Veritas (Atto Melani) (107 page)

From the day of Joseph’s death the sun no longer rose blood-red: it was truly an omen, famous throughout the city, and was still being talked of today. The almanac of the English
fortune-teller, after correctly prophesying Joseph’s death, now sells widely throughout Vienna. It truly is a golden age for the English.

The Italians, on the other hand, so well-loved by the Habsburgs up to the time of Joseph, are no longer popular. The French are arriving, summoned by the man who was their bitterest enemy in
Spain: Charles VI. Italian itself, cultivated by Joseph, is being gradually supplanted by French as the court language. As soon as he arrived in Vienna, Charles sacked all the palace staff who had
served his deceased brother. The first to fall were the court musicians favoured by Joseph. He replaced them with others, including very few Italians. Obviously Camilla’s services were no
longer required, nor have her oratorios been performed since.

Overwhelmed by her memories, Cloridia’s sister asked and was allowed to change convent. She is now at St Lawrence, seeking peace. The good musicians often go to visit her, but she does not
wish to see anyone, except my wife.

Despite everything, Vienna, the capital and Caesarean residence, is still the best place to live in these times. In no other city can one live so well if one wishes to be secluded from the
world.

I am finally living in the house with the vineyard in the Josephina that the Abbot one day gave me, which fostered so many dreams and hopes in my and in my family’s hearts.

The girls are now in Vienna as well; Examiniert und Approbiert, they have obtained their midwives’ licences and are both mothers. Cloridia has a wine shop selling
Heuriger
or new
wine, with the help of our son and our two sons-in-law, bright young Romans very happy to leave the capital of usury in search of a life worthy of the name. Hands are needed to cultivate the
vineyard, and, of course, hoeing in the sun – for my boy too – is healthier than breathing soot. And in winter we can stay inside in the warmth instead of freezing on the rooftops. Even
though chimney-sweeps are well paid in Vienna, one cannot put a price on one’s health. And in any case, they no longer need anyone to clean the chimneys at Neugebäu: the new emperor does
not want to restore it.

Of course, with the education that my son received at Abbot Melani’s home, he could aspire to something greater. He could continue to study, acquire learning and knowledge: but to know is
to suffer. And anyway, as Abbot Melani said, land feeds you and so makes you free. The best choice is still the one Cincinnatus made.

I have finally found the answer to my query. Now, only now, can I hear their voices distinctly. I have not heard the yelling again, nor the song of the
folia
. I remain
in religious silence. But I now hear all those spectres that appeared to me at the Place with No Name whispering among themselves. They have formed a circle around me. I see landscapes and faces
that are not unknown to me: the French castle of Vaux-le-Vicomte fades into the Roman Villa of the Vessel and the Place with No Name; and Superintendent Fouquet into Maximilian II and Joseph I. And
two dates that I have encountered many – too many – times, come back to me: the 5th and 11th September.

The 5th September was the Most Christian King’s birthday, but also the day when he had Superintendent Fouquet arrested. It was also the day Suleiman died and the day Maximilian, ten years
later, succumbed to agony. On that same day, over a century later, Vienna under siege came close, thanks to an Armenian traitor, to falling prey to the Infidels. My wife Cloridia, who sometimes
likes to amuse herself with the occult science of numbers, which was her specialty when young, has informed me that the sum of Louis XIV’s birthday is 5, and also Suleiman’s day of
death, while that of the arrest of Fouquet is 10, which is to say twice 5.

On 11th September 1683 the Christian troops arrived to free Vienna with the battle that would be fought at first light on the following day. And again it was 11th September when I first met
Abbot Atto Melani. The same day in 1697 Prince Eugene defeated the Turks in the famous Battle of Zenta, and in 1709 the French at Malplaquet. On 11th September 1702 Joseph conquered Landau for the
first time. The same day in 1714 Barcelona and Catalonia, abandoned by Charles, finally fell into the hands of Philip V with a bloodbath.

Only now do I finally understand: I have returned to where I started from. You have received, you will not receive anymore, I hear them whisper to me. Now you must give. You have learned, now
you must teach. You have lived, now you must give life.

From the day of my arrival in Vienna, in 1711, everything gradually began to talk to me of the past: first just in hints, like the resurfacing of Cloridia’s mother on Camilla’s lips.
From the time I finally visited the Place with No Name, the events of the past and those of the present interwove their frantic double gallop: from the Flying Ship to the death of Ugonio, whom I
had met twenty-eight years earlier, up to the news in the
Corriere Ordinario
and the
Wiennerisches Diarium
, which in one way or another spoke to me of the past.

Life, in imparting its teachings to me, had chosen to repeat old tunes from the past: it indicated that it was time to give back what I had received. It was time to transform myself, from the
spectator that I was, into an actor for other spectators; to turn from schoolboy into teacher, for new schoolchildren; to change from a vessel into a source of living water, to be poured into other
vessels. As in the parable of the talents, I was called not to bury the money that the Lord had entrusted to me but to risk it, investing it in order to multiply it. In what form? I had already
been given the answer: with the past. With the experience accumulated and with the tales that Abbot Melani had told me in the three years spent with him in Paris. Atto’s life would become my
life, his memories my memories. Art would be my shelter and my workshop.

And so, that which thirty years ago had been just a pastime for a young inn servant, and seventeen years ago had become a task
una tantum
given me by Atto, has now become a life
choice.

I write of the last century, of time now lost, the last century of mankind. In my books I transfuse what I have experienced with the Abbot, and what I have experienced through his tales. My ear
has discovered the sound of actions, my eye the gesture of speeches, and my voice, where it limited itself to repeating, dictates to the pen so that the fundamental note shall be fixed for all
time.

It is a lengthy task to pour so much of the past onto paper! At times I ask: “Will I have enough time? Am in a fit condition to do it?” Cradling in my hand the coin of Landau that
Cloridia never returned to Prince Eugene’s chest, I fear that I will not have the strength to keep a close hold on this past, which already seems so far away. For the most part I work when
everything around me is asleep. I will need many nights, perhaps a hundred, perhaps a thousand or more, to transfer to paper the imprint of time.

Our senses make many mistakes and hence falsify the real appearance of life, if such a thing exists. In my transcription, which I try to make as accurate as possible, I do not alter sounds or
colours, I never separate them from their cause, which is where intelligence locates them after hearing and seeing them. I describe the hundred masks that every face possesses; in some personages I
represent every gesture, however slight, that was the cause of mortal upheavals and led to variations in the light of our moral heaven, unsettling the serenity of our certainties. In transcribing a
universe that is to be entirely redesigned, I do not fail to represent the reader, but with the measurements not of his body but of his years – years that he unconsciously drags about with
him wherever he goes in life, a task that is increasingly arduous and which finally overwhelms him.

We all occupy a place, not only in space, but also and above all in time. So, this concept of incorporated time, of the years spent that are not separate from us: this is the truth, the truth
suspected by everyone, and which I have to try to elucidate. And on the day that, having “drawn the bow” and separated the wheat from the chaff, the master of my fate will ask me to
account for myself, I will pour into His Hands the fruit of my labour.

A quill pen and a piece of paper: I have no other way of communicating with men. I have not regained my voice, I have remained dumb forever. In some part of these notes appear
these words: “I suffered from that silence, which was like a place anyone could enter and be sure of a welcome. I ardently wished that my silence would close around me.” Well, now it
has. I could not present myself more fittingly as servant of the black thread in a white field – an image that reminds me strongly of Hristo’s chess-board, which saved my life.

The pen is my voice, and, apart from occasionally helping my two sons-in-law to hoe the vineyard, writing is the only job that a dumb man can do. A printer in Amsterdam kindly prints and sells
my books. I send my manuscripts up there, into free Holland: “Under the sign of the Busy Bee” is the address, and I like to think that it is a metaphor for my humble but unflagging
work.

Sometimes the old discouragement seizes me. I, who had eyes to see the world in this way, with a fixed stare that affected it and made it become what I had prophetically seen it to be – if
Heavenly Justice was behind this, it was unjust that I had not been not annihilated beforehand; I repeat this to myself from the depths of my soul.

Have I deserved that my mortal anguish should be appeased in this way? What is it that proliferates in my nights? Why was I not given the power to strike down the world’s sin with a single
axe-blow? Do my books touch any consciences? Why am I not given the intellectual strength to force violated mankind to start shouting? Why is my shouted response, which I entrust to pen and paper,
not louder than the shrill command that dominates the souls of a terrestrial globe?

I preserve documents for an age that will not understand them, or which will live so far from what happens today that it will say I was a forger. But no, the time to say this will not come,
because that time will not be. In my books I write of a single immense tragedy, the defeated hero of which is mankind, whose tragic conflict, being that between world and nature, finishes with
death. Alas, since it has no other hero than mankind, this drama does not even have any other audience. But what does my tragic hero perish of? He is a hero who perishes as a consequence of a
situation that intoxicated him, even as it constrained him.

Ah . . . if mankind one day, by the grace of God, should emerge safely from this adventure – however afflicted, impoverished and aged – and the magic of a supreme law of retaliation
should give it the power to call them to answer one by one – them, the ringleaders of universal crime, who always survive: Palatine, Penicek, and all the other serfs, the henchmen and
satraps, Beelzebub’s little slaves. Ah, if we could lock them up in their temples and then draw by lot a death sentence for one in ten, but not kill them; no: slap them! And say to them:
what, you didn’t know? You didn’t imagine that following upon a declaration of war, among the countless possibilities of horror and shame there was the chance that children might go
without their mother’s milk? What, you didn’t measure the tribulation of a single hour of anguish in an imprisonment that lasts for years? You didn’t measure the tribulation of a
sigh of nostalgia, of love soiled, violated, murdered? And you did not realize how tragedy could turn into farce – or rather, given the coexistence of the present monstrous situation, and the
old formalist delirium – into comic opera? Into one of those revolting comic operas so popular today, whose texts are an insult to the intelligence and whose music is a torture.

Under the shelter of this new demon from England called finance, hysteria overcomes nature. Its armed henchman is paper. The gazettes have experienced a real boom in these years, one that shows
no sign of letting up. And as a young man I wanted to be a gazetteer! Fortunately Abbot Melani, in that distant, so distant 1683, did what was needed to put me off the idea.