Veritas (Atto Melani) (8 page)

“All right, but no more than a jugful. Just one, is that clear?” said Cloridia, concluding the squabble with the footman.

I looked at her questioningly: although she had said the last few words in Italian, the Turkish footman had given her a sly smile of comprehension.

“He was taken prisoner at Zenta and during his imprisonment learned a little Italian,” explained Cloridia, while the man disappeared inside the great door of the palace. “Wine,
wine, they’re always wanting to drink. I promised that I would get a jugful for them secretly, I’ll ask the sisters at Porta Coeli. But just one, mind you! Otherwise the Agha will find
out and have both their heads cut off. And to think that every day the Commissioner for Victualling provides three okkas of wine, two of beer and a half of mulled wine for the Armenians, the Greeks
and the Jews in the Agha’s retinue. What I say is: why don’t these Turks all convert to Our Lord’s religion, which even allows the priests to drink wine in church?”

Then Cloridia turned towards the convent.

“Do you want me to get the wine?” I asked.

“That would be good. Ask the pantry sister to send a jug of the worst stuff, Liesing or Stockerau, which they use to clean wounds in the infirmary, so the Agha’s footmen don’t
get too fond of it.”

The great doors of the palace were closing. Cloridia ran inside and threw me a last smiling glance before the doors shut on her.

What a wonderful change in my wife, I thought, standing in front of the closed door, now that things had turned out so well for us. The last two years, full of hardships and privations of all
kinds, had sapped her strength and hardened her character, once so serene and gay. But now the line of her mouth, the bloom of her cheeks, the expression of her forehead, the light in her
complexion, the glossiness of her hair: everything was as it had been before the famine. Although the tiny wrinkles of age and suffering had not completely vanished from her delicate face, just as
they furrowed my own, they had at least lost their leaden bitterness and were even in harmony with her cheerful physiognomy. For all this I had only Abbot Melani to thank.

The twisted and crazed thread that linked me, my wife and Atto to Rome and Vienna – I thought as I made my way to the convent’s pantry – actually led in a third direction: the
Ottoman lands. The shadow of the Sublime Porte hung over my entire life. And not only because eleven years earlier, when I was working in the villa of Cardinal Spada, we servants had served dinner
in the garden dressed up as janissaries for the amusement and delectation of the guests, including Abbot Melani. No, everything began with Cloridia’s origins: daughter of a Turkish slave,
born in Rome and baptised with the name Maria, kidnapped in adolescence and taken to Amsterdam, where she had grown up, under the name of Cloridia, tarnished, alas, by the sin of trafficking her
own body, before returning to Rome in search of her father, and at last finding – praise be to God – love and wedlock with my humble self. As I have already said, we had met at the Inn
of the Donzello, where I was then working, in September 1683, just when the famous battle between Christians and Infidels was being fought out at the gates of Vienna, in which, by the grace of
heaven, the forces of the True Faith had triumphed. And it was at that same time that I had met Atto Melani, who was also staying at the Donzello.

Cloridia had finally narrated to me the vicissitudes she had endured after being torn from her father. But she had never wished to confide anything more about her mother. “I never knew
her,” she had lied to me at the beginning of our acquaintance, afterwards letting fall little half-sentences, like the fact that the smell of coffee reminded her strongly of her mother, and
finally cutting short my curiosity by saying that she could remember “nothing about her, not even her face.”

It was not from Cloridia, but from the events of those days at the Donzello that I had learned the few things I did know about her mother: a slave of the powerful Odelscachi family, the same
family for which her father had worked, shortly before Cloridia’s kidnapping she had been sold to some unknown person, and her father had been unable to oppose the transaction, since he had
never married her, precisely because she was a slave.

But I had never found out anything about my wife’s infancy with her mother. Her face would cloud over as soon as I or our daughters showed any curiosity.

It was with great surprise that she had received the Chormaisterin’s proposal to work for the Savoys as an intermediary with the Agha’s serving staff. She had thrown me a dark look,
indicating that she could guess who had told Camilla about her Ottoman blood . . .

And I was equally amazed, having no idea till that moment that my wife knew Turkish so well! The perceptive Chormaisterin, on the other hand, on hearing of the Ottoman embassy, had immediately
thought of Cloridia for the job, already certain of her linguistic abilities; this was a surprise, since I had clearly stated that Cloridia had been separated from her mother at a very early
age.

As I arrived in the convent cloisters, I only just avoided a collision with two porters as they staggered under the weight of an enormous trunk which was threatening to scrape the plaster from
the walls, to the extreme displeasure of the old nun at the door.

“Your master must have packed clothes for the next ten years,” grumbled the sister, clearly referring to some guest who had just arrived.

This day was doubly important. Not only had Cloridia begun her job at the palace of a prince, a distinguished
condottiero
and counsellor of the Emperor, but I myself
was about to embark upon my task in the service of the Most August Joseph I. After the harsh winter months and a scarcely less icy start to spring, the first warm days had arrived; the snow had
melted around Vienna and the moment had come to take charge of the chimneys and the flues of the abandoned Caesarean building, the task for which I had obtained so desirable an appointment:
chimney-sweep by licence of the court.

As I have had occasion to mention, the harsh atmospheric conditions of the previous months had made it impossible to carry out any work in a large building like the one I had been told awaited
me. Furthermore, a thaw in the upper stretches of the Danube had broken all the bridges and brought down huge quantities of ice, swelling the river and doing great damage to the gardens in the
suburbs. And so some of the less envious chimney-sweeps had strongly advised me against visiting the building until the clement weather arrived.

On that beautiful morning early in April – although the temperature was still severe, at least for me – the sun was shining, and I decided the time had come: I would begin to take
charge of His Majesty’s abandoned property.

Seizing the occasion, the Chormaisterin had asked a small favour of me: the nun who acted as bursar at Porta Coeli wanted me to have a look, as soon as I could, at the buttery that the convent
owned in its vineyards at Simmering, not far from the place I would be visiting. It was very large and contained a little room with a fireplace, the chimney of which needed sweeping. I was given
the keys to the buttery and I promised Camilla that I would see to it as soon as possible.

I had already told our assistant to harness the mule and to fill the cart with all the necessary tools. I picked up my son and went out into the street. I found the assistant waiting for me,
sitting on the box seat, with his usual broad smile.

A master chimney-sweep, in addition to an apprentice, must have a
Geselle
– which is to say, an assistant, jobber, or servant boy, whatever you want to call him. Mine was Greek,
and I had met him for the first time at the convent of Porta Coeli, where he acted as factotum: servant, odd-job man and messenger. It was Simonis, the talkative young idiot who, two months
earlier, had accompanied Cloridia and me to our meeting with the notary.

As soon as he had heard that I owned a chimney-sweeping business, Simonis had asked me if I needed a hand. His temporary job clearing the cellars at Porta Coeli was about to end and Camilla
herself had warmly recommended him, assuring me that he was much less of an idiot than he seemed. And so I had engaged him. He would keep his little room at Porta Coeli until my house was ready at
the Josephina, then he would come and live with me and my wife, as assistants usually do with their master.

As the days went by we had a few short conversations, if I can so term the laborious verbal exchanges between Simonis, whose grasp of reasoning was shaky, and myself, whose grasp of the language
was even more so. Simonis, perennially good-humoured, would ask countless questions, most of them fairly ingenuous, intermingled with a few friendly quips. When I understood these latter, they
served, at least, to put me at my ease and make me appreciate the company of this scatterbrained but gentle Greek, amid the Nordic coarseness of the Viennese.

With his corvine fringe hanging down over his forehead, his glaucous eyes fixed rigidly on his interlocutor, his facial features, which would suddenly turn grave, it was never clear to me
whether Simonis followed my answers to his questions, or whether his mind was seriously obfuscated. His protruding upper teeth, vaguely rabbit-like, were always exposed to the air, covering much of
his lower lip, and he held his right forearm out in front of himself, but with his wrist bent so that his hand dangled downwards, as if the limb had been maimed by a sword blow or some other
accident; these features inclined one to the latter hypothesis – that Simonis was a boy of fine character and goodwill, but with very little presence of mind.

This suspicion was corroborated by my sudden discovery, one day, that my young assistant understood, and spoke, my own language.

Tired of mumbling half-sentences in German, one day, as we were cleaning a particularly problematic flue, I was about to slip and, taken by surprise, I yelled in Italian for him to help me,
pulling on the rope that was holding me up.

“Don’t worry, Signor Master, I’ll pull you up!” he immediately reassured me, in my own language.

“You speak Italian.”

“Yes,” he answered with candid terseness.

“Why did you never tell me?”

“You never asked me, Signor Master.”

And so it was that I discovered that Simonis was not in Vienna in search of some little job to make ends meet, but for a far nobler reason: he was a student. Of medicine, to be precise. Simonis
Rimanopoulos (this was his surname) had begun his studies at the University of Bologna, which explained his knowledge of Italian, but then the famine of the year 1709 and the prospect of a less
impoverished life had sent him – reasonably enough – to the opulent city of Vienna and its ancient university, the
Alma Mater Rudolphina
, on which students from Hungary,
Poland, eastern Germany and many other countries converged.

Simonis belonged to the well-known category of
Bettelstudenten
– poor students, those without family support, who maintained themselves by all sorts of expedients, including, if
necessary, mendicancy.

It had been a stroke of luck for Simonis that I had hired him: in Vienna the
Bettelstudenten
were not looked on with favour. Despite the frequent edicts published, vagabond students
were often to be seen – together with others who joined them, but who were not really students – begging in the streets and in front of the churches and houses night and day, even
during lesson times. Under cover of studying, they loafed about, pilfering and thieving. Everyone remembered the tumult that had broken out between 17th and 18th January 1706 both within and
without the city, and also at Nussdorf; strict (though fruitless) investigations into this affair were still being carried out so that the culprits might be punished harshly. These students
tarnished the good name of the other students and His Caesarean Majesty had issued numerous resolutions, with the aim of uprooting once and for all this lamentable practice of
betteln
, or
begging – which was the word for lounging about and succumbing to vice under the pretext of study. After the tumults of five years earlier, the rector, the Caesarean superintendents and the
assembly of the ancient University of Vienna had been commanded to issue a special edict giving a final warning to the
Bettelstudenten
who were roaming around and not studying: within
fourteen days they had to leave the Caesarean capital. If they failed to do so they would be seized by the guards and taken
ad Carceres Academicos
, to the university prisons, where
suitable punishment would be meted out. Those impoverished students, on the other hand, who daily and continuously applied themselves to their studies, had to seek a study grant in the
Alumnates
or some other means of sustenance; only those who were unable, because of the numbers, to obtain such assistance, or those who were following a particularly demanding course of
study and for the moment had no other choice than to seek alms outside lesson times, would be allowed to continue in this fashion – but only for their bare necessities and until the arrival
of new orders. In addition they must always carry with them the badge identifying them as true
Bettelstudenten
, which they must get renewed every month by the university and wear on their
chests while begging. Otherwise they would not be recognised as genuine poor students but as vagabond students, and so be immediately incarcerated.