by Rita Monaldi
I resumed my reconstruction. Maria, then, had the task of bringing those forged signatures back to Spain, where they would be put to use in due course: when Charles II was dying and his will must be drawn up. A false will would be prepared, the last page of which would be that containing the signature prepared by Buvat. The blank space above would be used to set down the last part of the will. Obviously, a French heir would be appointed. That explained why Atto had never spoken to me of the Spanish succession, instead of which, he kept going on about the conclave! Poor fool that I am, I had not understood the real objective he was so doggedly pursuing.
Had the wait for Maria, then, been nothing but a charade? What a treacherous mise-en-scene, with all those sugary letters in which he spun out his yearning to see her again!
It had all been planned to perfection, so designed as to withstand any attempts at espionage. The Connestabilessa was to arrive at the wedding celebrations as late as possible, just in time to collect the paper with the signature from Atto and Buvat! It was important that she should not in fact attend the festivities: the presence of Maria Mancini, Mazarin's notorious niece who resided in Madrid, would at once have given rise to suspicions of an anti-Spanish plot.
How convenient it had been to make use of me to deliver the paper with the signature to the Connestabilessa! Atto need not even dirty his hands with the chore. He knew perfectly well from the outset that he would never meet her: he had deceived me up to the very last moment, making me think that he was too perturbed to see her after their thirty-year long separation.
The theft of Atto's treatise had been a mere complication which had frightened and impeded him but had only partly distracted him from his prime objective. Once the mystery had been resolved and the stolen good had (once more, thanks to my good offices!) been snatched back from the cerretani, Atto had been able calmly to conclude his shady business of espionage.
Having rapidly made my way back, driven by the force of my anger, I entered Villa Spada, already knowing what awaited me.
When I went to knock at the door, I found it already open. A few articles of clothing remained on the bed, and on the day-bed, a dry inkwell and a few scribbled notes. The scene matched perfectly my poor dismayed and bewildered spirits.
Atto and Buvat had gone.
Doing my best to dissimulate my rage and disappointment, I made a brief investigation, questioning the servants of the villa. I learned that the pair had departed post haste and that their destination was Paris. They had stocked up with provisions, and Atto had left a long letter of thanks for Cardinal Spada, to be delivered by Don Paschatio.
Now I understood why, that morning, he had donned his abbot's mauve-grey soutane and periwig which I knew so well: it was his travelling costume!
They had been gone for quite a while by now. They must have packed their bags in extraordinary haste, like refugees fleeing the onset of war. This was no departure; they had fled.
What from? I was quite sure it had nothing to do with fear of any further threats from the cerretani. It was not like Atto to fear what he had already experienced, once he was familiar with its nature. Nor was he fleeing any supposed political threats, as he had put it about earlier. No, it was something else: he was fleeing from me.
Not that he had any material fear of me — of course not.
Nevertheless, at the last moment, having accomplished what he had set out to do and fearing that I might have guessed at the truth, he had not felt up to confronting me and answering for his lies and subterfuges.
He had turned up after an absence of seventeen years, asking me to act as the chronicler of his deeds with a view to the forthcoming conclave. Yet, he had not provided me with any further instructions, nor had he subsequently shown any interest in the matter.
The chronicle of those days at Villa Spada had been a mere pretext: the only thing that had mattered to him was that I should look, listen to and report everything that might be of use to him. Whether or not I wrote it down was quite indifferent to him. What had he said to me at the outset? "You will pen for me a chronicle in which you will give a judicious account of all that you see and hear during the coming few days, and you will add thereto whatever I may suggest to you as being desirable and opportune. You will then deliver the manuscript to me." He had persuaded me that I would be acting as a gazetteer. Instead, he had got me to spy. So much so, that he had left like a fly-by-night without even taking delivery of my work.
Nor did he give a fig for the conclave, of which he had initially spoken at such great length. We had seen, discussed and done all manner of things: from the alarums and excursions with Caesar Augustus to the insane climb up into the ball of Saint Peter's, from the ineffable experiences at the Vessel to the final nightmare when we narrowly missed being slaughtered by the cerretani. But we had hardly touched again on the subject of the conclave.
"What a stupid, ingenuous imbecile I have been!" I berated myself, torn between laughter and tears. He had kept me at his service, manipulating me without the slightest regard for my safety, just as he had done seventeen years before. He had pointed out one road to me, urging me on, while he himself tiptoed off in a very different direction.
This time, however, it was far more serious. Now he had played with the future of my little daughters. When I was on the point of withdrawing from his dangerous games, he had envei- gled me with the promise of a dowry for them, and I had fallen for the bait, even risking my life for him. That very afternoon, we had been supposed to go to the notary for the endowment. One moment, however: I did have the document with his written promise.
Stung by a thousand scorpions, I rushed home, grabbed the paper and spurred my mule towards town.
I went from lawyer to lawyer, from notary to notary, in search of someone who might at least give me a glimmer of hope. To no avail. I met invariably with the same question: "Do you by any chance know whether this abbot owns property in the Papal States?" And when I shook my head the sentence was always the same: "Even if you sued and won your case, we would have no means of claiming what is owed you." So, what was to be done? "You should find out whether you can also sue in France. That would be a lengthy and expensive process and, what is more, my good sir, the outcome would be utterly uncertain."
In other words, I had no hope. Now that Atto was on his way to Paris, his promise was not worth the paper it was written on.
Returning to Villa Spada, I was tempted to hit myself with my own whip. I should have insisted on going straight to the notary, or at the very least, I should not have waited so long. The truth is that I had allowed myself to be swept along by events and I had let the Abbot use me like a slave, without any consideration for my family. What would have happened if I had died or become an invalid? Cloridia could not keep our household going on her own. What would have fed and clothed our daughters? Not their work as apprentice midwives. Farewell to those evenings when I had taught them to read and write and they had stared wide-eyed at the fine books bequeathed to me by my late lamented father-in- law. The children would have had to roll up their sleeves at once and slave away as scullery maids, probably in some foul tavern, unless Don Paschatio were magnanimously to find them some place in the Spada household.
I was boiling over with rage. Abbot Melani had deceived me.
He had run off and instead of the promised dowry I was left with nothing. I myself felt like fleeing, leaving that place; indeed, leaving this cruel deceitful world. Had my duties as a husband and father not prevented me, I would have taken flight like some new Daedalus, or become like Icarus, but instead of falling to earth, I would fall into the sky, sucked forever into the azure abyss of the celestial spheres.
As I was cursing to myself, I ran into one last piece of trouble.
"Signor Master of the Fowls! Did you not see what a success our festivities were? And did you hear the enthusiastic comments of our master, Cardinal Spada?"
Don Paschatio had intercepted me at the gate. He wanted to talk about the succes
s of the festivities. No doubt he would point out that if I had not been so frequently distracted by Abbot Melani, and had made myself more available, the triumph would have been even more complete.
This really was not the moment for such things. Anything, anything rather than suffer his logorrhoea.
"Signor Major-Domo," I replied bluntly, "since during the past few days I have absented myself on several occasions, I am sure that you will not be surprised if I interrupt this conversation and ask you to set me some useful task so that I can make up for my past failings and avoid time-wasting."
Don Paschatio faltered, stopped short by so brusque a response.
"Er, well…" he hesitated. "Yes, you could attend to the cleaning and provisioning of the aviary, as I was just about to instruct you to."
"Very well!" I concluded, turning sharply on my heels. "It will be done at once, Signor Major-Domo."
Don Paschatio stared at me, scratching his forehead in perplexity, while I marched nervously towards the kitchens to collect feed for the birds and the necessary to clean the aviary.
I could not know it, but I was never to accomplish that task. Hardly had I opened the big cage when an unusual noise, a sort of furtive fluttering, caught my attention. I looked up towards the cage of Caesar Augustus which had remained empty since the day of his escape, and suddenly, in a bewildering flash of intuition, the bizarre events which had involved the parrot during the past few days became quite clear to me.
As I have had occasion to mention, recently, in other words, just before disappearing with the note addressed to Cardinal Albani, the parrot's mood had been unusually unhappy and agitated. What was more, he would often return with a twig in his claws, for some unknown purpose, something he had never done previously. The bird's nervousness had come to a head with the theft of the note and his long absence. Later, during the course of the hunting party organised for the guests, a badly aimed crossbow shot had brought down from a nest on a pine tree an egg of unidentified provenance. With the oddity I now found staring me in the face, I recalled that another parrot of the same race as Caesar Augustus had recently arrived and came to a quite inconceivable (but correct) conclusion.
"Dismiss him! Dismisssss him!" screeched Caesar Augustus, mocking me from his comfortable perch in the middle of a fine nest of feathers and twigs.
"But you… you are… you have…" I stammered.
I could not even bring myself to say it. No one could easily have accepted, even if they had witnessed it with their own eyes, that Caesar Augustus was really a female parrot… with a nestful of eggs.
I was amazed, almost entranced, watching the new manifestation of that surprising being, by no means accidentally once the property of the mad Capitor: he — she? — had, as a calm spectator, traversed decades and decades of history; he had seen the decline of Mazarin, the advent of the Sun King, and then a succession of no fewer than five popes, and now, with his eternal, unbearable squawking, he was making a triumphal entry into the new century in the sacred guise of a mother.
I saw him rise briefly from the nest lovingly to arrange the surviving eggs with his beak. The hunters who had examined the egg that had fallen from that pine tree were all mistaken: it belonged neither to a riparian swallow nor to a pheasant, nor to a turtle dove or a partridge, but to a parrot.
"Doiiiiinnnnng," went Caesar Augustus, with a pair of accusing eyes, imitating the sound of a crossbow bolt embedding itself in a branch and making it vibrate: the same bolt which, shot by Marchese Lancellotti Ginetti during the hunting party, had caused Caesar Augustus's egg to fall from its nest and had obviously forced him to abandon the pine on the Barberini property for the relative safety of the familiar aviary of Villa Spada.
"I know, I know, for you it must have been quite terrible," I answered.
"One does not shoot at nests, it is both pointless and cruel," said he, repeating the words of the cavalier who, immediately after the incident, had derided Lancellotti Ginetti's bad shooting.
"Lancellotti did not mean to harm you," I tried to explain to him. "Of course, building a new nest and transporting your eggs must have been a terribly difficult job; but, after all, it was only an accident, and you shouldn't have imitated that arquebus shot that so terrified all…"
"Dismiss him!" he replied sharply, descending to cover with loving wings the little whitish spheres containing his brood.
Don Paschatio and the others at the Spada household would never have believed their eyes. I could already imagine the rush to find some other noble Latin name for the fowl: Livia or Lucretia, Poppea or Messalina? I had known that bird for so long that I had come to treat him almost as an equal, from one male to another. Instead, I had really been dealing with a scornful, rebellious, intractable lady clothed in feathers. I felt almost guilty for having developed these all but comradely feelings; the only extenuating factor was the fact that it is, as is well known, almost impossible to determine the sex of a parrot visually or by touch. To solve the mystery, the only possibility is to wait until, once the right company has been found, it lays eggs or becomes the vigorous defender of the nest.
After a few more moments of stunned surprise, I recovered my aplomb.
"If I know you, I'm prepared to bet that, in addition to the eggs, you transported something else. Do you not have a certain something to return to me, now that you have calmed down?"
He continued to turn his back on me, pretending not to hear.
"You know perfectly well what I'm talking about," I insisted.
The bird acted swiftly and apparently with utter unconcern, almost scornfully. With one foot, it scratched inside the nest, extracted it and let it fall. My request had been granted.
Like any other dead leaf, Cardinal Albani's message fluttered crazily down, making a few graceful pirouettes until my hands grasped it.
It was dirty, torn and stank of birds' droppings. How could it have been otherwise, seeing that the parrot, after sating itself chewing the corner dipped in chocolate, had used it for its nest? And, stubborn as he was, after building a nest inside the aviary, he had not failed to bring it with him.
With eager fingers, I opened the scrap of yellow paper. There were just three lines, but they rent my already lacerated soul even more:
Opinion ready.
Wednesday 14th at the Villa T, time to be confirmed.
Arrangements already made for scribe and courier.
My arms grew heavy and fell by my sides. What for anyone else would have been mysterious was for me as clear as daylight and as painful as a fiery arrow.
The Villa T. was obviously the Villa del Torre, where in fact on Wednesday 14th Atto and I had, from the terrace on top of the Vessel, seen the three cardinals. The ready opinion was clearly the document to be copied by the scribe and sent by courier to the King of Spain, whereby the Pope was indicating an heir to the throne.
As I already knew from what I had overheard just before the play at Villa Spada, on Monday 12th the Spanish Ambassador Uzeda and the three cardinals (those four "sly foxes", as they had called them) had convinced the Pope to set up a special congregation to be entrusted to the same Albani, Spada and Spinola. The Pontiff had formally created it two days later, on the 14th July. However, they had already made their decision even on the day when the message was stolen by the parrot, namely Saturday 10th!
It had all been a great sham. If the King of Spain was a dead man walking, the Pope too no longer counted for anything. Albani, Spada and Spinola had dictated the destiny of the world from the Villa Spada, between a cup of chocolate and a hunting party, without anyone knowing anything of it. Atto, the vigilant eye of the King of France, had kept an eye on them from a distance; and I, without knowing it, had seconded him.
Instilling in me a desperate feeling of impotence, Albicastro's words came back to mind: "The world is one enormous banquet, my boy, and the law of banquets is: 'Drink or begone!'"
Would I then never have any other choice? Did the authority invested by God no l
onger count for anything?
Autumn 1700
About a month had passed since Atto Melani and his secretary had abandoned me. Day after day of hatred, fury and powerlessness had followed. Every night, every single breath had been marked out in seconds by the remorseless clock of humiliation, injured honour and frustration. Perhaps it was no accident that I was tormented by that nasty tertian fever from which I had not suffered for years. It had consoled me little that, about a month before, a notary had come to Villa Spada in search of Atto: he said that the Abbot had instructed him to draw up an act of endowment but had failed to turn up to the appointment at which he was to sign it. Now I had the confirmation: Melani had not premeditated breaking his promise; simply, the instinct to flee had in extremis got the better of him.
Cloridia was sorry for me; despite her anger and humiliation as a mother at being denied her daughters' dowry, she was soon able even to make light of it all. She said that Melani had just been doing his job as a spy and a traitor.
Obviously, I had never set my hand to the memoir for which the Abbot had paid me. He was not really interested in it. I had thought thus to keep the money as partial compensation for the dowry he had failed to make over to my little ones. On 27th September, however, I did take up my pen, impelled by an event the gravity of which put my selfish suffering in the shade. I began to keep a little diary, which I am setting out below.
21th September 1100
The sad day is upon us: Innocent XII has passed away.
On the last day of August he had suffered an alarming relapse, so much so that the Consistory planned for the next day had to be postponed. On 4th September (as I had gradually come to learn from the broadsheets which the Major-Domo read out to the servants) his health had improved, and, with that, hopes had revived for his recovery. Three days later, however, his state again worsened, this time seriously. Yet his constitution was so strong that the illness lasted even longer. On the night of the 23rd and the 24th he was administered the Eucharist. On the 28th, he ordered that he was to be brought to the room where Pope Innocent XI, whom he had so revered, had breathed his last.
