Veritas (Atto Melani) (2 page)

There were four columns bearing mottoes. They were of the Doric order, the symbol of heroes, and very tall: about fifty feet, in imitation of the historic columns of Rome, the
Antonine and the Trajan. Between them, on the
Castrum
, an imitation night sky made of veils was adorned with golden flames and gathered upwards in the centre, in the shape of a crown, by
gold cords and sashes tied by four gigantic buckles in the form of majestic eagles, with their heads resting on their chests.

Alongside them, Glory, with rays radiating from her head (in imitation of
Claritas
on the coins of Emperor Constance), held a laurel crown in her left hand and a crown of stars in her
right.

Behind us, just beyond the great doorway, twenty-four valets were awaiting their lord. Suddenly the hubbub died down. Everyone fell silent and a glimmering light assailed the darkness: it came
from the flaring white torches borne by the scions of the nobility.

He had arrived.

The sound of drumming hooves coming to a halt on the pavement outside jolts me from my memories. The four footmen, palely gleaming with snow in the winter night, are finally
moving. Atto is here.

The candle flames flicker and blur before my eyes, while the doors of the church where I am awaiting him are thrown open, the church of Notre Dame des Victoires, the basilica of the Barefoot
Augustinians. From the black carriage emerges the red velvet of the bier, glistening in the torchlight: Atto Melani, Abbot of Beaubec, King’s Gentleman,
Cittadino Originario
of the
Most Serene Republic, many-time Conclavist, is preparing to make his solemn entrance.

The old servants bear the coffin on their shoulders; it is engraved with the piglet on a green field, Atto’s coat of arms. From beneath the gallery of honour formed by the black veils with
silver beads, some mourners make their way through the two wings of bystanders: they are the few people to whom the formerly illustrious name of Atto Melani, the last witness of an age now swept
away by war, still – perhaps – means something. The four footmen proceed right to the heart of the
Castrum doloris
, the funereal catafalque, and, having mounted the steps of
the truncated pyramid, they consign the corpse of their old master to the open arms of the two silver genuflecting angels, the palms of whose upturned hands finally receive what they have been
waiting for.

On the catafalque hangs a funeral drape of black velvet with silver fringes, on which is embroidered in golden characters:

The same words will be engraved on the sepulchral monument that Atto’s nephew has already commissioned from the Florentine sculptor Rastrelli. The Augustinian Fathers have
granted the site in a side chapel close to the high altar, opposite the sacristy door. Atto will therefore be buried here, as he wished, in the same church where lie the mortal remains of another
Tuscan musician: the great Giovan Battista Lulli.

“
Pietate erga Deum / Obsequio erga Regem / Illustris
”: the words are repeated on the two side columns, only the nearer of which I had been able to read before.
“Illustrious for his devotion to God and his obedience to the King”: in reality, the former virtue is in conflict with the latter, and no one knows this better than I.

The orchestra begins the funeral mass. Wecrato singing:

“Crucified and buried,” intones his reedy voice. I can make out nothing else, everything flickers and wavers around me: the faces, colours and lights blur like a
painting that has fallen into water.

Atto Melani is dead. He died here, in Paris, in rue Plastrière, in the parish of Saint Eustache, the day before yesterday, 4th January 1714, at two in the morning. I was with him.

“Stay with me,” he said, and breathed his last.

I will stay with you, Signor Atto: we made a pact, I made you a promise, and I intend to abide by it.

It matters not how many times you broke our pacts, how many times you lied to the twenty-year-old boy servant and then to the father and family man. This time there will be no surprises for me:
you have already fulfilled your obligation towards me.

Now that I am almost the same age that you were when we first met, now that your memories are mine, that your old passions are flaring up in my breast, your life is
my
life.

It was thanks to a journey that I found you again, three years ago, and now another one, the supreme journey of death, is bearing you away to other shores.

Safe journey, Signor Atto. You will get what you asked of me.

Rome
J
ANUARY
1711

“Vienna? And why on earth should we go to Vienna?” My wife Cloridia stared at me wide-eyed with surprise.

“My dear, you grew up in Holland, you had a Turkish mother, you came here to Rome all by yourself when you weren’t even twenty, and now you’re scared of a little trip to the
Empire? What am
I
supposed to say, seeing that I’ve never been beyond Perugia?”

“You’re not telling me we’re going to make a trip to Vienna; you’re telling me we should go and live there! Do you happen to know any German?”

“Well, no . . . not yet.”

“Give it to me,” she said, and she irritably snatched the document from my hand.

She read it through again for the umpteenth time.

“And just what is this donation? A piece of land? A shop? A job as a court servant? It doesn’t explain anything!”

“You heard the notary, just as I did: we’ll find out when we get there, but it’s certainly something of great value.”

“Right. We’ll go all the way there, clambering over the Alps, and then perhaps we’ll find it’s just another trick played by that scoundrel your Abbot, who’ll
exploit you for some other crazy adventure and then throw you away like an old rag, leaving you penniless into the bargain!”

“Cloridia, think for a moment: Atto is eighty-five years old. What crazy adventures do you think he’s likely to embark on now? For a long time I thought he was dead. It’s quite
something that he’s actually hired a notary to pay off his old debt to me. He must feel the end approaching and now he wants to set his conscience at rest. In fact, we should be thanking God
for granting us such an opportunity when things are so hard for us.”

My wife lowered her eyes.

For two years things had been bad, extremely bad, for us. The winter of 1709 had been very severe, with endless snow and ice. This had led to a bitter famine, which, together
with the ruinous war that had been dragging on for seven years over the Spanish throne, had thrown the Roman people into dire poverty. My family and I, with the new addition of a six-year-old son,
had not been spared this fate: a year of bad weather and frosts, something never seen before in Rome, had made our smallholding unproductive and wiped out my prospects on the land. The decline of
the Spada family and the consequent abandonment of the villa at Porta San Pancrazio, where I had undertaken many profitable little jobs over the years, had made our situation even worse. My
wife’s efforts to halt our financial ruin through the art of midwifery had, alas, proved insufficient, even though she had been practising it for decades to great acclaim, and now had the
help of our two daughters, aged twenty-three and nineteen. The famine had also increased the number of new mothers who were penniless, and my wife assisted these with the same self-denying spirit
with which she attended to the noblewomen.

And so the list of our debts increased and in the end, in order to survive, we were forced to take the most painful step: the sale, in favour of the moneylenders of the ghetto, of our small
house and holding, bought twenty-six years earlier with the little nest egg left us by my father-in-law of blessed memory. We found shelter in the city, taking lodgings in a basement that we had to
share with a family from Istria; at least it had the advantage of not being too damp and maintaining a fairly constant temperature in winter, even in the hardest frost, thanks to the fact that it
had been dug into the
tufo.

In the evening we ate black bread and broth with nettles and grass. And in the day we got by on acorns and other berries that we scraped together and ground up to make a kind of loaf, garnishing
it with little turnips. Shoes soon became a luxury and gave way, even in winter, to wooden clogs and slippers stitched together at home from old rags and hemp-twine.

I could find no work, none at least worthy of the name. My slight build often counted against me, for example in any job that involved lifting or carrying. And so in the end I had been reduced
to taking on the vilest and most sordid of jobs, one that no Roman would ever dream of accepting, but the only one in which I had an advantage over family breadwinners of greater stature: a
chimney-sweep.

I was an exception: chimney-sweeps and roof tilers usually came from the Alpine valleys, from Lake Como, Lake Maggiore, from the Valcamonica, the Val Brembana and also from Piedmont. In these
poor areas the great hunger forced families to give up children as young as six or seven seasonally to the chimney-sweeps, who made use of them to clean – at the risk of their lives –
the narrower flues.

Having the build of a child but the strength of an adult, I could offer the best guarantee that the job would be done properly: I would screw myself into the narrow openings and clamber up
agilely through the soot, but I would also scrape the black walls of the hood and flue with greater skill than any child could apply to the job. Furthermore, the fact that I was so light saved the
tiles from damage when I climbed onto the roof to clean or adjust the chimney pot, and at the same time there was no risk of my dashing my brains out on the ground, as happened all too often to the
very young chimney-sweeps.