Veritas (Atto Melani) (47 page)

“Eh? What are you saying?” mumbled Abbot Melani from beneath the blankets, his tongue still thick with sleep.

“You’re acting the innocent? I knew it!” I shouted, beside myself.

I had come crashing into Atto’s apartment like a Fury. I had hammered frantically on the door (the nuns’ cells were all at some distance, after all) and Domenico, jumping out of bed
in alarm, had opened up to me, convinced the city must be on fire at the very least.

“The Turkish Agha arrived in Vienna just a day before you, and you pretend you know nothing about it! Once again you had it all planned, you and that dervish!”

“Dervish? I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Atto, sitting up in his bed.

“Signor Uncle . . .” Domenico tried to interpose.

“Yes, the dervish in the Turkish retinue, that Ciezeber, who slices himself up with his disgusting rituals and then heals himself as if nothing had happened. Nice people you go around
with, Abbot Melani! And you’re conniving with the dervish to get the Emperor’s head. Ah, now you put on your astonished look! You didn’t think I knew, did you?”

Uncle and nephew fell silent. This gave me courage and I went on:

“You, Abbot Melani, you say you came here to force the Empire to make peace. You waved that letter under my nose from the traitor Prince Eugene, who wants to sell himself to France, but
you kept quiet about the other manoeuvre, the more important one, which removes the main obstacle in this war: the Emperor! His Caesarean Majesty Joseph I has no sons. If he were to die, the heir
to the throne would be his brother Charles, who for the last ten years has been fighting to wrest the throne of Spain from Philip of Anjou, the Sun King’s grandson. If Joseph died, Charles
would have to come straight back to Vienna to become emperor, and that would be the end of the war. Eugene has betrayed his side by now: even if the Empire wanted to, it no longer has a king to set
up in Spain, nor a general. The throne of Madrid would be left permanently to your sovereign’s grandson. A perfect plan! That’s why the Emperor is sick. Smallpox, my foot: it was you
French, in league with the Turks as usual, who poisoned him.”

“Is the Emperor sick? Smallpox? What are you saying, boy?”

“And the sickness, strangely enough, started with the head . . . the same head that the dervish was plotting to get. Or is that just a coincidence? But who could believe that! Not me,
that’s for sure, knowing you as I do, alas! But how could you do it? At your age, do you have no fear of God?” I asked, my voice broken.

“I don’t know where you –” protested Atto, who had put a hand to his belly, while his face contracted.

“And don’t think that I’ve forgotten that Philip of Anjou was proclaimed King of Spain thanks to a forged will. And it was you who forged it, eleven years ago in Rome, under my
nose!”

“Signor Uncle, you shouldn’t allow him –” said Domenico.

“Such a generous reward – I don’t think!” I went on with renewed fury. “You found me a job and a home here in Vienna so that you could exploit my loyal service yet
again, and then skip out at the right moment, as you did twice in Rome! This time it’s an even dirtier game: get the Emperor assassinated, a young man not yet thirty-three! That’s why
you made me rich. You wanted to buy me. But you won’t succeed, ah no! This time you won’t get away with it. There’s no price for the life of my king! I’ll go back to Rome
and starve in the
tufo
, but not before I’ve done all I can to impede your dirty plans. It’ll have to be over my dead body!”

“Good heavens, boy, you don’t . . . Domenico, please!” implored Atto, pressing his hand to his belly with a grimace and making as if to get up.

“Signor Uncle, here I am,” said his nephew solicitously, rushing to hold him up and lead him behind a curtain, where there was a seat for his bodily needs.

Here Abbot Melani had an attack of colic, the so-called gravel sickness, accompanied by discharges of diarrhoea and by a robust venting of piles or haemorrhoids, or whatever they are called. I
suddenly found myself without an adversary, and in a state of great embarrassment. I offered my assistance, but Domenico rejected it from behind the curtain with a sulky grunt.

“The Emperor . . . the poison . . .” I heard Atto gasping.

“Signor Uncle, you’re losing a lot of blood, you must drink your citron juice.”

“Yes, yes, quickly, I beg you . . .”

Domenico drew aside the curtain and signalled to me to support the old Abbot for a few seconds, who was sprawling awkwardly on the seat. For the first time I saw his castrato’s pudenda.
Atto, paying no attention to me, continued to moan, while his volcanic intestine gave no sign of settling, nor the piles of ceasing to gush forth. His nephew rushed away and poured a few drops from
a little flask into a large glass of fresh water, which he handed to his uncle.

“Well, I think that . . .” I blathered, getting ready to take my leave.

But Domenico thought that I wanted to continue with my accusations and from behind the curtain he yelled:

“Have you no pity for a poor old man? Do you want to kill him? That’s enough now. Go away, go away!”

Thus dismissed, I crossed the convent in a daze and dragged myself to my bed, where Cloridia was still sitting up, in a light doze. She had tried to stay awake for me, but had
been overcome by weariness. And so I was left to writhe in solitary despair and doubt. I collapsed on the bed, with my head between my hands. Ever since we had heard the fateful announcement in
church I had not had a single second to reflect: so was the Emperor about to die? It seemed a nightmare; but sadly there were too many signs that I was not dreaming. That same Sunday, had not my
assistant and I encountered as many as three processions heading towards the Cathedral of St Stephen, while Penicek’s cart took us to our appointment with poor Hadji-Tanjov?

I saw Hristo’s chessboard on the table. I ran my fingertips over the dent which, by blocking the projectile, had saved my life.

The evening before, I reflected, we had all noticed the Chormaisterin’s inexplicable nervousness during the rehearsal of
Sant’ Alessio
, when she had lashed out at poor
Gaetano Orsini with such unusual irritation. Camilla had chosen an extremely melancholy and gloomy aria for the rehearsal and had then talked of omens: now I realised that she had been brooding
over grim presentiments of death. She had been thinking of the Emperor, who had lingered at the tomb of his friend Lamberg, and undoubtedly also of the sombre prediction of the English divine and
the anathema of that treacherous Jesuit, Wiedemann, and probably of countless other signs, since there was no shortage of people wishing for the death of His Caesarean Majesty. How could one blame
her? Twenty-eight years earlier, as a servant boy in the Inn of the Donzello in Rome, with my own eyes I had read in an astrological gazette a correct prediction of the death of a sovereign: the
unfortunate consort of the Most Christian King.

No, unfortunately it was not a bad dream, I moaned, as I opened the chessboard. One question tormented me above all others: what lay concealed in Abbot Melani’s heart and mind? He had
arrived in Vienna on the same day that the Emperor had fallen ill, and just one day after the Agha’s arrival. Atto had come to play France’s game on two different boards. On the one
hand, to expose Eugene’s treachery, putting him out of action once and for all, without even granting him the Low Countries, as he had asked. He had confessed this to me openly. On the other
hand, the more radical solution: to assassinate Joseph I. Just how the two things were linked to one another was not entirely clear to me, but what did that matter? The Abbot himself had taught me
years ago: it is not necessary to know everything, but just to understand the sense of what happens. And the sense of it all – I had grasped that all too well. With all the experience I had
accumulated alongside the scheming castrato, I just needed to put two and two together. This time it had not been necessary to wait for all the misadventures to come to fruition for me to work it
out; I had not discovered Melani’s game only after his departure, but just twenty-four hours after first meeting him again. I was getting better at this game, I told myself with bitter
sarcasm.

And yet it was also true, on the other hand, that my accusations seemed to have upset Atto greatly. But I should not let myself be fooled, I told myself: he had always pretended in front of me,
even at the most dramatic moments. I had even seen him sobbing over the death of his dearest friends, only to discover later that he himself had been involved in it up to his neck! I must not
forget that Atto had come to Vienna on the very day that the Emperor had felt the first symptoms of his illness. The same thing had happened in the past: twenty-eight years earlier Melani had
turned up at the Inn of the Donzello on the same day that the aged French lodger had mysteriously died...

The baleful castrato had always used me as a pawn, as if I were of no more importance than the poor white pawn I now held in my hand, a helpless meal for the treacherous black bishop – the
scoundrel of an abbot.

Poor me: I had become a master chimney-sweep, and the owner of a cottage and vineyard in the Josephina, only thanks to Atto Melani! If his plot were to be discovered, I would end up on the
scaffold alongside him. After putting my life and my family’s livelihood at risk, now the old castrato might easily drag me with him to death! But he was a venerable old man of eighty-five:
the executioner, after all, would only be anticipating the grim reaper by a few days or weeks. Whereas I was in the full flush of life and had a family to support! I suddenly felt giddy and began
to shake with fear.

I clutched the black bishop tightly in my other hand, almost as if I could thus strangle Abbot Melani, crush him, make him miraculously vanish from my life.

I looked at our child, serenely asleep, and then at Cloridia’s sweet face. I cursed the castrato and his intrigues, so eager to unsettle their dreamless sleep! And what about my two girls,
who had stayed in Rome and were longing to join us? What would their wretched fate be, when they heard that their father had been condemned for high treason and hanged like a common malefactor, or
beheaded, or even (and here my shudders became uncontrollable) drawn and quartered on the terrible wheel?

With overpowering remorse, I confessed that I had brought these ills on my family by myself. What an unworthy husband and father I had proved! A poor insipid foot soldier, just like the white
pawn I now clutched in my hand and whose head I would have liked to rip off with one bite out of sheer rage.

Oh, my Cloridia, the bold, enchanting and learned courtesan of twenty-eight years ago, who had set my boy’s knees a-trembling! To what wretched fate had I consigned that lovely complexion
of gleaming dark velvet which contrasted with her luxuriant Venetian blond curls, which framed those large black eyes and the serrated pearls of her mouth, that rounded yet proud little nose, those
lips smiling with a touch of rouge just sufficient to remove their vague pallor, and that small but fine and harmonious face and the fine snow of her bosom, intact and kissed by two suns, on
shoulders worthy of a bust by Bernini? I had met her when she was more sublime than a Raphael Madonna, more inspired than a motto of Teresa of Ávila, more marvellous than a verse of the
Cavaliere
Marino, more melodious than a madrigal of Monteverdi, more lascivious than a couplet by Ovid and more edifying than an entire tome of Fracastoro.

What had I done to her? Widow of a gallows bird! To begin with I had not been a bad husband, I told myself: to unite herself with me she had abandoned prostitution, into which she had been cast
by the foul and secret events that I had uncovered when we met in the Donzello Inn. Yes, but afterwards? We had lived in the little house purchased by my father-in-law, not by me, and until two
years ago we had lived on the income of the small farm he had bequeathed to us. I had worked hard at Villa Spada, it was true, but what about the fame that Cloridia had won as an excellent midwife,
to the great financial benefit of the whole family?

What a good-for-nothing I must be, since in three decades I had been unable not only to guarantee my Clorida prosperity but even to spare her the insult of poverty and finally the loss of the
property inherited from her father. And yet she had not stinted herself: she had given herself to me wholly, remaining ever-loving and faithful, giving birth to three children, bestowing on them
with her womb the gift of being, and with her breast the gift of well-being.

At the end of all this reasoning, the trial I had been conducting against myself concluded with a conviction.

I looked again at the black chess bishop. I had to admit it: if he had not arrived, the black Abbot Melani, to save us from poverty, at this hour we would still be in Rome, in the jaws of
hunger, our little boy perhaps already dead from cold after yet another hard frost, myself dead from a fall from a roof, or, worse, burned alive in a chimney fire. Who could say? It is true that
with his donation Atto had been fulfilling a promise, I considered with wavering spirit; but if I had never met him, would I not in any case have fallen victim to the famine of 1709 and the
decadence of the Spada family, for whom I had been working?