Veritas (Atto Melani)

by Monaldi, Rita

  The light, in fact, was fading fast; it was still only early afternoon, but darkness falls very early in northern lands and almost without warning, especially in midwinter. Now we understood the sudden haste the notary had shown in his office.

  I was about to ask what the three things listed in the purchasing contract consisted of, when the carriage stopped. We got out. In front of us was a little single-storey house, apparently uninhabited. Over the entrance hung a brand-new sign with an inscription in gothic characters.

  “Gewerbe IV,” the notary read for us. “Ah yes, I had forgotten to specify: yours is company number four of the twenty-seven currently licensed in the Caesarean capital and surrounding area, and is one of the five recently elevated to the prestigious rank of city companies by command of His Caesarean Majesty Joseph I with Privilegium of 19th April 1707. Your principal task will obviously remain that of satisfying the Emperor’s urgent needs as a Hofadjunkt or court auxiliary: you are entrusted with full charge of an ancient Caesarean building which our benign Sovereign now wishes to restore to its original splendour.”

  At this last piece of information from the notary, Cloridia, who was trailing sullenly in our wake, under the dull gaze of Simonis, suddenly perked up and hastened her steps. My hopes revived as well: if the company Atto had acquired for us, and which I was to become master of, had been instituted by no less a person than the Emperor, and if the number of such companies in the whole city was fixed by decree, and if, furthermore, I was being put in charge – urgently! – of an imperial building, no less, then it could hardly be a trifling matter.

  “So, Signor Notary,” asked my wife in honeyed tones, wearing her first smile that day, “can you finally tell us what it is? What is this activity, which, through the generosity of Abbot Melani and the benevolence of your emperor, my husband will have the honour to practise in this splendid city of Vienna?”

  “Oh sorry, signora; I thought it was already clear: Rauchfangkehrermeister.”

  “That is?”

  “What do you call it in Italian? Master Smokebrush . . . no . . . Hearthsweep . . . Ah yes: Master Chimney-sweep.”

  We heard a dull thud. Clorida had fallen to the ground in a swoon.

  Day the First

  THURSDAY, 9TH APRIL 1711

  11 of the clock: luncheon hour for artisans, secretaries, language teachers, priests, servants of commerce, footmen and coach drivers.

  Greedily sipping an infusion of boiling herbs, I watched our little boy at his play and at the same time leafed through the New Calendar of Krakow for the year 1711, which I had picked up somewhere. It was now nearly midday, and at the eating house, for the modest price of 8 kreutzer, I had just consumed the usual lavish meal of seven dishes laden with various meats, which would have sufficed for ten men (and twenty of my size), a meal that is served in Vienna every day of the week to any humble artisan, but which in Rome only a prince of the Church would be able to afford.

  I would never have imagined, just a couple of months earlier, that my stomach could feel so full.

  And so I now made use – as I did every day – of Cloridia’s salutary digestive infusions, and sank sluggishly into my beautiful brand-new armchair of green brocatelle.

  Yes, in this one-thousand-seven-hundred-and-eleventh year since the birth of Our Redeemer Jesus Christ, or – as the calendar recorded – 5,660 years since the creation of the world; 3,707 years since the first Easter; 2,727 since the construction of the temple of Solomon; 2,302 since the Babylonian captivity; 2,463 since Romulus founded Rome; 1,757 since the beginning of the Roman Empire with Julius Caesar; 1,678 since the Resurrection of Jesus Christ; 1,641 since the destruction of Jerusalem under Titus Vespasian; 1,582 since the institution of the 40-days’ fast and since the holy fathers made baptism mandatory for all Christians; 1,122 years since the birth of the Ottoman Empire; 919 years since the coronation of Charlemagne; 612 since the conquest of Jerusalem under Godfrey of Bouillon; 468 since German supplanted Latin in the official documents of the chancelleries; 340 since the invention of the arquebus; 258 since the fall of Constantinople into the hands of the Infidel; 278 since the invention of the printing press by the genius of Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz and 241 since the invention of paper in Basel by Anthony and Michael Galliciones; 220 since the discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus of Genoa; 182 years since the first Turkish siege of Vienna and 28 years since the second and last one; 129 since the correction of the Gregorian calendar; 54 years since the invention of the upright clock; 61 years since the birth of Clement XI, our Pontiff; 33 since the birth of His Caesarean Majesty Joseph the First; 6 years since his ascension to the throne; well yes, in this most glorious Annus Domini in which we found ourselves, Cloridia and I owned an armchair – well, two actually.

  They had not been a gift from some compassionate soul: we had purchased them with the proceeds of our small family business and we were enjoying them in our lodgings inside the Augustinian convent, where we were still living while we waited for an extra storey to be added to our house in the suburb of the Josephina.

  This day, the first Thursday after Easter, fell almost two months after our arrival in the Caesarean capital and our life now showed no traces of the famine that had afflicted us in Rome.

  This was all thanks to my job as a chimney-sweep in Vienna – or, to be more precise, as “Master Chimney-sweep by Licence of the Court”, hofbefreiter Rauchfangkehrermeister, as it is known round here, where even the humblest ranks will not forgo the gratification of a high-sounding title. That which in Italy was considered, as I have already said, one of the vilest and most degrading of trades, was regarded here, in the Archduchy of Austria above and below the Enns, as an art, and one that was held in high esteem. Back there we were seen as harbingers of ill, whereas here people competed in the streets to touch our uniforms because (it was said) we brought good luck.

  That was not all: the job of master chimney-sweep brought with it not only a social position of great respect but also an enviable income. I could even say that I know no other job that is more highly esteemed or more thoroughly despised depending on the country where it is practised.

  There were no ragged chimney-sweeps here, wandering from town to town, begging for a bit of work and some warm soup. No exploited children torn from needy families; no fam, füm, frecc, or “hunger, smoke, cold”, the three black condottieri that give their names to the wretched trade in the poor Alpine valleys of northern Italy.

  One had but to leave those valleys behind and enter the imperial city to find everything turned on its head: in Vienna there were no roaming chimney-sweeps but only well-established ones, with all the formalities of regulation, confraternity memberships, fixed charges, (12 pfennig, or baiocchi, for a regular cleaning), official pecking orders (master, assistant and apprentice) and convenient home-cum-workshops, which often – as in my case – came complete with courtyard and vineyard.

  And, to my great surprise, the Viennese chimney-sweeps were all Italian.

  The first ones had arrived two centuries earlier, together with the master builders who had brought with them the Italian genius for architecture and building techniques. As houses grew in number and density, fires broke out more frequently, so that Emperor Maximilian I decided to hire the chimney-sweeps in Vienna on a permanent basis. In the headquarters of our confraternity there still hung on the wall, venerated almost like a sacred relic, a document from 1512: the Emperor’s order for the hiring as chimney-sweep of a certain “Hans von Maylanth”, Giovannino from Milan, the first of our brothers.

  After a century and a half we had gained such a solid position in the city that, to practise the trade, we were issued with a licence complete with imperial permit. Since the art of chimney-sweeping had been imported into the Empire by us Italians, for two hundred years we had done all we could to keep it in our own hands. Martini, Minetti, Sonvico, Perfetta, Martinolli, Imini, Zoppo, Toscano, Tondu, Monfrina, Bistorta, Frizzi, De Zuri, Gatton, Ceschetti, Alberini, C
ecola, Codelli, Garabano, Sartori, Zimara, Vicari, Fasati, Ferrari, Toschini, Senestrei, Nicoladoni, Mazzi, Bullone, Polloni. These were the names that recurred in the chimney-sweeping business: all exclusively Italian and all related to one another. And so the job of chimney-sweeping had actually become hereditary, passing down from father to son, or from father-in-law to son-in-law, or to the nearest relative, or, if there were none, going to the second husband of an eventual widow. That was not all: it could even be sold on. A rare and lucrative possession, which cost no less than two thousand gulden, or florins: a sum that very few artisans could afford! Not a day went past without my thinking gratefully of Abbot Melani’s generous action.

  If my fellow chimney-sweeps, back in Italy, only knew what a hell they were living in and what a paradise was to be found just across the Alps!

  I was making a very good living. Each of us chimney-sweeps was assigned a quarter or a suburb of the city. For my part, I had had the good luck, through Abbot Melani’s donation, to acquire the company responsible for the suburb of the Josephina, or the City of Joseph, from the name of our Emperor; this was a neighbourhood of modest artisans very close to the city, but it also included some summer residences of the high nobility, and with these alone I was able to earn more in a month than I had earned back home in my entire life.

  As I was Italian, Abbot Melani had had no difficulty in acquiring the company for me. Futhermore, with his money he had acquired absolutely everything. He had only had to forge the documents – birth certificate, curriculum et cetera – that were necessary to prevent the confraternity of chimney-sweeps protesting to the court. To tell the truth, when I presented myself for the first time they received me rather coldly, and I could not really blame them: my appointment as chimney-sweep “by licence of the Court” did not go down well with my colleagues, who had had to sweat hard to get what had been given to me on a silver tray. I also aroused some mistrust since they had never heard of chimney-sweeps in Rome. My colleagues, in fact, all came from the Alpine valleys or even from the Ticino or the Grigioni. They accompanied me on my first cleaning assignments, to make sure that I knew how to do my job properly: Atto’s money had a lot of sway in Vienna, it was true, but it was not powerful enough to make a chimney-sweep out of an incompetent fool who might one day set the whole city alight.

  And so began a new life for my family and myself in the Most August Caesarean capital, where even the humblest houses, as Cardinal Piccolomini had noted with astonishment, resembled princely palaces, and where every day the gates of the massive and sublime city walls let through an unending stream of provisions: carts loaded with eggs, crayfish, flour, meat, fish, countless birds, over three hundred wagons laden with casks of wine; by evening it would all be gone. Cloridia and I gazed open-mouthed at the greedy rabble, devoted to its belly, which every Sunday consumed what at Rome it would take us a year to earn. We ourselves were now allowed a place at the table of this lavish and eternal banquet.

  Atto Melani’s act of generosity had come about thanks to a fortunate conjunction of circumstances: His Caesarean Majesty Emperor Joseph I wished to restore an ancient building that stood at the gates of Vienna, and needed a master chimney-sweep who would undertake to renovate the flues and overhaul the system of protection against fires, which seemed to be breaking out with increasing frequency. Shortly after my appointment, however, there had been such abundant snowfalls that I had been unable to start my work there, and, to make matters worse, part of the building had fallen in, making building repairs necessary. Today I was to visit the Caesarean property for the first time.

  Just one thing was still unclear to me: why had the Emperor not appointed one of the many other master chimney-sweeps of the court, who were already responsible for the numerous royal residences?

  Abbot Melani had even arranged for a small single-storey house to be purchased in our name near the church of St Michael in the Josephina, and had undertaken to have an extra storey added, an operation that was still under way: my family and I would soon enjoy the great luxury of having a house all to ourselves, with the ground floor given over to business and the upper one to our living quarters. A real dream for us, after our experience in Rome of having to share a tufo cellar with another family of paupers . . .

  Now we could even send large sums of money to our two daughters who were still there, and we were even planning to have them join us in Vienna as soon as our new house was ready.

  Atto, in his donation, had also included wages for a tutor who would teach our child to read and write in Italian, “since,” he had written in the accompanying letter, “Italian is an international language and is, indeed, the official language of the Caesarean court, where hardly any other is spoken. The Emperor, like his father and his grandfather before him, attends Italian sermons, and the cavaliers of these lands have such an affinity for our nation, that they vie for the opportunity to travel to Rome and master our language. And those who know it enjoy great esteem throughout the Empire and have no need to learn the local idioms.”

  I was infinitely grateful to Melani for what he had done, even though I had been a little hurt to find no personal note in his letter, no news of himself, no expressions of affection, just generic salutations. But perhaps, I thought, the letter had been drawn up for him by a secretary, Atto being too old and probably too sick to see to such details.

  For my part I had, of course, written a letter warmly proclaiming my sense of obligation and affection. And even Cloridia, having overcome her age-old mistrust of Atto, had sent him lines of sincere gratitude together with an elegant piece of crochet work, to which she had applied herself for weeks: a warm, soft shawl in camlet of Flanders, yellow and red, the Abbot’s favourite colours, with his initials embroidered on it.

  We had received no reply to our attestations, but this did not surprise us, given his advanced age.

  Our little boy was now doing his best to copy into his notebook simple phrases in the Germanic idiom and in a special gothic cursive, very difficult to read, which the people here call Current.

  While it was true, as Abbot Melani said, that Italian was the court language in Vienna – indeed, the sovereigns who wrote to the Emperor were required to do so in that language – the common people were much more at ease in German; for a chimney-sweep wishing to practise his trade, it was essential to learn its rudiments at least.

  With this in mind, I had decided that the wages Atto had set aside for an Italian tutor should be used to pay a teacher of the local language, since I myself would undertake to instruct my son in his native language, as I had already done, quite successfully, with his two sisters. And so every second evening, Cloridia, my son and I received a visit from this teacher, who would endeavour for a couple of hours to illuminate our poor minds on the intricate and impenetrable universe of the Teutonic language. Cardinal Piccolomini had already complained of its immeasurable difficulties and its almost total incompatibility with other idioms, and this had been proved since the days of Giovanni da Capistrano; during his visit to Vienna, he had delivered his sermons against the Turks from the pulpit in the Carmelite Square in Latin; he had then been followed by an interpreter, who took three hours to repeat everything in German.

  While our little infant made great strides, my wife and I were left floundering. We made greater progress, fortunately, in reading, and that was why, as I said earlier, that in the late morning of 9th April of the year 1711, in the brief post-prandial pause, I was able to flick casually (almost) through the New Calendar-Agenda of Krakow, written by Matthias Gentille, Count Rodari of Trent, while my little boy doodled at my feet until it should be time to go back to work with me.

  Like every master chimney-sweep of Vienna, I too had my Lehrjunge, or apprentice, and he was, of course, my son, who at the age of eight had already endured – but also learned – more than a boy twice his age.

  A little while later Cloridia joined us.

  “Come quickly, they’re about to turn into the street. And the
n I have to get back to the palace.”

  Thanks to the good offices of the Chormaisterin of the convent, my wife had found a highly respectable job at just a short distance from the religious house. In Porta Coeli Street, or Himmelpfortgasse as the Viennese say, there was a building of great importance: the winter palace of the Most Serene Prince Eugene of Savoy, President of the Imperial Council of War, great condottiero in the service of the Empire in the war against France, as well as victor over the Turks. And now, on that very day, there was to be an extremely important event at the palace: at midday an Ottoman embassy was expected to arrive from Constantinople. A great opportunity for my wife, born in Rome, but from the womb of a Turkish mother, a poor slave who had ended up in enemy hands.

  Two days earlier, on Tuesday, five boats had arrived at the Leopoldine Island in Vienna, on the branch of the Danube nearest the ramparts, and the Turkish Agha, Cefulah Capichi Pasha, had disembarked with a retinue of about twenty people. Suitable lodgings had been provided for them on the island. To tell the truth, it was not entirely clear just what the Ambassador of the Sublime Porte had come to do in Vienna.

  There had been peace with the Ottomans for several years now, since 11th September 1697, when Prince Eugene had thoroughly defeated them at the Battle of Zenta and forced them to accept the subsequent Peace of Karlowitz. War was now raging, not with the Infidel but with Catholic France over the question of the Spanish throne; relations with the Porte, usually so troubled, seemed to be tranquil. Even in restless Hungary, where the imperial armies had fought for centuries against the armies of Mahomet, the princes who had rebelled against the Emperor, usually chafing and combative, seemed to have been finally tamed by our beloved Joseph I, who was not known as “the Victorious” for nothing.