bulging out of his head with surprise.

  "He is a brother from Holland. His name is Drehmannius and he's a bit gagafied, he can't even read the foliables he binds, but he is indeed an excellentissimus buchbinder. That's why he's a Mumper. He has the treaty," added Ugonio, with an imperceptible nod in the direction of the contents of the bag on the man's shoulder.

  I saw Atto's jaws tighten. What Lamberg? What imperial plot? Now it was all crystal clear: the Grand Legator was no legatus or Ambassador but a legator, in the cerretanis'' dog Latin, that meant he was an ordinary bookbinder! So the treatise on the Secrets of the Conclave, the key to Atto's destiny, was in the hands of that lousy insignificant old Dutchman.

  "What's this Dutch bookbinder, Drehmannius or whatever he's called, proposing to do with my treatise?" asked Melani, on tenterhooks.

  "To ungluify the binderings. The Maggiorengo has just secreted it to me."

  "To unglue the binding?" repeated Melani, utterly at a loss for words. "What the deuce do you mean?"

  But we had to stop talking. A tall, imposing cerretano, with filthy, stubby great hands, had drawn near to us, his right eye covered with a black bandage. He called Ugonio to one side and the latter followed him at once.

  Thus, we were suddenly without a guide in the very midst of that demented, lawless mass, at the tail of a procession of which we knew neither where it was going nor why. In the middle of that cortege, a group of old men were fighting over a flask of wine. One of them, obviously drunk, came face to face with Atto and belched loudly. Melani turned away in disgust and rummaged instinctively in his overcoat in search of his lace handkerchief, then realised it would be wiser not to seem finicky.

  Suddenly, the procession of cerretani, by now distinctly the worse for drink, struck up a bizarre song:

  Doing nothing at all is the very best trade.

  And when winter comes,

  You just lie in the sun,

  While in summer, you lie in the shade.

  With a branch in your hand, you chase flies away

  And the fat meat you eat

  And you toss out the lean…

  A tramp, bare-chested and all covered in bruises, with filthy bagpipes hanging around his neck and bare feet with long black nails, encouraged by the little chorus, began to sing loud and clear, caring not to keep time with the others:

  By lies and by tricks You can live half a year; By tricks and by lies, Live the other half too!

  I recognised this: it was the same cerretano doggerel Don Tibal-dutio had taught me.

  Suddenly, an icy cold, sliding presence came between the cassock and my neck. I turned sharply

  I nearly fainted. A slimy serpent, held in the hand of a disgusting wretch with a fat, greasy, ill-shaven face had licked my defenceless neck. The cerretano roared with coarse laughter and gave me a slap on the shoulder that almost knocked me over. It was all a joke. He then put the serpent in a wicker basket and began to sing in a chorus with three or four of his mates:

  We are scum, we are scum,

  'Tis for wenching we have come,

  From the house of Saint Paul we descend.

  We were born, we were born

  Far away from this land

  With a snake on the bum,

  On the bum, on the bum,

  And a snake in the hand…

  So this was a sanpaolaro, a healer and handler of serpents, like the on
e I'd seen at work a few days before. To make the meaning of his doggerel quite clear, he put his hand on his privates and accompanied the last verses with obscene rhythmic thrusts of the hips. If he and his companions were not drunk with wine, they surely were with bestial gaiety. A middle-aged tramp had seized a fiddle and was making it moan and whine like a cat on heat. But there was no time to stop and stare. New participants kept arriving in the amphitheatre, multitudes of cerretani were crowding into the arena. Choruses, chaotic ballets, screams and coarse belly laughter resounded everywhere. When we arrived, it was a meeting, now it was one of the circles of hell. The procession had become enormous: there were hundreds and hundreds of vagabonds, almost all bearing torches, and it had begun simply to turn on itself in the arena, imprisoned by the amphitheatre like a mole whose nest has become too tight for it. Curious eyes focused on us. Although well covered by Ugonio's cassocks, we did not have the agile, bestial movements of the corpisantari, nor did we seem to be playing any great part in the carousing. But we had no time to worry. Our attention was distracted by a new development. Other swarms of beggars had gathered around the little procession of the Maggiorenghi, overcrowding the end of the arena where we stood. Elbows, backs and legs struggled like gladiators in agony. It was hard to keep close to Atto and Buvat and not to get dragged off into the crowd.

  The chaos was such that, fortunately, no one seemed to be paying much attention to anyone else, and thus, not to us either. In the background, the whining of the fiddle was joined by the whistling of a group of rustic flutes and the nasal complaint of bagpipes.

  "Look: just take a look at that one," said Atto, pointing out a gaunt-looking young man with a bushy beard and sunken eyes.

  Standing on tiptoe, I could just make out this character's face.

  "Does that face not seem familiar to you too?"

  "Well, yes… I do seem to have seen him before, but I don't recall where. Perhaps we've seen him begging somewhere."

  Just next to the young man, almost in the very middle of the throng, three Maggiorenghi suddenly appeared. They had mounted a platform, or perhaps some other kind of dais, hurriedly erected by a group of scruffy half-naked youths. The Maggiorengo in the middle was the head of the Mumpers. The other two raised his arms heavenward and the crowd cheered. We needed no interpreter to understand that this was the new Maggiorengo-General.

  Beside the trio appeared the Grand Legator. He was holding a book in his hand. Both Atto and I recognised it: it was his treatise on the Secrets of the Conclave.

  "Tut, tut, another Dutchman, what a coincidence."

  "What do you mean?" I asked.

  "Use one Dutchman to hunt the other," he replied with a wicked little smile.

  While I was trying to understand the Abbot's enigmatic words, a fifth being mounted the platform: Ugonio.

  "Take care not to lose us, we must stay close to the platform," Atto warned me.

  Then silence fell — or almost.

  "My wily, artful friends, you guys and you heels, hear me out, prick up your bells!" began the Maggiorengo of the Mumpers, speaking in a stentorian voice. He was, it seems, beginning his enthronement speech as the new Maggiorengo-General: a speech in Saint Giles' Greek, of which we would probably understand next to nothing.

  Buvat, kneeling, well wrapped in his bedraggled caftan so as to avoid being seen, began rapidly to turn the pages of the glossary of cant. Atto and I did our best to shield him from unwanted attention.

  The Maggiorengo-General asked the Grand Legator to pass him Atto's book.

  "This breviar is by a froggy autem cull," the Maggiorengo continued, waving the book in the air; "an angler, and his falcon with the harness of little tapers, he wanted to make a razzia: to make up like a carp and whitewash the damned one."

  A scandalised and hostile hubbub arose from the crowd.

  "I think he said that the book which he's holding in his hand is by a foreign ecclesiastic who wanted to cause trouble and discover the language," Buvat muttered to Atto, continuing to leaf frenetically through the book.

  "To discover a language?" repeated Atto. "The Devil, I've got it! The stupid, ignorant jackasses, may God curse them…"

  At that moment, I noted with alarm that a young cerretano, barefoot and emaciated, almost completely bald and with his face horribly scarred, bare-chested and with the rest of his body covered only by an old blanket knotted around his waist, was staring perplexedly at Buvat and his little book. Atto, too, became aware of this and fell silent.

  "Baste the cull, baste the cull!" screeched a horrendous old man in the crowd, with his face all covered in pustules.

  "Siena! Si-e-na! Si-e-na!" the crowd responded, swaying with enthusiasm. Another round of applause followed and many bottles emptied by the mass of cerretani were hurled into the air in jubilation.

  "Baste the cull means… Well, they're saying this foreigner should be punished, in other words, he should be killed," whispered Buvat worriedly, still feverishly turning the pages of his glossary. "Siena means yes."

  "What a clever idea," commented Atto sarcastically, as he pulled the grimy cowl down more closely over his head, taking care to touch it only with his fingertips.

  The half-naked cerretano drew a companion's attention to us. By pure luck, at that moment the movement of the crowd blocked their view. Were they approaching us?

  Meanwhile, the Maggiorengo of the Mumpers waited for the applause to die down a little. Moved by an almost primordial instinct, I checked our distance from the entrance, which I supposed must also be the way out. It was still very near.

  "And now, my goodly heels," said the orator, "whereas We, Sacred Majesty, great and glorious Emperor, have duly been elected Emperor, King, Chief, Condottiere, Prince, Rector and Guide of the Canters; and whereas such authority as We enjoy appertains not only to His Most Scoundrelly Majesty but to the least canter among our select assembly, We are impelled by our scoundrelly nature to expatiate in this our speech on the pre-eminence and most condign worthiness of the Way of the Canters and all those who follow it."

  An ovation resounded through the amphitheatre.

  At this point, Buvat was fortunately able to leave off consulting his glossary. The speech was continuing in ordinary language since no strangers could be present to follow it (we, of course, being secretly present): the introduction in the cant language had served mainly to warm up the spirits of those present.

  Someone handed a bottle to the Maggiorengo-General, from which he drank voraciously, in great gulps, until he let it fall empty at his feet.

  "For a start," he continued, "the society of the canters is more ancient than that of the Baronci, of which Boccaccio speaks, older than the Tower of Nembrotto, and indeed that of Babel. Being ancient, it is of necessity excellent and perfect, and consequently, every single canter is excellent and perfect, so that it follows that its Sovereign will be most excellent and most perfect and almost immortal!"

  Waves of applause greeted the eulogy which the new Maggiorengo-General, laughing complacently, heaped upon himself and his subjects. Atto and I exchanged worried glances. We were in the midst of a host of madmen.

  "And let us, then, begin from the beginning of this great horrible world," continued the Maggiorengo. "Let us speak of the Golden Age, when Master Saturn was the King of men. What a scoundrelly life was ours back then! All lived in peace, considering the Sovereign as a good father, and he treated them like good children. All lived in freedom and safety, 'midst all manner of contentments and pleasures, eating, drinking and dressing after the manner of good canters, knowing not wealth or possessions, so that this epoch was called by the authorities of the people of canters the Golden Age. Then there were only goodfellows, purloiners free from all malice. Everything was held in common, there was no division of lands, no carving up of things, no separation of houses, no fences around vineyards. No force had ever to be employed in dealings with anyone, there were no disputes, no one stole chickens, no one contended for harvests. Everyone c
ould work the land he wanted to, planting whatever seed he would and training the vines as it pleased him. Every woman was everyman's wife and every male was every woman's husband and of every thing the valiant canters made one great bundle. What a wonderful stallion our good scoundrel Biello would have made in that Golden Age!"

  The Maggiorengo-General spoke these last few words turning towards a cerretano seated near him on the podium and pointing him out to the multitude, who applauded him long and loud.

  "But then came that beard-splitter Jove, who forgot that he too was a canter, seeing that he'd been raised like a beast and given suck by nanny goats. Greedy for power and no longer having the slightest respect for the people of canters, Jove drove his old father Saturn from the Golden Age. Thus, life and conditions changed for everyone, freedom was lost and enmity, wrath, disdain, fury, cruelty, arson and rapine arose among men. Then they began to divide all possessions and goods, to enclose vineyards, gardens and houses, to lock gates, doors and entrances, to be jealous of women, to question each other and to fight even to the death, and so many other evil things that one loses all count of them."

  One cerretano not far from us let out a great noisy fart, making all his neighbours laugh.

  "Ah, Jove did plenty of damage," Atto commented to himself in disgust.

  "Nevertheless, the tyrant Jove was not powerful enough to cancel out and extinguish the holy people of canters," continued the Maggiorengo-General, "who, being divine and immortal, even given this change and setback, gave that proud upstart clearly to understand that, king though he was, he could not do without us. For not only Jove, but all his relatives — and he had masses of them — lived in comfort and contentment only because they ate and drank what they extorted from the canters…"

  "Si-e-na! Si-e-na!" bawled dozens of cerretani in a chorus of approval.

  Atto motioned that I was to follow him: we moved to the left, doing our best to avoid the attentions of the half-naked cerretano. To no avail; when I turned around, he was still looking at us.

  "… And everything in which the gods took pleasure, they did using Canters'manners and tricks: dissimulating who they were, fooling and cheating everyone. Starting with Jove himself who, when he wanted to lay Europa, the maiden who looked after King Agenor's cows, had to get help from the Canters to dress up as chief cowherd. He'd never have had Europa if he hadn't fooled her with that disguise! And when he wanted to make the beast with two backs with Leda, he dressed up as a poultryman, and that's why, when she became pregnant, she laid eggs, ha!"