Veritas (Atto Melani)

by Monaldi, Rita

  Despite this, in the second half of March an urgent courier had come from Constantinople bearing an announcement for the Most Serene Prince Eugene of an extraordinary embassy of the Turkish Agha, which was to arrive before the end of the same month. The Grand Vizir, Mehmet Pasha, must have taken the decision at the very last moment, as he had been unable to send a courier providing suitable advance warning. This had seriously upset the Prince’s plans: since the middle of the month everything had been ready for his departure for The Hague, the theatre of war.

  The Grand Vizir’s decision cannot have been an easy one: as was pointed out in a pamphlet which I had picked up somewhere, in the winter it can take up to four months of hard and dangerous travelling to get from Constantinople to Vienna, passing not only through accessible places like Hadrianopolis, Philippopolis and Nicopolis but also filthy ones like Sofia, where the horses find themselves knee-deep in mud on the roads, through wretched villages in the uncultivated and unpopulated plains like the Ottoman Selivrea and Kinigli, or Bulgarian Hisardschik, Dragoman and Calcali, or fortified palankas, like Pasha Palanka, Lexinza and Raschin, crumbling border castles where the Sultan had left handfuls of Turkish soldiers to moulder away in long-forgotten idleness . . .

  No, the real difficulty of the journey lay in passing through the jaws of the Bulgarian mountains, narrow gorges, with room for just one carriage at a time; it lay in facing the equally fearsome pass of the Trajan Gate, following terrible roads, deep in thick, clinging mud, often mixed with rocks, and battling against snow and ice and winds strong enough to overturn carriages. And in crossing the Sava and the Morava, the latter tumbling into the Danube at Semendria, eight hours below Belgrade, rivers that in winter have no bridges, whether of planks or boats, since they usually get swept away by the autumn floods. And then, already worn out by the journey, entrusting oneself to the icy waters of the Danube on board Turkish caiques, with the constant danger that the ice might crack – perhaps, to crown it all, just beneath the terrible pass of the Iron Gate, most dreadful especially when the water is low.

  It was no wonder that, ever since the first Ottoman embassies, it had become traditional to undertake the journey during the summer months, spending the winter in Vienna and then setting out again the following spring. There had been no exceptions to this rule on the Ottoman side, given the extreme dangers of a winter journey. And in Vienna they still remembered with fear and trembling the misadventures that had befallen them, after the Peace of Karlowitz had been concluded on 26th January 1699, during the mission of the State Councillor, Chamberlain, and President of the Noble Imperial Council Lord Wolffgang Count of Ottingen, sent by his Caesarean Majesty, Emperor Leopold I, as his Grand Ambassador to the Sublime Ottoman Porte. Ottingen, who had taken far too long in preparing his journey, had not departed until 20th October, with a retinue of 280 people, sailing out on the Danube towards Constantinople, and – after reaching the inhospitable mountains of Bulgaria around Christmas – had truly, as they say, been through the mill.

  Despite this, and against all tradition, the Turkish Agha had set out in the depths of winter: the Grand Vizir must have a truly urgent embassy to communicate to Prince Eugene! And this had aroused a good deal of alarm in the court and among the Viennese people. Every day they watched the shores of the Danube anxiously, waiting to hear the distant fanfare of the janissaries and to catch the first sight of the seventy or more boats bearing the Agha and his numerous retinue. About five hundred people were expected: at any rate not less than three hundred, as had always been the case for over a century.

  The Turkish Agha did not arrive until 7th April, over a week late. On that day the tension was palpable: even Emperor Joseph I had considered it politically wise to give the Turks an indirect sign of his benevolence, and had gone with the ruling family to visit the church of the Barefoot Carmelites, which was in the same quarter, the island of St Leopold in the Danube, where the Turks were to lodge. When the Agha landed on the island, to the accompaniment of waving flags, resounding drums and pipes, the Viennese were amazed to discover that he had no more than twenty people in his retinue! As I was to read later, he had brought with him, in addition to the interpreter, only the closest members of his household: the court prefect, the treasurer, the secretary, the first chamberlain, the groom, the head cook, the coffee-maker and the imam, who, the pamphlet noted with surprise, was not a Turk but an Indian dervish. Servants, cooks, grooms and others had been engaged among the Ottomans in Belgrade, like the two janissaries who acted respectively as standard-bearer and ammunition-bearer for the Agha. The reduction of the retinue had meant that it had taken the Agha only two months to reach Vienna; he had set off from Constantinople on 7th February.

  That morning, the embassy – entering the city by the bridge known as Battle Bridge, and then passing below the Red Tower, skirting the square known as Lugeck and the Cathedral of St Stephen – was to make its entrance into the palace of the Most Serene Prince, who for that purpose had sent a six-horse carriage, with another four horses saddled and harnessed in gold and silver for the members of his court.

  I rushed out. Just in time. Before the curious eyes of the crowd, the convoy had turned from Carinthia Street into our road, led on horseback by the lieutenant of the guards, Officer Herlitska, and followed by twenty soldiers of the city guard assigned for the protection of the embassy during their entire stay. But I had to stop and press myself against the wall of the house at the corner between Porta Coeli and Carinthia Street, on account of the dust raised by the procession, the great flock of spectators and the approaching horses. First came the carriage of the Caesarean Commissioner for Victualling, which had met the Turkish embassy on the border, at the so-called Ceremony of Exchange, and had escorted it towards the capital; then – to the amazement of all – came a strange horseman of advanced, though indefinable age, who, as I gathered from the crowd, was the Indian dervish, followed by three Chiaus on horseback – the Turkish judicial officers, one of whom was riding on the right, with his horse being led by two servants on foot. This Chiaus was theatrically brandishing in both hands his letter of accreditation from the Grand Vizir, all wrapped in green taffeta embroidered with silver flowers and set on ruby-red satin with the seal of the Grand Vizir in red wax and a capsule of pure gold. To his left rode the interpreter of the Sublime Porte.

  Finally we saw the six-horse carriage sent by Prince Eugene, inside which the crowd recognised, with a buzz of uneasy curiosity, the Turkish Agha, wearing a great turban, a robe of yellow satin and a smock of red cloth lined with sable. Sitting opposite him was – as I gathered from the conversation of two little women beside me – the Caesarean interpreter. Alongside the carriage, puffing and panting and elbowing their way through the crowd, ran two footmen of the Prince and four servants of the Agha, followed by another Turkish cavalier, who was said to be the first chamberlain. The rear was brought up by other members of the Agha’s household, followed by soldiers of the city guard.

  I approached the Prince’s palace myself. As I imagined, as soon as I reached the great front door I ran into Cloridia, who was holding an animated discussion with two Turkish footmen.

  As I have already mentioned, thanks to the good offices of the convent’s Chormaisterin, Camilla de’ Rossi, my consort had found a job, temporary but well paid, of a certain prestige: thanks to her origins she understood and spoke Turkish quite well, and also the lingua franca, that idiom not unlike Italian, imported into Constantinople by the Genoese and the Venetians centuries ago, which the Ottomans often speak among themselves. Cloridia had therefore been taken on to act as intermediary between the staff of the embassy and Prince Eugene’s servants, a task that certainly could not be carried out by the two interpreters appointed to translate the official speeches of the two great leaders.

  “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.

  13 of the clock: luncheon hour for noblemen (while in Rome they have only just awoken). Court employees are already flocking to the coffee shops and performances begin in the theatres.

  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.