Veritas (Atto Melani) (87 page)

Simonis looked at me. I realised that he would rather go out and get soaked in the storm than stay and listen to this senile prattle. But it was still like the Great Flood outside. I indicated
he should wait a little longer.

A year ago – Melani went on – Domenico had settled in with his uncle. In vain had Atto urged that his nephew should bring just a few things “because the suit he had on and half
a dozen shirts would be enough”; he stayed for months and months, and his old uncle had to buy him a complete wardrobe. That was not all: Melani had had to send him money for the journey, and
since thirty doubloons had seemed very little to his relatives, they had sent Domenico to Paris without even a servant.

“And I had been hoping he would bring a servant who knew how to cook, so that at last I could eat some Italian dishes. Selfish and miserly, that’s all they are. And I know what
I’m talking about, I know just how much money is coming into the family: when Domenico got his post as secretary of the Council of Siena the Grand Duke sent me a note listing all the
emoluments and honours he enjoyed. One day or other I’ll come out with it and write to those skinflints and tell them it’s no good playing hide-and-seek with their old uncle, because
the Grand Duke tells me everything.”

As the months went by, however, the old Abbot had grown fond of his nephew, and even had him naturalised as a Frenchman.

“And the trouble that caused! The other relatives all got jealous, afraid that I was favouring him over them.”

Simonis and I listened wearily to the endless harangue. Atto explained that the relatives should all have been grateful for this decision, because if he had died all his furniture and the income
he received from his villa near Paris would have been given to anyone who asked for them.

“It is a right of the crown, which in France is called
aubaine
, and that is why most foreigners send for some relative of theirs and have him naturalised.”

He was not in fact the first nephew that Abbot Melani had taken in to live with him.

“Three years ago I lost my dear nephew Leopoldo. He was blond and very good-looking. It was a great grief to me: he was only thirty-four. He went to the Lord after over twenty days of
continual fever, with headaches and delirium. In His goodness God allowed him time to receive all the sacraments and he died a saint, which is the only consolation left to me. He had become a very
good young man, of angelic behaviour, and was loved and esteemed by all who knew him for his fine qualities. I too fell ill at the same time that he did, and God in His mercy preserved me, so that
the fruit of all my labours should not be lost.”

Here Atto came to an emotional pause, but also listened carefully to see if it was still raining or not. It was. Casting a last disconsolate look at Simonis, who did not move a muscle, Melani
started up again.

Thanks to family jealousies, he recounted, with the arrival of the first cold weather he had succeeded in sending Domenico back home. But then he returned, and so Atto took advantage of this to
be accompanied to Vienna, instead of hiring a secretary whose wages he would have had to pay.

“I wanted to make up, at least in part, for what my vulture-relatives steal from me. But Domenico fell ill. When we leave Vienna, I’ll send him straight back to Pistoia, together
with the mortadellas.”

“The mortadellas?” I said in surprise.

“Before embarking on the journey to Vienna, I asked my nephews and nieces to send me candied oranges and two of the best mortadellas that they make in Pistoia and to put them in the cases
of wine that His Royal Highness the Grand Duke honours me with. I wanted to have these things for breakfast in the morning. After all, given that I couldn’t make the journey except in a
litter, I wanted to bring some flasks of wine along with me. Well, the skinflints sent me inedible mortadellas, hard and very peppery, and there wasn’t a trace of a candied orange.”

All they can do is beg, these relatives! thundered Melani, completely transformed from the trembling old man we had seen on the Flying Ship. Had it not been for him, he stated, at this hour they
would still be the humble grandchildren of a bell-ringer, and not the descendants of a gentleman of the Veneto, he said, thus emphasising that he had been ennobled by the Most Serene Republic.

“It was I who carried out heraldic research and discovered that Machiavelli talks of a Castle of Melano in his
Istoria della Repubblica
, or
Istorie Fiorentine
or whatever
it’s called, and that its lord was a certain Biagio del Melano, from whom I am convinced we get the surname that these idlers are now so happy to boast of!”

Meanwhile the rain was letting up. Simonis felt his clothes and, although they were still damp, began to get dressed again, with Melani looking hopefully on.

“But you have to be able to carry out the offices of a lieutenant before doing those of a captain! I wrote to them in a letter. If only they would exert themselves as I had done, sweating
for their daily bread,” he declared sententiously, forgetting that his fortune had in fact begun with something one could hardly wish on others: emasculation.

But in the end, concluded the Abbot, it was almost impossible to elude all the requests of these money-grubbers.

“And so to save myself from being bled white, I had to pretend to be blind, and thus unable to serve His Majesty, and for this reason in straitened circumstances. I have to say that I
gradually acquired a taste for it: blindness saves me a lot of trouble, also with the Grand Duke.”

“With the Grand Duke?” I said wonderingly.

“Yes, in France he has some pupils with no talent either for soldiery or the court, and as unruly as they are foolish, and he wants me, as I’m on the spot, to advance their expenses.
Yes, and who will guarantee that I’ll ever get back the money that I lend them? With the war raging throughout Europe and raids by brigands and pirates – oh, very likely! And in any
case what are the Grand Duke’s pupils to me? The only possibility for such desperate cases is to become monks, so long as they never join the choir and remain either at table or in bed: which
is to say, they go on with the same life they lead when they have no money to gamble with.”

From Atto’s words, it would seem that everyone wanted to take advantage of him.

“And finally, as you know, the expedient of my blindness enabled me to enter Vienna undisturbed.”

But I objected that Domenico seemed to believe in his old uncle’s blindness; or else he was a great actor, I thought to myself – like his aged relative, after all. And furthermore,
the Abbot had confessed several things to me the previous day, even the fact that the letter in which Prince Eugene betrayed the imperial cause was a forgery that he himself had commissioned (but
Atto did not allow me to say this in front of Simonis). So why had he not revealed to me that his blindness was all a sham?

“Domenico knows that I can see, but just a little, as is in fact the case, and since the others are now all so jealous of him, he has no interest in betraying me. As for your second
question, I never reveal anything unless I am forced to.”

Exactly. After the bad news of the Grand Dauphin’s presumed smallpox, Atto had had no choice: he had been obliged to tell me that Eugene’s letter was false, otherwise how could he
have got my help? But if he had revealed his sham blindness at the same time, he would have lost all credibility with me irremediably.

Simonis was now ready. Having placed the little bag from which he was never parted round his neck again, he pulled on an oilcloth he had found in the room and slipped out of the door and headed
for the Place with No Name.

“We must find out how the devil that ship flies!” Atto brusquely changed the subject, happy that the Greek had finally left us alone. “It’s the greatest invention of all
time! An army that possessed such a ship would win every war. You could drop bombs much more accurately than with a canon. You could spy on the layout of the enemy battalions, their consistency,
the conditions of the land, everything, even know if a storm were arriving, if a river had dried up – everything you need to wage war.”

All that Abbot Melani had appreciated of the wonderful Flying Ship and its qualities were its possible military uses. Ah yes, I said to myself, Atto was the same old intriguer as ever. Indeed,
the more he felt his innermost being threatened by outward things, like the mysterious flying contraption that challenged our very conception of the world, the more he took refuge in the hard,
certain and practical kernel of his own profession as a spy.

“If only I could tell the Most Christian King about it . . .” he sighed. “It would be my great return to favour! Everyone would say: Abbot Melani is advising His Majesty once
again on military matters.”

“I have no idea, Signor Atto, how that ship manages to fly . . .” I said, shaking my head.

“We’ll talk about it later,” the Abbot cut me short. “Now that your sham-fool of an assistant has gone, there’s something more urgent I must tell you.”

It was Gregorio Strozzi’s melody, which Atto had thought he had heard being repeated by the amber stones of the Flying Ship.

Melani explained that in the margin of the manuscript copies of Strozzi’s sonata which circulated at the time of its composition, about thirty years ago, a phrase from Ecclesiastes was
jotted down:
Vae soli, quia cum ceciderit, non habet sublevantem se
. Which meant: “Woe to the Sun when it falleth, for it hath not another to help him up.” It was this phrase
that Atto had suddenly remembered on hearing the amber stones perform (if that was the right word) Strozzi’s sonata.

“So Simonis was right,” I said.

“What do you mean?” asked Atto, immediately suspicious.

“You didn’t hear him because you had fainted, but he at once recognised that your words came from Ecclesiastes.”

“Well, well,” remarked Melani. “Erudition worthy of a biblical scholar! Isn’t that a little singular for an assistant chimney-sweep?”

“Simonis is a
Bettelstudent
, a poor student, Signor Atto, and poor students are often highly educated,” I protested.

“All right, all right,” he cut me off, annoyed. “But explain to me how and why the amber stones played Gregorio Strozzi’s sonata?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea. I would say that the ship must have wanted to suggest to us the solution to
soli soli soli.
”

Atto was clearly exasperated. As I had seen him do in the past, he rejected the idea of having been a witness to arcane forces, and preferred to attribute inexplicable events to his own and to
other people’s ignorance of natural phenomena.

Without responding to my observation, Melani went on: as with the Agha’s phrase, the quotation from Ecclesiastes could be translated, playing with Latin words that have the same sound,
differently.

“Not ‘Woe to the Sun’, but ‘Woe to him that is alone’. Woe to him that is alone, like Joseph, because when he falls, he has not another to help him up,”
concluded the Abbot.

“So the
soli soli soli
of the Agha’s phrase could have a double meaning,” I deduced. “Hristo was right!”

“Ah yes, the Bulgarian. Now explain carefully to me,” said Melani. “What did he write in that note, before dying?”

“On the piece of paper hidden in the chessboard? He wrote: ‘Shah matt, checkmate, the King is enclosed’. And when we found his corpse, he was clutching a white king in his
hand.”

“Right,” he said with satisfaction; but his face immediately darkened: “Of course, if you had told me sooner . . .”

Then he fell silent. He had probably realised that the reason why I had not recounted the circumstances of Hristo’s death was that at that time, before hearing that the Dauphin of France
had also fallen ill and before his own confession, I had not trusted him. And, now that my suspicions had been allayed, I myself no longer had any desire to dredge up the matter. Meanwhile he began
again:

“I told you the story of the two sieges that Joseph laid at Landau, you remember?”

“Certainly, Signor Atto.”

“And I told you about the French commander Melac, who chivalrously offered not to shoot at Joseph.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“Good. Then you will also recall my explanation of his conduct: the good and ancient military rules resemble those of chess, where the enemy king can never be killed.
‘Checkmate’ in fact means ‘the King is enclosed’, ‘the King has no way out’, but not ‘the King is dead’.” Your Bulgarian friend must have been
tormented by this thought, the thought of the King and his destiny, since you found a chess king in his hand after his death.”

“And so?”

“And so the relationship between your Bulgarian friend’s note and
soli soli soli
is that . . . they are the same thing.”

“What does that mean?”

“
Soli soli soli
can be translated another way,” continued Atto, “if the first and the third
soli
remain as they are in the phrase engraved on the French
king’s cannons, while the second is considered not as the dative singular of
sol,
‘Sun’, but as identical to the first
sol
and is thus translated
‘solitary’, ‘man alone’.”

“And so that would mean . . . ‘To the only man alone of the earth’.”

“Exactly.”

“ ‘To the only man alone of the earth’ . . . It sounds a little strange,” I remarked.

“But it works. If this explanation is correct, before he died your friend had understood the real sense of the Turks’ message: ‘We come to the Golden Apple, which is to say
Vienna, to the only man alone of the earth’. A man alone, like the victim king of checkmate: the King is enclosed, the King is alone.”

“And why would Joseph be the victim of checkmate?”

“That too you should be able to work out from what I have told you over the last few days,” said Melani.

I was silent, gathering my thoughts.

“Yes, I understand what you mean,” I said at last, breaking the silence that had fallen between us. “Joseph is alone, and he knows it. It is no accident that he is seeking
peace with all his old enemies: to the west, France, to the east, the Ottomans and the Hungarian rebels, to the south, in Italy, the Pope, against whom the Emperor had even sent an army three years
ago. His Caesarean Majesty’s allies are the Dutch and English, who are actually his worst enemies: they are negotiating secretly with France and are afraid that Joseph, emerging victoriously
from the war or making peace with the Sun King, might block their plans to replace the old European powers. And finally in Spain, his brother Charles is fighting the French, but he hates Joseph on
account of the rivalry stirred up between the two of them by their father, the late Emperor Leopold. And Eugene, his military commander, has also hated him since the days of Landau, when Joseph
overshadowed his glory. The Emperor is alone. Alone like no one else in the world.”